“All right. All right.” Ryker swore. “I gave my word and I took their money so I reckon I have to see it through. But just so you know. I don’t appreciate you keeping it to yourself.” He gigged his sorrel toward the gap but abruptly drew sharp rein. “What the hell? What are you doing there, you old biddy?”
Aunt Aggie came out of the pass. “Watch your mouth, Mr. Ryker. I am a lady and you will treat me as such.”
“And if I don’t?” Ryker taunted.
“I will cut you some night when you are asleep. Cut you down low so that you can forget ever having children.”
“I’m shocked. I thought ladies don’t do things like that.”
“Some ladies have claws.”
Ryker snorted. “As for kids, who wants them? Raising a pack of brats isn’t one of my ambitions.”
“Nice man,” Aunt Aggie said as the frontiersman swung past her and on into the pass.
Nate kneed the bay over. “Did you mean what you said about cutting him?”
“At my age it is a waste of what precious time I have left to squander it saying things I don’t mean.”
“You are a hoot, Aunt Aggie.”
“And you aren’t one of the children, so Aggie will do. Or Agatha if you are of a mind.”
They followed after the rest. She kept glancing at him and cleared her throat but didn’t say anything.
“What?” Nate prompted.
“Tyne told me what you did. I suggested she not tell her parents, but she did anyway. Erleen is fit to scratch your eyes out over that lock of hair. She thinks you had no right.”
A shadow passed over them and Nate glanced up. He glimpsed a bald eagle with its pinions outspread go soaring off on the air currents. “I suppose I would feel the same in her shoes.”
“You had to give them the lock?”
“They wanted all of her.”
“Oh. Damn.”
“Don’t let Ryker hear you swear. He’ll think you are less of a lady than ever.”
Aggie chuckled, then sobered. “Erleen will still be mad. I love my sister dearly, but she can be a lunkhead at times. We’ve never been all that close. It’s the age difference. I am nearly twenty years older than she is.” Aggie chuckled louder. “Erleen was not supposed to happen. Our parents were considerably surprised when our mother found out she had a new loaf of bread in the oven.”
“I have never met a woman who talks like you do.”
“Open and frank? It comes with age. I hate to admit it, but when I was younger I was a lot like Erleen. Stuffy and snooty and convinced I had all the answers. Then I lost my Harold after thirty-eight years of wedlock. My oldest son went off to visit Europe, and stayed. My youngest took up with a woman of loose morals and under her influence wanted nothing more to do with me.” Aunt Aggie sighed. “That was when I woke up. When I realized that not only did I not have the answers, I didn’t even know the right questions.”
“I’m sorry,” Nate said.
Aunt Aggie’s face grew haunted with memories. “It’s not me. It’s life. We get so set in our ways that it never occurs to us that our ways might not be the way things really are. I took it for granted my husband would live as long as I did, and his heart up and gave out. I took it for granted my sons loved me so much they would never up and leave me alone in this world. But that is exactly what they went and did.”
They were well into the pass. Shimmering dust particles, raised by the others, hung suspended like so many tiny fireflies.
“Now I don’t know what to think,” Agatha went on. “Except that I still have my nieces and my nephews. They adore me and I adore them, and I will be there for them when they need me, even if it kills me. Family is everything.”
Nate studied her. “Is that why you’re here? For Tyne and her sister and brothers?”
“And for Sully. He’s Peter’s brother, but he was as close Tome as if he were my own.” Agatha paused. “Sully always treated me nice. He was quite the backwoodsman, that one. Could live off the land if he had to. He knew all the wild creatures and their habits, and which plants were safe for people to eat.
He told me once that he learned from watching the animals. If a plant was safe for an animal, it was safe for us. Smart of him, don’t you think?”
Nate knew better, but he didn’t interrupt.
“Sully brought me venison from time to time, and we would sit and have wonderfully long talks.” Her lips pinched together. “It worries me that we haven’t heard from him.”
“Peter and Erleen should have come by themselves and left the children home with you.”
“We’re a family. My boys aside, when one of us is in trouble, we do what we can.”
“This isn’t the East.”
“Meaning we don’t know what we have let ourselves in for? But we’ve managed to get this far without mishap.”
“Have you forgotten the Blackfeet? That could have ended badly.” Nate sighed. “It is not the same here as back there. The animals are different. The plants are different.
“My goodness. And I thought I had become a bit of a cynic.”
“I am telling you how it is.” Nate leaned over and touched her arm. “Be extra careful from now on. Keep watch over the children at all times. Once we are over the divide we are in unexplored country. We could run into anything. Anything at all.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“Good.”
“Besides, I thought you said you have been here before. That hardly makes it unexplored.”
“I was through this area once, yes, years ago. A few other whites might have passed through, too. But it’s never been fully explored. It’s as wild as wild can be, and it can bury you.”
Aunt Aggie coughed and then smiled. “I am beginning to understand why Mr. Ryker speaks so highly of you. Your woman—what did you say her name was again, Winona?—is very fortunate to have you for her man.”
The far end of the pass drew near. The others were waiting. Erleen was saying something to Ryker and Ryker didn’t look happy.
“You said Winona is a Shoshone, correct?”
Nate nodded.
“Why did you marry her? Her being an Indian, and all.”
“I never expected a question like that from you.”
“No. Please. Don’t misconstrue. I don’t hate the red race just because they are red, like so many of our kind do.”
“I married Winona because I love her. Because I care for her with all my heart and all my soul. She is the zest in my veins and the spring in my step. You could say she is the very reason I breathe.”
“Oh my. That was practically poetical. I bet you have a work or two by Byron in that library of yours.”
Nate grinned. “As a matter of fact, I do.”
The pass widened, and they were out of it. Below spread a spectacular panorama of peaks and valleys. Mountains so high, they plunged many of the valleys in near perpetual shadow. Mile after wild mile of country left largely untouched by the hand of man since the dawn of creation. The vast unknown, literal and true. Gazing out over it gave Nate King a rare ripple of goose bumps. He couldn’t say why but he felt a sudden unease.
“Your precious Sully couldn’t have picked a more godforsaken spot,” Ryker said to Peter and Erleen.
“He wanted somewhere where there was plenty of game,” Erleen said.
“His own Garden of Eden, as he liked to call it,” Peter added.
Ryker shifted in the saddle toward Nate. “Well, Blackfoot lover? You have been here and I haven’t. Which way? West? Southwest? Northwest? Where is that sandstone cliff Sully mentioned?”
“Southwest,” Nate said after some hesitation.
“Oh, hell. You don’t remember it all that well, do you? We could end up searching for a month of damn Sundays and not find the jackass.”
