Three weeks later:
Kitty looked down at the papers she held and stifled a cough. Even in the twenty-one days since she had seen Dr. Gilberts, her symptoms had noticeably worsened. She was beginning to believe that six months was too optimistic a prediction.
One was a copy of her Last Will and Testament, drawn up by a prominent St. Louis lawyer. In it, she left the Long Branch to Sam, Festus, Matt and Doc. The four-way split would guarantee them almost two thousand dollars each when they sold the place, and help provide for their comfort for the rest of their lives. To Ma Smalley, she left all her dresses. The liquid assets left in her bank account after her stay at the San Francisco sanitarium was paid for were to go to several poor families in Dodge who could use a bit of kindness and help buying groceries. She had seen to it that a copy of the document would be produced by her lawyer when she died and had been buried, and not before.
The other was a letter to Matt. It was short, honest, but necessarily vague.
Conveniently for Kitty, she had not mentioned her strange symptoms in her previous letters to Matt, but they had naturally grown shorter in length and more boring in content as her illness had confined her to her hotel room for the majority of her vacation. Thinking back on them, she realized that they might well have been interpreted by Matt as a gradual loss of interest in corresponding with him. Furthermore, over the last year, there had been several moments of tension between them – once she had turned twenty-five, her impatience with Matt's reticence to propose marriage and settle down had redoubled. Therefore, this last missive – the last letter she would ever send Matt – breaking off their friendship and romance, would appear quite natural to him. Kitty had cried many uncharacteristic tears while writing it. It told him that she had been thinking a great deal about her future during her time in St. Louis, and that she had come to the conclusion that being in Dodge, with him, was no longer what she desired. There was no need for him to come to St. Louis to discuss it, for she was leaving for a different place and life as soon as she mailed the letter. She thanked him for all his years of devotion, and wished him well.
With a short, bitter laugh, she sealed the envelope. Matt had spent years supposing that he was going to die before his time – and now he would outlive her! Kitty convinced herself that, as painful as this letter was, he would take it in stride like so many other challenges in his life, and overcome it. He would imagine her well and happy, perhaps even suppose her married to another man. By the time she died and word reached him, he would have gotten used to the idea of not having her around. All that would remain of her in his life would be some distant memories, and the monetary comfort that the sale of the Long Branch would provide.
The bellboy knocked on the door to collect her luggage. She gave him the letter and the money for the postage, and betook herself wearily to the stage office.
…
Kitty had never liked stagecoaches. They were always lurching, always fraught with danger. Many of the worst times of her life had begun with a stagecoach journey.
She was glad that this was the last trip she would ever take on a stage.
In order to avoid passing through Dodge on her way to San Francisco, she had elected to buy tickets for a longer, less-traveled route. This also practically guaranteed her the opportunity to be the only person in the coach – Kitty felt she could not, in good conscience, subject healthy people to hours in the same confined space as her.
"I suppose I finally can appreciate how the lepers in the Good Book felt," she murmured to herself as the carriage swayed and hit bumps in the road. "Unclean, unable to be around others, unable to see their families or enter their town."
The voyage was a slow one. Her exhausted body could not tolerate more than one leg of the journey at a time. Between every connection, Kitty was obliged to spend at least three days in a hotel, in bed, coughing and trying to ignore significant abdominal pain. Thus, it took her over a fortnight to make it from St. Louis to half-way across Kansas.
Fighting nausea, she forced herself to board the carriage that was destined to take her to the Colorado border. She leaned heavily on the cushions and tried to enjoy her last few hours in the state which she had come to call home.
As the prairies of Kansas rushed by her window, she let her thoughts wander back to that morning when she had first come to Dodge. She remembered how she had then hated the ugly buildings and muddy streets. Little had she known that that small town was the one in which she would learn to trust people, to make true friends, and to love.
The carriage began to travel over even rougher terrain, and made every bone in Kitty's thinning body ache. Glancing outside the window, she noticed that they were now driving over dangerous mountain roads. Suddenly, as they went around a bend, a large pothole appeared in the road, and it was impossible to avoid. The coach lost a wheel, careened wildly off the road, and towards the edge of a cliff. The driver, seeing no way to save any life but his own, jumped off his perch and rolled, unharmed, onto the other side of the road.
For Kitty, time slowed. Out the window, she saw the precipice coming closer and closer. There was no way she could open the door in time and exit. For an instant, her heart instinctively sped up in a panic; and then she remembered her situation. If someone had to die in a stagecoach accident, it was fortunate that it was herself and not a child or a woman who still had her whole life ahead of her.
Accepting her unavoidable fate, she closed her eyes tightly. As the carriage began to fall and her life began to flash before her eyes, her only thought was a prayer that she be judged mercifully, and that Matt would have a peaceful, happy, long life.
*Spoiler alert* Yes, I know that Kitty's situation seems to be going from bad to worse right now, but trust me, this stagecoach incident is actually a blessing in disguise! I personally don't like reading sad fanfictions and usually abandon them, so before you do the same, I'll let you in on a little secret - I don't think I've ever killed off a major character in my fanfictions, and I don't mean to start now, despite all this evidence to the contrary!