and sat on its haunches. She watched Chee come forward, his gun in his hand extended but pointing up, not wanting to shoot someone by accident.
“What is it, boy?” he asked, reaching the animal’s side.
The dog whined and barked low in its throat, circling and pawing at the dirt, climbing onto its hind legs again. It looked up into the darkness and though she knew she was invisible to human eyesight in the dark and at this distance, could not help but shrink farther back into the shadows.
The man looked up but could not see beyond a few feet. Shaniah silently cursed the man, for she felt certain he sensed her presence. He had the gift of inhuman stillness. Most humans were impetuous. Not this man. He was careful, thoughtful, and intuitive. But Shaniah had been alive for more than one thousand years and she had learned patience. She would outwait him.
He stood stock-still, as did the dog, which stared up into the darkness like a rattlesnake studying a mouse, waiting for the rodent to twitch so it could strike. Only, in this case, Shaniah was not so certain which of them was the mouse.
More than ten minutes passed, with the man staring silently into the night. Shaniah was about to give up and leave when his voice finally broke the silence.
“I’m watching,” he said quietly to the silence above him. “I’m watching over him. And I know you are there.”
He returned his gun to the holster and turned toward the door. “Come, Dog,” he said. The beast followed dutifully behind its master.
Shaniah waited in amazement until she heard the door click shut, not quite knowing what to think. This man Hollister and his witch Chee were her best chance at finding Malachi, but the man was a problem. If he got in the way…
She could not risk being discovered before Malachi was found. But Chee knew of her existence and the why and how of it no longer mattered. Shaniah crept along the beam until she reached the vent. She knew what she needed to do.
“H ow do you know it’s a woman?” Hollister said. They were sitting at the table in the galley. It was morning but the sun coming through the high windows of the warehouse only dimly lit the interior of the train. Chee would be glad to be out of the warehouse, on the move, in the open air. Monkey Pete had made pancakes and bacon. Dog sat on his haunches next to the table staring at Jonas.
“Does he want something?” he asked, the dog’s unrelenting gaze beginning to unnerve him somewhat.
“Probably bacon,” Chee said.
Hollister held up a strip of bacon and Dog snapped it out of his fingers almost faster than he could see.
“Jesus!” Hollister said, wiggling his fingers.
“He likes bacon,” Chee said.
“I guess,” Hollister said. “So, what makes you think it’s a woman?”
“Small feet. Too small for a man,” Chee said.
“I’ve seen men with some awful tiny feet. General Sheridan had tiny feet. Monkey Pete’s feet ain’t huge either.”
“General Sheridan was a small man, was he not?”
“Exactly my point,” Hollister said.
Chee was quiet, the look on his face made it seem to Hollister like he was struggling with something. He’d seen this look a thousand times on his men before. Usually when they’d disobeyed an order, or gotten into trouble off the post.
“What is it, Sergeant?” Hollister asked. Try as he might to make Chee feel comfortable and less formal, the young man continued to address him as “sir” and “Major,” and Hollister addressed him by his rank to try to get him to relax and speak his mind.
“I believe she was here last night,” Chee said.
“What?” Hollister nearly stood up. “Details, Sergeant, starting with why you didn’t wake me.”
“By the time I determined she was here, she was gone. There seemed no point in waking you.”
“And how do you know this is a woman again? You said the person wore a cloak with a hood. Did she take down the hood or something?”
Chee thought for a moment. He did not think Hollister would understand how the identity of the cloaked woman had come to him during his meditation. In the white world such a thing was not evidence. It would be difficult to explain.
“I thought about it, Major. I tried to remember and concentrate on the way she acted in the street. The way she studied the windows, moved through the crowd and last night I tried to pull up details in my recollection and it came to me that her feet were small.” He looked away, realizing it was not a reasonable explanation. Luckily, Hollister chose to ignore it.
“And you saw her here last night?” Hollister asked.
“I… no… Major… I didn’t see her, but she was here, I’m certain of it.”
“How the hell do you know that if you didn’t see her?”
“Dog saw her,” Chee said.
Hollister studied Dog, who stared back at Hollister impassively.
“Say again?”
“I heard a noise. Someone on the roof of the train. When we went outside, Dog alerted, looking up into the rafters. There was something up there or he wouldn’t have acted as he did. She was there, I’m sure of it.”
Hollister turned his stare on Chee. The young man sat there, never flinching under his hardest gaze. He didn’t know Chee at all really, not yet anyway. In the army and on the battlefield he’d learned to make snap judgments about men. He trusted his instincts. It’s what he’d done in the yard a few days ago when Chee had faced down McAfee. There was something in the kid that Hollister recognized. Will. Strength. Courage. All those things, but something else beyond that, and in truth he wasn’t even sure himself exactly what it was. But he’d seldom been wrong about men like Chee before.
“Sergeant, one of these days you’re going to explain all this to me,” Hollister said.
“Sir?”
“This,” Hollister said waving his hands around in the air for emphasis. “All of it. This dog. The crack shooting. The jumping in the air and kicking people in the face.”
“Yes, sir,” Chee said.
“Until then, if someone of interest shows up, you are under orders to notify me immediately regardless of the time of day, my personal bedtime or any other physical state, understood?”
“Yes, Major,” he murmured quietly.
“Eat up. We’ve got a long day ahead of us,” Hollister said.
Chee attacked his breakfast and gave the leftovers to Dog.
“Get your gear, we’re headed to the mining camp today. Monkey Pete has us provisioned but I want you to pick out a couple of those special rifles Winchester brought us. I’ll be taking the Ass-Kicker.”
A short time later, they left the warehouse and the train behind. The day was sunny and Hollister carried the gun down along his leg and hidden in the folds of his black duster. He was dressed all in black: hat, boots, shirt, riding pants, and gloves. Chee carried two of the rifles over his shoulder, apparently unafraid of being noticed. With his two-gun rig riding low on his hips, he looked especially lethal as he walked, with Dog loping along beside him. They were on their way to the livery stable to pick up horses. Monkey Pete had spent the previous day combing Denver for suitable mounts.
“Chee, don’t you think you might be scaring folks, with all the ordnance in plain sight?” Hollister said as they walked along the street.
“I hadn’t really thought about it, sir… I think…” His words trailed off.
“What is it? Speak your mind,” Hollister said.
“I believe there is going to be trouble ahead, sir, and worse, I think the danger is coming from many places. I would like to be prepared for the trouble and make others aware I am prepared for it as well. My grandfather always said to let your enemy know their aggression will be met in kind. It often stops trouble before it starts,” he said.
“Your grandfather really say that, Chee?” Hollister asked.
