Forgiven

Table of Contents

 

 

AN OUTSIDER

“Some people don’t think well of a Chinese man consorting with a non-Chinese lady,” David said.

I straightened, hearing him refer to me as a lady. My hands and fingers worked and fretted as I gripped my reticule. I knew all about it, I wanted to say. All about that skin that didn’t quite fit. “Maybe they were talking about me. About how I look.” I’d heard the name-calling. Heard the references to the blood that flowed in my veins. “Maybe they weren’t talking about you at all. It might have been about me.”

“If they talked about your looks, it’d be because you’re so pretty.” His cheeks went dark, and he stared at his feet. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to blurt that out. It was supposed to be a compliment.”

And I lost words. He stood there, this kind young man who had just saved me, his hands thrust into his jacket pockets, thick dark hair slicked back, his dark eyes lifting to mine and then dropping away in shy retreat . . . I didn’t know what to think. He was sweet and nice-looking, no doubt about it; he lit up some feeling deep in my heart.

Kula Baker keeps her wits about her. Kula Baker does not go soft over a young man.

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Published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2011

 

Copyright © Janet Fox, 2011

All rights reserved

 

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eISBN : 978-1-101-52880-8

 

 

 

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For Jeff and Kevin, with all my love,
and for Leda, with deepest thanks

PROLOGUE

 

 

 

 

JANUS, THE ROMAN GOD OF GATES AND BEGINNINGS wore two faces.

The Spanish named San Francisco for a saint. The Celestials met their Demons on its streets. Called Golden Mountain by those in the Middle Kingdom, it perched precarious on a cracking plate. Children’s sad eyes pleaded in the stench and filth of its tight alleys, where hawk-nosed men slithered and the unwary were shanghaied. San Francisco’s gilded halls and palatial homes held wealth beyond dreams. For some, it was a prison. For some, it was release.

I went to San Francisco to uncover secrets locked tight in its man-made canyons. But the earth shuddered and heaved and unleashed a consuming storm, and I saw its walls leveled. I saw what dissolves in a shivering fire and how that fire purifies. I witnessed how gates tumble and life begins new from ash. I found what is important, and what is too easily lost.

I discovered in that Janus place the secrets locked inside my own divided heart.

Chapter
ONE

November 27, 1905

 

 

 

 

WITH ONE SHAKY HAND I RAISED THAT BRANCH, AN INCH only. I quaked like an aspen leaf in a tricky breeze. Not from the cold, though there was that. But from the fear.

“Come on out, girl.” The voice of this intruder with the evil snaky eyes rang through the clearing, bell-like in the frost morning.

I eased back deeper into the tangle of chokecherry. Snake-eyes had his back to me, and I fixed my own eyes on the ripped edges at the bottom of his pants leg, watching those frayed threads as the knitted branches that hid me sliced up his form. If I could crawl back silent, if I could just belly back far enough here, if I could get on my feet again, could get enough ground between us so he couldn’t shoot me, I could outrun him. Because when I had to, I could outrun a deer.

“I ain’t gonna hurt you, now.”

Liar. The bruise on my upper arm spoke to that lie. The bruise where he’d grabbed me, surprised me, and I’d twisted around and whanged him good with that fry pan, giving myself just enough time to scrabble into the thicket where I hid now, my stomach on the frozen ground.

I wished I’d nailed him harder and less glancing and laid him flat. I’d be clear to the safety of the fort at Mammoth Hot Springs by now if I could’ve kept on moving.

Snake-eyes grunted as he rubbed at what must’ve been an egg-size lump forming where my whale of a swing with the pan had connected with his shoulder. He moved to the left, shoving the barrel of his rifle into the brush barely five feet from where I lay trying to make myself smaller, invisible. “You come out now, it’ll go easier for you. I’m gonna find you, one way or the other.”

Come back, Pa. I whispered the plea in my brain, begged. I sent that plea out over the trees and snow-dusted hilltops. I couldn’t hide here forever.

Snake-eyes moved away from me, and I took that as an opening. I could ease back a little bit more, just catlike . . .

Snap
.

Snake-eyes whirled, came at me so fast I didn’t have time to get farther than my knees. He reached into the thicket and had me by the hair and he yanked.

Kula Baker doesn’t scream.

“I got you now, you sorry little . . .”

My feet jabbed on the hard ground and slid on the snow patches, as my hands went up for my scalp, where he pulled on my braid so hard I thought he might snap my neck. He jerked me back into the clearing while my feet fought for purchase and found none, and then he threw me toward the fire ring at the center, where the fire smoked and sputtered.

I landed hard on my knees, the winter soil like bare rock. I thanked the good Lord and my pa for those thick denim overalls I’d borrowed, as I rocked forward onto my hands. The pan, my only weapon, lay too far away.

“Now I will ask you nicelike and you will answer.” Snake-eyes cradled his rifle with the barrel pointing in my general direction. “I want something I ’spect to find in this camp. Something of Nat Baker’s.”

Nat Baker: Pa. “Then you ask Mr. Baker himself, why don’t you?” I braced my palms on my thighs, trying to coil back, trying to be ready, trying to ignore the smarting pain where more bruises were forming and where I’d surely lost some hair from my scalp.

“I’m asking you.” He leaned forward, his lips curled in a sneer. “If you run, girl, I’ll plug you.” He straightened again. “There’s a box. About as big as a badger. Has a brass clasp and a lock. Now, you tell me if you’ve seen this box.”

Box? What box?

Kula Baker can keep a stony face.

“Spill it, girlie. You seen it, or ain’t you?”

If I told Snake-eyes the truth, he’d plug me. If I lied and he believed my lie, I might stand a chance of escape.

I lied. “I’ve seen it. If I tell you where, you’ll let me go?”

He snorted. “Once I have it, I’ll let you go.”

“Fine, then. It’s about so big, right?” I made a shape about as big as a badger with my hands. “Baker hides it in Cookie’s tent. Underneath the flour sacks.”

“Stand up.” He waved his gun at me.

I stood, wobbly, as if the ground beneath me quaked, and then with all my strength pulled my muscles together, ready.

Snake-eyes looked me up and down. “Thought you was just a girl. You more like a woman.”

He stepped closer. I stepped back.

I clenched my hands into fists, gave him the slit-eye look, but, oh. Pa, hear me. You must come back. My plea went up into the crystal sky, curling like smoke and vanishing.

As far as I knew Pa and the men would be off for hours. Who knew where they were—I never truly knew where Pa and his gang went. Never needed to. Saving myself now was all up to me. I could smell Snake-eyes’s sour breath from here, the stench of his filthy clothes. My stomach knotted.

But I pointed with a steady arm. “It’s over there. Hadn’t you better go get it if you want it so?”

“You surprised me once, girlie. I ain’t turning my back on you again. You lead me the way to that box.”

I stepped farther away, glancing sidewise to keep my footing; the last thing I wanted was to fall now. I knew what happened to a prey animal once it fell. I moved toward Cookie’s tent and calculated my options.

They were not good. I decided I would just as soon die with a bullet in my back as enter Cookie’s tent with Snake-eyes. Inside that tent I’d be as vulnerable as a fox in a leghold; and I hated closed-in spaces. I figured then I was done for. My skin prickled with sweat even though my blood ran cold. I sent up a last prayer to the sapphire sky; I had no hope for it.

To hear it answered was something of a shock.

Snake-eyes heard it, too, the drumming of hooves as Pa and the men returned to camp. He cursed and spat and reached for me fast, but I was faster.