Two in the Field (20 page)

“Late start today.” Linc squatted beside a small fire of buffalo chips, which proved to burn fast and clean, about like rotten wood. The smell of coffee had roused me, and I’d stumbled outside to discover that the sun had been up for maybe half an hour. He handed me a tin cup and watched as I sipped. “Too weak?”

“Weak?” I echoed. “Hell, it would strip paint.”

He looked satisfied. “Here, have some beans left from yesterday.”

They were greasy and had a strange undertaste. “Where’d you learn to cook?” I asked.

“U.S. Army,” he replied.

Devlin had assigned him the job of hauling timber from Eagle Creek, eighteen miles away. A few scattered stands of burr oaks stood along the Elkhorn, but it meant banishment for any settler who tried to cut one down. Logs had to come either from Eagle Creek or the Niobrara River, even farther distant. Milled lumber, pre-ordered from Omaha, 125 miles away, was out of the question.

Daylight gave me a better look at Linc, whose face and physiognomy, it seemed to me, could have made him a forebear of Jackie Robinson. Torso thick and powerful; thighs bulging his
denim pants; cords of muscle standing out in his forearms and hands.

“What I told you last night about my family,” he said, “I don’t want it going farther.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “I could say the same.”

He studied me for a moment. “There’s somethin’ about you that’s different.”

“What’s that?”

“You ain’t the slightest whit scared of me.”

“Should I be?”

He made a sweeping motion toward the settlement. “Some of ’em are actin’ damn nervy over me being here,” he said. “Devlin’s one.”

“Maybe he’s got something to worry about.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Well, good luck.”

“Same to you.”

I was about to mount Mr. P. when I spotted Tim in front of the store, prying open barrels and crates.

“Ma told me last night you’d be leaving,” he said sadly when I went over to say goodbye. “We got into a fight over it. You’re going now?”

Again I was struck by his resemblance to Colm. Cait must see it every day of her life.

“ ’Fraid so,” I said.

As he stared at the ground I fought back an impulse to say how much I wanted to stay with him, be his pal. Be his
dad
.

“Have you seen Andy?” He glanced defiantly toward his house, and I realized that Cait must have ordered him not to talk to me.

“I saw him play not long ago.” I embellished Andy’s game in Hartford until it was practically a one-man victory. “He’s married now. You’ve got a new cousin, a baby boy.”

He acknowledged this news with a quick smile, but his thoughts were focused on the past. “Those were the best times,” he said, toeing the ground. “When it was me ’n you ’n Andy.”

“It was good, for sure.” I felt as if a boulder was sitting on my chest.

“I wanted you to be my dad,” he said softly.

Feeling even worse, I wrapped an arm around his shoulder.

“It’s Ma’s fault,” he said bitterly. “She could at least talk to you, but she won’t—even though I reckon she ain’t sparkin’ Tip like he wants.”

“Tip?”

“Tip McKee,” he said. “You saw him with her yesterday. Tip builds things and fixes up the house. Ma calls him her second Irish boy. She fancies the way he sings and jokes.

“They’re not married?”

“Naw.” Tim looked disgusted. “But his soddy is next to us and he comes over all the time. Everybody knows he fancies her.”

A glimmer of hope.

“Could we have a catch, Sam?”

“You got a ball?”

While he ran into the store to get it, I tethered Mr. P. to a hitching ring. We tossed his well-scuffed baseball back and forth, and soon he began showing me his arm strength. My hands were out of shape but I made no complaint as he slammed ball after ball into them, throwing quickly and accurately.

“You’ve got a strong arm, Tim.” An echo of what I’d heard from my grandfather when I was a boy.

“Someday I’ll play for the Reds,” he confided.

“Timothy!”

We turned like guilty schoolboys to see Cait stepping from her soddy onto the dirt street.

“I don’t want Sam to go,” Tim said as she drew near.

“Get back to your work,” she told him. “Please.” Her eyes looked tired and I wondered if she’d lain awake last night like I had.

“If Sam’s leaving, I want to with him,” he said resolutely. “Will you take me, Sam?”

Cait glanced my way for the first time, her cheeks reddening with embarrassment.

“You know I can’t,” I told him.

“I hate it here!” His voice broke as he said it. Then, face contorted with anger and humiliation, he ran off behind the store.

“See what you’ve done?” Cait said accusingly. “I asked you to leave, but instead you caused this.”

She hadn’t asked but
ordered
, and I didn’t see how I was the cause of Tim’s discontent. But arguing wouldn’t help. “I’m going now,” I said, “if that’s really what you want.”

She hesitated, at least I thought so. But her answer, when it came, left no space for doubt: “For a certainty I do.”

“Okay,” I said wearily. “Before I leave, can I give you a message from Andy?”

She listened expressionlessly as I described her brother’s trip to Ireland and what he’d learned of their family and how he’d come to share her feelings.

“Fine,” she said softly, shrugging slightly as if to imply,
too little, too late
, but when she spoke again the brogue in her voice gave her away—it became distinct when her emotions were high. “If it’s sharing Andy intends, you might instruct him to send along some of the great amount of money he makes playing his game.”

“He’s married now, Cait. He has an infant son.”

Her expression softened, but only briefly, and I knew she
suspected me of using this as a ploy. “In that case, he’s welcome to settle here with us,” she said, “and demonstrate his grand new beliefs.”

She started to turn away.

“Please … can I at least explain what happened?”

“I
know
what
happened,”
she said in icy tones.

“Do you think I killed Fearghus O’Donovan?”

She turned back and faced me squarely, her eyes probing mine. “Since you bring it up, does that mean you have knowledge of how Fearghus died?”

I described the events on Russian Hill in San Francisco shortly after Andy and the Stockings had gone.

“You say Fearghus tried to kill
you?”

“He shot me in the chest,” I said. “The bullet hit my pocket-watch or I’d be dead.”

She studied me for a long moment. “And all this because of his wanting me?”

“Something else, too,” I said, mindful of the terrible vision I’d had while staring into the barrel of O’Donovan’s revolver. “Cait, he murdered Colm. He shot him in cold blood when Colm tried to stop him from deserting at Antietam.”

She blinked. “How could you know that?”

“I think Colm was inside me,” I said, “showing me how he had died.”

“To what purpose? So that you could avenge him?”

“I didn’t avenge anybody—but I think Colm did. Somehow he caused O’Donovan to trip over me and fall to his death.”

She folded her arms across her chest like body armor. “And just how did Colm, seven years dead, manage that?” Her voice was steely.

I recounted what I remembered of those confused seconds: the sound of beating wings, a shadowy shape. “Remember what
Clara Antonia told us? About Colm making it possible for me to come to you? If I wanted to?
Because
I wanted to?”

“Fearghus fell to his death, then,” she said, ignoring my questions, “without your being the cause?”

“Right.”

“And what then happened?”

“I woke up in a hospital. Everything was confused and I had to undergo months of treatments.” I couldn’t bring myself to say that it happened 130 years in the future. Or that the treatment had been psychiatric.

Cait’s green eyes narrowed. “And you didn’t think to tell me any of it,” she said, her voice rising. “A so-called journalist, but you couldn’t write so much as a note?”

I tried to think of something to say.
I wanted to, Cait. God knows, I tried to come back
.…

Her mouth twisted and her eyes sparkled with sudden tears. “So I had to learn about Fearghus from that bastard McDermott—

“He came here?”

“—and see the ugly leer on his face when he informed me that you were a murderer, that you’d assassinated a leader of the cause I’d given my life to—the man who’d protected Tim and me.”

I shook my head, thinking this was hopeless.

“Yes, Red Jim was here,” she went on, voice tremulous. “With you and Fearghus gone, he came here thinking to take me for his own. Thank God for John O’Neill, who heard me struggling, and had men pull McDermott off me and drive him away at gunpoint.”

I stared at her, raging inside at Red Jim McDermott and my own sense of impotence. “Cait, I’m sorry, but I didn’t—”

“And now you’ve come with a long face to tell me it was
Fearghus himself who murdered sweet Colm, my first and true love.” She pointed an accusing finger at me. It was her left hand, and I saw that it bore no ring. “And you tell me that Colm was not a hero in the great conflict after all—in fact, he was no more than a corpse. And finally, that his jealous
ghost
took Fearghus’s life and sent you to me in his place.” Tears splashed on her cheeks and she swiped angrily at them. “Is there no end to your mischief?” She spread her hands to indicate the entire settlement. “Is it your desire to spoil
this
for me after making a mockery of all that’s gone before?”

“Please listen.”

“I’ve heard enough!” Her voice was quavering. She pulled a small object from a pocket of her dress and handed it to me: the pendant with two doves I’d given her, unaware then that the Gaelic word for “dove” was
colm
. Another unintentional cruelty. “If you possess even a tiny bit of the feeling you claim for me, then, please …”

She pointed to the horizon.

There seemed to be no more words. I stood clutching the pendant. For the barest of instants I thought I saw in her face another flicker of uncertainty, but then she went walking swiftly away. I imprinted in my mind her narrow shoulders and slender neck and mass of curly hair.

A mile above O’Neill City, I reined in and gazed back.

In no way could it be construed as Shangri-la. It was a dreary little place with dreary people. Dirt and mud were its primary defining characteristics. Life in the settlement would be drab and precarious.

I’d have given anything to be part of it.

 THIRTEEN 

Yankton, booming hub of the Dakota Territory, was locked in hot competition with Cheyenne and Sioux City for chief jumping-off point to the Black Hills. Yankton’s location on the Missouri River allowed Southerners to arrive by water, while its direct link to the Union Pacific allowed Easterners access by rail. After outfitting themselves and sampling Yankton’s pleasures, gold-rushers could be at the southern entrance to the Hills in only a few days.