completely taken care of here. You can keep leaving your revolver with me, if you’re worried about my being safe. But the snow will be five feet deep before you turn around. I want to get down to that ranch with you, too, as soon as we can. I’ll bet I can find a lot of things you didn’t think to bring up here.”
“You might,” said Jeebee.
He thought he heard a note in her voice that was somehow wrong, and could be connected to whatever had happened to Paul, Nick, and the wagon—and to her as a result. It was as if she was trying hard to act as if there was nothing unsaid between them—a sort of unnatural brittleness. But he said nothing. He took the rifle, the horses and trailer—for the snow was now almost gone and the good weather held—and went back to his hunting. Now that she was here to do the cooking for him, he could simply drop off a load of raw meat at the cave and return to the flatlands without waiting. With the two of them and winter coming on, there was a more urgent need for stockpiling meat than ever.
The days were still sunny, but it was getting colder. It was now frosty in the mornings, and the cooked meat could be hung in places where it was in the shade all day. So it could be kept at close to ordinary refrigerator temperature.
So Jeebee spent the next few days hunting. Up at the cave, Merry gradually recovered her strength, although the strange brittleness of character stayed with her. She was almost overbusy, cleaning and recleaning the inner room, cooking the meat he brought in, and—although he did not know about this until she was halfway into it—she began enlarging the hole in the cold front room, at the opposite end of that long, narrow passageway from the blacksmithy, and had it half-dug before he found out.
Still, she seemed finally to have become fully rested. So that, while Jeebee by himself had been in the habit of going to sleep shortly after sundown and sleeping until just before dawn, he now took to staying up later in the evening with her, talking before the fire. In these talks, finally, little by little, without any coaxing from him but as if the memories were painful, the story of her journey to find him came out.
It came in bits and pieces. Clearly, she found difficulty in winding herself up to the point of telling it, and she was starting with those things that were easier to tell, first.
For Jeebee it was a little like reading a book, or watching a movie, which had been chopped into sections, each section being read forward in the ordinary manner, but with the sections not necessarily in order except that they generally revealed themselves in reverse order.
She had known, she said, in any case roughly, where Jeebee was headed, and thought she knew which way he would go. Although of course she had assumed he would be going directly up into Montana after leaving the wagon. It had not occurred to her that he might backtrack, cross the Powder River Pass, and take a side trip to get the wolf books. As a result, she had gone up the other side of that particular range of mountains and not crossed his trail until she was above Billings.
She had had an advantage over him. She was more confident about asking her way as she went.
When she started, the people she stopped with overnight and questioned as to whether they had seen anyone like Jeebee or signs of his trail, or even heard of such a person, were either people who had at one time been customers of Paul’s or who knew of Paul.
When she got beyond the point where Paul was known, she still continued by a chain method, in which she would ask the last family to welcome her whom she might contact farther north. So, equipped with a name and some information that would help introduce her to someone who did not know her, she had moved on, and on; each time, upon leaving she asked for the name of someone yet further up.
None of those she asked or visited had seen Jeebee, or knew of him directly. But she did pick up word, late in the trip, of someone glimpsed moving northward with a couple of horses.
Even this information was told her only from time to time. But since she knew she was headed in the right direction, she continued northward. Her figuring was that since Jeebee would be fighting the clock of the seasons to get to his brother’s ranch in time, he would keep moving in the direction she was taking herself. Her only fear was that he would reach the area of his brother’s ranch, then start to wander around trying to find it, and she might overshoot him at that point. Her hope was that she still could overtake him before he got too far north.
She was still feeling relatively safe when her chain of references, from household to household, broke.
She had already decided that if the worse came to the worst, and she had not caught up with Jeebee before winter started, she would try to find some family that would take her in until the spring. One which would be willing to trade food and shelter in exchange for the work she could do for them.
She knew that she had a good deal to offer in her knowledge of horses, of herbal and general medicines, and a multitude of other things useful to know around a farm or ranch. She knew she could be an asset to any such place and more than earn her keep. The only danger was finding herself stuck with people who would not give her a chance to prove what she was able to do.
“…and that’s more or less what happened,” she told Jeebee, staring into the flames in the fireplace of the cave. “I finally got sent on by one family—their name was Henderson, they were nice people—but they sent me on with only one name, a name for only one person in a family. He was an old man named Gary Brutelle. I was told he didn’t have any wife or children, but he was supposed to have a couple of younger men, nephews or cousins or something like that, living with him.”
She had always been wary of stopping with any family or group that had no woman among them. But the Hendersons had assured her that old Gary Brutelle was the nicest of men. In addition, he would be definitely in control of anyone else living under his roof.
It was the only lead she had. So she went forward, particularly feeling that she must be very close behind Jeebee, since at the Hendersons’ there had been talk of some sign found that somebody with horses had camped in the willow bottoms of a small river nearby. A camp, she was told, of which the sign had been recent.
So if that was Jeebee, he must be fairly close ahead of her.
Jeebee was tempted to tell her about the bear, but he did not want to interrupt her, now that she was talking.
She did not even glance at him, but continued with her eyes on the fire.
“But when I got to this Brutelle place,” she said, “the old man had died. There were only the two cousins there. They were men in their forties, and they seemed decent enough. I was going to move on anyway, except they seemed very good, and really insisted on my staying overnight.”
She paused.
“I shouldn’t have trusted them.”
Jeebee tensed. This time she did look at him.
“Oh, they didn’t do anything to me personally.” She looked back at the fire. “But when I got up in the morning and moved out into the kitchen, I found one of them holding a rifle on me. The other took away my revolver. They told me they’d talked it over last night after I’d gone to bed. I was to stay with them—and work for them. They needed a woman around the house. As long as I didn’t give any trouble to them, they wouldn’t give any trouble to me. But I was going to stay, and that was that.”
She hesitated.
“In some ways,” she said, “I don’t think they were really so bad. It was just that they really wanted to keep me, and they knew I’d never stay of my own free will. So they took my guns and my horses—everything I owned —and made sure I wasn’t carrying anything else, even a knife I might use against them. And kept me locked up nights. Daytimes, there was always one of them with me and he had a gun.”
She stopped, and stayed stopped so long that Jeebee finally prompted her.
“What happened then?”
She looked at him.
“Well,” she said, “I thought it best to seem to go along with them and maybe they’d relax and I’d have a chance to slip away.
And that’s pretty much what happened after several weeks. But I had to run at night, with nothing more than that packsack on my back, with a couple of blankets and a little bit of food that I stole from their kitchen. I headed north blind. I didn’t even get to keep my binoculars. With those I could have waited my time to come up and watch a ranch house from a distance until I was sure there was a woman there, or else there was some sign that it’d be safe to go up to them. As it happened, I’d only passed a couple of places—and that at night—before this snow caught me. I sneaked into a barn at one of the ranch houses, but left that morning before anybody was up, so I don’t know what they were like. I headed on north, but finally, I knew it was no good. I was out of food
