by Ward, Marsha
Carl nodded grimly and followed his father into the dining room. A dance was in progress, a waltz, and his eyes glanced over the swirling couples to find Ida. They found Ellen, encircled by James’s arms, gracefully moving in three-quarter time around the room. She was smiling, then laughing at James’s joke, then her eyes met Carl’s and she looked away, face gone white.
He tore his gaze from her face, disgruntled that she was occupied when he wanted her company. But he could not keep from watching her, and when the waltz ended and James went to get refreshments, he was ready.
He came up behind her in the corner where she stood, apart from the rest of the party-goers, and placed his hands on her shoulders. She stiffened, and he bent over to whisper in her ear.
“I reckon I can ask you to dance now, and have no anger betwixt us.”
Something in his shaky whisper made Ellen whirl around and stare up at him. Her eyes searched his face. “What do you mean?”
Carl closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked straight into Ellen’s. “I’m a free man, Ellen. Ida found somebody more moneyed than me, and she kicked me loose.”
Carl saw the flame of joy that leaped into her eyes before she could lower her head. He said, “Pa said I should come in here and find a pretty girl to dance with. You’re the prettiest one I know. Will you take a whirl with me?”
“James went—”
“Forget James. He’ll be gone a while. Dance with me.”
A shadow crossed her face, then she straightened and smiled a bit. “I’ll do it.”
“Thank you,” he said.
~~~
Carl was able to dance with Ellen one more time before he came across Ida in a corner kissing Cecil. Anger rose up in his throat, threatening to choke him, and he knew the time had come for him to leave. He shook as he turned his back on all that he had worked for, and walked slowly toward the lobby door, his eyes glazed, fists clenched.
Someone reached out and touched his arm, and he started to shake off the hand, then realized that Ellen was standing there, trembling at the sight of his glowering face.
“Carl?”
“I’ve got to get out of this place. I can’t mind my manners any longer.” He turned his red-rimmed eyes on her, and she gave a little cry at the wildness in his face. “Come with me,” he pleaded. “Come help me ride the meanness away.” Then he turned and bolted through the door.
~~~
Ellen, shaken, jumped at the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned to see Marie standing next to her, smiling.
“I told you a time would come. Go with him. It’s just his pride that’s wounded. He calls your name in his sleep.”
“Oh,” Ellen gasped, and ran out the door.
The lobby was empty. Ellen grabbed a cloak from a coat rack beside the dining room door, and swirled it around her as she walked out into the darkness of the street.
Pausing to get her bearings, she looked down the street toward the livery stable. A lantern burned beside the big front doors, and she stepped off the hotel porch and hurried toward the light. The stable boy was asleep beside the open door, and she ran past him into the barn.
Carl stood beside Sherando, saddling the gray gelding by the light of another lantern. His face was gaunt in the lamplight. She walked toward him, and he looked up, surprising her with a wan smile.
“Good girl. I figured you’d come.”
“What?”
“You’re a stayer.”
“Is that something good?”
“Means you stick to a task.”
Ellen shivered. “It’s cold tonight.”
“We can leave right now,” Carl said, ducking under Sherando’s neck and going into the next stall. His voice floated back over the side of the wooden enclosure. “We’ll get some exercise and warm you right up.”
He returned, leading Dun Baby, already saddled. A grin spread over his face. “I took a chance on being ready, but I wasn’t wrong about you.”
~~~
The horses were rested and willing to run. Carl gave Sherando his head as soon as they were clear of the town, and the gray galloped off into the prairie. Dun Baby did her best to catch the bigger horse. After two miles, Carl pulled the horse up and let him breathe. He looked up into the night sky, and figured it was about ten o’clock.
Ellen reined in her horse when she caught up, and slid off onto the ground. She stood with her arms outstretched and turned slowly around, as if embracing the whole sky.
The moon slid out from behind a cloud and shed silver light on the radiant girl. Carl noticed the joy in her as she lifted her arms to the moon.
“I love you,” she cried out. “Colorado, you’re beautiful.”
So are you, girl, he thought, and swallowed hard. She looks like Ma did the day we came into the meadow. So different from Ida. He scowled and said, “You’d best get in the saddle. It’s a long ride to the Greenhorn.”
“The Greenhorn? Ain’t we going back to the dance?”
“No. I thought getting out into the air would help, but I can’t abide seeing that double-dealing fox again.” He stopped, and set his teeth for a moment. “Pa told me to go home if I couldn’t mind my manners. I reckon I’m heading back home.”
Ellen walked over to Sherando and looked up at Carl. “It’s beautiful out here, but I don’t favor being left alone in the prairie.”
“I don’t figure to leave you. Come along and keep me company.”
He watched her face as she took a step backward, concern in her eyes. “That ain’t fitting, Carl. I can’t go that far alone with you.”
“I don’t aim to do you no harm,” he said firmly. “It ain’t in me to punish you for what she did to me.”
She put a hand over her mouth and gasped. “What about my folks? What about James?”
He gritted his teeth. “James! You don’t love James.”
“I owe him my hand.”
“You owe me your life!”
She sighed and backed away. He dismounted and caught her by the shoulders.
“Your folks will be along when the party is over. You can stay with Mary and Rulon. She’ll be pleased at your company.”
“Marie knows I came with you,” Ellen said. “She’ll know what to say to Ma and Pa.” She pursed her lips and blew out a breath. “Folk’ll talk, but I don’t care. I would just be a mound of earth in the graveyard if you hadn’t plucked me out of the way of those Yankees in Mount Jackson. I’ll go with you.”
Carl dropped his hands to his sides. “Thank you.”
He went after Dun Baby, grazing on dry buffalo grass on a nearby hillock, and brought the mare to Ellen. He bent and made a stirrup with his hand for her and she swung into the saddle. Her frisky horse sidestepped, and Ellen pulled her up short.
“She’ll run for me now, and you can’t catch me!” she challenged. Then she was racing over the moonlit plain, and Carl scrambled for Sherando.
It seemed vastly important to catch her, to draw up even with her. Carl flung himself onto the gelding’s back, and urged the horse forward with little grunts and mutters, as though all his energy was focused on the fleeing girl before him, leaving him with few words.
She had a good head start on him and held onto the lead for a half-mile, then the big gray started to catch up with the mare. Ellen turned to look back at Carl, her face alive with excitement as she drove her horse to keep up the pace.
Carl ducked lower over his horse’s neck, willing Sherando to catch the mare. Then he was alongside, and stole a glance at Ellen.
She was grinning, and looked at him in triumph, hair streaming back from her face. She reined Dun Baby down to a trot, then cooled her off at a walk. Carl kept pace with her horse, patting the lathered Sherando.
“You act like you won,” he chuckled, when he had caught his breath.
“Maybe I did,” she answered, running her fingers through her tangled locks.
A snowflake drifted down from the sky and landed on Ellen’s hair. It
melted, leaving a drop of water sparkling in its place, then the moon disappeared behind a thick cloud as other flakes swirled toward the ground. Ellen pulled the hood of the cloak over her head and snuggled into the folds of the cape.
“I grabbed this cloak and ran. I don’t know whose it is, but it’s good and warm,” she shouted in Carl’s direction.
Carl looked around at the eddying flakes, and noticed that the wind was moaning and whining in his ears. It blew the thick flakes into his eyes, and he shut them for a moment. When he reopened them, Ellen was gone!
Chapter 15
“Ellen!” he yelled into the white blanket before his eyes. “Ellen, where are you?”
No voice answered him, no cry cut through the keen of the wind. “Where are you, girl?” he shouted against the wind’s shriek. Still no human sound reached his ears, and he strained to see through the frozen curtain enveloping him.
Panic seized him. Ellen was lost; Ellen, who just moments before was glorious, wild, free. He turned Sherando this way and that, calling her name, trying to see through the storm. As he whipped his body from side to side in the saddle in his attempt to catch her voice in his ears, his arm brushed against his holstered pistol. He tugged on the binding loop and yanked the gun free, then fired it into the ground.
“Carl,” he heard Ellen cry, her voice whipped in all directions by the wind.
He glanced wildly about. “Ellen,” he bellowed, and this time heard her reply off to his left. He turned Sherando in the direction of her voice and called for her to stay in one place. Blindly, he followed her calls, hoping panic would not make her mute before he could reach her.
The wind puffed away a sheet of snowflakes, and he saw the dark cloak just ahead. He cried out “Ellen,” as he reached her side.
She turned, clutching the cloak around her. “Oh, Carl,” she breathed, and gave a great sigh of relief.
“We can’t stay here in the open or we’ll freeze,” he told her, voice raised over the storm. “I wish I knew what direction I’m headed. With all this snow blowing around, I’ve lost my bearings.” He reached over for her reins and looped them around his left hand. “If we’re heading south, we’ll reach the St. Charles before too long, and we can hole up on the bank.”
“Dun Baby should be headed south. I never turned her. I pulled up soon as I lost sight of you.”
“We’ll go that way, then,” he agreed, thankful for her good sense. “I reckon we can’t miss the river.”
Carl turned Sherando and started him off at a walk, wondering which was worse, to trot forward into the uncertain footing of the unfamiliar ground ahead, or to go at a walking pace and slowly freeze. He wished he’d paid better attention to the country as they had traveled through it, and he hoped the river wasn’t as far as he thought it was.
He heard Ellen behind him, shifting in her saddle. The leather groaned in the frigid air, crackling louder for a moment than the wind could moan. Carl gritted his teeth and pulled his hat down lower over his ears, and hoped that Ellen was warmer than he.
The horses plodded along, stumbling from time to time on the uneven ground. Occasionally, Carl dismounted and led the way, stamping a path through belly-high drifts, but the cold crept up his legs, and even when he rubbed his ankles, the loss of feeling persisted while he walked, and he had to remount.
To his frozen senses, it seemed hours later that the horses nosed downward into a gully, and the sound of the wind died abruptly. Carl pulled Sherando to a stop and peered through his ice-encrusted lashes.
The horses had brought them to a narrow ravine, an ancient waterway, protected from the driving wind by an overhang of sandstone. Carl climbed swiftly out of the saddle, gripping both sets of reins in his left hand. He ducked under Sherando’s neck, and stamping his feet as he walked, led the horses further under the overhang. Tying the reins to a creosote bush, he limped over to Ellen’s side, his cold muscles cramping as he used them.
Ellen awkwardly dismounted and rubbed her hands together to move the blood into her fingers.
“I’m glad we’re out of the wind,” she said, her voice quivering as she shook with cold. “I reckon I’m near froze.”
Carl helped her walk to a little cup-like depression in the wall of the stream bed and sat her down out of the storm. Returning to the horses, he unsaddled Dun Baby, patting her affectionately. “You’re a good horse,” he muttered. “A stayer like your rider.”
He turned to Sherando and rubbed the gelding’s muzzle and neck. “Let me get your saddle off, boy,” he said.
His hand brushed against the blanket rolled behind the saddle, and he remembered the prompting to bring it along. Untying the blanket and the bag of jerky, Carl unsaddled the gray, and did his best to make the horses comfortable before he returned to Ellen’s side.
“Sometimes I get smart,” he told her. “Put this blanket around you while I see if these bushes will burn. And help yourself to the jerky.”
Carl left the overhang and went out into the ravine to collect brush. Snow fell steadily into the little valley but the wind was cut off, and he could walk up the gully without fighting his way through high-piled drifts. The sky glowed with diffused moonlight, scattered by the clouds and the million snowflakes, and Carl could see where he was going, although he knew it was midnight or later.
Under one bank of the ravine he found an animal burrow lined with dry twigs and soft leaves. He cleaned it out and stuffed it all into his pockets for tinder. A few yards farther on, he came to an old scrub oak with several dead lower limbs that would be dry on the inside. He broke off as many of the dead branches as he could carry, then turned back to the overhang.
“Wish I had an ax,” he told Ellen. “There’s a big oak up the gully a ways. It would keep us in wood for a couple of days, if need be. Hush, the way these Colorado storms blow, we might need it.”
He set to work building the fire, keeping it small, but big enough to warm them, then struck his knife against an old piece of flint he had brought home from the war. When the sparks landed in the tinder, he blew them gently to life, nursing the baby flames with bits of dry grass and leaves, then twigs and finger-sized branches.
When the blaze had a strength of its own, he got up and stepped back to join Ellen. As he let himself collapse beside her, Ellen offered him a piece of jerky. He took it and held it up.
“Seems a shame to eat this critter after it walked all the way across the U-nited States. A hungry man ain’t got much choice, I reckon.” He tossed the jerky into the air and caught it.
“Eat it, Carl. It’ll give you strength.” Ellen shrugged the blanket off her shoulders and threw it around him. “You look froze, so you’d best take the blanket. I’ll get close to the fire.”
“Ellen, I ain’t going to get warm and leave you out in the cold. You take the blanket and get some sleep. I’m going to be fine.” He held out the woven wool.
“You’re loco, Carl Owen! I ain’t about to let you freeze yourself on my account. Get over here and we’ll share the blanket.”
“You ain’t afraid of what folks will say?” He took a bite of meat.
“In the middle of a blizzard? Not any more. I reckon this storm in this country makes the rules a mite different.” She eyed him sideways. “Besides, I have your word.”
Carl smiled, then yawned as fatigue swept over him. “And I’m a man of my word.” He scooted over next to the girl and enveloped both of them in the blanket. “My brother Peter used to tell me I snored louder ‘n a mess of locusts. I never believed him, but I best warn you, just in case he wasn’t lyin’.”
She laughed. “That’s silly, to worry about snoring. I always felt like my pa had a right pleasing kind of snore. I missed it all the time he was gone to the fighting. When he got back, even the tool shed was home, once he got to snoring away at night.”
Carl lay back against the rock and earth wall. “Strange what little things will bring a body comfort, ain’t it?” He chewed on the jerky. “A fire goes a lon
g way to help a man forget his troubles.” He took another bite. “You feel the same?”
There was no response from Ellen, and Carl turned to look. Her head nodded downward, her eyes closed. Carl put his arm around her and eased her head back onto his shoulder. “You’re all tuckered out,” he whispered. “It’s good you sleep.”
~~~
Ellen woke to the touch of pale sunrise on her cheek, which rose and fell with the motion of Carl’s chest beneath her head. Something held her from moving out of the warmth of the blanket, and she discovered his arm around her shoulders.
She stiffened, then relaxed as she recalled her invitation to Carl to share the blanket. I ain’t never been this close to him before, she thought, and remembered with a start the night she had tripped from the wagon and landed in his arms. But he had been another woman’s man then, and now he was free, at least he would be once his injured pride healed over. She bit her lip and eased her head off Carl’s chest. She wasn’t free.
I ain’t been free since the day Rod Owen said he’d give us food and a wagon if we’d go west with his family, Ellen thought, a sour taste rising in her mouth. She closed her eyes. Pa and Ma didn’t tell me I was part of the bargain. But she knew, when they said, “We’ve picked out a husband for you,” that Rod Owen had required her hand in marriage to his son as payment in full.
James ain’t free, neither. The thought brought Ellen’s eyes wide open. She’d heard he was courting Jessica Bingham, and wasn’t happy that his pa had made a match for him. He don’t hate me, nor dislike me, she reminded herself, swallowing her bitterness. I simply ain’t Jessica.
She caught her breath, and held it so she wouldn’t cry out. When she thought of James, no stir of passion tightened her body, no urgency bid her hold him in her arms. There was affection all right, like for a brother or a good friend, but no strong heartbeat or racing, heated blood that would melt her natural, modest barriers in their marriage bed.
Who could not love James? All the girls in Mount Jackson said he was handsome, with his crisp black hair and strong mouth. He was respectful, kind, and willing to work long, wretched hours to advance a good cause. Over time he had seemed resigned to the fact that they would wed sooner or later. Who would not love James? I would not.
