Sarah Todd Read online

The coast was full of natural food, of cheap transportation and energy, of a sense of hope and well-being. The further you got from the coast, though the rate was unique to every spit of land spinning ‘round a ball of gas anywhere in the universe, the rule held, the further you got from the coast, the further you got from a place folk wanted to live.

  Until you got to Lawrence.

  You got to Lawrence, and everything, rail, settlers, even the plants and animals, everything threw up arms and said ‘no further’.

  So she sat at the end of the line, looking down the length of parallel track until it vanished, straight as straight, black as death, wood ties rotting in the desert sun day after day.

  She rocked.

  She smoked.

  The sun set.

  Everything about Lawrence that had been alive had left down that track. Sarah was just here holding off the inevitable, but she did a damn fine job.

  She finished her gremlin and stood, throwing the glowing butt at the iron rails, then went to find the stupid horse and make her way back home.

  ––—

  The main street of the town was just about the only street in town. There was Granger’s shop, the old lawhouse where the Lawsons had whiled their days before they’d left, now abandoned, the tavern, where Elaine Lawson had died, the dressmaker’s shop, also boarded up, and the tailor’s shop, Grant’s, where the shirtmaker managed to eke out a living putting shirts to the backs of Lawrence’s short supply of young men. Granger sold cloth, which the ladies used to make their own clothes, these days. Simple dresses in durable fabrics were the only style of the day. Ladies who found themselves a husband were doin’ it on something other than looks, in Lawrence, as far as Sarah could tell.

  Sarah rode the length of the main street, making herself seen and seeing that nothing was out of place. Her rifle sat in its long holster behind her hip and a pair of handguns hung on their own holsters worn crosswise round her waist. A thick hunting knife was under her chaps, strapped to her thigh, and a pair of thin blades crossed between her shoulder blades.

  There weren’t one of them that hadn’t taken a man’s life. Sarah expected her weapons to put in real time, not just sit, pretty pieces to catch sunlight and men’s eyes.

  In her time in Lawrence, both before and after the big bust, she’d had men propose marriage to her. She never could fathom it. Her pa had been a drunk and her ma had died when she was still a suckling baby. She had no skills as a lady or as a wife, just a mean streak and a temper matched with a propensity to wear britches and a hat rather than skirts and a bonnet. Somethin’ about a woman with guns at her side, though, had always brought ‘em in, always unwanted, always out of clear blue skies, always rejected with little care or tact. The kind of man who’d chase her for her power was the kind of man who wouldn’t handle her well, later. They saw in her a bucking colt, desiring to put a bit in her mouth and a saddle on her back so they could parade her around before Lawrence and beyond, the Sarah Todd of yore, the one they broke.

  Pete’d had the decency to never propose, though she knew him to be in love with her. Poor, dumb boy. Sarah wasn’t the marryin’ type, not the lovin’ type either, and anyone who knew her well enough to deserve to ask her hand ought to know that well enough to hold off tryin’.

  She watched the sun rise over the wide, clear expanse of nothin’ that led eventually to Jeremiah, Carson, Wellsley, Mont Blanc, and eventually Preston. Two weeks’ of rail-ridin’ got you to Preston, and from there you had several big coastal cities to pick from. The moment that the rail line split, you’d hit real civilization. The rest was just roots, feeding resources scarce at the coast up into the big cities out of necessity.

  “Miss Todd?” someone asked. She looked down to see Granger coming out of his store, wiping his hands on a dirty cloth.

  “Mornin’, Granger,” she said. He nodded.

  “You been to the station?” he asked.

  “Last night,” she answered. “It’s still empty.”

  He nodded, wiping his hands again, and then his small, round spectacles. There’d been a day Granger had had implants keepin’ his vision good, but they’d malfunctioned or fallen out or some such loss, and he’d been reduced to glass discs.

  That was Lawrence in an image.

  “I ain’t got a shipment from him in weeks,” he said, looking up at her with weak eyes. “You think he’ll come?”

  “He always has,” Sarah said. Granger wiped at the back of his neck with the cloth, then did his hands again. She wanted to snatch it up and throw it.

  “He ain’t been this long, Miss Todd.”

  “We starvin’, Granger?” she asked.

  “Well, no,” he drawled.

  “Gremlin holdin’ up?”

  “Yessum,” he said. “Good crop this year from the Killians.”

  “We got babies coming this year?”

  “No,” he said, squinting again. “Can’t say that we do.”

  “We’ll be fine,” she said, shifting.

  Perpeto kept people feelin’ young, and feelin’ young kept ‘em from makin’ babies. Funny, that, but she weren’t complaining.

  “People is gettin’ desperate, Miss Todd,” Granger said.

  “What people?” she asked. He wrung the cloth.

  “You know. People.”

  “No, I don’t know,” she said, looking at him hard. He wilted.

  “Just folk,” he said, turning and scrambling back into his store. She sighed.

  Restlessness was a pastime round here, and she knew it but good. You’d think folk would hunker down when things got scarce, but instead they showed up at the tavern already half-drunk and they got in fights.

  The tavern was where her ground ended. Paulie and Willie ran the place as they saw fit, and Sarah didn’t go in. What happened there was their problem, and Paulie had a reputation for putting almost as many men in the ground as Sarah, herself.

  The glass windows were long gone, replaced by thick canvas and boarded over a hundred times and again from men going out through there rather than the door.

  There was no love lost ‘tween Sarah and the tavern owners. She held them as guilty for Elaine Lawson’s death, simply for breathin’ the day it happened, but in a town the size of Lawrence, you got on as best you could. She respected ‘em for making it, and for holdin’ their ground when they had to, and when it came to it, they were together against the bandits, but that was all.

  Sarah took out her canteen and took a long swig of the warm water there, wiping her shirt sleeve across her mouth as she put it back over the pommel.

  “Sarah,” a man said.

  “Thor,” she answered, greeting a man built like a door who was walking toward her like there weren’t any street left on either side.

  “Need you,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “Apex, up at the mine,” he said.

  “Need Doc?” she asked.

  “On my way,” he said.

  “Run fetch Pete on your way,” she said. “I’ll meet you there.”

  He gave her a head bob, touching his hat and continuing on his way. Her stupid horse skittered away from him on churning feet. She kicked the animal hard, then whipped it with the reins on either flank, getting it moving.

  She was a patcher. It was a skill from long back, learned from Elaine, and one that had seen as much use as her gun, in recent years. She stopped by home, grabbing supplies and shoving them into her saddle bag, then booting the black horse that didn’t seem to have any better place to be, riding hard up into the mountains.

  There were still prospectors up here. Even a little bit of absenta would fetch a living, and some of the men made it like that. These days, weren’t any claim jumpers or bandits to pester you, neither. Life was too spare for anyone to bother pokin’ around up in the mountains to try to take it from you.

  Apex and Thor were among the more successful prospectors, with a claim Sarah listed on her maps in her pa’s office. No one knew the claims
but her, on account that it were a lot easier to jump one if you knew where it was. Wouldn’t have worked in the old days, but these days it was just a matter of keeping the men out of each other’s way, spread out in the barren rocks enough to never see another soul as they dug in the hard ground.

  Which was why she was surprised to find Apex had a bullet hole in him.

  She dropped off the horse and took a spinning look around the claim.

  “Who done it?” she asked, pulling a gun. Apex was in pain and only hissed through his teeth at her. She kicked him in the side.

  “Man up,” she said. “Who done it?”

  He grunted and rolled onto his side, pointing through a stand of dead trees.

  “Over there,” he said.

  “Don’t let the horse wander,” she said, going to pull her rifle and walking to the trees, putting her back to the first one.

  “You still here?” she called. It weren’t somethin’ she expected to work, but sometimes men was stubborn enough to give themselves away when they heard her.

  There was a noise, and she spun, striding sideways to the next tree with the rifle leveled. She saw nothing, but she was closer and she was in control.

  “I hear you,” she said. “I killed five of your kind yesterday. Wasn’t plannin’ on gettin’ such an early start, today.”

  “Sarah?” the answer came.

  It was a woman.

  “Who’s there?” Sarah asked, staying with the tree ‘tween her and the woman.

  “Sarah, it’s Beth.”

  The voice was angry, but afraid, too.

  “Beth?” she asked. “What are you doin’ up here, woman?”

  Apex’ wife. Like most folk in and around Lawrence, they’d had their share of fights in public, with Beth throwing things at Apex and Apex cursing her as he run hide to the tavern to drink and heap defamations on her.

  “What I shoulda done the day I married the dog,” Beth called. “Go home, Sarah. You got no place here.”

  “Can’t let you just kill him,” Sarah called back. “What’s he done?”

  “He’s been steppin’ out with that whore Jezzie.”

  Jezzie was one of the women Sarah would have loved to chase up and down the main street with a horse whip, but you didn’t do that to women. Another thing Sarah had never quite come to grips with, but she went along.

  “Sounds like her,” Sarah called back. “You sure about him?”

  “He comes home at dawn singin’ and carryin’ on three times this week, I like to know what other reason there’d be for him to be that happy.”

  “You ain’t wrong,” Sarah called. “You ask him?”

  Silence.

  “Go home, Beth,” Sarah called. “I’ll patch him up and send him on to you. He admits he done it, you can kill him nice and private.”

  More silence, then a crackle of dead wood. Sarah dodged her head around the tree and back. Beth was in clear sight, now, holding a rifle by the barrel.

  “I’m goin’,” she said. “My buckboard is in the next valley.”

  “Don’t let Thor see you,” Sarah said. Beth sighed and scrambled past, headed uphill. She had feet more accustomed than most to the rough terrain up in the mountains, on account of Apex being a prospector, and Sarah shook her head, going back to Apex.

  “You done what she said?” she asked, getting bandages out of her saddle bag. The horse was nosing through Thor’s things. She didn’t stop it.

  “No,” Apex said.

  “Tell her so,” Sarah said, putting rough pressure on the hole in his side until Thor, Pete, and Doc got there.

  “Get him walking and send him home,” she said to Doc.

  “That’s a bullet hole,” Pete said, looking around wildly.

  “Danger’s past,” Sarah said. “Get him home, okay Pete?”

  “Who done it?” Thor asked. Sarah shrugged.

  “Hard to say, round here. Don’t think it’s likely to happen again. Y’all ain’t got nothing worth stealing.”

  Thor shook his head.

  “Been a bad month.”

  It was always a bad month.

  “Maybe next month,” she said, grabbing the horse and dragging it down to where she could mount up and ride home again. She had people to stop in on today, and an order to put together for the chemist in Jeremiah. She’d need to send Pete tomorrow or the next day. She didn’t have time for Beth and the universal fear that Jezzie was sleeping with someone not her husband.

  Jezzie didn’t have a husband, but she loved sleeping with them.

  She picked her way back home, squinting up at the sun once from under her hat. Calving season was soon, so she needed to move cattle down from the high country to watch em. She also needed to get Pete on his way for more Perpeto, and the day was half gone.

  She sighed, wiping her sleeve ‘cross her brow and taking a drink. Would be a late night. She finished the list of Perpeto mixes she needed, specific by gender, weight, and a few other things, and set it out for Pete, then whistled for Dog. The animal came willingly, sniffing her pockets until he found the jerky there.

  She packed up the ammunition and water she’d need for the trip, then loaded up the skittish black horse, kicking him twice for stepping away from her while she worked. Dog sat obediently to one side, itching at himself a few times.

  “Let’s go,” she muttered, looking over the homestead her pa had left her, then giving the black horse a boot. If she’d left in the morning, she might have made it home by nightfall, but a night out wasn’t the worst thing. She was headed into the wide space of nothin’ between Lawrence and the high-country mountains where things grew well enough to support livestock, and weren’t many men anxious to spend much more time out there than it took to cross it. She’d played out there as a child, with Jimmy Lawson, but that were about all it were good for.

  Lawrence would have to hold itself together without her for a day.

  ––—

  She slept on the flats under the stars, her head on the horse’s blanket and her feet propped up on the saddle. She didn’t need a fire, though the temperature dropped below frost every night out there, on account of Dog laying next to her and a long life of doing just this. Weren’t no firewood out here, noways. She woke up without feeling in her fingers or her nose, tacked the horse, whistled for Dog, and kept on.

  The ascent started early in the morning, weaving up cowpaths through the weak vegetation until she crossed over top the first peak. It was like some fool set a ruler out and drew a line between good country and bad. All the rain that fell, fell on this side of the great, stupid rocks, finding its way down through the valleys and eventually meandering toward the other side of the continent, feeding and watering any number of men and animals, eventually. For now, it watered her cattle among the herds the ranchers grazed up here, growing grasses that the cows had long ago learned to live on. She whistled to Dog and sent him down into the valley, letting the black horse follow at his own rate.

  This was one of the tests of a horse. Outsmarting a cow. Weren’t hard, but some horses never managed. They could pull a cart for a rancher’s wife, but if a horse couldn’t outsmart a cow, Sarah had no use for it.

  Dog barked and she slapped the reins across the horse’s flank, getting him up to a trot across the steep edge of the valley, toward a treeline where the cows would have sheltered, the night before.

  There was lowing and a sharp moo as Dog did his best to get the beasts moving, and as Sarah got close, a young bull came charging out of the stand of trees. She cursed as the horse went up on his back legs in surprise, hopping twice before his front legs landed again and he set of bucking.

  She cracked him over the head with her fist, then switched him hard on either side as the bull went charging by - not one of her animals - and then the horse was still again, skin twitching.

  “Stupid animal,” she said to the horse. “I swear, you pull that again, I’ll put a bullet to you and walk myself home.”

  Dog pushed
a few more cows out of the trees and she checked their brand.

  “Let ‘em go, Dog,” she said. “Keep movin’.”

  She tossed him a scrap of jerky and he darted away again, up and over a low ridge and out of sight. She pushed the horse forward again to follow.

  Three more families of cows weren’t hers, and then, late morning, she found the ones what belonged to her. Six cows and an older bull, down at one of the little ponds to take water.

  Dog pulled ‘em off the edge of the water and started pushing ‘em toward the ridges that lead to the bad country, and Sarah kept the black horse in line alongside, making corrections here or there to keep the cows in line as they tried to scatter before Dog. By early afternoon, they were on the flatlands again, and the sun weren’t yet set when she secured them in her barn, leaving the bull outside in a fenced enclosure where he couldn’t do no one any harm. Bulls didn’t like being separated from their cows, but it was for the best, if she intended to have a look at any of them, come morning.

  Pete was on the front porch.

  “Pete,” she said, by way of greeting as she unlocked the door. He followed her into the house. “Apex make it home okay?”

  “His old lady was fit to be tied,” Pete said, “but he was laying comf’table enough when I left.”

  She nodded, putting the kettle onto the stove before feeding the stove a halfcord of wood. The embers there were still hot enough to catch.

  “Need you to go to Jeremiah,” she said, goin’ to get her list. “You got time?”

  “Pa’s got the cattle in for the season,” Pete said. “Just me pickin’ at my little mine, these days.”

  She nodded. Pete had a claim, small, but specific up a ways into the mountains and he often spent weeks up there tinkering and poking at it. Kept him busy, and busy was better than drunk.

  “Let me get you money,” she said as he looked at the list like it meant somethin’ to him.

  “Lotta folk grateful you manage this,” he said, same thing he always said as he was getting ready for a trip to Jeremiah. She didn’t know what made him say it; he was the one out riskin’ his life for pills, but she didn’t argue. Gratitude was currency, ‘round these parts, and she’d take it, even when she didn’t earn it, if it were offered free.