Outlawed(31)

News had been watching and listening at Fiddleback Ranch for a month, posing as a journeyman cowboy on a temporary job. She had learned that McBride sent one of his most trusted men to the bank in town—the Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank of Fiddleback, owned by the only man in town as rich as McBride, a Swede named Karl Nystrom—every Friday to deposit the ranch’s income from cattle sales, stud, and other operations, and withdraw enough in small coin to pay his many employees. It would be nearly impossible to rob the man at gunpoint—throughout his short journey he was surrounded by people loyal to McBride. But with a little guile and expertise, it might be possible to waylay him.

Agnes Rose had been spending time in Fiddleback too. She’d been flirting with and flattering the bagman, one Alexander Bixby, for a matter of weeks. She had convinced him that she was a virginal young woman from a poor family who had been jilted by her fiancé after he got another woman pregnant. Punished for her virtue—her mama had taught her not to sleep with a man before her wedding night—and far from home, she was forced to take in piecework and live at a ladies’ boardinghouse near Crooked Creek, coming to Fiddleback only to sell her quilts and doilies. Bixby was taken with her sad story and her habit of telling him how impressed she was with the importance of his work. He liked to visit Veronica’s for a single drink on his way back from the bank, and this time Agnes Rose had given him to understand that if he wanted to take her upstairs, she might be willing to forget her mama’s lesson for the duration of an afternoon.

All we needed to do was get enough laudanum into Bixby’s drink that he fell fast asleep once he got to the bedroom. Then Agnes Rose would take his satchel, climb out the back window, and we’d be half a day’s ride away before he woke up.

The morning we set out, the first frost of fall was on the pasture. Agnes Rose wore a blonde wig with side curls, a long cloth coat with patches at the elbows (Lo had sewn them on at the last minute to add to Agnes’s air of poverty and resourcefulness), and a threadbare pink traveling dress with a low neckline. News and I wore false mustaches that Lo had affixed to our upper lips with spirit gum—she had chatted easily with News while gluing hers in place, but tended to mine in silence. There had been some discussion around the firepit of whether I should be allowed to go on the job at all, but Agnes Rose argued that I would be needed to advise her on the timing of the laudanum, and to help administer additional drops should the first dose fail to take effect. The Kid was convinced, under one condition: I surrendered my gun before we set out. I’d be going in my capacity as a doctor, not an outlaw.

Fiddleback was a little more than a day’s ride south, on the wide floodplain of the Powder. Our journey took us through flat country, the grass gone tawny in the cooling air. As we rode, the sky changed more than the land did, banks of cloud rolling fast across the blue, spattering us with rain before massing in the east in tall gray towers. The rain tamped the dust down and filled the air with the smell of sage—even though I felt alone and alien still in Powder country, that smell was becoming as familiar as the scent of my mother’s cornbread or my sisters’ hair.

When the sun was high in the sky and the air was warm enough I could almost pretend it was summer still, I heard a rumble in the distance. At first I thought it was thunder—the foothills to the east were gray with rain—but instead of dissipating it got louder, and then I felt the ground begin to shake under Amity’s hooves.

“Shit,” News said.

“What do we do?” Agnes Rose asked.

“Find the highest ground we can.”

“What’s happening?” I asked, but they both ignored me.

News led us northwest, back in the direction we’d come from, toward a serviceberry tree on a gentle hillock a few feet above the flatland.

“This is going to have to do,” she said.

“What’s happening?” I asked again.

Then I saw a dark patch growing in the northeast. My first thought was locusts, but soon I could see individual forms within the darkness, woolly and huge—buffalo.

“Keep a tight hold on Amity,” said News, “or she’ll spook and they’ll trample you both.”

I choked up on the reins. Amity’s ears shivered back and forth like leaves.

“There, baby,” I said, patting her neck, trying to keep my fingers from shaking.

When I looked up the herd was almost on top of us. In a cloud of red dust I saw the enormous heads of the buffalo. I had never seen something so heavy move so fast. They were like the giants in the stories Mama used to tell. They were like something from an older world.

Then they were all around us. The dust made me choke. The herd was its own weather. I saw News open her mouth but the hoofbeats drowned out her voice. Then Agnes Rose’s horse, Prudence, began to twist and buck beneath her. Even through the dust I could see the fear on Agnes’s face, I could see she had let her body go frozen. Prudence reared up on her hind legs, the whole bright black length of her rising above the herd. Agnes Rose clung to her back and hung on, but barely. The buffalo were so close to us that if Agnes lost her grip on Prudence she would be trampled for sure. They streamed around us with no sign of stopping, their hoofbeats rattling the teeth in my jaw. Only one thing was steady: underneath me I felt Amity’s calm like a human hand in mine. I remembered what Texas had told me—the horse knew the country better than I did. Maybe, I thought, she knew what to do now.