Returning to the wagon, she laid India rubber sheets over the books and ammunition as her father had always done, and tied down more sheets over the wagon top, knowing they wouldn’t hold forever.  Storms were familiar to her.  On the Second Migration, it seemed as if the rain never stopped.  The sky is weeping for us, the women had said.

Before the sky wept for her, Charlotte meant to collect firewood.  Chace took out his bow.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

“I’m going to shoot my horse to put him out of his misery.”

“What are you actually going to do?”

“Go down to the creek.  Fish rise in the rain.”  Drops had already started to fall.

Charlotte gathered all the deadfall she could find and carried it into the house.  She stacked the wood in the fireplace, lit kindling and dried grasses underneath it, brought in the pan and tin plates, left the front door open and sat with her back against the wall waiting.  The rain began to fall in earnest, not torrential yet but whipped along in spirals by the wind.  She could already see the rubber sheets straining at their holds.  The white canvas was well-oiled.  It would stay waterproof for at least a while.

Though she knew she’d made them up, the family was there by the fire with her, the practical father stitching leather for harnesses, the mother in an apron darning socks, obedient children, a girl and boy like Ada and Brewster lying on their stomachs reading books.

What would they eat?  Porridge.  Stewed fruit.  Salt bread.  Rabbit.  Quail.  Beef maybe if a trader ever happened by.  Then she remembered.  Fish.

“You do not disappoint,” she said as Chace appeared with a brace of trout.

“I try not to.  Disappointment’s never exactly my intention.”

“Did you fall in again?”  He was soaked.

He glanced out the door.  The rain was coming down harder now.  “I might as well have.”

She fried up the trout with wild onion and watercress from the creek bank.  They ate sitting on the floor in front of the fire while rain lashed the windowpanes.

Back in the barn, with the sky darkening and the light prematurely fading, Charlotte cleared a square of hard-packed earth and lit the oil lamp.

“What now?” Chace said.  “I’m not crazy about the expression on your face.”

She held out her hand.  In it was a deck of cards.

“Do you know anything about these?” she said.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Really?  From where?”

“From when, not where.  From when I was a soldier.”

She nearly dropped the cards.  “You were a soldier?”

He nodded.  “With Ellis.  Scout, interpreter, whatever they needed.”

“Because Chace Bridger Yellow Cloud knows the white man.  I can’t imagine you as a soldier.”

“When I’m with Ellis, it’s easy.  When I’m not, that’s a world away.”

She spread out a blanket.  “Would you play?”