Cloud's Rider

“That’s fine. That’s real fine. Appreciate your help,” the marshal, Peterson, said, and shook Ridley’s hand. Their departure stopped the debate, and various townfolk and several of the disputants came and expressed their appreciation for the report. “Glad to have you the winter,” one said, which was a lot better than riders got out of Shamesey folk. Then Reverend Quarles came and said, “I know I can’t convince Ridley there, but we’d be happy to see you in Sunday services, son.”

“Thank you,” Da

“Any time you, you know, want to talk, I’m just the other side of the wall.”

“I won’t forget that, thank you, sir.”

But by then he was sure the preacher’s invitation simply hoped to separate him from Cloud and thereby save his soul, and his partnership with Cloud wasn’t even remotely negotiable. John Quarles and his heaven-blue church was certainly a kinder-spoken and more forgiving preacher than the fire-and-brimstone peddlers down in Shamesey town. In Shamesey as a whole a rider’s leathers and fringed jacket weren’t welcome, not in the town streets and least of all in respectable places. This village as a whole seemed a lotbetter.

But he didn’t linger to quibble. He had his escape, and took his leave with Ridley, out the front door through the foyer and down the porch steps.

It was done, then. He’d told what mattered.

“Wasn’t too bad,” he said to Ridley. “But what are they going to do? Wait till spring or what?”

“They’re going to be down that mountain like willy-wisps,” Ridley said, “some maybe if the weather holds good, hoping to get a jump on the others, and if they leave down the road, I’m damn sure not guiding them, and if they go overland I’m not rescuing them. They’ve lost their damn minds.”

Village riders were very different from town riders, he’d begun to figure that. Ridley cared about Evergreen. Shamesey riders, who hadn’t any sense of personal attachment, just drew pay for guarding herds and fields, or they got hire as he had with the convoys that took commerce back and forth between the towns. But if people Ridley knew were fools, Ridley might still go after them—that was how he understood the man, and Callie as well.

Je

And walking back from the meeting in which neither he nor Ridley had told all the truth—for what he suspected were very different reasons—he said to himself he had to talk to Carlo very soon and tellhim what the thinking was in the village, in case no one got around to explain to Carlo what his rights were, because Carlo, being an outsider like himself, didn’t have anybody but him to do that. But he couldn’t run from here to there or people would draw fast co

A rider visiting a villager was going to occasion talk. No way not. But he could at least be smarter about it than that.

He watched the village kids throwing snowballs up and down the street. There were shrieks and name-calling, and no harm done.

Sleds plied the street further down, children amusing themselves on a white surface—while in Shamesey, snow meant muddied and dirty piles along the sidewalks. Here there were such snow-hills, but they were clean and clearly fair game for sledders.

On the way to the meeting he’d seen what was beautiful in Evergreen; in there, in that church, he’d seen what wasn’t.

But maybe they weren’t to blame for what they were doing. Ridley was mad and Ridley didn’t like the talk in there, but, he realized suddenly, the villagers in that church were proposing things that were going to hurt the village and draw off people the village needed, that had to be Ridley’s view of things.

And what was the truth? The notion in these people’s minds must have started small—just the notion that the staging area for everything they relied on was gone—and they were legitimately scared for their lives and safety up here.

So he couldn’t blame them too much at all for their plans, and he doubted Ridley did. When he thought about it—why shouldn’tthey take what was down there? They were overexcited and maybe a little quick to protect their own interests above others, but he didn’t think they were bad people.

He didn’t know what it would be to be a kid in this sparkling and white wintertime world that riders who went with the trucks would never see. Maybe a little more i

“Where’s the smith’s place?” Da

Ridley pointed a gloved hand toward the end of the village. “Near the gate, third building back.”

It wasn’t the building he’d guessed it was. It was much less conspicuous. “What are the big ones?” he asked.

“Miner barracks. Tavern.”

Of course. If miners and loggers came in for the winter, they had to have somewhere to stay. In Shamesey there were several hotels for the truckers who didn’t rent space in private homes.

For good and certain they didn’t stay near the horses in the rider camp.

“This house here, now,” Ridley said, and indicated a painted, prosperous-looking house on their way: the owner evidently didn’t believe, unlike most everyone else up and down the street, that a little space of sun was the signal to unshutter and enjoy the light. “This is the doctor’s. This is where they took the girl.”

“Huh,” he said, but nothing else. He didn’t want anything to do with the matter. And didn’t want to discuss Brio

“She lost her daughter.”

“The doctor did?”

“And her husband, right after. He was a good man. A real good man. All the kids were going skating—they do, when the weather’s been socked in for weeks: special outing. You know kids. Bouncing off the walls by then. Callie and I, every month or so we take ’em out to the pond just up the road, and sometimes you’ll see kids from Mornay join us. And there were some then. Faye, that was the kid’s name—she was fourteen the week before—Faye got to talking to a boy from Mornay, and she was kind of at that age, you know, skated off from the rest, she and the boy, just kid stuff, just flirting. It was about this time last year. The ice wasn’t solid in the west end—the waterbabies keep it churned up there by their burrow, where the falls comes out, and it wasn’t at all safe. I spotted the kids. I yelled—”

Ridley shook his head. Clearly it was a bad memory. And Da

“They skated off the other way from where I was,” Ridley said. “Playing games. She hit the thin ice. I yelled at her to go flat, and she maybe started to, but the ice split, and the fool boy tried to grab her—which put twice the weight on it. They both went under. He climbed out. She didn’t come up. Her father went in looking for her, without a rope, and he nearly drowned. The marshal and his deputy got her out, sucked into the waterbaby den, right where the water flows out. Just too late. Wasn’t anything to do. Sometimes the drowned ones will come around. But this one didn’t.” Ridley shook his head. “Her father went along quiet till spring and the ice started melting, just made his call on an old man who’d died, and then he went home and locked the office door and blew his brains out.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah,” Ridley said. “Darcy Schaffer, that’s his wife, she’s the surgeon for us and all the miners, only doctor we’ve got since her husband died, but she just isn’t opening her doors. I don’t know how the marshal talked her into it. I know what they were thinking when they took the girl there. But—”