Trail Angel by Derek Catron Page A

either side. With their hands full, the others wouldn’t be much help, and they didn’t appear in a hurry to make themselves targets. They seemed plenty aware of the two guns Josey wore on his waist and the rifle in its saddle scabbard at his side.
    With a heavy sigh, the sergeant said to the others, “We’ve gotten enough here. Let’s move on.” He looked back at the box of silver but made no move toward it.
    The woman looked up at Josey. Even with a dirt-streaked face and pain-dulled eyes, she was pretty. Josey wondered what else the sergeant might have taken if he had not come along. “They’ve left me with nothing,” she said. “I’ll starve.”
    Josey looked away. “I can’t help you, ma’am. An army’s got to eat.”
    The sergeant smirked as he led the bummers away. Josey dismounted, offering a hand to the woman. She ignored it, rising on her own with a grimace. She limped to her house, stooping to drag the box of silver inside, then closed the door.
    It should have been the last time Josey saw her. He should have never returned to the cabin, and over the last two years he’d lost track of how many times he wished that had been true.
    A commotion from the other side of the room drew Josey’s attention back to the party. A haze of cigar and pipe smoke hung over the room like a cloud of black powder. A cacophony of countless conversations assaulted his ears. Banalities about weather. Women’s gossip about the marriage possibilities for the plain-looking daughter of a merchant. Soldiers’ tall tales of valor. Mingled with the party noise, they sounded like battlefield commands. His throat tightened. His breath came in quick gasps. He put his back to the wall. Scanned the field for a line of retreat.
    The Colonel’s light touch on his arm jolted him. “Everything all right, Josey?”
    Josey swallowed. He breathed easier in the space created when a circle of admirers closed around Sherman on their side of the room. “Let’s take a minute,” the Colonel said. “We’ll wait until the crowd clears before talking with the general.”
    Before that happened, Sherman lost his position as the center of attention.
    A young woman in a black dress commanded the notice of every man in the room. Just as quickly, every woman studied the newcomer’s dark hair, tied up in ribbons to match her dark dress, and appraised the low cut of her gown. She spurned the hoops worn by the other young women so that the material clung to her slender figure. With her shoulders held back, her head high, the woman glided across the room.
    Directly toward Josey.

C HAPTER T HIRTEEN
    Annabelle began dying her dresses black after her brothers’ deaths nearly four years earlier. The subsequent loss of her husband left her no reason to alter her wardrobe. Her mother occasionally inquired when the mourning period might end. She still dreamed that Annabelle would remarry and make her a grandmother. The truth hurt too much, so Annabelle told her she felt no need to move on.
    â€œBlack is a forgiving color for a woman enduring the privations of war,” she said when pressed on the matter. So long as she overlooked the sheen where the fabric had worn thinnest, the dark color concealed the wear of material too scarce to be replaced.
    Standing before a mirror in her room at the Herndon House, the sounds of the merriment downstairs drifted in from the hallway. Annabelle rethought her plan to confront the man responsible for so much grief to the South.
    On returning to the hotel late that afternoon, she found a crowd gathered. Blue-coated soldiers moved with purpose across the hotel’s wooden boardwalk and under the awnings that covered the first-floor windows of the Union Pacific Railroad office. The place resembled a camp quarters more than a luxury hotel. Townspeople in business attire turned out to watch in hopes of seeing the great