expelled from the bloated travelers every time the stagecoach hit a pothole, or swayed from the dusty trail.
And on this day, their mode of travel was still the same.
Letty, who now went by the moniker of Sister Leticia, continued to hold a handkerchief to her nose, and glare at the offending travelers on the seat opposite where she and Eulis were sitting.
One was a traveling salesman named Morris Field, who carried a reticule full of fine laces, the other a gambler by the name of Boston Jones, who kept flipping through a deck of cards with monotonous regularity. Letty had seen right off that the cards were marked, but since she wasn’t going to be risking their money at a game with him, she chose to ignore the fact.
Tired of looking at their grumpy faces and smelling their bodily gases, Letty pushed aside the thin panel of green homespun that was passing for a window curtain, for a peek outside at the passing scenery. All she got for her efforts was a face full of dust and a sneezing fit.
“You all right?” Eulis asked.
Letty dropped the curtain back in place and hopelessly brushed at the dust that was settling on the front of her bosom.
“Yes, Brother Howe, but thank you for asking.”
About that time, the coach lurched again. Everyone went up—then everyone came down. Hard. It had to be said that the jolt caused another round of farts to erupt that were so gaseous and vile that even one sniff seemed to threaten a person’s existence.
Letty glared at all three men and then clasped her handkerchief to her face that much tighter.
Eulis had the grace to blush while Boston Jones, the gambler, added a burp to the mix.
Personally, Eulis couldn’t understand how Letty could be so pissed off about a fart and a burp, when less than a year ago, she would have taken any one of them to bed for the price of a dollar. Just in time, Eulis resisted the urge to snort. Her highfalutin ways were still new enough to him to render some amusement, but he didn’t have the guts to laugh.
The coach swayed again, this time sending a fresh cloud of boiling dust in beneath the window curtains, which only added to the heat and misery of the ride. Eulis licked his lips and thought how tasty a shot of whiskey would be about now, but not to get drunk—just a sip to settle his nerves.
He caught Letty staring at him and reached for his bible. Sometimes she was just plain scary. If he hadn’t known better, he would have sworn she’d just read his mind. Then he thought again, if she was such a damned good mind reader, she would know that he’d just been thinking about a drink. He wouldn’t really take one—not even if it was offered to him free. He had a reputation to uphold and preaching and drinking didn’t mix.
He’d quickly learned that he liked the high he got from preaching more than he did the hangover on the morning after, so Letty could just wipe that frown off her face right now before it stuck there.
Confident of his purpose in life, he nodded at the two men facing them, manly ignoring the state of the air and opened his bible, although with the dip and sway of the coach, he couldn’t focus enough on the words to make many of them out. And so the journey continued, always bearing west, hoping to outrun nightfall to the next way station.
Forney Calder had been working for Gibson Stage Lines for almost two years. Most of the time he was satisfied with his lot in life. The only thing he really minded was lack of female companionship. In fact, he’d been suffering from the lack for some months now and had toyed with the idea of giving notice. But if he did that, he would forfeit his back pay. Come October, he would be forty-five years old—or forty-six. He never could remember for sure because his mother hadn’t been certain of the year he was born. Either way, he’d come to like the comfort of a roof and a bed too much, to willingly go back to a bedroll on the hard ground.
He stabbed the pitchfork into the hay and tossed a fork full over the fence into the corral. The horses crowded toward the feed, pushing and nipping at each other in an effort to get the first bite.
“Get back you