Chapter Thirteen Trouble Calling #2
Thomas removed his hat, not for respect but because it was hot, and then decided, from long habit, to put the ground in order.
He scraped a grave with his spade, rolled the man in, covered him, and tamped the dirt.
It was a use of a half hour that bought him nothing.
He did it anyway, the way he’d shut a broken gate on a neighbor’s place when he found it.
A voice came from the slope. “Kind thing, that. Most ride on.”
Thomas turned, rifled half up. The man in the brush held his hands open, empty palms out. Gray in his beard, shirt sweat-dark, the look of a coyote who’d learned which way to trot when men were around.
“Name’s Ezra Pike,” he said. “Scout when the army pays me, hunter when they don’t. Saw your mount from the ridge.”
“Thomas McBride,” Thomas said. He did not lower the rifle much.
“You following sign?” Ezra asked.
“Following what’s mine,” Thomas answered. He watched the man’s eyes for the flinch of judgment. He saw something else instead: the quick, private assessment of a trader weighing goods in a dim back room.
“Woman taken off a coach?” Ezra said. “I heard about that.”
“She was coming from Boston to my ranch.” Thomas kept his tone flat. “I paid her passage. I wrote her letters at cost to my patience and she agreed to be my bride. She owes me work, and I mean to collect it if she’s alive to render it.”
“Sounds fair,” Ezra said. He neither smiled nor frowned. “I spotted a Kiowa band after a fight on the river, two days’ ride from here. Saw where women crossed. I kept my distance, like a man keeps his fingers.”
“You can take me there?” Thomas asked.
“I can.” Ezra glanced at the fresh dirt. “And I can tell you you’ll want a cooler head than your words sound like right now. If you walk in hot, you’ll end cold. Understand me?”
Thomas looked at him, deciding. The man spoke like one who didn’t need to be agreed with to be right. Useful. “I hear you,” he said. “You don’t have to like me.”
“I generally don’t like the men I guide,” Ezra said mildly. “But I like to be paid. That keeps us friends enough.”
?
They rode along the river. Ezra read the country without scolding Thomas for not seeing what he saw.
Here ponies had worked hard; there a travois pole had cut a clean line in the mud; farther along, a cook fire had been smothered with wet clay that cracked now like gray bread.
Thomas watched, learned, and said little.
Learning was also a kind of ownership; he collected what would be useful.
By late afternoon they found ash still faintly warm under a scatter of willow leaves. Ezra stirred it with a stick and lifted a bead, blue and cheap, from the edge of the bank. “Traders’ stuff,” he said. “Women like it for stitching and such.”
Thomas felt nothing at that but a tightening in his jaw. Trinkets meant a woman had stood here. If it was Violet, she had been foolish enough to set foot on the riverbank and leave a trace. If it was not Violet, then the world had other women in it and he remained empty-handed.
They made camp in a wind-scooped hollow and ate bacon thin as paper and coffee that tasted horrible.
Ezra asked where Thomas’s people were. Thomas said, “Buried or scattered,” and let the matter lie.
He did not talk about his father’s death or his mother’s notions of decency.
He did not talk about the lean years or the gamble he’d already won.
He certainly did not talk about Violet beyond what mattered.
“She was meant to come,” he said, rolling his blanket. “She didn’t arrive. That is the sum.”
“You say meant like a brand,” Ezra murmured.
“It is a brand,” Thomas said. “I paid the iron.”
Ezra studied him across the coals, not friendly, not hostile, like a man sizing up weather. “We’ll start early,” he said. “Dawn will be worth more than talk.”
Thomas slept in pieces, dreamless, which he preferred. Dreams were feeling, and feeling was a tax he did not owe.
?
At first light the river drew them like a line on a map. Birds quarreled in the sky; a heron lifted and skimmed away with a slow, offended flap. Around midmorning the air changed. Ezra slowed, lifted two fingers.
“Smell it?” he asked.
Thomas did: the thin sour of burned powder and, beneath it, the far rot of meat.
The ground scuffed, then pitted; the wheel-rut of a light wagon bit deep and tore out; the earth kicked up in sprays where horses had turned hard and stopped harder.
The stage coach lay on its side. Buzzards watched sullenly from the ridge.
Thomas walked to the place, not in respect but in inspection. The numbers were simple: a fight had come, men had died, others had fled, and whoever had owned the field afterward had done the accounting with their hands—anything of value taken.
He studied the churned earth, the blackened ruts where men had died. But he saw no trace of what he sought. No sign of a woman, no mark that spoke of her presence. Ezra crouched, touched the dirt, and shook his head.
“They ambushed the coach here, but they didn’t start here,” the scout said. “If any captives were with them, the trail will tell us farther on.”
So they pressed on, shadowing the river, following the faint paths left by ponies. For hours and days, they rode through low sky and scattered groves, the sun burning off the last of the morning haze, until the land bent again and showed fresher signs.
They came at last to a stretch of higher ground where ashes marked old firesides and the grass lay pressed flat in wide circles.
Poles from a tepee still leaned together, weathered and empty, their coverings carried off.
Ezra crouched, touching the blackened stones and the trampled earth.
“Kiowa camp,” he said. “They pulled out quick, maybe a day or two before soldiers pressed them. Women, children, ponies—all moved on. When the army caught them, it would’ve been on the run from here.
” The signs told the story clear: meat cut clean from bones and left behind in haste, a child’s moccasin too small to matter to those who fled, the tracks pointing toward the river bend where pursuit must have finally closed in.
?
Finally, at the water’s edge, they came upon the knee-deep churn where animals had crossed.
Here the ground was littered with sign. Thomas stooped over a splintered arrow shaft, the feathers at its end dyed a dull red that had bled into the wet mud.
Ezra picked up a fragment of parfleche, the painted rawhide stiff and curling where it had been cut free in haste.
“They left in a hurry,” the scout murmured. “Didn’t have time to carry everything.”
The river had swallowed the rest, but these scraps were enough to tell of warriors driving ponies across, pushing women and children ahead.
Then half set in mud, the small thing that clenched Thomas’ chest with hard recognition.
He pried it up with a thumbnail: a pearl button, not round but oval, the kind you saw on a dress sold to a hopeful girl who told herself she would wear it in a better room.
He turned it in his fingers. It meant nothing and everything.
It meant a woman whose clothes had included foolishness had stood where he stood; maybe she had torn loose crossing, maybe some hand had ripped a bodice in haste.
He had not asked what color dresses Violet owned.
He did not care for colors. He cared for proof.
Ezra came to crouch beside him and looked without touching. “From a traveler,” he said. “Could be hers, could be any. But it’s the right sort of wrong thing to find.”
Thomas put the button in his vest pocket with the letter—paper and shell, two soft things carrying hard meaning—and stood.
On the far bank the prints of women and children showed where the ground slumped under many feet going up, then steadied along the top.
He marked the direction with his eyes. He did not say please God. He said, “Let’s move.”
They hadn’t gone far before the riverbank told a darker tale.
Grass was flattened wide as a parade ground, the earth gouged by hooves that had circled and wheeled in frenzy.
Here and there the black crust of powder burns marked where rifles had fired close; farther on, a patch of soil lay soaked dark where blood had spilled and dried.
Thomas dismounted and found the outline of a soldier’s cap crushed into the mud, its brim torn away, and beyond it a lance broken clean in two.
Ezra crouched near a scatter of spent cartridges and the pale bones of a pony already picked over by birds.
“They caught them here,” the scout said, voice low.
“Band tried to shield the women while the rest fought. Soldiers pressed hard, but they paid for every yard.” A single feather, muddied and bent, clung to a thornbush at the edge of the trampled ground, stirring when the wind shifted, as if the fight still shivered in the air.
They pressed on from the scarred ground in silence, the river sliding dark beside them.
The trail grew clearer now—prints more hurried, deeper, as if both Kiowa and soldiers had driven themselves near to breaking.
Twice Ezra halted to study sign: a horse that had gone down and been left, a boot heel dragging briefly before vanishing again.
The land felt tense, holding the echo of men who had only just passed. Thomas kept his eyes to the horizon, the certainty growing in him that the hunters and the hunted were not far ahead.
They were about to cross their horses over the river when suddenly soldiers appeared on the skyline, pale in the glare.
They rode down with the look of men tired of chasing what did not want to be caught.
The lieutenant in front had dust cut into the corners of his mouth and a way of tightening his jaw that said he heard disobedience even when a man kept quiet.
“This ground is dangerous,” the officer said. “Turn around and go home.”
“We’re following a band that crossed here,” Thomas answered. “I have cause to believe a white woman is with them.”
“Every settler has cause to believe something,” the officer said. “We’ve seen no white women with the parties we’ve shadowed. Just camp sign. Cold sign.”
Ezra said mildly, “Found tracks fresh this morning on the far bank. Light feet. Small. Not soldier-sized. And a pearl button.”
“What you going to do?” the lieutenant snapped. “Waltz into an Indian camp and ask nicely? You’ll die for the privilege. I won’t spend men on your private errand.”
“I didn’t ask for your men,” Thomas said.
“You didn’t have to,” the officer muttered. He looked at Ezra. “Keep clear of our patrols. Hear a bugle, you turn your mounts. That’s an order whether you recognize it or not.”
He wheeled away. The dust of him stuck in Thomas’s throat.
Ezra spat dryly and watched them go. “He’s not wrong about dying,” he said. “He’s just not right about everything else.”
“I didn’t come for a sermon,” Thomas said. “I came for direction.” He pointed. “Let’s go.”
The current shoved hard against their legs as they entered the shallow water, not much more than belly-deep to the horses, but Ezra kept his mount steady, eyes scanning the far bank where willows leaned low, while Thomas urged his bay through with a firm hand.
Mud sucked at the horses’ hooves, water slapping cold against the men’s boots.
On the far side the prints showed clear—told a story of ponies scrambling up the bank in a rush, moccasins sliding in the wet clay, a woman’s smaller step dragged by the weight of skirts.
Thomas studied them a moment, his face set.
“They crossed here,” he said flatly. “With her.” He urged the bay onward to the shore.
?
Afternoon burned itself dull. The land slid from grass to sand to clay.
They found a skirt hem torn as if caught and wrenched free, calico pale with a sprig of green.
Thomas touched the edge with the back of his knuckles.
It smelled faintly of smoke and something once floral, long gone to dust. He folded the scrap and put it with the button and the letter. Not keepsakes; exhibits.
“Could be any woman,” Ezra said. No gentling in it, just truth.
“Or could be mine,” Thomas answered. “Which is the only portion of the truth I am equipped to spend.”
“You talk like a storekeeper,” Ezra said.
“I am one,” Thomas said. “I store what’s mine. I keep tally. I collect.”
At a willow hollow they found the ghost of cooking—stones blackened, bones cracked to suck marrow, a place where a child had played with a stick in mud and cut a crooked pattern.
Thomas stared at the small marks too long, then shook off the useless drag in his chest. He had no interest in the innocent habits of other men’s children.
They camped in the lee of a fallen sycamore and ate with the muteness of men who preferred food to talk.
Thomas raged silently at the thought that Violet had been stolen from him.
But he gazed into the hot coals and said nothing.
He had learned long ago that heat, held tight, made iron workable.
He would fault no forge that burned hot.
He slept, woke, slept again, the night broken into uneven measures.
In one waking he took out the letter, not to read it, but to feel the scratch of paper against his fingers.
He reminded himself of the sequence: he had asked, she had agreed, he had paid, she had set out, something had intervened. He would now intervene harder.