Into the Savage Country by Shannon Burke

settlement Ferris gave me a knowing look. He had heard of Alene in St. Louis, but he had not known she was in the settlement.
    “I see you continued the hunt even after you left the drainages,” he said.
    “If it is so, it has been a particularly meager sport,” I said. He glanced to check my meaning, and I said, “She is in mourning.”
    It was a cold, clear, windless day, the snow dry and glistening. On arrival at the lowlands we did not attempt to hunt, but spread out buffalo robes and lay on a snowbank with a robe on top and one beneath, gnawing on bits of jerked meat and passing a corked gourd between us.
    “You wouldn’t believe who we met on our return from the mountains,” Ferris said.
    “Henry Layton,” I guessed.
    “Yes!” Ferris said. “A thousand miles from St. Louis, and he’swearing an ambassador cap. I thought I’d died and woken up on Market Street. Pegleg asked him if he had porters on the march.”
    “Did he take offense?”
    “He knocked Peggy’s hat off and said, ‘Hadn’t thought of porters, but I’ll be glad to consider you for the position.’ ”
    “What’d Peggy do?”
    “He swung his rifle around, but Layton had the draw on him with his pistol.”
    “It’s a Collier,” I said. “Repeating. Can fire eight shots without reloading.”
    “Yes. He mentioned that afterward,” Ferris said dryly. “Not that he’d have needed more than one bullet at that range. The rest of us were scattering, but Pegleg pretended he was only checking the firing pan.”
    I laughed at that, imagining Pegleg’s feeble attempts at dissimulation.
    “Ten minutes after turning his gun on Pegleg he tried to hire us,” Ferris said. “Including Pegleg. Apparently he’s forming a brigade in the spring. He says he’ll pay three dollars a pelt. The others didn’t believe it. I can see the three dollars if he intends to make it up on the transport. But what mountains does he imagine we’ll trap? Did he tell you?”
    “No. And I’d hardly believe anything Layton said. He’s a damned scoundrel, though I admit he’s an entertaining one. We’ve had some dealings because … his companion married the Widow Bailey, who you just met, and was then killed in the settlement last March. He brought Alene’s correspondence.”
    I told Ferris how we’d ridden together during Layton’s time in the settlement, and how, on the last day, I’d seen him give money for Alene, which she’d accepted.
    “It is hardly charity if it is done in the open for all to see,” Ferris said heatedly. “It’s more like coercion and self-aggrandizement. The damned blackguard. When we met him in the native encampment he tossed a coin to a native boy. Some ungodly sum that I’d have gotten down to scramble for myself. He shouted, ‘Water, water!’ ”
    “What happened?”
    “The boy took the coin and got the water. But he would have done it without the coin. That’s the sort of thing you can do in St. Louis. Not out here.” Ferris hesitated, then said, “The widow seemed a fine western lady. Was she won over by his beneficence?”
    “Not by his money. No,” I said. “And she seems to hold her dead husband’s death against him. She paints him like he’s the devil, but she’s flustered when she’s around him.”
    “And you’ve made your own advances?” Ferris said after a moment.
    “I made an attempt. She slapped my face so I saw double.”
    “Did you counter?”
    “I did not at first. And then”—I hesitated, remembering how she’d made clear that she would not settle on a man bound to a brigade—“I countered with … nothing.”
    “Oh Wyeth.”
    “What?”
    “Renew the assault.”
    “She’s in mourning.”
    “Mourning is preparation for marriage. The widow has tamed you.”
    “She has showed me my manners,” I said with some heat. “And if I make an attempt and am wrong she’ll think me a scoundrel.”
    “If you do not she’ll think you perfectly respectable,” he said, with