The next couple of days were spent on the periphery of the city, wandering through small mining camps where mostly we were met with suspicious men who were much better armed than we. There could not have been one speck of color left in all California by then by my reckoning, but I figured men would keep trying for it until all the world burned up and maybe some after. For the first day and a half I could not figure out Boon’s objective and for the large part I just hoped she hadn’t cracked and decided to look for gold instead of vengeance. It wasn’t until we reached a derelict shack sandwiched between two tremendous rocks north of San Francisco, near a creek and alongside a narrow canyon, that I understood otherwise. She crept up to a cold firepit beside the place and hovered her palm over top of it just long enough to determine that it was warm enough to have been recently used.
“We keep going,” she said.
Boon hadn’t said much of anything to me in the time since we’d absconded from the city, so it was only then I gathered that she was looking for an abandoned camp to settle into while she healed up and we sorted out what was next. There was plenty of her squatting down next to the girl, whispering to her so that I could not hear, but I was little more than a camp follower and I confess that I came to resent it.
It was hard going afoot, though on the third day we reached the Grizzly Flat Road off the old Carson Trail and caught a ride with a small caravan of Mormons, disappointed with the prospects of California and turning back toward Utah. They all eyed us cagily and I could not blame them, for not one of us did not look like we’d been through hell and the Mormons were not to know whether it was a hell of our own making. Boon and the child rode in the back of a wagon with most of the other women, while I sat up on the lazy board with a scowling teamster and stared at the oxen’s asses for the rest of the day. The teamster never spoke a word to me. He never even met my eyes.
We disembarked at Placerville and shared a short and silent meal with the Mormons, consisting of salt pork and hardtack and creek water. I soaked my portion of the hardtack in the water to soften it. Otherwise it was unpalatable.
The Mormons made camp and Boon fell into some conspiratorial meeting with one of the men leading the caravan, apart from the fire at a stand of sycamores. When she returned with the child to the campfire, she said, “There is an old shack down the middle fork of the river, up on the flat. These people stayed in it before and say it is livable. We’ll hole up there tonight.”
“And what of the night after that?” I said.
“One night at a time.”
“And what of Arthur Stanley, Boon?”
She did not answer me. She just squatted quietly over the fire, the child beside her working with no small effort on a chunk of hardtack. Every man and woman present stared at her like she was the strangest thing they had ever seen, which I very much doubted. The religious see all sorts of wild things to hear them tell it. Surely a little girl was no great mystery, but then again, I could not profess to see into another man’s mind. All people were strange to me.
It was full dark by the time we reached the little cabin, and we were all shivering cold and soaked to our waists from crossing the Cosumnes River to get there. Fortune smiled upon us in the form of a crude but usable stone fireplace and chimney inside the tumbledown shack, which Boon instructed me to get going immediately. I did as I was told, eyeing the stars through the half-stove-in roof and hoping it wouldn’t rain.
The fire I built was mostly bits and scraps of the shack itself, with pine needles and dry leaves for kindling. It was smoky to the point of choking, but warm. More smoke wafted up through the hole in the roof than the chimney. I found an old book with yellow pages left behind by the Mormons, made to toss it on the flames, but Boon stayed my hand and said, “Leave it.”
I knew her better than to imagine it was some kind of superstition on her part. It was respect.
Boon sat on the floor with the child beside the fire, eating from the meager provisions donated to us by our brief hosts on the trail, while I paced the opposite side of the cabin, beneath the yawning chasm above, smoking a pathetic cigarette I made from dry crumbs left behind by some other squatter in weeks or months past. I did not take part in the meal. I wasn’t hungry.
After unwrapping her dressing long enough to check and prod her wound, Boon wound the rags back ’round herself and, leaning against the wall beside the fire, fell asleep. For a spell thereafter, the girl regarded me from across the room, keeping her bright eyes on me but betraying nothing in her face as to what might have been going on in her head. I pretended I didn’t notice until I couldn’t anymore. Then I met her gaze full on and smiled. She sort of half-smiled back; a crooked, unpracticed thing, the result of mimicking what she was seeing more than anything natural to her face. She held this awkward pose for a minute or two, then relaxed her face, let it sink back to the blank frown to which she was accustomed. I offered a nod, only because I could think of nothing better, and as if this was an invitation she rose from the floor and crossed over to me, where she sat again at my feet.
The child looked up at me and I down at her. The cigarette burned my fingers and I flicked it up, through the hole in the roof, before lowering my bulk down to the floor next to her.
Then, in a quiet voice to avoid waking Boon, I told the girl our story.
“A little over three years back,” I said, “I found myself in a spot of trouble outside Comanche. That’s in Texas, a fair piece east of here…”
I told her about that necktie party and Boon’s fortuitous arrival, about Mescalero Apache and crooked law dogs and crazed judges, hunting high and low for an Englishman who might never have been in Texas at all for all we knew at the time. She faced me with open eyes and a tightly closed mouth, listening to me prattle on about Stiff Neck and Red Foot, Darling and Revelation, our tight underneath the shadow of the Caprock Escarpment and the shoot-out back at the Palace in the Barbary Coast. I told the girl-child all of it, or as much as I could remember then and there, and from time to time I considered how I’d be hard pressed to believe half of it if somebody else were telling it to me. And knowing how the brains of a storyteller tended to embellish with each retelling of his stories, I came to wonder if I believed every word of it hearing my own self talk and talk and talk through the night. But damned if she didn’t listen to all of it, rapt as far as I could tell, and when I’d run out of stories to tell and fell into a long pause to search my memories for more, the kid curled up like a kitten and dropped into a deep sleep.
And like the changing of watch, no sooner was she out than Boon was awake, watching from the shadows of her place by the cold fireplace.
“You sleep?” she said.
“No. Just talked.”
“You do that.”
“I surely do.”
“She talk?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Maybe she can’t.”
“She will when she wants to,” Boon said.
“We playing house now? Ma and Pa and like that?”
“Just trying to be who I needed when I was her age.”
“Until what?”
“Until she finds some people a heap better than we are.”
“That’s most people,” I said.
“I hope so,” she said.
Dawn came and while the kid slept, I helped Boon root around the weeds and scrub outside for rabbit tobacco to pack her wound with. She took what little we found, smashed it up with her hands and mixed it with mud from the riverbed to make a poultice. Back in the cabin, she turned her back to me, slid out of her shirt and unwrapped the bandages again so that I could stuff the stinking mess into the hole in her back.
“Menominee reckon rabbit tobacco cures foolishness,” she said when I finished up and set to helping her get the rags back in place. “If they’re right, maybe we’ll both disappear before noon, fools that we are.”
“Boon,” I said, “what did you mean, that last day in town? You said she was dead.”
She heaved a deep sigh and turned back to me, buttoning up the threadbare shirt Jing Fong had given her and rolling the question around in her mind. Her lips parted and she started to speak, but in an instant her eyes popped wide and she clamped her mouth shut, turning her right ear toward the gaping roof. Boon heard it before I did—the jangle of gear and splash of hooves in the river nearby, snorting horses and grumbling men.
Someone was coming. Boon shot a worried glance at the girl, still asleep on the floor, then to me. Her hand was already at the grip of her Colt. I pulled my knife and mourned the loss of the Winchester. Then, together we went to the door to see about our visitors.