Lastly the herd of cattle filed past, issuing loud complaints and stirring up even more dust.  Men on horseback and foot attended them, those on foot prodding the animals with long sticks.

Ellis Gray appeared.

“Let me get the horses back in harness,” she said.

“I’ll do that,” he said.  “Then move over and I’ll take the reins.”

He hitched up the horses, tied his own fine-looking bay at the back alongside the mare and climbed up into the seat.  Charlotte took her place beside him as she had beside her father.  Even though Ellis Gray wasn’t nearly as old, she felt that somehow in the handoff he and her father had become the same person.

The wagon jolted along the track.  “I’m staying a ways back,” he said.  “Otherwise the dust’s intolerable behind all that cattle.”  They rode in silence.  Then he spoke again.  “Let me tell you some things, just so you know.  We came out of Missouri, but half of them are from back in Illinois.  There’s nineteen wagons, fifty-seven men, eight women and twenty-nine children.  Next week or so there’ll be another one born which means we’ll stop for at least a day or if it’s Sunday we’ll stop for two.  There’s lots of people related to each other somehow and that means not everyone gets along, not to mention the old woman who’s taken ill five times now and one hothead in particular who thinks he has a better way to do everything.

“With you, there’s just general mistrust of a woman alone.  When they see you, and I’m being honest one more time, they’ll have even more questions to which there won’t be any answers.  You can do what you want about the rest of it, but the one thing you can’t do is let on as to your real situation, and that’s serious.”

Ellis Gray held his silence for a minute, the reins in his hands.  “Your father posted a letter laying all this out, must have cost a fortune having a rider get it to me.  One of his biggest concerns was that word would get out and the law would be looking for you.”

Charlotte’s jaw dropped.  This was something that had never crossed her mind either.

“Not some small town sheriff, it’d be out of their jurisdiction, not their problem.  But maybe a federal marshal, that’s where the possibility would be.  So don’t give anybody the chance to be figuring something out.”

“I won’t,” she said, her voice barely audible.  Regarding herself as a fugitive was even a further shock than what she’d had already.  She’d wanted to believe that this whole large expanse of empty country would swallow her up, that she could start over, different if not better, and never have to dwell on the past again.  Apparently she was wrong.