Chapter 19
Two quiet days had passed since the shooting, and Curtis was already crouched beside Whiskey when David got up, Karen beside him, both studying the healing graze in the gray early light.
"How's it look?" David asked.
"Better," Curtis said. "No swelling worth worrying about, and Whiskey shifted his weight evenly onto the leg without any hitch in his stance."
"Ride him?" Karen asked.
Curtis looked the horse over a moment longer before answering. "Easy riding."
"That's what I was going to do."
"That's why I said it before you could argue."
Karen gave him a look that didn't argue the point.
Curtis moved to Waylon and Willie next, both sound after two days’ work, and Willie immediately started nosing around for anything worth stealing from the nearest saddlebag.
"He watches Whiskey get shot and learns nothing," Karen said.
"Willie wasn't the one who got shot," Curtis said.
"Don't tell him that", David said. "He'll be disappointed."
David spread the map while they finished. After the shooting, he wanted even less traffic than they'd been risking, which meant more county roads and farm lanes rather than reconnecting with anything they'd used heading east. He figured eighteen to twenty useful miles if the roads cooperated.
Curtis looked over his shoulder at the route. "And how many miles do we travel to get those twenty?"
"More."
"That's becoming your answer for everything."
They broke camp without further discussion.
David rode farther ahead on June than he had the day before, Smokey ranging the gap between him and the wagon. Karen sat Whiskey easy, no sign the gelding minded the added weight. Curtis drove the team at a steady pace behind them all.
The morning held cool and clear, the kind of light that made the whole world look a little more honest than it probably was.
David found himself thinking about the Hollow more than usual — whether the garden had come up yet, whether Grace had gotten the second field turned, whether Luke had grown another inch in the weeks since David had last measured him against the doorframe.
They reached a long straight stretch where David spotted movement well ahead — a lone traveler leading a pack horse.
David stopped immediately, positioning June off to one side of the road rather than letting the man close the distance unchecked.
Curtis stopped the wagon well behind him. Karen held her position near it.
The traveler stopped too, respecting the space without needing to be told why.
"Morning," David called across the distance.
"Morning." The man looked between David and the wagon, curious but not pushing it. "Headed east myself."
"West," David said.
Neither needed anything from the other, and neither offered more than that. The man's eyes lingered on the wagon a beat longer than the rest of the exchange had taken, but he kept his distance the whole way past, giving them a wide enough berth that Smokey didn't so much as lift his head at him.
Once he'd gone, Curtis brought the wagon forward again. "That went better."
"Nobody pointed a gun at us," David said.
"Our standards have dropped," Karen said, and nobody argued the point.
The day settled into the kind of quiet travel David hadn't let himself expect anymore — spring country drying out in patches where the sun reached it, new grass pushing up along the ditches, fields here and there showing the fresh cuts of somebody working ground that had sat idle all winter.
Smoke rose from a farmhouse well off their road, and David noted it without turning toward it.
Another field a mile on had been recently turned, nobody visible working it, just the evidence that somebody had.
People were coming back to the business of growing food instead of only surviving until spring. David had watched the same thing happen slowly at the Hollow since the thaw, and it looked the same out here — one field at a time, one family at a time, nobody making a show of it.
Curtis stopped to check the wagon after several miles, and Willie made his usual attempt at the roadside grass the moment his head was free enough to reach it.
"Persistent," Karen said.
"Greedy," Curtis said, pushing his nose away.
"Focused," David offered.
"You're encouraging him."
"He's a horse."
"He knows," Curtis said, and went back to checking the traces.
June chose that moment to stretch her own neck toward the same patch of grass, and Curtis caught it out of the corner of his eye.
"Apparently you've encouraged all of them."
David didn't have a good answer for that, so he didn't offer one. Karen checked Whiskey's shoulder once more while they were stopped, found it holding steady, and they moved on.
A soft stretch of road forced them onto the shoulder an hour later, and one wagon wheel sank several inches before Curtis felt it happening and stopped the team rather than let them dig in deeper trying to power through.
David looked at the wheel, half-buried in mud that hadn't fully dried since the winter. Curtis studied it, then looked at David.
"You remember that chain you didn't want?"
"I knew this was coming."
It didn't take long. Curtis ran the chain from the wagon's frame to a solid roadside tree, using it as an anchor point to keep the wagon from sliding deeper while Waylon and Willie worked it sideways onto firmer ground a few feet at a time.
Five minutes, maybe ten, and the wheel came free without any drama beyond the mud itself.
Curtis coiled the chain back into the wagon bed.
"You done?" David asked.
"For now."
They stopped for a midday break, and David spread the map again, the country ahead narrowing toward the river corridor they'd already dealt with once heading east.
The choices weren't many. A river only let travelers cross in so many places, and every road eventually funneled toward one of them.
He put a finger on the maintained bridge they'd used outbound. Curtis remembered the toll group without needing reminding.
"They weren't bad people," Karen said.
"No," David agreed. That was exactly the problem.
Outbound, three poor travelers with little worth remembering had passed through without much trouble.
Now they had a loaded wagon, a paired team, medical cargo hidden under clothing, and extra rifles taken off two dead men.
Even honest people remembered a wagon like that, and remembering meant talking, and talking meant word traveling faster than David wanted it to.
The hostile roadblock wasn't worth discussing. That left the ford they'd found while avoiding both those places outbound — the crossing where four horses had made it through clean.
"How deep was it?" Curtis asked.
"Manageable, on horseback. Firm bottom. Current wasn't bad."
"Then."
David looked toward the country ahead, toward whatever the river had done since the thaw took hold in earnest. He thought about the storm that had chased them into a stranger's barn on the way to Charlotte, about how much rain that alone had put into every creek and river between here and the coast. He hadn't let himself add that up until now.
"You think it's higher now," Karen said.
"I know it's higher. Question is how much."
Curtis said they'd look before deciding anything, and that was as far as the conversation went. They finished eating and moved on.
They made close to twenty useful miles by evening despite the distance the detours had cost them, and David chose to camp several miles short of the river rather than push on and reach it tired.
"Cross water in daylight," Curtis said, agreeing before David had finished explaining himself.
"That was the idea."
"Look at you two agreeing," Karen said.
"Don't get used to it," Curtis said.
The horses came through the evening check sound — Whiskey good, Waylon and Willie worked but not overtaxed, June fine. Smokey ate and took up his usual position where he could watch the approach.
David could hear the river faintly from camp, carried on the quiet evening air, just water moving somewhere ahead in the dark. He decided they'd scout the crossing properly in the morning rather than commit to anything blind.
The ground told them they were close before David saw any water at all — lower terrain, wetter soil underfoot, old flood debris scattered along the road's edge, creek channels running fuller than they had any right to this late in spring.
He recognized pieces of the route as they went, though the higher water had changed enough along the banks that nothing matched his memory exactly. Eventually he found the old approach, the same bend in the road, the same stand of trees marking where they'd led the horses down to the water before.
The river looked different. Higher. Wider. Moving faster than it had.
Curtis stopped the wagon well back from the bank. "That's more water than you described."
"There was less water."
"That's generally how that works."
Karen smiled despite herself, and David swung down to start the scout before anybody said anything else about it.
David and Curtis walked the bank together, working out where the old entry had been and where the exit sat on the far side, usable from what they could see.
The river had spread wider over the shallow shelf where they'd crossed before, though David remembered roughly where the deeper channel ran through the middle of it.
Curtis studied the current against a floating branch, timing how fast it moved, reading what the water told him about the bottom underneath it.
David mounted June and rode her into the edge first, letting her choose her own footing the way she always did.
Water rose slow — fetlock, then knee, then higher as she worked toward the center.
The current pushed harder there, and June adjusted her stance without losing her footing, secure enough that David pushed on and completed the crossing rather than turning back partway.
He came back the same line, confirming it a second time.
"She made it look easy," Karen called from the bank.