The knife glinted in the firelight. Garret didn't want to have to take it from him and risk hurting him in the resultant struggle.
God knew Cain Garvey couldn't have taken Garret's knife from him that night at Stormy Ridge unless the outlaw had severed Garret's hand.
"You—you were hurting her. I saw you," the boy accused, his voice touched, like the woman's was, with the strange, sweet lilt of Ireland.
"No, Renny, love. It's all right. Mr. MacQuade here is just upset—"
"Well, so are you!" the boy flung out defensively, edging to her side, eyes never leaving Garret. "You cried the whole time we made camp."
"Renny!" the woman chided. Petal-soft cheeks still whisker-burned from Garret's fierce kiss grew red.
"You did! And I never—never saw you cry before." There was confusion in the boy's voice, and so much love it made Garret ache.
He looked up to see three more child-shadows huddled near the wagon regarding him as if he were the devil himself.
Love, sincerity, sorrow. It wreathed this tiny campsite as certainly as the Missouri night sky.
He didn't want to look into the woman's upturned face, didn't want to see the truth that was written in the cherry-sweet, trembling lips, the sky-blue eyes brimful of hurt and grief and tears. Blast it, she was looking at him as if she hated him, blamed him....
In that one soul-crushing instant, he knew.
What the woman had told him was true.
Garret felt the anger drain from him, leaving in its wake a barrenness as parched and empty as any desert.
Dead. Kennisaw dead.
Never to roar out his bellowing laugh. Never to sing bawdy songs before a campfire in his tuneless voice. Never again to look at Garret with that glow of pride that had made him want to be everything the old man had imagined him to be.
"How?" Garret faltered. "How the devil did it happen?"
"Mr. Jones was shot. I couldn't stop the bleeding. We tried to make it to West Port before he died, but..." Her voice trailed off; she shook her head. "He wanted so much to see you, Mr. MacQuade."
Garret felt as though she'd rammed her fist into his gut.
Eyes soft with compassion flicked to the wagon, and Garret knew that the old man was there. That he was not even to be spared seeing that craggy, animated face lifeless, dead.
Garret turned away, away from the boy, away from the woman, the grief tearing through him too raw, too deep to expose to anyone.
He staggered to a scraggly cottonwood like a wounded animal burrowing away to hide its pain. Covering his eyes with his forearm, he leaned against the tree's trunk, forcing himself to suck in deep breaths. His chest burned, his eyes stung, his fists knotted against the loss, emptiness.
He wanted so much to see you... The soft, aching words raked at him.
For ten years he and Kennisaw had looked forward to their annual Rendezvous—meeting in Santa Fe, Sacramento, once even the bustling town of St. Louis.
Garret had been anticipating this meeting at West Port Landing for months now, packing away stories to tell the old man as carefully as he preserved the sheaf of drawings stored in his saddlebags.
There had been the one about the two Kiowa women who had slipped into Garret's blankets outside Santa Fe, and the tale about the Comanche youth who had stolen Garret's horse—stolen it only to have his father force him to return it once the brave learned the animal belonged to the dreaded white man Indians had named Spirit Stalker.
Kennisaw would have laughed until tears ran down his cheeks at the image of the fearsome Comanche eyeing Garret as though Garret were about to devour him.
Not his body, but rather his spirit. Imprisoning it forever upon a bit of paper.
It had been Kennisaw himself who had saddled Garret with that mystical aura one night when they had been surrounded by a dozen Tonkawa braves and were about to become the cannibalistic tribe's dinner.
Kennisaw had told them that if they killed Garret, they would kill the spirits of all Garret had entrapped in his drawings. Drawings so lifelike that when the Tonkawas had looked upon them they had been like fearful children confronting some creature spawned of night terrors.
Garret had never suspected, when he had sketched the band's leader from a hiding place in a jagged cliff the day before, that it would save his life. Save it many times over from more hostile tribes than he could count.
