Ride the High Lonesome

by Rosanne Bittner

  “There’s the cave,” he told her. “We’ll hole up there.”

  Kate nodded, thinking how good it would feel to get out of the wind. She shivered into the sheepskin jacket as Luke headed across to the east side of the valley. It took far longer to reach the cave than Kate first expected, but she was learning that nothing in this wild land was ever as close as it looked. The wind and snow let up a little as they drew closer.

  They were perhaps a half mile from the cave when Red stumbled, and his front legs seemed to collapse. Both Kate and Luke went flying forward into the snow. Luke quickly rolled away and got to his knees. He noticed Kate took a moment to answer. She rolled over, holding her head.

  “You okay?” Luke asked.

  Kate finally managed to sit up, wet snow on her face. “I think so.”

  Luke noticed a spot of blood on a snow-covered rock. “Jesus,” he muttered. “Sit still a minute.” He reached over to Red. The horse whinnied and stood up again, shaking his mane and stumbling slightly.

  “What happened, boy?” Luke got up and checked the horse’s legs. “I think he’s okay—just worn out,” he told Kate. He walked up to her and reached out a hand to help her up, then frowned. “Ma’am, your forehead is bleeding.”

  Kate put a hand to the painful spot. “I hit my head on that rock.”

  “He put an arm around her waist and helped her toward his horse. “Put some snow on it,” he said as he grabbed the reins. “The cold will slow the bleeding. I’ll find you something to hold against it.” He let go of her and turned back to Red and ran his hands over the horse’s shoulders and front legs again, then checked the ground around them. “There’s a big hole here,” he said, pointing to a spot just behind the horse. “The snow hid it.” He turned back around to see Kate crumple to the ground as her legs went out from under her. “Kate!”

  Kate tried to gather her thoughts and steady herself, but a terrible dizziness made that impossible. She fought a black fog that scattered her thoughts as Luke gathered her in his arms.

  “I’ll get you to that cave,” he told her. “I’m sorry, but I’ll have to drape you over Red unless you think you can sit up on the horse.”

  Kate couldn’t find the words to answer him. She was aware of being draped over a horse’s back and covered with a blanket. “I know this is uncomfortable, but we have to get to the cave,” Luke said. “I’ll lead Red so he doesn’t step into anymore holes. I don’t want to put my weight on him till I’m sure he doesn’t have an injured leg.”

  Kate instinctively reached down with her hands and grabbed the right stirrup, hanging on to it to keep from slipping backward off the saddle. The slow walk the rest of the way to the cave seemed to take forever.

  “It’s just ahead now,” Luke told her.

  His voice was the last thing Kate remembered.

  Five

  Kate awoke to the crackling sound of a fire, her head on something soft, two blankets covering her. She thought she smelled coffee, and the smell reminded her she was hungry. She opened her eyes to a dimly lit room. Except it wasn’t a room. The walls were made of rock. The only light was that of the fire.

  A horse whinnied, and now she saw a man wearing a gray wool jacket sitting on the floor of the cave and leaning against the rock wall only about five feet away. He appeared to be sleeping. She lay still, thinking. She remembered falling…someone telling her she was bleeding…something about a cave…lying facedown over a horse.

  Her head hurt. She put a hand to her forehead and realized it was bandaged.

  The fall! A snowstorm! She gasped and sat straight up. The blankets fell away, and she looked down to realize she wore only her camisole and ruffled pantaloons. Where was her dress? And where was she?

  A man’s voice spoke up. “So, you finally woke up.”

  Kate jerked the blankets up to her neck and looked over at Luke Bowden. She glanced at the fire then around the room, then back at the man. “Where are we? And why am I half dressed?”

  Luke got up and walked closer to the fire, where he sat down across from her and poured coffee into a tin cup. He handed it out to her. “Here. You need this.”

  Kate stared at the cup, thinking how good a cup of coffee would taste. “Answer my questions first, Mister Bowden.”

  Luke sighed. “So, now it’s ‘Mister Bowden.’” He shook his head. “Look, Kate, we are in that cave I told you about. You were blacked out from that blow to your forehead. The bottom half of your dress was soaking wet. I took care of that wound, and I took off your dress so it wouldn’t be wet under those blankets I made up into a bed for you to warm you up. As far as the coffee and blankets, they’re from my supplies, but this cave is stocked with a little food. It’s shared by outlaws who sometimes leave things stored here for the next men that come through these parts. Lucky for us, there’s firewood in here and extra blankets. I even found that coffeepot and a couple of wrinkled potatoes. They’re kind of soft, but they’re still edible. I figured I’d cook them for our supper along with that quail. We each won’t get more than a bite of the meat, but mixed with the potatoes, it should hold us over for a while.”

  Kate glanced at the fire, weighing all he’d told her. She was mortified that he’d taken off her dress, but she understood it was likely necessary. Still, had he taken any privileges while she was unconscious? He was a man, after all, and God only knew how long he’d been traveling alone. She cautiously took the coffee from him and sipped it. She had to admit, the strong, hot, black brew tasted wonderful.

  “I know what you’re thinking, but I didn’t take advantage while you were out,” Luke said. He poured himself a cup of coffee. “You are a handsome woman, Kate, but I’d never bring you harm. I was just aiming to make sure you don’t end up with consumption and die on me. How does your head feel?”

  Kate struggled to keep the blanket around her neck with one hand while she drank the coffee with her other. She wasn’t sure how to take his remark about her being a handsome woman. She’d never been what she thought of as beautiful and was sure he couldn’t have meant it that way. If he did think of her as handsome, she wasn’t sure how to react. It meant he’d been looking at her as a man usually looks at a woman. What if he thought that just because she was a widow, she needed a man in every way?

  “I…it still hurts,” she answered, “but I’m not dizzy anymore. At least I don’t think I am. I haven’t stood up yet.” She met his gaze, realizing only then that she’d not even taken note of the color of his eyes. By the firelight they looked dark. “What about you? Your voice sounds hoarse but not as raspy as it was before.”

  Luke ran fingers between his wounded neck and the scarf he wore around it. “I put a little whiskey in my coffee. It took away some of the pain. I found this scarf in my supplies and put it on so’s you wouldn’t have to look at this ugly scar all the time. I usually wear the scarf against dust when I’m herding cattle, anyway.”

  Kate glanced at a flask of whiskey he’d set nearby.

  “Don’t worry. It takes a lot more than one or two swallows of whiskey to get me drunk,” Luke told her. “I did have a pretty bad drinking problem when I first came out here…for personal reasons. Now I generally drink only for medicinal reasons or because I’m extra happy, and I haven’t been extra happy in a long, long time.”

  Kate noted the sadness in his words.

  “The snow let up,” he added. “That’s how it is out here. It could even be warm again by tomorrow.”

  Kate finished her coffee and lay back down. “There’s still so much I don’t know about you, Luke. How old are you? Where are you from? How did you end up out here with a bunch of cattle, getting yourself hanged? Are you married? What do you do for a living?”

  “I could say the same for you. All I know is that you’re a war widow whose wagon train was attacked. What’s a widow woman doing traveling out here in the first place?”

&n
bsp; Widow woman. There it was again—a term she was getting tired of hearing, especially with the slanted way men said it.

  “I’m not looking for a man, if that’s what you think,” she told him.

  Luke shrugged. “I wasn’t thinking that at all. It’s a simple question. This isn’t a place for any woman—single, married, or widowed.”

  Kate stared at her coffee. “I know this is no place for a woman, but ending up here certainly was not my choice. And I grew up on a farm in Indiana, so I am used to hard work and hard living. I’ll manage until we reach civilization.”

  Luke frowned. “You haven’t fully explained why you were with that wagon train in the first place.”

  Kate forced back an urge to cry over her predicament, not wanting to show any kind of weakness in front of this man she barely knew and who might think he could take advantage.

  “I’m from Indiana, as I said,” she told him, “and I’ve been living alone for four years, trying to run my husband’s supply store. He and my father were both killed in the war. My mother had died years before that, as had both of my husband’s parents.” She rubbed at her eyes, her head aching. “The store was failing. I wrote a brother-in-law in Oregon about helping him and his family with a big farm he has there. He answered right away, his letter glowing about how perfect the Oregon weather and the soil is for farming. He said he and his family could use my help. I couldn’t afford to travel by train, so I packed up and joined a wagon train.”

  Kate curled onto her side, keeping the blankets close around her and feeling more and more humiliated by the fact that Luke Bowden had seen her bare shoulders and a good share of her breasts not covered by the camisole.

  “As you already know, the Oregon Trail goes right through outlaw country,” she continued. “We knew an attack was possible, but I didn’t imagine someone would murder all of us, steal everything, and burn our wagons. She shook her head. “When I crawled out from under that wagon, there was no one and nothing left. I needed food and I found only one canteen of water, so I just started walking. On the third day I came across your hanging. When those men rode off and left your horse, I knew that horse and the supplies on it were my only chance of survival.”

  Luke grinned. “So, you meant it when you said that your intention to claim my horse and supplies was the main reason you came down that hill, not to rescue me.”

  Kate met his gaze. “No. I mean, initially, yes, it was, but I saw your feet moving, and I couldn’t bear the thought of how you must be suffering if you were still alive. I spent part of the war helping nurse wounded soldiers. I can’t turn my back on a man or woman needing help, stranger or not. I was just afraid I might regret my decision this time, since this is outlaw country. And that leads me to my own questions. Just how innocent are you, Luke Bowden?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not perfect, but I didn’t do anything to deserve a hanging. I bought those cattle from some outlaw who stole them from somebody else. I knew they were stolen, but I paid for them right and proper. Out here, most men survive that way. Fact is, a lot of them come here to get away from the law or bad memories from the war. I was a lieutenant in the war. I’m from Ohio. After the war I came out here to get away from things too familiar…and too painful…back home.”

  He lowered his gaze, an obvious bitterness in his voice. He poured a splash of whiskey into his coffee cup and swallowed some, grimacing from pain. “I’ve been wandering around out here, working odd jobs ever since, mostly for no-good, law-breaking men who are out here for the same reason I am. I figured maybe I would start my own ranch, maybe in northern California,” he continued. “Turns out the man I bought those cattle from ended up dead, at the hands of other outlaws who did steal those cattle first from a legitimate rancher. They took the money I’d paid the dead man and then came after me. They didn’t care that I paid for those cattle. I even had a bill of sale. They hanged me anyway, even though they are cattle thieves themselves. They just figured they could take back the cattle and keep my money and claim I stole the cattle.” He drank a little more whiskey. “I aim to make those men pay me what they cost me, plus pay for trying to kill me. They didn’t need to do that. They could have just tied me up and taken my money and the cattle. But they thought it would be fun to hang a man.”

  He coughed with a pitiful gag then, and Kate could tell he was still in pain. She wondered what he’d meant earlier by saying he wanted to get away from things too familiar. It seemed there were few people left who were not affected by the awful conflict that had torn the country—and families—apart. He still hadn’t fully explained what drove him to come out here in the first place.

  “So you bought cattle from a man who had stolen them from outlaws who’d already stolen them from a law-abiding rancher. And it’s the first bunch of outlaws who came after you.”

  Luke nodded. “That’s right. Now do you understand the kind of men who live out here?”

  “Yes, and it’s very disturbing.” Kate shivered into her blanket again. “A person doesn’t know who can be trusted.”

  “Exactly.” Luke held his cup up to her. “But you can trust me. You ought to know that by now.”

  Kate shook her head. “I feel like I don’t know anything anymore.”

  Luke swallowed more coffee. “Well, to help you a little more, you asked my age. I’m no spring chicken. I’m thirty-five. And no. I’m not married. Never have been.”

  Kate felt obligated to reply in kind. “I’m no spring chicken either,” she told him. “I nursed a sick mother for years and didn’t have time for men. I was already twenty-two when I met and married my husband, Rodney Winters. He’d moved from Michigan to our small town in Indiana and opened a supply store. He left two years later for the war. My father went with him because my mother had died, and he wanted to get away from too many memories. Neither of them ever came back. That’s when I decided to write Rodney’s brother in Oregon.” She felt her cheeks flushing at her next remark. “Rodney and I had no children. Now I’m glad, because it would have been difficult trying to raise them on my own.”

  Luke sighed. “Yeah, well, life can take us in strange directions sometimes.” He looked her over. “I have to say, ma’am, that you look a lot younger than you say, but no woman would lie about something like that. And I suspect you’re a lot braver than you give yourself credit for. You likely would have found a way to handle a child on your own.”

  Kate looked away, a bit embarrassed by his compliment but not sure why. You’re a handsome woman, he’d said. She wasn’t quite sure what to think of that remark. “So, what do we do now?” she asked, wanting to change the subject. “I desperately need clothes and to clean up and feel human again.”

  “We both need that.” Luke swallowed the rest of his coffee, then rubbed at his throat.

  Kate looked around. “Where is my dress?”

  “Draped over that rock behind you. You are right about that dress being a mess, but what’s left of it should be dried out by now.”

  Kate suspected he’d not touched anything he shouldn’t when he’d undressed her, but she didn’t doubt he’d looked. “I would appreciate it if you turned around while I put my dress back on,” she told him. “You might have been the one to take it off, but that doesn’t mean I am willing to stand in front of you half-dressed when I am wide-awake.”

  Luke looked her over appreciatively, which made her even more uncomfortable. “Doesn’t make much sense now, but I’ll turn around.” He did so, and Kate quickly got up and draped her dress over her head. She’d long ago ditched her slips somewhere in the endless valley as she’d walked through it. The slips had only made her even hotter.

  Now that Luke Bowden seemed to be getting better, she felt vulnerable and frustrated. She quickly buttoned the front of her dress, her cheeks feeling hot at the thought that the near stranger who sat across the fire had unbuttoned it while she was passed out.

 
; She sat back down on her bedroll. “Thank you,” she told him. “You may turn around now.”

  Luke obeyed, smiling. He poured himself more coffee and added more whiskey.

  “Please be careful with that whiskey,” Kate said.

  Luke shook his head. “Don’t worry.” He drank down more. “Lucky for us there were even a couple of extra blankets in here. That’s why I could cover you better. I have no idea how clean they are or if they’ve got bugs in them, but in this weather and this land, you have to make do.” He reached around and turned back with a black fry pan in his hand, which he set over the fire. Then he picked up one of two potatoes he’d set on a tin plate near the fire and began slicing it into the pan with his knife. “There’s a little lard still in this pan, and lard doesn’t spoil, so I guess it will have to do.”

  He took the bloody, skinned quail from a tin plate nearby and threw it into the pan with the potatoes.

  “I plucked the feathers off this guy while you slept,” he told Kate. “This bird and one potato each should help fill our bellies. We’re running out of biscuits, so we’ll save them for tomorrow. I did have a pack horse with a lot more supplies, but those men took that, too, so we have hardly any food. But I have a plan.”

  “To leave me here?”

  Luke nodded. “You can stay here and wait while I leave in the morning and keep following that cattle trail to Lander. They will try to sell those cattle there. I’ll find them, get my money and my revenge. Then I’ll get us some supplies and bring them back here along with an extra horse and get you out of here to someplace where you can feel like a human being again.”