Sweet Sarah Ross

“You cannot be serious,” she stated in that falsely pleasant voice that grated on his nerves.

It took him a moment to absorb the impact of that statement, then another moment to suppress the desire to strangle her. He shifted the sack on his back and demanded, “Are you always like this, or only when survival is at stake?”

“Always like what, sir?”

Why mince words? “Always idiotic.” He saw the flash in her eyes shift from seductive obstinance to outright anger. “We’ve done fine for the day here, but I’ve no desire to linger longer and make myself easy prey for either man or animal. And I’m assuming you see the advantage of traveling at night, so that I don’t have to spell it out for you.”

“No, you don’t have to spell it out for me, but I’d like to point out that I’m the one who’s been working all day while you’ve been sitting around.”

He gave her a very deliberate once-over. “You look like a healthy woman, and the amount of ‘work’ you did is nothing compared to the physical demands that will be put on both of us tonight—which is why I gave you half an hour to rest. We need to move, and the time is now.”

She didn’t budge.

It would take only one more idiotic word from her for him to leave her here to her own devices. Let her die, for all he cared. But then he thought of her scissors in his pocket, the valuable cloth in his hands and the fact that she had fetched him water more than once today, and he realized that it wouldn’t be fair to leave her. But when was life ever fair? Besides which, it was her choice, after all, to stay or come. You could lead a horse to water…and all that.

He turned to go.

“I need my shoes,” she said. “I don’t see them lying about, so I’m guessing that you have them in the half of my petticoat that you have slung over your shoulder.”

“Wear the moccasins I made you.”

“I want my shoes.”

“Moccasins don’t leave the same footprints as white man’s shoes, and I had to cut up the laces of your ankle boots to make four ties for our two pairs.” He saw her lift the rabbit skins and examine the ties. He saw her jaw drop. He cut off whatever idiotic thing was going to come out of her pretty mouth by saying swiftly, “They’ll fit you perfectly. I measured them against your shoes. Now, let’s go!”

He slipped through the trees and stepped out onto the riverbank, half hoping she wouldn’t follow him.

No such luck, but, then again, that was just his luck. He hadn’t gone ten paces before she was behind him, asking, “Where are we going?”

“To deliver you to your family.” He added, with feeling, “And without delay.”

“Oh! Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” When she caught up with him, she said, “You know, we might get along much better if you would explain yourself to me instead of making me out to be an…an idiot! And I could think of you less as a man-beast and in a more kindly manner if I had a name to call you.”

At that he stopped in his tracks and looked down at her. She was looking up at him, her beautiful eyes wide and almost beseeching, but not quite. Her practiced social smile held a hint of something else that he wasn’t willing to examine just yet. Instead, he pinned his thoughts on the incredible idea that she had called him a man-beast, and he almost laughed. Good God, she was an irritating woman, but she had a way of diverting his attention from the pain in his feet. He’d grant her that much.

“I asked you your name, sir,” she repeated.

“Powell.”

“Just Powell? Only that?”

“Wesley.”

“Well, which is the first name and which the last, sir? I’m afraid I cannot distinguish.”

“Wesley Powell,” he said slowly. “My name is Wesley Powell.”

“Very well, then, Mr. Powell.” She nodded her head graciously. “I am Miss Harris.”

He regarded her a moment longer, then grunted and began walking again. Really, she had expected no better from the man-beast, but she found that it humanized him to have a name, and such a perfectly ordinary one, although he had pronounced it with a kind of reluctance. Or did his tone hint of challenge?

No matter. Since their immediate goal was to find her family, she was content—if content was an appropriate word to describe her emotional state in a situation where her survival was not assured from one hour to the next—to walk along beside him. She hardly needed to be told that he didn’t like her any more than she liked him, and she didn’t need to be told twice, no, three times, that he preferred her silence to her conversation. However, since she saw no reason why she should behave according to his preferences rather than hers, she continued chattily, “So, Mr. Powell, can you tell me how we are going to achieve the very worthy goal of finding my family?”

“First, tell me whether, before embarking on this journey, you and your family established a meeting place in the event you should become separated.”

She had to consider that question at length. She did recall her father and mother discussing such a situation, but she hadn’t paid attention to what the outcome of the discussion had been. At the time, she had been thinking it would be a mercy to be separated from her bratty little sisters, but now, imagining that they had met some unspeakable fate—but, no, she turned her thoughts from dwelling on horrors and bent them toward remembering the names of the various stages of the journey that Morgan Harris had recited on more than one occasion. It seemed logical that her father would have decided that, if separated, the family would meet up at the next landmark.

She said, “Chimney Rock,” since that was the only landmark she could recall, and if she didn’t say something soon, Mr. Powell would think her an even bigger idiot than he already did—not that she cared.

“Chimney Rock?” he repeated under his breath.

Hoping that the landmark was ahead of them rather than one they had already passed, she repeated with confidence, “Yes, Chimney Rock. Is there something that troubles you in that, sir?”

“Nothing beyond the fact that it lies some two hundred miles and more to the west of here. Did you not identify more proximate meeting points? Windlass Hill, perhaps? Ash Hollow?”

“Ah, yes, Windlass Hill,” she said, picking the landmark that sounded the closest. “I had forgotten.”

“You don’t have the faintest idea of a meeting point, do you?” he snapped. “No, don’t answer that question! Tell me instead whether, in one of your two trips to the Widower Reynolds’s wagon, you bothered to notice the direction of the tracks of the wagons that had fled the scene?”

She interpreted this question as just another one of his gratuitous attempts to expose her ignorance. She composed herself before answering, “The character of the know-it-all is one of society’s least attractive types, in case you didn’t know it, Mr. Powell. Now, you might have asked me to notice the direction of the wagon tracks earlier in the day, if you had wanted the information, and you will not waste your breath asking me any more questions of this type if you know—and I make no secret of it—that I didn’t want to make this trip in the first place and would far, far rather be in Baltimore!”

He grumbled inarticulately, but she caught several syllables. Although her lady’s ears were offended, she guessed that he was cursing himself for having failed to ask her to investigate what seemed, to his mind at any rate, important clues left at the previous day’s wagon site. After a few more paces he turned away from the riverbank and made his way up the slope. She supposed she was to follow him, but his long legs scissored through the tall grasses at a faster clip than she could sustain, so she stopped not far from the top of the slope and hung back while he tramped around the wagon site, his head bent toward the earth. After a while, he stopped that activity and stood looking into the distance. He was facing toward the sun, which had set beyond the horizon but which was still streaking the open sky with broad strokes of pink and orange, while the earth below was bedding down in layers of gray shadows.

She refrained from calling out and asking him if she should come over to him or if he was going to return to her or what she should do. She was rewarded for her forbearance when, about ten minutes later, he returned to her side and said, rather grimly, that they would follow the river only for another mile or so. She also forbore to ask what they would do after that, thinking she’d find out soon enough, which she did. A mile, she had already learned, was not a considerable distance in this part of the world, even when one was on foot.

They traipsed along at the water’s edge, hidden from sight by the slight slope that rose on either side of the broad river. The air was getting chillier by the minute. She knew that although the temperature had dipped into the cool range the night before, it had not become uncomfortablycold. She was hungry, having only nibbled at a little jackrabbit all day, but she refrained from asking about food on the perfectly good grounds that if she brought up the subject, the perverse Mr. Powell was sure to concoct something disgusting to eat. She would wait until he got hungry, then eat what he ate.

At length he stopped abruptly. Looked down at her. In the light of the rising moon the planes of his face were sharp-etched, his expression somber. He nodded to the slope of the bank, which was steeper at this point than at their hiding place downriver. He climbed up high enough to be able to toss the sack over the edge, then moved back down and offered her a hand. She accepted his strong clasp gratefully, didn’t protest at the harsh squeeze he gave her or the rough tug that got her up and over the top of the slope.

Once again on her feet, she brushed her skirts off at her knees. He picked up the sack, shouldered it. They were looking out over the valley of the Platte, an enormous table of land that rolled away and merged with the whole of the darkened horizon. By day she knew the land was tufted with green and yellow grass. At night it looked to her more like the surface of the moon, cratered with every shade of gray, or a paradoxically dry ocean, whose dips and rises had been made solid.

When she noticed the direction of his gaze and followed it with her eyes, she saw two patches of white, not far off, crowded up against a slight rise in the landscape. The patches looked like the broken sails of two shipwrecked vessels. Her heart caught at the implications of that pathetic scene.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t look at her. Nor did he immediately move. It was as if he was allowing her to come to terms with the possibilities of the scene that lay ahead before actually confronting the reality of it.

After several long moments passed, he said quietly, “It’s as I thought. Back at the wagon site, I saw the two white dots in the distance and suspected something like this. Tell me when you’re ready to go over there.”

She summoned strength from the General, the father she had never known. She straightened her backbone, squared her shoulders. “I’m ready now.”

Together they crossed the open expanse. She feared. She hoped. As they approached the pitiful remains of two covered wagons, she experienced a kind of death herself. Resisted it with every particle of her being. But she didn’t resist looking upon the brute scene of the bodies of her former traveling companions, which littered the ground around the two disabled wagons. There were five, stretched this way and that. Some facedown, some faceup, caught in their scattered, equally ineffective paths of flight. Without blinking, she looked at each body in turn. Every moment that passed brought her new life and new hope.

She made the gruesome rounds twice, just to assure herself that hope and the moonlight weren’t playing tricks with her eyes.

She pronounced, “So far, so good.” Then she laughed at what she had said. “Of course, nothing good has happened to these poor folks, but at least none of them are from my family! It’s awful to say such a thing aloud, but I’m happy that if misfortune was to visit our wagon train, it has fallen on others.”

Powell didn’t reply. He had put his sack on the ground and climbed into one wagon wreck, then the other.

On a hope and a prayer she repeated, “So far, so good. At least as far as I know for now.”