“Sarah?”
“I’m … just a little confused, that’s all.”
He smiled wistfully. “Part of loving someone, really loving them, is accepting them entirely on their terms. I meant what I said. I shall be honored to simply remain your friend. I just…” He made a face. “I had to tell you. Even at risk of driving you away. I couldn’t have forgiven myself if I’d never said it.”
She took a deep breath, then blew it out, saying, “Dear me.” She laughed at the irony. “You don’t want to love me, Bret. It’s a bad idea. Find some woman who can dream and love and laugh. I’m nothing more than a walking ruin.”
“You’re a pillar of steel, Sarah. And each day I marvel at your strength and resilience. Your courage inspires me.”
“You’re an idiot, Bret Anderson.” She turned away, the hollow sensation of loss in her belly.
“I know what happened to you. You cry out in your nightmares. And it’s the same nightmare over and over. If I prove nothing else to you, it will be that I am not like those men. That eventually, you won’t have to run anymore.”
She stared down at the fire, swallowing hard. The demons down inside her tried to claw their way out.
“I killed the leader,” she heard herself say, as if from a great distance. “Used Billy’s Bowie knife.”
She felt herself sway.
In her mind she relived those moments, perched on the steep trail. Dewley was staring at her in horror, his leg broken. He kept trying to reach the Colt where it had fallen among the rocks. His fingers kept slipping off the end of the barrel. The memory of Dewley’s screams, the blood jetting from his severed arteries. It had spattered on her skin, warm and viscous.
“It was like Billy said. Not much different than butchering a hog.” She paused, gaze gone distant. “I was crazy, Bret. Like some mindless banshee. Possessed of the devil.” She hesitated, still feeling remote and separate from the world. “Maybe I still am.”
“My nightmares are of the war,” he told her. “That boy. Or seeing ranks of men blown to red bits in front of my guns. We all have our devils. It’s what we do with them that matters.”
She shrugged, bent down and stirred the chicken where it boiled with carrots she’d found outside of Fort Scott.
“I think we should go to Colorado,” Bret told her, his voice dropping into its familiar and easygoing cadence. “Someplace new for both of us. A place where no one will be looking for me, either as a deserter or for killing that scoundrel Parmelee. In addition, we can set ourselves up in a better residence. People don’t ask as many questions in places like mining camps. And Sarah, there are fortunes to be made.”
“Colorado is a long way from here, Bret. And winter’s coming.”
“In Fort Scott I overheard that there’s a new stage line running across the plains from Atchison, Kansas. That’s a week or so north of us. I’ll be fit enough to sit up by then. And it will be fast.”
“What about the wagon?”
“Sell it. Like you said, it’s September. It would take us months to make the crossing on our own. We’d freeze out there in some blizzard. The stage will have us in Denver in weeks. And Jefferson can follow behind the coach on a lead.”
Colorado? Did she want to go to Colorado?
“Aren’t stagecoaches expensive?”
“The fare is one hundred and seventy-five a person.”
“Dear Lord God, where are we going to find three hundred and fifty—”
“Here.” He reached over to pat his trunk. “In the lining, lower right side. We shall travel in style.”
“You are a man of surprises tonight, Bretford Jerome Anderson.” The more she thought about it, the more intriguing the idea was. Colorado was such a long way from Benton County, Arkansas, and the ruins of her old life. For the first time since the start of the war, a flicker of hope began to burn inside her. It would be new. A place where some horrible memory didn’t lurk around the corner. Where no former acquaintance might meet her on the street and cry, “Why, aren’t you Sarah Hancock? James’s raped daughter?”
She studied Bret thoughtfully, her gaze locked with his dark and anxious eyes. Was the fool really in love with her? Could a man really and truly love her, knowing what he did about her?
He’s never so much as hinted that I sleep with him.
And she knew he was interested, had seen the longing in his eyes. Had seen the quickening in him when she wore her red form-fitting dress and stood tall before him.
Oddly, just thinking of it kindled a flicker of warmth inside her.
“As to Colorado? I say we do it, Bret.”
“You’re sure? Just like that?”
“Paw always talked about the Shining Mountains. I never figured I’d see them. They were just kind of a dream, something for adventurous men.”
Bret gave her a sparkling smile. “We’ll do it up right, Sarah. I promise. You shall never want for anything. Once we climb into that stage, we’ll leave the devil behind us and never look back.”
“You’re a fool, Bret. You almost make me believe you.”
64
September 15, 1865
The camp was situated a half mile north of the Santa Fe Trail. It lay in the protection of a grassy draw that emptied into the Arkansas River floodplain. Doc and Butler were three days west of Fort Zarah on the Great Bend of the Arkansas, headed for Fort Larned. Word was that a caravan of freight wagons was about to leave under military escort and make its passage across the western trail.
Peace might have been declared in the east, but chaos reigned in the west where every Plains Indian tribe had taken the opportunity to declare war on the overland trails. In the south it was the Comanche, Kiowa, and Kiowa Apache. Move a little north and it was the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux.
As the depredations had increased, atrocity led to
