CHAPTER 27
Lou shouted orders at Buck and Ike as they helped load the wagon in front of Thompson's store. The items for the baby had finally arrived and now came the task fitting everything into the cabin.
Tapping Buck on the shoulder to get his attention, Ike signed, *You realize once the house is built we'll have to move everything again, right?*
Buck wiped the sweat from his tan forehead and leaned against the buckboard. Then he just smiled. "Lou, where's that husband of yours? Why isn't he out here helping us?"
Lou's head swiveled around and she swore under her breath. "I'll go find out," she told them and huffed off.
She was on her way to the marshal's office when one of the lady's in town stopped her and gave her a basket of baby things. The town was in some kind of dry spell as far as babies were concerned, maybe because so many of their young men had left with the army. Louise found herself getting all kinds of attention since coming back. At first she had been apprehensive, wondering what kind of judgment awaited her once they realized she had been a girl all along. But many of the townswomen seemed impressed, even envious, and she had been asked to recount her adventures many times.
She thanked Mrs. Peters for the diapers and salves and carried the basket as she made her way to her destination. But her path was soon blocked by the elderly Mrs. Dawson, who had a knitted blanket, blue on one side and pink on the other, that she wanted to give her for the baby. Lou folded up the lovely gift and placed it on top of the basket. She hadn't taken ten more steps when one of the older children ran up to her and handed her a little wooden duck attached to a string. She held it in her spare hand and thanked the child, knowing it would be a while before the baby could make much use of such a toy but it was the thought that mattered, and the little girl was so excited to give it to her. She knew this was just their way of saying they were happy she was back and thanking Teaspoon, Jimmy, and all of them really for taking good care of the town.
By the time she finally reached the marshal's office, she had an armful of gifts. Noah laughed at her predicament as she stared at the stairs wondering how she was gonna waddle up them without falling. He rushed down the steps and grabbed the basket in one hand, wrapping his other arm around her waist, and helped her climb the stairs up to the porch.
He placed the basket and other gifts on the desk. "Jimmy went to see about some trouble in the saloon. You want something while you wait? We got cold coffee."
"No thanks, Noah." She slid into the stuffed leather chair in the corner furthest from the empty cells. "What kinda trouble?" She absentmindedly rubbed circles over her belly.
"The stupid, drunken kind, I imagine. How are you feeling?"
"Baby's kicking. Do you want to feel?"
A little shyly, he spread a hand over her abdomen and grinned shen he felt what she was talking about. "Feisty like his mama."
She sighed. "This might be my last trip to town," she told him, suppressing a yawn. "It's tiring." Noah told her to stay there and rest. He went to relieve Jimmy from whatever was going on at the saloon.
The chimes above the door startled her awake. She'd dozed off while waiting for her husband. She turned towards the door expecting Jimmy. Instead she was greeted by the tall, skinny outline of Jake Colter. Last time she'd seen him had been at the wedding. He'd taken off the very next day, presumably in pursuit of a bounty. He'd looked like a different man: washed hair tied back in a bun, pressed suit, trimmed beard. Now he stood before her the grizzled bounty hunter: tangled long hair, dirt streaked face, shotgun in tow.
"Hi Jake." She looked up at him, half expecting him to be dragging a bounty behind him. "What brings you back to town?"
"Louise," he said in way of greeting. For a moment his eyes lingered on her growing stomach. His head swiveled to the marshal's desk. "Looking for Hickok. You know where I can find him?"
"Right behind you." Jimmy stepped into the office. "What brings you here, Jake?"
He glanced between the couple, figured Louise wasn't the type of wife to excuse herself from man talk so he pulled the dime novel from his pocket. "Found this in Seneca. Thought you'd wanna know."
Jimmy grabbed the book from Jake and stared at the title, grinding his teeth. Wild Bill's Bride by JD Marcus, it read. The cover displayed a drawing of a man, apparently him, riding a horse with a pretty woman riding behind him, hair flying wildly around her while she fired a shotgun at whatever was supposed to be chasing them.
"Goddammit!" His grip on the paperback tightened.
"Another book about Wild Bill?" Lou asked from where she sat.
"Not just Wild Bill," Jake answered. "He calls you the damsel of the Pony Express."
"How the hell would he know?" Jimmy wondered.
"I'd say someone in this quiet town of your's been running their mouth."
Lou, who'd finally managed to push herself up out of her chair, stood next to Jimmy and looked at the book in question. "Shit," she whispered. All the lawmen in Nebraska Territory would have heard about Jimmy Hickok replacing Teaspoon as marshal, and she'd been the talk of the town for weeks after their return. "But Marcus hasn't been here."
"Word is he has hired help. Now that people recognize his face, he sends his men to do the reconnaissance," Jake informed them.
"He sent someone to get a story on me taking over as marshal…"
"And got a juicier story, yeah. Gunslinger turns respectable lawman to win the heart of the love he'd pined for ever since the Express days. Maybe a little more on the mark." Jake shut his mouth right quick when he saw the hard stare that remark earned him from Hickok.
"That lowdown bastard." Lou's voice was low and cold but her blood was running hot."He had no right!" She realized how Jimmy must have felt when the contemptible writer turned him into Wild Bill. "Maybe it's better, if people think you're settled down. If they know you're the marshal, maybe they won't come after you."
"What about you?" he ground out. "Marcus went too far this time."
"Why would people come for me? It's not like he made me out to be some kind of gunslinger. Did he?"
"Not exactly," Jake answered tentatively. "Maybe more like Hickok's right hand gal. You kinda ride around stopping rustlers and robbers and the like. And there's, well, the more ah romantic parts." Louise turned bright red, ripped the book from Jimmy's hand, and began flipping through the pages.
"That ain't any better, just means we might have vengeful criminals coming after us!"
Lou was no longer listening. Her eyes were wide as she read something in the pages of Marcus's fantasy novel. "That bugger," she cursed as she came upon a rather steamy passage describing her naked female form. "This is libel!" Her eyes narrowed and she brought them up to Jake's. "You read all of this?"
Kid had made it all the way to Louisville, Kentucky, before everything he thought he believed in turned to dust. It didn't make sense to ride all the way to Virginia knowing they'd just send him away to fight. He could join the rebel army here. It didn't matter anyway. It wasn't Virginia or memories he was fighting for anymore. It was just the chance to forget about the gaping, empty, hole inside him where she used to be. He felt like he'd lost her twice. First, when she never came home and then again when he learned she had moved on, with Jimmy.
If he was being honest with himself, the real reason he left Sweetwater wasn't for some noble calling to defend his home. It was in hopes of forgetting, and he couldn't do that surrounded by everything that made him think of her. And he certainly couldn't look at Jimmy and imagine the two of them together another second. He'd managed to push it down inside of him for a while, but it was slowly eating him away and he had to run before there was nothing left of him. Dying in a bloody battlefield was better than slowly dying from within, he thought.
He was camping outside of the city, one last night as a free man before he planned to sign his life away to the Confederacy. He heard the rustling of boots on dried leaves, urgent, fearful whispering, and then in the distance he saw four huddled bodies scurrying from one group of trees to the other, hiding in the small cover the scraggly trees provided.
Expecting bandits or Indians he pulled his gun and cut them off at the other side of the thin woods. It wasn't thieves or a hunting party. It was a family. A woman, a man, and their two girls. Black skin, threadbare clothes. Runaways. Slaves. A family of slaves. He'd quickly sheathed his gun, muttering apologies and stared. The man jumped on Kid, pushing him to the ground and told the others to run. She tried, but the children were frozen still in terror. Kid easily bested the man at wrestling. He was thin, weak, malnourished, and God knew how many days they had been running like this.
Backing away from the man he raised his hands saying he wasn't gonna hurt them or turn them in. "I'll help you," he said. "Please, let me help you."
Marie, Tom, Gretta, and Abby. Those were their names. The girls were twins, only six years old. They'd never known freedom. Tom had gone through hell just to find them, reunite them. They had come so far. They just needed to cross to Indiana. Kid was too ashamed to tell them he had been on his way to join up with the Confederate Army. Instead he told them he was on his way home to Nebraska.
He gained a kind of shaky trust with them, sharing his food and water. They hid during the day and the next night he helped them traverse a little more ground. Then he helped them the next day and the next. He knew more about tracking and staying hidden and traversing this land than they did. He would let Gretta and Abby ride Katy, when they got tired. Eventually they all made it to Indiana. He left them in the care of abolitionists and then, knowing he could never go and fight with the south, he turned Katy west and rode aimlessly.
Omaha, Nebraska
He meandered through the streets of Omaha, not really sure what he was doing here. He had told Tom and Marie that he was going back to Nebraska and, in some strange way, he wanted to keep his word. He drifted, took any work offered, slept outside most of the time. The emptiness was there but he didn't feel it consuming him anymore. Sometimes he even thought about going back to Sweetwater.
He'd just spent a night in the hotel, had a bath, and was at the general store, picking up supplies. He was looking at beans when the cover of a dime novel caught his eye.