Cloud's Rider

John said other things. She didn’t believe in his God but she believed in John. They were partners in life and death, John doing the breaking of news and dealing with the next of kin, and that was a very useful thing to her. The marshal she had far less to do with and didn’t give a damn for most of the cases he brought her—miners and loggers who’d gotten drunk and bashed each other senseless or tried to shoot up the barracks.

But then they folded back the furs and showed her the girl, and it was Faye. It was Faye’s blond curls, it was Faye’s pale face, just that age.

Her eyes were open. Faye’s hadn’t been. Hadn’t ever been again. Faye’s eyes in this child looked through her, blue as the sky in summer.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?” Darcy asked, and brushed her hand across the girl’s forehead. But the girl didn’t blink.

“They’re reporting Tarmin’s entirely wiped out,” the marshal said.

She listened to it. It wouldn’t come into focus. Tarmin—gone?

“The girl didn’t come out so well as the brothers,” the marshal said. “They were swarmed. Kids holed up. She’s the youngest. Her mind’s affected. They say she’s getting steadily worse, don’t know how many days.”

Not my field, Darcy would have said. She’d dealt with a couple of shock cases—miners, generally, who in their profession had to get along without riders to do more than check on their camps now and again, and just made do with guns and dugouts. The miners were tough. One had come around. The other hadn’t.

“Her brothers and one rider got her up here, storm and all. They’ve been through hell. I know it’s cruel, Darcy, but I honestly didn’t know who else to take her to. Mackey’s going to take the two boys in or I’ll break his neck. I just don’t know what else to do with the girl. I know you got one guy over this. If you could just take a look at her—”

“Take her upstairs,” she said. Downstairs was the clinic. Upstairs was where shelived. “Warmer up there, most-times.”

“All right,” Peterson said, and furs and all, carried the girl out of her kitchen, around the corner to the stairs. Darcy followed with the lamp and got in front for the ascent. Peterson carried the girl up, and the preacher came behind her, with the deputy clumping after them, up, up where there was a small landing and a choice of rooms.

The whole upstairs wasn’t warm yet: the kitchen stove was only just getting going. Their breath almost frosted, and the storm had torn something loose outside that banged and thumped. But Mark had pla

Faye’s room had one. She opened the door. Dawn must be starting, because there was a faint glow coming in above the lamplight. She hadn’t noticed how much dust there had gotten to be. But the sheets were clean under the coverlet, and she had the marshal lay the girl down there.

“You sure you’re all right?” the marshal asked her then, and she knew damned well what he was thinking andasking of her.

“Fine.” She wasn’t angry, just ready for them to get out of her way and let her find out what the girl’s chances were. She wasn’t sentimental about Faye’s things. She could use this room when it was practical. And it was practical now, a matter of light that didn’t risk fire or cost money.

Such a pale, cold face. She couldn’t keep her hand from the blond curls. She knew it wasn’t Faye, but it was something to deceive her eyes and her hands and, at least for a while, the blank spot in her heart. “Oh, honey, can you blink for me? Can you do that?”

“Let us pray,” John said, and launched into something about the Lord and lost sheep.

“Yeah,” she said, instead of amen—she said things like that habitually and John kept his mouth shut and winced: John could havethe souls on their way to the next world, but she wanted this one alive.

So she herded the three men downstairs, as of no use, and had no time to spare for tea or cordialities: she shoved them out the door, with them promising to check this afternoon, and John Quarles promising to bring groceries if she needed them.

“I have everything I need,” she said, maybe foolishly, because it wasn’t the truth, and she shut the door on them, then shot the bolt and dropped the bar.

Faye, all done up in furs and softness. It was a beautiful dead child the marshal had brought her, That Day, and she began to cry.

But old thoughts came to her and prompted her to stop sniveling and get something done. She found the dusty warming bricks in the downstairs closet and set them on the kitchen stove top, and stoked it up with another few sticks of wood.

She took the hot kettle upstairs, moving faster than she had moved about her business in long, long months. She knewit wasn’t her daughter—she knewbetter; but she didn’t choose to know: that was the real difference between sane and crazy.

In the thoughts she chose to think, Faye was home, the marshal had brought her, and she had a chance this time to fight death, hands on and by hereffort—slim, but at least this time, a chance.

The smith, Mackey, hadn’t been exactly hospitable.

But Carlo thought now, sitting in a warm nook in Van Mackey’s forge, with the faint glow of embers for light as well as heat, that he was very willing to put up with pain in his fingers and feet. He was grateful that Da

He could say now that they’d made it. And he’d have wished to talk to Da

Thanks, he’d have said, at least, if he’d had his wits about him, and if that duck of Da

His eyes burned. He wanted just to sleep, and it was so still, so quiet in this place. The whiteout—

He suffered a mental slip, chin on his chest, thinking <himself back on the mountainside with horse-sendings shivering down the nape of his neck and ru

At next blink it was <Da

No, they were in the forge shed. He and Randy. The preacher and the marshal had said they had a place for Brio

And it was. From the branching of the dizzying wooden passages they’d parted with the marshal, taken a separate lantern which he lit and carried for the deputy who carried Randy, and they’d gone far down another spur to a side tu

Knock on the door, the deputy had said, having his hands full with Randy, and he’d knocked. They’d waited. He’d hammered with his fist, though it hurt like hell, figuring people were asleep, and the deputy had carried Randy all the way from the rider camp.

It had taken three such assaults before he heard steps inside, and finally the door opened on a sleepy, burly man in his underwear, who’d gazed blearily past the lantern he carried while they stood in the dark of the tu

“These kids hiked up from Tarmin,” the deputy had said. The deputy had gone on to say they were the smith’s kids from down there, and that the marshal wanted them to have a job, at which Mackey acted as if he’d slam the door in the deputy’s face.