A cowboy swung off his black mustang and thrust out his hand for my tool. Mud splashed the front of my skirt. Sunlight slashed behind his hat—golden skin, roughened from sunlight and dust, stretched across a square jaw.
“What in thunder you doing?” I swatted at a cloud of gnats. “Go on—get after your own land.”
“Minnie,” Ezra warned.
I rolled my eyes and kept working.
“You reckon you’ll survive all on your own?” The cowboy’s voice was rich and deep.
“I can take care of my own damn self,” I said.
He stood there, considering me. His face held no expression, just crisp, green eyes.
I pressed back the tendrils of hair fuzzing from my twist. “Look here, cattlehand, I don’t have time for this.” I gestured between us. This wasn’t the occasion to battle for the biggest toad in the puddle. I’d duel cowboys when land was at stake.
The cowboy tipped his hat. “Ma’am,” he drawled.
He vaulted onto his mustang, and his thighs turned the beast upstream. I plucked my sweat-soaked blouse away from my collarbone,then spun back to the buggy. Willie hovered, jaw slack, his spade drooped at his side.
“Blazes, Willie—why aren’t you digging?”
In a crate on their buckboard, the white wings of chickens flapped. “That feller,” Willie said, “him there—”
“What?”
“That’s the Lawman.”
I faltered, sludge sloshing around my calves. That cowboy was the notorious, cold-blooded gunfighter, the one gossiped about fireside? No one knew what he’d done, but he’d spooked the Dalton Gang. Whispers said he’d betrayed them. Or something else gruesome and deranged. Apparently the Lawman crafted his own law, doing whatever he felt suitable, no matter how diabolical.
“You know, the renegade Bitter Creek and the rest of the Wild Bunch avoid.” Willie snorted. “Don’t get us shot before we even get a spread.”
The outlaw scaled the rise, the muscles in his shoulders tensing and adjusting beneath his charcoal vest. Well, I reckoned that was what an outlaw looked like. The type of human who’d slit your throat or burn you alive just to steal your land.
“Lawman,” I hollered.
He rotated, his bearing easy, subdued.
“Don’t take ’em rolling hills by Crooked Creek,” I called. “It’s mine.”
A vein beat on his jaw, but he paused. Why wasn’t he frazzled like the rest of us? His energy was slow and controlled, like a warm, oozy summer mudslide. Well, I supposed if you were cozy with bloodshed or robbery or whatever anarchy this untamed land tempted, well then, there wasn’t need to rush.
His voice carved across the brook. “You do realize this is a race?”
I blew at my hair, flicked my hands for him to move on.
“Ride quick.” He galloped up the hill, his mustang’s glossy, black mane frothing in the wind.
The outlaw was right: I must hurry. Fixing the rig wasn’t working. My brothers started quarreling about how to fix the buggy, and I was stuck, digging into the mud, waiting on their decision, while gunfighters and widows grasped all the claims. Growing up, my younger sister Magnolia and I had always planned to homestead. Long years racing through tunnels of wheatgrass or lazing about springtime wildflowers, watching clouds scatter on by, dreaming up what could be. We just knew someday we’d strap our supplies about our horses and go. My parents had chased their yearning for wide spaces and adventure, leaving family and decorum back East and finding a homestead on the Kansas plains. Pa, with his unbreakable pioneer gumption, and Ma as gardener, caretaker, shepherd. She wouldn’t define herself as a tenacious explorer—but that was the woman I’d watched.
I’d learned that while a woman couldn’t own much, if she had enough grit, enough determination, she could homestead. Four years ago, during the sworling excitement of the first land run, I just knew—I must go. And now, here I was, headed into the unknown. Finally ready to stake my own claim, waiting on my foolhardy brothers. My fingernails dug into the shovel’s wooden handle, the metal tip submerged in the mucky creek. Beyond the rise, the wide sky arched. The color a watery, purpled brown like saltmarsh asters, a plume of smoke bubbling against the burnished horizon. Another prairie fire.
During the long nights waiting for the Strip to open, the smoke of a thousand campfires smudged the sky. My brothers and I strung up canvas tents below a sweet gum tree, where spiny balls scattered the ground and exasperated my back through my saddle blanket. I’d wake and wander into the open, toss my blanket cross riddled dirt, and watch the stars slip round the firmament, those faraway sparks crisp, then fuzzy and indeterminate.
Memories of home flickered in and out like starlight, crisp moments, then fuzzy and faraway. Bygone places. The swampy creek,where quicksand grasped my knobby childhood ankles, gilded leaves floating down in autumn, the cloudlike tufts of yarrow in springtime. The faroff pasture beyond the thicket where fireflies buzzed through summer grasses, hazy cottonwood seeds floating on by. The live oak bough that swooped over the yellow milkweed, where Magnolia and I would sprawl, reading aloud tales of Calamity Jane and Belle Starr till dark shifted over the meadow, something lavender and indistinct hanging about the air. When we couldn’t quite see day any longer, we’d wrench up our skirts about our calves and race home for supper.
As we camped along the border of the Strip, the night sky seemed quiet and faraway, the childhood memories clogging up my thoughts idyllic and fanciful. In the end, Magnolia hadn’t come along to homestead. She’d married instead. Under the starlight, I sifted through my memories and couldn’t determine anymore what had been real. The stars sharpened white, then blurred to gray. When I thought into my future, I saw a world altogether different from what I’d once imagined. There was the vast prairie, my calico skirts snapping in the wind, summertime flowers blooming in the evergreen shadows, and a far-ranging quiet. It was better this way, to start a new life alone.
In the swampy rivulet, my brothers still arguing, the scent of burning woven into the atmosphere, I knew it was time to leave. “Your plan is dumber than a sack of hammers.” I tossed the shovel at Willie and vaulted onto Cricket. “I’m leaving.”
