Fortune's Journey by Bruce Coville Page B

get up and come with me. We have to get back to the wagon.”
    It wasn’t until she stood and began to pull at him that he finally staggered to his feet again.
    The darkness and the pounding rain made it impossible to see more than a few inches ahead. They tripped and stumbled along, and it was only by luck that they managed to find their way back to the campsite rather than go wandering off across the prairie.
    She left Aaron at the door of the men’s tent. She was too tired and filled with despair to be amused by the cries of dismay from the others when he stumbled, soggy and dripping, into their midst.
    Splashing through the puddles, she climbed over the back of the wagon. It was wet in there, too, the painted cloth cover insufficient to withstand the full fury of the storm.
    Even so, it was home—or as much of a home as she had at the moment. The sound of Mrs. Watson’s snoring, so annoying such a short time before, suddenly seemed oddly comforting.
    Stripping off her soaked things, Fortune climbed into her makeshift bed. Pressing her face to her blanket so that Mrs. Watson would not hear, she cried herself to sleep.

Chapter Eleven
    It was three days before either of them spoke of what had happened. Fortune was riding beside Aaron at the front of the wagon—something she had avoided entirely the previous two days—when he said, “About the other night…”
    â€œI don’t want to talk about it!”
    Aaron nodded, and fell silent. Fortune glanced at him from the corner of her eye. He was staring straight ahead, his jaw set. A moment later he tried again. “Listen. I just want to say I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to do.”
    She relaxed a little. “I’m sorry I got so mad,” she said.
    He shook his head. “You had every right.”
    They rode in silence for another moment, then he reached for her hand. She let him take it. Yet the gesture didn’t make her nearly as happy as she wanted it to. Her feelings for him, once so clear, were now as muddy and churned as the road beneath them.
    Turning her head, Fortune began to study the vast prairie that stretched away on all sides of them. As always, she was amazed at the flowers, sweeps of red, orange, and yellow that looked like schools of multicolored fishes swimming through an ocean of grass. Life seemed to pulse around her—the hawks that circled overhead, the insects that buzzed and swarmed over the grasses. She knew there was more life, too, life she was less apt to see, like the coyotes that sometimes prowled the edges of their camp at night, the rattlesnakes she had been warned against, the red deer the men sometimes shot and carried back to camp.
    She had been revolted the first time she saw Jamie clean and gut a deer; it was the only time in her life that she had been forced to come face to face with the reality of the meat she ate.
    Her squeamishness had evoked some teasing from Edmund and Aaron, and also left her thinking about some of the other women she had met on the journey—women like Becky Hyatt’s mother, who had been killing and cleaning animals since she was a child.
    Eventually Fortune slipped her hand from Aaron’s and scrambled back into the wagon to talk to Mrs. Watson.
    The red-haired woman sat serenely on a chair she had wedged between two chests, looking like a queen in exile. She had a book in one hand and was quietly turning the pages, as if the bounce and bump of the wagon had no effect on her at all.
    Fortune sat on the rounded top of one of the chests next to her and waited for Mrs. Watson to notice her. When it became clear that she was so absorbed in her book that she wasn’t going to, Fortune asked loudly, “What are you reading?”
    â€œWhy, Fortune!” Mrs. Watson seemed genuinely pleased to see her. She closed her book and looked at the cover. “It’s called Frankenstein,” she said with a shudder. “Most gruesome