“Red-skinned devils took the coach whole,” the soldier was saying. “We tracked them—blood and bodies. Two survivors. Survivors said they saw a white woman grabbed and run off with by one of them savages on a horse.”
Whispers rose—pity, outrage, noises that never prevented anything.
“When?” Thomas said, flat.
“A week?” the soldier answered, surprised by Thomas’s tone. “Maybe less.”
Thomas did a quick mental calculation: exactly when Violet would have been on the road, if she’d quit Boston when promised. Thomas felt a swift, concentrated fury—not grief, not fear. Rage at waste. Rage at being made a fool of by fate andstrangers. He pushed out of the knot and stood with both hands on the hitch rail until the first sharp itch of violence left him.
Then he swung up, rode to the smith, bought cartridges without bargaining, and left town without saying goodbye.
?
At the ranch that night he opened the drawer where he kept receipts and maps and took out her letter. The paper was creased soft, the ink thin from handling, but he had not been handling it out of tenderness. He kept things that might have use later; a promise on paper was a tool like any other.
I will come. Do not doubt it.
He had made sure she would write that. He had engineered it. He told her what Boston girls liked to hear: plain talk about respect, a roof, work that wasn’t too mean, a place at table, a future with a man steady and grateful. He had chosen his words carefully, knowing exactly which lines would lure her into believing she was wanted and safe.
And she would be safe, provided she worked, obeyed, and didn’t cost him more than she was worth. He did not see the cruelty in that; he saw arithmetic.
He folded the letter, slid it into his vest pocket, and went to bed without praying. God answered men who didn’t need Him more often than those who begged, in Thomas’s experience.
?
He rode at first light. The bay ate up ground; the river unwound beside them, green-brown and thick, pulling to a future Thomas didn’t care about. He kept the water to one side, the sun on his cheek, and his mind on the thing he could control: his next step.
Midday, carrion birds tilted black above a stand of scrub oak. Thomas turned that way at a lope and found what he expected: asoldier in blue with his unseeing face to the sky, leather stripped, boots gone, cartridge loops empty. The dead man’s hands had been folded on his chest by somebody who knew what a soul needed afterward. Not by savages, then; by another soldier who had survived.
Thomas removed his hat, not for respect but because it was hot, and then decided, from long habit, to put the ground in order. He scraped a grave with his spade, rolled the man in, covered him, and tamped the dirt. It was a use of a half hour that bought him nothing. He did it anyway, the way he’d shut a broken gate on a neighbor’s place when he found it.
A voice came from the slope. “Kind thing, that. Most ride on.”
Thomas turned, rifled half up. The man in the brush held his hands open, empty palms out. Gray in his beard, shirt sweat-dark, the look of a coyote who’d learned which way to trot when men were around.
“Name’s Ezra Pike,” he said. “Scout when the army pays me, hunter when they don’t. Saw your mount from the ridge.”
“Thomas McBride,” Thomas said. He did not lower the rifle much.
“You following sign?” Ezra asked.
“Following what’s mine,” Thomas answered. He watched the man’s eyes for the flinch of judgment. He saw something else instead: the quick, private assessment of a trader weighing goods in a dim back room.
“Woman taken off a coach?” Ezra said. “I heard about that.”
“She was coming from Boston to my ranch.” Thomas kept his tone flat. “I paid her passage. I wrote her letters at cost to my patience and she agreed to be my bride. She owes me work, and I mean to collect it if she’s alive to render it.”
“Sounds fair,” Ezra said. He neither smiled nor frowned. “I spotted a Kiowa band after a fight on the river, two days’ ride from here. Saw where women crossed. I kept my distance, like a man keeps his fingers.”
“You can take me there?” Thomas asked.
“I can.” Ezra glanced at the fresh dirt. “And I can tell you you’ll want a cooler head than your words sound like right now. If you walk in hot, you’ll end cold. Understand me?”
Thomas looked at him, deciding. The man spoke like one who didn’t need to be agreed with to be right. Useful. “I hear you,” he said. “You don’t have to like me.”
“I generally don’t like the men I guide,” Ezra said mildly. “But I like to be paid. That keeps us friends enough.”
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