thirty-three

That kiss was the sweetest that Dirk Skye had ever known. But he rejected it. He had no intention of reviving a liaison with a woman who had abandoned him. That was cold hard reality. She was fickle. But that brief hug, and the touch of her lips, lingered through all of him.

“You heading for your place? Want company?” Dirk asked Reilly.

“I’m sure not going back there where a man can’t hear himself think,” Reilly said. “Damned Métis.”

“I’ll catch up with you. I’ll escort Miss Trouville home first.”

Reilly laughed, and Dirk couldn’t fathom why. But the man whipped the ox into action and the farm wagon creaked away. Dirk led his horse and walked beside Therese, through the thickening cold.

“Are you leaving now?” she asked.

“Bain told me I must. But no, I’m not. There’s work to do.”

“Work? Translate?”

He wondered if he should tell her what he had in mind, and then decided to go ahead. “There may be more of your people burned out, abandoned, dying of cold, by Bain’s night riders. I’m going to go look for them.”

“Why?”

That response surprised him.

“I don’t like people suffering, starving, dying from the cold.”

“Even if they are Métis?”

“What has that got to do with anything?”

“You were with the army.”

“I was discharged in the field by a captain.”

“For what?”

“For interfering with command. My office was to translate.”

“And?”

“I got riled up, I guess.”

She pondered that and reached over to him and took his hand. “Merci,” she said.

Her hand felt good, but he was damned if he’d let some small affection trump what had happened at their wedding.

She sensed it and withdrew her hand. They walked quietly through the saloon area of central Lewistown, and he was glad he was there to offer some safety for her. And then he escorted her into the Trouffants’ wood yard. The place had turned quiet. It wasn’t that people were sleeping, but that they sat about, mostly inside, lost in their own reveries.

“Thank you for taking me home,” she said.

“Yes, this is your home,” he replied. “Your people.”

She smiled softly, caught in lamplight from the window. “Oui,” she said.

She stepped in, and he could see the crowded mass of humanity there, quiet and sad, but somehow content with the evening.

He closed the door behind her, collected his buckskin, and headed into the bleak night. He’d catch up with Reilly and his lumbering ox soon enough. The air eddying out of the north whispered of snow, and even as Dirk rode through the night, the air turned bitter. The stars vanished and he let the buckskin pick the trail because he couldn’t see it. He pulled his coat tight and endured.

The sound of the wagon’s wheels groaning on their axles greeted him out of the blackness.

“That you, Reilly?”

“Froze to death and it’s all your doing. I should be tight in my cabin, storm coming, but you put all the Frenchies on me, and now I’m cold and stuck and needful.”

“What do you need, Reilly?”

“I haven’t any idea where I’m steering this ox, and I need a bottle to warm me.”

“Well, we’re both stuck.”

“It’s all your fault, Skye.”

“Yes. Out in the night, burying people, and you don’t have a drop with you.”

“You’re making fun of me, Skye, and I won’t forgive it.”

“This horse seems to know where he’s going, because I sure don’t. So we’ll let him take us to your place.”

“Or drop us in some ditch.”

They proceeded through the blackness awhile, and then the overcast vanished and there was starlight again. They were close to Reilly’s place, with the black bulk of the Judith Mountains off to the right.

“There, luck of the Irish,” Skye said.

“There’s no such thing, Skye. We were born to misery and doomed to sadness.”

“A bottle would fix you up fine.”

“You’re persecuting me, Skye. You haven’t a Christian bone in you.”

“I guess I don’t, and neither do you.”

“You go to hell, Skye.”

The ox lumbered into Reilly’s ranch yard.

“Go build a fire, Reilly. I’ll put the ox out to pasture.”

Reilly didn’t argue. He had wrapped his scarf tight around his neck but still looked drawn with cold. Dirk unsaddled his buckskin, found some oats for it, and turned it loose in the pen. Then he parked the wagon, freed the ox, and hung up the harness.

Reilly had a fire going in the stove and hovered over it, his bony hands absorbing what small heat the infant fire threw up.

“You should have brought a bottle. That was the least you could do, after all I did for them Frenchies.”

“I guess I should have, Reilly.”

“Them people, there’s more of them coming down from Canada, getting caught in the storms. They’ll all croak. The ones around here, they’re getting froze to death on purpose, Bain’s night riders.”

“Tomorrow, you and I are going to go save any we can, Reilly. Your horse’ll be rested. We hitch up the wagon and go looking. We can bring some food and matches and whatever we can find. Flour sacks, gunny sacks. Anything.”

“I knew you were going to say that, Skye. You just want to kill me off.”

“I’ll go alone, then.”

“The devil you will!”

Dirk joined him at the stove, blotting up the heat, which finally was beginning to take the ice out of the cabin.

“Was that a wake at Trouffant’s wood yard?” he asked.

“The Frenchies wouldn’t know how to have a wake no matter how hard they tried. There’s no such animal as a Frenchie wake.”

“What did they have then?”

“Fiddle music and whiskey.”

“Well, that’s a wake.”

“You get more and more insulting, Skye.”

They hunted up stuff for the cold journey in the morning. There wasn’t much. Reilly didn’t live in luxury. But they managed a tin of hardtack, or ship’s biscuit, Reilly kept for emergencies, and a bunch of burlap bags and a few flour sacks. Reilly added a couple of ancient shirts, but that was it. This wouldn’t be much of a rescue. Still, Dirk had a feeling that some of the refugees were holed up and desperate for any kind of help.

“You got any riding animals? Mules, jackasses?”

“They can ride my hogs,” Reilly replied.

Dirk napped restlessly, and at the first sign of gray morning, he was up, loading their miserable succor into Reilly’s wagon, while Reilly made some tea.

“You’re making me do this. I should stay here. It’s about to snow. You’re risking my life,” he said.

“You stay, then.”

“To the bottom layer of Hades with you.”

They rolled out into a deep gray overcast and a northwest wind, and immediately the bite of cold chilled Dirk’s face. Reilly simply hunkered low, wrapped in a blanket. Dirk had no idea where to go other than west, out upon lands controlled by Harley Bain, lands where the Métis wanted to settle. Dirk had no idea how many had filtered through that country. A dozen? A hundred?

The world was utterly silent. The north wind didn’t blow hard enough to scrape the ears, just hard enough to burrow through anything Dirk wore. One good thing, Dirk thought. Bain’s riders would be huddled around their stoves this day.

For two hours they spotted nothing. Then Dirk headed for a copse of naked trees, their bare limbs cobwebbing a bleak overcast. It was the first significant shelter they had come to, and Dirk intended to check any likely place where the desperate might harbor.

They rode in and found it empty, and Dirk steered the dray into the wind, north by northwest, toward another copse of naked trees at the base of a low bluff. The dray fought the lines, wanting to go downwind. This was a fool’s mission. There were hundreds of square miles in the Judith country.

“You could have gotten me a quart of Jameson’s before we started, Skye. You take me for granted, is what.”

Dirk lacked any means of buying anything, least of all Irish whiskey.

They entered a sheltered area, brushy and protected from wind by cutbanks and juniper and slopes. There was something ahead.

“Jaysas,” Reilly said.

There was a mountain of ash, the bare ruins of a Red River cart, and little else except bodies. Barefoot, coatless, shirtless, bold, stiff, blue, naked against the bitterness. Six bodies, all deprived of footwear. Two children, three young adults, and one old man. They had survived a while, even barefoot, collecting anything burnable that could be dragged or carried to the dying embers of the Red River cart. But the time came when they could find no more deadwood, drag no more, walk no more on frozen ground with bare feet, and then they had perished in the cold. And now they were frozen hard, frozen to the ground, frosted into the earth. One had been mauled by a predator.

“A family,” Dirk said.

“Jaysas,” Reilly said.

The hog farmer knelt beside them, where they had huddled close to one another to fend off the icy breath of death. He muttered some sort of prayer, while Dirk stood, hatless, in the wind.

Dirk had never seen such a hopeless situation. No shelter, not enough clothing to fend off cold, no shoes or boots, no means.

“Let’s go on,” he said. “Maybe we will find the living.”

“Who can we tell? Who can we shout at?” Reilly said.

“We will tell what we’ve seen if it’s the last thing I do,” Dirk said.

“Aye, and who’ll listen? Frenchie half-breeds,” Reilly said.

There was nothing they could do here. No way to bury them, no way to revive the dead, no way to identify them.

They clambered into Reilly’s protesting wagon and continued, once again out upon the sweeping flats claimed by Bain. There was a hint of sleet in the air, needles borne on wind. The dray wanted to quit, struggled against the lines, but Dirk quieted him by turning southwest toward a group of low hills, cut sharply by one of the creeks running through the country.

And after a silent hour, they entered the hill country and followed the bed of the creek, which had a faint wagon track beside it.

And smelled smoke.

Dirk couldn’t be sure. Smoke was elusive, a teasing hint on the wind, a faint notion that blossomed in the mind.

“You smelling it?” Reilly asked.

“I am.”

“I’m ready to warm my bones. I’m so cold I’ll join the Frenchies lest I got warmed up quick. Maybe it’s the cowboys. Maybe I’m the hog farmer, but I’m planning on warming up real good, and maybe get me some redeye if it can be had.”

The fickle winds were mostly blowing the smoke out of the creek bottoms, but once in a while Dirk caught wood smoke, heartening and plain, a sign of life ahead.

And when they rounded a bend in the creek, there was a goodly fire, and people lying about it.

“Hello,” Dirk yelled. Only one of those at the fire raised his head. But then another did. And one struggled to sit up.

Dirk steered straight for them, even as others wrestled themselves up.

They were Métis, barefoot, half-naked, hollow-eyed, and alive beside the ruins of a farm wagon, its metal tires about all that remained.