The Book of Lost Friends(115)

“Relieves my mind to see it.” I smile wide at him and give hardly a thought to the man who fell dead from that other saddle. If Elam did the killing, it was a man who had took up evil ways.

“I’d hoped to catch you before you set off. My work ran longer than expected.” Elam leans an elbow on his saddle horn. He’s wet and mud spattered. Dry lather lines the horses’ breast collars. Elam slacks the reins, and the poor, tired dun sags its head and fills its lungs with a long breath.

“I wanted you to know, we’ve cut off the head of the snake,” he says, and he looks from me to Juneau Jane and back. “Marston, himself, is jailed in Hico, to be tried for his crimes and hanged. I hope that eases the burden of your loss in some way.” He looks at Juneau Jane again and then at Missy. “We’ll be after the rest of his lieutenants and higher officers now, but many will lose faith in their cause without Marston, and wander to the frontier or to Mexico. Their leader did not go bravely from his command. We dug him from a corn crib, where he was hiding like a trapped rat. Not a single shot was fired to bring him in.”

Juneau Jane sniffles and nods, makes the sign of the cross over her chest, and looks down at her hands in her lap. A tear drips from her cheek and draws a small circle on the front of her dress.

Anger burns in me. The unholy kind. “I’m glad of it. Glad he’ll be made to pay. Glad you come back in one piece, too.”

His thick mustache lifts with a smile. “As I promised you I would, Miss Gossett. As I promised you I would.”

“Hannie,” I tell him. “Remember I said you could call me by my name?”

“Indeed I do.” He tips his hat, then goes on forward to talk to the men.

That smile stays with me through the day and into evening. I watch him ride away from the wagon, then back, then disappear over the hills. Time to time, I spot him on the horizon. I feel safer, knowing he’s there.

It’s when we’re stopped to camp that the uneasy comes over me again. The animals fret at their pickets, toss heads and twitch ears. Juneau Jane takes the halter of a big gelding and strokes its nose. “They have a sense of something,” she says.

I think about Indians and panthers and coyotes and the Mexican gray wolves that howl on the prairies at night. I hold Missy’s old reticule close, feel the weight of the derringer tucked inside. It’s some comfort, but not much.

Elam Salter comes into our camp, and that’s more comfort, yet. “Stay between the rocks and the wagon,” he tells us, and then talks quiet with the men on the other side of the wagon. I watch their hands and bodies move, pointing, looking.

One of the soldiers hangs a blanket between two cedar trees for our necessary, and another cooks on a small stove at the wagon.

There’s none of Elam’s friendly talk or smiles that night.

When we bed down, he’s disappeared again. Don’t know where he goes or if he sleeps. The dark just grabs him up. I don’t hear or see him after that.

“What does he search for?” Juneau Jane asks as we settle in a tent with Missy twixt us. I tie Missy’s ankle to mine, case she’d take a mind to get up and wander…or I would in my dreams.

Missy’s asleep quick as she can get flat on the blanket.

“Don’t know what he’s after.” I think I scent smoke on the wind. Just a hair of it, but then I ain’t sure. Our cookstove’s been out for hours. “Reckon the night’ll pass all right, though. We got five men looking out after us. You and me been in tougher spots.” I think of the swamp and not knowing if we’d live to morning light. “We ain’t alone, at least.”

Juneau Jane nods, but the lantern light through the cloth shines on a brim of tears. “I have left Papa. He is alone.”

“He’s gone on the other side of the door. He ain’t in that body no more,” I tell her. “You sleep now.” I pull the blanket up, but I don’t find rest.

Sleep finally comes like a summer dry river, a trickle that’s shallow and splits around rocks and downed branches and tree roots, dividing and dividing, till by morning it’s the thin bead of gathered morning dew, dripping lazy off the army tent overhead.

On rising, I think I smell smoke again. But there’s barely enough fire in the stove for coffee, and the wind scatters it the other direction.

It’s only your mind, Hannie, I tell myself, but I make sure we all three get up together and go behind the blanket to see to our necessary. Missy wants to pick snowball flowers there, but I don’t let her.

Elam Salter comes in from wherever he’s passed the night. He looks like a man who ain’t slept. He’s keeping watch for something, but he don’t ever say what.

We eat pilot biscuits, dunking them in our cups to soften them up for chewing. Missy fusses and spits hers out. “You’ll go hungry, then,” I tell her. “You need to eat for—” I catch for the baby in my throat, and swallow hard.

Juneau Jane meets my eye. This baby won’t hide much longer. Missy ought to visit a doctor, but if her mind ain’t better soon, any doctor we ask will want to send her away to the asylum.

When we move out, Elam points his dun gelding up and across a rise. I see him there with his spyglass as the sky breaks a full dawn that’s like coals from the underside. Red-pink and rose yellow and lined in gold so bright it stays in your eyes when you blink. The sky is wide as the earth, from one end to the other.