The Hunger(29)

So she walked straight for them, not even bothering to conceal the calico square in her hand. “Hello,” she said. “Mary Graves is taking a bath at the water trough. She’s stripped down to her bloomers.”

That was all it took. They were off with hardly a backward glance.

She was alone now with the boy, and her pulse thudded in her ears. She pushed the narrow barn door open and stood in the doorway while her eyes adjusted to the dark. It smelled of old hay and chicken feathers. “Hello?” The blackness remained still as the surface of a pond. “I—I brought you something to eat.”

Something stirred. Slowly, she blinked, and Thomas emerged from the shadows, though he kept half hidden, staring at her in a way that was both curious and aloof. Something in Elitha’s chest fluttered.

“My name is Elitha Donner.” She held out the package she’d brought. “I thought you might be hungry.”

He didn’t move. She put the bundle down on a bale of hay and backed away. After a long frozen minute, he approached. But he didn’t leap out or creep forward like some wild thing, the way she imagined he might. Instead he stepped politely toward the bundle and opened it with careful, practiced fingers. His posture was as straight as a governess’s.

“I made those biscuits myself. I would’ve brought some honey to go with them but I couldn’t think how . . .”

He had already started to eat, studiously, though his hands shook, betraying how starving he must have been. His politeness made Elitha want to squirm. Maybe one day, she thought, she’d invite him to join the family for a meal. Neither Father nor Uncle Jacob liked to skimp on food (though for the servants it was another story). Sunday dinners back at the farmhouse meant chicken stew and dumplings, buttered green beans and corn bread, fresh cold milk and cream over berries for dessert.

But she knew it was a fantasy. Tamsen had called Thomas a filthy heathen. He would never be one of them.

But looking at him now, she thought the opposite. He stopped eating and glanced up at her, his eyes two dark pools. Something flickered across them, and she felt suddenly embarrassed by the way she’d been staring at him. She was so used to watching people, to being ignored. It was unsettling now to be seen back.

Unsettling and wonderful.

She blushed at him and smiled. He gave her a slight nod. She took the tankard when he’d drained the beer—she tried not to look at the way his throat bobbed as he drank. She was pretty sure Thomas smiled, just a little, when he handed the jug to her. That was her reward.

It was enough.

That and her realization that, for a moment or two, the voices in her head had gone silent.





CHAPTER TWELVE





They found the note pinned beneath a small rock on the top of a boulder, fluttering like a white flag of surrender. Stanton felt something in his own chest rise and then gutter in response.

Donner read it out loud: “Way ahead rougher than expected. Do not follow us into Weber Canyon.—Lansford Hastings, Esq.” The wind tugged at the paper in Donner’s hand, as though a ghost were trying to snatch it away.

“What the devil does that mean? I thought this man knew the trail.” Keseberg spat. “He named it after hisself, for crissake.”

A strange mood had infected the party since Fort Bridger. It was understandable, given the bizarre incident with Bridger’s prisoner and the stories told by the Paiute boy, Thomas, but still, it left Stanton uneasy. They were teetering on a knife’s edge: He feared that without Hastings’s help, they would soon turn on each other. Impatience crackled in the air. Everyone knew they were racing time now.

The weather would turn soon enough, even if the heat was so oppressive at the moment that they could hardly imagine it ever letting up.

Stanton’s gaze skipped over the ground. “Their tracks are plain enough. Despite what he says, it should be easy enough to follow them.” They led to a pass completely obscured by forest, dark and impenetrable, the trail swallowed up behind a wall of growth. Above the ranging forest was a wall of imposing white-capped mountains. The majority of the wagon party came from the plains and had never seen mountains like these. “California must lie right behind,” Patrick Breen had said breathlessly, unable to imagine that the country could go on for much longer. Stanton knew that the few existent maps, sketchy as they were, said Breen was wrong. But he wasn’t going to be the one to say so.

“Is that smart?” Franklin Graves asked. Everyone turned instinctively in his direction; people seemed to listen to Graves. It might’ve been because of his imposing size; Graves was a large man, made broad of back by long hours in the fields, building up his farm. “Not if Hastings says it’s not safe. He must’ve had a reason for warning us off.”

“We can’t just sit here on our asses waiting for his permission.” That was Snyder, the Graves family’s teamster. Stanton noticed that Reed flinched at the sound of his voice. Odd.

Donner’s eyes moved nervously from Keseberg to Eddy, to the wheel tracks in the dirt. “We have an Indian boy who knows these parts. We could keep going,” he said, testing the idea before the crowd. Stanton didn’t care for the look on Donner’s face, like a man who had swallowed a pebble but would rather choke than cough it up and reveal his mistake. Donner had fought hard to make himself party captain, seemingly without thinking about the difficult choices that came with the position.