Chapter 18 #3
Both horses had carried decent flesh, better fed than most David had seen on the road since leaving the Hollow.
Clothes worn but serviceable, nothing patched past use.
These hadn't been desperate men forced into it by hunger.
They'd had enough to get by. They'd wanted the wagon because taking it was easier than earning what filled it.
Curtis went through one saddlebag and stopped, holding up two mismatched pocketknives, a woman's pair of gloves, and a wallet emptied of anything cash could buy anymore.
"These aren't all theirs," Curtis said.
"No," David said, and didn't need to say more than that. Whatever these two had done before today, David and his group hadn't been the first ones to meet them on a quiet road.
He checked both for anything that suggested a larger group behind them and found nothing connecting them to anybody else. They might have been working alone, or they might have belonged to a larger group. No way to know which.
Two riderless horses stood nearby, spooked but catchable, and David considered for a moment whether they were worth taking. Two more horses meant two more sets of shoulders that could eventually help pull the wagon, if they drove.
Curtis shut the idea down fast. They didn't know if either horse had ever worn harness, how they'd behave under it if they had, or whether they were sound enough for another hundred and fifty miles of hard travel.
More horses meant more feed, more water, more handling, more tracks marking their path.
"Somebody knows those horses," Curtis added.
David looked at him. "You think somebody's looking for these two?"
"Don't know. But if they are, I don't want to be riding into them on their horses."
That settled it faster than the feed and water math had. Curtis stripped the saddles and bridles, keeping the useful straps and whatever sat in the saddlebags worth the weight, and turned both horses loose to fend for themselves.
Karen watched them trot off toward the tree line.
"They didn't choose their riders," Curtis said, and left it at that.
David wanted distance from the bodies immediately, and nobody argued for burying them. There wasn't time to spend exposed on an open road where anybody else might come along.
There wasn't much to be done about the wagon tracks pointing straight west from the scene, but a couple of miles on they reached a fork, one branch continuing west, the other bending south.
David took the south branch.
"Home's west," Curtis said.
"So are our tracks."
They held the southern road for a mile or two before David found a farm lane cutting back west, and they followed that instead, the detour costing time but making any casual follower's job harder than a straight line would have.
They moved west, then left the road at the first opening that could take a wagon, working deeper into cover than they'd bothered with the night before. David kept checking behind them the whole way. Smokey did too, glancing back more than his usual pace called for.
Karen led Whiskey rather than ride him, sparing the graze any unnecessary pressure. Curtis checked the wound again once they'd stopped for the day. No fresh bleeding.
They pushed several miles before choosing a camp far enough from any road to feel safe, Curtis positioning the wagon where the tree line hid it completely.
No fire. Waylon and Willie came out of harness, and Curtis checked them over more thoroughly than the work that day had strictly required — shoulders, backs, legs, feet, twice through on each animal.
"They're fine," David said, watching him start a third pass on Willie's legs.
"I know."
He kept checking anyway, and David let him, understanding well enough that Curtis was working through the day with his hands because there wasn't another way he knew how to do it.
June was fine. Whiskey's wound got cleaned a second time, the bleeding fully stopped now, the horse standing calm through the whole process.
Karen sat near the wagon afterward with her pistol in her lap, slowly working a cloth over the barrel and grip.
David watched a moment.
"Don't," Karen said, without looking up.
"Didn't say anything."
"You were going to."
"No." David said.
She glanced at him. "Now you sound like me."
She went back to the pistol, and David let her finish it in her own time. When Karen finally set it aside, her hands were steady.
Curtis handed around food from what they'd taken off the dead men. Nobody ate much of it. Smokey lay where he could watch the approach, more alert than usual even for him.
Curtis broke the quiet first, angry at himself for letting the two men get as close as they had.
"I saw them split up before they reached us," Curtis said. "Should've read that for what it was right then."
"Wasn't just you," David said. "I let them close too."
"So did I," Karen said.
Nobody needed to assign the blame further than that.
David turned the larger lesson over instead — the wagon had changed the rules faster than any of them had adjusted to it.
Two days ago, two decent people had backed away at the mention of sickness.
Today, two other men had looked at the same wagon and decided three lives were worth less than what it carried.
"The masks wouldn't have worked on them," Karen said.
"No," David said.
"Nothing would've," Curtis said.
David wasn't sure that was entirely true. Distance would have. That was the change going forward — not treating every stranger as a threat, but not letting anybody close enough to draw on them before they'd shown their intentions one way or another.
"So, what do we do different tomorrow?" Curtis asked.
"Stop farther out. Let them come to us if they want to talk, and keep enough room that a hand going for a weapon means something before it's already too late to answer it."
Curtis nodded slowly, turning that over the same way he turned over anything involving the horses — testing it before he trusted it. "That'll cost us time too."
"Everything out here costs us time," David said. "At least this costs less than today did."
Before sleep, Karen checked Whiskey one last time.
David came over. The wound had stopped bleeding cleanly, and Whiskey was eating again, which told them both more than anything else could have.
Karen rubbed his neck a while in silence.
"I shot a man today," she said.
"You did," David said, not denying it.
She was quiet a long moment. "I'd do it again."
"I know."
David took first watch, the attackers' weapons stacked within reach, Smokey settled against his leg.
He listened to the camp settle around him — Waylon shifting his weight somewhere in the dark, Whiskey's steady chewing as he worked through the last of his feed despite the graze, Karen and Curtis gone quiet enough that David guessed they'd finally found sleep.
Smokey raised his head once at some sound farther off, listened a long moment, and lowered it again without further concern.
David didn't lower his own guard the same way. He kept his eyes on the direction of the road even though the trees hid it completely from here, turning over the day without much drama left in him to spend on it.
They'd gained close to thirty-five or forty useful miles west across the two days, though the ground they'd physically covered ran well past that with every detour counted.
Home remained a long way off. Now they carried medical supplies worth more than anything else on the road, a sound horse with a fresh bullet graze, two dead men behind them, and no guarantee the next stretch would be any kinder than this one had been.
Tomorrow, David decided, nobody would get close enough to surprise them again.