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Part 2 — A Life for a Life

Josie worked by a fire she fed with the last of the split pine, because a dead hearth would kill them both faster than Stanton.

The bullet had gone through. That was the only mercy. She boiled water in a tin, tore a clean shift from her valise, and packed the wound the way her father had packed them on a kitchen table in Philadelphia while she held the lamp and tried not to faint. The mountain man jerked once, a huge hand closing on her wrist hard enough to bruise, then let go as if the strength had been borrowed and spent. He did not wake. Fever took the space where waking should have been.

She found his name on a scrap in the tin box by the bunk. Caleb Holt. A fur receipt. A date from September. No letter from a wife. No tintype. She said the name aloud so the cabin would have it if he did not.

The blizzard held for two days. On the second, Caleb surfaced long enough to drink and to look at her as if she might still be an O’Driscoll wearing a kinder face.

“You stitch?” His voice was wrecked.

“I sewed buttons until a man sold me to pay a saloon. The stitches are ugly. They will hold if you stop trying to stand.”

“Stanton.”

“Burned his beard. He will not thank me for it.”

A sound that might have been a laugh broke into a cough. She got water into him and sent him under again. When she checked the ridge through the cracked shutter, the world was white and empty. Empty was not the same as safe.

On the third night the snow eased and a horse screamed once, far down the draw, then went quiet. Josie barred the door with the bench. Caleb was awake, gray and furious at his own body, the Colt in his lap because he would not let her move it.

“If it’s his men, you get in the root cellar,” he said.

“If it’s his men, you cannot lift that gun for long. I did not walk out of The Rusty Spur to hide under potatoes.”

Boots stopped on the porch. A knock, polite, which was worse.

“Holt. Bull says the little bird flew this way. Open up and we won’t burn the roof.”

Caleb’s mouth thinned. Josie took the iron poker from the hearth and stood where the door would hide her. He nodded once, the smallest permission she had been given since Philadelphia.

“Ain’t home,” he called, and the lie was so weak the man outside laughed.

The latch jumped. Josie drove the poker through the gap as the door gave, not a killing blow, a brutal one to the knee. The man howled and went down in the snow with a rifle he did not keep. Caleb fired once into the dark above him, a warning that sparked off rock. The second shape on the trail decided the cabin was not worth a funeral and dragged his partner down the draw. Hoofbeats faded. The snow took the sound.

Josie shook so hard she had to sit. Caleb lowered the Colt and looked at her as if the fever had cleared a lens.

“You could’ve left me.”

“I know.”

“Silas Caldwell sold you.”

“He wrote beautiful letters.” She hated how small that sounded. “I answered them.”

“Letters lie cheaper than train tickets.” He shifted, pain cutting the next words shorter. “Stanton won’t stop for a beard. When I can ride, I take you to South Pass. Marshal there still remembers what a star is for. Until then, this roof is yours. Not a debt. A roof.”

She almost told him the West did not believe in roofs without prices. She didn’t. The wound needed changing, and the coffee had boiled over, and somewhere under the panic she was still her father’s daughter.

“Caleb Holt,” she said, testing it the way she had tested the stitches.

“Josie.” He closed his eyes, not unkind. “Don’t you die on me either.”

Outside, the wind worried the chimney and did not bring the horses back. Inside, the mail-order bride who had been tendered like a sack of flour wrung out a clean cloth and set her hand, steady now, against a stranger’s side. He had nothing poetic to offer. He had a barred door, a gun he could barely lift, and a promise that sounded, in that cabin, more like a vow than any letter Silas Caldwell had ever sent.