Sweet Sarah Ross. Julie Tetel

scattered, equally ineffective paths of flight. Without blinking, she looked at each body in turn. Every moment that passed brought her new life and new hope.

      She made the gruesome rounds twice, just to assure herself that hope and the moonlight weren’t playing tricks with her eyes.

      She pronounced, “So far, so good.” Then she laughed at what she had said. “Of course, nothing good has happened to these poor folks, but at least none of them are from my family! It’s awful to say such a thing aloud, but I’m happy that if misfortune was to visit our wagon train, it has fallen on others.”

      Powell didn’t reply. He had put his sack on the ground and climbed into one wagon wreck, then the other.

      On a hope and a prayer she repeated, “So far, so good. At least as far as I know for now.”

      He climbed back out of the wagon nearest her, jumped down on the ground. “Nothing,” he reported. “Not a pot or pan or sack of flour to be found.” He walked over to her. “Don’t feel bad about being happy your family isn’t among the slain, although it may feel odd to be so happy in the midst of this misery.”

      She nodded and voiced her puzzlement about another matter. “Two others from this wagon are missing. You see, here are the Kelly brothers.” She gestured toward a trio of bodies. “They were traveling together and had left their aging parents behind in Ohio. Now, beyond the second wagon lie Mr. Clark and his grown son Jack, but Mrs. Clark and her daughter aren’t there. I’m wondering whether they might have escaped.”

      “Possibly.”

      “Which means they might be roaming the hills,” she said. “Perhaps we should look for them.”

      “They might have been captured,” Powell replied. “Or they might be lying dead yonder, out of our sight.”

      “Still, I’m wondering why it is only the men who have been killed outright, and none of the women.”

      Powell walked around the large dispersed triangle that was formed by the Kelly brothers, studied the sprawled attitudes of the dead bodies. “Do you know whether all three were carrying firearms?”

      “I would suppose they did. Every man on the wagon train had a rifle, sometimes two. Why, even Morgan—my father—had a rifle for shooting game.”

      “Judging from the way these bodies lie, and adding the Widower Reynolds into the equation, I would say that those who were killed outright were the ones doing the shooting. From the placement of their arms and hands, it looks as if each one was holding a rifle that was subsequently taken.”

      “You must have had a rifle when you were captured, no? Why didn’t they kill you outright?”

      “My rifle was on my back,” he said, “and I wasn’t shooting at them. At the time I was sorry to be so defenseless, but perhaps not anymore.”

      “They were going to kill you anyway,” she observed, “and I don’t like to think of Mrs. Clark and her daughter facing unspeakable torture. I doubt the two of them would be able to escape the way you did.”

      “How old is the daughter?”

      “About ten.”

      He considered the matter. “The Teton Sioux might currently have a shortage of women. A ten-year-old girl who could be taught their ways and a woman perhaps still of child-bearing age might be prized rather than killed.”

      At that Sarah’s mind boggled. The phrase “Fate worse than death” drifted into consciousness but just as quickly drifted out. Her thoughts easily embraced the idea of her sisters, if captured, remaining alive, and her mother, too, but stumbled against the notion that they would be condemned to live an Indian life. Condemned? Her thoughts bumped uncomfortably into the image of her father, Morgan, and her brother, Laurence—that is, her stepfather, Morgan, and her stepbrother, Laurence, child of Morgan’s first marriage to an Iroquois woman.

      Laurence had lived with them since Sarah was a baby, but he had left the Maryland farm already thirteen years ago. Sarah had always been in awe of the remarkable Laurence Harris, who was fifteen years her senior, and she had always been angry at anyone who might have called him half-breed behind his back.

      At the same time, she had always been…well, not ashamed of his Indian heritage and the life that Morgan had lived before he had married her mother, but maybe rather confused by it. Or alienated by their background, which had so little in common with hers, and conflicted with hers. Their background was a complication in her life, another strike against her, although few people had ever dared refer to her own background or the disadvantages it had brought her. She had sometimes felt like a stranger in her own country, in her own family. And she had been there first—before Morgan or Laurence or her bratty half sisters!

      “You said that even your father had a rifle. What did you mean by that?”

      Sarah’s tangled musings were cut short. “Only that he’s a peaceable man and wouldn’t shoot at another person.”

      She waited for the retort, “Not even at an Indian?” But it didn’t come. Instead Powell said, “All right, then. One wagon remains back at the original site and one body. Two more are here, five bodies, minus two women. The other six wagons—”

      “Seven,” she corrected. “We were ten in all.”

      Powell paused, then said, “I must have miscounted the tracks. In any case, the other wagons dispersed more to the north than the west. What I don’t know is how many warriors descended on your wagon train and how many were spread out looking for me in other parts of the territory. Covered wagons move a lot slower than horses, so in order to get away, the men in those wagons must have killed some of their attackers. I can’t be sure of the number, of course, because those bodies would have been long since returned to their villages by their tribesmen to be given a proper burial.”

      “We don’t know that all of the seven other wagons escaped in the end, do we?”

      “No, but they made it at least two or three miles, which is a rough estimate of the distance I could reckon from the wagon site.”

      “So which way do we go now?”

      He pointed in the northwesterly direction they would travel for the night. “It will be slow going to put the complete puzzle together, but with luck we’ll have it solved in the next day or two.”

      “Speaking of proper burials, do you think we should do something about—” She broke off and gestured vaguely about her.

      He shook his head. “No good reason to advertise that anyone has been through this territory, which is what we’d be doing if we buried the bodies but didn’t dispose of the wagon wrecks.”

      She saw the wisdom in that.

      “And we don’t have any shovels.”

      “True enough,” she agreed. “Then you might wish to choose a pair of trousers that fits you better.”

      Powell nodded. When he began to walk around the bodies, sizing them up for the best fit, she looked away from the scene and out over the darkened infinity stretching before her, trying to keep fearsome thoughts at bay. She asked quietly, “Do you think we should take another pair of trousers, just in case?”

      He didn’t immediately respond to that, which made her think he hadn’t heard her, but when he came up behind her several minutes later, he said, “I’d like to, but I don’t want to have to dispose of another body.”

      She turned and saw that he was fully dressed. White shirt, torn and bloodied over the left breast. Trousers that fit. Leather suspenders. A pair of boots laced together and slung over his shoulder. She glanced around and saw the body that had been stripped down to long Johns, the arrow still sticking straight up from the heart.

      “I see what you mean,” she said. “We can hardly leave him out in the open, can we?”

      “I’m thinking of dragging him into the wagon.