LITMIR.BIZ

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If her prisoner had been an ordinary criminal instead of a savage heathen—if she hadn’t seen him naked—she might even have asked him to help her, but that was out of the question.

      “Git to it,” she snarled, much as she would have addressed Sorry.

      By the time the sun had passed overhead she intended to have three of the five stumps out of the ground. Using gestures and a few simple words, she explained how they would go about it, then propped the rifle against a nearby stump within easy reach. While her prisoner sawed through the first of the newly exposed roots, she dug out around the next one. When the roots were all cut through, she cussed Sorry into position, fastened the harness to the stump and whapped him on the behind. “Pay attention,” she said when the mule set his weight against the heavy stump. “This is the way we do it.”

      With the first stump hauled to the edge of the field, they moved on to the next. The mule was powerful, she’d grant the miserable bastard that much. It took a lot of swearing to get him to moving, but once he did, things happened fast. Small roots popped and snapped, earth broke, and one stump after another surrendered.

      Once, in a moment of triumph when a deep taproot gave way, she glanced up and grinned at her prisoner. He looked startled, then embarrassed. And then, of course, she was embarrassed, too, and so she swore at the mule. Snatching up his lead chain, she led her prisoner to the next stump.

      Jonah was used to hard work. Back on the reservation it had been the women who had done most of it, freeing the men to hunt and trap and make war and ponder on the changes that were coming to their world and how best to deal with them. But he’d worked, even then. Mostly with horses. He understood horses far better than he understood men, either red or white. Both as a prisoner and as an ordinary seaman, he had worked, but he’d worked hardest of all after retrieving his money from the bank and buying his own land here in the East.

      Breeding horses was a noble thing. It was not drudgery. His people were convinced that if a man followed the plow, the drudgery would take away his manhood and he would become like an old woman, withered and good for nothing.

      Jonah feared the yellow-haired woman might force him to follow the plow. So far she had not. He did as she directed, but he did no more than that. He could have made things far easier for her, but he did not.

      The second day, she drew another of her lines in the earth, outlining the section she intended to clear of stumps and eventually plant. He told himself that she would have to do most of it without his help, for by the time winter passed and the earth grew warm again, he would have long since cleared his name and returned to his own land.

      Or failed in his attempt and been returned to jail, to be tried or hanged without benefit of judgment. The white man’s justice was not always logical, or even just.

      Sawing through the thick, damp roots, he thought about what he must do, and knew he could not wait much longer. Soon he must escape long enough to retrieve the papers he had hidden on his horse farm and return before he was found missing. If he was caught trying to escape before his work parole was over, he would be shot down before he had a chance to prove his innocence.

      Timing, Jonah told himself, was important. Meanwhile, he must allay the woman’s suspicions and allow his ankles more time to heal. When the time was right, he would set out as soon as darkness fell, running hard for as long as it took, uncovering his papers and running all the way back before the sky grew pale again. Once he had proof of his innocence in his possession, he might even work in her damned field one more day. She had fed him well. She had even forgotten herself so far as to give him one of her rare smiles.

      As tired as she was by the end of each day, Carrie felt like celebrating, seeing the progress they were making. Even Sorry was easier to manage with the prisoner nearby. It was almost as if the two of them spoke a silent common language. As if they had some secret understanding. Like to like, she told herself, unwilling to admit she could possibly envy a mule, just for having someone to talk to.

      Carrie hadn’t been able to visit Emma since she’d brought her prisoner home. She could hardly leave him behind, but she didn’t dare take him with her. Poor Emma had seen enough misery over the years, having outlived a husband and a whole slew of children. Living alone, with the rheumatism so bad she could hardly hobble around on damp days, the last thing she needed was to come face to face with a wild Indian in her own home, even though renting him had been her idea in the first place.

      Although Carrie had to admit that cleaned up, he didn’t look quite so fierce. He still wore those same old ragged clothes, but then, her own weren’t much better. His hair, the color of polished mahogany, was long enough to be tied back with a piece of string, while hers had been hacked off with a butcher knife back in the spring, when she’d caught a fever and Emma had said she had to stay cool. Instead of the neat braids she had always worn, her hair had grown in thick and curly, reached a certain length and stopped growing. Emma said it was because of what she ate—or rather, what she didn’t eat.

      She ate as well as she could when half the time Darther forgot to leave her enough money even to buy salt, much less bacon and flour. She needed a damn-blasted cow, was what she needed. She’d taken her nanny goat to Shingle Landing and traded her for a supply of tinned milk, but tinned milk didn’t make butter.

      Once her corn crop came in, she vowed, she would get herself a fresh cow and six more hens, and maybe a pig. Maybe even two pigs.

      She got through the day without cursing more than once, when Sorry deliberately stepped on her foot. It was something she was working on—not cursing. Something else she was working on, she amended. Today they had cleared out all but the last few stumps and dragged them over to the edge of the field to burn. Carrie watched the sky, unwilling to risk setting a fire unless rain was in the offing. According to Emma, her cabin had once been a tenant house, the big house having been burned when Colonel Draper and General Wild had led their Union forces on a rampage though Camden and Currituck counties, burning more than a dozen homesteads.

      Carrie thought it must have been something like the Indian raid that had taken her own family. Years had passed, the sharpest pain had faded, but the memories would be with her until the day she died. Looking back, the home she remembered as a child had seemed large, but it couldn’t have been too much larger than Darther’s small cabin.

      At any rate, a small cabin was enough for her needs, as long as the land was still fertile. Emma said it had once grown cotton, the bolls as big and as white as snowballs. Carrie didn’t want to grow cotton. She couldn’t eat cotton, wouldn’t know how to harvest it even if she could grow it. But corn…

      It was going to be so beautiful. Row after row of tall, green stalks. Enough to grind for meal, to save for seed, to feed her stock and still have some left over to trade for cloth, salt, side-meat and calico. And then, she would clear more land and grow still more corn.

      The air was lavender with dusk as they headed home from the field. Sorry plodded along behind her prisoner like a faithful hound. Carrie could have chosen to be jealous, but instead she felt only satisfaction with the amount they had accomplished. It would have taken her until Christmas to get this much done alone, even with two good hands.

      She was smiling when she happened to notice the way her prisoner was walking. He was exhausted. They both were. His stride was hampered by the heavy irons, but it was more than that. Her smile gave way to a look of concern. He was limping. If he was injured—if he could no longer work, she would have to return him, and then she’d be right back where she’d been before, only now she owed Emma two dollars which she was fairly certain the jailer would refuse to refund.

      Biting her lip, she shifted the heavy rifle to her other shoulder. She no longer even attempted to keep it turned on him. It was almost impossible to manage when they were working together, anyway. They both knew that.

      He was definitely limping. It had to be the leg irons. The heavy things allowed him to walk, but not to run. If the jailer hadn’t warned her not to remove them, she’d have been tempted to unlock them before this. He could work twice as hard if he could clamber in and out of stump holes more easily. But in that case, she’d be the one who was handicapped, with the gun in

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