The campfire was still burning when I emerged from the mine and the first light of morning was starting to glow on the horizon. I’d already sat down by the fire before it dawned on me that the man Boon left to die was gone. Either he wasn’t in the dire straits he thought, or he’d managed to crawl someplace else to croak. I really couldn’t be too fussed to think about it. For a short while longer I could still hear the high, desperate screams from deep in the shaft, so mostly I thought about that. About what she was doing to the man she’d waited so long to kill. Her father, except in the sense that he wasn’t. Just like he’d said. Nobody was wrong all the time.
And when the screaming stopped and all I could hear anymore was the crackle of the campfire and the song of the morning birds in the tall California trees, my thoughts turned precisely where I wanted them least to go—to Meihui.
Poor, sweet Meihui. She might have turned down a path like Boon’s, or she might not’ve. I supposed life was riddled with thousands of paths, not just one or two, and it took a hell of a lot of different choices and circumstances to end up anyplace in particular. There was no telling where a kid like her might have gone, and no sense dwelling on it now. She was gone, killed by the man who probably paid to own her like a doll or a dog. That he paid the price did nothing to ease the pain I felt in my chest about it. Stanley’s death would never undo it, would never bring her back.
In spite of my grandest effort not to, I lay my face in my two hands and sobbed. My heart hurt so badly I might have reckoned I was dying if I hadn’t known it was just the loss. The limit, really. The limit of how much, after all the years on the trails and roads and railways with Boonsri, that I could take. I’d taken a lot, and I’d caused my fair share of horror and heartache along the way. I was puzzled when she hauled us clear back to that lonesome grave to mourn the boy she’d shot but mayhap she had limits, too. Degrees of limits, I supposed, that both hardened the heart as she went along but chipped away at it, too. Now that I studied on it, my own heart had taken quite the beating as well. Of all the nasty things I’d bore witness to in my days, it was that fraction of a second when the Englishman’s muzzle flashed that I regretted the most, then and forever. That sight was my last limit. Any more chips to the cold stone in my chest would be the end of me.
I was done.
The sun rose, uninterested in what the night had borne, and I got to rifling through the camp in search of victuals and vice. I came away with half a dozen hand-rolled cigarettes, a quarter-full, unlabeled bottle of something brown, some hard biscuits and a bit of pemmican jerky. Back at the fire I ate and smoked and drank, but none of it was sufficient to fill the hole opened up inside of me. Later, I wept a little more. Later still, I started to doze right there on the scrub and dust and scratchy pine needles that carpeted the ground.
Boon came back sometime after that. I must have sensed the movement because I hadn’t heard a thing, but I turned to look at the mouth of the mineshaft just as she appeared from its shadows. The front of her was awash in dark, drying blood. Her long, black hair hung in oily ropes over her face and down her shoulders. In her arms, the small, lifeless body of Meihui dangled. She looked like she did not weigh anything at all, even less than she had in life. Like the emptiness her death left behind took every substantial about her. Everything real.
I said, “Howdy, Boon.”
She said nothing. Just stopped once she was fully in the sunlight and closed her eyes for a few moments. I watched her. The campfire was dying out by then, just embers. Boon opened her eyes and walked on, past me and into the camp, where she ducked into one of the tents with Meihui. She was in there for a little while. I smoked. When she came out again, she carried with her a bundle. I had to look at it a minute to tell that she’d wrapped Meihui up in a bedroll and tied it up with twine. She didn’t have to tell me it was to keep from turning into the sort of gruesome thing the late Bartholomew Dejasu had become, drawing blackflies behind her saddle on the ride down to Darling.
Boon lay her down on the ground to catch her breath and roll the knots out of her back and shoulders. She was starting to cry, but soundlessly and without so much as curling her lip or wrinkling her nose. Just water running down her filthy cheeks, and her like she hadn’t even noticed it. She hauled the body back up into her arms and continued on, through and past the camp, into the dense trees that marked the boundary between the mine and the ghost town we’d mostly burned to the ground, just like Red Foot before it.
I waited a bit longer, just to see if she’d come back for me. She didn’t, so I rose back up, smarting head to toe and probably still bleeding here and there, and limped the way she’d gone. On the other side of the stand of trees, I found one of the two mounts she’d ground-tied behind the hotel. The other was gone, and so was Boon.
I saddled up, which took a few failed attempts before I made it, and rode alongside the smoldering remains of the hotel and the farrier’s, glancing over at the dead, burnt mules and all the men’s corpses splayed in the street and covered with flies. I squinted in the bright morning light and looked straight down the road that led out of what used to be Handsome Frank, California. In the middle distance was a small black shadow shrinking into the hazy, shimmering horizon. I gigged the mount with the heel of my boot and followed.
It was past noon before I got within hailing distance. I called out to her, but she did not acknowledge me. She just rode at a fair clip, me maybe a quarter mile behind. I kept that distance between us, more or less, until we got back to Burnside, where I got buffaloed by old Arthur Stanley, who I reckoned now lay in pieces scattered in worthless hole in the ground.
Boon’s mount was hitched up at a rail between a general store and what I took for an undertaker’s given the fresh pine boxes on display out front. She was not in sight. Neither was Meihui’s body. I hitched up, too. And I waited outside, trying not to think about anything at all.
In my haste to catch up with her, I’d left the bottle and the tobacco makings back at the miner’s camp. I stuffed my hands in my pockets, looking for stray coins to spend at the general store, when the shouting erupted inside the undertaker’s. A lamplighter in the street rushed over to get a look through one of the two glass windows in the front of the place. At the same time, someone smashed right through the other one, slamming against the porch in a tinkling rain of glass and rolling off into the grass. Boon appeared in the broken window, her fists balled up at her sides.
Seeing me, she said, “Won’t bury the girl proper on account of she’s Chinese.”
“God Almighty,” the bruised and bloodied undertaken said. He scrambled to get to his feet. “It’s nothing personal.” He looked around in a panic and alighted on me. “Fetch the marshal, would you?”
I shook my head, but the lamplighter fell into a clumsy sprint down the street. Boon heaved a sigh and vanished from view. She reappeared at the front door, the bundle back in her arms, and on her way to where she’d hitched up, she delivered a sound kick to the undertaker’s shin. He dropped back to the ground.
“To hell with this place,” she said, and she set lashing the body back up on her mount.
There were some raised voices and milling about, and a crowd of onlookers began to form in the street while Boon and I climbed back onto our saddles and turned back out of Burnside, this time together. I kept looking back for an hour or so after we cleared the town, but nobody gave chase. We camped rough that night and only because it was too dark to keep on and risk one or both of the horses stepping in some critter’s hole and breaking a leg. The only thing I said the whole night was, “I am sure sorry things went this way.”
She said nothing at all.
I dropped into sleep before she did, and I slept fitfully. At dawn I awoke with a full bladder and hardly looked one way or the other before taking care of business on some coyote brush. Once that was done and I had my trousers buttoned up, I turned ’round to discover that there was only the one horse hobbled nearby.
Boon was gone.