Trail Angel (4 page)

The Colonel got up. He didn't go far, and Josey heard the old man's dribbles against a stone.

“Don't worry about the people,” he said when he returned. “You and Byron will range ahead, keep us out of trouble, find us a good campsite with water and grass.”

“I can do that.”

“I'll deal with the people.”

The Colonel didn't need a response to confirm he was right, and Josey was relieved he didn't have to explain himself. A coughing fit overcame the old man, his dry heaves tearing through the night. He spit into the fire. “Guess I talked too much.”

“Didn't know that could happen,” Josey said, drawing another cough mixed with laughter. The Colonel had been trying to shake the cough for weeks.

“I knew a job would put you in a better mood. Now you can quit worrying about money.”

“Now I can worry about the Sioux.”

The Colonel waved a gnarled hand. “You always find something.”

“I suppose you're not concerned.”

“The army's negotiating a peace treaty,” the Colonel said. He didn't sound convinced, tried a different tack. “The Sioux didn't bother us.”

“We didn't have wagons. Or women and children.”

Byron's snoring cut off as he snuffled in his sleep. They waited for the big man to quiet before speaking again. The Colonel nodded toward Byron. “The two of you should go to town tomorrow and use part of the advance to get supplies. Get as many rounds as you can.”

Josey had never needed to be told to load up. He looked closely at the Colonel, but the old man returned his gaze to the fire. “Peace treaty, huh?” Josey rolled away from his friend and drifted off so quickly the Colonel's next words sounded like they were part of a dream.

“Go to sleep, Josey. We've got a long ride ahead, and there will be no rest where we're going.”

With more than one hundred rooms, the Herndon House occupied a full block, rising four sturdy stone stories above Omaha. Annabelle didn't mind that the place had no running water and stoves in only a few rooms—a feature for which management charged extra. In a town that still housed many of its people in log houses with sod roofs, the Herndon qualified as palatial. A four-poster bed, four walls, a ceiling—these were amenities Annabelle and her mother would be denied for the next few months. If for this alone, Herndon House proved worth the splurge of three dollars a night, a savings of fifty cents since they did without a stove.

The plank sidewalk that fronted the Herndon House gave out at the end of the hotel, and Annabelle lifted her heavy, black skirts while picking her way on the unpaved street, rutted by wagon wheels and littered with manure. At her urging, the women had dispensed with their crinolines. The wide skirts would be the death of one of them cooking over an open fire. Annabelle intended to rid herself of corsets as well. If anyone asked, she would blame the sacrifice of fashion on the need to reduce weight in the wagons.

With her mother, aunt and young cousins in tow, Annabelle led the way five blocks along Farnham Street to M. Hellman & Co., a dealer in ready-made clothing and other goods. She and her father had completed most of the purchases they needed for the trip, along with the goods they hoped to sell in Virginia City, yet there remained some final things they needed.

It distressed Annabelle to see how much more expensive things were here than in Charleston. They would be even costlier in the mining towns, where many stores accepted payment in gold dust but not greenbacks. She had read that during one winter the price for flour rose to twenty-five dollars a sack. Every hundred pounds they bought here for three dollars would not only feed them along the way but help them afford to eat when they reached Montana.

Hellman's bustled with activity, and the family split up on entering the store. Wandering to a table covered with women's clothing, Annabelle spied on the others with a feigned casualness. Her mother looked at candles. Her aunt Blanche took the children—fourteen-year-old Caroline and her brothers, twelve-year-old Mark and ten-year-old Jimmy—to study the selection of hard candy behind a glass counter on the other side of the store.

Certain their attention was diverted, Annabelle reached for the garment before her. Made of basic gray wool, it resembled an undergarment or gymnasium costume. Annabelle knew better, only because she had seen young northern women dressed in a similar fashion. Her mother described the outfit as scandalous, but where her mother saw immorality, Annabelle saw a bold practicality. She had associated bloomers with abolitionists and members of the temperance movement—until venturing to a new world where bloomers would be more practical than crinoline and corsets.

Holding the fabric to her waist, Annabelle imagined the fit on her body. Hoping to keep out of view of her mother and aunt, she turned her back to the others—and bumped into Josey Angel.

“Ma'am,” he said, with a respectful touch of his broad cavalry hat. He looked at her, at the bloomers, then back at her. Flustered, she could think of nothing to say. She waited for him to speak, but he stood dumb, holding an armful of ammunition boxes. His face betrayed only an arched eyebrow and that twitch at the corner of his mouth she recalled from the previous night.

Quickly replacing the bloomers, Annabelle turned to move, but he remained in her way. “Are you going to greet me like a proper gentleman or stand there like an ox all day?”

He stepped back and offered a curt bow, which only kept her penned in. “Are we acquainted?”

Annabelle scoffed. She wasn't vain, but Josey Angel had looked directly at her the night before. Men did not forget her so readily.

“Not formally, no, but you met last night with my father, Langdon Rutledge.” His damnably impassive face offered not even a flicker of recognition. “I was there,” she added. His eyes were dark and soft, but they revealed nothing. He was either a skillful actor or he honestly had no recollection of her. Annabelle couldn't decide which irritated her more.

“I am Annabelle Rutledge Holcombe,” she said with more shrug than curtsy. Still seeing no reaction, she sighed and extended her hand. Balancing his boxes, he took her hand but still said nothing.
A country bumpkin.
“And you, I presume are Mr. Angel—”

“Anglewicz. But, please, call me Josef.”

“Mr. Angel-witch,” she said, wincing at the pronunciation.

He released her hand quickly. “My apologies, ma'am. My memory isn't what it used to be.”

He became aware he blocked her path and apologized again. “I intended no disrespect.” He might have looked sincere if his face showed anything, and Annabelle wondered if she'd misjudged him.
It had been dark around the fire. Maybe he hadn't seen well enough to recognize me.

He slipped away before she thought of something to say in amends, so she moved off to find her mother.

Still deliberating over the boxes of candles, her mother raised her head and smiled. “Find anything you like?”

Annabelle looked back toward the bloomers and Josey Angel. “I have everything I need.”

“Are you feeling all right, Annabelle? You look flushed.”

“I'm fine.”

Her mother ignored her abrupt tone. “I think we might want more candles,” she said. With her wide mouth and dark eyes, she had been a great beauty, the kind of woman men describe as handsome now that gray spotted her dark hair and lines creased her expressive face. She had retreated into herself on losing Annabelle's brothers, emerging again only once they started the journey. “I would hate to run out. I hear the prices we'll find on the trail are criminal.”

“War profiteering is criminal, Mother,”Annabelle said. Thinking of their plans for Montana, she added, “These prices are merely opportunistic.”

Her mother laughed. “Do you think we'll have the opportunity to sell these candles for twice this price in Montana?”

“I should think at least three times,” Annabelle said.

“We should buy more,” her mother said with a sly grin.

They spent another hour in the store, even though they needed little. Annabelle studied jars of fruit, boxes of dry goods and stacks of clothes for no reason other than the uncertainty of when she would find such bounty again.

The shopkeeper was bundling their purchases and the children sucking on peppermint sticks when several men rushed out of the store. Her mother must have asked about the fuss because one shouted over his shoulder as he left. “There's fixing to be a gunfight.”

Annabelle looked for Josey Angel.
Surely, he is far away by now.
She grabbed her packages. “Mother, can you see to the rest?” She charged out the door before hearing her mother's reply.

Annabelle pushed through the crowd gathered on the wooden boardwalk outside Hellman's, her slender frame riding the tide of townspeople until she saw Josey Angel. He stood near the hitching post outside the store with a pair of Indian ponies and a black man who looked too large to ride such a small horse.

Three men faced them. From their look and demeanor, Annabelle assumed they came from the saloon across the street. One wore a tattered, gray Confederate coat. All were big enough to make Josey Angel look small in his baggy shirt as he stepped toward them, his hands held wide from his gun belt.

The man in the middle wore a bolo tie and a crisp white shirt beneath a vest. A neatly trimmed mustache accentuated the grin on his face as he spoke, a finger pointed in Josey Angel's face. Annabelle wondered what prompted the trouble, whether the men were acquainted or had fought in the war. She knew Josey Angel had the kind of reputation men might want to measure themselves against.
Two cocks in the yard. Could it be something so foolish?
Unable to hear what they said, she eased closer.

The man in the bolo stepped forward and knocked Josey Angel's hat from his head, then rested his hand on his belt, just above the white-handled pistol on his hip. Josey Angel didn't move.

“I heard you killed more men than any soldier in the Union army,” the grinning man said. “I always wondered. Are you fast? Or did you just rely on that Henry rifle of yours and shoot 'em down like hogs at the slaughter?”

If Josey Angel responded, Annabelle didn't hear. She'd heard stories of western gunfighters, heroic figures who might gun down three men before they fired a single shot. She assumed these to be the fevered imaginings of dime novelists. Watching Josey Angel, the way his eyes narrowed and never wavered from the men standing before him, she wondered if there might be some truth to the tales.

“I don't think he heard you, Harrison,” the man in the gray coat said.

The man called Harrison stood face to face with Josey Angel. “See, I figure it's easy to stand behind an army, shooting away at
boys
—” he spit the last word for emphasis “—while they reload and you can just keep firing away. Empty your rifle, pull out a revolver. Empty that one, pull out another.”

The man was half a head taller, and he stood on his toes to hover over Josey Angel. The men beside him had their hands on their weapons, waiting for a response. “Is that how you killed so many?”

“Sometimes.”

Josey Angel never flinched. He no longer looked boyish to Annabelle. The night before, he had worn two gun belts with a rifle strapped to his back. The rifle was now with his horse, and he wore only one gun belt. His hands hung loose at his waist, betraying none of the fidgeting she noticed earlier. They were near enough to his holstered pistols that the men facing him focused on his hands, too.

Harrison seemed to expect Josey Angel to say more. When he didn't, Harrison's grin returned wider than ever. “Sometimes?” He tried to laugh, but the sound held no humor. “I suppose the rest of the times, you just stood back and shot down men who never saw it coming, like hunting deer in the woods.”

“Sometimes it was like that, too.”

Harrison shook his head, still grinning like playing a game. “It doesn't take any courage to gun down unarmed boys or stand behind a tree and murder men who don't see the fight coming. It's different when a man is right before you, gun loaded and ready. I wonder if you've ever killed a man who saw you coming.”

“Sometimes.”

With that last word, the crowd fell away, everyone scrambling to a safe distance. Annabelle felt rooted to the spot, unable to tear her eyes away. She perspired just standing there. The air felt heavy, like before a summer storm when the wind dies and the clouds are primed to explode. She looked from one man to the other, wondering who would move first, surprised she cared so much about who should be left standing.

Caleb reached for the grease bucket slung under the wagon bed and saw Rutledge riding toward camp. Grease had to be applied to the wagon's wheel bearings, and Caleb didn't trust anyone else to do it right. He remained on the ground at his task as Rutledge arrived, looking awkward on his rented draft horse.

“Hello, Caleb,” he called as he carefully dismounted. “I'm sorry I'm late. You didn't have to wait. I'm surprised to see you here.”

The Daggett boys had already run off, eager to blow their advance wages in the last saloon they would see before Dobytown and Fort Kearny. Caleb had no intention of following their lead.

“I met some friends of yours on the road and told them I thought you had gone to town,” Rutledge said. He walked the horse to the wagon. “If you wish to borrow the horse you might catch them.”

Friends?
There weren't many people living Caleb even liked, much less anyone who fit that description. He stood and took the reins from Rutledge, trying to sound indifferent as he asked about them.

“They looked like soldiers,” Rutledge replied. “Least they had been. One wore an old Confederate coat.” Leaving Caleb to tether the horse, Rutledge moved his bony ass to the back of the wagon.