News of the World: A Novel by Paulette Jiles Page B

and closed and those who were about were not people he wanted to meet.
    The shotgun lay at the Captain’s feet under the dashboard, longways, loaded, the little lever on safety and he worried about it. The lever was too easy to shift. It was loose. He could grab for it and fire off a shot right into one of the horses before he could bring it to bear if he were not careful.
    It was March 5 and cold, his breath fumed and his old muffler was dank with the steam. Above and behind them the Dipper turned on its great handle as if to pour night itself out onto the dreaming continent and each of its seven stars gleamed from between the fitful passing clouds. After several hours he found a track going west and took it and within two hours they wereon the Meridian Road. The country here was sparsely settled and only occasionally policed. Indian raids out of the north were a given. They pressed on.
    The girl sat in the wagon bed behind wrapped in the thick red and black jorongo. There was no method by which he could explain anything to her but she did not need explanations. Her family and her tribe had fought with the Utes, their ancient enemies, and the Caddos. They had conducted a long guerrilla warfare with Texas settlers and Texas Rangers and then with the U.S. Army. Often enough they had faced the howling, striving demons of the open plains: hunger, tornadoes, scarlet fever. She didn’t need to be told anything except that there were enemies in pursuit and she had already figured that out.
    The road was open before them, a two-track stretch in the pale of the moon, rolling over the lifts and falls of the prairie country of central Texas. They passed a farmhouse set back among trees. The farm buildings appeared to be great dozing animals that had gathered near the house in the night. There was a light shining in a window. Somebody was waiting up for somebody. Pasha tested the air for the scent of a mare. Had there been one he would have called out, making promises he would never be able to fulfill, but since all he could smell was a donkey and another gelding he held his peace and trotted on. Here and there were copses of post oak holding up wiry armatures of limb and twig, rattling with old brown leaves, and in the cold night air a hissing swift shape passed in front of them.
    The girl cried out. Sau-Podle! She bent herself forward and carried the red wool up around her nose as if she would notbreathe the air. Sau-Podle brought news of a death; soon, here. It cut the air like a blade and trailed plump legs like a child’s in fluffy pantaloons.
    Great horned, said the Captain. Ignore it, Johanna. Pretend it was a night hawk.

ELEVEN
    A T FIRST LIGHT the Captain and Johanna were only a mile or so from the Brazos. As they went on they came to the little road that ran alongside the north bank. Then they came to a place he remembered as Carlyle Springs. The spring fed down out of a bluff of red sandstone into a ravine and then into the Brazos itself. It sparkled all the way down, jumping in transparent streams from pool to pool. The Captain looked up and thought he saw a way to get up there; a faint wagon track zigzagging up the slope.
    He turned Fancy off the road and went uphill. After a hundred yards he had to get down and lead the mare through agarita and spiky young live oaks that tore at the underside but all he could think of was Get under cover, get under cover. He felt like he was pulling the load of the world behind him, Fancy and the girl jolting around in the driver’s seat and Pasha scrambling behind. Everything was dripping wet and bedewed and soon he was soaked to the knees.
    At the top he found the only flat place to stop. There weretrees and thickets of sumac to give them some concealment. Some stumps; somebody had been up here cutting fence posts. From a layered stack of red sandstone, crenellated and thick as a barbican, he could see the road below.
    He bent over with his hands on his knees to relieve his back