roe? I hear she’s a widow and she’s got a couple of lit-
tle ones already. She might take him in on a temporary
basis.”
“I hadn’t thought of her.”
“Well, you ought to give her a try since she’s used
to handling kids.”
“Can you be ready to leave in the hour?”
“You still ain’t said how much it pays.”
“How much you charge for tracking a man?”
“I never tracked one before. How about twenty
dollars for the whole job?”
“Done.” Toussaint was surprised at the quick
agreement, thinking he’d start at twenty dollars and
let the lawman barter him down; twenty dollars was
the price of the silver ring.
“I’ll be ready when you come back around,” he
said, thinking he’d just take a stroll down to the jew-
eler’s and put his name on that ring before someone
else did.
Jake called the boy and set him up on the horse
and said, “You ever been to school?”
The boy simply stared at him. It seemed to be a
trait of the Swedes—to stare at you when you asked
them a question.
Clara Monroe felt caught between the sense of safety
of living in such a far-flung place as Sweet Sorrow,
and the isolation that came with it. She’d arrived only
two weeks earlier having responded to an advertise-
ment she’d read in the
teacher. It seemed at the time a godsend to her. Fallon
Monroe had become more and more abusive since his
discharge from the army. He could only seem to find
glory in the bottom of a whiskey bottle now that his
Indian-fighting days were behind him. He’d tried his
hand at various things but found them all too uninter-
esting to suit him. He was a man riveted to his past,
and could not, it seemed, adjust to his present circum-
stances: that of an alcoholic ex-soldier who’d gotten
the taste of war blood and now that there was no war,
he felt lost. With the Plains Indians all whipped, the
army had little use for men whose personal shortcom-
ings and demons would not allow them to rise higher
than the rank of a lieutenant. Finding himself out of a
career only exacerbated his drinking, and his drink-
ing led to being abusive. Clara found it a relief those
nights when he did not find his way home. So too did
her young daughters.
And so when she’d seen the ad, she knew what she
would do. Escape proved no problem, since Fallon
was often passed out on the bed until midday and the
stages leaving from Bismarck generally left at an early
hour.
But once upon the grasslands, Clara began to suf-
fer doubts that nagged at her until each time she
looked at her girls, April and May—Fallon’s insis-
tence that they be named after the months they were
born in. Still, Sweet Sorrow seemed as far removed
from civilization as the moon, and she was struck by
its stark placement in the world, by the vast emptiness
they’d crossed to reach it. She could not imagine a
more desolate place.
Two weeks wasn’t very long to settle in, but she’d
found a small house to rent, fortunately; the man
who’d occupied it had died recently, she was told, and
later heard via rumor he had died of gangrene from
having lost a hand. She was not told the full details:
that he’d chopped off his own hand after cleaving his
wife’s head in with a hatchet—nor would she have
wanted to know. It was enough to find a place for her
and the children.
Roy Bean, as he explained, was the self-appointed
“temporary town’s mayor.” And he personally
showed her around, took her out to the little one-
room schoolhouse, saying as he did, “You’re very
young and attractive, Miss Monroe, is it?”
“Yes,” she lied.
“But I see you have children?”
“I’m widowed,” she said. “My husband was killed
fighting Indians.”
Roy Bean had offered the proper amount of condo-
lences before asking her to join him for supper at the
Fat Duck Cafe that evening. She politely declined. She
did not want any possibility of personal involvement,
not yet, and certainly not with a man of Roy Bean’s
obvious reprobate character. She made sure that her
rejection was most kind so as not to risk losing the job.
Roy Bean hired her on the spot, saying, “Well, I
suppose there is always time for suppers later on,
once you’re settled in.”
It hadn’t been easy, the adjustment, the fact that
she had to school her own daughters into lying about
the fate of their father. And at night she wept, but by
morning she steeled herself and met her obligations—
teaching arithmetic, reading, writing, and Latin to a
roomful of children whose ages ranged from seven to
fourteen. Boys and girls.
The one saving grace of all this was that the
weather was pretty that time of year: the sun yet warm
with just a hint of the winter to come once the sun
