“Get comfortable with it,” said Cal, raising my hand up.

  “It ain’t loaded, right?” I squeaked.

  “Of course it’s loaded,” said Tim. He’d come over as soon as he figured out what we were doing. “That there is a Colt Paterson revolver. .36 cylinder, that’s why it’s so darn heavy.”

  “Which one of you is the expert?” I demanded. Cal glared at young Tim.

  “This one here fancies he’s a gunfighter.”

  “I ain’t ever said such a thing,” retorted Tim. “I just like guns, is all.”

  He puffed his chest proudly. “If she’s gonna learn to shoot, I better be the one to teach her.”

  “You never shot anything bigger than a rattlesnake,” scoffed Cal.

  “But I shot it, didn’t I? How many snakes you shot, Cal?”

  I laughed, taking them both by surprise. “I don’t even know what I’m aimin’ at.”

  “Aim at Tucker,” growled Miranda. “Put him out of his misery.”

  The other three- Saint and Guts and Miranda- were getting up from their game to watch the show. I avoided Saint’s eyes and looked to Cal.

  “What do I aim at, Cal?”

  They all jumped in with ideas. Guts went to look for a log downriver. He thought a log was the very best thing for target practice, on account that you could set things on it to be knocked down. Tim bragged he could shoot an apple off a man’s head at fifty paces.

  “A dead man,” said Cal dryly.

  Finally the log was brought- a half-petrified thing- and set twenty paces away.

  “What’s she gonna shoot at?” said Saint. He’d come to watch me with his cold blue eyes.

  Miranda brought out an empty can of beans they’d finished that morning. They set it on the log.

  Tim reached for his pistol, cutting in front of me. “I’ll show you how it’s done, girl.”

  Cal pushed him aside. “This ain’t a circus, and I ain’t here to show off. Let her go.”

  Tim withdrew, sulking.

  “Alright,” said Cal. “Raise the gun, Ada.”

  I swallowed. “You sure-”

  “Raise it. Don’t be scared. Put one foot behind you- she kicks like a bitch. Alright, now pull that hammer back.”

  click.

  “Close one eye. Line her up.”

  “I ain’t ever seen a woman shoot,” drawled Saint. “Far less a black-”

  I fired, cutting him off. The recoil jolted through my arm, but it wasn’t half as bad as the roar. I looked at Cal. His lips moved, but no sound came out.

  “Missed,” observed Tim.

  “Try again,” said Cal. “I got plenty of shot.”

  His green eyes looked warmly into mine. I smiled. Trying again, and again, I hit the can on the fourth shot. With each shot he found a way to be closer to me, found an excuse to touch me. He rearranged my hand around the handle, showed me how to unload, reload. Then we took a seat, dissembled the entire gun, and put it back together.

  Once all the shooting stopped the rest of the men lost interest and returned to their game. But I didn’t mind. It was enough to stay with Cal, and talk to him.

  “You’ll get better,” he said.

  “I hope so. But why’d I got to learn anyway? It’s not like I can use a gun.”

  “Sure you can. Anyone can. Out here it’s your best defense. Say a horde of Comanche were to come through. You can’t rely on me to shoot ‘em all down.”

  “I can’t?” I looked up at him through my eyelashes.

  He jerked me against him by my waist. I giggled into his shirt.

  “You do beat all,” he said.

  “I don’t want to see that,” called Tim. “Y’all keep that grab-ass bullshit to yourself.”

  Cal didn’t care what they thought. Neither did I. I knew he liked spending time with me. I knew he liked me. After the shooting lesson we took a walk down the shallow river. I thought he might try to tumble me again. But we only talked. At first.

  “What’s the wildest thing you’ve seen out here?” I asked him.

  “On the drives, and such?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Buffalo hunt. I went with Iron Eye, ‘bout three year back. I saw one brave take down three buffalo all by himself, with one quiver of arrows.”

  He caught my unimpressed expression, and laughed. “I guess you’ve never seen a buffalo, Miss Ada-Bell-from-Boston.”

  “Only the other day,” I said. “And those were pretty far, remember? They’re big, I guess.”

  “The brave that did it was Fox,” said Cal. “Our Kiowa friend. They sang songs about that for months.”

  “Craziest thing I saw in Massachusetts,” I said, “Was an Irishman with no legs and arms paintin’ with his mouth. He did it right on the street corner, for money.”

  “I hope you tipped him.”

  “I think there was crazier stuff in Georgia. But I don’t remember most of it.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “A pond,” I said, thinking. “My brother Bill and I would go fishin’ there, in the spring. And Eulah, this old white lady that lived across us. She used to tumble sometimes, with the slaves on the Goodnight Plantation. Oh, and Christmas. That was when Daddy slaughtered the hog.”

  “You were never a slave, right?” asked Cal. The question held a note of something underneath it that I didn’t like.

  I looked at him sharply. “No.”

  He shrugged. “One of the men- no, Ada, I won’t say who- brought it up a couple days ago. Thought you might be a runaway.”

  The idea that they had been tossing that notion around made my blood cold. “I’d like ‘em to say that to my face. The yellow bastards.”

  “I put it out of their minds.”

  “Well, how can you be sure?” I said, rounding on him.

  “I’m not,” he said. “I think you’re tellin’ me the truth about everythin’.”

  “Let’s say I’m lyin’ then. Let’s say I’ve run off from somewhere. It’s your duty as a citizen of these united states to turn me in. That’s the law. Would you break the law?”

  Shut up, Ada, I told myself. Or you won’t like the answer.

  “Yes,” said Cal. “I’d break the law.”

  I checked a bitter remark on my tongue. Cal had surprised me.

  “You wouldn’t turn me in?”

  “No.”

  “But you’d hang a horse thief. Even your own brother.”

  “Look, Ada,” said Cal. “The way I see it, the worst thing you can do in this world is steal. When you steal a man’s horse, you’re takin’ away his livelihood. You’re takin’ away his chance at survival. It’s next to murder, out here in this place. Understand?”

  “Yeah. But I don’t see how that fits.”

  “When you put a man in chains,” said Cal, speaking over me. “When you put a whip to his back and say hey, why don’t you cut my crops and dry my tobacco-why don’t you give me your children and wife so I can make ‘em work for me too - and then don’t pay him wages, you’re stealin’ away his life. It’s theivin’ of the worst kind.”

  “Worse than horse theft?”

  “I believe so.”

  I couldn’t hide my shock. Scratch a cowboy and you’d get an abolitionist. Who knew.

  “I can’t abide thieves,” he said flatly. “Not now, not ever.”

  The gold bar in my pocket seemed to grow ten times heavier. I licked my lips.

  “But what about people who steal because they have to?” I said. “What if a runaway slave stole the master’s horse to get away? Then what would you say?”

  “Aw, now that’s not fair,” said Cal. “I never heard of that happenin’.”

  “Well? What would you say?”

  He looked down his long nose at me. A little twinkling amusement danced in his eyes.

  “I’d say, you’ve got a piece of sagebrush in your hair.”

  He reached out and took hold of the end of my braid. In the few weeks or so since I’d met him, his appearance had changed. The sun had baked him to a hard finish. The freckles on his nose became less and less pronounced the deeper his skin tanned.

  He pulled the tie from the end of my hair and untwisted the curling strands. I wanted to stop him- no one dared touch my hair. But the feeling was so light and gentle it froze me. He ran his fingers through the end of the braid, and back again to the top. It all blew loose about my face.

  “Your hair’s longer than I’d suspect,” he said.

  “I never let it out like that.”

  “You should,” he murmured.

  I knew he was avoiding my earlier question. He couldn’t wrap his head around any gray areas. That was the way with Cal. The man dealt only in absolutes. He was black and white as they came. And he had his code of honor, which he lived by as some men lived by their bible.

  Somewhere in there, I had become his temptress. Our relationship went against what he believed was right. And he wasn’t alone in that. It went against what even I knew to be right. But still, we kept coming back to each other for more.

  “Say, Ada,” said Cal.

  “Uh huh.” I eyed him. His voice had taken on that playful tone.

  “Tell me somethin’.”

  “What, Cal?”

  “What did you do for an ass like that?”

  I stared at him. “I don’t know.”

  “No?”

  “Cal, shut up.”

  He grabbed for me. I tried to dance out of his reach, but he was faster. He crushed me against his chest and delivered two light swats to my bottom.

  “Hey!” I shrieked.

  “Little miss attitude. D’you know why I took you out here?”

  “I got an idea,” I said breathlessly.

  He forced my hands against my sides. I turned my face up to be kissed, but he held back.

  “Sometimes you get noisy, that’s why.”

  “Noisy? Why you-”

  “So I figured I’d take you here. And I could tell you just what I want to do to you. Startin’ with those pretty lips.”

  My lips parted. “What about my lips?”

  He brought me forward and eased his mouth over mine. Wet, hot, and slow. That was Cal. I shuddered as he drank me in. In his iron grip I couldn’t move a muscle.

  “That,” he said. “And then I’d go lower. Right to these. Lift up your shirt and show ‘em to me.”

  He let me free. My eyes fixed on his, I grasped the hem of the shirt and raised it up over my breasts. The dark nipples thrust out towards him. He weighed my breasts in both hands, then bore me down into the grass. A fall of gold hair blocked my vision as he took a brown peak into his mouth. For a drenching moment he suckled me, his hands pinning mine above my head.

  A light wind blew across the place he had just sucked. It felt achingly good against the sensitive buds.

  “I’m not done,” said Cal, reaching down to the hem of my skirts.

  “What’s next?” I murmured.

  “This,” he said.

  “Oh. Oh- Oh Lord.”

  Whatever he said next was lost against the melting heat between my thighs. My head fell back. I buried a hand in his fountain of gold hair.

  “Not fair,” I gasped.

  ᢇ

  Joseph returned to the camp later, astride a little gold pony. He had an Indian girl with him.

  “This is Sweetgrass,” he said. “She might do somethin’ for Tucker’s leg.”

  “Why she ain’t more than a girl,” said Guts.

  “She’s Chief Red Feather’s wife,” said Joseph. “You don’t know what I had to say to get her here.” He looked meaningfully at Saint.

  “I’m not going to do anything to her,” snarled the blue-eyed cowboy.

  Sweetgrass went to the delirious Tucker. Throughout the day we’d tried to make him comfortable. But in the end he’d slipped into a bad fever that nothing could bring him out of.

  She pulled the blanket back from his leg- and hissed between her teeth.

  “Bad,” said the girl. She murmured in Joseph’s ear.

  “Very bad,” Joseph amended.

  Cal twisted his hat. “All hell. What can she do for him?”

  The answer was: absolutely nothing. Sweetgrass made a paste with a chewed-up herb, slathered it on Tucker’s leg, and chanted some words over it. Tucker could hardly get the energy to tell her he didn’t want her Indian Witchcraft.

  She stayed on with Joseph a while longer, ate a good chunk of our salt beef, then took her horse back and rode on out again. Joseph went with her, walking behind on foot.

  “I never heard of anyone dyin’ from a centipede bite,” said Guts miserably.

  “Some folks is made different from others,” said Cal. He chewed his lip. The last thing he’d said to Tucker hadn’t been nice. He regretted it.

  “If he dies,” said Miranda, “We will have to get a new hand.”

  “I know that,” said Cal. He breathed deeply. “We’ll need a change of plans, boys.”

  “Branson is close,” said Saint. “We can stop there.”

  “We’re supposed to make it to Baxter Springs by Friday.”

  “One of us could ride out and tell the contact what happened,” said Saint. “While the rest wait in the town.”

  “Where we gonna put a hundred head of cattle in Branson?” said Cal.

  “Maybe somebody got a pasture they ain’t using.”

  Cal glared. “Very funny.”

  Tucker died in the night. But we didn’t find that out until morning. I’ll never forget the smell coming off that blanket. The Osage girl’s herbs had clotted into a dark purple mass. They couldn’t stop the overpowering odor of dead flesh.

  I hadn’t liked Tucker. He was a mean and sorry old bastard. But it took a bit out of Cal and the others, when he died.

  “We can’t bury him in this damned grass,” said Saint. He stamped the ground. “It’s too hard-packed.”

  “The coyotes will get him,” said Guts.

  “He ought to be buried properly,” said Cal. “It’s the least I could do for old Mrs. Tucker, to see her son buried properly.”

  “Rig ‘im up to some horses,” suggested Saint.

  They did that, and we made for Branson at a quicker pace.

  For the next day or two I kept to myself, and well away from the blanket-wrapped corpse of Tucker, which bumped along behind us on his horse. The men were busy trying to do Tucker’s share of work. Cal seemed in a very black mood the whole way. He didn’t so much as look at me.

  The horses and cattle were kept well away from water of all kinds until we came to the river. This was to make them more keen on getting in the water. I felt bad for the poor animals.

  When we came to the Neosho river, I couldn’t hide my surprise. Cal assured me the river should be no higher than the knees, this time of year. No more than a “little bitty stream”.

  But when we reached it, the “stream” had swelled into a wide river. In this part of the country the earth became harder, rockier, and redder. Mud and silt turned the water a very rich brown.

  “Must have rained up north,” said Saint.

  “We can cross,” said Cal firmly. “Ain’t no harder than the Red River.”

  No, the Red River at its fullest would have swallowed us all to a man, with room to spare for the horses and the cattle.

  “I can’t swim,” Guts put in quickly. “We ought to ride down to a shallower spot.”

  “This is the shallower spot,” insisted Cal.

  “How do you know that?” I asked. “Joseph doesn’t even know we’re here. Did he tell you?”

  “I crossed it once before,” he snapped. “Now this is the only thing standin’ in between us and Baxter. We drive the cattle ahead first. They can swim. We go after ‘em. Shouldn’t be no higher than Ada’s shoulder.”

  “Cal,” said Butch carefully, “I ain’t so sure.”

  But the decision was made. In Cal’s mind, anyway, which meant we all had to listen. Butch and Saint moved out to herd the cattle across the river. Tim went back to wrassle the spare horses.