The Book of Lost Friends - Lisa Wingate Page 0,163
other. The skin under her eyes is puffy and rubbed red raw. She’s cried by the hour, so hard I’m wondering if she’ll survive through all this. She turns to the back of the wagon over and over again, to catch one last look at the soil where we laid down her papa. He won’t rest easy in that grave, so far from Goswood Grove. Juneau Jane wanted to take him home to bury, but it can’t be helped. Even to get back ourselves, we’re calling on the mercy of strangers. And for Old Mister’s burial, too. Once, the man owned over four thousand acres, and now he rests under a plain wood cross with his name scratched on it. Had to guess, even, at the proper year of his birth. Juneau Jane and I ain’t sure, and Missy can’t say.
A light rain comes, and we draw the wagon curtains, and just sit and let the wheels wobble on, mile after mile. It’s later in the day when I hear the men hail somebody, off distant. The hair on my neck raises, and I climb to my knees and lift the canvas. Juneau Jane moves to follow.
“You stay back and keep Missy there,” I tell her, and she does. These past weeks made us more than part cousins. I’m her sister now, I think.
The man comes again like a spirit, as much a part of the land as the brown and gold grasses and prickly pear cactus. He’s riding a tall red dun horse, and leading another one that’s wearing a Mexican saddle with the rawhide seat stained in dry blood.
My heart quickens up, and I throw back the wagon curtains and look Elam Salter over to make sure that blood ain’t his. He sees the question in my eyes as he comes alongside the wagon. “I fared some better than the other man.”
“Relieves my mind to see it.” I smile wide at him and give hardly a thought to the man who fell dead from that other saddle. If Elam did the killing, it was a man who had took up evil ways.
“I’d hoped to catch you before you set off. My work ran longer than expected.” Elam leans an elbow on his saddle horn. He’s wet and mud spattered. Dry lather lines the horses’ breast collars. Elam slacks the reins, and the poor, tired dun sags its head and fills its lungs with a long breath.
“I wanted you to know, we’ve cut off the head of the snake,” he says, and he looks from me to Juneau Jane and back. “Marston, himself, is jailed in Hico, to be tried for his crimes and hanged. I hope that eases the burden of your loss in some way.” He looks at Juneau Jane again and then at Missy. “We’ll be after the rest of his lieutenants and higher officers now, but many will lose faith in their cause without Marston, and wander to the frontier or to Mexico. Their leader did not go bravely from his command. We dug him from a corn crib, where he was hiding like a trapped rat. Not a single shot was fired to bring him in.”
Juneau Jane sniffles and nods, makes the sign of the cross over her chest, and looks down at her hands in her lap. A tear drips from her cheek and draws a small circle on the front of her dress.
Anger burns in me. The unholy kind. “I’m glad of it. Glad he’ll be made to pay. Glad you come back in one piece, too.”
His thick mustache lifts with a smile. “As I promised you I would, Miss Gossett. As I promised you I would.”
“Hannie,” I tell him. “Remember I said you could call me by my name?”
“Indeed I do.” He tips his hat, then goes on forward to talk to the men.
That smile stays with me through the day and into evening. I watch him ride away from the wagon, then back, then disappear over the hills. Time to time, I spot him on the horizon. I feel safer, knowing he’s there.
It’s when we’re stopped to camp that the uneasy comes over me again. The animals fret at their