The major smoothed his palm against the warm hide of his mare, now safely enclosed in the makeshift rope corral Arvo Ollesen had rigged inside the wagon circle. The Ollesen brothers had lost five of their mares since they entered Nebraska Territory. John would bet a month’s pay that Yellow Wolf had all five animals holed up in a box canyon somewhere. Another eight or ten head and the wily Cheyenne could buy himself whatever he wanted. Food. Whiskey. Guns. Maybe even a wife.
Anything except his honor. That was gone forever. Even in his own tribe, the name Yellow Wolf brought a growl of disgust.
He wondered why the Indian had been left free to forage for himself on the plains. Why the Sioux, who held no Cheyenne to be honorable, hadn’t killed him.
Or maybe a Sioux war party was headed this way and the ostracized Cheyenne warrior would sell them information for a sack of corn and some jerked venison.
“Gonna bed down somewhere’s near tonight?” Billy West rasped at his elbow. “Don’t spose you’d much want to cozy up too close to Yellow Wolf.”
“Nope.”
“’Member the time down in the Red Hills when you’n him fought it out over—”
“Nope. I try not to remember some things.”
“You cripple up his arm like that, John?”
“No. A bullet did that.”
Billy glanced up with interest. “Yours?”
John looked away. “Had it been mine, I wouldn’t have missed.” He gave the mare a final stroke and turned toward the corral entrance. “Let’s get some sleep, old friend. Tomorrow I want you to ride point and keep a sharp eye out.”
Billy pulled his frame upright. “I ain’t so old, John. By my math’matical reckoning, I’m still under forty.”
“Not by much, I’d guess. You’ve got sun-squint lines like dry ravines, and a ground blizzard caught in your beard.” John hid the grin of pleasure he always felt when he and Billy needled each other.
“Huh! Sure would like to know when I was born, though. What day and which month, I mean. I never know when to celebrate my birthday.”
“You’re too far gone for birthday celebrations.”
Billy yanked off his cap. “My hair’s still black, though. I notice you’re gettin’ some salt in yours, Major.”
He thumb-stroked his chin. “Think I should shave off my beard?”
John surveyed the man who’d ridden at his side for the past eighteen years. “What the hell for?”
His scout’s left eyelid closed. Tipping his head sideways he gazed at John with the quizzical expression he’d come to call Billy’s “befuddled look.”
“So’s I kin be pretty, like you,” Billy snapped. “So Miss Weldon’ll notice what a good-lookin’ fella I am.”
The chuckle escaped before John could catch it. “Her eyesight’s better than that, Billy.”
Billy’s eye snapped open. “Don’t josh me none, Major. I’m plumb serious. Bet you didn’t know I got an eye for pretty ladies.”
This time John laughed aloud. “Billy, you’re a damn fool.”
“I ain’t neither! That just proves you don’t know nothin’ about me. Nothin’ at all.”
“I know you better than your momma did. You’re crotchety in the spring, mad about everything in the fall, mean tempered in the summer, and somnambulant all winter. And you never looked twice at any female taller than your knee.”
Billy’s eyes lit up. “What’s Sam Bullet mean?”
“Sleepy. You damn near hibernate all winter.”
“Hell if I do! Winter’s when we dragged that supply wagon outta Smoky Hill Canyon, ’member, John? I do lotsa things in the winter. Why, I remember the time up in Idaho when we—”
John clapped his friend on the shoulder. “Sure, shave off your beard, Billy. Might keep your jaw from flapping. Now, Mr. West, it’s Sam Bullet time, so let’s…”
Billy checked the picket rope on his pinto. “Know what your problem is, Major?”
“Yep.”
“You got yourself detoured from life.”
“Yep.”
“You oughta notice pretty ladies, John. Do you a world of good.”
John bit back the retort that curled around his tongue. Billy was just trying to help, making small talk so he wouldn’t have to think too much about Yellow Wolf and…other things.
“I’m sure Miss Constance will admire you without your beard, Billy.”
“Miss Constance! Who said anything about Miss Constance? I meant Miss Nettie. She’s a firecracker, she is.”
“Firecracker,” John repeated. “You sure you don’t have them mixed up?”
“Naw. I been studyin’ them two sisters.” Billy crossed one foot over the other and grasped his unbuttoned leather vest with both hands, as if preparing to give a speech.
“You have, have you?” John didn’t want to hear one word of Billy’s long-winded analyses. Especially not after seeing how upset Constance was about her younger sister. He didn’t want to think about Constance Weldon one minute longer than absolutely necessary.
But for some reason he couldn’t make his legs move him toward the corral gate.
“Miss Nettie, now, she’s like a flea on a hot skillet. Skittish, like. And none too straightforward, neither. What she needs is a firm hand to steady her down and keep her on the straight.”
John nodded. For all of Billy’s reticence around women, he had the keen eye of a man who saw right through most people. Even females. He was faintly relieved that Billy wasn’t blinded by the younger sister’s silver-spun hair and pouting lips. Billy saw what there was to see—an attractive but self-centered young woman with more glitter than backbone. Sand, his father had called it.
“Want me to tell ya ’bout Miss Constance?” His friend spread his arms in a gesture John recognized. His sermon stance.
“No, I don’t,” he said quickly.
“How come, Major? You got her all figured out already?”
Figured out? A man didn’t “figure out” a woman like Constance Weldon in a few days. Or a few months. Women like Constance took years, maybe an entire lifetime to really understand. His mother had been such a woman. Pa had never figured out the first thing about her beyond the fact that she was a general’s daughter and ended up being a general’s wife who carried out her duties to perfection. What was underneath, his father had never cared to find out.
“Now you take Miss Constance,” Billy began. “Bein’ the older sister—”
“I’m not interested.” John stalked out of the corral, grabbed the bedroll he’d stashed in the back of Ollesens’ wagon and headed for the spreading cottonwood grove on the other side of camp.
Billy did the same but went on talking. “There’s trouble comin’ between those two. I seed that right off.”
John jerked the rawhide strap around his rolled-up quilt and underblanket and flapped the pallet onto the ground.
“See, it’s this way, Major. You’ve got one woman who’s used to—”
“Yeah, I see. Don’t need an explanation.”
Billy plunked his wiry body onto the bedroll he’d created by stitching two sheepskins together outside-in. “Like havin’ two women in the same kitchen, don’tcha reckon? One cooks the eggs sunny-side, t’other mixes ’em up with a fork.”
“Go to sleep.” John snapped out the words like a command.
“Same thing with the—”
“Now!” The major shucked his boots and shrugged out of his buckskin shirt.
“—toast,” Billy continued. “One’ll want it so crisp it like to shatter your teeth, the other’ll under-bake it so it balls up like warm dough in your mouth. Now myself, I prefer…you listenin’, John?”
“Nope.”
“Oh, well, in that case.” Billy let three heartbeats go by. “Women are like that, too. Some are kinda stiff and they crumble easy. Others can take the heat. I like the kind that…Major?”
Silence.
“Aw, hell. And I was just gettin’ to the interesting part.”
Billy crawled into his sheepskin cocoon, gave John’s motionless form a long, assessing look and then reached out and patted his shoulder. “Sleep good, Major. Ol’ Billy here will protect you from sticker-weed and quicksand and renegade Indians.
“But I draw the line at pretty females. You’re on your own, there.”
More than an hour has passed and I am still shaking from the events of this evening. My hand flutters so I can scarcely guide the pen into the ink jar, and every line is blotted. What is the matter with me?
I do not normally muddle up over a fright, even one as unexpected as an encounter with an Indian (a starving Indian, from the look of him). Perhaps it is not that which has unnerved me.
Tonight the major spoke to me about Nettie. His words sent a cold knife right through me. Your sister bears watching. At least I am assured I have not imagined Sister’s unhelpful attitude. If I did not know better, I would judge her to be angry over something. Her mood at times seems almost sullen, and in her face I see more and more often that odd expression I began to note even before we left Liberty Corners, as if her mind is far, far away.
Usually she relishes being at the center of everything. Never before have I seen her so…distant. Preoccupied, that is the only word I can come up with. I wonder but what she has left some young gentleman behind, or perhaps she is pining still for Papa.
I miss Papa so keenly at times I cannot draw breath. I long to sit down right then and bury my face in my apron and cry and cry. Nettie must feel even worse, as she was the center of his world. Poor lost Nettie. If no one loves her, she fancies she does not exist.
I love her, of course, despite her willful nature.
But for Nettie that is not enough.
It would surely be enough for me. But now that Papa is gone there is no one; I am all that she has left. I am all that I have left as well, for no one else in the world loves me, not even Nettie, deep down. I must care about myself since none other will.
I fear that is vain of me, but otherwise I shall shrivel inside like an old dry scrap of leather. If I allow that to happen, neither one of us will reach Oregon, as Papa had wanted.
My hand is steady now that I have written out my woes and heartache. My head nods toward the lantern.
Tomorrow I must talk to Nettie.