Page 18 of Caroline’s Compass

She did not look at him.

*****

CAROLINE TOLD HERSELF the mapping position was good news.

Thomas was a surveyor. Surveyors required surveys. Fort Kearny required men who understood roads, rivers, measurements, and the irritating habit of turning ordinary objects into moral observations.

The position suited him.

She tightened the lead ox's strap until Rebecca reached over and loosened it by one hole.

“Too tight,” Rebecca said.

“I knew that.”

“You were proving it?”

“Go to your wagon.”

Rebecca followed her gaze toward Thomas. “Ah.”

“There is no ah.”

“There is a very large one.”

Caroline climbed onto the bench. “We are moving.”

The morning road crossed rolling ground broken by shallow swales. The first two were dry. The third looked dry until Mr. Turner's front wheel sank nearly to the hub.

Mrs. Bell leaned from her wagon and studied the buried wheel. “That ground appeared perfectly honest.”

“So did Mr. Bell when he asked me to marry him,” she said. “Both impressions proved optimistic.”

Nathaniel halted the company. Men gathered with ropes and shovels. Mr. Turner urged his team forward, but the wheel only settled deeper.

“Stop,” Caroline called. “You will bury the axle.”

Mr. Turner let the reins fall. “I cannot leave it there.”

“No one suggested you should.”

Thomas walked around the trapped wagon, testing the ground with his measuring rod. Caroline climbed down and joined him.

“The edge is firmer,” he said. “If we pull straight back, the other wheel will enter the soft ground.”

“Then we unload the right side and turn the rear slightly north.”

“The angle is narrow.”

“Can you mark it?”

Thomas looked at her. Whatever lay between them—the letter, the unasked question, Rebecca's enormous ah—fell behind the work.

“Yes.”

Freeing the sunken wheel required more than the neat plan suggested afterward. Caroline ordered the back half of the wagon unloaded while Thomas drove stakes along the firmest angle. Flour sacks, bedding, a cradle, and three iron pans spread across the grass. Mrs. Bell guarded her best china as if the marsh had developed criminal intent.

When the team pulled, the wheel rose two inches and slid sideways. Thomas called for a halt. Caroline saw the downhill ox losing footing and shifted six people to the rear rope before the wagon could tip. On the second pull, mud released the wheel with a sound like a giant boot being yanked from clay.