The salt plain.
Mist shimmered atop the white expanse, snow coiling skyward, as if spirits flew over the surface. The horror of the plain wasn’t the eerie landscape, but that somewhere out beyond, the Wild Bunch stalked—under the ground, along the windbreak, in a lowland around the bend. This was their territory.
Stot slipped from his saddle and tied Shark to a tree, then headed southward, surely looking for the lake or another bearing so we could figure the direction home. Far into the distance, the long wings of a crane lifted into flight. The flaps thumped through the quiet as the bird soared overhead. I slid down and hushed Cricket, his pale ears relaxing back into his black hair. I hung his reins beside Shark, snow sworling down in looping currents. Stot and I whispered through the woodland, One Eye slipping in and out of shadow as we roamed this space between earth and sky.
Stot prowled forward, Colt revolver trained on the icy horizon, our boots sloshing through the slush, snow fizzling across my cheeks. Woven in with the wind’s ebb and roar, Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind, with her twang, told cowboy Willie Matthews about one spectacle or another.I’m a flash of lightning, straight up sideways, butteredwith quicksilver.The ancient voice muttered something indistinct, her cadence almost frantic. Alarm pulsed up my neck, and I halted, palm resting on snow-brushed poplar bark. Sakes alive, what on earth did she need me to know. Then beside me, a whir of cracked air—a bullet.
“Minnie, down.” Stot yanked me into a snowdrift, his body pressed over mine.
This wasn’t memory. The gunfire was in our timeline.
Blasts pinged, splattering the ground with wet thunks. What if I hadn’t paused—
“We need cover,” Stot said, withdrawing his body from mine. We scrambled up the rise, my hands sheltering my head, and tumbled into the brush behind a sycamore. I pressed back against the trunk, Stot beside me, and worked the action on my six-shooter.
A bullet zipped past.
Stot scanned the forest, a furrow trenched between his brows. He maneuvered me down, my knees sunk into the slush. “Get down,” he said.
“The hell I will. You know I’m the best shot.”
He muttered some curses but permitted me to stand. I couldn’t spot the outlaws. Just the bent shadows of gnarled trees, the moonglow off the uncanny plains beyond, the zing of reverberating gunshots, the misty snowfall obscuring the woodland.
My exhale foamed against my revolver as I fired. “How many, you think?”
“Maybe five.” He leaned around the bark. “At least three distinct guns. They’re spread out some.”
A cardinal aggressively squawked above, a scatter of leaves at the tree line, a thump twenty rods farther on. But no crimson-hued blanket cloaks or the blur of a body.
“Let her go,” Stot yelled. “Your quarrel is with me.”
“Boy, that’s not even half the size of it, Lawman,” a voice called, wispy and strident. “Your end is nigh.”
“Well, come at me, Tulsa.” Something like mirth glinted in Stot’s eyes. “If you’ve even learned to shoot straight, with that dainty gold pistol of yours.”
Tulsa Jack scoffed. Stot apparently knew him well enough to recognize him by voice. Stot leaned his shoulders into the shoot-out, his bearing at ease, cloak tight across his back. I watched him shift into a different version of himself. His brusque voice dropped lower, slowed to a drawl, a viciousness flooded his tone. Of course he was lawless as the day was long—but he could be so gentle with me. It was bewildering to see this darker side of him. I wanted to wedge closer, bind myself to the wildness of him.
The Wild Bunch continued their taunts, but I heard only fragments, Tulsa Jack’s curses lost within the screech of blustery weather. A low branch with spiny twigs snagged my hood, and the storm tossed down handfuls of snow. The sky an ivory smear, an opaque wash of white before us. Shots plunked sporadically but with less regularity as the blizzard picked up.
“I can’t see nothing.”
“Neither can they,” Stot said. “We could slip away.”
“You’ve had worse notions,” I said. “This one might just hold water.”
Stot straightened my blanket cloak across my shoulders. “Now I’ll get a big head with such praise.”
I snorted. Then we snuck from tree trunk to tree trunk, zigzagging across the forest, from one cloud of whirled snow to the other, gunshots fading in the roar of the storm. Soon enough, we swung onto our horses and were off into the snowfall, disappeared with the fury of weather.Thank you,I spoke below my breath, assured that the ancient voice had protected me. I couldn’t comprehend how she had such magic, but it was as if her hands had tossed down those clumps of snow, as if her apprehension had paused me. There was enchantment in the air.
We galloped along the ravine, the moonlit sky an unnerving shade of quiet mulberry. Balls of ice shattered from the clouds, battering my face and Cricket’s flanks. I swung off and led him toward the gully. Beneath the overhang, a slick layer of ice hardened over the silt. My boots skidded, unable to find sure footing. Cricket stamped, hoovesclacking on the rime. He wouldn’t step down. A tightness spread over his hindquarters and thighs, the cold seeping into his joints. “Come on, old buddy.”
Beside us, Shark reared his head, and a shiver racked One Eye’s side. “They can’t make it down,” Stot hollered over the clattering hail. “We must make camp.”
We were so close, perhaps a mile from home, but our horses couldn’t cross the chasm, the nearest bridge a hundred miles away. I groaned and leaned my forehead against Cricket’s mane. Ice slid beneath my collar as I unbuckled a saddlebag.
“Wait.” Stot laid his glove atop mine. Snow clumped on the brown wool. “Let’s head northward. They won’t look for us north.”
And so we journeyed over the slick ground, Cricket’s eyes wide, icicles twirling the length of his mane. A layer of ice froze over my cloak, weighing me down. There must be shacks out yonder, some folks, somewhere. Any homesteader would offer shelter during a storm, even to the fearsome Lawman, but I couldn’t see but a couple of rods before me, sleet falling in a thick blur. I searched for the boxy shadows of a home, for the glow of firelight, but saw only the eerie steel tones of ice and shadow, the pink of filtered moonglow. When the horses could travel no more, we stopped, hopefully far enough outaways that the bandits wouldn’t find us. We’d heard no gunfire for a while through the storm’s rumble, so the outlaws had either lost our trail or halted their pursuit. We slipped beneath an overhang of chinkapin oaks and made camp.
