The Hunger(59)

Donner finally stood up. “Who?”

“The teamster John Snyder.”

Mary was immediately relieved: She didn’t like Snyder. Nor did Donner. No one did. There were some people in the party you could probably kill and there was a chance you’d get away with it; Mary had to admit that her own father might even be one of them. And unaccountably, she found that she felt sorry for Reed, a man her father hated.

“What do you want me to do about it?” Donner asked, with genuine puzzlement. He looked over the assembled crowd as if surprised to see them there.

“You’re our fucking leader, aren’t you?” Keseberg said. “Or were,” he spat. Mary was surprised. He had once been one of Donner’s staunchest defenders. But a man like Keseberg didn’t know loyalty. “He just killed a man in cold blood. Didn’t give Snyder a chance to defend himself. What do we do with him?”

“Murder’s a capital offense,” Samuel Shoemaker said, as though anyone needed reminding.

They might have acted like George Donner was still the party captain, but it was James Reed who had been leading the wagon party for weeks and they knew it. He’d done the brutal, dirty work, found a trail through the desert and listened to their bickering and complaints. He had served them selflessly, kept his calm in the face of panic and loss, and yet now they were talking about stringing him up. If only Charles Stanton were here. The thought came to Mary automatically, but once she noticed it, she didn’t mind it warming somewhere in her chest. Stanton would talk sense into them. He wouldn’t let them hurt Reed.

The longer Stanton was away, the more Mary came to inwardly rebel against her father’s admonishments and her own hesitations. Without Stanton’s calm presence, she felt even more keenly how he’d been the only truly sensible person among them.

She knew he had terrible secrets that ate at him from within, and that these were things she ought to know about a man before she’d be willing to trust him, but she had begun to realize, too, that only a man with a conscience could be so seriously afflicted by his own past as to show it in his every gesture—the apology in his shoulders, in his voice, in the way he avoided eye contact with her despite the tension, the good tension, she knew they both felt.

“That may be true within the sovereign territory of the United States of America,” Donner was saying now. “But I remind you all that we are outside that territorial limit. We are no longer governed by U.S. law.” His eyes went to Reed. What, she wondered, could he be thinking? Reed had fought him from the start and had displaced him at the head of the wagon train. But Donner only shook his head. “If you kill this man, you will be in essence taking the law into your own hands.”

“You’re talking a lot of fucking nonsense as far as I’m concerned,” Keseberg said, smiling crookedly in a way no one could mistake for friendly. “I’m talking biblical law. He killed John Snyder. He deserves to die.”

As hideous a person as Keseberg was, people seemed to listen to him. He had a kind of power over them.

As for Mary, her own voice felt stifled in her throat. She needed to say something, but caution held her back.

She had always been a practical person, to a fault. She wished sometimes she were passionate, that her beliefs came pouring out of her unfiltered and uncensored.

Perhaps it was those qualities Stanton had been drawn to in Tamsen.

Mary kept quiet. She was glad, at least, that some of the others did not agree with Keseberg. “I’m not going to kill a man unless a judge orders it,” Milt Elliott finally said. “We don’t want to do anything that’ll get us in trouble later.”

“Banish him.” Tamsen spoke up suddenly. Everyone turned to her with a faint rustling of cloth. Despite everything that had happened—despite how much people despised and distrusted her now—she held her head high and was unafraid to make eye contact. To Mary, she looked almost regal.

Something twisted in Mary’s stomach at the sight of her. People were still afraid of her, that much was clear. Peggy Breen and Eleanor Eddy told anyone who’d listen that the woman was using her witchcraft to draw the life from George Donner like a succubus. And then there’d been the incident with the fire. Mary didn’t buy into the worst of the rumors—still, she saw that Tamsen was taking a serious risk now, in speaking up for Reed.

Taking a risk where Mary had not.

“It’s God’s place to judge him, not ours,” Tamsen said. “For those of you who think this is too lenient a punishment, just remember: A man can’t survive out there on his own. Sending him out is as good as a death sentence.”

Keseberg glowered at Tamsen. Mary caught the look. “Most of you mighta only thought of John Snyder as a servant. That he was only good for driving the oxen and doing what he was told. But he did his part. We owe it to him.”

Donner frowned. “We need the facts. Do we know why Mr. Reed did what he did?” Before Keseberg could answer, Donner raised a hand to shut him up. “James?”

Reed swallowed. His eye was nearly swollen shut. “You all saw what he was doing, and you know the kind of man he was. He was a liar, hoping to ruin lives with his lies. He came at me—I, I had to defend myself.”

“Don’t speak ill of the dead.” Keseberg cuffed him, shoving him down on his hands and knees again.

“He could get a wild hair up his ass and speak out of turn,” Walt Herron said. Walt had been the closest thing Snyder had to a friend. “But like Keseberg said, that’s no reason to kill him.”