by Jodi Thomas
“Yes, ma’am,” he yelled over his shoulder.
By the time McCall went inside to get her hat and gloves, he was waiting with the horses. She didn’t say a word when he handed her the reins to one of the mounts without offering to cup his hands and give her a boost, as every man she’d ever known would have done.
She lifted the leg of her split skirt and pulled herself into the saddle. From three generations of Texans, she’d never considered herself spoiled, and certainly not pampered, but she did expect common courtesy…of which this man seemed lacking. She hadn’t seen any sign that he knew how to treat a lady. The major would have had one of his men walk a month of night guard for treating his wife so. But the major had been dead for three years, and she was no longer his wife, only his widow.
McCall kicked the horse into action, angry both at Sloan for his rudeness and at herself for caring one way or the other. Getting the children to safety should be the only thing on her mind. What did it matter if the man she’d asked to help was a gentleman or not? He’d go his way soon and she’d find another cause to fight.
She could hear Sloan’s horse thundering to catch her and knew he’d have trouble doing so. McCall had ridden before she had walked. Sometimes, during the war, Holden had sent her with messages because he said there were no men who could outride her. She’d heard the major brag once that a bullet couldn’t catch his wife on a good horse.
They crossed the road and galloped past open fields she’d known all her life. She glanced back when she changed direction and watched Sloan. He rode well, but then she’d expected a man who kept his gauntlets from the cavalry to be able to handle a horse.
They rode along rows of winter-crisp fields. Everything smelled cool and clean after the storm. For the first time in longer than she could remember, the war seemed long past.
McCall slowed as she rode onto the ranch her grandfather had named Phantom Ridge. Away, she always thought of herself as confident and independent, but here, surrounded by ghosts, she changed. Her father and grandfather had dominated the early years of her life, until they passed on that responsibility to Holden when she married. Holden and her father were at West Point together, and many times in her marriage, she wondered if they hadn’t been twins. Holden had been the first gentleman to court her, or rather the first man her father and grandfather allowed close enough to court. He’d done all the right things to impress a seventeen-year-old girl, and he’d looked so grand in his major’s uniform. He hadn’t held her hand when he asked her to marry him. She’d fallen in love within hours of meeting him. He was good, and fair, and solid as a rock. McCall dreamed of adventure at the major’s side, but she had gotten war.
Holden Harrison had been a man no other could measure up to, in McCall’s eyes, and she’d sworn the day she buried him to wear black until she also died.
Looking at the ranch house now, with its long porch and wide balcony, McCall knew, as she had the day she brought Holden back to bury beside her father and mother, that she’d never live in the house again. It was her father’s house, and maybe a little bit Holden’s, but it was no longer hers. Someday maybe others would run cattle over the rolling hills and finish the second floor her grandfather had built to hold many children. She never would. She’d make her home at the station with Miss Alyce, when she had time to think of home at all.
Sloan didn’t say a word as they passed the small, neat cemetery and rounded the house. She glanced at him as he reined up at her side. The slight rise of his eyebrow told her he had a few questions. But he seemed the kind of man who’d wait for the answers.
“No one’s around,” she answered as if he’d asked. “I closed the ranch after my husband died. An old couple stayed on to see after the place but they left a few months ago.”
Sloan still didn’t comment.
McCall waited. She didn’t want to go back into the house for the guns she needed for the trip. Alyce Wren once said her father’s house was built on woe, but McCall never understood why. Now as she looked at it, she thought she saw what Miss Alyce meant. The paint was starting to peel and the roof was in need of fixing. Yet the old house stood like an aging veteran, tall and proud.
Sloan watched her closely as he lowered himself to the ground and tied the reins of both horses to a tarnished ring hanging from a post in need of paint. His ribs ached from the ride, but he wasn’t about to touch his side to let her know he was in pain.
When he turned, she reached out her arms for him to help her down.
On instinct, he circled her waist with his gloved hands and lifted her from the saddle. Her hands were warm on his shoulders, and her hair smelled of roses as he slowly lowered her beside him. He bit back the pain in his side from the blows he’d taken against his ribs. He decided he’d get the old woman to wrap them tighter.
“Thank you,” she said impersonally as she moved away.
Sloan nodded, suddenly embarrassed at himself. What he’d done was a common act men did for women all the time. His reaction must mark him a fool to her for she could have no idea how rare such an action was for him.
McCall climbed the steps. “You’re welcome to come in, or wait out here if you like. I’ll only be a minute.”
Sloan followed her into the house. He’d never been inside a home like this. It reminded him of the officers’ quarters on a few old forts he’d seen back east, only this was larger. In fact, most of the hotels he’d stayed in were smaller. The rooms all seemed to open off a wide foyer, which had a staircase at the far end. All the furniture was draped and rugs had been rolled to one side.
McCall moved toward the stairs. She paused on the first step and glanced over her shoulder at him. Staring up at her, Sloan thought she belonged in this house. She was as proper and straight as it seemed. He wanted to ask her why she lived at the station, but it was none of his business. He was just someone she’d asked to help drive a wagon, nothing more. She wasn’t offering friendship and he wasn’t about to pry.
McCall turned and disappeared upstairs, leaving Sloan to wander around. With all the curtains drawn, the shadowed furniture seemed asleep beneath cream-colored sheets. The pictures were covered and looked as if they were bowing their heads in sorrow.
Pulling off a glove, Sloan ran his finger along the mantel, wiping off a layer of dust. He strolled past a parlor, then what must have once been a large dining room. The air seemed colder inside than he’d remembered it being outside. If houses could be lonely, this one surely was. The very walls seemed to mourn the silence of endless days without voices to echo.
As he moved through the rooms, more from impatience than curiosity, a tiny square of tin caught his eye. It seemed to blink at him from the corner of a room lined with bookshelves. Sloan bent, putting his hand between the leg of a table and the wall. Slowly he pulled out the twisted piece of metal.
Moving to the window, he straightened the two-inch-square tintype. Since the war, most pictures were photographs, but before and during the war men carried only tintypes of their loved ones. McCall, a few years younger and much happier than he’d probably ever see her, looked back at him from the glinting metal.
Over the years Sloan had glanced at a hundred squares made the same. Wives, sweethearts, mothers. But none had ever drawn him as this one did. Her face had a warmth not even the shadowy light could cool.
Footsteps sounded from the stairs. Sloan turned, slipping the picture into his pocket. He wasn’t stealing, he silently told himself. The picture had been bent and discarded. Someone had tossed it away as worthless, but the square had missed the trash bin and hidden in waiting until now.
He wrapped his fingers around the metal in his pocket. It wasn’t worthless anymore; it was his now. He’d never tell her he had it. But somehow he knew he’d carry the small square with him the rest of his life…as short as that might be.
Glancing up, he saw her hurrying toward him as if she didn’t want to stay in this place a moment longer than necessary.
She tossed hi
m a rifle and fully loaded shoulder belt. “Ready to ride?” Her face seemed as stiffly starched as the high-necked blouse she wore. At least the blouse was white and not black like the skirt, jacket, coat, and boots she always wore.
“Ready,” he answered as he followed her from the house.
Neither looked back as he helped her into her saddle this time and she thanked him with a nod.
They rode slower back to the station, side by side, but both deep in their own thoughts.
It was not until almost midnight, when the wagon was loaded and ready for a dawn departure, that Sloan reached in his pocket and pulled out McCall’s reflection. Carefully, as though the tin were fragile, he wrapped it in a bandanna and tucked it deep into his saddlebags.
Four
“AS SOON AS we’re out of sight of the station, I’ll climb up front and ride shotgun,” Winter whispered from the back of the wagon as Sloan drove the team in line behind the horses McCall managed.
“I’d appreciate that,” Sloan said over his shoulder. The sun wasn’t up yet, but he noticed all the children were wide-awake. They seemed to feel it was their duty to listen for any sound that might mean trouble. Only Winter broke the silence. He talked in a low tone to the others in a language Sloan couldn’t understand.
Sloan focused on the lead wagon. McCall was as good at driving a team as she’d been at horseback riding. Alyce Wren sat beside her, and for once the old woman looked like she hadn’t slept in her clothes. She was dressed in shades of brown and had managed to pull her hair into a bun. She carried a faded parasol as though she were on an afternoon outing. She looked as out of sorts as ever. Sloan wondered if McCall had spent the past three days trying to talk her out of making the journey.
They moved through the few buildings too sparsely populated to be called a town. Winter knelt just behind the bench. “You worried about this trip, mister?”
“No,” Sloan answered. “I figure trouble will find us in its own good time. There’s not much I can do about it until I finally see it coming head-on.”
“Me too,” Winter echoed. “I’m not worried.”
Sloan looked over his shoulder. “Why don’t you climb on up with me? We’re far enough along that it’s unlikely we’ll see anyone.”
Winter jumped over the bench and took his seat. “I won’t bother you none. I know how to ride shotgun. When my father was alive, I used to ride in the wagon with him all the time. He told me he’d teach me to drive a team when I was old enough.”
Sloan raised an eyebrow in question.
Winter shrugged. “I guess I forgot to tell you that my mother is one of The People. She’s Black Kettle’s sister. But my father, he was a trapper named Adam McQuillen, who wandered into Black Kettle’s camp one winter, half frozen and starving. When my mother’s family took care of him, he decided to stay. My mother named me after the season that brought him to her.”
Sloan looked at the boy carefully. The blood of two peoples blended in his features.
“My father used to tell me I needed to walk in both worlds, but after he died, I decided I wanted to stay with my mother. It’s not as easy to walk with his people as it is with hers. In the settlements, I was just an Indian, but in Black Kettle’s camp I am Winter, Adam and Elk Woman’s son.”
“Do you have any idea where she is?” Sloan asked. If Winter could remember something about his people camping across the one hundredth parallel, it could help Sloan locate the tribe. Maybe she’d said something when they’d parted.
Winter shook his head. “When we heard the horses coming that morning, she told me to run toward the river and not to stop until I hit the water. The river had a thin cover of ice on it, but I didn’t let that stop me. I crossed the water and hid in the brush until it was dark, then I just started running with the current.”
He looked up with huge eyes brimming with tears he refused to let fall. “I can still hear my mother’s people screaming and the sound of so much gunfire rattling together like someone was rapping on the clouds. Sometimes at night, when I’m asleep, I think I can still feel the ice cutting my cheeks as I swam as fast as I could to get away. We thought we were safe, camped along the Washita. Black Kettle told us the army wouldn’t bother us there.”
Sloan had heard of the battle on the Washita, but he’d guessed it was more an open attack than an equal fight. Custer was looking for glory at any price. But Sloan didn’t blame anyone anymore in the Indian wars. He’d seen both sides do unthinkable things. If one side started hating the other, it became a circle no one walked away from. Sloan had witnessed it in the War Between the States and now with the Indians.
He also knew what it was like to have his dreams haunted, and he’d never wish that on anyone. The months he’d been in the Union prison camp still shadowed his nights to the point that he no longer remembered dreams, only nightmares.
“The old medicine man called Willow Hawk found me a day later,” Winter continued. “He already had four children with him, but one died before we traveled two more days.” Winter’s words were matter-of-fact now. “He kept moving south along the river, reminding us we had to get away and that he’d find someone to take us back when it was safer. He said he’d seen a few women escape and ride north to where several of the men had gone hunting. They’ll go to the plains, where no one can get within rifle shot without being seen. Miss Alyce told us she rode up there in a wagon once. She says the earth just opens up in a crack that could hide a herd of buffalo. Our people will be safe.”
Sloan glanced at Winter, but didn’t interrupt the boy by telling him that soon there would be nowhere for his people to be safe, maybe not even the reservation.
Winter smiled to himself. “Miss Alyce says she can take us to them. My mother will be worried if we don’t hurry. My father used to say it was her favorite pastime.”
Sloan wished he could say they’d find her, but he knew the chances were slim that she was one of the few women who’d escaped. Even if she was alive, there were hundreds of miles of land to cover, looking for a people who were doing their best to hide. A thousand Indians could disappear forever in the canyons.
“Since we’ve got some time,” Sloan glanced down at the boy, so full of sadness he looked like it might ooze from him like sap, “I thought you might be old enough to teach to drive a team. I’m most likely not as good a driver as your pa was, but I could show you how to hold the reins. There will be times in the next few weeks when it would come in handy to have another driver.”
The boy nodded, as if he understood the reason for Sloan’s sudden change of subject and appreciated the effort.
Winter spent the day watching for trouble and taking the reins from time to time. He talked little, as did the other children. McCall stopped for a few minutes at noon and passed out biscuits and ham left over from breakfast. The road was little more than a trail, but now and then they saw signs of other people having traveled the same path—a cold campfire, a discarded wagon wheel, a trail leading off toward a dugout in the distance.
At sunset McCall pulled the wagons into a wooded area where they could camp without being noticed. Hundred-year-old cottonwoods framed a wide, shallow creek bed. Sloan tended the horses while McCall built a fire and Alyce Wren started supper. The children didn’t run and play as he’d thought they might. Instead, they moved around, circling the campsite as though checking the perimeters for safety.
One little girl of about six picked up small rocks and stuffed them into a pouch. When the pouch was full, she continued to search. Another child the same size followed her, stepping only in the imprint of each of her footsteps. A third sat on the grass with a branch and wiped away the prints of anyone who passed within three feet of him.
As Sloan walked past them, he realized he’d seen soldiers do much the same thing after a battle. Yet these were children. He could tell them the camp was secure, but he wondered how many years it would be, if ever, before they would feel safe.
It was almost full dark when Sloan
brought the last two horses from the stream. He tied them to graze near the tall grass at the water’s edge and started back to camp. The night was crisp, but not as cold as it had been the past week.
He almost passed McCall without seeing her in the darkness.
She leaned against an aging cottonwood, so still she could have been a statue. The pale outline of her blouse reflected creamy in the moonlight.
“Mrs. Harrison?”
“Yes.” She moved slightly, stretching her back against the bark. Without the black waist-length jacket she appeared softer, more human.
He stepped closer, knowing he’d startled her. “Are you all right?”
McCall smiled up at him. “I’m wonderful. I just wanted to be alone for a few minutes and enjoy the stillness.
“I thought I’d give my ears a rest from Miss Alyce’s stories. She’s sitting in her rocker now, telling them to the children, though most of them can’t understand a word.” McCall suddenly sounded excited, as though she’d been thinking of something and had to share it with someone.
He didn’t answer, but watched her closely. In the past three days he’d never seen her look so content.
“We made it without a hitch today, didn’t we? I was afraid if we had trouble we’d cross it the first day. Someone would realize what we planned and stop us before we could try. But we made it.”
Sloan leaned against the tree, so close beside her that his shoulder brushed hers. He wanted to enjoy her mood. “We made good time today. I can tell by how much my backside hurts.” He’d never seen her like this, tired but content, proud of herself.
McCall laughed. “I know how you feel. Alyce Wren became so tired she almost fell from the wagon a few times. I finally had the children crowd up so she could spread out on a pile of blankets in the back, I didn’t figure you’d want me to keep stopping to pick her up, and I couldn’t find any rope to tie her to the bench.”
The picture of Alyce Wren nodding off as they moved along made Sloan smile. The old woman drove him crazy with her grumbling advice, but he would never wish her harm. He wouldn’t mind saying “I told you to stay home” to her a few times, though. In the hour since they’d stopped, she’d managed to complain about everything, including the hardness of the ground.