“Joseph is here,” said Miranda. “You can stop acting like animals.”

  The Kickapoo waded into camp. A giant furry animal lay slung over his back. He appeared both alarmed and amused.

  “So,” he said dryly. “The father leaves for one minute and finds his sons about to burn the tipi down.”

  The animal hit the dust. Cal stood up, wiping a bloody nose on his sleeve.

  “What’s that, Joseph?”

  “Come look, yellow-hair.”

  I stepped over. Joseph pulled out his own knife and jabbed it into the animal’s belly. I winced. With two quick strokes he had the belly open and spilling out on the grass.

  “That’s a wolf, isn’t it?” said Cal.

  “Yes.”

  Joseph reached inside the wolf with both hands. He scooped out the steaming entrails. When he got to the stomach, he held it up. Distended and gray, it reminded me of a fish eye. Then his knife moved again.

  I fancied I was dreaming. A torrent of slimy black beans spilled from the stomach, followed by gobbets of half-digested meat. Tim put a hand to his mouth.

  “Lord,” said Saint.

  “There’s your thief,” said Joseph. “Nothing but a clever wolf.”

  “I never known a wolf to behave so.”

  “How did a wolf bust a locked box?” said Miranda.

  “She was dying when I found her,” said Joseph. “The beans made her sick.”

  “I’m gonna be sick,” said Tim.

  “Wolves don’t steal alone, but this one did,” said Joseph. “And now she is dead. There might be a lesson for all of you cowboys.”

  He wiped the knife on his trousers, and stuck it back in his belt. “Say, Miranda. Do you have any biscuits?”

  “Come near my wagon with those filthy hands, I will shoot you where you stand.”

  Seeing Joseph gut the wolf was more effective than Miranda and all his buckets of water. After that we were all quick to move on.

  Well, some were more quick to move on than others.

  “This ain’t over,” Butch hissed to me. Spit flew from his busted lip. “You got Cal to do all your fightin’. Tucker knows, and Saint knows, and I know. As soon as we get to Kansas, you’re gonna wish we’d left your ass on the prairie for the Indians.”

  “You don’t scare me none,” I hissed right back. “I wish he’d knocked both your teeth out.”

  Butch Allison drew away, his eyes full of cold rage and promising revenge.

  But I wouldn’t be afraid of men like that. Cal would protect me. And even if I couldn’t rely on Cal, well, I wasn’t exactly a helpless little daisy. I could handle myself.

  ᢇ

  “Jesus Christ in a handbasket,” swore Cal.

  We all came round to look at Tucker’s swollen leg. It had nearly split his pants that morning. Miranda was busy cutting away the fabric around the centipede bite.

  A sunburst of red, orange and purple surrounded the bite. Veins of blue streamed out from the center of it like lightning from a red cloud. We didn’t need to feel his forehead to tell he had a fever.

  “I’ll go find some medicine,” said Joseph.

  “I don’t want none of your Indian witchcraft,” snapped Tucker. “What I need is some iodine.”

  “Iodine?” I said. “I think that’s a little past iodine.”

  “I know a woman-” began Joseph.

  “A what?”

  “Not a what, a who. I said I know an Osage woman, a healer, who does medicine for these things.”

  “So go find her,” said Cal, “And don’t stand here jawin’.”

  He cleared his throat and added, “Thank you.”

  Joseph left. Cal ran a hand through his hair. “You can’t ride like this?”

  “I can’t,” said Tucker.

  “You gonna have to.”

  “I can’t. Hurts too bad. I’d be hollerin’ the whole way. Would spook the horses.”

  Tucker was the kind of person who thought he knew better than everyone else- especially Cal. But our fearless leader wasn’t going to let a thing like a bad leg get in the way of his schedule.

  “So what the hell you propose I do, then?” demanded Cal.

  “You just gonna have to wait until I get better,” said Tucker.

  “Or until you die,” said Miranda.

  We all looked at him. He shrugged. “The leg is poisoned. It should come off. Or he will not make it past the week.”

  Tucker jerked away. “You ain’t takin’ no saw to my leg.”

  Cal rubbed his jaw. In his mind he worked out all the delays and missed connections between here and Baxter Springs. It nearly made him sick to say it.

  “We’ll wait one more day,” he said heavily. “There’s an Osage band ‘round here Joseph might be familiar with. If they ain’t left for the hunt already, maybe he can get some medicine.”

  Tucker raised his voice. “I don’t want no Indian-”

  “Shut the fuck up, Tucker,” said Cal viciously. “If you wasn’t such a damned stupid jackass we wouldn’t be in this position.”

  So we brought the drive to a stop again.

  They threw down the usual camp with the usual games. Cal didn’t join them. He got up and paced around. Tucker lay on the buffalo blanket, breathing hard. He tried to work his boots off his foot. But the leg was swollen so tight he couldn’t move it. When I looked at him last he was eyeing the bowie knife in his belt- wondering if he should cut the boots off, I reckon.

  We all grew tired of poor Tucker’s wheezing.

  Cal stormed off down the river.

  I got up and started to pick the burrs from my skirts.

  “Witch,” said Butch Allison. “It’s you that done this to him.”

  “You can do better than that,” I said.

  He casually pointed his gun at me. He’d taken it out to clean. I stared down the black hole, big as a quarter. It hypnotized me. It scared me.

  “One day I’ll get you alone,” he said. Loud enough so the others could hear.

  I said, “But not today.”

  “No. But one day.”

  I turned and followed Cal.

  Lucky for us, we’d come close enough to the river before we stopped. Cal told me that in spring the little trickling ravine became a mighty rager, tearing up trees and roots, carrying away any buffalo that tried to cross. By the end of summer you could hardly see any water at all.

  I walked behind him along the grassy banks. He must have heard me, but his eyes were on the river. Little crystals of sunlight bounced across its surface.

  We came to a higher, dry spot. Cal threw himself down and rubbed his eyes. I sat down next to him.

  “I got to mind the herd,” he said, still rubbing his eyes. “But I can’t get the strength. I’m so damned pissed.”

  “It ain’t your fault.”

  “I ain’t like Saint. Everything I got is depending on this drive.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was gonna go out West and build myself a little farmhouse. Work that land.”

  “You ain’t coming back to Texas?”

  “Hell no,” he said.

  “Well, quit complainin’. You can’t tell the future. Anything could happen between now and then.”

  He looked at me. His green eyes squinted, both annoyed and amused. I’d interrupted his pity party.

  But what he said next had nothing to do with the cattle drive. “Say, Ada, this light makes your skin real pretty.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. Come here.”

  He put out his arms and I lay down into them. I felt his chest rise and fall. Then without warning, he rolled over on top of me. His hands began fumbling with his belt.

  I threw my hands over his shoulders. He got his cock out and lifted up my skirts. A finger plunged inside me; I was still dry. I winced.

  He slowed down. Thrust, thrust. With each push of his fingers he leaned closer, bringing his face to mine, until his lips came down with a biting, sucking force.

  “I just need one,” he said breathlessly. “I been lookin’ at you all damn week wantin’ it so bad it made my cock hurt.”

  “What if someone comes-”

  “I’ll be fast,” he murmured.

  I opened my legs. He took his fingers out and replaced them with the head of his cock.

  This was the first time we’d made it since that night in the Kiowa camp. I hadn’t been able to see him then. I could see him now.

  He seemed like those pale statues of Greek gods; carved with all the detail of a marble sculpture. His green eyes dipped to me under long golden lashes. When he moved inside me he fell forward over my breasts. I could feel each scrape of his cotton shirt against my exposed nipples. But more than that, I could feel the strong heart beating underneath everything.

  Cal pumped his cock inside me with long, hard strokes. I knew he didn’t mean to be fast at all. He got hold of my chin and made me look into his eyes as he claimed me. All week, he said, he’d been staring at me. Waiting for the right time to get me alone, to lift my skirts up and wet his cock inside me. This was a side of Cal he kept hidden. A lustful, demanding beast that came to life inside him as he fucked me in the prairie grass.

  One hand groped my bottom, holding it still so he could hit my venus with each direct thrust. The other, which he balanced on, wrapped lightly around my throat.

  It built inside me. That thing I didn’t have a name for, that Cal could ignite with just a few strokes. It turned me into a wanton, moaning woman. I tried to hold it in. But the combined movement of his hips, and his presence above me told otherwise. I would have to submit to it. I would have to submit to the pleasures he could give.

  When he sensed I was close he picked up speed, and then everything else went dark but the cries of my mind, begging him not to stop, not to stop. I dug my heels into the muscles of his buttocks, which clenched and unclenched as he drove his cock to the deepest parts of me.

  We were one in that moment. He held me as I came. And then his jaw clenched- his eyebrows came together- and a look of tenderness and masculine depravity came over his face. He pumped his seed inside me in three hard strokes. I felt it deluge my insides like a hot stream of life.

  We lay like that for a long time. Then I said,

  “I think I’m the world’s biggest fool.”

  “Don’t you feel sorry for yourself, after you done told me not to do the same thing.”

  “I know how people make babies,” I said. “We coulda made one right now.”

  “You still drinkin’ that tea?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’ll be fine.”

  I knew the old folks had their ways of getting young girls to stay without children. But those were old black folks. I knew nothing about the Indian medicines. Maybe they didn’t work on people like me.

  Cal got his breath back and so did I. I pushed the thought of Joseph and his pregnancy teas from my mind.

  “How come you ain’t got a wife, Cal?” I asked.

  “You sound like Joseph,” he said dryly.

  “Aw.”

  “I’m serious. You been buggin’ me about gettin’ married. I never thought to put the question to you. Where’s your wife? Children?”

  “Don’t have any.”

  “But you must be- what, forty?”

  “Forty-one,” he said- a little grimly.

  “So?”

  “Don’t know. I been a cowboy for almost ten years, a beggar before that, and an Indian before that. None of these things make for good husbands.”

  He smiled. “But- there was a Comanche girl. When I was younger. Her name was Wing. Almost married her.”

  “What happened?”

  “Cholera.”

  “Oh.”

  “What about you?”

  “Daddy wanted me to marry his friend Mr. Henry,” I said. “He was an old cat. Looked like a bug. I almost ran away from home when I heard about the engagement.”

  “I can’t see anyone makin’ you do anythin’ you don’t want to do, Ada.”

  I smiled. “I think we have that in common.”

  “So what happened to Mr. Henry?”

  “I told him to go to hell.”

  “Your father-”

  “Oh, he came around.”

  I smiled at the memory. We stood up after a bit, and walked on down the river. Then Cal took me over a little hill. It was the only view for miles in this endless stretch of flatland.

  I looked out at the nodding prairie. Hard to believe such a place existed on the same continent as the forests of Georgia and the bustling cities of Massachusetts. Hard to believe I’d come as far as that.

  “Ada!” Cal said, his voice hitching in excitement. “See there?”

  “See what?”

  He turned me to the right, and pointed to the distance.

  “Cal, I don’t see nothin’.”

  “Over there.”

  Clusters of brown specks moved on the horizon. They took shape, separated, and reformed again like a wave. As we looked on more came to join them, until they blotted the joining of earth and sky as far as we could see.

  “It’s the buffalo,” said Cal.

  We watched the herd move for a while longer. I wanted them to move closer. But they stayed on the very edge, and moved out slowly as we waited. I imagined them all falling over the lip of a great jug that held the rest of the world inside it.

  Cal put his arms around my waist. I leaned against him. His wide chest engulfed me, and his strong arms held me in a wonderful cage. Through his vest and shirt I felt his strong heart beating. A sweet tune I’d come to know well. He rested his chin on top my head.

  We stood like that for a long time. I wanted to turn around to kiss him. Maybe pick up what we’d left off. But this felt too pure to stop. Cal could do things to me with his body. He could light me like a firework and make love with the endurance of a stallion. But nothing he did in those moments could compare to this simple feeling. Just being near him, feeling him alive and whole next to me. Smelling his earthy cowboy smell. Watching the endless dance of other, primitive creatures just reminded me how lucky we were, to have this moment. I could feel my love for him moving through me with each deep push of his breath against my back.

  I wonder if he thought the same. His hands stroked my stomach over the Spanish skirt. Such a big man, to be so tender.

  “Come on, Boston,” he murmured after a while. “Let’s head on back.”

  We went on back to the camp. Tucker was worse. Joseph still hadn’t returned. The wounded cowboy made such a show of hollering and yelling it made the horses uneasy. With nothing to say for the rest of us.

  “He ought to have a proper doctor for that leg,” said Guts.

  “I say we just cut it off,” declared Tim.

  Miranda eyed Tucker. Then he eyed his jagged buffalo knife. It was the sharpest thing we owned among us, in that camp.

  Cal shook his head. “Tucker would shoot you if you took that leg off.”

  “Then take away his guns.”

  “Who’s gonna be the one to do it? I know it ain’t me,” said Stu.

  They all fell quiet.

  “This isn’t good,” muttered Cal.

  “Joseph is sure about that Osage girl?” asked Saint.

  “It’s all we can count on, at this point.”

  They looked at Miranda, who shrugged. As the cook he was supposed to have some working knowledge of medicines and healing.

  “I never knew a centipede to bite like that,” he said, and settled gloomily down into his coat.

  “Well, I guess we’ll wait,” said Cal.

  ᢇ

  “I’m gonna teach you how to shoot,” declared Cal.

  “You sure that’s a good idea?” hawed Tim. He looked me up and down. “They’d hang you in Tennessee, for teachin’ a nigra how to use a pistol.”

  “Good thing we ain’t in Tennessee. C’mere, Ada. Hold this.”

  Cal pushed his gun into my hand. I had never held one in my life. The weight surprised me.