They might have been little boys fighting in a schoolyard. I watched it all with fading interest. Beyond the odd mention of my name it had nothing to do with me. Did men never learn? Did they ever grow up? Shadrac spat into the grass and made for his horse. The argument was over.

  Not long after that Sam’s scouts returned. The news they brought put the entire camp in chaos.

  “We’re leavin’,” said Sam. He kicked me in the ribs. “Get up.”

  In no time they’d packed up the camp. Sam hauled me over the side of his horse. They seemed in an awful big hurry.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Sam.

  He vaulted up next to me and slid an arm around my waist. The movement was cold, but still familiar. I swallowed a lump in my throat.

  “Someone’s after my gold,” he said shortly.

  “Gold?”

  “One of the wagons got busted.”

  Apparently he had set up a train to move on out ahead of them. Someone, maybe a rival who was wise to the scheme, took advantage as the wagon made to cross the Wahoe river. For the wagon to float across the gold had to be unloaded by hand and brought across on flotillas. A slow process. Perfect for an ambush.

  We pushed ahead at top speed. But the horses were slow, it being many days since we’d changed them. We came up to the crossing point much later than we’d planned. Here the river plunged between two short bluffs, which cut through the force of the current. Embedded in the red earth were the skinny tracks of older wagon crossings. Sam called this the Devil’s Road.

  As for his wagon, well, there was not a wagon in sight. We stared out at the scraggly red soil. The gurgle of the river sounded like laughter.

  “What the fuck?” roared Sam, wheeling on his scouts.

  They were just as confused as he, but the time to think disappeared. Shots exploded from around the bluff. A horde of riders burst into view.

  The earth came pitching up to meet me; Sam cut the cord binding my ankles under the horse. He dumped me over the side of his saddle.

  The attackers had planned well.

  The cries of the outlaws and our attackers were drowned out by cracks of pistol fire; in no time the pebbly red earth rose up clouds of dust that blotted out the sky.

  I crawled away from it. As best as I could crawl. When I reached my limit I just curled up in a ball and prayed.

  A human can experience the total loss of their senses in a couple ways. One is lying back in prairie grass in the dead of the night, when all other sounds have been wiped away by the silence of the still air. The other is in the heat of fighting. Gunfire and choking dust took away my senses and left me dumb. I watched like a stupid, flightless bird, but it was no more than a series of strange images that I didn’t understand. A bullet sprang from the dust-cloud and punched through my Indian shirt. I felt the pressure of it but no pain. How strange.

  A hulking figure came loping towards me. I screamed and screamed. It was Cal. But no- it wasn’t. Sam had red blood all over his face and shirt. His eyes rolled like a horse’s. And then he doubled. A second Sam burst through the choking dust and leveled a pistol at the first. The two men faced each other. They were brothers. They were enemies.

  Cal had told me once he felt nothing for his brother. He’s let hate eat him up his whole life, he’d said. He ain’t the boy I knew. He’s a man. And he’s got to answer for his sins like a man should.

  And justice came to Sam Twist sure enough. In slow time I watched the pistol crack and smoke and recoil in the shooter’s hands. Sam Twist fell like a marionette whose strings had been cut. He crumpled to the ground.

  The shooter- and I realized later it could have only been Cal- paused for a moment over the body of the fallen outlaw. A storm passed through his face. He had fulfilled his promise to shoot his brother where he stood if their paths ever crossed again. But at what cost?

  Cal turned and disappeared into the haze. He hadn’t seen me.

  A bullet caught me in the shoulder next. Red flowered over my dirty shirt. I imagined a vat of red bubbling dye. Suddenly I felt very tired. I slid sideways. The earth met my cheek like a soft pillow. But what came next wasn’t sleep. I moved between light and darkness, pulled between each by the fierce pain flowering out of me, and inside me.

  In minutes the fighting died down. Excited shouts replaced pistol fire. I peered through the dust. Brown faces, Indian faces, moved about. They picked through the huddled bodies. I imagined for a moment I’d seen Joseph.

  One of the Indians spotted me. I didn’t even bother running; I just stayed right there on the ground. The Indian came up to me and called over his shoulder for someone else.

  A tall form broke through the cloud of red. Darkness reached into the corners of my vision with little hands. I fell backward, backward.

  “Ada?” shouted Cal. But his voice sounded warped to me.

  I slumped forward. Maybe I fainted. The arms that lifted me up felt light as feather-brushes.

  “She’s in shock,” said Joseph.

  “Jesus Christ. They got her in the arm.”

  “Where is your brother, yellow-hair?”

  “Dead. Get her out of here.”

  “I don’t think-”

  “Do it, Joseph!”

  For a dazzling moment my vision cleared. I saw the same old Cal. His hair was longer- somehow. He looked different. I’d never seen that expression on his face.

  I opened my mouth to say sorry. Nothing came out.

  “Don’t talk,” he said. “It’s best you just say nothing at all.”

  I shut my eyes. Our reunion didn’t have stars or celebration. We didn’t kiss. To be honest, I don’t remember most of it.

  9

  “What do you plan to do with her?”

  “I don’t know,” said Cal.

  “Well, you better think about it.”

  “I am thinking.”

  “That’s your problem, Yellow-Hair,” said Joseph. “You turn away from everyone’s advice. You think the whole world is right or wrong.”

  “What’s that got to do with Ada, Joseph?”

  “You think she’s a bad person.”

  “I never said that.”

  “You think she is a thief.”

  “She is.”

  “Once I saw a Coyote steal a fish from an old woman’s fire. The old woman was so angry, she woke all of us up with her noise. We followed the Coyote to her den. We realized she stole the fish to feed her pups.”

  “Humans aren’t animals. That ain’t the same.”

  “Don’t interrupt me,” said Joseph sharply. “As I was saying, it used the fish to feed its little ones. So we let it go and didn’t tell the old woman. Do you know what happened?”

  “No.”

  “The next day our camp reached the Brazos. A big tree had blocked off part of it and dammed the river. There were so many fish the water looked alive. We ate fish for a week, so much fish we were all sick. And the old woman didn’t care about the Coyote anymore.”

  A silence. Then Cal said, “So you’re saying, I should just let everything go and figure itself out.”

  “Sometimes,” said Joseph, “It’s better to let things happen the way they are meant to. Sometimes it is not our responsibility to punish.”

  “Well aren’t you a wise old Indian.”

  “I am very stupid, for a Kickapoo,” said Joseph. “It just happens that you are even stupider than me. I thought you would have learned these lessons from the Kiowa.”

  “I have a bad memory.”

  “But not bad enough to forgive your woman.”

  “My woman? She ain’t anyone’s woman but her own.”

  “The day you took her into that tipi she became yours.”

  “I never-”

  “You told me she was yours yourself. Are you a liar?”

  Cal fell silent. Joseph was right, as usual.

  I stayed real still throughout their conversation. Eventually Joseph finished his pipe and got up. My back turned to the both of them, I never saw Cal’s face, but I sensed he was looking at me.

  “I know you’re awake, Ada.”

  Nothing of the old friendliness in his tone; we had somehow become strangers.

  “Hello, Cal,” I said.

  A long silence fell. Cal shifted. He’d be digging into his pockets for the piece of wood to whittle. Just like Sam. Were they really so different?

  “You were hurt.”

  “They shot me in the shoulder. I know.” The area was still raw to the touch.

  “I didn’t expect to see you again.”

  “No?”

  “Don’t be sore, Ada.”

  Angry? I hadn’t even started getting angry. I turned to Cal. He sat against the cliff face, hat in hand, his eyes turned towards something in the distance. Fury swelled up in me. As if he had a right to be mad!

  “You abandoned me.”

  “I did no such-”

  “And you’re gonna deny it?”

  “The way I heard it,” said Cal, his voice suddenly rising, “Was that you went on back to David Harmin. I figured he had the rest of the gold and you’d up and decided to split it. Made perfect sense to me.”

  “You thought I went back to David?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you don’t know me half as well as you think you do, Cal Sampson.”

  “I thought I knew you weren’t a thief, Ada.”

  “I’m not!” I shouted, so loud it echoed through the canyon. Cal’s mouth snapped into a line. I’d startled him. Did he think I would just let him talk to me any way he wanted?

  “I won’t have you call me out my name,” I snapped. “I won’t have it. You don’t know everything, Cal.”

  “So explain where you got that gold.”

  “I took it from the wagon when the comancheros ruined it.”

  “It wasn’t yours to take.”

  “I was a black woman by myself in the middle of the Texas prairie with no connections and a passel of cowboys ridin’ my ass,” I said. “Just what would you have done?”

  His eyes said it all.

  “You know I’m right,” I continued. “I can tell. You’re just too proud to admit it. You can never admit when you’ve made a mistake. And that’s your problem, Cal.”

  “God damn it, Ada. Tell me what I was supposed to think.”

  “You were supposed to trust me. I thought you loved me.”

  There- I’d said it.

  “Loved you?”

  “Yes,” I said. My voice trembled. “Though obviously I was fooled.”

  “I never-”

  “You left me there,” I said. Forget the talk of love. I wouldn’t lose track of my point. “And you know what David Harmin did? He tried to sell me.”

  “I never meant- oh, Ada.”

  “He tried to make me into a- a whore! And it was your men that told him where I was. And I had nobody there to help me, I thought I’d be dead or ruined for sure.”

  “I didn’t know, Ada.”

  “Well, it happened.”

  “Did he touch you?” Cal’s voice grew dark. He dropped the hat and moved close.

  “What?”

  “What did he do?”

  “Who? David or Sam?”

  “Both. Either. Did they trespass on you?”

  For a moment I wanted to be childish, I wanted to lie and punish him with it. Let him feel an ounce of what I had felt those long weeks! But no. I could never lie to Cal again.

  “They did nothin’,” I said. “But not ‘cause they didn’t try.”

  He put his hat carefully down on the ground. He stared at it for a few long seconds. Then he looked at me and opened his arms.

  “Come here.”

  “No,” I said.

  But I went to him anyway. He smelled the same. Sage. Leather. Red dust from the road on his collar and nose. These little things that I had come to know and recognize. The things I had thought about in the long stretches of captivity, and before then, in the hours of night when I waited for him to finish his duties and return to me. When I thought of Cal I thought in colors. Gold, green, and red. They blurred before me now.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I just want to know why you left,” I said lowly.

  “I didn’t mean to leave permanently,” he said. “I told Butch I’d go to our contact myself. When I came back he told me you’d left with some outlaws. And he told me I’d no longer be trail boss.”

  “What?” I exclaimed. “How come?”

  “The others seemed to think it was my fault about Tim,” he said grimly. “They reckoned if it had been me there instead of Saint, I could have done something.”

  He looked at me with a dry little smile. “They didn’t much like how I’d been attached to you, neither.”

  “I bet.”

  “A drive is a democracy, when it comes down to it. I couldn’t very well force myself back as leader.”

  “What about your contacts?” I said. “They won’t take the cattle from just anybody, will they?”

  “Saint’s name is as good as mine, as far as they’re concerned,” said Cal.

  I looked out at the red desert. Joseph sat a ways away with some Indians- other Kickapoo, I believed. Out of all Cal’s men he had been the most loyal. I wondered what had happened to Guts. He and Tim had been the least popular among the cowboys. He’d been loyal to Cal, too. Just like that they’d all rode on out of my story. I’d never see them again.

  “So how did you find me?” I asked.

  “Dumb luck,” said Cal.

  Memories of the past two weeks were piecing themselves together. I knew there had been a gunfight. Somehow I’d slipped away from Sam Twist and ended up with Cal. Somehow Sam Twist’s wagon of gold had vanished off the face of the earth. I knew Cal had all the answers. But did he trust me enough with them?

  “Come on.”

  “I heard there was a raid on the Osage. Some Comanches. Ain’t no Comanche in this area besides Little Buffalo’s band, and I knew they were friendly to the Osage, so it couldn’t be them.”

  “That’s it?”

  “One of the chief’s daughters got kidnapped- and I guess they let her go. She described the men who had done it pretty good. Of course I knew she was talkin’ about Sam. Do you remember her?”

  “Yes,” I said, shuddering. “They did bad things to her.”

  Cal nodded grimly. “I heard. Well, the Osage chief was in a tizzy about it. I was campin’ with them for a couple days while I got my affairs in order. Joseph ‘n me made some guesses as to where Sam was. The chief sent some braves with us to help. We didn’t come up on him, but we found one of his wagons.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Who was that black fella in the buckskin? His name was Shad, or somethin’.”

  “Shadrac. An old friend. He was doin’ some scoutin’ for me.”

  As big as the great plains were, somehow we all got jostled together in the middle. What happened in one small corner could spread like wildfire over miles and miles. I looked at my hands. Somehow, maybe by dumb luck, like Cal said, we’d been thrown across each other’s paths again.

  “I was wrong to leave,” said Cal. “But I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “You could have stayed.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “You could have turned me in. You’d have done that to anyone else,” I said.

  “You know I wouldn’t do that to you, Ada.”

  “Why not?” I said quietly. “Just what makes me so special to you?”

  I wanted to hear him say it. I wanted to hear him admit it to himself. He struggled to speak. At last he said, “I don’t know.”

  “You do know, Cal.”

  “I don’t. I don’t. Ada, you mix me the hell up and then ask me which way’s up and down. I can’t tell my dreams from reality sometimes. I can’t tell you-”

  “Then to hell with you, Cal,” I said. I scrubbed my eyes with the heel of my hand. That damned red sand. It got everywhere. Made your nose run and your eyes burn. It could even make you cry.