and her mother lay together on the bed. Jake stepped
close and touched their faces and felt how cold they
were, then withdrew his hand.
“Goddamn it.”
Toussaint followed him back outside, and they
stood outside the cabin in the damp chill with the rain
dripping down from the overhang. Jake took in two
or three deep breaths. He’d seen all sorts of death in
his time as a physician, even the deaths of women and
children. But never so much slaughter of innocents in
one place. Death by murder was a different sort of
death than any other.
Toussaint cradled the shotgun in the crook of his
arm.
“I didn’t see the man,” he said.
“He did this.”
“Looks like.”
“Question is why?”
“Men go crazy sometimes. Lots of reasons. None
of them good.”
“But not like this.”
“No, not like this, till now.”
No words seemed to fit anything they were feeling.
No words were going to fix anything, or bring any of
those children or that woman or girl back. No words
were necessary.
The weather itself mournful, it seemed.
Then Jake stiffened.
“What is it?” Toussaint said.
“I counted three.”
“Three what?”
“Boys. There were four.”
They fanned out, walking cautious, because the
mist had closed in upon them to the point they could
barely see the outbuildings.
Toussaint heard it first.
“Coming from back toward the house,” he said.
It sounded like the mewing of a cat.
They stopped at the back wall, saw the loose board
along its base.
Jake went back inside, got the lantern, lowered it
to the base as Toussaint drew back the board.
A pair of eyes shone in the dark recess when the
light reached them.
It took some time, but Jake coaxed the boy out. He
was muddy and shivering, his face streaked where
he’d been crying. He stood about as high as Tous-
saint’s hip, disheveled dirty blond hair.
“You think he saw it, don’t you?” Toussaint said.
“He knew to hide,” Jake said. “He saw something
that scared him.”
“Man like that who’d . . .”
Jake warned his partner to silence with a look.
Toussaint went inside and tore down the door blan-
ket and brought it out and wrapped the kid up in it.
The weather had turned even more bitter, the rain
to snow, the wind driving it into their faces. The sky
lay so low out across the grasslands a man afoot
would walk right through it.
“This is going to get worse before it gets better,”
Toussaint warned.
“Karen’s,” Jake said, setting the boy on the front
of his horse and swinging up behind him. “We’ll ride
to Karen’s and wait it out.”
“Hell, she’ll be doing cartwheels she sees me.”
“You mean the boy, don’t you?”
“Him, too.”
And the boy rode silent in the cradle of the law-
man’s arms.
7
They reached the outskirts of Bismarck and
William Sunday told Mr. Glass rather than skirt
the town as they often did, that this time they were
to go on in.
“You’re calling the shots,” Glass said, privately
glad not to have to spend another night sleeping on
the prairie. Hadn’t been a night gone by since he’d
left Denver that he didn’t miss his wife and home-
cooked meals and all the rest of what having a wife
offered a man. All her demands for him to do better
had been pushed aside by the loneliness he felt. He
thought that when they reached their final destination
he’d sell the carriage and catch whatever stages and
trains he could to return home again as quickly as
possible. Women were a premium and highly prized
in the West and he’d not want to take a chance that
his might find herself a new man, one who was more
enterprising and could afford to give her all the things
she wanted, like the hats she saw the French women
were wearing in Paris as advertised in the fashion sec-
tion of the newspapers.
Such worries were something he wouldn’t have
minded discussing with his employer: women in gen-
eral. But his employer was a quiet man who did not
engage in idle conversation. Glass had tried various
subjects to interest him, thinking it would make the
journey a little less onerous, the time pass a little more
quickly.
