All Together in One Place by Jane Kirkpatrick Page A

in the wagon. They pushed hoop rings before them with sticks. She overheard one say, “You think she's blind?”
    “Why else would she carry that stick?”
    “To hit people with, she's so grumpy.” The boys laughed.
    A girl with short pigtails stuck straight out like thumbs ran between them, forcing wind through a sock attached to a stick.
    Tipton spied a dozen dogs, some tied and barking, others lying about or marking their homes. She'd gotten used to the Bacons’ dog. He was big and carried a deep bark, but he gentled when he knew a person. Other dogs proved more worrisome, and she made a wide berth around two snarling over a deer's leg bone beneath a wagon.
    So much was worrisome. She tried not to think of it as she walked. But there was the river, the Missouri. Wide and gorged with rain, it was worth worrying over. People said lightning fires could race across the prairie and leave nothing but charred remains of wagons and people.She could worry over that and over the Sioux, too, who could steal and kill stragglers, and the Pawnees who just harassed. She'd heard tales of messages left by travelers scraped onto human skulls warning of the dangers of sickness ahead. Everything was worrisome if she was honest, everything. Her mouth got dry with the thinking.
    “You got to settle your thoughts,” Tyrell told her nearly every day. “You can tell them, ‘go straight away and they will. It's the only thing we all control—our thoughts, our own actions. No one else's.” But he helped control hers, when he was there to remind her to take deep breaths She could bury the fears because Tyrell stood beside her
    He said he'd never leave her, sounding almost like the words in Scripture Mrs. Mueller read out loud before they went to bed. Because of that fine promise, she felt more confident now as she walked. Tyrell gave her that, and she took some small satisfaction in knowing that Miz Bacon, Mazy, a wiser, older woman, envied it.
    Tipton meandered in her own world of thoughts and didn't notice the couple until she bumped into them.
    The man apologized for not watching, then introduced himself as Bryce Cullver and his wife, Suzanne, who wore a bonnet so floppy it shadowed her face. She held in her hand a goading stick instead of a parasol. “She carries a pink parasol as pretty as the lady herself,” the man said, apparently describing Tipton to the woman clinging to his arm. “She has blue eyes, dark as dusk. Quite a photograph she'd make,” Bryce Cullver said, patting his wife's hand.
    Tipton watched the woman tug awkwardly at him as though to move away. She swung the goad and Tipton jumped back.
    “Suzanne,” the man said He shook his head, tipped his hat, his eyes saying “sorry” before they moved on.
    Tipton watched them, then became distracted by a tall, well-dressed man who bent in attentive conversation to a bloomer-clad woman. He had the look of a white-collared man, a gambler, one Tipton knew best to shy away from.
    At last, she spied Tyrell. Not in the circle of wagons but near thestock ropes, those reddish curls clustered around his head looking almost like spun sunrise. She smiled and took a deep, filling breath.
    He bent beneath a gelding whose foreleg braced against the leather apron laid out on Tyrells thigh. The whole weight of the animal leaned against the man though three legs held the big sorrel up. No wonder his back ached, with the constant bending and the leaning of horses against his frame. Tipton heard the familiar rasp of the file pressed into service to shape the horses hoof. Clumps of nippered hoof littered the ground before him, giving up their pungent smell.
    A woman—a pretty woman—held the horse by its halter.
    Tipton felt her chest tighten.
    The woman's face lit up when she talked. Tiny white lines made their way from her hazel eyes then disappeared like wisps into fawn-colored hair caught in a snood at her neck. She wore a faded calico dress, and what looked like men's boots poked