Indian, just as casually as she had greeted the outnumbered situation with Joshua Breed and his hooligans. I wonder if anything scares her, Lloyd thought, before turning his mind to what she was doing out in the wild, awake and alert, at such a time of night.
“You folks’ll have to be right quieter if you expect to get where you’re goin’, and travelin’ at this hour is for those who have to or know how. I take it you have to.”
“Who … is that?” Hephaestus gasped, almost dropping the reins.
The weary horses had snapped awake at the first hint of the creature’s presence. Perhaps if there had been a breeze they would have known about the brute long before. In any case, they were nervous and distraught now.
“Tid be now a long tale tru,” Rapture muttered, not wanting even to think about the incident back in town.
“I am the best shadow you’ll meet in these parts tonight,” Fast Fanny replied. Nearby, Lloyd thought that he could make out a group of shelters tucked away, hidden by both branch and mist.
“We weren’t wanting to meet any shadows a’tall,” the elder Sitturd replied.
“Best not to venture by moonshine then,” the woman answered.
“What’s that … animal?” Lloyd called, unable to help himself.
“Hush there, boy,” Fanny returned. “Other folks are trying to sleep, and you don’t want to be stirring up Senator again. I’ll be to sunup getting him peaceful and he’ll be a sack of possums all day on the trail. Now follow me, with a lid on your questions. I can give you a place to bunk for a bit, and come a brighter hour you can make a better plan than the one you got.”
“You know this woman?” Hephaestus demanded.
“Aye that,” Rapture assented, not wanting to say more.
“And you trust … her?”
“Yes,” Lloyd answered decisively, still curious about the tethered creature, which was quite obviously of the same mind regarding them.
Hephaestus took stock. They had just fled civilization, well before their preparations were complete, to embark on the most difficult leg of their entire journey, having witnessed some kind of nightmare magic that had beset their hosts, then buried the evidence of the atrocity in an unmarked grave on the edge of what was to them real wilderness, with the possible charge of murder hanging over their heads, and maybe even more serious trouble awaiting them if anything like what his son had hinted about was true. In this mix of moonlight and mist, the idea of following a total stranger—a woman who looked like a man and who wielded a kind of gun that he had never seen before, and had some kind of monster animal, no less—seemed if not reasonable to him, then at least possible and maybe even advisable.
Fanny led them around the stand of trees to two wagons, one of them large and of odd design, and several improvised structures, which Lloyd recognized as Indian-style tepees made of animal hides supported by wooden frames. The rest of the camp, whoever they were, seemed to be asleep, except for a short, stocky man who had been leaning against a wagon wheel with a large cudgel on his knees. He got to his feet when Fanny gave a tight whistle.
“Who’s this now?” he whispered.
“At first light,” Fanny replied, as if to say no more would be said until then.
She ushered the Ohioans into a squat tepee pitched in the lee of the larger wagon and ducked her head in when the family had straggled through the slit.
“I’ll unhitch your horses and give them some feed. We don’t have much for our own, let alone yourn. But they’ll get some rest. We rise early and we’ll be on the trudge earlier than usual. I reckon you should do the same. But take a load off now. Whatever called you out on the move at such an hour won’t have an easy time making worry for you for a few hours at least. Now, no questions till birdsong. Get as much shut-eye as you can.”
Suddenly, the hardened woman was gone, and the Sitturds were left in deeper bewonderment than ever, but more than a little grateful not to have been attacked by the beast or waylaid by dark men with even darker designs. All three were bone-fagged and brain-sore, and still coming to terms with the crazed events of the day. Lloyd felt particularly bleary, since he had not slept more than an hour the previous night owing to his encounter