Outlawed(36)

“Get up,” said Agnes Rose, extending a hand. “You’re fine.”

We rode until near sundown just to make sure no one was trailing us. I was breathless, sore, excited by what we had done. News and Agnes Rose seemed excited, too, and we talked and laughed as soon as we were out of earshot in empty red-rock country.

“Where did you find the feed sacks?” I asked Agnes Rose.

“Just lying around by the horse troughs,” she said. “Ronnie’s stable boy is sloppy. But you would’ve been all right without them. You saw the ceiling in there—that drop wasn’t more than six feet.”

The evening was clear and unseasonably warm. In the distance a pair of mottled hawks were hunting prairie dogs, the whole colony squealing in distress as the birds circled and dove.

“I’ll miss Ronnie’s,” Agnes Rose said. “I was starting to like it there.”

“I wasn’t,” News said. “Doc made a friend, though.”

I blushed, caught off guard. Of course, I realized, News had been paying attention to me and Lark even when she was watching Agnes Rose and Bixby.

“I wouldn’t say ‘a friend,’ ” I said.

“Maybe more than a friend,” News said, teasing.

I rolled my eyes, still blushing,

“I doubt I’ll be charming many men dressed as a cowboy,” I said.

News and Agnes looked at each other like I’d said something funny.

“That’s the best way to charm some men,” Agnes said. “Do you like men, Doc?”

I had not given the question any thought. Watching Cassie and Elzy had made me wonder if I might at some point come to like a woman, but since I felt no stirrings of attraction toward any of the women at Hole in the Wall—and understood that they would not be welcomed if I did—I had spent only a small amount of time considering the matter. Whether or not I liked men seemed unworthy even of that small consideration, since not liking men had never been presented to me as an option.

Still, I could remember craving my husband at the beginning of our marriage; I could remember wanting him so badly I felt a pain between my legs. And I could remember boys in school—and, if I was honest, Lark too—from whom I could not look away, whose faces or backs or muscled legs I saw when I closed my eyes.

“I suppose so,” I said, staring at Amity’s back.

“It’s too bad,” News said. “Girls are much safer.”

The sky was purpling at its edges and the scrub thickening around the horses’ hooves. A jackrabbit startled from our path, leggy but sleek from eating summer grass.

“The safest way to meet a man,” Agnes Rose explained, “is to get dolled up and pretend to be a young lady with no family on the hunt for a husband. Couple times a year we usually go down to either Telluride or Casper. The bars down there are a little more congenial than Ronnie’s, and you can usually meet someone and have some fun.

“Of course, News likes to live dangerously,” she added, guiding Prudence away from a dry streambed.

“I just prefer not to play dress up,” News said. “And you should talk. When was the last time you put on a pair of dungarees?”

Agnes Rose shook her head, smiling.

“Plenty of cowboys like other cowboys,” News said. “But this is serious, Doc—if you let them know you’re really a girl, you don’t know what they’ll do. My advice: you do whatever you want to them, but your clothes stay on. And sometime while you’re drinking together, you mention a horrible accident you were in a while back. Gored by a bull, whatever. That explains anything they feel or don’t feel on your body.”

“The good news is, most men are pretty stupid,” Agnes Rose said. “And pretty gullible. They want to believe what you tell them.”

At sundown we camped in a gully with a trickle of water for the horses. Nightjars were calling overhead, and bats came out to feed, their bodies clumsy in the dusk. We got a fire going, and gathered round the satchel like it was a holy crèche.

“Doc should do it,” Agnes said. “She’s the one who knocked Bixby out.”

“I just measured the laudanum,” I said.

But I reached for the satchel anyway. I was proud after weeks of shame—finally I had done something right. I remembered with gratitude the lessons my mother had given me with an eye dropper, the lists of dosages she had made me memorize.

The leather was heavy in my hands and faintly sweet smelling; it made me think of expensive clothes and fine furnishings, of the mayor’s house in Fairchild or the back room at the bank where the rich ranchers made their deals. I opened the buckle.

At first I thought the gold must be under the bottles. They were packed carefully, each wrapped in oilcloth, so as not to shatter with hard riding. The whiskey inside the one I opened smelled rank and weak—Bixby, it appeared, had a sideline in delivery for a mediocre bootlegger. And he had been carrying no coin at all: I even turned the satchel upside down to make sure. All that fell out was a slim paper envelope, sealed with wax. I slid my finger under the seal.

“ ‘On the twenty-first day of September, eighteen hundred and ninety-four,’ ” I read aloud, “ ‘two hundred golden eagles are added to the debt owed by Roger McBride of Fiddleback Ranch to the Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank of Fiddleback. The total amount of the debt stands at fifty-six thousand eagles, or two hundred and twenty-four thousand in silver. The Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank continues to hold the deed to Fiddleback Ranch and its assets and surrounding properties as collateral on the debt, and reserves the right to sell at any time.’ ”