Outlawed(66)

“I can, El,” said Lo, shouldering her rucksack. “And you can too. Maybe you should think about it.”

And Lo shut the door behind her, leaving a stunned silence in the room. News and Agnes Rose looked at each other with worried eyes. Texas put her head in her hands. Only Lark, sitting cross-legged on his bunk, his long feet bare, looked unafraid.

“We can’t do anything now,” Elzy said to Cassie. “We’re two down, and I’m not even half the shot I used to be. We have to start a fire, break into a vault, hold up who knows how many bank clerks—”

“Two,” said News.

“Fine, two,” Elzy went on. “Plus loading up a wagon with gold bars and driving it back up here. How are we going to do that with just six people? We’ll be slaughtered.”

Lark lifted his eyes to Elzy’s face.

“Seven,” he said.

That night I went to the kitchen cabin as Cassie was preparing dinner. Now that it was spring we had rabbits in our snares, fat with new grass. Cassie had laid out two pearly pink carcasses on a butcher block. A broth boiled on the stove, its smell green and spicy.

“If the Kid needs help with sleeping,” I said, handing over the near-empty bottle of laudanum, “two drops in tea or water, no more. And don’t leave it in the cowboy shack. The Kid shouldn’t be alone with it just now.”

“Thanks,” Cassie said.

She slid a small sharp knife under the front legs of the first rabbit and sliced them away from the body. I lingered.

“You could’ve called the plan off,” I said. “Why didn’t you?”

Cassie carefully trimmed the fat from the inside of each front leg and set it aside in a yellowish-white pile. Then she sliced upward from the loin to rib cage and cut the meat away from the ribs. She worked for so long, and so silently, that I thought she might not have heard me. Then she said, “The day I met the Kid, my husband cut off all my hair. He said I wasn’t a real woman, and I didn’t deserve to look like one.”

“That’s awful,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

She cut along the rabbit’s pelvis, looking for the back-leg joint.

“I believed him,” she said. “I believed everything he said about me. It was the Kid who didn’t believe.”

“So you owe the Kid?” I asked. “Is that it?”

Cassie shook her head. She reached inside the rabbit’s leg flesh and popped the leg-joint open.

“The Kid was a ranch hand for my husband,” she said. “We used to meet in the barn and plan our escape. At first I thought it was just for me. I thought the Kid was so selfless, a hero. Then my husband went on a cattle drive and I let the Kid stay the night in my bed. The Kid never slept.”

She popped the second joint and cut each leg free.

“After that I started to notice things. The red threads in the Kid’s eyes. The way the Kid always talked about the future whenever the past came up. I saw the Kid had some terrible pain to carry, and helping me was a way to carry it.”

“The sickness,” I said. “The one the Kid’s father had.”

“That was part of it, I think,” Cassie said. “But I always thought there might be more. The Kid has always stood a little bit apart, even from me.”

Cassie brought the flat of her knife down on the rabbit’s spine with a force that made me jump.

“So when you ask, do I owe the Kid, the answer is yes, of course, the Kid gave me a life. But also the Kid needs to be a hero. The Kid needs to be the Kid. If I take that away—”

She bent the rabbit’s pelvis backward away from the spine, then sliced it off and tossed it in the boiling water. “If I take that away, then I don’t know what,” she said.

She turned away from me and began to trim silvery skin from the outside of the loin.

I took a breath.

“What happened to the two of you?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“After you left your husband. Texas said something happened, and then you had to come here to be far away from everything. What happened?”

Cassie put down her knife.

“We moved to an integrated town near Arapaho land and called ourselves the McCartys: the Kid was the husband and I was the wife. Nearly a year we lived that way, perfectly happy. The Kid worked for a rancher and I took in sewing. We lived in rooms at first, and then when we had a little money we built a house on the edge of town. With our own hands we built it; I’d never seen the Kid sleep so well as when we’d spent all day sanding the doors to fit.”

“And then?”

“There was an accident at the ranch. A horse kicked the Kid in the head. The Kid wasn’t moving; everyone feared the worst. Before anyone could send for me, the doctor was there undressing the Kid to check for a heartbeat.

“The rancher was kind. He could have had the Kid thrown in jail, but instead he gave us the night to pack. ‘If I see your face in town tomorrow, I’ll have no choice but to call the sheriff,’ he said.

“We were gathering what little we had when the men came. I don’t think the rancher sent them. I think he was honest. But in the end it doesn’t matter. First they shot our horses. Then they put a torch to our little house. We only escaped because the men were drunk, and because months of running had made us fast. For miles, the Kid kept looking back at the house we’d built, going up in flames.”