Outlawed(67)

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

Cassie shrugged.

“Now you know,” she said. “Go get me some purslanes. And not the ones the snails have been eating.”





CHAPTER 10




On the thirtieth of May in the year of our Lord 1895, the Hole in the Wall gang rode for Fiddleback—minus its leader, plus one itinerant thief, cowboy, and veterinarian’s assistant. The journey took a day, and we camped by the same lake where Agnes Rose and News and I had stopped a few weeks before. There we fed and watered the horses, and passed around a bottle of gin that Agnes Rose produced from Prudence’s saddlebag. News had brought along her fiddle, and she began to play “Sweet Marie,” first slowly and then faster, her eyes closing, a smile forming on her face. After a time Texas got up to dance. Cassie and Elzy quietly joined hands.

The night reminded me of my very first at Hole in the Wall, but missing from our circle now were Lo with her beautiful jacket covered in bells, and the Kid presiding over all of us, binding us together.

“You’re quiet,” Agnes Rose said to me, passing the bottle.

The herbs cooled my tongue; the alcohol warmed my throat.

“Do you think Lo will be okay on her own?”

I handed the bottle back and Agnes Rose took a long drink.

“She should be worrying about us,” she said.

I looked around the circle in the falling light. Where that first night I had seen only wildness and joy in the gang’s celebration, now I could sense a desperation in the way Texas jumped and somersaulted, the way we all swigged from the bottle. Cassie whispered something and Elzy gave a high, fevered laugh.

All this time I had been following Texas’s lead, assuming that sticking to the Kid’s plan was the best way for me to assure my passage to Pagosa Springs. But now I was afraid. In the last few days it had occurred to me that perhaps the Kid would not recover, and that when I returned from Fiddleback, the Kid might be unable to hold up the other end of the bargain—if I returned from Fiddleback at all.

“Why are you going through with this?” I asked Agnes Rose.

She was quiet a moment. She slid out the pins that held her hair in place, and the heavy auburn braids fell down past her shoulders.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean, I know why Cassie’s doing it, and Texas. I have an idea, I think, about Elzy and News. But you clearly know how to fend for yourself. Why don’t you leave? Why risk your life for the Kid’s plan?”

Agnes Rose untied the ribbon from the end of one braid, then the other.

“I don’t talk about this much,” she said, “but I loved my first husband. We were very happy together. I wanted badly to have his children. We tried for years; he was patient with me. When he finally kicked me out, I knew how to keep from getting hanged, that’s true enough. I knew how to make money. It’s like I told you—I’m a swimmer. But my grief nearly dragged me under.”

She began to unwind her left braid, the locks emerging in glossy curls.

“The year I met the Kid, I’d tried to kill myself twice. The second time I would’ve succeeded if one of the other girls hadn’t been quick with the ipecac. The Kid couldn’t promise me money or safety, but when the Kid talked about making a place in the world for people like us—well, for the first time since I’d left home, I saw my way to some kind of purpose in my life.”

“I understand,” I said.

She gave me a long look.

“Then you’ll understand why I can’t just strike out on my own again,” she said.

She shook her hair out, a wild lion’s mane, glowing in the firelight.

“Anyway,” she said, “A plan is a good thing, but it’s not the only thing. We’ve survived this long because the Kid knows how to improvise. Whatever happens in Fiddleback, the Kid will find a way to turn it to our advantage.”

“If the Kid recovers,” I said.

“The Kid is going to recover,” Agnes Rose said.

She stood and held out both her hands. “Come on,” she said, “dance with me.”

We waited until the afternoon of the next day to ride into Fiddleback proper, so as to catch the clerks sleepy from their lunchtime ale. On the ranchlands, the spring calves had grown tall and leggy on their mothers’ milk. In the cornfields, the plants were high as a five-year-old child, nearly ready for the harvest. We slowed down on a side street a few blocks from Main Street, and Agnes Rose and I climbed out.

In the weeks prior, News had mapped out the bank and the establishments that abutted it down to the cracks in the window glass. She’d found that while Madame Trumbull’s lingerie store seemed like an ideal site for a fire—all that lace and tulle—in fact Madame was very diligent about securing her wares, and the back entrance was locked at all times with a sturdy dead bolt. The proprietor of Stewart’s Meats, on the other hand, routinely left the back door unlocked, and was an assiduous but disorderly record keeper. His back storeroom was piled floor to ceiling with paper ledgers, some lightly stained with meat drippings, detailing every aspect of the operations of his business from the purchase of steers at market to complaints lodged by customers about rancid pork. It was there, amid the accumulated history of the butcher’s entire career, that the robbery of the Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank of Fiddleback began.