Part 2

Martha did not move at first.

The stranger had already turned his back. He worked the traces on her mules with the same blunt efficiency he had used on the axle, talking low to the animals when one of them shied. The Henry rifle leaned against his wagon wheel, close enough for him to reach and far enough that it did not look like a threat. Dust lifted around his boots and settled again.

“I don’t know your name,” she said.

“Caleb.” He didn’t look up. “Yours?”

“Martha.”

“Baby’s coming when?”

“Two months. Maybe less.” She set a hand on the curve of her belly. The child shifted under her palm, a hard, rolling press that stole her breath for a second. “I lost track of the days after Jeb.”

Caleb nodded once, as if she had given him a weight he could add to a load. He finished with the mules and led them to the rear of his wagon, where he tied them on a short lead. Then he came back and stood over her, blocking the worst of the sun.

“Can you stand?”

“I can.”

“Then stand.”

It took her two tries. The second time he offered a forearm the size of a fence post. She used it. The moment she was upright the world tilted; she locked her knees and waited for it to settle. Caleb did not rush her. When she could walk, he matched his pace to hers and stopped beside the high freight bed.

“There’s a space behind the seat,” he said. “Blankets. Water barrel’s lashed on the side. You drink when you’re thirsty. You tell me if the pains start. Anything else you need, you say it plain.”

Martha looked at the height of the wagon, then at her own belly. “I won’t make it up there clean.”

“Didn’t figure you would.” He set his hands at her waist, careful of the child, and lifted. She was not a small woman. He still got her onto the boards without grunting. She crawled the last foot into the narrow nest of blankets and sat with her back against a crate of dry goods. The wood smelled of pine resin and flour dust. Below her, the four draft horses stamped and blew.

Caleb climbed to the driver’s seat. The wagon lurched once, then settled into the slow, heavy rhythm of loaded freight. Martha’s mules followed on their lead, heads low. For the first mile neither of them spoke. The sagebrush slid past. Heat shimmered over the trail ahead. Martha drank from the canteen he had set within reach. The water was warm but clean. She drank until her stomach cramped, then stopped.

“You haul for the army?” she asked.

“Sometimes. Sutlers. Mining camps when the pay’s better.” He kept his eyes on the horses. “Mostly I haul what needs hauling and don’t ask who’s waiting at the other end.”

“Fort Laramie still the closest?”

“Three days if the weather holds and the stock don’t quit. Four if it doesn’t.” He glanced back once. “You got people there?”

“Jeb’s brother. He wrote last spring. Said there was work and a room if we made it.” She rested her head against the crate. “I don’t know if the letter reached him. I don’t know if he’s still there.”

“We’ll find out when we get there.”

The afternoon stretched. Martha dozed in pieces, waking whenever the wagon hit a stone or the child kicked hard enough to make her gasp. Once she woke to find a piece of hardtack and a strip of dried meat on the blanket beside her knee. She ate both. Caleb did not comment. When the sun dropped and the air finally cooled, he pulled the team off the trail into a shallow draw where a line of cottonwoods marked a seep. He watered the horses first, then the mules, then filled the barrel. Martha climbed down on her own this time. Her legs shook. She walked a little way into the brush to relieve herself and came back to find a small fire already going and coffee set to boil.

They ate beans from the same pot. Caleb sat on an upturned crate with his rifle across his knees. Martha sat on the lowered tailgate, one hand braced behind her for balance.

“You don’t talk much,” she said.

“Don’t have much that needs saying.”

“Most men would’ve asked what I was willing to trade for the ride.”

He stirred the beans. “Most men ain’t hauling four thousand pounds of freight with a schedule. I got room. You needed the room. That’s the whole trade.”

She studied his face in the firelight. The beard hid most of his expression. What she could see of his eyes stayed steady. “You married?”

“Was. Fever took her and the boy three years back. South of here.” He said it the way he had said the axle was shot—fact, already measured, already set down. “I don’t keep a place. Wagon’s home.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I.” He handed her the tin cup of coffee. “Drink. Then sleep. We roll at first light.”

Martha took the cup. The heat moved into her fingers. For the first time since she had buried Jeb, the night ahead did not look like a place she would have to survive alone. The fire cracked. One of the horses blew out a long breath. Under her ribs the baby turned, slower now, as if it too had decided the worst of the day was over.

“Caleb,” she said.

“Mm.”

“Thank you.”

He nodded. That was all. But when she had finished the coffee and eased herself back into the wagon bed, she heard him move around the camp one more time—checking the stock, banking the fire, settling his own blankets on the ground beside the rear wheel where he could hear both the horses and the woman who had, for tonight, stopped being only a calculation. The wind moved through the cottonwoods. Martha closed her eyes. The boards under her were hard. The child was heavy. The trail tomorrow would still be long. None of those facts had changed. What had changed was the simple, arithmetic truth Caleb had offered her on the side of the trail: she did not have to die in the dust. There was room. And for the length of the road still ahead of them, that was enough.