Chapter 24
Okee
Snow blinds me the moment I hit the yard. Smoke settles low along the cabin wall. Stinging the back of my throat, the blue-white tendrils curl against the morning glare.
Somewhere off to my left, Boone is shouting, “Get down here and face me like a man, you son of a bitch!”
Another shot cracks from the trees and bites splinters from the wood near the door.
“That’s it,” Boone grunts, then leaps into a run, boots pounding the earth toward the trees.
The fire has already climbed halfway up the window frame. Smoke rolls along the wall. Lula is still inside.
I drag in one slow breath and listen. Footsteps. I barely have time to sort one sound from the next before a man bursts through the smoke at the corner of the house.
He hits me like a charging bull.
We go down in a tangle of limbs and snow and breath. Frozen ground slams my back. My rifle flies from my hands. A knee drives into my ribs hard enough to burst the air from my lungs. Then his face is over mine—wild-eyed, teeth bared—as he drags a knife from his belt.
I catch his wrist with both hands.
Steel flashes.
The blade touches my throat.
“Knew you’d be trouble,” he pants.
That is when I know him. The guard from the hiring line.
God.
I have just enough time to think what a hateful end this is. Then the pressure vanishes.
A shot cracks—smaller than the rifles, sharper, close as a whipcrack in my ear—and the man lurches forward. His eyes go wide and empty. He topples sideways into the snow, blood steaming black-red against the white.
For a heartbeat I cannot move.
Then I see her.
Lula stands in the doorway with both hands locked around the pistol I taught her to shoot. Her face is white as linen, her eyes bright with shock. Smoke curls from the barrel.
I lurch to my feet and reach her in three strides.
“Mother of God,” I say, catching her around the waist and dragging her back behind a barrel for cover. “That was madness. Are you all right?”
She breathes fast, staring past me at the body in the snow. “The cabin’s burning.”
Boone shouts something from the far side of the yard. I cannot make out the words over the ringing in my ears. Then he comes through the smoke at a run, one sleeve blackened, rifle in hand, eyes searching us both.
“You hit?” he barks.
“No,” I say. “Are you?”
He twists his arm, coat blackened with blood. “Ain’t mine. Little general?”
Lula shakes her head once, still gripping the pistol.
Boone follows her stare to the dead man in the snow, then looks back at her, resting a hand gently on her back. “Rest of ’em lit out,” Boone says. “We got to get ahead of this fire. Now.”
We move without another word.
Boone takes the bucket to the drift by the woodpile and comes back hauling snow in both arms when the water proves too slow.
Lula, coughing into her sleeve, beats at the scorched wall with a wet blanket until steam bursts up around her hands.
I climb through the broken window frame and stamp at the burning sill from inside, knocking down embers before they can catch the rafters.
The smoke is thick enough to blind. The heat singes my face.
More than once I have to drag Lula back from the wall before falling timber or sparks can hit her.
At last the flames begin to die down.
The crackling shrinks to hissing. Orange gives way to black. What remains is smoke, slush, wet ash, and the deep red hue of embers buried in the ruined wood.
We stand in the yard breathing like hunted things and stare at what is left.
The cabin is still standing, though the wall by the window is charred nearly through. Half the roof above the loft has burned away, leaving the upper room exposed to the pale winter sky. From where I stand, the loft looks like it is sitting in a blackened bowl of half-collapsed logs.
Lula stares at it as though she cannot quite understand what she is seeing.
“Your father’s cabin,” she says softly.
Boone spits into the snow. “We ain’t safe to stay here no more. They’ll be back. Send more next time. We take all we can carry and we move on.”
He turns to me. “Okmulgee’s half a day from here. You said he offered you a place?”
My father. I nod once, though my stomach has already tightened against the thought. My father might take Lula in. He would do it for her. But Boone—
I should have said it before. I had hoped I would not need to.
“We can’t,” I say.
Boone’s expression hardens, but not in anger. In resignation. “I’ll eat my words,” he says. “Eat every damn one, if it means you and wild are kept safe.”
“No.” I shake my head. “You do not understand. He will not allow it. Not with you.”
Boone gives a short, humorless laugh. “Hellfire. Your daddy hates me that much?”
I do not answer quickly, which is answer enough.
Lula begins pacing in the snow, one hand pressed hard to her middle.
“How long to Fort Gibson?” she asks.
Boone looks at her as if she has suggested we walk into the jaws of a trap. “Honey, there ain’t nowhere safe for us in Fort Gibson. They’ll be lookin’ for us.”
“There is a safe place,” she says.
The graveness of her tone makes us both look at her.
She stops pacing. Her mouth tightens with the effort of forcing the words out.
“The Gemini,” she says. “My mother.”
Boone frowns. “Thought you hadn’t seen your mama in ten years. How do you know she’ll—”
“She’ll shelter us,” Lula says, cutting across him with a force that surprises even her. “I know she will.”
Silence settles between us.
I look past the ruined cabin to the snow-flocked country beyond it and begin measuring the distance in my head whether I want to or not.
From here to Fort Gibson would be a hard ride even in fair weather.
In this snow, with roads gone to slush and ice beneath…
A full day at least. Perhaps more if the river crossings are bad.
Too long in the open if Hollister’s men are still ranging the territory behind us.
But staying here is no option at all.
The wind slips through the burned-out loft and sends a fresh scatter of ash into the yard.
Boone sees my face and reads enough of the arithmetic there. “Well,” he says, “you’re the one with a bee in your bonnet. Say it plain.”
I keep my eyes on the broken roof.
“In this weather, by horse, it’s a hard two days to Fort Gibson. Longer if the river crossings are bad, which they will be.”
Lula folds her arms tight across herself. “But it can be done.”
Boone glances at the dead man, half covered now by kicked snow, then back at the ruined cabin. “I reckon this miserable old shack has done all she’s gonna do for us.”
I look at the place where we slept last night. At the black mouth of the window. It already looks less like a refuge than the husk of one.
Lula lifts her chin. Soot has streaked one side of her face.
Her eyes are red from heat and ash, but steady.
She rests her palm on the remains of an exterior wall with a pensive reverence that reaches into my chest and tugs.
I follow. Setting my palm against a log.
For a moment it all floods back. The relief of shelter and safety.
The heat of the hearth. The arguments. The whiskey and guitar.
Our eyes meet, Lula and I, just long enough to feel each other’s grief.
“Then we go,” I say.
For a moment none of us moves.
We only stand there in the trampled snow, staring at the wreck of the cabin while the last threads of smoke unwind into the winter air.
Then Boone turns for the horses, Lula for the scattered supplies, and I stay where I am one second longer, looking at the burned shell of the place and understanding with sudden clarity that whatever small life we had managed to build here is gone.