miserable bunch of pilgrims.
Near the rimrock, the trail had become an icy staircase, stomped down and smoothed over by the passage of a hundred pairs of webs.
“How you expect me to climb with no hands?”
“Haul in your neck. I’m helpin you, ain’t I?”
Joss purposely tripped, and Al had to grab her under both elbows to keep her from sliding down the mountain.
“We’re almost there,” he said. “Can you climb ten more steps?”
As Joss struggled to her feet, her fingers grazed over the bowie knife jammed down into her canvas trousers, and she thought,
Fifty feet back down the trail, Joss heard a woman scream.
“Where’s Daddy?”
“He rode up to the pass with Mr. Wallace, honey.”
“What for?”
“Don’t you worry about that.”
Bessie walked ahead of her daughter as they climbed the slope above town, her mind running in ten directions at once. The gold. The murders. Heathens riding down from the pass. They’d been delayed in getting to the chapel, because Billy had told them to go home first and pack for the trip to Silverton. But she was with him now, and despite everything, it felt right. He was her husband, after all. The Good Lord commanded that she obey him.
The trail steepened, and just ahead lay a series of icy steps that climbed the remaining distance up the cuesta to the rimrock.
“All right, Har, I need to hold your hand on this part.” Bessie turned around. “Harriet!” she screamed. “Harriet!” She couldn’t see anything downslope, standing high enough above town that a slice of the sun still lingered over the far side of the canyon.
“What’s wrong, ma’am?” An Englishman leading his wife and two daughters stopped on the trail just below.
“You seen my daughter? She’s yea high. Six years old. Curly black hair. She was right here with me not a second ago.”
“No, I sure haven’t seen—”
“Oh Jesus. Excuse me.” Bessie tried to scoot by, but the big bearded Englishman stretched his arm out to stop her.
“Ma’am, now you gotta keep climbing. We’re in terrible—”
“I’ve lost my daughter!”
“And someone’s gonna find her and they’ll bring her along.”
“Sir, please step out of my way.”
“You’re holding up the line.”
“Harriet! Harriet!”
As Bessie tried once more to step around him, he scooped her up, threw her over his shoulder, and continued up the steps toward the rimrock, Bessie flailing and screaming, the Englishman shushing her.
“We’re gonna get everyone safely inside, and if she isn’t there, I’ll go find her myself. That’s a promise.”
But Bessie’s desperate screaming drowned him out. She even surpassed the church bell until the mountain swallowed her.
2009
FIFTY-THREE
J
une whimpered, “I should’ve stayed with Emmett. He’s all alone in that place.”
Abigail walked with her arm around June, supporting her, and within earshot of the two professors. “I know,” she said, “but we can’t split up, and with the snow coming down like this, the roof of Emerald House could collapse.”
They made a careful descent out of Emerald Basin, down the steep switchbacks to the canyon floor, Lawrence and Quinn talking shop while they fought their way through the snow.
Even though her tailbone was in agony, Abigail felt revived by a second wind as they passed their buried tents, the llamas standing together in a mass of fur and breath clouds. It was almost four in the morning when they entered the ghost town of Abandon, a pride of headlamps moving between the dark and snow-fraught buildings— some swaying in the wind, on the brink of collapse.
She caught a fragment of what Lawrence was saying: “. . . tempting, but my first priority is getting June and my daughter out of here.”
As they approached the north end of Abandon, Abigail improved her pace, came up between the professors, said, “So where are you taking us, Lawrence?”
He glanced back. “Not much farther now. All will be revealed.”
