Trail Angel

by Derek Catron

  “When are you going to teach me to shoot?”

  “You want to learn?”

  “I saw you teaching the boys,” she said of her cousins. “If I’m going to live out here, I ought to know how to handle a gun, too.”

  Josey offered her a pistol.

  She pointed to the rifle. “Why can’t I shoot that?”

  He grimaced. “The Henry’s not a good weapon for beginners.”

  She knew the rifle held special meaning to him. A gift from his father, it had been the finest rifle in the family’s store. With its lever-action, his Henry could be fired sixteen times before reloading, an advantage he told her had kept him alive more times than he recalled.

  “You don’t trust me with it?”

  “I don’t trust it. The Henry’s not the safest rifle. See here?” He showed her how the hammer was down, the lever flat against the barrel. “It looks safe. You have to pull the trigger to fire it. Unless you drop it.” He let go of the rifle, stooping and catching it, quick as a cat, before it hit the ground. “The hammer rests against the cartridge that’s in the chamber. If something hits the hammer, it can go off.”

  He handed the pistol to her. Its weight surprised her. Josey had been wearing four pistols with the rifle slung over his back when she first saw him, and he was not a large man.

  “How do you carry so many?” she asked, avoiding any reference to his size. Men were so sensitive about such things.

  “Whatever discomfort they cause on my hip is worth the peace they give to my mind,” he said. “You survive one time wishing you’d had another gun, and you’ll never mind carrying it again.”

  He wore only the one gun belt on this day, and he used his other pistol to show her how to fire. She flinched at the sound of his gun exploding so close even though she’d prepared for it. He motioned to a flower ten yards away. “See if you can hit that prickly pear.”

  Annabelle fired, again and again, shaking violently every time. She blinked with each shot no matter how hard she tried to keep her eyes open. Josey showed her how to brace her legs and hold the gun with both hands. By her sixth shot, she made the cactus move, even if she missed the flower.

  He took the gun from her. “Let me reload it.”

  “You’ve got another.”

  “I never leave a gun unloaded if I’ve got time to load it,” he said, as if the point should be obvious. He pulled a flask from his belt, carefully measured out powder and poured it into the first chamber. “The first thing I do every morning is clean and load my guns. Any man who feeds himself before his guns isn’t worth much in my view.”

  After he dropped the ball in, he pulled back the loading rod, straining with the effort to force it in. “I’m not sure I could do that,” she said. He had moved to the next cylinder, filling it with powder. It surprised Annabelle how long it took.

  Josey seemed to read her mind. “Now you know why I carry four pistols.”

  After the shooting lesson, they didn’t ride far before he pulled to a stop and studied the horizon with his binoculars. The fear of Indians flashed in her mind before he handed the glasses to her. “What do you see?”

  Annabelle never seemed to have any luck focusing the glasses. The distant shapes might have been horses. A thrill ran down her spine as she wondered if they were buffalo, but she wouldn’t embarrass herself with a guess. “Tell me.”

  Josey looked again. “I’m thinking antelope, though they could be deer.”

  “Can we get closer?”

  “It’s not easy. They’re skittish.”

  Annabelle couldn’t see a tree or bush higher than her horse’s haunches anywhere. There was a natural slope to the land but no hill to maneuver behind. She wet a finger and held it out, something she had read in a book. Josey laughed. “Even if we approach downwind, you’d need a rifle more powerful than a Henry to get a good shot.” So much for antelope steaks. Her disappointment must have shown. Josey walked his horse forward. “Come on. I know another way.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Annabelle and Josey were still a fair distance from the antelope when he leaned forward behind his horse’s neck.

  “They’re accustomed to wild horses, but not riders,” he whispered. They walked forward on their horses, their silhouette not much different than a rider-less horse. When they got as close as Josey dared, he slid off, careful to keep Gray between himself and the antelope.

  Josey tied his kerchief to the end of his rifle barrel. Then he sat on the ground, patting a spot in the dirt next to him. “Come on.” He lay flat, holding the rifle so it stood on its butt, the kerchief listlessly moving in a light breeze.

  “Have you lost your senses?” But she followed his actions. As she lay down, she felt the warmth of his body beside hers. “If this is some kind of joke, I will slap what sense you have left out of your head.”

  He shushed her and whispered instructions as he moved the rifle for her to take. “There isn’t much wind, so you’ll have to move it a little. Not much. Like this.”

  Annabelle felt a fool, lying prone while moving the rifle so the kerchief danced in the breeze. She imagined Josey had somehow planned for the others to discover them in this ridiculous position. She would never hear the end of it. But Josey kept so still she matched his silence, measuring her breaths to his until she forgot how foolish she looked. He took the rifle when her arm tired.

  The days were longer now, but she sensed the sun’s descent as the air grew cooler and the breeze increased so the kerchief flapped steadily even without their aid. Annabelle closed her eyes, willing herself to be as still as the earth beneath her.

  She might have fallen asleep, for Josey’s voice, light as the breeze, brought her eyes open with a shudder. “Look to your left.”

  Annabelle tried to look without turning her head, but the effort strained her eyes. Ever so slowly, she tilted her head by single degrees—and gasped. The antelope looked humungous from her vantage beneath it. Its white-furred chest and belly nearly obscured her view of its dark face and eyes as it studied her as curiously as she gazed at it.

  “Is this close enough?”

  She had forgotten about the rifle or her hope to provide steaks for supper. Instead of startling the animal, Josey’s whisper set off its pointed ears, creating a quizzical expression. Annabelle stifled a laugh. The curious animal’s eyes as it studied her struck her as nearly human.

  “I can’t shoot it. Not now.” Annabelle extended a hand, fingers splayed, and the antelope’s snout flickered in response to the smell. It stepped forward on impossibly slender legs, lowering its head so that they nearly touched. Annabelle leaned forward, extending her fingers a few inches more. The antelope skipped away. Annabelle sat up and it bolted, bounding off with the rest of the herd, like birds in formation, first left, then right, their white tails wagging mockingly.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, though she didn’t feel regret.

  Josey rested a hand on her shoulder. “I’ve never been able to shoot when they’re like that, either,” he said. “The only ones I’ve hit have been at a distance. Pulling a trigger’s always easier at a distance.”

  They rode back to camp slowly to spare the horses, Josey told Annabelle, though he didn’t mind prolonging their time together. Once they were at camp, they would behave almost as strangers in front of the others, their horse-riding lessons nothing more than a matter of mutual convenience. Maybe that’s all it is to Annabelle. Josey felt safer thinking so.

  Looking at her reminded him of the first time he had seen the western mountains: beautiful and formidable. He had spent a morning once watching a mountain slowly emerge from the murk of night, light descending its slopes like a fleet-footed climber. First a fiery glow on snow-capped peaks, then a peeling back of shadow over rocky crevices and piney slopes, the mountain reluctantly relinquishing its secrets.

  Josey led their horses up the ridge overlooking the wagons, corralled in a good spot by a stream with clear water. A drop of sweat rolled d
own Josey’s back, giving him a chill despite the lingering heat of the afternoon. Annabelle looked at him curiously but sensed his need for quiet. He liked that about her. Talking with her was never boring, but she didn’t mind quiet, either.

  Something in this quiet felt wrong. He dismounted and examined swirls of dust in the ground. Plenty of hoof prints. An Indian might make sense of them, but Josey couldn’t. He held his hand over a pile of horse dung nearby. No warmth, but it looked moist. In the dry heat of early July that had to mean something.

  “What is it?”

  He was making Annabelle nervous. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”

  Focus. His mind wandered when he and Annabelle were alone, like time didn’t exist. He returned from an hour-long ride feeling like only a minute had passed. When he was with her, something turned off in his brain, a welcome respite from worry, regret or memories he would rather forget.

  With Annabelle, he thought only of the moment—no, thought wasn’t it. He lived the moment. The only thing like it in Josey’s experience was battle. If you didn’t live the moment in battle, you were dead. Josey imagined the Colonel’s advice: It was good to loose his mind with a woman, making a joke, loose or lose all being the same in love. Yet standing on a ridge overlooking the emigrants whose safety was his responsibility, a mounting dread pricked at him, like a man who remembers too late a forgotten task.

  Josey jumped back on his gray pony and fetched his binoculars. He almost missed it. The ridge sloped into a gully carved by the stream near the campsite. Josey couldn’t see into the gully as he trained the binoculars there. Waves of shimmering heat rising from the ridge played tricks with his eyes. He blinked twice to clear them. The dark smudges on the rocky outcropping near the gap were probably just the shadows of odd-shaped boulders. Three birds took flight from the gap, and he held his gaze on the spot, wondering what stirred them.

  “We need to go,” he told Annabelle. “Now.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  At the end of every day the drivers formed the wagons into a large ring, chaining the tongue of one wagon to the rear wheel of the one in front to create a corral that held in the stock at night. After unhitching the teams and unyoking the oxen that afternoon, Caleb freed the Daggett boys to run off for a swim in the adjacent stream.

  “It’ll be cold,” he warned. They didn’t care. In a moment their bare asses gleamed like a pair of moons as they whooped and hollered their way to the water.

  The sight reminded Caleb of something, like an itch in the back of his brain. The harnesses were still in his hands and he found himself twisting them so tight, the blood ran out of his fingers. He watched the boys, hearing their screams as they splashed in water that had started as snow melt.

  Looking to the road behind them, he thought of a man he hadn’t seen in almost two years. Jacob Cooper was tall with unnaturally long arms and so thin his chest appeared concave. A man could count his ribs through his translucent skin, like furrows in a plowed field. Yet that wasn’t the most remarkable thing about Cooper.

  On a day even hotter than this one, Caleb’s unit camped near a secluded lake on a plantation in Mississippi after having been on the move for days. In a rare act of generosity, the officer they called “Captain Bastard” out of earshot ordered a halt so everyone could cool off in the lake.

  Cooper was a funny-looking man to begin with, built more like a bird than a man, but when he emerged from the water, his dripping pecker dangling nearly to his knobby knees, one of the men called out, “Look, the sparrow’s got himself a worm.” Cooper didn’t mind. There were worse things to be baited about than an enormous pecker.

  Caleb moved to the back of the wagon, his eyes still on the road. Cooper’s out there somewhere. He, Harrison, Johnson— they’re all out there. Caleb felt it. He’d felt them since Omaha when he heard men were looking for him. He hadn’t wanted to believe it. A coincidence, he told himself, but then he overheard the Colonel talking with Josey Angel about riders following them. So much for coincidences. Caleb didn’t know how they tracked him.

  With practiced movements, he set aside the boxes of supplies in the back of the wagon until he located the two small trunks buried at the bottom. He used a key he carried on a leather loop around his neck to open one of the trunks. He groped blindly, squeezing the pouches inside.

  A tie had come loose and the light that filtered through the wagon reflected a glimmer like a match light. He started counting the coins once, but there were too many. He knew it totaled a fortune, more than any one man could spend in a lifetime, at least a man like Caleb.

  The money was supposed to be driven through Texas into Mexico to buy guns and ammunition. Once the captain got word of it, pulling off the ambush wasn’t difficult. Those men had been worried about Union spies, not a Confederate captain. Caleb hadn’t even known the wagon drivers were Confederates until they were dead.

  Caleb had forgotten how much the captain told him his share would be, more money than he had ever expected to see. It never occurred to him to steal from the others so that he might have a bigger share. Only now he realized it never would have occurred to the captain not to steal it. But not even Captain Bastard could do it alone.

  They planned to sneak away under cover of a faked ambush, a night Caleb was on guard duty. His responsibilities were limited to tying the pouches together and slinging them over a pack mule. He led the animals away while the captain set off explosives around the camp. Caleb fled before anyone knew what happened.

  The brilliant part of the captain’s plan was the escape. They had crossed a river using an abandoned ferry the day before. Caleb led the animals with the gold to the ferry and waited for the captain. It had all seemed too easy. Then he heard gunshots and calls in the distance. Caleb had known the captain too long to betray him, so he waited as long as he dared before crossing the river.

  Even once on the opposite side, he lingered, wondering if the captain might yet find his way to the river, maybe swim his horse across. Caleb knew the captain had to be dead when he never showed.

  Having all the gold frightened Caleb more than it excited him. He had no idea how to explain coming by so much money. Throwing around a lot of gold coins would only make him a target, either of thieves, authorities or his former comrades. They would never stop searching for him. He started back to Charleston but realized they would look there first.

  He buried most of the gold until he could figure what to do, then drifted, spending a coin here or there when he had to. The gold weighed as heavily on his mind as on his pack mule until he came across an old neighbor in St. Louis and heard Langdon Rutledge planned to lead a wagon train to Montana. Caleb couldn’t recall what thoughts he strung together to arrive at a conclusion that seemed obvious only in the end. What better place to hide a cache of gold than in a town where men were pulling big chunks of it from the rivers?

  Reassured at seeing the gold again, Caleb closed the trunks and shifted the boxes of goods and supplies to cover them. The air cooled quickly as the sun dropped. The breeze had shifted and his nose twitched at the earthy smell of the grazing oxen. He looked up at the sound of pounding hoof beats and saw Josey Angel riding hard into camp, already stirring a commotion. Annabelle trailed behind on her ugly paint horse.

  Watching them, Caleb realized how his old comrades had found him. The answer should have been clear enough all along, if Caleb had been willing to believe it. Captain Bastard must still be alive. Caleb shivered just thinking it. At least I won’t be the only one surprised to see him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The riders emerged from the gully near dusk, six horsemen silhouetted against the dying day. They showed themselves barely an hour after Josey raced into camp, but to Annabelle it felt like days had passed.

  She had been bewildered and a little hurt at how quickly she had become an afterthought to Josey. His hasty return had stirred the wagon corral like a hornet’s nest by the time she followed him into camp. Men loaded weapons an
d piled boxes of supplies to create a protected circle within the corral, providing cover for the women and children. They were preparing for battle.

  By the nearest wagon, Josey talked with the Colonel, her father and a few of the other men. Josey came toward her, his face slack, eyes vacant. She wasn’t sure he saw her until he stopped. “I have to go.” He paused just long enough to look at her. Before she thought of anything to say, he leaped on Gray, breaking into a gallop toward the ridge from where they had come.

  “Coward.” Caleb Williams had been watching, his thick arms crossed in disapproval. “First time there’s any real danger and he runs off. Suppose he’s going back to Omaha for help.”

  Annabelle didn’t know what to think. The next hour was a whirl of activity. She helped her mother and the other women prepare meals, which they took to the men in their positions around the corral, waiting for—what? No one would tell her.

  After serving the meal, the women had nothing to do. Annabelle sat near her mother and aunt, nibbling on a cold biscuit, her leg shaking with nervous energy. The women chattered with speculation, but nobody knew anything. Annabelle’s frustration with Josey grew. If only he had spoken his mind instead of riding off in such haste—all so they could sit here and allow their fears to compound. She didn’t know how men waiting for battle managed it.

  Surely, it’s better to plunge ahead than to sit back on one’s haunches awaiting the inevitable. Or was it inevitable? She’d seen Josey examine some hoof prints in the dust, stare at some horseshit, look through his glasses at—what? Why hadn’t he talked to her?Why hadn’t she made him speak? She had been so confused, and more than a little frightened, that she hadn’t thought clearly.