by Jane Steen
A huge yawn interrupted my reverie. Sarah had woken up, and she soon made sure Tess was also awake. Now that we were in the gully, trees lined the trail, and it wasn’t long before we came to the group of boulders that indicated the spring, strewn carelessly by the gully wall as if left there by a giant handnInvigorated by the cold, sharp air and the sunshine—and in Tess and Sarah’s case, by a good rest—the three of us cheerfully set ourselves the task of gathering dead wood and making a fire. Judah unhitched the horses and led them to the clear pool, from which I had scooped a potful of water to boil up some coffee.
By the time Judah returned, I had managed—with some difficulty and danger of setting fire to my skirts—to get a small blaze going in the middle of a circle of stones that were obviously there for the use of travelers. He nodded in appreciation at my efforts and took the tin cup I handed him with a word of thanks, but a frown marred the perfection of his brow.
“There’s a crack in that horse’s hoof—I didn’t notice it before. The farmer’s a fool to have let that happen to such a valuable beast.”
“Is that serious?” The horses looked fine to me. Judah had rehitched them and tied nosebags to their bridles. They were both munching with relish, their ears flicking as they gazed at us with great, patient eyes.
“It could be. If some grit got in—I can’t feel a warm spot now, but an infection would need treatment.”
“You can’t do it?”
“Not if I have to cut into the hoof. I haven’t the tools.”
“We can do that when we get to the mission, can’t we?”
“As long as the brute will carry us that far. I can’t drive the wagon with just one horse.”
Judah looked up at the sky, which was now invaded by drifts of cloud, mounded white and gray billows through which the sun shone a diffused but still bright light. “It’s around ten—let’s break camp and get moving. The sooner we get to the mission, the better.”
43
Confrontation
“Have we stopped?”
I pushed away the buffalo hide, scrambled bleary-eyed into a sitting position, and began to neaten my hair.
The air had changed, I realized. It had taken on a damp chill with an edge of frost, sullen and portentous. I was stiff from lying on the boards of the wagon with just an Indian blanket between me and the various bumps and depressions that indicated the compartments contained in the wagon box.
A crack of the whip made me start, and I scrambled to my knees. Beside me, Sarah made a noise of complaint and twitched the buffalo hide back over her shoulders. Tess’s presence was betrayed by a lump in the other hide. She had burrowed right down under the covers and curled up like an oversized dormouse.
We had definitely stopped. I was able to get to my feet easily, unhampered by the swaying of the wagon. I was just in time to see Judah lower himself down from the bench, an expression of fury on his face. Grabbing hold of the bench, which bounced gently on its springs, I leaned out over the singletree and watched as Judah inspected the hoof the left-hand horse was now holding off the ground.
“Our luck’s run out, hasn’t it?”
I could see by his face that it was bad news. By the time we had reached the end of the long gully and gotten out of the wagon to make the horses’ job easier as they climbed the steep, sloping trail, the left-hand horse was setting a slow and uncertain pace, its ears pinned back as Judah cracked the whip to urge it up the slope.
We had stopped only for the briefest necessities since then and had eaten our meal of biscuits and fried chicken as we rolled slowly onward. Sarah had decided that was a great treat and had been exhaustingly chatty for some time afterward. The last thing I remembered before sleep overcame me was the drone of her penny whistle, which she played in an endless rise and fall of the same two or three notes, over and over again.
“We’ll have to make camp here. If I’m careful, I can get down that slope there with just one horse, and we’ll have some shelter.”
Judah indicated another gully, which ran at a right angle to the trail. It was choked with trees and brush and had no trail through it, but the dirt of the downward slope was packed hard as if worn by the feet of generations of hunters.
“What about the injured horse? You’re not going to leave it up here, are you? Won’t there be wolves?” I watched, worried, as Judah began unbuckling the straps, muttering under his breath.
“It’ll probably follow us once we get far enough ahead. Horses don’t like being left on their own. I can’t make it move now though—it’s acting like it has a broken leg. Infections are painful.”
It took a little while to awaken our companions and lighten the wagon’s load as much as possible for the endeavor of guiding it down the slope with just one horse. We were all silent as we walked behind the lumbering conveyance. We couldn’t see the sun, hidden as it was behind a mass of thick gray cloud, but I knew that day would soon be waning, and there would be no moonlight or starlight. We were stranded, and we could do nothing about it until dawn. It was going to be a long night.
We made ourselves as comfortable as we could. Judah was right—the injured horse turned up before darkness fell and stood, its head hanging, as near as possible to its hobbled companion.
The mood of our journey had soured. Judah was taciturn and showed little patience with Sarah’s and Tess’s repeated remarks on the cold, the darkness, and the sheer loneliness of the spot we were in.
At least we were out of the wind, I thought as Judah and I set silently about the task of gathering wood. And while the trees in the gully formed a dense, impenetrable mass that whispered and creaked like a host of demons, they provided plenty of wood for the fire. We arranged the wagon and our camp so our backs were against the gully wall and the fire was between us and the access to the wagon.
“We won’t be able to see if anyone—or anything—approaches us.” Judah passed a hand over his chin.
“It’s impossible to see anything anyway,” I pointed out in a brusque tone. Worry and the discomforts of travel were making me cross, and I had the added burden of trying to allay Tess’s and Sarah’s fears. I felt uneasy in Judah’s presence and annoyed with him for being so curt with my daughter and companion. Could he not see they needed comforting? So did I, for that matter, but I wasn’t going to let Judah see that.
We had brought more than enough food for a day’s journey, but traveling had made us hungry. What remained made a meager supper after I had divided it so we would have some breakfast. And once our morning meal was over, we would have little left.
“You’ll have to ride for the Lombardis’ once day breaks,” I said to Judah once Tess and Sarah finally retired to huddle under the blankets and one of the hides. I had conceded the other to Judah, who planned to sleep by the fire.
“I’m aware of that.” There was a note of derision in Judah’s voice, and his slanted eyes held an expression of mild contempt.
“I’m sure you are.” My own voice sounded shrewish. “I just want to be sure we each know what the other is to be doing. It’s safer that way. And I have to explain things to Sarah and Tess, so I want to be clear myself.”
“It won’t be difficult to explain to them what you’ll be doing,” Judah said. “You’ll be doing precisely nothing while I take the risk of a bareback ride of some two hours’ duration.”
“Do you think I would not rather take your role?” I retorted, nettled. “If you don’t know by now that I dislike idleness and passivity, you don’t know me at all.”
Judah’s lips twitched. “When we’re married, you’ll find out just how well I know you.”
I had spent the day reining in my anxieties about Judah in general, and this journey in particular, for the sake of my daughter and friend. I had spent the week worrying about the letter that may—or may not—hold information about Judah that might, at the very least, give me an unassailable reason for breaking with him. I was tired, my feet were cold, and my stomach was growling. So perhaps it wa
s excusable that I said what I did.
“If you knew me at all, you’d realize you shouldn’t be so sure of me.”
I knew instantly that I’d done exactly what I didn’t intend to do. The alert lift of Judah’s head and the gleam in his eyes—more than just the reflection of the fire’s flames—indicated that my remark had put him on the qui vive. I quailed inwardly. Then, like a steel spring recoiling on itself, my nerve returned to me, and I stiffened my spine against his reaction.
Judah was silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was like the purr of a cat, low and powerful in the dead silence of the winter’s night.
“You’re having second thoughts.” His eyes widened a little as realization came to him. “I thought you were a little distant because—well, I imagined you were making an effort to get that numbskull Rutherford out of your mind. A man who can’t stay faithful to his wife in thought but doesn’t have the intestinal fortitude to seize the opportunity any truly red-blooded man would pounce on.” He sniggered, poking the fire with a stick from the supply we had heaped up.
“Don’t say such things about Martin. He’s trying to preserve his honor—and mine.”
“You have no honor. You’re the mother of a bastard child. The only honor you can ever obtain is by marrying it, don’t you understand that? Are you so stupid that you’ll really pass up the only offer that has come to you in four years? Except that milksop Lehmann, of course, but he hardly counts—and he was pretty quick to change his mind once he found out the truth.” Judah flung the stick into the fire, which was now blazing high, the flames sending sparks up toward the clouds.
My hands were trembling, and I balled them into fists by my side.
“I’d rather live without honor than live with you, Judah.”
I scrambled to my feet from the flat piece of rock on which I had been sitting. I noted as I did so that a few snowflakes were whirling down from the sky, brushing my face with soft, cold fingers.
“You’re tired and anxious.” Judah also got to his feet and came to stand between me and the wagon. “Come, Nell, you need to sleep. In the morning, we’ll reach the mission, and you’ll remember all the good reasons you have for becoming my wife.” He reached a hand toward me, the beautiful smile back on his face—but I batted it away and took a step backward.
“No, Judah. Never.”
“May I remind you that you are promised to me?” The smile faded. In the firelight, Judah’s slanted eyes looked like chips of stone. “Cam Calderwood all but announced our engagement in front of the town. And you went with me—willingly—with only a child and an imbecile as chaperones. That could only have one possible interpretation. If you return from this trip a single woman still, your reputation will have evaporated like the morning dew. Especially if I let it be known that our embraces have, shall we say, overstepped the bounds of propriety. And that would be the truth. If you’re intending to jilt a man, Nell, you must not let him kiss you—or put his arm around your waist—thus.”
He moved as quickly as a striking snake, encircling my waist with both of his hands and then hooking one of his arms around me so that he had me pinned against his body.
“Of course, I could always make sure of you here and now,” Judah murmured, his breath warm on my cheek. “You’re practically my wife, Nell. We’re meant to be together, and it’s too late for you to be capricious. Yield to me now, and I will do you the favor of forgetting the conversation we have just had.”
The hand that was not around my waist moved upward, following the line of my corset up to the swell of my breasts.
“No,” I said faintly.
The hand squeezed, and suddenly my mind was flooded with the memory of a day in May four years before, when Jack Venton had done something very similar—
“NO.”
And suddenly I had lost control of myself and become a kicking, squirming madwoman, my hands flailing desperately as I tried to rake Judah’s face with my nails. I could hear myself making a peculiar noise, a sort of sustained squealing mixed with groans and pants as I fought to get free of Judah’s hands. I would have bitten him if I could get close enough with my teeth. I rained blows at his face, neck, and shoulders until he let go of my waist in an effort to defend himself and then pushed back as hard as I could so that there was a little distance between us.
But not enough. The blow seemed to come out of nowhere, a lightning bolt through my cheekbone that jarred my head as if I had run it into a stone wall. I reeled, catching myself just in time before I stepped backward into the fire. I snatched at my skirts, checking hurriedly for smoldering patches as I stumbled sideways and back. As I did so, the pain came, an ache so fierce that both eyes began to water, and Judah became a black blur among the shadows of the night.
Nobody had ever hit me before. And certainly nobody had ever called me the name that came out of Judah’s mouth. I backed around the fire, trying to put the blaze between me and Judah and yet ensure he was not between me and the wagon.
I stumbled over a long branch that stuck out of the fire. Now Judah was closing on me, and I knew he would hit me again at the very least. I grabbed at the branch, pulling the glowing end out of the blaze and pointing it at Judah. It was long enough to keep him at more than arm’s length. I wrapped both hands around it as he tried to dodge it, following his movements as best I could with the red heat that glowed brighter as the wind caught it for a moment.
“Leave.” My voice sounded strange to me, calm and cold, although I was blinking desperately in an effort to see, and my legs were shaking. “Get away from us before I push this into your face. You’ll never put your hands on me again—and you’ll never see a cent of my money, whatever tricks you may try. We’re finished, Judah. Utterly finished.”
“And where precisely am I to leave to?” Judah inquired, a note of derision in his voice. “We’re in the middle of the prairie, and a snowstorm is probably coming. You’re terrified of snow, Nell. Do you really want me to leave you alone in this?”
“I’m not alone. And even if I were, I’d feel safer alone in a snowstorm—with wolves into the bargain—than I would with you, Judah. Take the horse if you wish—I doubt I’d be able to make use of it anyhow, and we’d be safer in the wagon than with me trying to ride or drive. Pastor Lombardi will come looking for us—he’s probably looking for us now since we didn’t arrive at the mission by dark. Tess and I will keep the fire going, and we’re not so far off the trail—he’ll find us. And when he does, you’d better be long gone. I don’t care where you go—return to the seminary if you like and spin a tale about me. See if your precious moneymaking schemes come to anything now.”
“A fine speech, my dear Nell.” The firelight flickered on Judah’s curls. “Keep talking. That branch will soon have cooled down enough for me to grasp, and then—“
“And then I’ll shoot you.”
Judah whirled around, and I almost dropped the branch. The firelight shone orange on Tess in her white nightgown, a few feet away from where we stood. A log shifted behind us and a flame shot up, reflecting off the barrel of the rifle she held in her hands.
“Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t know how to use that.” Judah took a step forward but then appeared to think better of it and stopped.
“I pull my finger back on this thing, don’t I? I watched the farmer do it.” Tess’s voice shook, but I had the impression it was more from cold than fear. I was horribly afraid for her though. Judah was right—she really didn’t know how to use a gun. But she did have the barrel pointing straight at him from a distance of some ten feet.
“If you move, I will try,” Tess said. “I watched carefully—pull back and then push this lever forward and back, and then pull back again.”
“And when you miss, you’ll wish you hadn’t been born,” said Judah calmly as he took another step forward.
I swung the branch in a wide arc. For a few seconds, time seemed to pass very slowly, and I could see the wood glow as the movement fed
it with a rush of air. And then it connected with the back of Judah’s head, and he collapsed face forward onto the dead growth on the gully’s floor.
Tess squeaked and dropped the gun, which promptly fired, causing the horses—which, luckily, were on the other side of the wagon—to snort and buck with fright. Tess screamed and ran to where I was standing, the branch still in my hands, gaping at the dark shape on the ground in front of me.
“Did you kill him?” Her teeth were chattering.
“I don’t think so.” Handing the branch to Tess, I dropped to my knees and placed a hand on Judah’s back. To my relief I felt the steady rise and fall of his breathing. I scrambled to my feet again.
“He’s all right,” I gasped as I pushed myself up. “I didn’t even mean to knock him out. I was just trying to distract him from you.” I winced as pain shot through the left side of my face and tentatively touched my cheekbone with the tips of my fingers. “But it serves him right.”
“What a-a-a-a-are we going t-t-to d-d-d-d-do?” asked Tess. What with the cold and the excitement, her stutter was so bad I could hardly make out what she was saying. I looked at her, realizing anew that although she had stockings on, all that stood between her and the freezing wind was a flannel nightgown. How she had climbed down off the wagon by herself, I didn’t know, let alone with a rifle in her hand.
Soft flakes of snow brushed my cheek, achingly cold on the bruise. I looked down at Judah, who let out a soft groan, his fingers twitching.
“We’re going to get back into the wagon, fast,” I said. “You’ll freeze out here like that, and he’s going to get up in a moment and come after us.”