by Judith Stacy
“I don’t know the song.”
“Well, that’s all right. You don’t have to sing or nothing. Just come and stand for a minute. Lillyann, she’d like that—a real schoolteacher paying her respects. She’d like that a lot. She was always wishing she could read and write. She said her baby wasn’t going to be ignorant like she was—especially if it was a girl. Girls need all the learning they can get, she said. You can’t go out to Selby’s till Dan goes, and he’ll be at the funeral.”
“He was a…friend of Lillyann’s?” Eleanor already suspected the nature of Lillyann’s vocation. The question was inappropriate at best—and none of her business.
“Friend? No, not so much. But I reckon he’ll be there so’s he can kill Karl Dorsey if he shows up.”
“Why would he want to do that?”
“It’s Karl Dorsey’s fault Lillyann and the baby died. Dan’s said in front of everybody Karl’s going to have to pay for it. Karl never could leave the bottle alone and him and Dan didn’t ever get along much,” she added.
“So Lillyann is a good excuse.”
“Excuse? No, she ain’t no excuse, miss. She’s…just Lillyann. She was a good girl—you didn’t never have to worry about her stealing things off you. Not like some around here. She was trying real hard to get Karl to the altar and working for Selby’s—Mrs. Selby, she likes for the hands to be married men. It civilizes them, she says, and the sooner this country is civilized, the better. She even gets the married ones a little house to themselves—if they show they’re willing to stay on and work hard. I reckon Karl won’t be going over to Selby’s after all this.”
Eleanor listened with interest, in spite of her incomplete sleep. Her own presence here had to have something to do with Mrs. Selby’s plan for civilization.
“Colonel Selby, he ain’t much for Mrs. Selby’s way of doing things, though. Mrs. Selby told him he weren’t in India anymore—he couldn’t lord it over people here in Wyoming Territory. He didn’t much like that, but she don’t care what he likes. She’s a strange kind of a woman—but she’s right a lot of times. I like a woman that’s right about things, even if it does make the men all mad. She said women out here is going to get to vote. You reckon she’s right about that—?”
“Hester!” a man’s voice bellowed from the other side of the hung blankets, and the girl jumped violently, knocking the can of hot water over on both of their shoes.
“Oh, lordy, oh, lordy,” she whispered as the blanket wall was suddenly jerked back.
A man reached in and grabbed her by the hair, and she began to shriek loudly. He let go, but only so he could slap her hard. She fell facedown on the floor at Eleanor’s feet. When he would have kicked the girl where she lay, Eleanor fired the revolver into the floor an inch from the toe of his boot.
“What the—!”
“My goodness,” she said sweetly. “You must excuse me, sir. I’m afraid I’m not all that used to firearms. These things will go off when you don’t expect it, won’t they? And I do find this one very heavy for a woman’s hand. I can’t raise it as high as I would like and hold it steady, so I’m afraid the next one might strike you sooner than I intend it.”
The man had stopped in his tracks, not knowing if she was serious or not. Eleanor smiled.
“This ain’t none of your damned—”
“The gentleman who taught me to fire a revolver was very adamant about one thing,” she interrupted. “‘Eleanor,’ he said. ‘A firearm is a great equalizer—especially for a woman. But you women have such tender hearts. You must forget your forgiving nature, Eleanor, and don’t you ever, ever aim a gun at a man unless you mean to kill him.’ I wonder if I can do that—forget my forgiving nature?”
She stared into the man’s eyes, waiting. The girl sobbed loudly on the floor, then scrambled to her knees and crawled to hide against Eleanor’s skirts. The man licked his lips and tried to decide if he could overpower her. Several men had come out of the saloon to watch. Eleanor ignored them.
“This young lady was helping me with my toilette,” she said to the man. “At Mr. Ingram’s request, I believe.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Ingram push his way through the swinging doors of the saloon and join the others. Clearly, the man had seen him, too.
Ingram moved closer, but made no attempt to intervene.
“You don’t mind her helping me, do you?” Eleanor asked, drawing the man’s attention back to the situation at hand—but only briefly. He was much more interested in what Ingram might do.
“No,” the man said finally, his voice sullen.
“And I’m sure you won’t punish her for it later. Will you?”
“No,” he said again.
“Do you give your word, sir?”
“My word?” he said incredulously.
“You’re not an animal,” Eleanor said. “When a man gives his word, he keeps it. Especially in front of witnesses. Do I have your word?”
“Yeah. You got my word. You can put that damn gun down.” He turned to go, roughly pushing his way through the crowd that had gathered.
“Burley,” Ingram said quietly as he tried to pass.
“I ain’t looking for no trouble with you, Dan.”
“Then it’s all going to work out fine,” Ingram answered.
The man clearly had more to say, but he didn’t say it. He shoved the nearest man aside and headed for the saloon. After a moment, the rest of the men followed him—all except Dan Ingram. He looked at Eleanor and then at the gun that now rested on her lap. Hester still cowered and sobbed on the floor. Eleanor reached out to put her hand on Hester’s shoulder, and the girl immediately grabbed her around the knees.
“This is all your fault,” Eleanor said to Dan. “You should never have put her in a situation where she’d get beaten—and for what? I can do without hot water.”
They stared at each other.
“You know,” he said after a moment. “You’re not going to have near the trouble keeping order in a schoolroom as I thought.”
The meager procession of mourners had to climb up the hill to reach the cemetery. The coffin containing the unfortunate Lillyann and her child went first, on a wagon pulled by two fractious horses. Eleanor followed well behind the others, only deciding at the last moment to accept Hester’s invitation to attend. She had nothing else to do, and she felt a certain empathy for a young woman who, for whatever reason, had apparently fallen. There was some irony to it all, Eleanor supposed, that she, of all people, would be considered a welcome witness to the burial ritual. She could hear Hester still sniffing as she walked along, but she had no idea if it was grief or the altercation with the man called Burley that was responsible for it. Perhaps both, she decided.
The sun was shining brightly and the wind blew as strong as ever. Already the muddiness of yesterday was drying away. They walked past another building—the last structure on the path to the cemetery. A man and woman stood on the lean-to porch, watching, their expressions all too familiar to Eleanor.
Righteous disapproval.
Of the young woman who had died and of every person in the procession who accompanied her on her final journey.
It occurred to Eleanor that she herself was off to a less than stellar beginning in this new life she’d chosen. She hadn’t been in Soul Harbor twenty-four hours and already she’d been in a brawl requiring a firearm, and, unless she was very mistaken, she was going to be publicly denounced by the two people on the porch—something not likely to meet Mrs. Selby’s approval.
A number of men joined the mourners, but not the man called Burley, thankfully. No singing accompanied the brief interment. Either no one knew “Farewell My Friends,” or no one was willing to perform it. Ingram said a few words after all, words that were snatched away by the wind before she could hear them. He removed his hat and stood tall, his face impassive as he spoke. Then, at his signal, the coffin was lowered. Hester stepped forward to drop a clod of dirt into the grave. Each of th
e women with her did the same, and then two of the men, who had come with shovels, began to fill the gaping hole.
Eleanor was feeling short of breath again, and she turned to walk back toward the exchange alone, nodding purposefully at the man and woman who still stood watching from their porch. The woman gave a short sniff and looked away. The man merely stared.
“Are you ready to go?” a voice asked behind her—Ingram.
“I am,” she said without looking at him. As there had been no murders at the graveside, she could only assume that Ingram’s intended victim hadn’t deigned to put in an appearance.
“A train will be back through in three or four days if you’ve changed your mind.”
“I haven’t,” she said.
“Why did you come to Lillyann’s burial?” he asked bluntly.
“Hester invited me,” she said.
“Why would she do that?”
“You’ll have to ask her.”
“You understand that Mrs. Selby might not like it that you did.”
“It occurred to me,” Eleanor said. Too late, she thought. “I suppose the couple on the porch will tell her.”
“Well, they’ll be two of the ones standing in line for the privilege. You might want to say something to Mrs. Selby before anybody else gets to her.”
“No,” she said. Even as a child, she had never had the slightest inclination to try to justify her behavior, and she wasn’t about to start.
He made a small sound of disapproval or understanding or neutrality. She had no idea which.
“That’s a shortcut to the privy,” he said of a path to her left. “I’ll meet you at the exchange.”
She looked at him for a moment, then took the shortcut. It was indelicate of him to mention the proximity of the sanitation facilities—but it was very helpful.
He was indeed waiting for her in front of the exchange—on the same wagon that had just served as a hearse and now held her trunk and her valise and what looked like a basket of food. He sat in the driver’s seat, holding the reins to the same cantankerous horses, his own mount tied to the back.
“I can drive a wagon,” she said.
“It’s a long way. You can spell me after a couple of hours.”
She looked around at the sound of running feet—Hester hurrying down the hill. Her eyes were puffy from crying, one more so than the other, thanks to Burley.
She stopped a few feet away, then walked the rest of the distance to where Eleanor stood. “You’re going now,” she said unnecessarily.
“Yes.”
“Well…thank you.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Eleanor said.
“You helped give Lillyann a good send-off. You stood up to Burley.”
“And you’ll likely be the one to pay for it.”
She shrugged. “Burley, he don’t need a reason to go and hit somebody. You made him promise he wouldn’t—in front of everybody. Maybe he’ll keep it,” she said wistfully. “I reckon you won’t be back in town for a while—but if you do come and there ain’t nobody watching, I’d be much obliged if you’d say hello to me—if we was to meet on the street or something like that.”
“I’ll say hello to you, Hester. Whether anybody’s watching or not.”
Hester leaned closer. “You got to watch yourself, miss,” she whispered. “Colonel Selby and Mrs. Selby—they don’t get along. They’ll be trying to use you against one another, trying to blame each other for things you do even if you didn’t do anything—”
“Miss Hansen,” Ingram said.
The girl glanced in Ingram’s direction and reached up to touch her swollen face. Then she nodded. “I believe you will say hello to me, miss,” she said out loud. “But it’s all right if you don’t. I ain’t wanting to drag you down.”
“Hester—”
“Let’s go, Miss Hansen,” Ingram said, and the girl turned and ran back up the hill.
Eleanor stepped up on the hub of the wagon wheel and climbed in, accepting Ingram’s help only as a last resort. Her parasol was strapped to the valise, but she didn’t bother with it, in spite of the bright sun. The wind would have snatched it away before they crossed the railroad track. She grabbed on to the side of the seat as the wagon lurched forward, and braced herself for the last leg of the journey to a new life.
She made no attempt at conversation. She already understood that Ingram was no great talker. Their conversations consisted more of the things he wanted to know rather than the things she could pull out of him.
She looked out over the land and up at the sky, which seemed to be forever changing. There was nothing else to see. After a time, Ingram drove the wagon off what passed for a road and into the open grassland. She wondered how he could possibly know where he was going, but she didn’t ask. She just rode along, mindful of the fact that she was alone in the middle of an unfamiliar and dangerous land—with a man who was a complete stranger. All she knew of him was that he worked for the Selbys and that he was willing to give a dead girl and her baby a decent burial. Thanks to Hester, she also knew that he meant to kill the man responsible for it.
She gave a wavering sigh. She would never understand that kind of dichotomy in men’s natures. Killing another man—even with a good reason—was still that.
Killing.
The very idea was abhorrent to her. Rob’s willingness to take another person’s life, albeit for a so-called noble cause, had cost her dearly, and yet she’d just threatened a man with the very same consequence. She liked to think she wouldn’t have actually shot Burley, but she was by no means certain. Clearly, the dichotomy was a part of human nature in general and not just that of the male of the species. In the quest for “civilization,” Mrs. Selby surely had her work cut out for her.
They rode for what seemed a long time. Eleanor was comfortable in the silence, so much so that it startled her when Ingram suddenly spoke.
“You were right,” he said.
“About what?”
“I put Hester in harm’s way—I know what Burley’s like.”
His admission was unexpected, to say the least. He kept glancing at her. She didn’t know what to say.
“It…wasn’t my intention to make enemies,” she said finally.
“Enemies?”
“That man—Burley—”
“I don’t much think you made an enemy of him, miss. He’s so impressed, he’ll be asking Colonel Selby if he can marry you.”
Eleanor looked at him, not knowing whether he had meant it as a joke or whether he had spoken the truth.
“In that case, I…should have brought my hope chest,” she said.
To her immense surprise—and his, she figured—Ingram smiled. It was brief, and, she thought, embarrassingly unwelcome. Ingram, for whatever reason, had clearly given up on finding things to smile about, and he didn’t much appreciate her resurrecting his sense of humor.
She looked away, trying not to smile herself. For a time she occupied herself by listening to the creaking and rattle of the wagon and the clink of metal on the horses’ harness—what she could hear of it above the wind. It made a constant whistling sound against her ears, one she couldn’t escape no matter which way she turned her head.
“I want to ask you something,” Eleanor said abruptly. “I want to ask you about Lillyann.”
“She was a whore, miss,” Ingram said with a bluntness that surprised her. “She was hoping to get herself a better life with a man named Karl Dorsey. She couldn’t have picked anybody worse. It was just a matter of time before he killed her.”
“She…loved him?”
“I reckon she did. You know what they say, miss. There’s not a man so bad that a woman or a dog won’t love him. He decided she needed to be put in her place, and he locked her out in the cold the night it snowed. Some say he was drunk. Maybe he was. Maybe he wasn’t. Anyway, she died from it and her baby with her. It was a cruel thing for a man to do, drunk or sober.”
“And you’re planning to kill
him for it,” Eleanor said. It wasn’t quite a question.
“It’s more that I’m planning to keep him from killing me. Lillyann had a good heart. She didn’t deserve what she got from Karl Dorsey, and she didn’t deserve to be tossed into the ground and forgotten like she and her baby were nothing. Karl took offense when I pointed that out.”
“I see,” Eleanor said. And she did—a little. It was more a matter of perceived insults than justice for Lillyann.
She took a quiet breath and stared at the horizon. “It all depends, you know,” she said after a time.
“Miss?”
“On the dog and on the woman.”
Eleanor could feel him waiting for her to elaborate, but that was all she wished to say. Instead of talking, she focused her attention on her surroundings.
She was learning as they rode along that there were animals about, small creatures that scurried out of their way. She also realized that the flat land wasn’t really all that flat. There were dips and hollows along the way that could keep all manner of things from view until you were right on top of them.
Like trees. She would have sworn there were none beyond the scrubby, bushlike things she had spotted growing here and there, but she could just see the tops of some real trees off to her right, a long zigzagging line of them.
“Cottonwoods,” Ingram said, as if he’d read her mind. “When you see them, you know there’s water. They don’t grow anywhere else.”
“Is there a river?” Eleanor asked with a certain amount of dread. Thus far, crossing rivers had been a less than pleasant experience.
“Yes, but you won’t think much of it.”
“Why not?”
“Not very wide, not very deep.”
She might have been more reassured if she’d had at least some idea of what he meant by “very.”
“How much longer until we get to Colonel Selby’s ranch?”
“After we cross the river, we’ll be on it. But it’ll be nearly dark by the time we get to the main house.”