Chapter Thirteen Trouble Calling
The spring wind rolled across the country, lifting curls of dust from the wagon ruts and stirring the grass into waves.
Thomas McBride reined his bay gelding to a slower walk along the ridge above the river, eyes narrowed against the white glare.
The land lay open as a ledger: cottonwoods marking the water like tall, spare figures; prairie running off toward the horizon.
He had spent years learning how to read it: what it yielded, what it hid, what it owed.
Lately, it felt delinquent.
The ranch was too quiet. Cattle bunched together instead of spreading to graze, with their eyes tilted north, as if the wind carried warnings only they could hear.
His horse tossed its head and snorted, ears pricked.
Thomas laid a palm on the gelding’s neck to steady him and, by habit, steady himself.
There had been talk for some time—bands moving, military and Indian raids, coaches ambushed and robbed, and whites and Indians killed alike. Talk didn’t bother him; losses did. And loss was what he had been living with since the last post rider had failed to arrive.
He had sent money to Boston in good faith and expectation.
Letters, too—words he actually did not feel, with details that did not exist, written solely to produce a result.
And they had successfully created the result he had wanted and needed.
She had agreed. Violet Carter, of Boston had agreed to be his mail-order bride: to become a housekeeper to keep his house, a cook to keep his table, and a womb to keep his name.
He had promised comforts he had no intention of furnishing and a tender heart he did not possess, because any man with sense understood that promises were paper and reality was iron.
Paper got you what you needed. Iron kept it.
And now, according to the new talk, a coach had been taken, possibly hers.
If true, his paper had blown away in a wind that was not of his making. That stung worse than anything. He disliked being cheated, whether by drought, by man, or by God.
?
By noon he had ridden the north fence and set a cracked post. The work should have done its usual thing—bleed off his temper, tie thought to muscle.
It did not. He was coiling wire when dust rose across a field in a thin line like smoke.
A rider came hard, not a man who Thomas recognized: blue coat rounded by road, hat cock-eyed, mount lathered and hollow-eyed.
Thomas swung up on his horse, jaw tight, and met the stranger at the fence line. The soldier slid forward, nearly falling, and croaked, “Water.”
?
Thomas led him back to his ranch and to the water trough. The man bent, gulped with both hands, and came up coughing. His face was blotched with sun and shock, his eyes rimmed red.
“Ambush,” he rasped. “Up north. Stage Road. Coach was taken. Kiowa.”
The words dropped like stones. Thomas felt the first hit of cold, then the hot wash that always followed—the flare of anger that clarified everything.
“How many?” he said.
“Too many. Most of the passengers killed. All of them robbed. One woman taken by the savages. We tried to follow and lost half our company for our trouble.” The soldier’s voice caught. He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve.
Thomas steadied him by the elbow, more to halt the man’s useless swaying than out of kindness.
His thoughts ran ahead, quick and exact.
Woman taken. His money wasted. He had no tears to offer for strangers and none for a woman who, if she had any sense at all, would have kept to her place on a seat and not invited attention.
If she had been taken, then somebody else had put a hand on what he had paid for. That was theft in any language.
“Where?” Thomas asked. “Exactly.”
The soldier shook his head. “North fork of the road. Four long bends past the cottonwood grove. We found the stage burned out and the driver dead. More than half the passengers scalped and massacred. Only two, a man and a woman, escaped into the tall grass and shrubs to tell the tale.” He stopped.
“They told us of a bloody massacre and of a dark-haired woman taken by a savage on a brown-and-white horse.”
Thomas nodded once. Not acceptance. He would ride to the place, measure it with his own eyes. Men lied, especially to themselves; ground did not.
“You can rest your horse in the shade,” he said shortly. “Then be gone by sundown.”
He walked back to his bay, uncinched the saddle, and felt the flare of anger settle into the iron he preferred.
He was heated to the thought of her being taken.
If the woman lived, he would take her back.
If not, he would settle accounts with the world that had dared to bill him for goods never delivered.
?
That evening he sat on the porch with a ledger open to a blank page and a cold cup of coffee at his boot.
The crickets sang; a thin breeze rolled down from the north carrying the tired smell of blown dust and distant ash.
In the lamplight the columns on the page gleamed, ready to be filled: steer branded, calves dropped, salt and oats purchased.
There hadn’t been much to fill those columns with lately, half his small herd having been sold off to settle a debt several months ago.
Jim Harkins, a neighbor, appeared out of nowhere on his flea-bitten gray, an unusual visit. When Thomas waved him forward, he took a seat on the bench with a creak of old knees. “Army rider stopped here?” he asked.
“Stopped. Talked too much. Left.”
Jim grunted. “Town says a coach was hit. Maybe two.”
“Town says many things.” Thomas made a mark on the paper. “Sometimes the town is right.”
Jim glanced at him. “You going to look?”
It was not a comment Thomas had expected, but it gave him added resolve. He set his pencil down. “I am.”
“Alone?” Jim asked.
“Two men are slower than one. And I am not hunting bison.” Thomas turned the ledger so the lamplight pooled on the page.
“My mail-order bride was on that coach. If she’s dead, then the matter is closed.
If she’s not, then she belongs here.” He tapped the paper.
“On this side of the house ledger. Not the loss column.”
Jim let out a long breath through his nose, like a horse that had decided not to spook. “You ever think on the human side of it?”
“I just did.” Thomas shut the book. “All people owe their debts same as cattlemen. She owes hers.”
Jim stared out at the dark yard. “You always were a hard man, Tom.”
“Soft men get conned,” Thomas said. “You’d be the first to tell me that when the tally comes due.”
Jim didn’t argue. He took a drink of coffee and made a face. “It’s cold.”
“So is life,” Thomas said, and rose.
?
Badger Crossing boiled like a kicked anthill.
Wagons blockaded the street; boys ran with shouts; women pulled children close and glared at any man who looked as if they might touch one of them.
A knot of men formed around a soldier outside the general store, their hats pushed back and their mouths hard. Thomas shouldered in.
“Red-skinned devils took the coach whole,” the soldier was saying. “We tracked them—blood and bodies. Two survivors. Survivors said they saw a white woman grabbed and run off with by one of them savages on a horse.”
Whispers rose—pity, outrage, noises that never prevented anything.
“When?” Thomas said, flat.
“A week?” the soldier answered, surprised by Thomas’s tone. “Maybe less.”
Thomas did a quick mental calculation: exactly when Violet would have been on the road, if she’d quit Boston when promised.
Thomas felt a swift, concentrated fury—not grief, not fear.
Rage at waste. Rage at being made a fool of by fate and strangers.
He pushed out of the knot and stood with both hands on the hitch rail until the first sharp itch of violence left him.
Then he swung up, rode to the smith, bought cartridges without bargaining, and left town without saying goodbye.
?
At the ranch that night he opened the drawer where he kept receipts and maps and took out her letter. The paper was creased soft, the ink thin from handling, but he had not been handling it out of tenderness. He kept things that might have use later; a promise on paper was a tool like any other.
I will come. Do not doubt it.
He had made sure she would write that. He had engineered it.
He told her what Boston girls liked to hear: plain talk about respect, a roof, work that wasn’t too mean, a place at table, a future with a man steady and grateful.
He had chosen his words carefully, knowing exactly which lines would lure her into believing she was wanted and safe.
And she would be safe, provided she worked, obeyed, and didn’t cost him more than she was worth. He did not see the cruelty in that; he saw arithmetic.
He folded the letter, slid it into his vest pocket, and went to bed without praying. God answered men who didn’t need Him more often than those who begged, in Thomas’s experience.
?
He rode at first light. The bay ate up ground; the river unwound beside them, green-brown and thick, pulling to a future Thomas didn’t care about. He kept the water to one side, the sun on his cheek, and his mind on the thing he could control: his next step.
Midday, carrion birds tilted black above a stand of scrub oak.
Thomas turned that way at a lope and found what he expected: a soldier in blue with his unseeing face to the sky, leather stripped, boots gone, cartridge loops empty.
The dead man’s hands had been folded on his chest by somebody who knew what a soul needed afterward.
Not by savages, then; by another soldier who had survived.