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touch—sun burnt no doubt although it hadn’t turned red like his did. Her lips were cracked from lack of moisture, her face swollen with thirst. He went back to his burro to recover his water skin, squirting the slightest trickle onto her parched lips. They opened feebly in response, so he gave her a little more, careful not to do more than dampen the flesh. She couldn’t drink if she wasn’t conscious, but maybe the water would help revive her.
    It didn’t.
    Carson recapped his water skin and tied it to the burro alongside the Sharps. Then he picked up the unconscious woman, cradling her in his arms until he could set her on the burros back. He had to hold her in place as he began to guide the burro on the walk back to his little shack.
    She was very light with little meat left beneath the flesh. She’d been on the road a long time—a runaway most likely—and the journey had taken a grueling toll on her body.
    He hoped that she would make it.

    Carson’s home was a one room shack in the middle of his arid farm. He had a larger structure—somewhat sturdier than his house—that served as his barn. He’d lived here in this Godforsaken part of the Oklahoma Territory for nigh on seven years now and he still didn’t know who held the actual title to the place. It was empty when he happened upon it and if the bad weather held up for another year or two it would be empty again when Carson moved on.
    He laid the colored woman on his own pallet and checked her temperature with his hand on her forehead. Her flesh felt burning hot. He left her to go out back and draw water from the little seep hole in the back yard. There were times that little hole turned into a full blown pool and even a pond, but today it stretched barely four feet across and was rarely more than eighteen inches deep. If the rain didn’t return soon, even this little bit of moisture would be gone.
    Carson carried the bucket of water back into the house and poured it into a cast iron kettle which sat on the firestones in the center of the room. He blew the ashes to life and fed in fresh wood. The smoke quickly filled the upper reaches of the shack before escaping through a hole cut for that purpose into the roof.
    When the fire burnt strongly enough to sustain itself, Carson returned his attention to the woman. He wasn’t certain how to help her and was a little bit afraid to try. He didn’t see too many men in the course of a year and hadn’t seen a woman in three.  So he had damn little idea about how to go about doctoring one of them.
    Her burnt skin held a dark ebony hue. Her hair was long and tangled. The smock she wore looked more patched then whole with still more tears in the garment that needed mending. The flesh of her hands and feet wasn’t in much better condition. She’d walked a long way without shoes.
    Carson swallowed his sense of propriety and lifted the hem of the woman’s dress just high enough to expose her knees. They too were lacerated and scabbed. She’d been tough enough and scared enough to crawl when her feet gave out. She had grit, this runaway. Her body had given out—not her spirit.
    He wondered if the slave hunters were still on her trail or if she’d lost them on the arid plain. The reward for capturing an escaped slave would be quite good—powerful motivation for her pursuers to keep after her. He reckoned they’d try and take her if they caught up with her here.
    Carson spit on his own dirt floor and considered what he should do. Two years without and he still missed his chewing tobacco. Want was one of the drawbacks of being poor. So was loneliness.
    He went out to his mule, removed its pack and his rifle and carried both back into his shack. The rifle—still loaded—went on hooks above his single door. The pack he propped against one of the walls. The water was still a long way from boiling so he couldn’t clean the woman’s wounds yet—not that he was sure that he ought to. They needed cleaning, but