Read Online Into the Savage Country by Shannon Burke - Free Book Online

children from taking the apples, a nasty creature with a small, pinched mouth and a dry-looking tongue, writhed her way out to the road where I stood.
    “The general warned the soldiers from coming.”
    “I’m not a soldier.”
    “Then even worse. You’re a beastly trapper. She’s in mourning for Sir Bailey.”
    “I know her from St. Louis.”
    “I don’t care if you’ve known her from the cradle. There is sickness here. You think you’re the first to come? Not the first. And not the most promising. And one would-be suitor already dead from the illness. I’ll talk to the general. Go away. Go!”
    She shooed at me and behind her Alene half seemed to protest, but not loudly. She was showing sense in keeping me away from the illness.
    “I’ll see you in town,” I yelled.
    “Good day, Mr. Wyeth,” she called faintly.
    A few wasted-looking natives sat along the wall in the sunlight watching her dodge my advances. They cackled among themselves and it was irritating, to say the least, but I had little choice other than to retreat. I went back to my lodgings and mulled it over. Alene was there, penniless and desperate, and for the first time in my life I had some money, yet it seemed she would not even speak with me. Given the exaggerated tales of my fortune, many women would have made up to me out of desperation, but Alene was the exact opposite. She did not want to appear to beg, and that made me all the more determined to offer assistance.
    One of my father’s main complaints of me was that I had no ballast, always looking off to the horizon, dashing here or there without forethought or consideration, as ill prepared as I wasenthusiastic. If he had seen me that fall he would have felt that flawed impulse had borne full fruit. I went from being flattened and deflated over memories of my injury to puffing myself up in a blissful daze, drunk with dreams of my imagined future with the Widow Bailey. Gauzy schemes filled my idle mind.
    Late summer now: Dry grass, and the drone of insects, and I was near the high point of the ridge, stepping up the steep drainage to the white stone bluff that overlooked the Missouri, when I saw that Alene already occupied the space. She was clearly annoyed to be caught there by herself and began moving away before I arrived.
    “I’ll leave you to the view,” she said.
    “I’d rather you stayed and admired it with me,” I said in an awkward way that was meant to be gallant.
    “I have my work with the children,” she said.
    “It is not work that sends you away. You know that,” I said. “I see you struggling, Alene. There are those who’d come to your aid if you’d let them.”
    “At what cost?”
    “At no cost.”
    “It is not my experience that aid comes from men without a price.”
    “You have grown bitter from your experience.”
    “I’ve grown practical,” she said. “I appreciate your commiseration.”
    There was a savagery in the
commiseration
. She started to go, but I held a hand out as if I’d detain her. She moved to walk past me. I tried to take her hand and she slapped me, hard, so there wasa white light in my head and a tree on the horizon passed across my view twice. She was hurrying away through dry grass. All around there was the metallic droning of insects.
    “Well that’s blasted,” I said. “All because of fat Bailey.”
    I laughed to myself, falsely jovial.
    “A woman of principle,” I said out loud.
    I walked back to town with my cheek burning and a dull resignation simmering. Up to that point I’d seen her physical attractions and understood her to be a western lady with an able tongue and fine manners. A catch for any young trapper. But that slap drove appreciation into me like a spike. I understood that her husband’s death was not a mere inconvenience for her. She was attempting to mourn him and was enduring hardship honorably. My attentions were only increasing her hardship.
    Three days later I saw her exiting the dry goods store