Prairie Moon

by Maggie Osborne

  They both looked at her as if they didn’t expect a woman to understand. And she didn’t.

  “How many times have you tried to kill him?” she asked the old man.

  “I don’t know. Once or twice a year.” He looked up at Cameron. “You don’t move as fast as you used to, and this is the third year in a row that I caught you without your guns. You’re getting careless. Next time I’ll get you.”

  “Next time I’ll bury you and ride away without a backward glance. You aren’t as good as you used to be. I knew you were here.”

  Disgusted with both of them, Della went looking for the doctoring kit. Cameron’s saddlebags were neatly packed, which she expected, but she took her time locating and then checking the kit. Figuring things out.

  She couldn’t guess how Cameron had known that Luke Apple was in the vicinity, but he had. And while Mr. Apple might—or might not—have seriously intended to kill Cameron, Cameron had removed his gun belt. She thought about that. And when she returned to the men, she wasn’t as grim-lipped.

  Cameron had stripped off his shirt and helped the old man out of his buckskin trousers.

  “Green Feather will flay me alive when she sees these pants cut up.”

  “How is she?”

  “Fat and mean and crazy. Just like always, God love her.”

  Cameron grinned. “Tell her I send my regards.”

  “Like hell I will.” He glanced up at Della. “Do you intend to douse these wounds with whisky?”

  “That’s my plan, since I didn’t see anything else in the kit.” A quick look told her that both had long slashes, but the major wounds didn’t appear deep enough to require stitches. Good. Even the thought of stitching skin made her feel queasy. “I brought the bottle of whisky from your saddlebags,” she said to Cameron.

  “Where’s your hospitality, James Cameron?” Luke demanded. He jerked his head toward the bottle in Della’s hand. “If you were bleeding at my place, I’d offer you a drink.”

  Cameron started to get up, but Della waived him down. She poured herself a cup of whisky first and took a long, fiery swallow. An armadillo was easier to understand than a man. Men simply did not live in the same world that women did.

  She washed their wounds, doused the cuts with whisky, applied ground charcoal to draw out poisons, and bandaged them.

  “There’s nothing I can do for your eye, Mr. Apple.”

  “I know it. This ain’t the first time I had a shiner.”

  “And you’re going to crack open your lip every time you talk. It’ll take a while to heal,” she said to Cameron. The cut was small but ill placed.

  “Nothing to be done about it.” Pushing to his feet, he flexed his shoulders and tested his body for aches and bruises. “I’ll fetch your horse.”

  “It’s the same old paint I always ride. Over yonder.”

  “I’ll start some supper,” Della said. Apparently Mr. Apple, their revenge-crazed guest, would be staying. She eyed him uncertainly. “You’re finished attacking us?”

  He jerked back with offense. “I got nothing against you, just him. I don’t attack women. What kind of a man do you think I am?”

  “I’m trying to figure that out.” She worked while she talked, keeping a wary eye on Mr. Apple, and reminding herself that Cameron wouldn’t have left her alone if he thought she was in danger. On the other hand, he hadn’t let her go to the water hole alone, so Mr. Apple wasn’t harmless by any means. “What kind of man are you?”

  “Well, now. Been a long time since anyone asked me that.” Mollified, he considered. “I admire Indians, for one thing, like ’em fine, which I guess makes me different from most folks. I liked ’em better before they ended up confined. They ain’t taking to it well. But who would? I got me an Indian wife; third one, in fact. That would be Green Feather. The other two up and died on me.”

  “Is she really mean and crazy?” Supper would be simple. Beans, bacon, and biscuits. A 3-B supper, Cameron called it.

  “Crazy people are interesting,” Mr. Apple said at length, as if he’d given it considerable thought. “It’s the crazy that makes her mean.”

  “I knew a crazy woman,” Della said, remembering Clarence’s mother. “She was mean spirited before she went queer in the head. Getting crazy just made her worse.”

  “Did your crazy woman try to kill you?”

  Her head jerked and she looked up at him. “Possibly.” She cleared her throat. “Once she threw a pan of boiling water at me. It was lucky that I was wearing several petticoats.”

  “That’s what makes a crazy woman interesting. You never know what they’ll do. Once Green Feather staked me out on the range and left me to die. An old man like me.” He shook his head and swallowed half his cup of whisky. “When I finally came home, she said she didn’t remember doing it. But she asked if I still planned to take a second wife.” He laughed. “Where’s your husband, missus?”

  “He died at the end of the war.” The beans and bacon were coming along nicely, but her biscuits looked too skimpy. She powdered them with more flour.

  “That’s a long time to be a widow lady.”

  As she couldn’t think of anything to say, she busied herself seasoning the beans. Lots of salt, a little pepper. She didn’t find any other spices.

  “A woman could do worse than to cast her eye on James Cameron,” Mr. Apple said after a minute. “That’s a good man.”

  She raised an eyebrow, resisting the urge to smile. “But one with a short life span.” In a more serious voice, she asked, “Were you truly trying to kill him?”

  The old man’s good eye sharpened. “Did you really try to kill me?”

  Silence answered the questions for both of them.

  “I admire James Cameron, I truly do,” Mr. Apple said. “There’s many a time I’ve wished some other lawman had killed Green Feather’s nephew. There ain’t going to be much celebrating when I finally get my revenge.”

  “That’s kind of you,” Della said, not sure if she meant it sarcastically or sincerely.

  “I know it,” he said cheerfully. “But back to what we were talking about . . . it ain’t natural for a woman not to be married. A woman needs a husband.”

  Cameron appeared then, leading a swayback, spotted horse carrying spare saddlebags. Every now and then he made a sound and touched his bandaged shoulder, but he didn’t ask for help unsaddling the paint and settling it for the night.

  After they’d eaten, he thanked Della for the meal. “The biscuits were especially fine.”

  “Best biscuits I had in a while,” Mr. Apple agreed.

  The biscuits had been flat and too browned on the bottom, but Della didn’t point out the difficulties of camp cooking. She scrubbed the plates and pot with loose sand while Cameron and Mr. Apple exchanged news and talked over cups of coffee mixed with whisky. Cameron dabbed at his lip occasionally when a drop of blood leaked past the salve Della had provided as treatment.

  Occasionally she looked at him across the fire, thinking about what Mr. Apple had said regarding a woman’s need to be married. Certain things went hand in hand with marriage, things she hadn’t thought about in a long time. Suddenly her stomach felt hot.

  “If you’ll excuse me, I believe I’ll just . . .” She waved a hand toward her bedroll. Then she looked at the two of them. “It is safe to sleep, isn’t it?”

  Mr. Apple rolled his eyes and looked disgusted. “You disappoint me, missus.”

  Cameron smiled, and Della’s stomach burned a little hotter. “Luke’s finished for today. He’s too tired to assault a gnat. Between the fight and the whisky, he can hardly keep his old eyes open.”

  “Now that is a damned lie!”

  “You’re safe,” Cameron said in a serious tone, his gaze meeting hers.

  In fact, she’d never felt safer than she did in the company of James Cameron. The realization surprised her a little, but she supposed it shouldn’t have. The man was a legend.

  He was also a wee bit of a fraud, she t
hought before she fell asleep. He’d known the old man was hiding nearby. But he’d set down his guns.

  There were layers to James Cameron that she hadn’t suspected.

  And there was that strange hot weakness in her stomach . . .

  Chapter 9

  “So, what kind of a woman are you, missus?”

  “Today, a cold and wet one.”

  A steady drizzle had fallen since morning, running down the neck of Della’s oilskin duster, leaking between her wrists and gloves, and finding entry into her boots. By the time she realized that her hat must have a hole, the knot of hair coiled atop her head was soaked and dripping rainwater down her cheeks.

  “The temperature’s dropped thirty degrees since midday,” she said, shivering. Using her saddle as a backrest, she leaned against the damp leather and blew on her fingers to warm them.

  She and Luke Apple sat on blankets spread over wet buffalo grass, listening to the hum of raindrops singing on the canvas roof of their lean-to. They looked out into the rain, watching Cameron moving around the campsite.

  “How did he manage to get a fire going?” Della couldn’t see the fire from the lean-to’s opening, but she could smell hot coffee, and for once she was eager to have it.

  “If a man can’t start a fire, he should live in a town and stay there.”

  “I don’t remember it ever being this cold in the middle of August.”

  “Huh. This ain’t nothing. Out here on the range, it can snow one day and bake your hide the next. Especially late in the season, with fall coming on.”

  She wondered if it was worthwhile to try to dry her hair or if the air was too damp. Wondered if it was worth the energy needed to rummage through her saddlebags and find her towel. “Why does it take more out of a person to ride in wet weather than when it’s dry?”

  “Now that I don’t know.”

  “And why does he,” she nodded toward the rain falling past the opening, “have to be so stubborn?”

  Cameron had helped Luke erect the lean-to, then he’d insisted that he didn’t need an old man and a female getting in his way. Della had mentioned that the work would go three times as quickly if she and Luke helped set up camp, and besides they were already soaked.

  “Which is a worry,” he’d said. “I don’t need either one of you getting sick on me.”

  As if he were immune to ague and chilblains, but they were ripe for illness. She had argued that they didn’t need him coming down ill, either, but he’d dismissed the comment as if he’d never had a sick day in his life.

  “When I was younger, I’da done the same thing,” Luke Apple said, adjusting a stiff horse blanket around his shoulders. “I didn’t cotton to folks messing with my camp. A man likes things a certain way.”

  “Women prefer to share chores.”

  “Even in your kitchen?”

  “Well, not in my kitchen,” she admitted with a thin smile.

  She wasn’t sure why it made her angry that Cameron didn’t want her help. Over the last two days he’d surrendered a couple of small tasks, yielding them up like treasure, but also making his reluctance clear.

  Filling the coffeepot and opening the bedrolls didn’t satisfy her need to contribute. Nor did it fulfill her secret image of the two of them working side by side in productive harmony. She blinked. Now where had that thought come from?

  Needing a distraction, she found her towel, then set her hat aside and removed her hairpins, carefully catching them all and tucking them in her pocket. Vigorously she toweled her hair, showering drips down the front and back of her oilskin duster.

  “You didn’t answer my question.” The old man was a talker. He listened well, too.

  “I guess you could say that I’m a woman who doesn’t amount to much,” she said at length, glancing past her towel into the rain. “I’ve been a wife and a mother, but I wasn’t good at either. I didn’t do right by my husband or by my baby girl.” Riding alone in the rain had opened her mind to a deluge of bitter memories.

  “Go on.”

  “That makes me angry. Deep down, gut-hurting angry.” The minute she spoke the words, she understood they were true. Lowering the towel, she stared into the gray, wet landscape. “I didn’t do right, and I let myself get stepped on,” she whispered. How could she have failed to understand that sorrow was not her defining characteristic, anger was.

  “There must be something good about you,” Luke said after a minute.

  “Well, there is,” she snapped. “I’m generally capable, can stretch a dollar; I grow the biggest damned pumpkins in Two Creeks, Texas; and I can whistle.”

  “I never did learn to whistle. And I don’t stay in towns.”

  Either he’d lost interest or he found her as dull as dish-water. “I guessed that was why we didn’t stop.” They’d glimpsed a town yesterday but had given it wide berth. Later Cameron had inquired if she minded much, and she’d just shrugged. But right now she would have given everything she owned to be sitting in a dry, warm hotel looking forward to a hot meal and a fluffy mattress.

  “Here’s coffee,” Cameron said, ducking into the lean-to. He sounded irritatingly cheerful. Sinking to the ground, he folded his long legs Indian fashion, then inspected the wet hair dropping to Della’s waist. “A hole in your hat?”

  “Now how did you guess?”

  “She’s an angry woman,” Luke explained. He still wore his own wide-brimmed hat trimmed with a green feather tucked into a snakeskin band. Cameron’s hat-band was plain, fashioned of braided rope.

  “Are you angry at anything particular or just in general?”

  “Sounds like she’s mad at everything, but mostly she’s mad at herself.”

  “I can speak for myself,” she said to Luke. Then she threw down her towel and gripped the hot coffee between her hands. “I don’t know why I’m angry.” The two men exchanged a glance, which made her grind her teeth. “I’m mad at the rain, I’m mad at you because I feel useless and dependent,” she said to Cameron. “And I’m mad at you for scaring me and trying to kill him,” she added, narrowing her eyes at Luke.

  “I guess that’s fair,” Luke decided. He studied the canvas overhead. “I’m mad because I have to go home and tell Green Feather that once again I failed to kill James Cameron.” He looked at Cameron as if to say, your turn.

  “All right, I’m mad, too. I’m mad because my lip keeps splitting and because the rain slows us down.” They both turned to Della.

  “I’m getting madder by the minute because I suspect you’re teasing me,” she said slowly, searching for a betraying twitch in their expressions.

  “I ain’t teasing about being called squaw-man for forty years. That pisses me off something fierce.”

  “I guarantee that I’m damned mad that some two-bit bastard wrote a sensational book that painted a target on my back.”

  Luke sat up straight, indignant. “By God, we should go shoot somebody! Who do you want to shoot, missus?”

  “What I’m really mad about is that Clarence had the mother he had.”

  “You want to shoot your mother-in-law?”

  Della considered the suggestion. “She said and did hurtful things. She held herself above gratitude and forgiveness. She had a cruel streak a mile wide.”

  “That was a long time ago,” Cameron offered quietly.

  But the time with the Wards had been so intense, so terrible, that it had burned as deep as a brand. She couldn’t seem to shake free of them.

  “Time stopped when Mrs. Ward stole my baby and Mr. Ward let her do it.” A bubble of fury expanded in her chest. Not the pain and sadness she usually felt, but acid rage, erupting against her insides as hot as lava. “And I let her do it.”

  There was no place to put the rage, no way to handle it and crush it. Burning inside, she shoved to her feet and stumbled past Cameron, needing to run and scream, to rend and tear.

  “Della, wait.”

  Skirts sweeping the mud, she spun and pointed a shaking finger at him.
“I swear if you come out here, I’ll rip you apart with my teeth and nails!” She ran into the rain.

  “What in the hell just happened here?”

  Luke shrugged and adjusted his blanket. “Damned if I know. Traveling ain’t easy for white women.”

  “Did you say something that upset her?”

  “Not that I know.”

  At the farm, Cameron had felt her sadness, but out here on the range her sadness had hardened into anger. He’d decided a little anger was beneficial, it erected a barrier between them, and that wasn’t such a bad thing. But what was the cause? At first he’d wondered if it was him. Now the answer seemed obvious. Knowing she would see her daughter had triggered powerful memories and emotions.

  Reaching for her towel, he blotted the rainwater on his face and throat, then swallowed the last of the coffee she’d left behind.

  “You’re a married man. You must know about women,” he said to Luke. “What would you advise? Should I find her and try to offer comfort? Or did she mean what she said?”

  Luke puckered his lips and considered. “Well . . . usually when a woman says she’ll tear you apart with her teeth, she’s mad enough to mean it.”

  “She could get lost out there.”

  “She’s been lost for a long time, son.”

  He stared at Luke, remembering why he cared about this old man, then he pulled down the brim of his hat and stood.

  The rain had settled into a steady downpour with no indication of ending. He could see about ten feet before the slant formed a gray wall.

  Where would she have gone? He checked the fire first, and discovered the flames had gone out. The grass was too thick to hold prints. He couldn’t tell if she’d come here. There was no sign of her anywhere near the lean-to. Water poured off his hat brim as he faced the range, wondering how far she’d gotten.

  Ducking his head, he walked toward the horses. If it took all night, he’d find her.

  “I told you not to come after me!”

  She was leaning against Rebecca, rain running off her oilskin in sheets, wet hair streaming down her back. As he came closer, he saw that her eyes were wet, but that might be only rain. She’d bitten her lips. Her bare hands were red with cold.