Sadie left Wapiti with the first hint of dawn peeping over the eastern horizon, riding into the morning with gleams of sunlight off the damp stone. Down from the mountains, over the Dakota and well into the rolling hills of the Cumberland Forest, hopefully to make it to Valentine by noon. Her job today was to go there, see how things stood overall, and get some supplies. Everyone on the reservation was packing things up, and soon they'd move out. Charles and the Wapiti were headed north to Canada, and she and Arthur were headed south to Mexico. It seemed to say something sad that all of them were getting the hell out of America at this point, and it wasn't just about the government having a keen interest in all of them.
Another four days of rest had done Arthur a lot of good. He'd borrowed some of Charles' clean clothes, gotten out of bed, moved around the camp, helped people with a few small tasks. The toll of the disease and the last few months had finally caught up with him, though. He still got tired easily, and usually after that he'd go roll up in that bison robe, and sleep like the--no, she wouldn't finish that thought. He slept like what he was: a man exhausted. He looked better, but she wouldn't delude herself that a week or so in bed would see him cured. She'd seen it in New Austin as a kid, desperate pale men and women coming to the desert hoping for a miracle, and most of them struggled for months or even years.
When she'd last seen Arthur this morning, he'd been left minding Red Shawl's son while she and her husband packed their stuff. He'd done it making a face and grumbling that his life had come to him being a nursemaid, but she knew that all of them who heard it knew there was no real irritation behind it. She'd seen a soft shine in those eyes of his as he looked at that tiny newborn boy, heard him muttering something lowly in that tone of voice people used with babies, as she swung up into the saddle. He couldn't fool her. In some ways, she'd started to see through his mask even at Colter, with Arthur trying in that awkward, courteous way of his to check in on all the women and Jack besides. He could be a fierce and ruthless bastard when he needed, and she was thankful for that, but there was that part of him too soft as a cloud, and she was thankful for that too.
He'd be all right. If he tried to do something stupid and push too hard, she had every faith Charles would tell him to sit back down, and would enforce that if need be.
Valentine was a fairly easy ride, and she didn't move to push Bob too hard besides. She needed him to have some reserves for the journey back, given he'd be loaded with some things from the shopping. It wasn't like she could get the Wapiti a whole winters' supply of provisions, not without driving numerous wagons up there. She knew full well to the sack of flour and tin of kerosene what it took to provision two people and farm animals for a northern winter, let alone the dozen or so who were on the reservation now. That would attract too much notice. Besides, they wanted to move quickly, with a light load to help that. The ones leaving now were the ones who most needed to get north and settled fast, because they were the frailer ones, with less time to spare on a journey in increasingly cruel northern November weather.
So she'd been sent to buy only a handful of essentials for them. Medicine and ammunition most of all, two of the most critical things the Army had kept back from them, the things that would let them heal and let them hunt when they made their way to their new home.
The Wapiti had some money laid by, so that hadn't been the problem. The problem was that they couldn't as easily ride in Valentine, St. Denis, or anywhere else, and buy the things they needed. One look at them, and suddenly an Indian's money wasn't much good, assuming they could even make it to the shops without being harassed.
Sitting together yesterday, helping mend a jacket for Six Bear Killer, one of the elderly men, Red Shawl had bitterly complained that when she'd tried to buy some ginger root for her pregnancy nausea, a shopkeeper in Colorado had stared her down and told her that if she'd gone through her allotment from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, that wasn't much his problem. "What allotment? My people hadn't seen an full food allotment in months before we left the reservation in Oklahoma. He said that his supplies were for settlers who truly needed them, not greedy Indians looking for more than their share." She flung up her hands. "Snow Goose walks into the same shop fifteen minutes later and buys that same ginger root, nothing said about it!"
Sadie didn't doubt the tone of that particular altercation for a moment, or Weathers' ease in getting the purchase himself. She and Red Shawl both knew exactly why that had been. Her husband, with his white skin and that Weathers name that could shield him when need be, wouldn't get a second look.
She figured she might as well put her own ability to buy things without much remark to good use here, even if a woman shopping alone might get a couple of comments. The Pinkertons weren't looking for her. She knew that with full confidence. She'd never made the papers. The Wapiti had gotten screwed for sure by the government, and they'd been good enough to shelter Arthur while he got back on his feet, even if he barely qualified for that distinction. Maybe she hadn't been a full-fledged outlaw or anything like that before O'Driscolls and their violence came into her life, but there was a reason she and Jake had decided to go way up into the Grizzlies as they had, to live their own life away from anyone's say-so. Even Colter had been abandoned for more than a few years by the time they built their home in Pinetree Gorge, and Ambarino might have claimed statehood two years ago, but she really had no idea how, given how lonely and lawless and empty much of it was, a different kind of empty from the New Austin desert.
She and Jake had both grown up near Tumbleweed, and in her life it had turned from a rough-and-tumble boomtown to something constantly decaying and dying, with only a few stubborn souls and the bandits to claim it. That was the government's doing. They'd forced Tumbleweed's fate after the brutal local Seven Ridges War when she was a girl, and made the decision to route the rails through Armadillo and avoid Tumbleweed entirely as too much of a risk. That decision was what began slowly killing off the place. One arbitrary decision, and in the time she went from girl to woman, what had been a decently happy albeit hardscrabble town for most aside from the Calhouns in their mansion up on the hill, became a mere shadow of itself, all dust and dying dreams and despair. Even the Calhouns had fled long ago, the mansion abandoned and left as some decrepit relic like Miss Havisham's manor.
Her parents and Jake's had moved from Pennsylvania to escape, to have a new start, a new chance to prosper. So much as she and Jake had hated to leave, feeling like they were giving up, there was nothing more they could fight for in the end. If thirty years of blood, sweat, and tears couldn't make that land prosper, an eternity wouldn't do it. If they'd have stayed linger, they'd have gone under entirely. By that point she was twenty-eight already and he was thirty-three, and they'd done everything they could to keep their parents' dreams and their land afloat, and all it got them was more struggle, more debt, more waiting to be married. Going north, way up away from it all, and hoping it took a full damn generation or more for all that government control and the wiles of powerful rich men to catch up to them there, sounded like a pretty good idea. Given up on their parents' dreams in favor of their own, however guiltily, they'd packed their trunks, and they'd headed for Blackwater to be married.
They'd had such plans. Making that homestead, living a quiet life on their own terms away from politicians and bankers whose vagaries destroyed lives with the stroke of a pen. Both of them agreed they wanted to raise their kids to think for themselves, have choices, and just how much they wanted those babies. But long as they'd waited to marry, they'd put having them off a few years more until the homestead got more established, until the time and money stabilized more. Though it hurt to realize all over again that the ranch would never settle, and she'd never hold a son or daughter in her arms and see that mingling of herself and Jake, so she put that thought away with some pain. It had been just the two of them against it all. They'd hunted, fished, ranched, tried to carve out a living in an even harder place than the one they'd left. They'd grown used to the rhythms of the seasons, so very different from the sun baked sand and rocks of western New Austin. They'd both been all childish wonderment at the snow. After that first blizzard, after digging a path to the barn to feed the horses, she'd stuffed snow down Jake's collar, and he'd repaid the favor by throwing her over his shoulder and dumping her in a snowdrift. They'd hurried inside after that to warm up by the fire and then stayed in bed for most of the next three days, keeping each other warm in the best way they knew how, venturing out only to feed and water the horses. There had been some dangerous types around, more than a few bandits, and she'd been on edge and ready to shoot if she had to, but it wasn't the same as it had been living the outlaw life. Having to kill was one thing, and Jake had struggled even with the notion of that, wanting to find ways short of that to solve things. She hadn't imagined that she could even feel a fierce satisfaction in killing, given the right rage and circumstances.
Now here she was, down from the mountains that she once thought she'd die in long years from now, leaving that dream behind her in ashes both literal and figurative. Running south, just as she'd run north three years ago, just her and a man by her side hoping to make some kind of quiet life away from the scrutiny, away from it all. She couldn't help but see the symmetry of it, though it wasn't like that with her and Arthur, even as fine a man as he was. He'd relieved her beyond words that he'd never had expectations, that after she'd stood up for herself that day they went on the supply run to Rhodes, he hadn't protested much even then. After that day he'd treated her with the same respect he gave any hunter or gun hand in the gang, and he'd never assumed a widow acutely felt the lack of a man in her bedroll and made nasty comments. She couldn't say the same about Micah.
Though to hear the girls in camp, Arthur didn't bother them either, treating them with gentle courtesy like they were all his little sisters. Whatever scratching the proverbial itch the man did, like every other man in the gang, it was apparently in town with painted ladies. She'd heard Javier teasing him back at Horseshoe about bungling it with someone in Valentine. Too bad for Mary-Beth, given Sadie had seen the way she looked at him sometimes, with that dewy-eyed romanticism. But she'd been that young once. Arthur, thirty-five or so, fine-looking, and Dutch's chief enforcer? Might as well be locoweed to a young thing around twenty or so. She knew what it was like being smitten with a man old enough to wear some mantle of power and wear it easily, the sort that seemed wise and strong and experienced and just dangerous enough in a way that melted a gal's heart and other parts besides, old enough for youthful prettiness to have yielded to a rugged handsomeness, but not near so old as to be revolting. Next to that, boys her own age had felt so callow and dumb, and she'd secretly had her fantasies about someone older, wiser, who'd seen more of the world than that corner of the desert. Though she'd never gone crazy over a man she didn't know, couldn't seem to look at one and fall head over heels like her sister had once done. She'd been lucky she saw the fineness in Jake right in front of her.
She hadn't been through Valentine that much, given she had mostly kept to herself and stayed in the camp while they stayed at Horseshoe Overlook, and then they'd fled elsewhere to other towns closer by for their needs. She'd passed through some while hunting down O'Driscoll trash, but unlike the boys with their mayhem of various types, fistfights and drunk shenanigans and bank robbery and a gunfight with Cornwall's men--no Goddamn wonder the Pinkertons found them--she'd left little to no impression on this town, which served her well now. Sometimes in life it paid to be invisible, as any woman knew all too well.
The streets were as pokey and muddy as ever, and she hitched Bob first at the gunsmith, went in, and bought a significant amount of repeater ammunition. "Homesteader?" he guessed, looking at her practical shirt and pants and kerchief.
She nodded her acknowledgment. "Yeah, up in the Grizzlies. The husband and me want to get that last bit of hunting in before we get snowed in for the winter." Easy to draw on memories for that to speak with confidence, though she and Jake had done their stocking up in Strawberry with Chip Cooper, not here in Valentine. Best to not talk too much, leave too many memories by being something remarkable. Humdrum sodbusters scraping out a living would be a dime a dozen to most any shopkeeper.
Down the street to the general store next, buying some clothes for herself, and some for Arthur besides. She hoped she got the size estimation right. It helped that he was around Jake's size, at least he was when he wasn't a skinny scarecrow shadow of himself. Bought some books too, gave the same excuse of homesteading and preparing for the winter. It all felt like being thrown back in time a year, like she really was here in town buying all the supplies to last the months of another long, cold winter up in Pinetree Gulch. Books. Clothes. Ammunition. Medicine. But some things were lacking. No kerosene, coffee, flour, oats, or anything like that.
Good thing she wasn't in Strawberry, because if Chip, with his half-moon spectacles and his not-so-secret still making excellent white lightning in his basement, had been there, it might have been too much. He knew both her and Jake from these past couple of years. She could imagine him smiling at her and calling her Mrs. Adler, asking what she needed this time, assuming she was buying those clothes for Jake, recommending the latest books he'd gotten in the new shipment. Had she been there and he'd done that, she might well have fallen apart. Being in Big Valley would have reminded too of Hanging Dog to the north, and how vengeance on Tom Watkins and all the rest had only left her hollow rather than healed.
Shaking off those thoughts with effort, she looked at the stack of a half-dozen novels, and asked, "Do you have 'A Tale Of Two Cities' by Mr. Dickens?" She remembering Arthur saying to Charles he'd got only partway into it and then things went wrong in Blackwater, and he sure as hell hadn't had idle time to read since then. He might enjoy getting a chance to finish it, and she'd never read that one herself.
The shopkeeper nodded, adding a red-bound book to the stack. She paid the bill, having him hold the stuff until she was ready to leave, given it was growing into a considerable bundle. Good thing she'd have that proud bastard of a horse of Arthur's to bear some of the burden on the way back.
At her next stop, things suddenly got strange from the moment she walked in the door. The doctor appeared oddly nervous, glancing towards the door of the shop as if expecting someone. "I don't want any more trouble, now," he protested. Even with as chilly as it was today, he looked like he was sweating.
She shook her head, not understanding him. "What the hell are you talking about, Doc?"
"I saw you come through town a few weeks back with that big fella. Look, those O'Driscolls threatened me into running that crap from my back room, all right? He actually did me a real favor clearing them out. But they were the high rollers making money at this place, not me, not me at all. Did he send you to finish the job, see what you can get from me...what is it, four months later? I've got ten bucks in the register right now, lady. Nothing more, I swear it. And I've got kids to feed."
His nervous rambling unsettled her. She shook her head, exasperated. "I ain't here to rob you." Fool, she finished silently. Obviously Arthur had left quite the impression, though hearing he'd sent a few more O'Driscolls to hell at this store still satisfied something within her. But it was a dull echo of the savage pleasure it had once been. They'd broken the gang, all of them were dead or fled, and about the only consolation was knowing they wouldn't make any more widows or orphans. What they'd taken from her couldn't be stolen back, no matter how much blood she spilled. Revenge is a idiot's game, he'd insisted. Maybe he hadn't been wrong. But she still wasn't sorry they were dead.
He eyed her, shoulders visibly relaxing from where they'd been as tense as piano wire. "I read in the papers he's dead. The Pinkertons got him."
"That so?" She'd have to buy that paper before leaving town and confirm that, but given the Pinkertons on the road had boasted of it, that seemed like sound information. "I left all that behind after he and I went out riding that day. I found out just how much he kept from me, mister. Found out who and what he really was, that miserable lying sack of shit." How the hell to explain the need for all that medicine, though? She thought fast. "He left me with a souvenir, unfortunately."
"Ma'am, I'm sorry, but I ain't dealing in that kind of drug--"
With a sour amusement she realized he'd assumed the "souvenir" was Arthur leaving her pregnant, and that she was looking to get rid of it. Most women didn't go to doctors on that. They went to other women. It was Susan Grimshaw, of all people, who'd slipped her the right herbs at Horseshoe Overlook, told her that if there was any complication after her ordeal with the O'Driscoll boys, that particular tea would make sure said problem got rooted out. She'd wanted to like the older woman for that alone. "I ain't pregnant. No, from the cough I've got, the blood in it, he left me with his damn TB." She saw him instinctively take a half-step back. "Jesus, I wasn't gonna cough on you."
Something in him steadied again, and now his gaze turned sympathetic, almost kindly. "I'm afraid there's not that much I can do for you. Tuberculosis is--well, doctors always hate to lose a battle. But that's one damn mean enemy."
Yeah, she didn't need to hear that reiterated, and start to worry again about Arthur's long odds. She couldn't deny they were bad enough. "I'm heading south. I have cousins down in New Austin." She lied through her teeth, because if he talked to anyone, it felt best they not know she and Arthur had gone to Mexico. "I assume that's gonna help?"
He leaned on the counter, more at ease again, the professional instinct taking over from his previous consternation. "It should. Armadillo's supposed to be a growing place that might well suit. But the desert, yes. Hot, dry weather. Lots of rest." Nothing she didn't know already. "Eating a lot. You look to have lost some weight already, and I see the strain in your features." She'd certainly dropped some weight these past months, and not rested well either. But that was from everything she'd been through, and what it cost to keep everything stitched together as best she could. "You can take laudanum for the pain, of course."
"Give me a couple bottles of it, then." She rattled off the rest of the list for the Wapiti, staring at him, daring him to tell her it was ridiculous and wouldn't help. But apparently he wasn't going to disillusion a supposedly-dying woman from throwing everything possible at it and hoping something stuck. Probably didn't hurt he'd make some good money off this transaction too.
He filled the order, carefully wrapping the bottles in cloth to keep them from jostling and breaking each other on the journey. From the price he quoted, he only charged her about half. "You and that fella parted ways on bad terms, and it seems he was no gentleman towards you. I'm sorry for that. But I owe him something and it seems he's put you in a bad way, so call this my paying a debt forward as best I can."
It felt like strange, tortured logic, but she wasn't going to question the kindness too deeply. "Sure." She hoisted the bag over her shoulder and headed out, down the street to the stable. Five minutes later, leading a sulky Buell to hitch him beside Bob at the general store, she eyed the big stallion, trying to feel out whether she was in for a tantrum or test from him. He eyed her right back with an imperious blue-eyed glare. So it was going to go like that. She'd show him who was boss and not back down, or he'd keep balking the whole way back to the reservation. "Behave or I'll turn you into glue, you grumpy bastard," she told him. "And tell Arthur you died as a tragic victim of your own stubbornness. Though I suppose that trait makes you two a pretty pair."
He snorted and flicked his ears at that. She sighed, holding out a carrot, and he carefully reached out and lipped it out of her hand. "Yeah, all right. Your old friend died, Arthur says, and leaves you to him, and then he goes and leaves you here to go riding off with a pretty female. Typical of a man, huh? Tell you the truth, I'd be a bit sore too." She reached into her saddlebag for a sugar lump, and he reached for it more readily than he had the carrot. She ended up patting his neck, feeling him ease fractionally beneath her hand. "Trust me, boy, you was better off here. Poor Zenobia went with him right to the end, and she ain't coming back."
She would have gone with him too had he let her, but given he'd intended that as his final gesture, and bound her with that promise to look after the Marstons, she'd left him. That was how it had to be. All the same, she'd resented him a time or two during that long night for not letting her die a decent death fighting before the dark growing inside of her consumed even her regrets and shame, the last shreds of her humanity. But it seemed it had worked out as it ought. If she'd gone with him to the Hollow and beyond, maybe she would have died there, and he would have died too. God's good humor, she supposed.
The two of them came to terms, at least enough that Buell followed Bob amiably. She didn't stop to eat dinner, even though it was into the afternoon now. There were biscuits and a chocolate bar in her satchel, and that would tide her over well enough. She made one last stop at the train station. She would have much preferred to buy tickets up at Bacchus Station, away from all this other business in Valentine, and a shorter ride for Arthur from Wapiti besides. But Dutch's infinite wisdom in blowing Bacchus Bridge to try and rob that train meant that train route was temporarily messed up on heading back westward, to put it lightly. Unless they wanted to go east from Bacchus through Annesburg and St. Denis, which sounded like a particularly choice piece of stupidity and altogether tempting fate a little too much, they'd have to catch the train from Valentine instead, and head west.
So she asked the agent about tickets, playing the dumb hayseed who'd never ridden a train or robbed one either, trying to shave the edges off her west New Austin accent so her ignorance would better pass locally. "My husband's brother, he's a bastard and don't want us on the homestead now that their daddy's dead. One of them's gonna kill the other if we don't get out of there, so we was thinking to go real far south. Make a new start. How far does the rail line go beyond Blackwater? What options have we got?"
He gave her that familiar smile that men so often gave women, the one that combined friendliness with the automatic assumption of her being slow on the uptake. "Well, ma'am, trouble is that's a couple of different rail lines, see? You'll have to buy tickets for the next leg of your trip at each changeover point. And it's not continuous either, sadly. Hopefully will be someday, but that won't help you today, I'm aware. You'll still have to stop at Riggs Station, either ride into Strawberry from there to take a stagecoach a couple of hours south to Blackwater. Or if you and your husband are bringing your horses, you could just ride it yourself." She'd known full well about the different rail lines, but that pointed reminder about Riggs Station plucked at her nerves. Outstanding, given she'd run into that rail discontinuity herself when northward bound three years ago. She and Jake had taken a wagon from Blackwater onward since the train could take them no further directly, and it was easier to drive from that point all the way up to the Grizzlies given the things they had with them, and with their planning to collect more along the way even further north.
She saw the risk in changing over from their horses or a stagecoach to a train out in the open in Blackwater where they'd likely shoot Arthur on sight, if they recognized him as being at least halfway alive still rather than dead as the newspapers claimed. But it was a risk they'd have to take. He pulled out the railway map, unfolding it on the counter, tracing the routes with his finger. "We here are the Central Union line. You take us to Riggs Station, get off there, and you get yourself to Blackwater from there. From Blackwater, you take the Union Pacific to the next junction at MacFarlane's Ranch. From there, you can change over again to the Southwestern, and that'll take you either west into New Austin or south down into Mexico at Manteca Falls, if that's where the wind takes you."
"Thanks, friend. I'll get the tickets to Riggs Station, at least. What times have you got late tonight or early tomorrow? Got my man meeting me here tonight. Best to be done with it and get out of town before his brother notices I ain't come back yet and Alan's up and vanished besides."
He rattled off the list, and she asked for two tickets on the midnight special to Riggs Station. Actually 10:30 PM, according to the schedule, but who was counting? Cheap tickets, since fewer people wanted to board at that hour, and that was good, but it wasn't her main reason for the choice. Better to be on a less crowded train, and by her figuring, that would still mean they would get to Blackwater and through before sunrise. If they timed this right, and if Arthur could push hard enough and not need to rest up, they'd be across the border in Nuevo Paraiso already by that next afternoon. Sliding the money across the counter, she said, "Done. Thanks, friend." She leaned in close, braced an elbow on the counter, lowered her voice. "If a big, mean looking bastard with a scar on his right cheek comes asking after me or my man over the next couple of days--"
"Oh, I know nothing," he assured her, a faint trace of a smile playing about his lips. "Though I'm off at nine tonight and the midnight special ain't my shift, so what's the name you're leaving them under?"
Her brain stuttered to a halt for a moment, and she froze, feeling foolish for not having expected that question. She sure as hell couldn't say Morgan, and Adler might not be the best idea either, and some part of her also instinctively balked at giving the name Jake gave her to Arthur, even as a ruse. She seized on the first thing that came to mind as a surname she would react to naturally, given it was hers by birthright. "Griffith. Alan and Sarah Griffith." Hopefully Arthur didn't mind a woman giving him her name. If he knew what was good for him, he wouldn't protest it. It would only be until they got to Mexico anyhow. She had the sad feeling that given what she'd become, it would take a lot more than a new name for her to leave Sadie Adler behind.
~~~~~~~~~~
He'd missed so much of this with Isaac, arriving two months into the boy's life as he had, but given he'd seen Jack as a newborn and it was much the same, he guessed they all likely slept about as much as Shawl Junior did. It made minding him easy enough, anyway. Let him sleep, say something soft and kind if he started to whimper, and if that turned into actual howls of hunger or squalls of discomfort at shitting himself, he could poke his head from the tent flap and summon Red Shawl from where she was busy doing her packing.
Minding a baby didn't feel like much work, but it was about what they'd let him do. About what he could do, if he were to be honest with himself. He'd come out from under the worst shadow where he was so weak it was all he could do to sit up and eat, but he wasn't much better than that yet. Better to marshal what diminished reserves he had for the trip to Mexico, because that wasn't going to be an easy trip. He smiled wryly to himself at how things changed. A year ago, without bounty hunters eager for his hide, if he'd had the horses for it he could have ridden from Wapiti all the way to Mexico if he'd wanted. Done a ride of at least a full day, without stopping to rest. Sure, he would have slept hard the next night, but he'd have come out of it little the worse for the wear. Strange how effortless that strength had been, how casually he'd taken it for granted all those years, until suddenly it wasn't there anymore.
Red Shawl peeked into the tent again, scooping up Junior, giving her boy a fond smile. Then she looked up at Arthur. "If you're able, Rains Fall wants to speak with you before you go."
He pushed up from where he'd been sitting, staring into the fire and half lost in the trance of his own thoughts. "Sure." He nodded to Junior. "He's a good kid."
She hesitated for a moment. "Announcing his name as one of the tribe," she told Arthur, obviously choosing her words with care, "is something for once we get to our new place in Canada. It's...a sacred thing, that naming ceremony. Not for--"
"We all got our rituals, ma'am." The Wapiti had whatever their tribe's naming ceremony was, and whatever tribe Red Shawl came from did as well. Christian folks went in for baptism. All to the same purpose, wasn't it? Bringing someone into that particular tribe, recognizing them. He wasn't sure why she'd brought it up.
"But Snow Goose and I both think he should have a proper wašícu name. Who knows in this world, maybe a time comes when he needs it. So if you agree, we'd also call him Arthur Weathers."
He almost fired right back with a smartass remark. My God, lady, why would you saddle any poor kid with my name? He kept his mouth shut long enough to recognize the compliment in it, undeserved as it was. She and her husband would name their boy for the man who'd almost wrecked their lives coming to collect on a debt? About the only thing more hilariously awful would be poor Archie Downes naming his first son after Arthur. "You saved our lives," she said insistently, obviously reading into his awkward silence. Yeah, and if he was the good man they all kept trying to insist, he'd have helped them fix the damn wagon to begin. No, even beyond that, he wouldn't have been chasing debtors to start. "We left the Shawnee, my people, so the Army's anger wouldn't fall on them for Snow Goose's sake. Chances are we weren't going to make it through the winter alone anyway, just the two of us on the run, and me about ready to have the baby." He couldn't argue that. "Losing our things made us come here, join them. So it was a good thing in the end."
It still seemed like a weird trail of logic, but to hell with it, people sometimes needed their comfortable illusions to make sense of it all. And if allowing them to name the kid for a rotten ugly bastard like him could somehow protect Junior in this life, so be it. Maybe that would be one more good thing done against a life with so much bad on his account. "If you think it'll help him, then by all means. I'm...honored." Getting to his feet, he reached for his old waxed canvas jacket, shrugging it on. With as thin as he'd gotten he couldn't seem to keep warm easily anyway, but it served for walking only about thirty feet to the lodge he knew from before belonged to Rains Fall.
The old chief invited him in, and as he settled on a bearskin pad, he saw the man looking him over. No delusions as to what he saw. An outlaw, an outcast, a man on the run, thin and tired and ragged and sickly. At least he was washed, dressed and shaved, clothes and shaving kit both borrowed from Charles, so that was an improvement. Though keeping his hands steady enough for the shaving cost him a couple of nicks. He'd had to settle for leaving a close-cut growth of stubble, because with his luck he'd manage to slice his own throat open with that razor if he went for a true clean shave. He waited, sensing that whatever Rains Fall meant to say, it would come in its proper moment. Probably a full minute or more, and then finally the man bowed his head, sighed, and spoke. "It's good to see that you survived the madness of these past months, Mr. Morgan."
He sounded so old and tired and beaten. A man who'd lost his people, his son, his country, his entire world. Arthur could relate to that feeling all too well, unfortunately. Right now when it came to life, he felt about as lost and rootless as any man could possibly be. "I owe that to Sadie Adler. To Charles and you, for taking me in." He stared into the heart of the fire, not wanting to look at Rains Fall's face when he said it. "I'm sorry. About Eagle Flies, I mean. I keep thinking if there was something...that whatever I did, it should have been more. That I should have stood up to Dutch, gotten him to back off, maybe."
"My son was a warrior, Mr. Morgan. He was both too angry and too trusting. Much like you, I expect. But Eagle Flies was no child. Not like your son when he died. He chose his path, though he broke my heart with it, and with how that choice killed him. But that guilt isn't yours." He huffed out a soft laugh. "Though probably you feel it all the same. You're a better man than Dutch van der Linde. He may have been called your leader, but...the best chiefs, they suffer for their people, they feel every loss. Being a chief isn't about power. It's sacrifice, carrying the responsibility of those who trust you. I think that you understand that in a way he didn't. I won't..." His voice faltered, failed for a moment. "Eagle Flies will always be with me. As I suspect he will stay with you, as well as the others you lost." Blinking back the sudden threat of tears, he managed a nod at that. There were so many of them, and the weight of that sat so heavily on his exhausted shoulders. "But you're only a man, Mr. Morgan. Accept that. It's not within your power to save everyone. Not when you were that sick besides. But--I thank you. For saving Eagle Flies, when it was within your power."
"He saved me," he said, finally daring to look up, not surprised to see Rains Fall watching him. "At the Cornwall refinery. That was--Favours shot Eagle Flies while he was there saving me." Because Dutch had left him there to die, just as he'd left Arthur up on Bluestone Ridge. He had to say it bluntly for of them, and accept the weight of it. "Your son died saving me." The thought of it was its own kind of agony. "I couldn't do nothing for him. But I tried to return the favor for another man, but I guess that didn't take, so here I am."
Rains Fall sighed, nodded, seemed to sag a little further into himself in that moment. Breathed in deeply, and squared himself up. "You're a hard man on yourself. So maybe I shouldn't ask. But as a father who loved his son, if Eagle Flies gave his life for yours, then...go and live a good life. Remember him. Make his death mean something. Become something other than another victim of Mr. van der Linde. It would make me happy to think of you doing that."
"I can't promise that I'll live through the TB still, but I shall try. Get myself to Mexico and see what can be done." Whatever living a good life meant, but Rains Fall had the right of it. He owed it to all of them who'd died to make his survival, however long it ran, count for something.
"Good."
He watched the old man, grieving and with his strength broken, but still dignified, courteous, wise. Mustering himself to take up the burden of leading the last ragged remnants of his people into exile in a foreign land, running ahead of the merciless government men pursuing them. Yes, of course with the similarities he couldn't help but compare this man to Dutch and his ranting about Tahiti. For so many years he would have called a man like this the delusional, weak fool, not Dutch. But Rains Fall had more than proved his worth. "This has been...sir, I've learned a lot from you. I wish I had something more to give you." Some kind of hope, if nothing else, because he knew full well the pain the man was in. Nine years on and Isaac was still with him, and he always would be.
"If you say I've helped put you on a good road, and you stay on it, that's reward enough for me." He could almost hear Sister Calderón at that. Helping people makes you happy. Maybe it did, when he had been able to get away from playing Dutch's tough. Planning on dying made a hell of a lot of trivialities and uncertainties slough off.
He nodded, accepting that as best he could, telling himself that he'd better not make a mess of it either because now he owed Rains Fall also. There seemed to not be much left to say, but he found himself reluctant to get up and leave. Canada and Mexico--their paths diverged in completely opposite directions from the moment he exited that this lodge. Chances were he'd never see this man again, and some crazy part of him wished if not for the disease doing its damnedest to kill him, that he could go north too. Keep learning more from Rains Fall, maybe, and perhaps help the Wapiti where he could. It would be almost easy to be good, living that life, knowing what he had to do, who he should be, who needed the help. But his path went elsewhere. He'd have to find his own way to be a good man. Charles would help look after them, and they couldn't have a better man for that job.
The question came to mind, and he let fly with it before he lost his nerve. If those dreams would mean something to anyone, maybe that knowledge would be here. There was far more wisdom in the world than was found in books, after all. "Charles said yesterday that dreams mean something to your people."
"They mean something to every people, I'd expect. We Indians don't have some total claim on the spirits, Mr. Morgan." He saw the momentary smile on Rains Falls' face, and couldn't help it, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly, acknowledging the foolishness of how he'd said it. Rains Fall's suppressed humor reminded him so much of Hosea in that moment, and he felt the mingled pain and gratitude at that. "Paints The Shield, the wicasa wakan, went north already. He'd be the best to read dreams. But I can try."
"I been dreaming a lot these past few months of a buck deer. Thing is that it keeps looking up and looking right at me, like no deer I ever knew, cause it wasn't running off after it seen me. I swear I caught a look at it in St. Denis once when I was awake, right in the middle of the city. Though that was right after I'd about passed out from the coughing, and maybe my judgment of reality ain't the best at that kind of moment?" You're seeing lately that your judgment of reality ain't ever been the best, moron.
"You're a smart enough man. What's a deer like? We say the deer stands for goodness. Kindness. Love. Generosity. Sacrifice, if it comes to it, so that others survive." That smile stayed put, maybe even grew a little bit into something both amused and wistful. "To me, it sounds as though the right spirit found its way to you when you needed it."
All that stuff don't sound much like me. And spirits? I ain't saying I believe in all that. But better to not throw that in Rains' Fall's face. He had to admit he probably hadn't dreamed the animal over and over from some odd hunger for venison. Between Rains Fall and Calderón, maybe about time to acknowledge the notion there might be more in heaven and earth, like old Hamlet had said, even if he wasn't sure what exactly he believed in all of it.
He found himself uncertain again, hesitating. It was Rains Fall who finally found the guts to say it, getting to his feet and offering him his hand. "Goodbye, Mr. Morgan, good luck and a good journey."
Echoing the sentiment and leaving the tent, he figured he might as well make a clean job of it and say the farewells while the going was good, so he found Charles next, packing his last things on Taima. Sadie would get the train tickets for Valentine, and they'd leave here probably around dusk to make it to Valentine in time. The Wapiti would leave then too, try to put some miles on the road in darkness before the Army realized they were gone. All of them on the run in the night, leaving behind ghosts and grief and broken dreams and promises.
Here with Charles he knew that he could help a little, securing down a few things on Taima's back, the two of them working in unison without much needing to be said. Though some things needed to be said. Tucking Charles' bow into its holder on Taima's saddle, he launched into it. "I said it and I meant it, all right? You're a good man."
"So are you, Arthur. I knew there was a lot more to you than you pretended. It's good to see you give up the charade." It felt good to hear that, knowing Charles didn't give out compliments lightly, though it took a lot not to turn it aside with a joke.
"Can't say I know what's coming in Mexico or where Sadie and me are gonna end up, so do you know where the Wapiti plan to go? I'd write to you, if I could."
"Sounds like they plan to settle in New Caledonia near Spirit Lake, given Rains Fall says Loud As Thunder had scouted up that way last year. Send any letters to the town there. It's called Banner, I think, though you may want to double check the map."
"I will." They, he'd said, not we. He thought back to Charles talking at the campfire, all confusion about his place in the world. Son of a black man and an Indian woman, two worlds and belonging to neither, another misfit and outcast. Looking at him now, it didn't feel like Arthur was the only one who had changed in the past couple of months. Something about Charles simply fit now, a new quiet confidence. A man who knew who he was and his place in the world, and Arthur suddenly envied him that. "I don't hold nothing against you leaving before it all went entirely to shit. I see it for sure now. You do belong here with them. They don't seem to judge who they take in."
"Thank you, Arthur."
He mentally smacked himself, realizing how it probably had sounded rather than the compliment to both Charles and the Wapiti he'd intended. "I mean…" He had to try to not speak in a rush, not out in this cold air. Inhaling too quickly and deeply would set off a coughing fit.
Charles gave him a sly grin. "Ah, it's fine, I know what you meant."
"If it don't work out with them for some reason, what I'm saying is--wherever I end up, you're welcome there." He wouldn't speak for Sadie, given who knew what her plans were in the long term once she figured things out. "Dutch--yeah, sure, he wasn't what we all believed. And maybe he was the one who threw us all together in the stew pot, so to speak. But all of us? We was family. We are family. The camp, the sitting around the fire, the times we had together. Hell, even the bickering. That's ours, every bit of it. Dutch took a lot from us in the end, but he can't take that notion away. Not even from the ones we lost."
Charles paused, right in the middle of lashing down his blanket. "Thank you, Arthur," he said it again. But this one was genuinely moved rather than wryly amused. Charles let go the leather thong and crossed around Taima, grabbing him close for a rough hug, which Arthur couldn't help but return. "Listen to Sadie, cause you're awful at looking after yourself, brother."
"The hell you say! Pot, meet kettle." They ended up laughing at it, though he took care not to laugh too hard, and he wished he could laugh himself breathless in the normal way. He'd love to part with one truly fine laugh that went on till his sides hurt with it as armor against the sorrow. This was the hardest part in some ways--the damn goodbyes, and knowing he'd have to live with that aching absence and all the memories. John was his brother too and he'd never see the man again, so he couldn't help but keep some spark of hope alive that he wouldn't lose Charles also. He'd write. He'd be sure of that. Sounded like he'd have plenty of time to do not much but read and write and sketch while he tried to recover, so he might as well use some of it to keep hold of a tie that truly mattered. Though the knowledge that Sadie would stick with him made even more of a comfort. He wouldn't be alone in this new world, and that made the thought just about bearable.