Outlawed(32)

I loosened my grip on the reins just enough to give her freedom of movement. She paced very slowly until she was neck and neck with Prudence. The horse’s eyes were wild and her muzzle foamy, and I knew she could knock me or Amity unconscious with one kick, but Amity didn’t stumble or shy. Instead she began to nuzzle Prudence along her snout and neck in a gesture so tender it made me miss my sisters, the way they would lean in to butterfly-kiss my cheeks with their eyelashes. Following Amity’s lead, I reached over to Agnes Rose and put my hand on her shoulder. I tried to press all the steadying weight of Amity and me down into her body.

I felt the change in Agnes Rose before I saw it, the shoulders falling from the ears, the muscles working where once they’d quivered. She choked up on the reins, lifting Prudence’s head so she couldn’t buck. The horse huffed and twitched and began to quiet.

As quickly as it had reached us, the stampede left us behind. The herd thinned out—I could see red dirt between the animals again; then a few straggling beasts, thinner and more pallid than the rest; then nothing. News looked back at me and Agnes Rose. Already her face was clear of worry.

“Shall we?” she asked, and we rode away.

We camped overnight by a small lake about a mile outside of Fiddleback. News watered the horses while Agnes Rose and I went to gather firewood.

“Thanks for your help back there,” Agnes Rose said. “You’re a good rider.”

The compliment washed over me like warm water. It had been days since anyone had said a kind word to me.

“How come you’re helping me?” I asked. “You didn’t have to push for me to come along. Why did you do that?”

“Like I told the Kid,” Agnes Rose said, “we need you to handle the laudanum.”

“I could have measured it out for you,” I said. “It would have been easy enough.”

We were scavenging in a stand of cottonwood trees half-burnt by lightning some time ago. Agnes Rose picked up a blackened branch, decided it was too burnt, and let it fall.

“You know what I did before Hole in the Wall?”

“I heard you were in jail,” I said.

She smiled. “Only for a little while. I got married at fifteen and my husband’s family threw me out on my seventeenth birthday. I ended up at a brothel in Telluride, but the work was hard and the madam took most of my money, and after two years I struck out on my own.”

“How?” I asked. I had never heard of a barren woman doing much of anything on her own.

“You find a man to cover you,” she said. “Sometimes he’s your ally, sometimes he’s your mark. If you’re smart, and you don’t stay with the same man or in the same town for too long, you can survive. You can even do well. I was a wealthy woman when I got arrested.”

“What did you get arrested for?” I asked.

Agnes Rose hefted a last branch, fire-scarred but still bearing a few leaves, onto her pile.

“Bigamy,” she said. “But that’s another story. The point is, you live like I did, you start being able to spot what makes some people sink and other people swim. There’s a quality, I don’t even know how to describe it—sometimes it looks like luck and sometimes it looks like skill and sometimes it doesn’t look like either one. But you have it, I saw it when I met you. You’ve made a lot of mistakes, but you’re a good bet. You’ll swim.”

The town of Fiddleback emerged slowly from the grassy flats. First came the ranchlands, marked off with barbed wire and, every mile, a post bearing McBride’s fiddleback brand. The cows grazed in placid clusters—roan, black, and dusty white—and every mile or two a solitary bull loomed hulking and heavy-shouldered, presiding over his herd. Then came the cornfields, green with the spring planting, the delicate shoots peeking a few inches out of the earth. Then the modest clapboard homes of the shopkeepers and ranch hands, and the boardinghouses where the cowboys lived on their way to somewhere else, arranged around a carefully watered green. Then, on a small rise above the flats, the homes of the town’s wealthiest residents, built with fluted columns or else with peaked roofs and gabled windows, in the style of mansions from before the Flu. And then, below the rise, the town’s main street, with a bank and a butcher shop, a few shops selling men’s and women’s clothing, a general store, and at its eastern end, the large roadhouse known as Veronica’s.

Inside, Veronica’s was full of spills and smells and jostling, the most crowded place I’d been in more than a year. To get to the bar we had to push past more cowboys than I could count, and three women dressed like Agnes Rose but more provocatively, their breasts pushed up into the necklines of their dresses. The room was large but the ceilings were low; some of the taller men had to stoop to stand at the bar.

Agnes Rose ordered her drink first, then took a seat at the bar to wait for her man. After a few moments News followed. I went last, but when I pushed my way through the crush of men to rest my elbows on the bar’s sticky wood, News was still waiting.

“What can I get for you?” Veronica asked me immediately.

She was an imposing woman of mysterious age, wearing a foot-tall chestnut wig and thick pancake makeup. Her eyes and her mouth moved separately as she looked me up and down while smiling.

I ordered a whiskey in what I hoped was a passable man’s voice, and Veronica poured it and set it in front of me. Only then, and only after searching the bar for other men to serve, did Veronica turn to News, as though seeing her for the first time, and without the smile she’d put on for me. At first I was confused. Then I looked around the room and saw that nearly everyone in the bar—the other cowboys, the women giggling at their jokes, and Veronica herself—was white.