“They’ll have waited for us here. Patricia was ill and Cole will have found a place for them to spend the night.” Malcolm slowed Aces to a walk, rewrapping the rain blanket around my huddled, shivering form. I was a mess, physically and emotionally drained; any part of me not touching Malcolm’s warmth seemed coated in ice crystals. I needed a hot shower. I needed a heaping plate of fried fish and mashed potatoes, Shore Leave-style. I needed my twenty-first century life, my children and Mathias, and our cabin in the woods beyond White Oaks. I could hardly shift my head to nod in response to Malcolm’s words.
“Hold on, love, it ain’t much longer now,” he murmured.
Backlit by the gloom of fading dusk, the settlement appeared as little more than a handful of false-fronted structures. No streetlamps burning, no horses tethered along the street, the drizzle keeping all signs of life to a minimum. Only one set of windows shone with evidence of inner light and Malcolm headed straight for this place – a nondescript wooden building two stories high. Behind it loomed another, larger structure, ringed by a corral, in the second floor of which I spied a haymow as Malcolm helped me from Aces. I struggled to find my footing, overcome by a dizzy rush, but Malcolm kept an arm locked around my waist. He patted his horse’s neck, promising, “We’ll find you a dry place to spend the night, old friend, and get that saddle off.”
The rain blanket bundled over my shoulders like a shawl, I rested my forehead on Aces High; his damp hide bristled against my skin and he made a soft, snorting sound, an acknowledgment of our affection. I whispered, “Thank you, boy. You’re such a good horse.”
“He’s carried me through a fair amount of the worst times in my life,” Malcolm acknowledged quietly. “He’s the best horse I know. I love him as much as Sawyer loved Whistler in her day.”
We climbed wooden steps and Malcolm knocked on the deep-set door. Moments later a man inquired sharply, “Who’s there?” The tone of the question suggested he was aiming a rifle in our direction.
Malcolm’s shoulders slumped with relief as he muttered, “Thank you, Jesus.” And then, louder, “Cole, open up!”
An hour later our physical circumstances had drastically improved. Clean and dry, I sat in a rocking chair near Patricia’s bed, snuggling a sleeping Monty to the rhythmic creak of our gentle motion. Patricia lay facing us, both hands tucked under her cheek, blue eyes tender with love and, by turns, tearful. Pale and much too thin, she appeared ill despite her insistence that she felt worlds better. The room was one of two in a boardinghouse belonging to the same couple who owned the adjacent general store and livery stable. They had promised help and, later, discretion when Cole appeared on their doorstep yesterday, begging for a place for his ailing wife and newborn son to rest.
“We arrived here in the evening hours,” Patricia had explained. “We pushed hard once we parted ways from you and Malcolm and I was in a state of fatigue so pronounced I could not walk of my own accord. But we did not encounter Dredd or his father on our flight westward, nor did Fallon darken our path, and so I care little for my current physical state. Monty and I may have been Dredd’s prisoners at this time had you not found us, dear Camille.”
Shortly after Malcolm and I left them to ride for Muscatine, the decision was made for Blythe to continue northward to Minnesota. Alone, he would not be a potential target for the Yancys; they had no idea who he was in relation to Cole and Patricia, and he was anxious to arrive at his father’s home, not only to set eyes upon him, but to deliver word of all that had transpired. Patricia said Blythe had been initially reluctant to leave them with one less person to offer protection, but Derrick was given a gun and Cole insisted there was no additional reason for Blythe to detour so far west when he was headed north.
Derrick, without a horse, had been left with the choice of either walking alongside the wagon or riding with Cole on the wagon seat. The two men ended up taking turns driving the wagon, neither any too eager to chitchat; Patricia mentioned the mild animosity bubbling between them, almost beyond their control.
“Perhaps I was fortunate to be in a state of immobile exhaustion. At least I was not required to participate in such awkward conversation as that which transpired between them. When they spoke at all, that is.” A wan smile lifted her lips as she related this detail.
Derrick had gathered me in a tight, intense hug upon my appearance at the boardinghouse, pure relief overpowering his usual aloof arrogance; his first question was, “How soon can we return?”
But I had no answer for him.
Derrick was currently downstairs, along with Cole, Malcolm, and the proprietors, an elderly couple named Lund. Aces High was bedded for the night in the Lunds’ nearby barn. Not a moment too soon; the downpour let loose only minutes after our arrival. The scents of beef stew, bread, and coffee wafted up the narrow staircase, sending hunger pangs on the attack. The smell of a hearty dinner, not to mention the rich aroma of coffee, brought to mind Grandma and Aunt Ellen, and the cheerful home in which I’d lived as a pregnant teenager and new mother.
Millie Jo spent the first few years of her life in their house, making pancakes and biscuits, pies and pan sauces along with her great-grandma and great-aunt in the bright, comfortably cluttered
