“And you wouldn’t want to try catching up with them at this point.  Up in those mountains.”

“I imagine that’s so too.”

“So you’re just…here?”

“I am.”  She knew she wasn’t helping him but she didn’t yet have the composure to think of reasonable answers to his questions.  In the first place, there were no reasonable answers.

“Well I’m supposed to take a census of everyone passing through so that’s what I was doing.”  He glanced out the gate again as if hoping something had changed.  Nothing had.  “One wagon, I guess.  Three horses.  One woman.”  One woman, she said to herself.  Chace.  He’d be far out of sight by now.  Was he riding fast?  But she had to put all those thoughts out of her mind.

“That’s about what there is.”  She was aware that she had to pull herself together.  “Can I camp outside then?”

“When you’re not with a wagon train?”  The soldier frowned.  This was getting too complicated for him.  “That doesn’t seem right.  It wouldn’t be safe, I don’t think.  But let me get someone who’d know.”  He started off, but she called him back.

“I’m not doing a very good job of this,” she said.  “And I apologize for that.  I’ll do whatever you want with the wagon.  I was sent here, more or less, to find four children who were also with Ellis Gray’s wagon train.  I was told they’d been taken to the missionaries but to expect that now they’d be here.”

Something clicked in the young man’s mind.  Sometimes he worried that he didn’t have a brain at all.

“Are you Charlotte Duchesne?”

Charlotte nearly fell off the seat.  Relief flooded through her, quickly replaced by wariness.  How did he know?  What had been said?  She would have to feel her way very carefully through every step of these proceedings.  She was in a fort, close to being in the hands of the military.

“I am.  But you just set me back a great deal by saying that.”

“Miller Dawson told me to watch for you.  I don’t know how I could have forgot such a thing, especially since, pardon for saying so, it’s not every day of the week that a woman rides through those gates alone.  Or ever, that I know of.”  He seemed dazed by having made such a speech.

“Do you know where I’m supposed to go?”

“They didn’t tell me that.  But let me find someone.  I expect it’ll be the colonel’s wife.”

Wait, she wanted to say again, but he had already run off.  The colonel’s wife could be nothing but more trouble.  She felt as if she’d barely got out of the wagon train unscathed and now she was likely back in the same kind of disapproving company.