kill men with them. Hiding behind her mother, the girl cringed as they yelled and pointed their weapons. Her mother tried to speak to them, but they did not understand her. The girl knew some of the white man's tongue and looked up, hoping to speak for her mother.
The weapons roared, and the girl woke with tears on her cheeks.
Victoria itched. Her arms itched, her legs itched, her head itched, her feet itched, her hands itched, even her face itched. She blamed her new clothes for much of the problem, but the sun and the desert wind were also at fault. The sun beat down on her, making sweat bead on her forehead beneath the brim of her hat. Stirred up by the wind, dust and sand clung to the sweat, forming a film that covered her from eyebrow to collarbone. Denim trousers - the first trousers she'd ever worn - rode up behind her knees and chaffed her thighs. Her new shirt was slightly too large, billowing out around her chest, and yet it still bunched up under her armpits and stuck to her back. Blisters were already starting to form on her feet, drawn up by the rubbing of her new boots. The horse's constant motion beneath her, up and down, back and forth, twisted her hips and back until the joints creaked with every step.
She was miserable.
"You sure we're riding the right way?" Cora asked from beside her.
Victoria squinted at the horizon. "As long as we don't change direction, yes. It was dark, though, so I can't be certain." Truth be told, she wasn't at all sure they were going the right way. They'd started from where the blueeyed man had left her just outside of town and ridden back along his path. None of the landscape looked familiar because it all looked the same: scrub brush the color of aged cheese and taller bushes standing like sentinels at irregular intervals. Mesas loomed on the horizon, distant and serene, attended by rolling hills.
The sight was enough to make her dizzy, and she dropped her gaze to the saddle horn. What made her most uncomfortable about her predicament, even more than the blisters swelling on her heels or the vast expanse surrounding her, was the weight resting on her left leg. She glanced nervously at the smooth wooden grip sticking out of the holster like a thick, hooked finger. The guns her father used to hunt game had always frightened her; to carry one on her person, even a small one, made her more than a little uneasy. She kept expecting the heat or the motion of the horse to somehow make it fire and blow her leg off. When dismounting to make water or eat a quick meal of salted beef, she made sure to carefully remove the revolver from its holster and hand it to a smirking Cora.
"How far was it, again?" Cora interrupted her thoughts.
"I'm not sure, exactly," Victoria said. "The woman with him said it was farther than I could walk in a day and a night."
"So two day's walk, then? I'd say that's about a day's ride if we push it some." Cora tapped her heels into her horse, an aging chestnut mare she called Our Lady of Virginia. The mare responded by breaking into a brisk trot. Victoria urged her own horse forward to match Cora's pace. She hadn't bothered coming up with a name for her new mount, a silver-grey gelding whose coat seemed to shimmer in the sunlight. Cora had picked it out. No horse would be more reliable than a good old Confederate grey, she said.
Aside from her own mare, anyway. Victoria's stomach had turned slightly when she saw how comfortable and indeed friendly Cora was with her horse. The old hunter not only spoke to it as if it could understand her, she even fed it handfuls of oats from time to time. Victoria shuddered at the thought of a horse's wide, slobbering lips covering her hands. Even if she did bother to name her new beast, she would never go that far.
"Quick!" Cora's voice cracked like rawhide strips.
Victoria's head snapped up, but she couldn't see anything. "What is it?"
Cora punched Our Lady's sides, and the mare sprang away. Startled, Victoria tried to follow her, but the gelding didn't heed her kicks or her voice. It tossed its head at her and kept its trotting pace, forcing Victoria to watch Cora thunder off into the desert. The old