Disclaimer: The characters used herein, with the exception of original characters (please don't borrow) are the property of MGM and Trilogy. No profit sought or accepted.
Rating: PG13
Warnings: Language, violence
Notes: Yakoke, Adrian, for a heart deep and true; words cannot say how much you mean to me, and to my writing. And to my new friend, Lynne Smith for beta-reading and valuable suggestions.
Bibliography:
That night he scooped most of the embers from their fire into a shallow trench in the ground, which he covered with soil and pine and the ground cloth for their bed against the bitter cold. Frost snapped and popped in the trees, creaked and cracked a melodic harmony with the wood of their fire, and she was warm as toast under the buffalo robe without so much as the tip of her nose showing. Warm in her heart, too, for the smile of his invitation to share the robe again, though he protested her burrowing and had a few tender spots.
She'd spent the evening watching him make a bow-string out of several fibrous lengths of sinew from his bag, wetting them in warm water and rolling them on his thigh with the flat of his hand into one smooth length. He folded that length three times and looped one end around a stick the size of her thumb, then rolled it again until the three strands became one. The loose end he knotted at one tapering end of the bow, touching a twig with a ball of glue on the end of it, also out of that bag and softened in hot water. The quilled bag hardly looked big enough to have all the things in it he kept pulling out at need. He plucked another piece of sinew out of his mouth and wrapped it in an intricate weave to secure the knotted end of the string, chewing gently on more lengths.
She didn't bother him, sipping a cup of coffee and working her way through the last of the jerky, just watched him apply forest crafts she suspected he had a great store of. Put him down in the middle of the mountains with nothing and he would be dressed and fed and housed within a day. Finally, he worked the stick out of the end of the strand and stood up, setting the simple curve of the bow into the arch of his foot as he flexed it and drew the loop down into the first of two notches at the top of the bow. Her eyes rounded as the shape reversed itself into something resembling the horns of a Texas steer. He smiled at the feel of the draw and she did, too, and the quiet thrum it made when he released it. Then he slipped the loop into the bottom notch and the bow resumed its unstrung shape.
The shafts of the arrows, he said, were gooseberry, cut in late winter when the sap was down so the wood wouldn't split in drying. They'd been straightened through the hole in the round piece of sandstone she'd been idly warming in her hands as she watched him, heated and drawn through to correct any curves. They were fletched with a single turkey-feather split and glued to each side of the shaft above the nock that fit to the string. He told her these things as she watched him check the arrowheads, her eyes focused with curiosity. There were three arrows among the rest with barbed hooks, and when she'd asked about them, he told her quite matter-of-factly that those were for hunting men, made to cause harm going in and even more coming out. Hunting arrow-heads were smooth and made to be withdrawn easily. Her nose all but touched his fingers as he stretched a sinew around an arrowhead that had come loose, the taut line unspooling from his mouth as he turned the shaft in his hands, guiding the the string in a neat wrap. When he glanced at her, she was grimacing around a piece of sinew she'd taken experimentally into her mouth, curious about the taste.
He used that string for the next arrowhead, sitting in front of her and reeling it tight from between her teeth. It was very hard to do that while laughing, but she managed it, and had him chuckling, too, by the time the arrowhead was secure. He didn't have a qualm about handling it all spitty from her mouth, and she liked that.
He rewrapped the bow and quiver and tidily repacked his quilled bag, and by the time she came back from relieving herself, their bed was made and she went to it happily.
"Good-night, Uncle Vin." She'd murmured sleepily, leaving him thunderstruck. Simple as that, four little words that connected them as he'd never been connected to anyone but Duley all his life. Uncle. Never in his life had he expected to be anything to anyone, it was safer that way, he was too damaged too young. But he'd been a husband - no, he was a husband, even now. And an Uncle, too, it seemed. Lord, that was a truly unsettling concept. Of course, Julianna couldn't be calling him Uncle Vin in front of her blood Uncles, but still ... he knew it would be in her eyes no matter what he said, her affection a warm exuberance that kept sparking against his flinty soul. She had those eyes, like Duley's, that peeled him like an onion sometimes. In fact, there was more of Duley in this child than he'd ever thought possible.
He wanted to decline, wanted to say he'd rather hold no one and nothing in his arms or in his heart except her memory until he was with her again. And a deeply superstitious part of him shied from what felt like Duley giving him a family to replace her in his life. He took himself away from that thought where he was far too vulnerable, too mortal, and his arm tightened along the girl's back so she stirred, then settled again with a quiet snore.
He hadn't slept much last night and didn't expect to sleep much tonight, but he'd gone sleepless before and knew that somnolent state where a man could rest and leave his senses on guard for him. She was a lump under the robe nestled against him that his eyes continually went to in deeply troubled thought.
Mary kneaded the day's bread almost grateful for the warmth of the work. They'd taken to cooking under the raised wall of the tent to gather the reflected heat of a substantial fire, and still her breath condensed into a thick fog with every exhalation. Her glance at Elizabeth beside her was sympathetic for the worry on the woman's face, though Elizabeth's confidence in Vin's ability to safeguard her niece seemed wholly sincere.
"Josiah says we should meet up with them sometime today." She said, and Elizabeth's laugh was short and fraught with anxious anticipation.
"If he hasn't decided to leave her behind for driving him crazy with questions - he doesn't seem to like children very much, and she is a perfectly exasperating example of the species."
Mary's hands paused, her mouth opened, because Vin and Billy were close in a way not even Chris had managed; it would do no good to mention that. She wasn't sure herself why the tracker seemed so ill at ease around Julianna, who seemed a bright, brave girl and altogether likeable. The others seemed to have taken to her in a brotherly way, and she knew her father-in-law appreciated the girl's clever little defiances of her Uncles. But Vin ...
"Good morning, Mrs. Travis."
"James." She nodded distractedly and forgot to wonder why he'd become his sister's shadow lately. Something was very wrong among the seven and no one would tell her what, or why. Chris, especially, had no patience whatever on the subject and last night had walked right away from her when she'd dared ask. The Judge had noticed it as well, and was of the opinion that only one or two of them - perhaps Vin or Chris by their moods - had any grasp on the trouble among them. He'd suggested she question Buck, his cleft chin tucked down but his black flaring eyebrows high so she'd blushed at being set to use her wiles, but she'd applied herself shamelessly. Buck, however, despite a troubled darkness in his eyes, proved every bit a player in that regard and danced around the subject so adroitly that she had to give up or compromise her virtue.
They were a team, those seven men, a whole made of disparate components - which was putting it mildly. Four Corners needed them, all the brave souls flowing west following a dream needed them. It was distressing to see cracks in the unassailable foundation they created among them, and even more so to realize how much she'd come to depend on that foundation, and on them. All of them.
With a heavy sigh, she called the men to breakfast.
He was awake, of course, when she burrowed her way out of the folds of warm buffalo hide, blinking in wonder at the silvery frost all around them and her hair a sleek tousle. The rising sun danced off the crystals, and for a little while she was content just to sit there, resting against his side cocooned in warmth, to look around at it.
"Wow." She breathed, and the delight in her voice was dazzling bright in her face when she turned to him excitedly and bounded to her feet and out of the robe. He had frost on the brim of his hat, and got to his feet very stiffly, stretching parts of himself with wincing care so she laughed at him and went to the fire to make him a hot cup of coffee. By the time they'd sipped it, watching the day come, the frost had shimmered and turned to dew where the sun struck it, and the air was almost warm.
Finally, feeling almost human again, Vin got to his feet.
"Let's saddle up, girl."
"Jules." She said, tipping her head toward him with a stern eye for emphasis, "My name is Jules, not 'girl', Uncle Vin."
His expression was peculiar and she wasn't sure what it meant.
"You can't be callin' me that in front of anybody."
Her eyebrows twisted and she blew air out of her lips, "As if I'm stupid. I know you and Aunt Elizabeth don't want anybody to know, I can be trusted with a secret. I know just as well as she does how my father feels about Grandpa, and my Uncles, too - I wouldn't want you to have to shoot them or something for being too rude, you know."
His grin warmed her to her bones, grudging and admiring and liking her just as much as she liked him, and she gave him back that grin tooth for tooth.
From a ridge just north of their camp Vin spotted the pale distant plume of smoke he knew to be the breakfast fire of the rest of their party. Quite a way behind and rough country to traverse, they would have a long wait at the ford in the river ... unless he went hunting. He closed up the distance glass thoughtfully, standing in his stirrups and taking a good long look around for any other campfires. No wind to speak of and sunlight warming the meadows, several likely stands of oak between here and that ford that attracted turkeys.
"Jules, you like turkey?" She had a grin like a knife, that girl, but it was not for the promised meal; how she loved the way he said her name, the one she'd chosen for herself.
He tied Peso's lead off in a small meadow, the pony staying near like a colt, and headed up the flank of the mountain on foot, his rifle in his hand and the bow and quiver slanted across his back. She followed close at his heels, trying to step where he had stepped and marveling that he could move through thickets without a sound, hardly disturbing the dry shafts or the wet litter of leaf and twigs underfoot. It was pretty steep in places so she used both hands and feet to keep up with him, but he seemed to expect she could keep up, and it was a matter of pride that she did.
He prowled the circumference of a large clearing edged by huge gnarled oaks, and came back to her.
"Stay here, n' be real quiet, don't be movin' around. Turkey's got eyesight and hearing better than just about anything in the woods. They had a sense of smell like a deer n' no man ever woulda tasted turkey, I swear."
Yet halfway up to the crotch of the tree he'd chosen he felt the branch under him flex with her weight and turned around to see her climbing right after him. He stopped and bit off a curse.
"I can be real quiet and not moving around up in a tree as well as on the ground, and I want to see." She declared in a whisper as quiet as it was determined. So he looked the tree over again and found a place near the bole where she could tuck up in a crook. A pointed look settled her there in attentive motionlessness, though she watched him climb a few feet further into the crotch he'd wanted where he could stand against the tree, his feet braced on an upsloping branch. He strung the bow and set it firmly into his left hand with two arrows between the fingers of the same hand, and he made a warbling sound that surprised a giggle out of her and earned her a stern glance. He made the sound a few more times and then went as still as the tree.
Now and then he made the noise again, and she refused every inclination to cough or itch or make any move at all. An hour they waited, more, before his call was finally answered from a little distance away. Vin responded with a contented chicken-like chuckle and he drew the bow up, his elbow level with his shoulder and the forefinger of his right hand curled around the shaft of the arrow for guidance. The feathers brushed his cheek, and she saw that he held the nocked end between his thumb and the first joint of his index finger, using the third and fourth to draw the bowstring. The spare arrows bristled against the arc of the bow and she moved nothing but her eyes, from studying every move he made to the area he was looking out toward. She held her breath as a big dark bird with brilliant red and blue wattles stalked almost imperiously into the clearing. It stopped warily at the edge, head ticking and turning to every sound, every motion, even cocking its small eye at the wafting fringe on Vin's sleeve. He waited, and she stared up at him, blended into the trunk of the tree in color and limb angles, too narrow to add much bulk. Astounded, she realized that if she'd been that bird even looking around so cautiously, she never would have seen him.
The turkey moved under the oak with high purposeful steps, and finally began casting away a layer of composting leaves with quick scratches before striking at the damp acorns beneath in rapid darts and pecks, its head returning to an attentive upright each time. Then she noticed that Vin was still looking into the wood, and as she looked back there herself, a hen turkey joined the big tom with a contented burble. Even though she was looking right at him, she barely saw the blurred motion of the second arrow being snatched, nocked and let go in a snap of sinew, his fingers opening away from his face and the tom mortally struck before the hen had hit the ground.
He grinned like a wolf and she stared at him, awestruck. He hunted like the poetry she loved best, spare and graceful and without fanfare. His coat-fringe tapped against her cheek as he slithered past her on the way down, the hen fluttering on the shaft in an urgent rattle of pinions and she shrank back to let him pass. He dropped down onto the sodden ground soundlessly, loping to the hen on the edge of the clearing and stooping over it. She knew he broke its neck, one quick merciful twist that stilled the pattering of its struggling wings. Then he did a peculiar thing. He squatted down over the hen and placed his hand on the glossy pelt of brown feathers, and he remained there in a stillness that felt like church. He laid the hen beside the tom and paid the tom the same respect, and this time she caught a drift of murmured words she knew with a thrill were Indian. She made no move until he looked up at her with a smile and bid her come down.
They went back down the slope the way they'd come, the turkeys bound by their feet across his shoulders, and he surprised her by seeming inclined to talk.
"You know how to pluck?"
Behind him she made that rude noise with her lips that made his mouth twitch at one corner, "It's just a big chicken, right?" Eyeing the sizeable birds warily and laughing when he did.
"Auntie Elizabeth is going to be so pleased! She loves turkey - and you'll love how she roasts them, she uses all these dried up leafy things inside and rubs the skins with butter."
"My mouth's waterin' already."
They hunkered down-wind of the horses to pluck the turkeys and she watched him remove the pinions carefully and stack them on a soft piece of hide, the tail-feathers as well, admiring their luster and health.
"I know an old man up in those mountains who'll be right pleased t'get these." He said with a glancing smile, and there was pleasure in it over the prospect of seeing that old man again.
"Is he an Indian? I haven't got to see any Indians yet."
"He's a Lakota, a fine warrior with many coups."
"What's that?"
Her question led to an illuminating conversation about the counting of coups, which these people evidently held to be far more exalted than killing their enemies. This didn't fit with all she'd been told about them, about scalpings and torture and murderous raids, but there was a deep affection and honesty in his quiet talk that she knew was truer than anything she'd heard. Not bloodthirsty, but full of humor and righteousness, loving and honoring the land and one another so that none went hungry or unprotected or uncared for. It was so fascinating that for a moment she didn't know what her eye had fallen upon over his shoulder, and when she realized what it was, her breath froze in her throat and her blood in her veins.
He looked up as he felt the change in her, saw her eyes wide, her mouth a round O of terrible admiration.
"What?" He murmured, stock still in her alarm.
Jules didn't know what it was called, a low tawny slink and huge amber eyes.
"Cat." Then, without breaking her fascinated gaze, "Not the tabby sort."
The grin that chased across his face was quick as a blink, and hers regained some color to see it from the corner of her eye. He would know what to do.
Very slowly Vin turned his head until he, too, saw the lion crouched in the undergrowth not ten feet behind him. A yearling, by the size, and hungry beyond caution, skinny flanks and sides, drawn by the scent of blood on the wind. Hungry enough to have half a mad light in its tawny eyes, the broad flat head rose questing after the scent, unfamiliar with the threat men could be and even more dangerous in that ignorance. He heard Peso whinny to their left and he was glad he'd tied him. Peso purely hated mountain lions.
From the angle she was at she saw his jaw jump, her hand closed around the legs of the half-plucked hen for no reason she could think of. She knew her eyes were wide as dinner-plates, but she'd never in her life seen a cat so big, with such enormous teeth, and beautiful as it was with its strikingly marked face, it was terrifying. His rifle was beside him on the ground and his hand went gliding toward it. What happened next was a frantic blur: The cat broke from its deep crouch and Vin rose in a threatening curve to reach the rifle and use the motion to draw it away from her.
His hand closed around the rifle, but before he could swing it up the eighty pound cat hit him and knocked him down in a thumping explosion of wet leaves. He felt pricks on his arm, on the side of his back, claws barely piercing the leather, and he grabbed the cat's ruff to keep the teeth away from his face and throat. However, he knew those back claws were rising toward his belly where one swipe would eviscerate him, and he struggled for the upper hand, his strength sapped by the burning pull of unhealed injuries. Just as his fingers were slipping off one side of the snarling cat's head, he got a blast of fetid breath hot on his face as something struck the lion with a hollow thump he could feel reverberate all through the slinky body. A flurry of feathers broke right over his head as the cat was knocked loose, he heard Jules screaming in furious anger as the cat tumbled off, the half-plucked hen rolling after him, and he snatched the bird up in starving jaws and leapt in a growling scramble for the woods.
Breathless on his back, Vin blinked up at Jules, who was scowling after the cat like she had half a mind to chase him.
"What in hell just happened?"
"I smacked him good with that turkey is what, but he got away with it! He stole our hen, Uncle Vin, and I was nearly done plucking the darned thing!" She didn't realize he was laughing until he gasped for breath, knees rising, rolling to his side, one hand on his lean belly and the other slapping the earth.
"Smacked him ... with a turkey!" She'd never thought he could laugh like that, and she'd had no idea what she was going to do when she'd stood up with that hen's feet fast in her hand. She'd just seen it take Vin down and she was in motion before she knew it, swinging the heavy bird as hard as she could ... she started laughing herself, then, a rush of relief and a hot spike of pride in having actually saved the day. There were feathers all over his face, feathers dusting his chest and neck, feathers drifting down out of her own hair. They laughed so hard it seemed they'd never stop, and every time it seemed to be winding down they'd look at each other and go off again.
For the rest of the day it was that way. Once he spotted deer track going across the trail and turned back to her with the most serious expression to ask if she wanted to hunt it. "We still got that other turkey n' all." Her shriek of hilarity frightened every bird in every bush for a mile and he knew it with a regretful wince, but it was worth it. The boys would never let him live this down - saved from a cougar by a twelve-year old girl and a turkey.
A very resourceful girl, and one who didn't note the danger to herself in defending him, he'd heard her defiant scream and didn't have to see her face to know it had been determined fury and not fear moving her. There was a significance to the event, an auspiciousness he felt even if he didn't wholly understand it. Lions were powerful spirit animals to those called to walk in both the spirit and physical worlds, and he respected shamans despite not fully understanding them. Had the lion come for her as much as it had come for that bird? If so, she'd surely proven herself worthy! 'HO!' The people would cry in big deep voices, their faces proud and celebratory that the girl had Stood, and knew her kinship, and the drums would speak in booming exclamation. Lion and girl young and hungry and crossing boundaries a lesser soul would leave alone, proving themselves worthy.
While he didn't grasp all that the Lakota's spiritual connection with the land was, he could see the patterns in life and knew to watch them. Both girl and lion had stalked him, and both had taken him down in their different ways and had their price of him. The cat had gotten his meal and Jules had gotten hers, because he'd give everything he knew to a soul so in love with what he loved beyond measure. He could see it in her eyes, the dizzy astonishment he'd felt himself that day on the ridge with Wicasa Hinhan, when the spirit of the land spoke to a heart and the world ... opened. It had knocked him down, but she had Stood, had fought and prevailed and exalted like a warrior. No longer just on the world but part of it, in rhythm with what breathed and lived in the free land. It was a marvelous thing to see in any child, much less a niece of Duley Monroe, and it satisfied him in a way he'd never experienced before.
Casually he untied his bandana and worked it down against his right flank without her noticing. The cat's price; those back claws had done a bit of damage, but he knew very well how much worse it could've been. Would've been an instant later, he wouldn't lie to himself. He hadn't gotten his strength back altogether, his body wasn't healing as fast as he needed it to and he'd just had proven to him how mortal that could be. Nathan would have a fit; he almost smiled to think about it - at least it was on the other side of him this time.
"Chris!" J.D.'s excited voice and the sound of his mare's rapid hoofbeats drew everyone's attention as his fleet little bay came flying up the slope; "They're waiting across the river a half mile up, Josiah saw 'em! There's a ford, we can get across ..."
Elizabeth's smile was so eloquent with relief that Mary reached across the space between their horses to embrace her, and down the line that relief was reflected in the sudden easing of shoulders that had been tight for days. Smiles wreathed tired faces. They trusted Vin, but he was only one man in the wilderness with a troublesome and inexperienced girl to protect - and an unknown danger he was very wary of. The cold was beginning to tell on them all, fingers went numb on burning cold tack metal, bits needed to be warmed under their arms before being introduced into the mouths of mules and horses alike, the skin of their faces drawn tight and toes feeling like they'd never be warm again. Still, they were nearly whole again, and every one of them felt that, even Chris, to his dismay. Vin was coming back, they'd feel whole again, but would they be? They sure as hell hadn't been so far, and he had no confidence whatever that Vin would be with them when whatever the hell was going on here was over. Vin was up to something big, Chris didn't mistake that feeling, he was doing something under the guise of this journey that he wouldn't reveal even in the face of Chris' open suspicion.
Mary Travis' smile drew his eye, a week in the wilderness and still brightly beautiful. He didn't see the scowl on his own face as he thought of how he'd treated her last evening, walked away and left her like she'd ceased to exist. For the rest of the night he'd thought of nothing else but what danger Vin Tanner might be putting her into. The younger Monroe brother had taken to tagging along with his sister, maybe to comfort her in worrying about their niece, but that didn't account for the looks that passed between him and Ezra. The gambler and Judge Travis kept with Stephen, and there was something there, too, that had his suspicions up. Mary glanced his way but didn't linger, his face was so fiercely thoughtful. He was thinking it was about damn time for a talk with somebody.
It took an hour to get to the ford, picking their way carefully down a steep trail surrounded by thick evergreens toward the river below and the broad plateau of high plains veined with waterways and clustered stands of trees.
Elizabeth was not the only one to be confounded by the pair of them waiting across the broad ford. Julianna stood leaning against his cocked hip, his arm slung loosely around her like they'd grown up together, comfortable as friends of many years and great understanding. Something blossomed in her at the first sight of them, distant as they were and affection plain as an honest smile.
"Well, lookee there." Buck murmured wonderingly, glancing around at a bobbing walk to see that everyone else had noticed as well. He laughed with admiring delight and shook his head; "I do believe that little filly has roped n' tamed our wild and woolly tracker."
The wistful joy on Elizabeth's face didn't escape him, nor did the dark glower on Chris', as if he'd seen something foretelling of doom. Buck lowered his head a moment, a sadness touching him that he wasn't sure was for Vin or Chris or that woman gazing across the river as to a dream within reach that could never be real. Vin wasn't a trifling man, he approached all associations soberly and thoughtfully and entered into very few. He had to know this woman would never be right for him, yet she had a light in her eyes when she looked at Vin of a woman with cause to have feelings, and the tracker was far too sensitive not to have noticed. Wasn't like him to hurt a woman like that, no, it wasn't like him at all, and old Buck was just about sick of wondering why.
Josiah moved the mule train down to the riverbank with minimal fuss, walking his horse into the icy water as if into a grassy meadow, and the mules followed that placid lead without much objection. At its highest, the current lapped against their bellies and that sudden wet lick of cold was what set Buck's normally placid grey on its haunches. Buck, in the middle of teasing J.D. about something, was off-balanced, and he went sliding off into the water, fortunately landing on his feet. Even so, the water was nearly to his waist and so cold it took his breath away.
"Cold, Buck?" J.D. laughed with high good humor, and for a few moments Buck was too concerned about his testicles trying to get up into the warmth of his body to do much more than scowl.
He caught the grey's tail and let it pull him along, wincing every time the water sloshed too high.
"You go ahead n' laugh, boy, you just remember I'm about three feet taller n' you and we're gonna be crossin' a whole bunch of streams colder than this before we're done - " Which J.D. found out at the bank when his mare slipped and dumped them both into the drink. Fortunately, Vin had a good fire going, and the riverbank would accommodate a cozy camp, he hefted a big tom turkey plucked and ready to roast as they sloshed up the embankment.
"Oh, I do love turkey!" Josiah said with an appreciative nod at the size of the tom as he drew up beside them, and the tracker shrugged with a twinkle in his eye matched in Julianna's.
"We had two, but Jules here give one to a starving cougar."
"Mighty Christian thing t'do, Miss Julianna." Josiah said, touching his hatbrim with an approving grin that made her blush with pleasure even as she laughed with him.
In the next moment Julianna was enveloped in her Aunt's crushing hug, embarrassed by the tears of relief with the men's rough greetings around them. It wasn't like she was in any danger, for heaven's sake! And wasn't it kind of insulting to Vin to act like she'd been in some terrible peril just being in the woods without anybody but him?
"I'm just fine, Auntie, really, you're choking me ..."
She let her go, her hands passing over her niece's face and shoulders and arms reassuring herself, then she went right up to Vin and impulsively hugged him, remembering too late how skittish he was of being touched, then surprised that he not only allowed it, but returned it. His smile was so easy, wide blue eyes finding anxious circles and lines on her face so he shook her a little with a very gentle light to him.
"Never worry when she's with me, Elizabeth. On my life, never worry so."
She smiled up at him wonderingly, her eyes eloquently grateful and pleased, and let him go as Stephen came into view.
J.D.'s lips were faintly blue despite the blanket he'd wrapped around himself before sitting down by the fire. Vin stripped it away from behind him, ignoring his confused objections as he kneed him in an awkward scoot closer and closer to the fire until, to J.D.'s alarm, the front of his clothes started to steam. Vin's legs at J.D.'s back kept him from retreating.
"Stay put, kid. You don't feel it now, but it's comin' on dark n' you can't be wet after dark. Get the shirt n' pants off, get warm there, break a sweat." J.D., flustered and embarrassed, still did as Vin said because Vin knew what was necessary out here to survive. And because he was pretty glad Vin cared enough to even tell him what to do.
Buck, legs already spread around the selfsame fire, raised his dark glossy eyebrows with a hoot as the kid skinned out of his wet clothes and tented the blanket around his back, coming back to the fire and resuming his steaming as if he were at a spa. The others took care of unpacking and hobbling the mules, setting up the camp, while the Monroes, Ezra and the Judge enjoyed a drink and a cigar as they watched.
Chris' eyes narrowed on them; Ezra was making the most of his charade and had managed to avoid anything resembling physical labor but for saddling and grooming his horse. Looked mighty satisfied about it, too, and his innocently raised eyebrows to notice Chris' glower only increased the gunman's ire.
Ezra didn't hold his look; Chris was twitchy as a teased fighting dog and itching to let loose on something, and since Ezra had no intention of being a target of convenience, he wisely prodded James and Stephen into motion to set up their own hovel.
On the other side of the camp Nathan homed in on Vin like a blood hound; "Alright," he said, "Let's see what new dents n' such you collected." Vin wasn't about to turn away help with cat claws, he'd seen such wounds fester and kill, so he swung his coat aside with a faint grimace and showed Nathan the blood-fringed rents in his pants. The healer only cast a darkly irritated eye at him when he dryly said that at least it was on the other side of him.
A half hour later, Vin sat tamely on the same stack of valises he'd occupied previously. This time Nathan did without Elizabeth's help, since Vin had to doff his pants and take down his long-johns to an indecent degree. Four parallel gouges striped down his pale right flank from just under the last rib to 3 punctures where the crest of his hipbone had stopped them short. And one long deep slash that had dragged down and around the front of his body all the way to the crease between thigh and groin. He looked up at Vin, seeing that, wondering at the man's luck, but the tracker had his eyes closed and his head dropped back wearily, so he didn't see the healer's alarm at how near the femoral artery it had come. Vin would've bled out in minutes, and that little girl would've been all alone in the wilderness. He offered up a grateful prayer as he went for his needle and thread; he and the Lord always talked when he was trying to heal folks hurts and sicknesses.
Three of the slashes would require a few turns of cat-gut to close, the last considerably more than several, and he set to cleaning them out, grumbling about the rate at which Vin was consuming his medical supplies. Nathan looked glumly at the bruises on Vin's left side and hip, finally beginning to fade to brown, checked the scabbing scrapes across the top of his hard-boned shoulders, and then went back to the new wound, shaking his close-cropped head in amazement. The human body could endure so much abuse sometimes, half his fascination with healing was pure wonder at that capacity.
Through it all Vin said nothing, accepting injury and pain as he accepted everything else that came his way with nothing more than a few flinches and the occasional soft pop of breath when something hurt particularly sharply. The tracker shared an instinct to disguise vulnerability that Nathan had noticed was common on the frontier, which said a lot about how dangerous life here was. But though Vin was a stoically quiet soul normally, he was more than quiet today.
As he heated, and then threaded, his needles, Nathan didn't miss the gradual downward drop of Vin's head and the deepening curve of his back within a few minutes of quiet stillness. Vin was nearly dozing off when he turned back despite the sting of his ministrations, and Nathan found that quite telling - he felt safe among them and could let down the tension, get off the adrenalin he'd obviously been running on. He was completely exhausted.
Elizabeth insisted on collecting his buckskins for cleaning and repair, and though Jules had been deeply dismayed to see the rents and the blood, her admiration also grew in such evidence of his stoicism and courage. She hadn't even noticed he was hurt, and he hadn't seemed to, either! With a new understanding, she accepted the hard truth of what fortitude could be required of anyone thinking of making the frontier home. She figured it was worth it because he obviously did - a body never knew what would cross their paths, what opportunities or challenges - life would never be boring!
Within an hour Elizabeth returned his pants, the buckskin cleaned, though stained, and neatly stitched. She couldn't put words to the strange feelings that had moved in her to have had them in her hands, warm from his body and holding its contours, his blood rinsing over her fingers. There was an intimacy to the task that made a contented glow in her, and that also made her wonder who had made them for him to begin with - had Duley sewn this soft buttery leather to her husband's shape? Had her sister cut the notch in the back of the high waist to accommodate his movement? They were finely made. Perhaps lovingly made. She worried her lip between her teeth in quiet conflict.
Vin was grateful to be relieved of the chore of repairing the buckskins, and he smiled tiredly when she passed them, with a scarlet blush at the glimpse of his pale sinewy body, through the tent flap into Nathan's hand. When he was dressed again, the wounds throbbing angrily, he went to rub down Peso and found Josiah already there. He'd wanted to check his stores, too, it'd been a constant worry that one of them would break open or something and give him away. He saw them stacked and covered and knew Josiah had done that, too. The Preacher had been shouldering Vin's chores since before they'd left Four Corners, and Vin was no more sure what to make of it now than he had been then.
"Brother Tanner, you look as done in as a man can get and still be vertical. Lay down awhile, dinner's gonna be late anyway."
Vin already knew he'd have to do just that, and very soon. His ears were buzzing and his eyes felt grainy, he was used up past even being hungry. He regarded the preacher a moment; Josiah was the only one who didn't look at him sideways lately nor appear to have the slightest suspicion, but he'd always been a man of insight beyond Vin's understanding. Was it sympathy in the pale deepset eyes that had nothing to do with commiserating over Vin's wounded exhaustion? Was there, in that knowing eye, some wordless agreement with whatever Vin might be up to? Vin didn't know, but he felt himself growing heavy and down-slipping and he made no argument. He had to sleep.
The work of the camp went on and he laid down with a bone-weary groan out of the way of the cookfire with sundown reddening the sky. He was deeply asleep within minutes.
The women went about their work in quiet regard for his rest, which meant Elizabeth had to catch Julianna's headlong rush as she came looking for him. A meaningful flick of her Aunt's eyes warned her about waking the man on the far side of the fire, a spill of tawny hair from his robe, tucked in among the supplies.
He looked so tired, Jules thought, and he hadn't before. He'd seemed ready for anything, alert and able even after they'd returned to the others, but she now realized - with a pang of true guilt - that he'd never slept all the time they'd been on their own. She should've thought to stand a watch at night so he could rest, a few hours at least, she should've remembered that standing watches was a shared duty she'd seen the six of them serve over and over in quiet order. Indeed, she'd taken comfort in the muted sounds of their changing shifts, their subdued voices in the night while the rest slept. They never asked the Monroes to stand watches, obviously not trusting them to do so without falling asleep and leaving them all vulnerable - was that what her Uncle thought of her? She felt very bad about that, and went away quietly, refusing to let Buck wheedle out the story of the turkey and the lion until Vin was awake to remember it with her.
Mary and Elizabeth had split the turkey and staked the halves over the coals, a fry-pan catching the drippings for basting. By the time it was ready, Vin had joined the restless men hovering around the campfire with their mouths watering, and he caught Julianna's hand despite her elder Uncle's fruitless snatch after her and brought her to the front of the line for the first piece. Blushing furiously and grinning so wide her face seemed like to split, she took a whole leg without apology, sliding the thigh onto Vin's tin plate with a proud grin because he'd told her that was his favorite part.
She told the story as they ate in excited bursts, the meal interrupted again and again by uproarious laughter through which Stephen simmered with growing disapproval that he dared not show. He didn't like that damned tracker, and he didn't like his niece's attachment to him or his sister's admiring looks or the way he could see the father he hated in him.
"That's as inventive a use for a turkey as I've ever heard." Josiah opined, twinkling blue eyes promising, as did most of the others, endless teasing of their uncharacteristically hapless tracker. Vin took it all with good humor and a wry acceptance that he would never live it down, chewing placidly on the crispy bone at the end of one wing with Jules copying him at his side. They crunched this tasty proof of their victory down as far they could, comparing progress now and then like children with bad table manners. Elizabeth said nothing, even found herself smiling at them once Stephen and James had followed the gambler back to their crude campsite for a game. The fire Stephen had made was too large and too close to the shelter so the canvas kept filling with smoke, but he stubbornly kept feeding it wood, determined to find some warmth as night fell, and cold followed.
Chris looked easy and lazy where he was, stretched out on his bedroll against his saddle, long legs crossed at the ankles and his finger laced together over his narrow waist. But his hooded eyes were deep in the black curve of his flat hatbrim and followed Vin with fully predatory attention. The tracker had been blatantly unwilling to be in that girl's company at all, and now he had her at her side with sidelong grins and catches of eyes between them like a little sister. Like a daughter.
More interesting yet, he'd lost his discomfort with the girl's Aunt entirely, and now their eyes, too, met, sometimes for longer than was strictly casual when they thought themselves unobserved. Not anything overt, just a ... consideration of each other. This was new. Chris knew he hadn't been wrong, there hadn't been anything other than a very edgy friendship until he figured Vin started pulling the idea of a romance like a smokescreen over whatever else he was up to. That's how it started, anyway, and now it looked like Vin might just be getting trampled by his own stampede.
Chris' black hatbrim rocked slightly. He was finding out things about Vin Tanner he didn't like at all, the capacity for deception first and foremost. It was a skill he knew Vin possessed, and a necessary one, but he'd never known him to deceive his friends. Chris didn't like being in these woods. Too much random movement and too many sounds strange to a gunslinger's senses kept his shoulderblades prickling. That it was Vin's home territory, however, was crystal clear, as was the idea that maybe he was reverting to his true nature as well. He'd thought him a forthright man, honest and open, but that no longer seemed to be true. Chris was neither comfortable in these woods or in this camp with secrets being kept, Vin's, Ezra and the Judge, Elizabeth and Vin, the younger Monroe in it somehow and the elder a continuous annoyance.
He still didn't know what Tanner was fixing on, and he wasn't the only one wondering - his pale eyes flicked around the jovial firelit faces, resting a moment on the majestic bones and hollows of Josiah's face. The Preacher had sensed something, he had an eye to men's soul's Chris had come to depend on, and that whatever he sensed didn't trigger any alarms in the man was part of what had kept Chris quiet this long. But Chris figured to ask him what he knew, no matter that he more than suspected he'd get a gospel riddle for an answer.
The sound of Vin's rare laughter pulled him back, the girl beside him with a smug look on her face and a turkey feather she'd just worried out of Vin's hair between her fingers. Everyone was in high spirits both to have the pair back safely among them and to have whatever enmity had seemed to exist between them gone. That seemed good enough to stop them from worrying, but Buck, despite having a twinkle in his eye and a grin, was not fooled. Chris knew that scoundrel well enough to know he had an eye to Vin and Elizabeth, too, his instincts keen as a razor when it came to matters of men and women. Buck knew as well as he did that something wasn't right there. And Mary ... she sensed something, too, and he thought it might even please her. A frown creased the corners of his thoughtfully pursed mouth, but she didn't know about Vin's wife and he couldn't blame her for innocently wanting Vin to find a mate. It was impossible to hold a frown long with her looking as she did by firelight, a breathtaking woman. Sometimes, in pure male desire, he wished she wasn't as breathtaking inside as out. She turned toward him, feeling his eyes as she always did, and his shied away off that dangerous ground. He'd be every bit the fool Vin was to ... consider Mary Travis. A soft snort escaped him that no one noticed - Vin thought to hide in playing a fool and was becoming a real fool in the process.
He looked at the circle of firelit faces again, one by one, wondering which one he should corner for the answers he'd determined to have. Stubborn men here who wouldn't take kindly to being questioned, much less about Vin by someone they'd considered his best friend. He made his decision, then, and settled down to await the opportunity with a hunter's endless patience.
A hand struck like a snake-bite out from behind a pine trunk and snatched Ezra by the silken folds of his cravat, yanking him into the darkness so fast his feet actually left the ground. For a split second, the dapper gambler was certain he was in the grasp of some savage warrior and about to shuffle off his mortal coil very prematurely, then:
"We're gonna have us a little palaver, Ezra." Friendly and determined as silk over a razor's edge. Chris pulled him deeper into the thick stand, his pale eyes intent in the shaft of distant firelight through the foliage.
Ezra spent a moment, aghast, in straightening his crumpled finery and getting his heart out of his throat, feeling the dangerous eyes of the gunslinger on him like burning coals.
"An invitation to converse does not usually involve sartorial abuse, Mr. Larabee."
Chris ignored the attempt at disarming humor and cocked his head, his hands on hips and leaning forward aggressively. Whatever he wanted, Ezra had no doubt he would give it to him.
"You and the Judge are cozier than little fuzzy birds in a nest, Ezra, n' the younger Monroe, too. And all three of you nearly as keen to that woman as Vin; perplexin', since she ain't no great beauty. It's time you n' the Judge let the rest of us in on what's happening with them Monroes, Ezra."
"Happening? Why, Chris, I don't ..." Ezra's voice faded away at the hardening of Chris' face, sculpted bones seeming to rise ferociously and one hand coming to rest on the butt of his gun. One thing he knew was that Chris didn't bluff.
"Alright, alright ... but the Judge has to be included, let me get him."
Chris leaned back skeptically, his mouth small and his eyes openly suspicious. Ezra willed himself not to shift nervously, to hold those astonishly cold eyes. More and more as this journey progressed, Chris Larabee was reverting to the scornfully deadly man he'd been when Ezra had first met him. To his disconcertion, it was hurt that straightened his back under that withering glare, and anger to be looked at with such disdain by someone he'd proven himself to over and over again.
Chris said shortly, "Go get him, right now. You think of giving me the slip, and I'll drag you out of that sorry excuse for a tent by the hair of your head."
"I'll be right back, then. And Mr. Larabee ..." Ezra said, his own eyes hot to be spoken to in such a manner, "'Lest you might think I do so out of fear - if you ever attempt to drag me anywhere, I guarantee you will fail."
Chris knew he meant it and regretted the unfairness of letting his temper at Vin cut Ezra. He showed it by taking his hand off his gun and letting his shoulders tilt; it was all he could do, but Ezra nodded, mollified, and went to invite the Judge for a stroll.
The gunslinger waited, nerves high and knowing he was reaching an edge where he couldn't predict himself what he'd do next. That wasn't good, he'd been sorry too many times for things he'd done in such a mood.
Orrin Travis, his craggy face somber as he approached, immediately saw the danger. Chris was on the barest edge of frustrated violence, and he calculated that the time had come to share what they knew before he went off and the opportunity to bring these criminals to justice was lost. Larabee probably had no idea his anger was likely the purest sort of hurt feelings, the man was unable to see his own heart and likely believed he no longer had one, but Travis had seen it many times, and it was a noble one. In many ways Tanner was Chris' anchor against the emotional forces that drove him so close to madness, and the Judge didn't want to see such a good man go down under the burden of his own past.
"Let's walk, Chris."
The three men spent a long half-hour doing just that, Travis and Ezra telling a silent Chris what they'd discovered. About the land grants under Elizabeth's signature that James hadn't known about and his certainty that she hadn't signed them, about the old letters their sister had written from the wilderness that had been the seed from which all of this had grown. To Orrin's deep surprise, however, Chris did not at all agree that Elizabeth was innocent in it all. In fact, he scoffed at the very idea, because he knew the sister who had received those letters, and in his mind many things came together into a picture neither the Judge nor Ezra could have considered. Chris couldn't tell them about Duley, on that he'd given his word and he had his own hard set of principles, but their information made a terrible sort of sense to him.
No, not innocent. Letters written by Vin's dead wife to this woman were now leading her family to gold and the Lakota to ruin. Vin was the only one who knew where it was, and he'd been taken in by the sister of a woman he loved more than life. Seduced, and Chris was sure that was coming, into being her protection against a double-cross by her treacherous brothers, who obviously had a plan she wasn't privy to by what the Judge and Ezra had discovered. Or maybe she planned to use him like a weapon against those brothers herself - a more potent weapon than she might know if she pushed Vin to kill. That was as likely in his mind as the Judge and Ezra's suspicions that her brothers intended her harm. Vin was in the middle of a nest of snakes.
"Judge, I'm years past thinkin' a woman can't be as devious or as dangerous as any man. I've got serious doubts about that woman, and nothing you've told me makes them go away."
Both the Judge and Ezra argued about their own more intimate knowledge, having spent time with all the Monroes, but Chris remained unconvinced.
"At least you must agree that Vin can't be told about this." Travis said, watching Chris closely and anxious that the man's temper might set off a disaster that would rip their charade apart prematurely. He wanted those men behind the scenes to be brought to justice, he wanted to root out the faithless cancer of such corruption in the institution he so loved and had served so faithfully. He needed to see this through to the end in order to do that, and if Chris told Vin now -
Reluctantly, however, Chris nodded. Vin would kill the brothers, both of them, if he even suspected they intended harm to Elizabeth, and Chris wasn't sure Vin would believe him if he told him he thought Elizabeth had been playing him the whole time. If he didn't, it would set them all at each other's throats in a place and time where there were already enough ways to die. And if he did - he'd be gone, that much Chris knew. He'd disappear like a wounded animal into the only place he'd ever felt safe, and he'd likely never come out again.
"I'm tellin' the boys, though." He ground his teeth when the Judge and Ezra exchanged doubtful glances. "Look, we're all in this, Judge, and there ain't no reason in hell everybody has to be walking around totally blind, whether you're right or I am. I can't have them going along without any idea at all there's trouble coming. We'll keep Vin out of it, but I'm telling the rest of the boys what you've come up with." And that was all he'd tell them. Neither Orrin or Ezra could interpret the flash of angry guilt that crossed Chris' face in figuring half an idea was better than none. The gunslinger shook his head with a disgusted sound, feeling like he was suffocating on the tangle of all these things and wanting to just shake it all off and disappear himself.
When he walked away from them at last, the two men exchanged deeply worried looks. They walked a while longer together, considering what they knew added now to Chris' plain suspicions. Ezra worried at the inkling that Chris knew far more than he'd said, something that made him too certain Elizabeth was in on it. Why wouldn't he say, if that was so?
"Could he be right?" Ezra asked, thinking furiously and hardly able to believe he could have the wool pulled over his eyes by Elizabeth Monroe, but his own mother had proven many times how devious and impossibly manipulative a woman could be, no matter how innocent and guileless she appeared. He couldn't trust his own judgments of character, and he looked to Travis for that now. Orrin's lips were pursed, his head down in deeply unhappy thought. As they approached their camp, both men disturbed by suspicions neither had considered before, Travis shook his head and said,
"I think he's wrong, Ezra, but ..." The furrows along his mouth deepened with somber dismay.
"Wonderful." Ezra groaned, his hands rising helplessly. "Why can nothing ever be simple?"
Chris was no less disturbed. He thought he'd found the reason Elizabeth Monroe was here, where a woman need not be. She had no cause to be out here and maybe she'd brought her own niece into it just to give herself the excuse of chaperone. Maybe she thought Vin would protect her from her brothers, because he didn't believe her signature was on those land grants without her knowledge and he didn't buy the idea of forgery as Travis had suggested. Maybe she intended to set Vin against her brothers, use him to get rid of them and leave the way free and clear for her to cash in big. Maybe she suspected her brothers were planning a double-cross and she'd taken Vin as safeguard against them, binding him with memories that made him pliable as a child. Sure as shit those Monroes were a twisted bunch, and he in no way believed Elizabeth was any better.
Vin was a smart man, and so was Judge Travis; Ezra was as slippery and cunning as they came, and yet if she'd fooled them all ... it infuriated him to imagine it, filled him with a bitter cold anger that a woman would so callously destroy a man who had survived all Vin had survived. Treachery could do what none of the battles they'd fought together had - rob him of a friend he counted on, and a hope he had only begun to dare believe in.
His eyes fell with predatory determination on Elizabeth Monroe making her way back from a private trip into the woods. No James at her heels, no one shadowing her for the moment. Chris Larabee was not a man who wasted opportunities, and he moved to intercept her like a snake sliding through the foliage so he was upon her before she noticed him. Her oval face paled when he came into the dim light near her, and that satisfied him. He knew what his face was in her eyes in this moment, had seen that sort of fear when his demons were high and near breaking loose. He knew he was scary, hell, he cultivated it to warn off anyone thinking to try him with their guns, to drive away anyone trying his patience before he had to kill them. Scared himself sometimes to understand how truly ruthless a man he'd gotten to be, but if he was right, she could give him lessons.
"Miz Monroe," He said directly, his face and tone both unfriendly in the extreme, "I've had all I'm gonna take of wonderin' what in hell is goin' on with you and Vin Tanner." He ignored her startlement completely.
She was good alright, she reared up away from his aggressive approach like a princess stepped in horse-shit.
"I beg your pardon?" Umbrage formal and stiff-spined like she hadn't the faintest idea what he was talking about. Obviously she knew he didn't like her - not that he'd made much of a secret of it - and was prepared for confrontation. Or so she thought. Chris' smile was cold as glacier ice, in no way a gentleman to be bound by manners or courtesy. He'd known some Satan-cold and wicked women in his time and was no longer susceptible to the feminine wiles that could beguile and make fools of men. This one was aristocrat to her bones and wouldn't frighten easily, but he had no doubt it could be accomplished.
Sudden alarm jolted through her at the blatantly threatening step he took toward her, and she was ashamed to flinch back from him. Such a look of scorn answered that betrayal of her fear that her shame grew - as if she was trying to play on his masculine sympathies and was failing miserably! She stumbled over the hem of her dress under her heels, looking down behind her at the trees too close to retreat any further, and looked back to him with faint defiance, pressing her skirts to her legs with her hands.
"Look, lady," He growled, and there was no titular respect in the term, "I know who you are to Vin, and I know why he's taken this job on for you - because he damned well wouldn't be leading white men into the Lakota territories otherwise." Not saying the words that would breach the promise he'd made to Vin, but making it clear Vin had told him about Duley. "I've also got a good idea what you and your brothers are up to in the Black Hills - and I'm real sure Vin doesn't."
He'd almost reached her, towering overhead like a cobra about to strike, when Vin came between them so unexpectedly, with such silent authority and strength, that he was able to intercept Chris and take the taller man bodily several feet back. The tracker's eyes were enormous and bright as new-forged gunbarrels, his face a set landscape of oddly desperate fury, but he let Chris go at once and stepped back out of easy reach, admitting in the action at least how dangerous a man Larabee was to set hands on. They stood facing each other, vibrating like tuning forks and neither backing down an inch, both on the sheerest edge of mortal tempers.
Elizabeth didn't move, barely breathed, captive in the deadly dangerous moment she felt so keenly and regretted so deeply. She didn't know why Larabee was so angry today, nor what perfidy he was hinting at that he blamed her for, but though he'd frightened her deeply, she wished it was anyone but Vin to have stopped him. The nearness of disaster electrified the air around the two of them, friends before she'd come, and obviously better friends than she'd realized. This wasn't a challenge of men over business, but of a friend worried about a friend. The gunslinger cared about Vin every bit as much as Nettie Wells did, and the power of their anxiety suddenly rendered Vin far more vulnerable than she'd realized he was. He was so self-contained, so masterfully in command of his life and confident on the world, they had no worry about him coming to physical harm - it was his heart his friends guarded for him.
Larabee turned his head and looked at her, then, standing there pale and wide-eyed with her hand at her throat, a pretty and vulnerable pose for Vin's sake, he was sure.
In his stony jade eyes Elizabeth saw the very promise that iron-willed old woman in four Corners had made her - hurt him at your peril. Understanding no more than Nettie had how far from hurting Vin Tanner her intentions were. She couldn't blame them for thinking she was using him, entertaining herself during this adventure or manipulating him to some foul secret purpose. But she wasn't. She wasn't, and she withstood the gunslinger's peeling examination with that fact defiantly bright in her eyes.
"Vin, this woman ain't what you think she is, n' them brothers of hers are spearheadin' some doin's she hasn't told you about."
"Chris, stay out of it." Shoulders high in her defense, angry that Chris had assumed she was part of her brothers scheming after the gold in the Pa Sapa. Jules had turned him around in some ways, made him accept some things he'd never thought would even come his way before, and now ...
"I'm tellin' you, Tanner," Chris pressed, "You're being a hundred kinds of fool here, n' ..."
"Don't put yourself 'tween me and mine, Chris." Vin rasped, wide blazing eyes meaning it, taking a stand from which he would not back down short of death. "Don't do it."
That set Chris back on his heels with a surprised bark of bitter laughter. "Between me and mine, is it? Claiming the Monroes as family, are you?" In the periphery of his range of vision he could see the little smile that flitted across Elizabeth Monroe's face, a little smile he was sure reeked of triumph at having fooled Vin so utterly that he'd turn against his friends for her. He wanted to hit her in that moment, it burned bitter and strong in him and Vin saw the urge with an obvious rise of hackles.
But Chris figured she'd like it if he and Vin came to blows, if he got so mad he stopped trying to save Vin from whatever use she had planned for him, if he let himself be made the wedge that would drive the seven apart completely, and forever. He had no intention of playing into her hands that way and he deliberately relaxed his own shoulders.
"Funny." He said, turning back to Vin with a sour smile twisting the generous curves of his mouth, "I'd thought you were one of us." Meaning one of the seven, one of the circle of friends, upholding the loyalties they'd all paid for in bloody experiences since they'd met. Vin Tanner's real family, if ever a family he would have, not these newcomers no one trusted, not this woman wheedling her way into his fiercely protected heart by means no one else could - she had the sure way past Vin's defenses that no one else in the world had; she had Duley, and she was using that as skillfully as Nathan used his knives. The barb hit and bit, he could see Vin flinch, but he still kept himself between the woman and Chris and made no move toward conciliation.
"You so desperate for a family you'd take leave of your good sense, Tanner?" It was mean and he'd intended it to be, Vin had to be shown how stupid he was being, he had no concept of family to recognize the warped and wicked thing this one was, and it made him far too susceptible to this woman's pretty smiles and warm words of brotherhood - he doubted sisterhood had a place in her plans. Chris had long since come to trust Buck's instincts in that regard, and he'd said she was hungry for their tracker. She was baiting her trap by offering not only herself, however subtly, but what Vin had never had and always longed for, and it was the cruelest thing Chris could imagine anyone doing. It would destroy Vin completely, break him into pieces from the inside out when it fell into ruin under the weight of the truth.
But the fear Chris saw in Vin's angry eyes now wasn't fear of that eventuality, which his instincts wouldn't let him ignore no matter how much he wanted to. And he wasn't afraid of Chris - hell, Chris wasn't sure Vin couldn't take him hand to hand if it came to it. No, Vin was in fear of this very edge they stood on opposite sides of now, this moment past which a blow thrown or a word too cutting deep would irrevocably end a friendship Chris was taken aback to realize was as important to Vin, despite his actions lately, as it was to him. It wasn't impossible to think Vin knew the risk he was taking and was counting on his friends to understand and forgive him - maybe that was what made him bold enough to risk it in the first place, knowing they were at his back even if he'd lied to them, hid things from them, got them mixed up in something bad.
Vin obviously didn't want that door closed between them and he was afraid, knowing Chris as he did, that the gunslinger would force it on him. If he made Vin choose, he might choose wrong, because Duley led him now, and her cause was bigger than anything else, he wouldn't be able to let it go. Chris was surprised when his fury suddenly subsided, giving way to a tide of sympathy to understand how torn Vin must be right now, how tormented. Not even the wounds of his experience could protect him from the mistakes he was making now out of pure love for his departed wife.
So Chris decided that if Vin had to be stupid, he'd do all he could to make sure, at least, that it didn't kill him, or anyone else he cared about.
Chris leveled a dire warning behind one straight index finger, his eyes starkly serious and including Elizabeth with a slicing glance over Vin's shoulder.
"Vin, you bring harm to any of the boys in going on ahead with whatever it is you're up to, and I'm considering it you comin' between me and mine, you understand? They aren't stupid, none of them, and they all know something's going on with you and this woman ..." The term tossed out like something wilted and useless.
"That ain't nobody's business, Chris." Stubborn to the end, set on this path and bound to walk it even if it led him over a damned cliff.
"Maybe not, but I think she's usin' you to her own ends, n' she don't give a damn what happens to the rest of us because you trust her when you shouldn't."
"Chris, that ain't so, it ain't."
"That's what you say, Vin, n' maybe that's what you believe. But I don't, and I am not leavin' it be on your say-so - you ain't exactly in your right mind these days, n' I don't intend to get killed because of it, or let any of the boys get killed, either."
He set scornful fingers to his hatbrim in a sarcastic salute to Elizabeth, knowing Vin wasn't ready to listen and where the argument would lead if he tried. She'd won this round, but the war was far from over, and Elizabeth clearly read the threat in his manner. He would be watching her, and he would be looking for the way to destroy her hold on Vin, never realizing she had none. Never realizing the hold was Vin's on her, though that was something not even Vin knew.
Elizabeth realized with dismay that part of the gunslinger's disdain for her was a genuine disgust that a woman would make a play for her sister's widower, maybe play on the sisterly similarities to overwhelm a grieving man. That was the root of her own discomfort over her growing feelings for Vin, the worm in the apple she couldn't help but hope would ripen. She shouldn't hope for that, she knew it was foolish and wrong, but she couldn't help wanting it.
She went into his arms for comfort not because she was frightened of Chris, though she was, and worried about what he might do to compromise her standing in Vin's eyes, but because the excuse was there to go into his arms and be held by him. To close her eyes and let her hands rest on his chest, to press her cheek there and hear his heartbeat and breathe in the wild scents of him, take in the vibrant heat of him. To dream awhile that he held her for other reasons, and let the hope grow that would not be denied no matter how she tried.
The conversation that night among the five men gathered close around a low-burning fire was as delicate and intense as a high-wire act. With a word to each during the remainder of the evening, Chris had set the time, and with the grim chill of his eyes he set the tone. Most had expected Chris to let Vin rest rather than stand a watch, he was so tired his face looked bruised, but Chris had set him out there and Vin hadn't protested. There'd been a freshening of the anger between them like a surly wound broken struck open again. Everyone's necks were prickling with how those two edged around each other, no eye contact, no words but what needed speaking.
Buck wondered if tonight they all might find out just what the trouble was between them. The lanky gunslinger eased himself down across from Chris where he could see his face; Chris had his tongue pressed up behind his front teeth, his chin flexing subtly now and then like there was something boiling in him being held back and Buck swallowed an anxious sigh. That was a bad sign. Chris had two kinds of mad: flashfire, the way he'd been the last few years, and this slow-burning fuse Buck knew could be even more dangerous - to Chris as much as to whoever made him that mad. He couldn't think how Vin could've done that even if they were presently at odds over something. They respected each other, Buck knew it, deeply and abidingly, as if each knew the other's soul inside and out. The same instincts, a natural read of signals and knowing where the other was in the heat of battle. He'd seen that kind of bond between men before, knew it himself, and knew no outside force could ever ruin it short of ruining them both. Now he sensed something powerful working on eroding that foundation.
He felt J.D. fidgeting beside him, knowing his hazel eyes were wide and searching around at all their faces. Kid had been uncertain as a sparrow finding his flock had somehow turned into ravens in the last few weeks, and Buck leaned a little on him as he passed a cup of coffee fragrant with brandy to Nathan on his other side. When they all had cups warming between their hands and a sip or two warming them inside, Chris, who'd been back in the shadows, leaned forward and rested his elbows on his widespread knees. He looked like a storm about to break, but his voice was soft.
"Had me a talk with the Judge n' Ezra earlier. There's things you gotta know." He said, his face all bone and sinew and unhappy eyes in the upcast glow of the embers.
"Seems those Monroes have turned out to be more than just a way to get us all into Ft. Laramie and Fetterman. They've got a big dirty hand in it, they're part of what's pushin' this gold rush." J.D.'s quick intake of breath was the only audible expression of surprise, but Chris went on like it was something he had to get said and didn't much like saying. "There's some twists and turns among the three of them the Judge n' Ezra haven't got figured out yet. They're of the opinion that Stephen's the dirtiest of the bunch. The little brother found a bunch of land grants with the sister's name on 'em for some mighty big pieces of the Black Hills - course, he says she doesn't know about it, and that he'll help Ezra n' Travis." Doubt cut into every line of his face.
Buck, shaking his head in bitter marvelment, said, "They got all any man could ever need, more money than a man could ever spend - why in hell are they out here scrappin' after more? And turning on each other to do it ..." He made a bitterly disgusted sound and his eyes caught at Chris meaningfully; "Taking what they don't need like it's their right just because they can - and taking it from folks it'll kill to lose it."
Chris knew what Buck was saying under that seemingly general condemnation and he didn't misunderstand Buck's worry no matter his wry smile. It was Vin being taken, Buck was saying, and though Chris knew his friend believed Elizabeth had genuine feelings for Vin, he also knew that Buck agreed it wasn't right and never would be.
Josiah had a different interpretation, but no less valid, and closer to Vin's than he could tell any of these good men. Taking the Pa Sapa for the gold in that sacred body, desecrating what could give all the riches the human soul could hold. Vin would not wait a moment to act against any such scheme, Josiah understood that with philosophic pessimism.
"Is that the reason Vin's not here, Chris? He was pretty mad about that gold rush - you afraid he'll kill those guys?" J.D. asked, watching their expressions for how they were feeling about this. An awkward silence fell among them, but he'd only asked what he figured everyone had already been wondering - why Vin wasn't here and why Chris wasn't expecting him.
Chris looked at J.D. a moment, thinking about how to say what he had to without saying too much, and then he turned to Josiah, the answer there. The Preacher's face looked just like Vin's would've had he been there, and Chris asked, "Josiah, you figure Vin'd keep his peace if he knew this?"
The preacher's brow gnarled, knowing the answer but not liking being used to set everybody's mind at ease about meeting behind Vin's back. Chris nodded with a hard look, his reasoning confirmed, and turned back to the coals.
"Well, it's worse than that according to the Judge - him n' Ezra think Stephen might be plannin' t'do away with Elizabeth to have those land grants." That rounded every eye around the fire.
"He thinks the two oldest brothers put them in her name to keep theirs out of it, some sort of conflict of interest with Gerald holding a military command there. So, J.D., how do you think Vin would feel about that?"
"He'd shoot them conniving sons-of-bitches in their tracks!" J.D. exclaimed, seizing on the forgiveness of 'for his own good' in keeping Vin uninformed. Cowardly as it felt, the rest of them had to do the same.
"You think there's somethin' goin' on between Elizabeth and Vin, Chris?" Buck's head was at a lazy tilt, but his deep blue eyes anything but lazy. He knew Vin had feelings for the woman, but he wasn't at all sure what those feelings were. Elizabeth had an unsatisfied longing he'd seen in many women, a flare of light inside, taken unawares by something so long asleep it had nearly been forgotten. But Vin - Vin's feelings were something very different, if no less intense - that was what confused Buck, who figured he knew every nuance of what could be between a man and a woman.
"Well, I don't know Buck," Chris answered with sharp sarcasm, "What do you think?"
Buck wasn't phased by the sarcasm, one bony shoulder hunched a laconic shrug under his coat and his smile was easy, like they were discussing the weather.
"Me?" He laughed softly, knowingly; "I think there's somethin' goin' on that Vin doesn't have half a clue about. That boy ain't careful, he's gonna be hogtied to a wife before he knows what hit him."
"Oh come on, Buck!" J.D. protested, "They're friends is all, even I know a woman like that n' a man like Vin ..." Knowing eyebrows went up around the fire and J.D. knew he was preaching to the choir. He flushed and shut up.
Buck was watching Chris; Chris thought there was something there, and it riled him more than it should. What did Chris know that made her so sure a villain to him? Was Vin in more danger than a romantic disappointment?
But it was Nathan, thoughtfully direct, who set aside the Monroes and the gold and brought all seven, present or not, back together.
"Monroes or not, Vin's one of us, n' we ought to be guardin' his back, not talkin' behind it like this." His dark eyes were sincerely gentle at Chris' immediate insult, but it had to be said. He spread his big hands and looked around at the other four men; "We know how he feels about this gold rush, and not telling him the Monroes are in on it makes him part of it. He ain't gonna thank us for it no matter how good our intentions are."
A troubled silence fell. At length, Josiah mused thoughtfully, "The road to hell is paved with such intentions." He looked at Chris. "Our intentions, and Vin's."
Chris clearly saw that the Preacher knew those causes were different, and he zeroed in on him, wanting a whole picture to make sense of, something to focus on so he could do something other than just get ... madder.
"Do you know what Vin's intentions are, Josiah?"
"I know he's an honorable man, so I assume his intentions are as well." Blunt as a punch, if matter-of-factly spoken, and the color climbed Chris' cheekbones with a swift anger he knew wasn't justified. Josiah regarded him calmly, his faith in Vin a condemnation of Chris' doubt that made Chris feel chilled and brittle inside.
For a moment or so nobody moved, and nobody had any idea what Chris would do. He didn't know himself, his fury gnashed and whirled inside him.
"Even honorable intentions can turn out wicked, Josiah. He's lyin' to us."
Josiah knew that, and it didn't change his mind. "Most likely he is, but he might need our help." He said, "He won't ask for it, nor will he welcome it, but he might need it."
"Dammit, Josiah, there ain't no way we can help him if we don't know what in hell he's into! We could all walk right into dying, and not just us! I'm gonna ask you again if you know what he's doing!" Chris was on his feet without knowing how he got there, seething in a frustration Buck knew was born of helplessness - his guns, his strength, his blood, even his life, all these things Chris Larabee could more easily give than patience, trust or faith. Especially when he'd already given them to Vin and still been betrayed in not having it wholly returned.
"He's never told me." Josiah said flatly, "And I won't speculate."
"And if he dies because you never said anything?" A question bleak as death, but Josiah only shrugged.
"I've got my eye to 'im, Chris. That's all any of us can do. We can keep Elizabeth Monroe alive, because that's what Vin wants. We can help the Judge keep the Lakota safe on their lands, because that's what Vin wants, and because it's the honorable thing to do."
"We have to trust him." Buck said, with such sober sympathy that Chris couldn't argue.
Vin was a man grown, with a depth of experience few old men possessed - experiences Josiah seemed to have a far better grasp on than he did. Trusting Vin was something Chris never had trouble with from the first time he'd laid eyes on him, but he realized that he couldn't tell them why it was so hard to trust the tracker now. That was personal, and even if he broke his word and told them about Duley Tanner, it was beyond Vin having had a wife to him. His eyebrows knotted, words started and stilled in his throat. Would those lies that were most fundamental to Chris even matter to the rest? Why should they? They all had their secrets, a man was entitled ... that betrayal was private. There was no way out. The Preacher was right.
If Vin was doing something in these mountains that he wasn't sharing with them, it could only be because it was either dangerous or illegal, neither of which he would want to expose them to. Josiah smiled very slightly to sense Chris had realized that, too.
The roiling furnace of rage in the gunman subsided into a nasty tangle of confusion. "Alright then. We trust him."
J.D. nearly sagged against Buck, and Buck laughed lightly with a relief they all felt in varying degrees. So they weren't all on the same road exactly, but they were still what they'd always been - seven men watching each other's backs in dangerous places.
Buck was sure Chris was holding onto a private grudge, but one thing about Chris that hadn't changed since the day he'd met him was his loyalty. Threaten one of his friends - even if he was being a fool - and find out what death looked like - it had Chris' eyes. It didn't much matter that Buck knew it was more complicated than Vin being sucked into the Monroe's plot or reeled in on Elizabeth's romantic hook; what was important was that Chris' keen attention to ferreting out Vin's secret inadvertently protected the tracker from anyone trying to slip up on him and do him harm. Suspicious or not, and whether he intended it or not, the tracker couldn't have a better guardian angel than Chris Larabee.
Vin walked a perimeter deep in the darkness where the camp was a distant glow, no rhythm to his steps that would alert a seasoned ear to his presence, holding moments of stillness and listening to the night beyond. He knew he was the subject of their grim conversation, and he was as miserable about that as he could ever remember being. It was a constant struggle against his own instincts to just tell them what he was doing and let them help him, but the risk he'd be exposing them to, imprisonment even more than death, was a cowardly thing to contemplate. He couldn't do it, even though he desperately needed the simplicity of being honest with them again, rare men who were worthy of it. He felt like something was dying in him by slow degrees in this rat's nest of politics and friendships and greedy schemes.
Several times he found himself starting out of a wide-eyed trance, breathing too high and fast, hands tight and the grief, old and new, so immediate and utter that he had to close his eyes despite being on watch. Had to refuse the lure of the cold silent night, breathe deeply and purposefully, slow the tide down that wanted to drown him. But still that tide of memory and apprehension lapped higher and higher, and he was too pragmatic and pessimistic a soul to deny that it would overtake him one day. He had no idea what would happen to him when it did, all he was certain of was that he wanted these people safe before then. Jules and Elizabeth, these six friends, Mary and the Judge - all of them he wanted safe, out of these mountains and safe from the righteous wrath of another people he loved just as much. He dreaded the thought of any of the Lakota falling to their guns, or they to the bows and guns of the Lakota. Friends slaying friends ... the idea made him shiver all the way to his bones.
He groaned out loud to keep himself from screaming with frustration and the terrible suspicion that it was all going to fall apart. That he was losing Chris and Four Corners and everyone, everything that he'd come to value, in a futile act that would save no one and nothing. That he might end up without them, without the Lakota because he was white and dangerous to them even in loving them. Even - God forbid, God kill me first - even without Duley if she was using this journey, this last service he must do for her spirit, to leave him behind at last. When his Mama died, he'd learned what it was to feel utterly and completely alone, bereft, defenseless. Lost. It'd taken so long to find a way out of that ... he couldn't do it again. If Duley left him now ... he'd be lost for good.
Elizabeth bent to one side and gently moved a branch knotted with buds from her path with the back of her gloved hand, setting it right behind her with a wholly unconscious grace. Vin felt a flow of warmth toward her to see that instinctive kindness, the trait ingrained in her just as it was in Duley.
For the last four days, they'd been traveling north toward, then over, the Twin Mountain pass down to Granite Canyon. From the spruce and aspens of the higher elevations they descended in a long slant across the steep eastern flank of the mountain, evergreens closing in on them as they went. But the forest was gapped and scattered with meadows, some broad and greening at their sunlit centers, some small and still slumbering under the dark wet cover of winter. The rain had mostly let off so their leathers and ground-cloths had a chance to dry, but it was drizzling today.
Vin was gone more often than he was with them, ranging far and wide with not much more than a word to someone of the direction he'd return from later in the day. He hunted with the bow for them all, and had made it clear the man who discharged his weapon without damn good cause was going to answer to him. They were far form any fort or settlement, he'd told them, someone answering the betrayal of a gunshot could leave them all to rot and no one would know of it for a very long time, if ever. They thought he meant Indians, and he let them think so. In fact, Vin was even more anxious about the open prairie coming ahead where it would be very difficult to hide a group of this size. If Gerald was looking for them, he'd find them there.
Chris, his chin tucked down and his eyes clear and hard on Vin from under his fair eyebrows, said not a word. Chris wasn't talking to him at all and Vin kept his distance, uneasy that the gunslinger's anger now seemed to bypass him and focus on Elizabeth Monroe. It worried him for her sake, and for Chris' if any harm came to her from his hand. Chris Larabee didn't make war on women, didn't kill them nor let harm come to them if he could help it, but he might think he couldn't help it if Vin was imperiled in some way. For the first time that depth of ferocious loyalty was not a comfort. Vin didn't want harm coming to any of them much less be the cause of it, so whenever he was among them, he kept Elizabeth away from Chris, too, despite Stephen's glaring disapproval. Big brother didn't like his sister being companioned by a mountain man, and Vin wasn't above pricking at that snooty displeasure for his own wicked amusement.
Spite, however, had turned into a two-edged sword in the reality of her company. He glanced at Elizabeth riding beside him now, easy in the saddle and a light touch on the reins even in rugged terrain such as this, seeming as natural in rough woolens and leather ahs she'd been in that find wine-colored dress she'd worn that evening in the dining room. He'd been glancing at her often in the last few days, studying her with faint wonder as it came to him in a slow certain tide. Duley's sister, and Duley in her. Muted, but still vibrant, no less a force than her bright bold sister had been. It made him ache with longing to recognize beloved blood in Elizabeth's smaller and more subtle ways. She was peaceful embers compared to Duley's fire, a calm steady breeze to the gale-force storm Duley could sometimes be, a different beauty informed by the same thoughts and instincts.
This morning he'd watched her emerge from the tent, head rising, eyes smiling even into this cold dawn around her, glad of the morning as Duley had always been. Glad. Maybe Duley was keeping her company in being held at a necessary distance from him, sharing with her sister the love of the wilderness she'd only shared by letters before.
Maybe that was why he rode near her now, needing even echoes of Duley with all that had followed him from his dreams of these places they were traveling right now. Seeing the lands they'd lived in together was too surreal, calling up a lonliness even her memory couldn't wholly dispel. He'd grown so used to having all this be only memory, hurtful edges blunted on time and distance and acceptance so it had become a comfort and now ... now it was coming alive in all her colors and sounds and dreams, what had been small turning into an avalanche he was struggling mightily to stay on top of when everywhere he turned he could picture her, their life alive around him.
Not far away, higher on the flank of this very mountain, there was a high thin waterfall and a grove of quaking aspens where they'd lain on warm summer afternoons, entranced by the flickering dance of the leaves as the wind tossed their pale undersides into view and out again, flashing like the belly of a trout in the water. Entwined in the pale scatters of golden light, in the eyes and the oneness of slow satiated caresses. The thought he recalled most clearly, with her warm in the curve of his arm and her bright head a welcome silken weight on his chest, was that he could either stay that way forever or die in that very moment, either fate accepted with utter contentment. She was all of contentment he'd ever known, the only one who could take the years and the scars and the terrible memories from him, as if stripping away his clothes for her loving took all of that away, too. Naked and only hers, all of him, inside and out, only hers.
They'd trapped up here in winter, too, and built a little cabin into the face of a cave not a mile away; he was taking them around it purposefully, certain he would crack and bleed himself dry to see it. But he couldn't avoid the mountains nor the wind nor the smells and sounds and sights that could do nothing else but remind him of her more and more insistently.
'I will be the one for you with whom fear, and nothing else, is a stranger.' Duley had married him with those words and he'd heard his own sigh run through the people to hear them. Felt the warmth of their smiles at the clarity and depth of her vow, their approval that she knew him so well, understood him so completely. They'd been first with each other, virgins together, everything of soul and heart and body new and uninhibited by expectations or experience. Free in a way he'd never known and never expected to understand. So it had always been, never a lick of fear or shyness of any sort, nothing withheld, they didn't even know how with each other.
From childhood, Vin had sheltered deep inside himself, watchful and wary, everything trusting or innocent or ignorant of the wicked harm folks would do each other had been stripped off long ago. Feelings hoarded, thoughts held private, everything at arm's length and always, every moment, on his guard. No one touched him, inside or out, it was safest that way and had long been pure instinct by the time he'd met her.
But Duley could touch him anywhere, any time or way, and he was always glad for it, her touch was like the whole world opening to him. His masks were invisible to her, the aloof wall of latent threat meaningless to her, she'd walked right through every defense he had from the first like they didn't even exist. And when words weren't there, as they so seldom were for him, she read him to his very soul and loved every scar and sin and foolishness. For the first time in his life he was part of the world, not a distant moon at its edges, and he wanted that back so badly the longing was nearly a physical pain. He wanted his friends back, wanted to sit at Nettie's table again and admire her humbling strength, to trace words on a page in Mary's fragrant kitchen, wanted to settle back after a long day for a drink and a game at that back table that was theirs. Four Corners, the other six regulators, the folks of that town - it never would've happened before Duley, he hadn't been able to recognize folks who would befriend him, had he even known what that was. Had he ever been able to let down that much. Duley had opened places and lit needs he never knew he had.
Though wickedness could not fool the soul that had suffered it in every guise and deceit, what was noble and good he'd seldom been able to see before Duley had cracked him open. It was a wondrous thing she'd done for him, it made his life in Four Corners possible, but she'd rendered him vulnerable ever after. She could not have known it would destroy him so many years later. Not perfect, his Duley, not so perfect as he'd always held her to be. She'd made terrible mistakes in her exuberant faith, mistakes he never would have made, closed up and secretive as he was, more inclined to hoard than share. He was learning that, and it hurt to know how truly fallible she'd been. But if he got called home because of righting things for her, he wouldn't hold that any fault of hers. Indeed - maybe all things would be made right and he'd be in her arms when this was done.
Usually he would've wanted solitude with such feelings moving in him, but today he didn't. Today, Elizabeth Monroe's calm sweetness was balm enough, her face and form and voice offering enough hints and flickers of Duley living to make him want to stay.
From a distance Stephen Monroe watched the tracker riding beside his sister, wishing he could show the man just how much he hated him. Everything about the him infuriated Stephen, the length of his hair, the primitive, undisciplined manner, the fey and feckless confidence in the wild life he led, buckskins and quill-work and a by-God bow and arrow at his back like a barbaric defiance of his own race. Elizabeth accepting his company, even welcoming it, was an indecency that had Stephen seething.
She'd be reminded of her place soon enough, and that wild-cat of a niece would also be brought to obedience, both would yield, as women must! Strip them of any means but what came to them from a man's hands - women must not be allowed independent wealth, his sister proof of that! She'd caused nothing but trouble for them with hers, but that was all coming to an end! She would sign over the land grants, the farm, everything before this was done, or she would die out here and trouble them no more! Gerald would not be thwarted, and out here she was be a continent away from home and help. Not even these seven men could defend her from an army his brother led.
He heard Julianna laugh, raucous as a crow, and ground his teeth. He would personally see to her future; there was that senator he needed an alliance with, a nasty old fox who'd already buried two wives and had too large an appetite for nubile young brides to demand a significant dowry. She was within a few years of that usefulness right now and he had no doubt she could be broken and tamed before then. She, too, had taken to following the tracker around, grinning at him, sitting by his side when he was in the camp at night, bringing him coffee on his watch, touching him with clear affection - Gerald's own daughter!
It worried Stephen mightily that they hadn't met Gerald by now, he was chaffed raw with the need to set these females right, to take command and put that damned tracker and every one of these arrogant outlaws in their places. They hadn't seen even a sign of him and he'd said he'd find them by their third day out. Stephen's eyes narrowed on Vin's back with renewed suspicion that the tracker was taking them a different route than originally planned. If Gerald was out there searching for them, Stephen well knew who would take the blame for it because he hadn't studied the maps their brother had sent, but why should he be expected to know their course when they'd hired experienced guides to do it for them?
Gerald's temper frightened him, and for a man with a temper as vicious as Stephen's, that was saying something. And James wasn't helping matters, James was being more of an obstacle than usual in hovering around Elizabeth so Stephen hadn't had a single opportunity to take care of that part of Gerald's plan for him. If he could've accomplished that, at least, maybe Gerald wouldn't mind not finding them sooner ...
His baleful eye fell on his little brother, looking like a sack of potatos jouncing around in his saddle, as always. James was a cunning and cagey attorney with an instinct for investment that enriched them all, but he didn't have the stomach for the hard choices required to gain true power. It didn't sit well that Gerald had set James over some of his own businesses, nor that his younger brother routinely reported his activities to Gerald like he was a child. James was weak, falling time and again under his sister's influence so that Gerald and he had been forced to clandestine manipulations in their own affairs. But though he'd been agitating against him for years, Gerald insisted they needed him until this deal was done and that gold started pouring in. Stephen's eyes crinkled and got small - what if Gerald thought James was planning some sort of double-cross? Thinking to thwart even the smallest part of this plan would be his ruin. James didn't understand that, and it could be his downfall - it was vengeance as much as conquest for Gerald, a rich and long-sought condemnation of their father.
That he'd borne the deprivations of life in the wilderness these last few years made it clear how far he'd go, and Stephen was impressed anew after experiencing it for himself. It was a terrible place, awful, without a single redeeming quality, cold and wet and miserable in every aspect, not even the barest scrap of comfort to be found. Yet Gerald had suffered it all, had built the reputation needed to ensure high office when the time came. Gerald had laid the design, held to it, nurtured it, lived it. And now the Monroes were all coming together in this very wilderness a bare heartbeat away from the culmination of so much effort and sacrifice.
He stared at Tanner's back, despising the rhythm of fringe and the seat on horseback comfortable as a satyr. Huddled in a coat that had cost more than most men made in a year, he hated that mountain man for looking like not even a deluge would bother him. For being capable here where Stephen was helpless and stoic where Stephen suffered beyond what could be expected of a civilized man. There was nothing Stephen Monroe hated more than being humbled, and this ancient endless sweep of timeless frontier, these seven hard men, made him feel smaller than he'd ever tolerated before in his life. He'd killed men for making him feel that way, ruined companies, destroyed generational empires, yet he could do nothing here but follow in sheepish obedience. Gerald would have no such trouble. Gerald saw kingdoms as things to conquer, and this savage wilderness was only another.
Sullenly, he comforted himself with thoughts of being home when this was done, imagining the glittering rounds of honorific events and the envy of such wealth as would make him impervious and supreme. A sudden wicked thought actually made him smile - if Gerald believed these men knew his design, perhaps from some indiscretion of Elizabeth's, of Jame's. None of them would ever make it back to that filthy little town. Now that was a comfort ...
At the end of the day they came around a steep bend in a shallow tree-choked valley and the plains were suddenly there, spread wide and far before them in a glimmering slant of late sunlight. Pale and veined with thick copses of trees along the many creeks and rivers emerging from the mountains, it undulated in rugged tufts and gorges before smoothing out into endless ripples like a sea suspended. Jules fell silent to see it, struck dumb.
Vin did, too, a dark thread in his soul widening.
He'd seen it earlier in the day when he'd scouted ahead and it had taken his breath away, swept him into it like a hard wind at his back without a moments grace to fight. Once it had flowed with buffalo, the people had swooped down out of these very hills on bright autumn days to harvest the noble lives given for their winter's stores. What they took was the balance, thinning the great herd so the winter forage would be enough for what was left, and it was done with that sort of love all mixed into the ferocity of the hunt. Thunder and the sharp piercing war-cries of hunters testing death in the chopping sea of horns and might, the distant music of the ululating women in thanks and admiration. They died and it was the people's victory over death, they died, and life was assured for from season to season in the sacrifice of the sacred buffalo, comfort and life from the first breath to the last.
He'd had to close his eyes against it, but the memory wouldn't stop, it vibrated in him, it entered him in the dust he breathed in and the birdsong and the lay of the sun-warmth on his face after the cold shade of the forest. Here the place the drying racks had risen beside the broad tall cones of painted teepees, there the boys had chivvied the horses down to water. The camp had been a laughing place, full of heart and belly in Spirit's generosity.
The light from their fires had laid in broad alleys between the teepees at night, he'd first seen her in that light, gold and red and so alive he could look nowhere else. Drums in his soul, hammering his own heartbeat when those eyes had met his and knew him and wanted him and Lord God in His Beautiful Heaven but he'd wanted her right back.
A rough sound from his own throat, defiant and defeated, had waked him from that reverie, sure his heart would burst if he remembered it even an instant longer. A coldness on his face when the wind struck him was how he knew he'd had tears running down his face, and he turned back to the mule-train numb and throbbing inside.
"Wow ..." Jules breathed, feeling like there was more coming into her in that breath than only air, and when she looked up at Uncle Vin she knew it was so. It was something that had lived in him a very long time, though, an old dear friend he'd missed more than he'd ever known until he saw it again. She wondered, following the far look in his eyes, if it would ever feel like that to her. And she wondered, too, that such grief as darkened his face could go unvoiced.
She sat at the edge of the forest while they set up camp behind her and watched the shadows at her back lean out over that expanse, creep in dark tendrils across the graying land. It was so beautiful, beyond beautiful. Alive, waiting for her, whispering where only she could hear.
It seemed like everyone was glad to be out of the confines of the forest, there was a collective sigh of relief to be done for awhile with steep rocky terrain and cold shadows. Vin didn't blame them, though he was fondest of the forests himself, the safety of the shadows where he could disappear.
After dinner and into the hours where he should be sleeping, he stood at the farthest distance of the firelight keeping an eye on Jules where she'd crept back out as the darkness fell deeper. She'd come to him after supper as he'd oiled the arch of the bow across his lap, wandered to him, really, her eyes dreamy and inattentive, and sat down at his side without the usual babble of words. Girl seemed to think every thought that crossed her mind was something somebody ought to hear, he didn't know if could've stood it if she'd done that tonight. But she hadn't, just settled down by him.
Over the course of a quiet hour she'd absently woven one of the turkey feathers into the loose ends of the sinew at the bottom of the bow, he'd felt the tug at his hip now and then as she worked, recognizing the weave with an indefinable pang as his own, perfectly copied. Properly it was her coup-feather, but he couldn't disallow her giving it to him, sensing she wasn't thinking of him in particular, or the feather or the bow, they were just occupying her hands. She'd gone on to bed with a glancing smile, as if she'd just noticed he was there, but within an hour had returned to the forest's edge where she sat now, her feet tucked up under her coat staring at the mists forming in the hollows.
"Julianna?" A soft call brought his attention around to the camp, Elizabeth looking for her niece, and he might've answered if he'd had a breath in his body.
That flash of gleaming scarlet, her hair loose and he couldn't move. Duley ... her name a song quiet and low, as she was in his soul, ever clear, always there. A better heart than his, the one Duley'd given him, and the only treasure he would ever care about.
"Vin, she ain't Duley." Chris' voice came unexpectedly over his shoulder and it was hard to tell which of them was more surprised that he'd come that close without Vin hearing. The tracker didn't turn around, though, and Chris didn't take that privacy from him, having seen the naked misery of his face. This was hard on Vin, seeing that woman, being in her company, as much as it was a comfort, Chris knew that strange torn torment himself. Something about this place, too, was hard for Vin to take, and Chris understood that as well. It was why Buck sometimes drove him crazy, having loved Sarah like a sister, bringing memories of her with him sometimes when Chris was too raw to stand it. He'd come close to killing Buck once in a drunken rage, just seeing his face struck up a dream of the supper-table, laughter and Sarah moving around the kitchen, touching them, each of the men, her son. God, that picture about broke him. Buck never held it against him, he didn't know how, but he knew it was so; next day he'd looked at him from swollen eyes and grinned like nothing had happened. Chris wasn't that understanding, not just now.
Vin's hands rested loosely on his gunbelts, shoulder tilted over his cocked hip and his head low. Chris had to strain to hear him.
"I know she ain't, Chris, I know it ..." But his hat brim rocked helplessly all the same, knowing it and doing anything about it being far poles apart.
"It ain't you she's after, cowboy." He saw the bones rise across Vin's shoulders, even regretted it, but Vin just walked away from him back toward the camp and his bedroll and as much of Ezra's fine brandy as it took to put him to sleep. He just couldn't think anymore, didn't even want to, his brain felt like pudding and tonight he didn't know his own heart well enough to defend it against eyes sharp as Chris Larabee.
Chris watched him go, hackles high.
It was Buck who eased his long bones down beside him, pouring himself a cup of coffee and refreshing Vin's without asking if he should. Refreshing, too, the burning concentration of brandy he could smell from three feet away. He'd never known Vin to do something so wrong-headed, wrong-hearted, as this, leastways that he didn't think his way clear of eventually. It'd never taken this long, though.
Offering Vin advice wasn't something any of them did, he always knew what he was doing whether they did or not, sometimes his logic took a long time to become apparent, but he never explained himself. It was different this time, he was ... Buck still couldn't pin it down besides seeming to be torn in about ten directions at once. Elizabeth Monroe drew Vin's eye, she drew him, he'd circle her like a wolf pretending not to notice her but Buck knew she was all he saw, more skittish than he'd ever seen him around a woman - and Vin was always skittish around women but for Nettie.
"Vin ..." He dared.
"Buck, let it lay."
The gunslinger took no offense at the bite in the sharp words, he pressed his lips together so his mustache bristled and raised his dark eyebrows like a man bound to do something unwise.
"You gonna marry her, Vin? Settle down in some farmhouse? Put up barb-wire n' run some cows?" Mild but pointed skepticism that zinged right to the heart of the matter; Buck liked to be gracious, but Vin hadn't the patience for it and didn't trust it. Vin had to be struck straight and blunt with the truth because he was an honest man in the heart of him and would have to listen.
"Do y'think she can roam the wilds with you, Vin? Does she look like that sort of woman?"
All he could see of Vin's face was the high crested angle of his cheekbone, the line of his jaw, and he didn't try to stop him as he drained his cup with a grimace and got abruptly to his feet. Buck watched as the tracker disappeared into the dark woods, glanced over at Chris approaching, also following Vin's going. Buck shook his head grimly.
"Ain't nothin' sadder 'n a woman lovin' a man with all her heart, tryin' all her life t'be what he wants and never ... quite ... makin' it. To be a disappointment t'the man she loves when all along there's another man out there'd who'd treasure every breath she took. Nothin' but unhappiness there, Chris, n' that's a lovely n' spirited woman. Right shame."
Chris' eyes were chilly and he looked down at Buck and said just what he'd said to Vin. "She isn't going after him, Buck, she ain't in love with anything but gold, just like her brothers."
Buck only smiled a little and looked down, trusting his own expertise when it came to women and knowing Chris was as far wrong as a man could be.
"It looks like a whole entire world all of its own up there, doesn't it? Mountains and valleys and plains ..." Jules rode tipped far back in her saddle to observe the stately clouds moving like enormous flat-bottomed riverboats across the late afternoon sky. The steep valley snaked before them, twisting back and forth on itself and revealing bits in the fall-away turns.
Vin glanced up himself, noting that the thunderheads were growing more substantial, but willing to be distracted by the beauty of late afternoon painting their forward curves gold and the deep folds in shades of blue-gray. Might rain, might not; they had a pretty good wind in their faces that might carry these clouds on away by the time night fell, and he decided to hope for that.
Jules didn't expect him to answer, he seldom did unless the question was less rhetorical and more specific, but that was alright with her. Just being with him was alright with her, warm inside to know, without knowing how, that she was the only one he was easy with right now. Made her proud, that did, to stand beside him like he was a wild thing with sharp claws and teeth and she was the only one he sheathed them for.
Vin had been standing watches on whatever heights he could gain above their camps at night, and even after he was relieved he'd remained on the prowl, staying away from the fire even cold as it got, keeping his eyes in darkness to see into it. After a few nights, they'd gotten used to him being out there, and in that security felt free to be fireside themselves. He was glad for that. For their sake he watched the night, the only one with ears able to hear and the experience to know what he heard. A warrior would walk in no regular cadence, would break his motion to blend into the constant uneven chorus of trees and wind. In daylight, such motions would most likely be wind or deer, but when the breezes were up, as they were in this cold tail of winter, and the forest and plains were in constant restless motion from treetops to undergrowth, the Lakota could move swiftly as wolves hunting. He'd had feelings last night, a sense of eyes on his back, of ill-fortune coming up on them, but he couldn't be sure it wasn't just memory and tiredness.
In the last week, Vin had managed to keep them in the ravines and off the ridges as they struck out north/northeast across the rough-cut plain, fording first Lodgepole Creek and then Horse Creek. Both were far too broad and swift to be called creeks, and Buck had wondered out loud at Horse Creek how they'd get across them on the way back once the snowmelt from the mountains swelled them into true rivers. Vin knew everybody'd been waiting for an answer, but he hadn't had one then and he didn't have one now.
A few miles back with the rest of the train, J.D. was remembering that very thing. He had the ominous feeling that the tracker hadn't thought that far and wasn't going to. The further they went, the quieter Vin got, J.D. noticed. Well, maybe not quiet, he was always quiet, had cat feet, Buck said, was half shadow already. He'd noted that before, that Vin never made a noise he didn't have to, even set a whiskey glass down in a crowded bar without a sound, like he'd lived his entire life in hiding. Watched with those quiet intense eyes. A hunted man, J.D. knew that, he'd found the poster and burned it without a word to anyone. Not just that, though. Vin was getting ... further away, his eyes full of the wilderness and dark with things J.D. realized not even Chris was privy to.
Vin was always separate even right with them, like a cat accepting company for its own mysterious reasons but aloof even on your lap, disappearing when it wished without a clue why or where. So many times he'd wondered what Vin thought about in those moments when he drew into himself, all of them had times when their eyes got so old and sad and made him feel too young and too inexperienced. That was happening all the time now, to each of them, and J.D. didn't want to think why, or what might come as a result. All he could do was his job, take care of those mules and look after their horses and try to be more help than hindrance. It was hard work, which was something J.D. never minded, especially when his heart was so troubled. He didn't know what he'd do if everybody broke apart, he wasn't ready yet, he had too much to learn still and the Rangers wouldn't take him as he was. He'd be an orphan again. J.D. sighed heavily and gave a tug on the lead-line to hasten the mules so he could ride at Buck's shoulder, needing to be near someone.
Vin pressed on, Jules close on his heels. The Laramie range rose on the east, and they'd ascended again up the long slope of Iron Mountain and down again into the Chugwater Valley. Vin could've kept them to the plains where the travel was easier, but he was so tired he could hardly think, and like an animal pushed too far beyond its limits, just wanted to go to ground out of the open so he could let down awhile before he was no good to anyone. He kept to himself and away from camp all he could, senses on too keen an edge, rubbed raw and aggravated and more than a little confused about now by his own inner conflicts, which was not something he knew how to handle very well. Josiah hadn't asked him why they were going this rough way, only looked at him with those wise considering eyes, and J.D. was about near bursting with questions he hadn't yet screwed up the nerve to voice. Vin knew the kid thought it would be bad news in answer, and he wished he didn't feel so much like that was so himself. Chris ... well, he'd rather not think about Chris looking at him like he was a total stranger, and not even one he liked much.
Mostly everyone respected his need to be left alone, knowing that prickly mood and how likely he was to disappear if it wasn't taken into account. His own conflicts, however, became clearer still when Jules had taken to following him out on his afternoon scoutings - and he found himself allowing it. Elizabeth didn't seem to mind so long as she knew where the girl was, but while he was gratified by that trust, he was astonished to welcome Jules' usually intrusive company. Maybe because it was easier to hold his own feelings at bay when he had someone with him; when he was alone, they came swamping in too hard and fast. And he had to admit to himself, as he couldn't to another living soul, that he was lonesome without the company of the other six, isolated from them and eaten up with guilt to be deceiving them. Even Elizabeth, though always welcoming and concerned that he ate and rested, was making him increasingly uneasy through no fault of her own ... his reactions to her were starting to confuse him. They got all smudged up with Duley and how it felt to be here without her, finding her irresistible echoes in Elizabeth's company and wanting that when he shouldn't want that - it'd been so long since he had a clear straight thought. Indeed, since he'd really dared any thinking of consequence. He'd set out with one goal in mind, fixed on it in narrow focus and fighting so hard to keep it that way, but now it was so many other things, too, feelings he didn't trust and didn't know how to handle.
Jules was the only one who came without complications, and he was nearly dizzy from far too many of those. Jules painted a streak of brightness in the grim days he was living now, warmed the cold in his soul that arose in doubt of his own actions, and fear of Duley's reasons. His niece - and he'd accepted that familial bond with unprecedented willingness - made him feel better in her forthright affection, which was something he yearned after with shameful need. After a few nervous days he'd understood that she could, indeed, keep a secret, she wasn't going to call him 'Uncle' where anyone could hear, nor give away the true depth of their friendship. But when they were alone, they were family, and she looked at him and touched him that way, like it was her right and a natural thing to do. He both wanted it and was wary of it.
So he let her come with him even though it mystified everyone who knew him, because, above all else, it was a relief to have one pair of smiling eyes without purpose other than that, one soul clear and clean and all out in the open, happy to see him just because he was him whether he was smiling or scowling or what. She was a comfort, and by now he hadn't enough will to deny it to himself no matter how delicate the balance was between needing it and being annoyed beyond endurance. Jules gave him distraction from himself, and he was plain sick to death of himself just now, inside and out.
Two more days, three at the outside, and they'd reach Fort Laramie, and he still didn't know how he was going to slip away to find the Lakota and pass on the weapons burdening that mule and his own heart so heavily. He had a sense of his own fate on him that he couldn't see into, thus he couldn't plan a path to it much less away from it afterward. Vin wasn't a man easy with not knowing what was happening or would happen, didn't go into things without an idea how to get out again, but ...
"What's that?" Jules' voice, quiet as she'd learned to be with him, took him out of that dark reverie, and he was grateful to be distracted from it.
He leaned down out of his saddle to see what she was pointing at, a narrow, five-toed hindprint and smaller, round, front-print with a dragged line centering them. She had a keen eye to have spotted them in the moist soil and his eyes were approving; "Muskrat." He said, "Probably denned at Bear Creek - let's go check, eh?"
She grimaced doubtfully, "That doesn't sound like something I want to eat ... musk-rat ... no, neither sounds good."
He smiled, astounded to be able to do so, and took them over a hillock and down to that very creek, the sounds of their horse's hooves on the water-rounded stones a hollow sliding clatter. The current was slow, yet the creek was deeper than it looked, lined with trees along its banks, which were high enough to show where the winter floods would reach, and quiet pools carved out at the edges out of the current where water-greens were beginning to flourish. Sure enough, just above the flood-line Vin could make out several burrows, and he pointed them out to her with an anticipatory grin.
"Muskrats are hoarders, Jules - you bust into their burrows and who knows what you might find? Pond lily bulbs, now that's a right tasty root, nuts and prairie potatoes, all sorts of possibilities, y'know?"
Jules was fairly well bored with eating meat and beans and bread every meal, and Vin craved vegetables and greens as much as any Indian, who knew how healthful and necessary they were to a man's diet. But when he got down and dragged his little spade out and a handful of parched corn, she tilted her head at the hole and said,
"Why do you have to ruin his house like that? I mean, what's he going to do tonight when it's so cold and he's got nowhere to sleep?"
A soft chuff of surprised laughter escaped him until he realized she was serious, and then he looked at her quizzically. He'd intended to leave the corn in payment, uneven a trade as it was likely to be. He'd intended to thank the little creature and apologize for his need, but it was a need nonetheless. Her question, however, was one Duley would have asked, too. Hell, half the time he'd sworn they would've had to survive on dirt if he hadn't ignored that tender inclination, his own pragmatism was all that kept them from starving sometimes! Yet it was a thing he'd loved about her, impractical as it was. Why hadn't he remembered that blindness of hers, loving though it was? How hadn't he known at the time what else such a misguided heart might cause to come to unexpected ruin? What mistakes it led her to that he was having to fix now? It was a hard thing to love her and be shown in the bits and pieces coming at him lately that she could make such terrible mistakes, smart as she was - maybe about him, too?
To Jules' surprise he snorted scornfully, angry for no reason she could see. She watched him climb the embankment to the largest of the burrow entrances, snapping a limb off a nearby tree and trimming it as he went with quick hard strokes of his knife. He got down on one knee, not without some trouble from the cat-clawed hip, which had been hurting in a deep hot way for a few days, said a few words he tried very hard not to let sound grudging, and thrust the branch into the hole to make sure its occupant was not at home. No hissing answered, and he was just about to widen the entrance with his shovel when Jules said in a mild but carrying tone,
"Unless, of course, you just like to dig and all. If that's how you have fun or something. Hmph ..." A shrug he heard in her voice, also Duley's, sarcastically unconcerned; "Each to their own, I suppose." When he straightened up impatiently, certain this idea of letting her come along was as foolish a notion as he'd ever had, she was looking at him with her wrists crossed casually over the horn of her saddle, her expression curious, but doubtful. His anger faded, as it always had with Duley, curious himself, now, to see what clever thing she'd come up with to prove him wrong in his mortal ways.
"Alright." He challenged, "You got a better way?"
"Sure." She shrugged, like he was dumb as a rock not to know it himself, "I can get in there easy."
Indeed she could, but he'd never even thought to ask it of her, muddy and dark and fusty as it would be, and who knew how deep. He shook his head, ready to deny that brave impulse, and her chin cocked hard.
"I don't think we have to ruin the poor thing's house, and I don't care if I get a little dirty at it, so why should you?"
"You don't think yer Aunt will have something to say if I bring you back covered in mud and what-all?" He thought that was a point good enough to forestall her and almost congratulated himself for unraveling her logic, but she only shrugged again - a careless gesture far too much like Duley.
"Well sure she will, but it won't be anything I haven't handled a thousand times since I was old enough to walk. It isn't like it's my house getting knocked in or anything." Her head tipped toward him meaningfully, challenge bright in her eyes: "You that scared of my Aunt?"
One of his eyebrows arched at her, then he stepped aside with a little bow and a sweep of his hand toward the hole inviting her to have at it. He couldn't be sure she'd be successful if it narrowed much past the entrance, which such burrows usually did, but he was willing to let her learn that for herself. And he guessed he didn't need the musk-rat mad at him with everything else going on right now, it wouldn't hurt to placate a spirit or two. Sometimes that's what led Duley, the sense she had of things needing balancing that he didn't even know were out of balance. No, it couldn't hurt.
She was backing out of the hole a half-hour later dragging a bag filled with half of whatever stores the muskrat had put aside, not wanting to take all and leave it hungry, when the sound of distant gunfire snapped Vin's head around and sent his heart plummeting into his boots.
"Get out of there, come on!" He snapped, and she said something impatient from inside, her indignant voice muffled by the earth as she scooted herself backwards out of the dank den, dragging the bag and whatever it was in there, since she couldn't see what she was picking up anyway. Suddenly his fingers closed hard on the ankles of her boots and he hauled her out with a yank, knocking her off her hands and knees and onto her belly, which infuriated her no end, since she'd been careful not to lay on the muddy bottom of the burrow and now was going to be smeared from head to toe. Say what she would, she wanted to minimize her Aunt's displeasure as much as possible, but when her head cleared the hole and she twisted over, kicking out of his grasp and ready to let him have the sharpest side of her tongue, he simply grabbed her coat front and snatched her bodily off the ground, the bag still in her grubby hands.
"Wait! Let me ... wash up at least!" Protesting breathlessly and uselessly as he dragged her after him at a dead run, her feet barely skimming the ground, and all but threw her into her saddle. Even in her fury she gathered the reins and herself to ride hard, because he was in a fired-up hurry and he wouldn't be without a darned good reason. Then she heard something ... a crackle from the deep-cut range behind them that made no sense at first, but had to be guns by the way Vin was acting. He vaulted onto that big black horse like he had springs in his boots, leaning hard over its withers so it bolted into motion even as he glanced back at her to be sure she was with him. She was, the bag of roots and nuts secured to her saddle-horn by the expedient grip of one hand, and they exploded up out of the river-bed through the brush racing back toward the pack-train.
She held on hard, trusting the pony to keep its feet in the cuts and drops of the terrain, gorges opening up, ravines choked with trees, little rises where there didn't appear to be any and feeling his hocks and elbows giving under her to absorb without stumbling. Just ahead of her the churning black haunches kept up the breakneck pace, Vin laid low in the saddle, in perfect tandem with the black's quick cutting moves around and over obstacles. The pony followed gamely, and she knew Vin had an ear to her, following her progress as closely as she followed him. The big black broke a trail through a thin screen of shrubbery down a steep embankment, dust rising into a thick choking cloud, and only then did he slow down. His hand reached back for her and she moved forward until the horses, now at a quick trot, were abreast. His face was all business, his eyes capturing and determined as he drew his rifle from its scabbard on the right side of his horse and leaned to grip her leg with his left hand.
"Jules, stay tucked up tight, and drop back n' hide if you see this ..." a quick little chop of fingers in sign; "Do what I tell you as soon as I tell you, don't argue, don't say nothin', and stay out of the way. You hear gunfire, you get down and under cover, send the pony on for decoy."
Usually she would argue, not being the sort to whom blind obedience came easily or at all, but he was worried, and she didn't want to be another worry to him now. Her nod was all the answer he needed, his fingers tightening and his eyes sparking appreciatively at her, reassuringly.
As it turned out, he put her to ground and got down himself several hundred yards away from the continuing roar of gunfire, gray smoke rising from a series of switchback ravines ahead telling him where they were, the dun dust churned up by the mules saying where his side was. It didn't feel like Lakota, this wasn't the way they operated, pinning people down and firing from a distance, they'd be right in there, singly or in small groups, trying to pry their prey out of the crevice they'd gone to ground in. Which meant outlaws, it had to be.
"Please stay put, Jules, I'll be back for you, but right now you be part of this bush, alright? Invisible ..."
She knew what he meant, and by now she was frightened of how sincerely he meant it. Vin ran his gloved fingers down the side of her cheek, not knowing where the urge came from but not wanting her as scared as she seemed to be. Then he left her and ran, on foot, through a twisting maze of creek and riverbeds toward the battle.
To be continued...
Feedback to Author