“Well, not to any place, I suppose. It runs from this here down to Fort Sill, but this end of it’s mostly used by odd folk like us now, to make the run into town a bit easier on the bones,” Hutch told her. Caroline looked behind them, back along the empty road. She watched the dust resettling into their tracks. She had pictured the country virgin, untouched by any hand but God’s. Here already were ghostly ruins and a road to nowhere. “We’ll be crossing the North Canadian in just a short while, Mrs. Massey, but I don’t want you to worry about that none. This time of year it’s not going to pose us any problems at all,” Hutch said. Caroline nodded, and smiled gamely at him.
The river was wide but shallow, the water reaching only halfway up the wagon wheels, and to the horses’ stomachs. Hutch let the pair take the reins from him when they reached the far side, and the animals drank deeply, kicking up sprays that spattered their dusty coats and filled Caroline’s nostrils with the smell of their hot hides. She wiped at some droplets on her skirt, succeeding only in making a grubby smear. They paused for lunch on the far side, where a stand of cottonwood trees curled their roots into the sandy bank and cast a dappled shade onto the ground. Hutch spread out a thick blanket, and Caroline took his hand down from the wagon, seating herself as well as she could on the ground. Her corset would not let her be comfortable, though, and she spoke little as she ate a slice of ham that required an indelicate amount of chewing, and bread that crumbled into her lap. Grains of sand ground between her teeth as she ate. The only sound was the soft hiss and clatter of the breeze through the cottonwood leaves, which twisted and trembled, flashing muted shades of silver and green. Before they moved on again, Caroline went to some lengths to extract her scalloped silk parasol from her luggage.
The wagon made slower progress over the open prairie, bumping over knots of sagebrush, dragging sometimes in patches of shifting sand or the boggy remnants of a shallow creek. Occasionally they passed small dwellings, homesteads dug in and knocked together in haste to keep a family safe, to stake a claim, to make a new beginning. But these were far apart, and grew more infrequent the further they went. As the afternoon grew long Caroline drowsed, swaying on the seat next to Hutch. Each time her head began to droop some jolt brought her around again.
“We’ll stop for the night soon, ma’am. I reckon you could use a hot cup of coffee and to bed down.”
“Oh, yes! I am rather tired. We must be very far from town, by now?”
“It seems further in this slow wagon. I have made the journey on horseback in a day before, without even trying too hard. All you need is a good, fast saddle horse, and your husband raises some of the finest such animals in all of Oklahoma Territory.”
“Where will we stop the night? Is there some other settlement nearby?”
“Oh, no, ma’am. We’ll make camp tonight.”
“Camp?”
“That’s right. Don’t look so alarmed, Mrs. Massey! I am a man of honor and discretion,” he said, smiling wryly at Caroline’s expression of wide-eyed bewilderment. It was a moment before she realized he had imagined her scandalized at the thought of spending the night alone with him, just the two of them. She blushed and dropped her gaze, only to find it resting near the waistband of his trousers, where his shirt had pulled a little loose to reveal a small area of his hard, tanned stomach. Caroline swallowed and set her eyes firmly on the horizon. Her first fear had actually been of being outdoors all night, unprotected from animals, weather, and other savageries of nature.
Before sundown Hutch drew the wagon to a stop on a flat area where the ground was greener than it had been, and more lush. He helped Caroline down and she stood, aching everywhere, unsure of what to do. Hutch unhitched the wagon, took the bits from the horses’ mouths and slapped their behinds. With glad expressions and swishing tails, they trotted lazily away to a near distance and began to crop huge mouthfuls of grass.
“But… won’t the horses run away?” Caroline asked.
“Not far, I reckon. And they’ll come miles for a slice of bread, anyway.” Hutch unloaded a tent from the wagon and soon had it built. He spread blankets on top of buffalo hides to make a bed, and put her vanity case inside for her. “You’ll be cosy as anything in there. As fine as any New York hotel,” he said. Caroline glanced at him, unsure if she was being mocked, then she smiled and seated herself inside the tent, wrinkling her nose at the smell of the hides. But the bed was deep and soft; and the sides of the tent belled in and out with the breeze, as if gently breathing. Caroline felt her heart slow, and a gentle calm came over her.
Hutch soon had a fire going and crouched beside it, tending to a large, flat pan that spat and smoked. He fed the flames with pieces of something dry and brown that Caroline did not recognize.
“What’s that you’re using as fuel?” she asked.
“Cow chips,” Hutch replied, offering no further explanation. Caroline did not dare to ask. The sky was a glory of pink and turquoise striations, marching away from the bright flare of the west to the deep velvet blue of the east. Hutch’s face was aglow with firelight. “I put that box there for you to sit on,” he said, gesturing with a fork. Caroline sat, obediently. In the darkness beyond the flames one of the horses snorted, and whinnied softly. Then a distant howl, high and ghostly, echoed across the flat plain to where they sat.
“What was that?” Caroline exclaimed, rushing to her feet once more. The blood ran out of her head and she reeled, flinging out an arm that Hutch caught, appearing at her side in an instant.
“Do sit, ma’am. Sit back down,” he insisted.
“Is it wolves?” she cried, unable to keep her voice from shaking.
“Nothing more than prairie wolves, is all. Why, they’re no bigger than a pet dog, and no fiercer. They won’t be coming anywhere near us, I promise you.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure as I’m sitting right here, Mrs. Massey,” Hutch assured her. Caroline pulled her shawl around her tightly, and huddled fearfully on the hard wooden box, her every fiber strung tight with alarm. Hutch seemed to sense her disquiet and began to talk. “Coyotes, they also get called sometimes. They run around in packs and squabble over leftover bones here and there. That’s all they’re singing about-who’s found the best old cow bones to chew. The most mischief they get up to is stealing chickens from homesteaders, but they only do that when they have to. I reckon they’ve learnt not to go too close to folk, unless they want to take a bullet in the tail that is…” And so he talked on, his voice low, and soothing somehow, and Caroline was reassured by it. Now and again the coyote song drifted over the camp, long and mournful.
“They sound so lonely,” she murmured.
Hutch glanced at her, his eyes lost in shadow. He carefully passed her a tin cup.
“Take some coffee, ma’am,” he said.
The sunrise woke her, light glowing irresistibly inside the tent. Caroline had been dreaming of Bathilda, watching over her shoulder as Caroline ran scales up and down the piano, exclaiming Wrists! Wrists! as she had been wont to do. For a moment, Caroline could not remember where she was. She poked her head cautiously out of the tent and was relieved to see no sign of Hutch. The eastern sky was dazzling. Caroline had never in her life been up so early. She stood up and stretched, hands in the small of her back. Her hair was in disarray and her mouth was sour with last night’s coffee. She rubbed her eyes and found her brows full of sand. Her whole face, in fact, and her clothes. There was a line of dirt inside her cuffs, and she could feel it inside her collar too, rubbing at the skin. Rumpled blankets beside the cooling embers of the fire spoke of where the foreman had spent the night.