with a blanket draped around her shoulders. Roland Bartlett hunkered on his heels beside her, obviously ready to fetch her anything she might need.
Preacher picketed the horses, including the pack animal they had brought with them from St. Louis. As he had his breakfast the orange glow in the eastern sky grew brighter. The camp bustled with activity as Bartlett’s men hitched up their teams and moved the wagons into a long line.
“Are all your water barrels filled up?” Preacher asked Leeman Bartlett.
“Yes, of course.”
“You should fill them every chance you get,” Preacher advised. “There’ll be some long dry stretches once you get to the Cimarron Cutoff.”
“Is that the best way to go? I wasn’t sure.”
Preacher nodded. “You could take the northern route and go by Bent’s Fort, but you’d have a hell of a time gettin’ heavy wagons like these through Raton Pass. It’s more suited for mule trains. You might lose several wagons if you tried it.”
“We certainly don’t want that,” Bartlett said. “The Cimarron Cutoff it is.”
“Don’t go thinkin’ that route’s safe, though. Like I said, there’s some stretches where you won’t find any water and damn little graze for the oxen. Plus that’s where you’re most likely to run into trouble from the Comanch’.”
“Indians, you mean?”
“Yeah. Durin’ the first part of the trip, you’ll have to worry about Pawnee and Kiowa, but they’re less likely to cause trouble . . . dependin’, of course, on what sort of mood their war chiefs are in. The Comanche, though . . . Well, nine times outta ten, they’re gonna be a mite proddy.”
“Will we have to fight them?” Bartlett asked with a worried look on his lined face.
“We might. Sometimes you can trade with ’em and get through that way. And it could be we won’t even run into any of the varmints. Their regular huntin’ ground is farther south than we’ll be goin’, but they wander up into the Cimarron country quite a bit.”
“We’ll hope for good luck, then,” Bartlett said.
“You can always hope,” Preacher said, leaving unspoken the fact that hoping often did no good at all.
Roland leaned over to Casey and said, “We can find a place for you to ride in one of the wagons, if you’d like.”
She smiled and shook her head. “Thanks, but that’s not necessary. I rode horseback from St. Louis, and I can continue to do so. I was raised on a farm, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know that. I’d like to learn more about you.”
“We’ll see,” she said. Preacher thought Roland’s doglike devotion was starting to get on Casey’s nerves, but that was her problem, he told himself.
Bartlett had several outriders armed with rifles, and he and his son each had a couple saddle horses, so they could switch back and forth and rest the animals. The big freight wagons weren’t equipped with seats for the drivers, so the bullwhackers walked alongside their teams, working their magic with whips and shouted curses. As the sun began to peek over the eastern horizon, Bartlett rode to the front of the wagon train and waved an arm over his head as he shouted the well-known order.
“Wagons . . .
The bullwhackers popped their whips and turned the air around their heads blue with profanity. The oxen, in their stolid way, surged against the singletrees yoked to them, and under that immense power, the heavily loaded wagons rolled slowly forward.
Casey pulled up her dress revealing a pair of doeskin trousers underneath. She swung up onto her horse and rode astride like a man. From the way she handled the reins, it was clear she was telling the truth about being an experienced rider.
Roland rode up and joined her. Preacher and Lorenzo fell in on horseback on her other side.
Leeman Bartlett turned from leading the caravan and rode past them, calling to his son, “Roland, I want you up front with me!”
Roland looked at Casey, obviously reluctant to leave her. But she smiled at him and said, “Go ahead, Mr. Bartlett, I’ll be fine.”
“Roland,” he said. “I told you to call me Roland.”
“All right. I’ll see you later, Roland.”
With a sigh, the young man heeled his horse into a trot and rode after his father. When he was out of earshot, Lorenzo chuckled and said, “That boy has sure got it bad for you, Miss Casey.”
“He’s sweet,” she said, “but I’m afraid he’s going to be disappointed.” She looked at Preacher with a smile.
He tried not to frown. He didn’t want Casey getting any ideas about him. He had been in love a time or two in his life, but it had never worked out. The first girl he’d ever had real feelings for had been murdered, and a couple of other gals he had been close to had wound up getting themselves killed, too.
He was bound and determined another tragedy like that wasn’t going to take place again, even if it meant never letting himself get too involved with a woman. If Casey was starting to think about the two of them settling down together, she was whistling up the wrong tree.
Preacher was too fiddlefooted for that, and he thought Casey knew that.
But it wasn’t the time or place to discuss it. The three of them rode alongside the wagons, gradually moving closer to the front of the caravan. They saw Bartlett and Roland up ahead, leading the way along the trail that had been worn into the ground by the wide wheels of hundreds of wagons in the past dozen years. The pops of
