Apart 20

Matt stood solemnly by the two graves, hat off, holding the baby as he desperately thought of what he could say to the small boy at his side that would ease the grief of losing both of his parents. Nothing, he decided. There was nothing he could offer, save a few already spoken bible verses, that he could offer. And not even those were much help to a child who had lost so much.

"You ready to go?" Matt asked as he looked down at 8 year old Beau Carson.

Beau nodded as he looked up at Matt and his sister being held by the lawman. "Guess so." He sighed. "Ain't nothing more we can do here."

"No, there isn't." Matt agreed. "Come on."

Casting one last glimpse at his parent's graves, Beau put his small hat on his head and silently followed Matt over to his family's wagon. By some stroke of luck, the wagon had been sitting well away from both the cabin and the barn and so had not suffered the same fate as those two structures. Although one wheel was off and the other was shaky, Matt realized it was the only option for travel, carrying, as he would be, a baby, a small boy, a dog and four puppies. So he had quickly set about the repairs.

As he worked on the wagon, Beau sat close, minding the baby and explaining to Matt just exactly what had happened and how his family had come to be out there in so desolate a place. His parents, Louise and Lucas Carson, had moved the family there a little over three years prior. They had been warned of Indians, bandits, plagues of locusts, drought and flooding rains but the promise of free land, to those who persevered, outweighed the risks.

Though they'd had no flooding rains or clouds of locusts and nary had an Indian been seen, they did experience a severe drought which devastated their first crop and threatened their next. But Lucas Carson was not a quitter and he pushed on, determined to make a go of the land he now called his. Through sheer stubborn grit, he managed to turn things around and by the time baby Sarah was born, they were sure of their success. They never gave consideration to the other threat they'd been warned of.

It had been early morning when the first signs of something wrong had come. Lucas had risen early and gone out to milk the cow and feed the horse while Louise rose to begin the task of making breakfast. But she'd barely gotten dressed when the front door of the cabin crashed open and two men spilled in.

Beau hadn't seen exactly what had happened after that, as his mother, upon seeing the two men, raced past them to the yard outside the door and the two men followed her out. Beau, frightened and understanding somehow that he couldn't help his mother, grabbed his baby sister and climbed out the back window of the cabin, hiding the both of them in a thick grove of trees away from the house. When he heard horses galloping away, he came out from cover and carried his sister back to the house.

His father was lying on the ground, unmoving. His mother was rushing back and forth with a bucket throwing water on the now burning cabin. "Get the animals out, Beau!" His mother had screamed when she saw him. That was when Beau realized the barn was burning. Sitting his sister within his father's reach, Beau ran into the barn and began pulling out the chickens. Those safely shooed out, he had grabbed a robe, tied it around the cow's neck and began to pull it outside as well. That was when Matt had ridden in and he had no need for the boy to go on.

Though he'd said nothing to Beau, Matt had seen the bullet in Lucas Carson's back and knew he'd probably been shot right off as he tried to reach the cabin to protect his family. He'd also seen the torn clothing and bruising on Louise and knew what those men had done to her before shooting her and riding off, leaving her for dead. Only, Louise hadn't died, just yet anyway and her desire to save the children she still thought inside the cabin had driven her beyond the pain to try and save them. Matt supposed that even after seeing her children safe, she'd continued to work, knowing of nothing else to do. But willing though her spirit was, her body finally succumbed to her injuries and she had died, falling into Matt's arms with her last breath.

Now he had two kids, 5 dogs, a cow and a plow horse to look after, not to mention the 3 scraggly chickens that Beau had managed to save and he had no idea what to do with them. He'd wanted to leave the animals behind but Beau looked so distressed at the idea and set up such a ruckus that Matt decided it better to take them along. The boy had lost enough, he decided.

"Beau, you sure you don't have some relatives around here somewhere, maybe some friends of your parents that you could stay with?" He asked as he picked the boy up and put him in the now repaired wagon with his sister and the dogs.

"We don't have anyone." Beau replied. "No one but you."

Matt let out a breath, secured his horse and the cow behind the wagon and then climbed up into the wagon seat. "Yeah." He shook his head. "You got me."

TBC