That got a nervous laugh from some of the settlers, but I shivered. I remembered that steam dragon. It was the first time I’d ever heard the alarm bell in Mill City ring the wildlife warning. The dragon had flown right over the Great Barrier Spell, and it had taken most of the magicians in town to bring it down.
Once the protection spell was up, Mr. Meyer asked for volunteers to bury the dead and salvage what they could from the wagon. I wasn’t too keen on helping with the burying, but I could see that someone should at least try to find out who they’d been and where their people were, so that their family could be notified. I said I’d help with the wagon.
I was sorry almost as soon as I got near. The wagon had had four oxen pulling it, and they and the settlers had been dead in the hot sun for two days. On top of that, the saber cats had been marking the area as theirs. The whole area stank of death and decay and cat urine. I hauled out my handkerchief and tied it over my nose and mouth. It helped, but I still had to breathe shallowly.
Four of the men gathered up the bodies of the settler and his family, while some of the others started in digging the graves. As soon as they said the wagon was cleared out, I climbed up on the driver’s seat and started looking around. There was an old sawed-off shotgun lying crosswise right where the driver would have been sitting. Both barrels had been fired. Under the seat, I found a metal box, the sort most settlers used to carry money and family papers. It wasn’t locked, and when I opened it I got a shock. The dead settlers were Giles Carpenter, the man we’d met at Puerta del Oeste who’d been in too much hurry to get to his allotment to wait for a travel guide, and his family.
That rattled me more than a little, and I was still shaky from the fight with the saber cats. I’d always known that the settlements were dangerous, and I’d met a few folks who’d been injured by wildlife, but Mr. Carpenter was the first person I’d met who’d actually gotten killed in the West. That I knew of, anyway; about half of my class from the day school had gone out to settlements and I hadn’t kept in touch with any of them. That thought was even more unsettling. I closed up the box and set it aside, then crawled back into the wagon to see what Mr. Carpenter had brought along with him.
Mr. Carpenter may not have been too smart about traveling with a guide, but he’d done a bang-up job at picking his supplies. There were two more guns packed away, an old smoothbore rifle and a revolver, and plenty of ammunition for all of them. He had a small keg of nails, two barrels of flour and another of sugar, a lot of beef jerky, a large crate of tools for building and mending things, seed for both a field of soybeans and one of Scandian wheat, and a lot of other things. All of it seemed like it would be real useful, even to a well-established settlement like Neues Hamburg, so rather than deciding anything myself, I made a list for Mr. Meyer. I was glad when I finished and got back to the camp, even if it was only a little way from the wagon.
Over dinner that night, the settlers had a solemn talk on what to do with Mr. Carpenter’s wagon and supplies. There was too much to just abandon, but nobody wanted to come back a second time. Luckily, one of the men said he could jury-rig a harness for horses from what was left of the straps and the yoke for the oxen. It wouldn’t be as good as a proper horse collar, but if they went slowly and some of the men helped push the wagon, it would do. What clinched the argument was that we could put the three injured men in the back. They’d be jolted around — there was no helping that — but there was no way they could ride, and the wagon was better than having to ride double.
As soon as she heard we were taking the wagon, Professor Torgeson asked if there’d be room for one of the dead saber cats. The settlers gave her funny looks. One of them offered to skin one for her right there, if she wanted it that bad, but she said she wanted the whole cat for the college to dissect. Mr. Meyer said that as long as she took care of preserving it herself, and knew what she wanted done with it, he didn’t see a problem. So the professor spent the rest of the evening looking at the dead cats to find the one that had been shot up the least. She picked out two, a female saber cat and a male Columbian sphinx, and stayed up through the first watch putting layers of preservation spells on them so they’d get back to the college in good condition.
Just before dark, Mr. Meyer set watches, and the rest of us settled down under the stars to try to sleep. I was restless for a long time, and when I finally did fall asleep, I had the first of the dreams. Even then, I knew it was different. It was sharper and clearer than my other dreams, and I never had any fear that I’d forget the smallest part of it.
I dreamed I was standing in the old well house back in Helvan Shores, where I’d lived until I was five. It was dark and damp and too warm. Someone had left the cover off the well, and a bucket on a rope beside it. I was desperately thirsty, but I was afraid to go near the well to try to draw up any water for myself. Mama had drilled into us all that we weren’t to be in the well house without an adult, and if that hadn’t been enough, the older childings told all us youngers all sorts of tales about childings who’d fallen in and drowned.
After a while, I crept to the bucket and pulled it back to the wall, where I could look at it without getting too close to the well. There was a little stale water in the bottom, barely a palmful, but I drank it down as fast as I could. It only made me thirstier, but at the same time, I was more afraid than ever.
I decided that it would be best to leave. I peered into the dark well room, but I couldn’t see the door. I edged around the wall, peering, and feeling the cool stone with my fingers. After a long time, I tripped over the bucket. I’d gone all the way around, and there was no door. I pressed back against the wall, sure that something would come out of the well and get me. And then I heard rain on the roof.
I woke up feeling terrified and chilled. As soon as I recollected where I was, I went straight to the fire. It had burned to embers, but it still gave off heat enough to warm me a little. When I was finally warm, I laid myself back down, but it was a long time before I slept again.
The next morning, we finished burying Mr. Carpenter and his family. Mr. Meyer read a psalm out of the little Bible he carried with him, and Wash said a few words about people brave enough to come across the Great Barrier into the West. He didn’t mention people who weren’t smart enough to follow good advice when they got it, but that would have been unkind. Then we got to work loading up the professor’s dead cats and the three injured men, and started back toward the settlements.
With four horses pulling and five men across the back pushing, we kept the wagon rolling pretty well until we had to part company. We sent the wagon on to Neues Hamburg, because the settlement was old enough and large enough to have its own doctor and two of the injured men were from there. One of the men from Jorgen went with, on account of the other injured man being from Jorgen. Before they left, the settlers from Jorgen and Neues Hamburg both thanked Wash and the professor and me for letting them know about the saber cats. Mr. Meyer even tried to offer a reward, but Wash said helping out like that was a circuit magician’s job, even if he was only half on duty, and the professor said that as long as they saw to it that her large samples got back to the university, she’d be more than happy to call it square.
When we got back to Bejmar, we had to go over the whole business one more time for the settlement magician. “Thank you,” he said when we finished. “Both for the warning and the help.” He shook his head tiredly. “I’d hoped that with so much forage and cover gone, we’d have a year or two before the big predators came back, but it seems not. Though the smaller wildlife aren’t much better.”