“I don’t mean to interfere in what’s personal.”

“It’s not interfering.  I’ll tell you.  I had a wife.  She was from the tribes, I guess you know that, but she was gentle and kind and beautiful, the best thing that ever happened to me.  When she died, and knowing how she died, something in me broke right in half.  It was my own people.  Some out of the company I rode with.  Others mostly volunteer soldiers who’d lost their minds.  I can’t ever travel far enough out here to get away from it.”

“I’m so sorry,” Charlotte said.

“It leaves a hole in you forever,” he said.

“It would have to.  I imagine that shooting a man and taking his life is going to leave that same hole in me.”

Ellis Gray was silent for a long time, squinting into the rain.  Charlotte put her shawl over her head.  Water dripped off her eyelashes and her nose.

“You and I shouldn’t talk about these things,” he said.  “Despite the difference in our ages…”

“Which is a hundred years.”

“Which is not a hundred years…I think we both have too much of an understanding about the dark places.”

“I wish that neither of us did.”

“Wishing won’t do it.”

The sky began to lighten as the squall passed overhead and the rain let up.

“How many times have you made this trip?” Charlotte said, wanting to move on to any other topic.

“This one’s the third.”  Or would have been, he thought.

“Have you always got all the way to California?”

“Not California.  It’s Oregon Territory.”

“Oregon?  There’s no gold that way, is there?”

“No, there’s land, so much of it, good for settling down on.  That’s why all these folks are headed there.”

Charlotte grew thoughtful.  “What’s Oregon Territory like?”

“Lots of rain, makes it as green as anything you’ve ever seen.  Dark rich soil that’ll support whatever a person might want to be growing, from cows to cabbage and back again.  And there’s the ocean if you choose that farther distance.”

“Sounds like it might appeal to you one day.”

“Maybe.  I can’t get that far in the future, though.  There’re other things coming before land-owning.”

Charlotte turned inward, imagining the greenest hills, black furrows ready for planting, a fine-built house, cows and cabbage.  How she would accomplish such a thing on her own, she didn’t know.  It was just an idea.  She made the mistake of voicing the idea out loud.

“Maybe I should go to Oregon Territory,” she mused quietly.