San Antone. V. J. Banis

had no idea what.

      Without thinking, Joanna snatched up Lewis’s pistol and fired before Clifford could pull his trigger again. There was an explosion; the pistol leaped in her hand like a living thing, wrenching her shoulder. She’d never suspected—it looked so effortless.

      It was impossible to miss, she was so close; the barrel was nearly grazing his belly when she fired. She was looking into his face. He looked surprised, amused almost, as if she had done something clever, something “precious.” It was the movement of his hands, lifting toward his stomach, that brought her eyes down.

      She stared at where his midsection had been, where a fragment of his watch fob still glinted. The blood was spilling from a great, gaping wound—blood, and something else, gray and coiled....

      He clutched at his entrails, took a step backward, then toppled into some bushes, mercifully out of her sight.

      She looked down. Already the rain was washing the blood from her hands in little rivulets. “My God,” she heard Lewis say. “My God, you’ve blown his guts out. You’ve killed him, Joannie.”

      Why, he hasn’t called me that in years, she thought.

      Someone was screaming—Alice Montgomery, perhaps—but the scream faded on a roaring that rose up inside her, drowning out everything else.

      She fell across Lewis, knocking him once again to the ground.

      Chapter Seven

      The hearings were mercifully brief. Alice Montgomery, sobbing and threatening every few breaths to swoon, told essentially the same story Joanna and a subdued—even a surprisingly sober—Lewis told. It took the judge only a matter of minutes to hand down a verdict of self-defense.

      Lieutenant Price, who somehow blamed himself, had taken care of everything, or so it seemed—attorneys hired, doctors brought (Lewis was entirely unscathed, not so much as a bruise to show for the incident), the whole family moved to a boardinghouse the lieutenant found.

      “You musn’t blame yourself,” Joanna said, not once but it seemed a score of times. “It wasn’t your fault.”

      The wagons that had been assembled for the journey northward were in shambles from the storm. One of the Hartes’ could be fixed up; the other was completely destroyed—it would have to be built anew.

      Lewis surveyed the wreckage grimly. “We’d better hope that train gets through with our household goods,” he said, and wandered away, leaving Joanna to worry what exactly their financial position was.

      She’d never concerned herself with money before; she’d never had to. But it took no great insight to see that this adventure had already proved expensive. A delay of several more weeks—a new wagon, the expense of boarding the entire family while they waited.... She would have liked to ask Lewis about the money—would have liked, in fact, to take over the responsibility for it—but he looked so beaten down with despair, so humbled. His shoulders drooped when he walked, and when he spoke to her now, it was in a much chastened voice, with none of the curtness, the insolence, that had marked his attitude toward her in the past. She couldn’t bring herself to embarrass him further, to do any more damage to his pride.

      The court hearings had not been easy on him. It had been necessary to tell of Clifford’s assault on her. And how could she explain shooting the man without telling of Lewis’s falling down, his defenselessness? He had held his head down while she spoke, refusing to look at her, at anyone in the courtroom.

      So, she did not ask him about the money, but she began to think of ways they could save a little—not big things, not things that would be conspicuous, and force Lewis to be extravagant just to show they weren’t in straits. Little things, here and there. At the boardinghouse Lieutenant Price found for them, she put all three of the children in one room—to general dismay.

      “But, you and papa have your own rooms,” Melissa protested. “And I’m sixteen.”

      “Which is quite old enough to be looking after your brothers for me,” Joanna replied.

      Gregory looked pained, and Jay Jay said flatly, “I don’t need looking after.”

      Alone with her brothers, Melissa was quick to inform them. “I heard the whole business that night. Everything!”

      The boys, whose comprehension of what “everything” entailed was only slightly scantier than hers, remained unimpressed.

      “We’ll all be sleeping in the same wagon on the trail,” Gregory said, following some train of thought incomprehensible to the other two.

      “I might not be,” Melissa said. “I’ve already met Doña Sebastiano and her daughter—they’ll be traveling in the train, but they’ll have an actual driver to handle the team for them, so they won’t have to work. And they’ve already hinted that I might prefer to ride with them.”

      “Everyone has to work on a wagon train,” Gregory said, and was ignored.

      “Meskins?” Jay Jay asked; he had already picked up the local pronunciation.

      “They’re Spanish, which is a different matter altogether. Actually, she’s full-blooded American, she came from Baltimore, but her husband is a Spanish grandee—that’s like a nobleman. And they’re going to be our neighbors, practically. Nancy, that’s the daughter, plays the piano. She’s going to teach me when we get to San Antonio.”

      “I’m going to ride with William Horse,” Jay Jay announced.

      “They’re going to be our neighbors?” Gregory asked. “In San Antone?”

      “She says it’s no distance at all, by Texas standards. Whatever that means.”

      “Did she say what it was like there? What it looked like?”

      “Not really.” Melissa frowned thoughtfully. “I don’t think she cares much for it, actually. I think they’d both rather stay in Galveston than go back there.”

      “Why don’t they, then?” Jay Jay asked.

      “Because her husband’s there, silly.”

      “So what?”

      “It’s something you’re too young to understand,” Melissa said primly. “And you can’t ride with William Horse. He’s an Indian—he’s liable to scalp you when no one’s looking.”

      “Mama would be looking,” Jay Jay said. “Did you ever notice? She’s always looking. Only, sort of sideways, so you won’t catch her.”

      “It’s good to be observant,” Gregory said.

      “I think she’s afraid,” Melissa said. “I don’t think she wanted to come any more than I did, only she doesn’t want us to know.”

      “I don’t see why she’d be afraid,” Jay Jay said. “I’ll protect her.”

      “Lieutenant Price wouldn’t let anything happen,” Gregory said. “That’s what he’s here for, to protect everyone.”

      None of them even bothered to mention their father’s protecting them. He was automatically included in the “everyone” looked after by Lieutenant Price.

      “Don’t you think,” Melissa said, “if she’d just let herself go a little—bend, sometimes.... She always looks like she’s afraid something’s going to slip out of her fingers.”

      “She’s carrying a lot on her shoulders these days,” Gregory said sagely.

      “Mama?” Jay Jay looked puzzled from one to the other. “I never see her carrying anything.”

      * * * *

      Joanna was surprised when Lewis came to her room the night of her acquittal. He had gone back to the bottle. Lewis’s drinking seemed to come in waves, like the ocean’s surf, sometimes receding, only to return, bigger, more advanced.

      She