White Desert by Loren D. Estleman

the holster, a huge Walker Colt designed for carriage in a scabbard attached to a saddle, was heavy enough to bend her wrist with its weight, but she didn’t look as if she wanted to put it down any time soon. Her other hand was occupied with a double-barreled Stevens ten-gauge shotgun, the kind Wells Fargo messengers carried, with the muzzles pointed at the ground. I counted myself fortunate that when the time had come to shoot me she had decided to use the pistol. If it had been the shotgun there wouldn’t have been enough left of me to shovel into the tent.
    She had a good face, if you liked strong bones and eyes that didn’t shift. The skin was sunburned from the light reflecting strong off the snow, peeling like old paint, but with a good scrubbing and some powder and rouge, it would turn the occasional
male head at even so jaded a place as Delmonico’s in New York. Just now it was severe and hawklike, the pale gray eyes as hard as January ice and just about as responsive. There was an animal alertness in them but no sign of human intelligence.
    â€œI’m guessing you’re Mrs. Weathersill.” My voice scarcely qualified as a croak. “My name’s Murdock. I came from Moose Jaw with provisions.”
    Hope Weathersill—for it could have been no other—said nothing, and gave no indication that she’d understood my words. After a long time her eyes moved, flicking toward the spilled bowl next to the blanket, then back to me quickly, as if I might make an attempt of some kind while her gaze was elsewhere. After another long silence she moved, and at the end of so much stillness it was as if the Cascade Range had lifted its skirts and danced the Virginia reel. However, all she did was insert the muzzles of her shotgun inside the bowl, slide it over toward herself, and stoop to pick it up, during which her eyes and the Colt remained on me. When she had the bowl in the same hand in which she held the shotgun, she backed out of the tent. Through the open flap I saw an edge of yellow flame and heard wood crackling.
    She returned without the shotgun, but still held the big revolver in one hand with the bowl steaming in the other. The bowl must have been hot to the touch, but as she holstered the Colt and shifted the bowl to that hand I saw that her palms were shiny with callus; the life out there had been hard long before the massacre, and she would have taken her turn chopping wood and driving the mules and horses to pull up stumps. Beyond that her hands, face, and dress were smudged with soot. There was soot in her hair as well, and it was tangled and snarled so badly it would have been easier to cut than comb. Only that delicate bowl and, when she knelt beside me and shipped soup
into a spoon, the ornate filagreed silver of the handle between her thumb and forefinger bore witness to more civilized aspirations, clouded now by green tarnish.
    Painfully I propped myself up on one elbow to accept the spoon between my lips. She made no attempt to support my head, although as a wife and mother, she would have been skilled in the details of tending to the injured and ill; as a widow with slain children, she knew that I could not attack her easily as long as I needed one arm to keep from sprawling onto my back.
    The soup tasted better than I remembered from my delirium—less greasy, the greens richer and more full-bodied. Her eyes—close up, they had a yellow-amber tint, like those of a wild creature encountered unexpectedly—never left me as she worked the spoon. She might have been nursing a wounded predator, keeping it alive for reasons of her own without trust or tenderness.
    â€œThe supplies are on the gray pack horse I brought,” I said between swallows. “I was riding a mustang. I hope you’re taking as good care of them as you are of me.”
    She filled the spoon again and brought it to my lips. There was no sign that she understood.
    When the bowl was