Chapter Five
Kid’s eyes flew open promptly at daybreak, the sound of ravens’ cries echoing in his ears. The sun was rising ever higher in the sky, spreading red-gold fingers across the horizon. The wooden floor underneath him was hard and unyielding, and as he shifted, his left leg ached in protest. Between the journey and the damp, not to mention the hard, cold floor he had tried to sleep on, he wasn’t doing himself any favors. If Maggie were with him, she’d have given him a stern talking-to about the conditions he was forcing himself to endure. He smiled to himself at the thought.
When he turned his head, Lou was sitting bolt upright in the dilapidated bed across from him. Her eyes were wide open and she was staring at him in mute trepidation.
She. Damned if he’d ever get over the shock.
Kid sat up then too, ignoring the persistent pain in his leg. For a long, silent moment they eyed one another. Then he said, “You’re awake.”
“’Parently so,” she replied sarcastically.
“You’ve been out since—since,” Kid faltered. How did he say it? Since just after I opened your shirt to look at your wound, and got the shock of my life?
“Since you dressed my wound.” Lou paused for a split second. “No need to beat around the bush, Kid. We both know what you saw.” She was matter-of-fact, still meeting his eyes with unwavering precision. It was more than a little unnerving.
Kid ducked his head then, face flushing at the memory of just what he had seen. Enough to know Lou McCloud was not what she had pretended to be. Enough to know he had been an idiot to think she was. How could he ever have believed she was a boy? Now, when presented with the evidence, it was easy to see how wrong he’d been.
Maggie had known; she must’ve known. She had known and she hadn’t told him. She had let him make a fool of himself. The boys were probably back at the station, laughing at the reporter who couldn’t tell that the tiny, delicate-featured boy was a woman in disguise. Kid snorted to himself. So much for investigative journalism.
As she watched him wrestle with embarrassment, Lou remembered the dull, throbbing pain that had penetrated her ribs so suddenly, so unexpectedly. She remembered the shock that had catapulted her to the ground, and hearing Kid’s desperate cry of alarm. She felt the sharp thud of her body landing, heard Kid’s horse racing to her and Kid dropping to her side. She remembered protesting, struggling as he moved to undo her shirt.
“You’ll be okay, Lou,” he had said, wincing. “Just let me see how bad.”
She had pushed feebly at him, her strength rapidly dwindling, and had protested weakly. “No…Don’t.”
And then the astonishment on his face; the complete and utter shock as he had lifted her shirt. “Lou…” he had murmured lamely.
He was looking at her now with the same measure of confusion, although the jolt of surprise was gone from his eyes. He opened his mouth and closed it abruptly, shaking his head. As he watched her, the proud, defiant tilt of her chin, the blaze of challenge in her eyes, he was struck by how much she reminded him of Maggie. She was practically daring him to say something.
There was so much fire in her; he had seen that from the first, even if he hadn’t known the truth. Lou McCloud wasn’t one to be trifled with. His face burned with mortification as he recalled raising her shirt to check the bullet wound, only to find…Well, he was too much of a gentleman to think about just what he had found. It was enough to say he had discovered something that most assuredly proved she was a woman and not a boy.
And the audacity she had, the fight in her, even as she shivered with pain. What was it she had said? “What’s the matter, Kid? Never seen a girl before?” The last thing she had managed before her eyes had rolled back in her head and he had scooped her in his arms and carried her into the ramshackle hut close by.
“Well? Aren’t you goin’ to say anything?” she asked him now.
He shrugged uncomfortably, unsure how to speak to her, and not because she was a woman. He rose to his feet and began to rub at his leg, working out the stiffness in it. “I reckon I ought to build a fire. Maybe another rider will see the smoke and--”
“You wanna cut the small talk, Kid?”
The anger in her tone spurred some spark in him. Thoughts came rushing through his brain. What was she doing working a job like this? Didn’t she know the danger? Hell, she had to realize it now, with a bullet wound in her side. If Maggie had risked her neck in a job like this, he would’ve killed her himself.
“Well?” Lou prompted, jutting her chin out with further insolence.
“What are you doin’ here? In this job—in this life?” he finally cried.
Apparently she had an answer already prepared. Still holding his gaze with her own, Lou spoke clearly and without hesitation. “I run away from an orphanage in St Joseph, Missoura,” she said, giving the state its midwestern pronunciation. “I got a little brother and sister there.” She paused, sensing where his thoughts were leading. “A girl with no ma, no pa, no kin—what’s left for me? Scrubbin’ floors…or worse?”
“Ain’t there somethin’ else you can do?” Kid asked helplessly.
“Why should I?” she retorted. “I can shoot and ride with the best of ‘em. I’m good at my job, Kid, you got no call to judge me.”
“I ain’t judgin’ you! I’m just—I’m just tryin’ to—to help you, Lou.”
“Help me?” Incredulity was thick in her voice. “I don’t recall askin’ for your help. I’m doin’ just fine as I am.” Damn him and his blue eyes. If it wasn’t sort of sweet of him to be this way, and if she wasn’t in so much pain, she would’ve happily punched him right in the chops. Help her? She didn’t need any help.
“This ain’t right, Lou,” he said then, employing what Maggie referred to as his signature line. ‘When all else fails,’ she would say, ‘you pull out “It ain’t right” like it’s your secret weapon’.
Lou grimaced at him. “Your idea of right may not be the same as mine, Kid. I got a right to make a livin’ as I see fit, and you got no call to interfere. The boys and Rachel and Teaspoon all know, and they’re behind me. You’re nothin’ to do with us, or the Express.” She bit her lip then, afraid she had gone too far. The truth was that she already suspected she wanted Kid to have a great deal to do with her life in general.
“That may be,” he whispered in acknowledgement, “but I’m a reporter, Lou, and I got an obligation to report the truth.”
Lou gaped at him in astonished fury. “You’re not sayin’--”
“I’m not sayin’ anything yet. I’m just tellin’ you how it is.”
She studied him for a moment. She had already committed every curve and line of his face to memory, but just now she was searching his frank blue eyes for some sign that he had any intention of carrying out this awful threat. “You don’t mean it,” she said finally.
Kid looked at her in surprise. She sounded so sure of herself. And she was right: he didn’t mean it. But it was unsettling to have anyone other than Maggie take one look at him and know what was going on inside his head. “I didn’t…I didn’t mean it as a threat, Lou, honest I didn’t. I’m just…” He smiled faintly and sank back down onto a worn-out wooden stool behind him. “I’m still surprised, is all.” And confused, he added silently.
He really did feel his duty as a reporter was to write the truth. And the truth—at least part of it—was that the Rock Creek station employed a girl masquerading as a boy. The fact that the station master knew and approved of it only added drama and intrigue to the story. And drama and intrigue were two things a reporter knew all about.
But one look into Lou’s dark, trusting brown eyes and Kid knew he couldn’t go through with it. He couldn’t betray her like that.
They were quiet again, his words hanging heavily in the air between them.
“What are you lookin’ at me like that for?” she whispered after the silence had continued till it was awkward.
“What? Nothing.” He shook his head firmly, trying to convince himself he hadn’t noticed the arch of Lou’s lips or the soft outlines of her neck. What the hell was wrong with him? Just because she was a girl didn’t give him free reign to stare at her that way.
“You’re lookin’ at me like you never seen me before.”
Kid smiled wryly. “I don’t guess I have, Lou.”
To his surprise, she blushed and looked away. It was the first sign he’d gotten that she would allow herself to be vulnerable. “You been ridin’ with me for days now,” she insisted.
“Yeah, but, ah, you could say I ain’t ever seen…ah, this side of you.”
They looked at each other again and after a moment’s hesitation, both burst into laughter. Red crept up Kid’s face, all the way to his ears. He couldn’t believe they were laughing about something like this.
“So…” he finally ventured, “what’s your real name?”
Lou lowered her lids bashfully. “Louise,” she murmured.
Kid stood then and walked to her, holding out his hand. “How do you do…Louise,” he said, with soft emphasis on her name.
She made a face at him and shoved his hand away. “You already met me,” she grumbled in reply.
“Nah, Lou. I think—I think I just met you today.”
This prompted a smile that bloomed from Lou’s lips and spread to her eyes. “If we’re being properly introduced, why don’t you tell me what your real name is? I know it ain’t Kid.”
He laughed and shrugged again, this time uncomfortably. “Aw, it’s not important.”
“Maggie calls you ‘DC’, why is that?”
At the mention of Maggie, Kid visibly froze, and the tentative camaraderie that had been struck up was dashed just as quickly. Lou cursed herself inwardly for bringing up Kid’s fiancée. They had been doing just fine without the thought of Maggie hovering over them.
“It’s just a nickname,” Kid said dismissively. “How are you feelin’, Lou?”
Lou sighed and tried not to sound as disappointed as she felt. “I’m fine. The bullet went clean through. I’m a little stiff, but I’ll be okay.”
“You reckon anyone’ll pass through here in time to help out, or are you feelin’ up to headin’ out tomorrow?”
“I can ride,” she assured him firmly.
He nodded. “Let’s give you tonight to rest up some more. We’ll head out first thing in the morning.”
“All right.”
“I’m just—just gonna head out and take a walk around. Loosen my leg up a bit. You’ll be okay, won’t you?”
“I’ll be fine. You go.”
Kid watched Lou as she spoke, privately wondering at the sudden softness in her voice; a softness that hadn’t been there before. It seemed now that he knew her secret, she wasn’t going to pretend to be anything other than she was. And when she looked at him, even though it was full in the face, with a man’s directness, she was every inch a young lady.
“Holler if you need me,” he murmured, and then stepped out of the rickety shed and out into cool morning, notebook and pencil in hand.
For close to an hour he skimmed over the grounds surrounding the dilapidated old building. He crossed to where the horses were tethered to a tree and saw the marks where Lou’s mount had reared back in fear, the blunt lines in the dirt where Lou had fallen, the patches of blood dried into the grass.
They had been riding at a brisk, yet leisurely pace. With Lou’s run finished, they knew they could take their time. Lou had gone ahead to scout out a place to stop for a quick supper, and before Kid realized it, he heard gunshots, and raced to Lou in time to find her crumpling to the ground, and a gang of half a dozen men stampeding away. He had fought back the desire to chase after them, knowing he would be vastly outnumbered, and more importantly, that Lou needed him.
He had crouched by her side and pulled up her shirt despite her resistance. Oh God, he was so ashamed. What had given him the right to just yank her shirt up like that? Why hadn’t he listened to her protests? Reason shrieked at him, telling him he couldn’t possibly have known Lou was anything more than a stubborn boy afraid to be tended to, but he still wanted to kick himself for not knowing.
He would have a bone to pick with Maggie when he got back to Rock Creek. How dare she keep this from him? How dare she not tell him something that would have been so vitally important to his job? There she went, playing mother hen again, deciding what was best for him and what wasn’t. It was damned infuriating.
And there was Lou at the back of his mind. The boy’s façade had slipped away, and he had seen her—truly seen her—for the first time. The soft eyes, the gentle curves, the sweet, low voice. His body had reacted to her loveliness as quickly as a moth to a flame. He tried to tell himself it was only physical; he couldn’t possibly know her well enough to form any basis for attraction. It was too soon, he had only known her a short time, and besides, there was Maggie. There was always Maggie.
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They rode slowly over the next three days, pausing whenever Lou showed the slightest hint of fatigue. Kid found himself in tune with any alterations in her mood, and could tell when she was suffering in silence and the ride had gotten to be too much for her. He would stop them then, and find a cool, comfortable spot to rest for a while.
During these quiet times, they began to talk. Small things at first--vague mentions of their respective families, their childhoods, their ambitions—and then gradually, so slowly they hardly noticed it, they spoke of bigger things, more important things. Things like the death of their parents, the plight of Lou’s brother and sister in the St Joe orphanage, and the accident that had caused Kid’s leg to be forever twisted in pain. This last caused Lou so much pain just hearing it that she could no longer doubt her feelings for Kid were growing stronger by the minute.
They were sitting before a crackling fire, grasshoppers chirping in the distance. The firelight was casting flickering shadows over Kid’s handsome face, and Lou was completely absorbed as he revealed more bits and pieces of his life back in Denver. They had been discussing childhood friends, and Lou had regaled him with the tale of how she and her best friend, Jacob Cuthbert, had gotten whippings from the nuns at the orphanage when they had been caught sipping at the communion wine.
Kid chuckled and shook his head as she ended the story. “You were quite the cut-up, weren’t you, Lou?”
“You might say that. I was always a kind of tomboy.”
He looked at her dubiously. Despite the fact that she played her role of a young man to the hilt, and he had believed her, it was impossible to look at her now and not see that a lady lurked underneath the dirt and grime and men’s clothes.
“Besides,” continued Lou, “Jacob was always real good at eggin’ me on. I never could say no to a dare, and he knew it.”
“Somehow I believe that, Lou.”
She stuck her tongue out at him playfully. There was a sociable peace between them for a short while, and then she ventured, “What about you and Maggie? You two seem like you go back a long ways.”
“Since we were seven years old and I pulled her pigtails in the school play yard,” he said with a wicked grin.
Lou laughed. “I bet she had a few words for you after that.”
“She jumped on me and damn near beat me to a pulp,” he said fondly, as the memory danced through his head. “Maggie fought with her fists back then, not with her words. I learned that lesson the hard way.”
“What’d you go and pull her pigtails for anyway?” teased Lou.
“Aw, I was new to the school and I didn’t have no friends. I looked around the play yard and saw this girl with bright hair playin’ tag with all the boys, and I remember thinkin’ she was pretty.” He smiled wistfully, laughing at his seven-year-old self. “I wanted her to be my friend, but I didn’t know how to ask.”
“So you went up to her and pulled her hair, ‘stead of introducin’ yourself,” Lou interjected playfully. “Ain’t that just like a man? Can’t stand to feel awkward, but you make fools of yourselves anyway.”
“You’re mighty hard on us, Lou.”
“No more than I see fit.” They were laughing again, comfortable with one another. It felt nice and friendly, and Lou was happy, even if the subject was Maggie. She still had nothing against the other girl, but she would have much preferred if she were not an ever-present ghost between her and Kid. “Go on now, what happened after that?”
“Well, I…” Kid tried to recall. “I slunk away with my tail between my legs, but I guess she took a fancy to me, ‘cause the next day Hank Sweeney tried to hand her some flowers and she told him she didn’t want any flowers from any boy, but she reckoned she wouldn’t mind if I picked her some.”
“And did you?”
“Of course I did! That girl had a mean right hook!” When their giggles had died down, he sobered suddenly and his voice grew soft. “She was my best friend when we were kids.” He looked over at Lou. “She saved my life once, you know.”
“She did?” Lou gazed back at him, interest piqued. “Was it your—your leg?” she asked tentatively.
“Yeah.”
Catching the guarded look on his face, Lou said, “I don’t mean to pry.”
“You’re not. You’re all right,” he assured her. “I just don’t really talk about it much.”
A heartbeat passed, and Lou licked her lips nervously. “Would you talk about it now?”
She had expected him to protest, to wave away her words, to shake his head and say no. Instead he settled his head back onto his saddle and rested his sore leg on a stone in front of him. He gazed into the flickering flames and then he spoke. “It was a real nice spring day and I was fixin’ a fence for Old Man Moore. I’d been out there for hours. He was a nice old fella, and he was good to me, always givin’ me chores and payin’ me good money for doin’ them. He didn’t mind if Maggie stayed with me, and he didn’t mind if I took a while, ‘long as I did a good job. I…” Kid hesitated, then plunged onward, “I didn’t tell my pa about the jobs ‘cause I knew he’d take the money I made and spend it on whiskey and card-playin’. Instead, I just gave it to my ma. She was scared sometimes that he’d wonder where she was findin’ the money to pay for things, but the drunken fool never even noticed when we had somethin’ nice on the table.”
He glanced over at Lou, who was paying rapt attention to his tale. Her interest gave him the courage to continue. “I remember the sun was up real high, and Maggie was jabberin’ away about somethin’ or other, makin’ me laugh like she always did, and…All of a sudden I felt someone…watchin’ us…I felt eyes on us…I looked up, and it was my pa. He come chargin’ toward us, his eyes just blood red, just screamin’ and hollerin’ like a wild man. Before I knew what was happenin’, he’d picked up one of the fence posts.” Kid’s voice was strangely detached as he related all this to Lou, but inside he was quaking at the memory. His eyes focused on the fire before him and he spoke slowly. “He started swingin’ it at me, screamin’ that I was useless and lazy, and he couldn’t count on me to do nothin’ around our house, but I sure was good for some cheap labor for Old Man Moore. And then he got closer and he—started hittin’ me.
“I was so—I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there and took it. I mean, I tried to protect my face, but I just stood there and took it. He’d hit me before, but he’d never come at me with nothin’. He’d never gone crazy like that before. I didn’t know what to do. But I looked over at Maggie and she was just—on fire or somethin’. She jumped up and threw her arms around his neck and screamed at him to let me alone. He just—he just threw her off like she wasn’t nothin’. Like she was a rag doll. I got so angry then. I couldn’t let him hurt Maggie like that. But he grabbed that fence post up and started at me again. He—he got my leg that time. He just whacked it out from under me. I fell on the ground…”
By now Lou had risen and joined him. She sat by his side, eyes huge as he told his painful tale. Without thinking, she reached out her hand and slipped it into his, offering him strength and comfort. “You don’t have to go on,” she whispered. “You don’t have to tell me, Kid.”
His eyes were bright, but there were no tears. He went on as if he hadn’t heard her and didn’t feel the warm pressure of her hand in his. “He just kept on and kept on, goin’ after my leg like it was his target. I guess I passed out after a while, and when I came to…” Kid’s voice trailed off as a clear picture of that bright, sunny spring day sprang to mind.
He could see it all so clearly—The blood soaking his shirt, the blood coated on the fence post that now lay on the ground, the tears streaming down Maggie’s helpless face, his father nowhere to be found. His head was in Maggie’s lap and she was stroking his face gently, wiping away the blood, sobbing with all the energy and rage in her sixteen-year-old heart. It was as if the weight of the world was in those tears. He could hear her begging him to wake up. “Please wake up, DC. Oh, please. He’s gone, DC, I won’t let him hurt you. Please wake up…”
Fearfully, Lou watched Kid as wave after wave of emotion passed over his face, and his eyes remained unfocused, seeing not ahead of him, but into his past. She bit her lip and waited, holding her breath, hating his pain. She hated herself for having asked. It was because of her that he was reliving it—her and her questions, her need to become a part of his life the way Maggie Seaborn was.
“And when I came to,” Kid said, as if there had not been that terrible pause, “my pa was gone, and it was only Maggie and me.”
“He ran off?”
“Maggie ran him off,” he corrected her. “She picked up a fence post, a bigger one, in her little-bitty hands—hands that hadn’t held nothin’ heavier than her baby brother—and she hit him with it; hit him till he run off.” Kid tried to smile, but he could still see the blood on his pants and on Maggie’s hands. His breath caught in his throat and he coughed to clear it away. “I never thought a skinny scrap like her could send a man runnin’, but she did it, and she’s got the scars to prove it.”
“Oh, Kid…” murmured a helpless Lou.
“I don’t know why I told you all this,” he said. It was a lie. He knew exactly why he had told her. It was because he trusted her, implicitly, and because he knew she trusted him, and because when he looked into her eyes—those big, beautiful, brown eyes, so velvety and soft—he wanted her understanding and her sympathy. He wanted Louise McCloud to know him, and that thought was terrifying.
Their hands were still joined together as they sat quietly, the only sounds to be heard the fire and the grasshoppers. Suddenly they broke away from one another, but Kid could still feel the softness of Lou’s hand.
“I did ask,” Lou reminded him gently, as an afterthought. “I wasn’t just bein’ nosy.”
“I know you weren’t.” His voice was muted. She hardly heard him.
For her part, Louise had no idea what to say to the revelation that Kid had shared with her tonight. She had suffered cruelty at the hands of her own father, but it had never been physical, and while she knew that words could bruise just as deeply as fists, she doubted whether her experience could hold a candle to what Kid had suffered. She didn’t even know the half of it.
“We should get to sleep,” she finally said.
“Yeah.”
“We’ll be in Rock Creek by tomorrow evenin’, I reckon.” It was time to move on to safer topics, even if she did feel like a coward for doing so. “Night, Kid.”
“Yeah. Night, Lou.”
Lou began to slide down under her bedroll, her mind whirling. The aching wound in her side had flared to life, but she ignored it, concentrating as best she could on overcoming it. There were too many things to think of, and all of them centered on the man next to her. How was it possible she had only known him a handful of days? Hadn’t she known him forever? Hadn’t he known her the minute he’d looked into her eyes? She sighed and rolled over to face the fire.
Sneaking sideways glances at Lou, Kid watched as her eyelids drifted lower and lower until they shut completely and her breathing became shallow and even. For several minutes he watched her sleep, grateful for the peace her wound seemed to be giving her for the moment.
She was pretty. Prettier than Maggie, even. But it was strange…He’d seen many girls prettier than Maggie, but none had ever so much as turned his head. And now here was Lou, covered in trail dust and dried blood, hair shorn to a boyish length, dressed in clothes a size too big, and she was making his heart skip a beat as she lay there, breathing softly.
This wasn’t possible. You didn’t meet a woman and feel a connection like this so quickly. He had known Maggie for years, they had built a relationship out of memories and experiences, not some instant bonding you only read about in those ridiculous tragic romances the papers all liked to print. He wasn’t like that; Lou wasn’t like that. This was real life.
Kid picked up his notebook and pencil, sifting through the pages, trying to ignore Lou as she slept. If he could just write it down, write it exactly as he was feeling it, then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. There had never been anything so bad in his whole life, that writing it down didn’t make it better somehow.
Words were springing from the pages in the dusky firelight. Maggie’s name was littered again and again on page after page, and a sense of the most awful, nagging guilt began to eat at him. Finally he slammed the book shut and tossed it to the ground in disgust. He couldn’t live with himself if he ever put into words what he was feeling right now.
It’s just a fancy, he told himself. Lou is an amazing person and I’m just…just intrigued, that’s all. We’re out here on the prairie, just me and her, and we’re talking like old friends, and I’m telling her things only Maggie knows. It’s natural. We’re becoming friends. That’s all.
But as he threw the remains of his coffee on the fire and began to stamp it out, he was horribly afraid that he was wrong; that somehow, somewhere, deep inside of him, the spirit and fire and beauty of Lou McCloud were beginning to work their way into his heart. He hung his head and stared at the ground, wondering what kind of heart he had that could forget Maggie Seaborn so quickly.
To be continued...