Arizona Gold by Patricia Hagan

reddish colored sap. The Injuns use it to make dye for their war paint.”
    He showed her other things as they rode—signs of coyotes and javelinas, and they spotted jackrabbits and deer along the trail. Red-tailed hawks and prairie falcons wheeled in the sky, and there were flocks of pylon jays, juncoes, and chickadees flitting among the bushes at the base of the cliffs.
    “So tell me about raising horses back in Virginia,” Rufus prodded when he had grown tired of doing all the talking.
    “My family had a farm.”
    “So how come you left it? Seems to me a body would be a fool to leave a nice farm to come out here and maybe wind up scalped.”
    “My mother died recently, and I didn’t want to stay.”
    “What about the rest of your family?”
    “There was just the two of us. The only family I have left is an uncle in Tombstone.”
    “Which explains why you’re going there. What’s his name? What’s he doing there?”
    The conversation was getting too personal, and Kitty smoothly changed to another subject. “I notice your gloves are awfully thin. Seems to me you’d want thick ones to keep from getting blisters.”
    He flexed his fingers. “Yep, they are, but that’s so’s I can feel the ribbons…feel how the animals are responding. If I pull too tight, and it’s not needed, they’ll dance around. I’ve got to keep ’em moving smooth.
    “Now, these gloves,” he went on, “are made of the finest, softest buckskin, but they’re cold in winter. I don’t dare wear anything warmer, though, like fur, because then I couldn’t feel the ribbons. I’ve known some drivers who got frostbit and lost a finger or two, but that’s how it is. You got to be able to feel them ribbons.”
    Kitty marveled aloud that it took so much dedication to drive a stage, and Rufus beamed. “That’s a fact, boy. We got to be able to face any situation—blinding snowstorm, stream too full to ford, or a horse going lame. And not only have we got to be able to decide right then and there what to do, but we’ve also got to know all about the country we’re passing through—routes and landmarks.
    “And don’t forget the Injuns,” he was quick to add. “The times I’ve run up on ’em, I’ve managed to get away without me or my passengers getting hurt, ’cause I’ll give ’em the gold or anything else they want to keep from having big trouble. And the way I did it was by learning their language—Sioux, Pawnee, Comanche. That’s what it takes. Why, I even know of a few drivers who actually went and lived among ’em to learn their ways so’s they could get along with ’em should they ever get attacked.”
    “That’s really something,” Kitty murmured.
    “Oh, that ain’t nothin’. Drivers are just tougher than most men, that’s all. But you know somethin’ else?” He jabbed her with his elbow and snickered. “They ain’t all men.”
    “You mean there are women drivers?”
    “Well, you never know, especially since it came out about Charlie Parkhurst. He could handle the reins as good as anybody and fought off a goodly number of bandits and mishaps in his day. Even when he got old and suffered with rheumatism and lost an eye from a horse’s kick, he kept on driving. He finally retired to a farm in California, and nobody knew he was actually a woman till he died of cancer in ’79, and they started getting his—or I should say her —body ready for burying.”
    He paused to lean and spit tobacco over the side. “Now, I never met Charlie, but I can tell you if I had, he wouldn’t have fooled me. Ain’t no woman smart enough to pull the wool over ol’ Rufus’s eyes. I’d have spotted him right off for what he was.”
    Kitty turned her head as she felt her lips pull in a smile.
    Reaching a stream, they stopped to water the mules and have a drink themselves.
    Kitty made sure to hang back, pretending to empty her boots of sand as Rufus and Hank relieved themselves. That part of her ruse had been