Chapter Twenty-Four #2
She turned on the bench to face him fully, her knees pressed against his thigh, her hands gripping the bench edge.
"I love you. Lord help me for sayin' it, and Lord help you for hearin' it, but there it is.
I love you, Sam Cooper. I love you, and I'm gettin' on a train in forty-five minutes, and you're sittin' there tellin' me to pretend none of this happened, and I think, I think you're the most cowardly brave man I ever met in my life, because you'll face down a killer in a crowded fair but you won't face down what's right in front of you on this bench. "
The words hit Sam Cooper harder than Wilkes's fist at the fair, harder than the bullet that had grazed his ribs, harder than any blow he'd taken in thirty years of hard living.
Three words. I love you. She'd put them in the air between them on a buckboard headed for a train station on a cold morning in Montana, and they hung there, taking up every inch of available space, pressing against the walls of his chest from the inside.
He should say it back. The words sat right there, right behind his teeth, three words that matched hers, three words he'd been carrying around for days without letting them form fully because forming them fully meant committing to a thing he couldn't commit to while Wilkes drew breath. He should open his mouth and let them out. Damn the consequences and damn Wilkes, and damn the danger, and damn everything except the woman sitting beside him on this bench. She’d just laid her heart in his hands and waited for him to do a thing with it besides set it down.
He gripped the reins until the leather cut into his palms.
"It's better this way." His voice came out rough, scraped down to splinters.
"You go back to Springfield. You build your life.
You find a man who can give you what I can't; a man who stays put, a man who comes home every night, and a man who ain't got ghosts followin' him from territory to territory.
You deserve that, Evelyn. You deserve better'n what I am. "
"That ain't your decision to make for me, Sam. I done told you that before."
"I reckon I'm makin' it anyhow."
She turned away from him. She turned forward on the bench and stared at the road ahead, her jaw clenched, her hands gripping her own knees.
The flush in her cheeks had deepened past anger into a color he'd never seen on her before, the color of a person swallowing a wound that went too deep to bleed outward.
The buckboard rolled on. The mule plodded. The road stretched ahead, white and rutted, the town visible now in the distance, the church steeple poking up above the tree line. Another mile, maybe less. Another mile and they'd reach the livery where the Helena stage departed at seven.
Sam stared at the road. He could still say it.
He could still reach across the eighteen inches of bench seat between them, take her hand, say the three words sitting behind his teeth, and change the whole trajectory of two lives with a single sentence.
He could still do that. The option sat right there, right in front of him, close enough to touch.
He stared at the road.
The mule screamed.
The sound came from deep in the animal's chest, a bray of pure terror that Sam had only heard from livestock twice in his life, both times in the presence of a predator.
The mule reared in its traces, front hooves leaving the ground, the harness jerking tight as the animal's weight shifted violently backward.
The buckboard lurched, the right wheel catching in a frozen rut while the left wheel lifted six inches off the ground.
Sam grabbed the reins with both hands and hauled back, trying to bring the mule's head down, trying to get the animal's front hooves back on the ground before the whole rig tipped.
The buckboard pitched sideways. Evelyn grabbed the bench rail.
The mule reared again, higher this time, the harness straining at the traces, the wooden singletree cracking from the force.
"Whoa! Whoa, damn you, whoa!"
The mule plunged forward instead of down, lunging into the traces, jerking the buckboard so hard Sam's hands nearly tore free of the reins. The right wheel caught again, the axle groaning. Evelyn braced herself against the bench while the buckboard swung sideways across the frozen road.
Sam hauled the reins left, trying to straighten the mule's course and trying to keep the rig from going over.
The mule fought him, its eyes rolling white, foam at its mouth.
The animal had got spooked at a thing Sam couldn't see—a thing on the road, or beside the road, or in the timber flanking the road, and every instinct Sam had developed in thirty years of frontier living fired at once.
Animals got spooked at predators, and predators in this territory included mountain lions, bears, wolves, and men.
The buckboard slewed sideways across the road, the mule still fighting the reins. The bench pitched under them while Sam fought for control of an animal that had decided, with the absolute conviction of a mule in terror, that the only option available was running.