The Brittle Star

by Davina Langdale

Genres: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; War & Military; Westerns; Historical Romance; Western Romance

Synopsis

A DAILY MAIL STARS BOOK OF THE YEAR A FOYLES BEST BOOK OF 2017 ' Langdale is excellent . . . The Brittle Star is a great beginning to what I hope is a long and productive career ' Guardian If a man beats you, you never let your anger show, never at the time. You wait, until he least expects it, until nobody remembers that you were angry at all . . . In 1860s Southern California, life on the Burn ranch has been peaceful for 15-year-old John Evert since the death of his father. But recently there have been violent raids on nearby properties, where it's not just cattle and horses that are taken, but women too. And when the white-painted men arrive at the Burn ranch on horses in the dead of night, John Evert is near-fatally injured, his beloved mother spirited away, and their house torched to the ground. Setting out on a journey to find his mother and reclaim his land, John Evert will fight in the Civil War and befriend an outlaw, challenge his assumptions and fall in love, before returning to fledgling Los Angeles older, sager and set on revenge . . . 'Fans of Annie Proulx, or Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy will love her eloquent descriptions of California's rural terrain ' Henry Deedes, Daily Mail 'This book artfully blends careful research with beautiful writing. This young British writer is clearly incredibly talented and versatile, and I hope this will be the first book in a long and fruitful career' Historical Novel Society

Release date: February 9, 2017

Publisher: Sceptre

Print pages: 384

Sample

Deep among the white-armed sycamores, there was a pool where the river bent back upon itself. It was fine for fishing, and John Evert was there that day, with a rod made of willow. He wore faded breeches and a blue cloth shirt, open wide at the neck, and the bar of his collarbone shone with perspiration. A haze of midges clouded about his head, but he paid them no mind, keeping his eyes upon the dark brown shape of the fish that hovered in the outer tendril of the current. He could not see the speckled pink and lilac stripe that ran down its side, but he knew well what it looked like. He kept his body right still, only his forearm and wrist moving back and forth smoothly as he worked up a flat cast, making allowance for the low-hanging branches overhead. His line, when it spun out, cast a sickle shadow over the amber water. The mayfly trembled upon the surface before the fish, which moved its tail a fraction. When the fish came up to take the fly, it was lazy as all hell, gulping it down exhaustedly. He set the line with one stiff jerk and hooked it cleanly. There was little fight; he had it on the bank and dead in a matter of seconds. Afterward, he took off his clothes and swam naked in the river.

He walked back through the woods, the same way he had come, ascending the steep slope of the back pasture up to the ranch house. He left the bucket there on the stoop, removed the wooden lid from the water barrel, and took up the wooden scoop to his mouth. The water was as warm as he was. Over the lip of the scoop, his eyes travelled slowly across the pastures.

Like most of the properties in southern California at that time, the Burn ranch was mired in litigation. The sheriff held a writ of ejection, but out of respect for John Evert’s mother, or some other mysterious principle, he had not seen fit to issue it. John Evert’s father had been a Scotsman, by all accounts a fine man, a decorated soldier of the Mexican War, a hard worker who had transformed the fertile but unruly land of the ranch into a going concern. A man of vision, he had diverted the course of the river, damming and dividing its flow, so that it flooded and watered a greater area of pasture. Yet he had made sure that the tributaries he had broken were re-joined to filter back to the original path where the river left his property. A fair man, he took for himself, but never at the expense of another. He had passed when John Evert was five years old. Now, at the age of fifteen, John Evert possessed but one clear memory of him: a large, steady hand in the small of his back, supporting him as he rode a horse for the first time.

According to John Evert’s mother, his father’s death had had a profound effect upon him. Prior to it, he had been a happy, laughing child, gregarious with strangers. Afterward, he became silent and taciturn, and never quite recovered from this early loss. Perhaps it might have been different had he a brother or sister but, as it was, he was never again entirely at ease in company. Yet whatever his reservations when it came to people, he had a way with horses, and with all things that loped and scuttled and flew. Where words might fail him, sensitivity did not: he could read the thoughts of animals and knew their goodness, and they, in turn, were drawn to him. His mother’s temper had been sorely tested by the baby possums and fallen fledglings that she would come across in makeshift nests within her laundry. She had forbidden him to bring any more animals into the house, but when one of the mares disappeared and later returned in foal, John Evert had spent twenty-four hours with her, first in the blazing sun, then out in the dark, delivering the foal single-handed by the light of an oil lamp. After that, his mother no longer chastised him.

At one time, the ranch had boasted a thousand head of cattle, but now there were just a few hundred, while their mounts consisted of a few sway-backed, slab-sided mustangs, sorry excuses for horses. The fields of wheat had been reduced to a fraction of their former size and wild mustard now grew taller than a man in many areas, amid the Indian paintbrush. John Evert was not concerned with what the ranch might once have been: he lived in the present. He knew every inch of the ranch and loved it all, but his favourite place would have to be the ancient oak tree that stood hidden upon the back of a rise in one of the far pastures. Some time, long ago, it must have been struck by lightning, for the enormous bull-thick trunk had split through the centre and peeled down to either side, so that the still-living branches rested their wearied finger tips upon the ground. Up through the centre of the trunk had sprung a holly bush, which burst out like a wayward cuckoo child. It was a place of special significance for John Evert, of mystery and power, although he could not have said why. He would go there often to sit in solitude, to ask questions of the stillness around him, and listen to the answers in the songs of the grass and the cricket’s whir.

A vineyard-owning neighbour, a character going by the name of Phineas Gunn, had offered more than once to buy the ranch, for even in its dwindled state it had the mighty advantage of the river that ran through it, but John Evert reckoned there was more chance of one of Gunn’s Indian labourers remaining in a state of God-fearing sobriety on pay day than there was of his mother selling to such a man. Gunn was one of those cultivators to employ Mission Indians who, once emancipated from the iron-fisted rule of the Mission fathers, proved to be good Christians, and nothing short of indispensable as farm labourers and herders. Gunn, however, had taken to paying his Indian workers in aguardiente, and as a result, every Saturday they would spend the night in drinking and gambling, fighting viciously with knives until the marshal, with his special deputies, would drive the brawling mass to a corral someplace to sleep it off. In the morning, they would be sold as indentured labourers to pay off their debt to the community, and Gunn would buy them back again, and pay them the following week in aguardiente.

‘How many innocent souls have been ruined like that?’ his mother would ask angrily, of no one in particular. John Evert’s mother was Spanish and thus a Catholic. Every Sunday, without fail, they made the long journey to the church at Anaheim, where she would remain, long after the service was over, her velvet-black head bent deep as she spoke to God. Whatever these private conversations entailed, John Evert was of a mind that they did not constitute praying exactly. He had a notion that prayer should involve asking for something, an element of begging. His mother never begged. Anyone who happened to watch her at it would be hard pressed to escape the impression that what she was actually doing was holding God to account. After the service, she would engage the priest in long conversation. The father’s face would run through a gamut of emotions: from benign indulgence, to concentration, to uncertainty, to exhaustion. Worse than that, was the reaction of the congregation. None of the women, straw-haired, sallow-faced creatures with crooked teeth, even looked at her, let alone spoke. She stood out like a cactus bloom in a dustbowl: her hair and eyes shiny black as agate; the bright teeth exposed in her smile as unexpected as the white lupins that would erupt in the pastures during a wet spring.

One day, John Evert overheard part of the conversation of some men outside the church. ‘Goddamn,’ one said. ‘I’d like to know what she’s got to talk to that priest about for so long. Guess when you got a body made for sinning, you got a helluva lotta confessing to do.’ His companions fell about laughing. One clutched at his groin, as though John Evert’s mother caused some pain in him. John Evert’s cheeks burned the whole way home. His mother said not a word, but somehow knew what had passed.

That night, as they often did, John Evert and his mother played cards. She was expert at every game and he had never beaten her; she was not the sort of woman to play beneath her ability. At a crucial moment in the game, she looked at him over her cards, frowned and rapped the table. ‘You remember what I told you about the face, eh?’ she said, her inflection particularly Spanish in her annoyance. ‘The most important part of any game is to keep your countenance. Mira! Look. Don’t show your opponent your hand. It bores me if I know what will come next.’ Her cardinal insult, this, boredom being, to her mind, the greatest of sins.

She won, of course. John Evert could not disguise the faint twist of his lips when she did so, at which she took hold of his forearm across the table. ‘If a man beats you, you never let your anger show, never at the time. You wait, until he least expects it, until nobody remembers that you were angry at all.’

She slapped his face then, only gently, but it felt like a whip. Her eyes glittered in the candlelight, with the flat opacity of a snake’s. In that moment, John Evert was afraid of her.

It was at about this time that there seemed to awake in her a new feeling. She no longer drew him to her and hugged him passionately as she had when he was younger, and her unexplained withdrawal was bitter. She expected more from him, without giving any indication of what she wanted. His chores increased. Phineas Gunn paid them a visit, moving stiffly up the steps on his snapping legs. He had a curious gait, Gunn, suggestive of some mechanical delay, and there was a momentary pause before each of his movements. To John Evert’s surprise, his mother sent him out to work in the barn while she spoke with Gunn. John Evert brooded on this in the dusty, husk-filled shadows.

A few weeks previously, she had done something else with regard to Gunn that had surprised John Evert. They had been passing along Gunn’s fence line when she had spotted a plum tree in early fruit. She slowed the wagon to a halt, and stood upon the edge of the box to pull one from the tree. She winced at the bitterness as she sank her teeth into the bright flesh. ‘Hmm, not yet,’ she said, wiping red juice from the corner of her mouth with her thumb. All the same, she made a loose bowl of the gathers of her skirt, within which to hold the fruits.

‘But, Madre, it’s stealing,’ John Evert hissed, scandalised. She looked down, haughtily, and threw a plum at him. He watched her, uncomfortably, remembering early lessons in the sacrosanct nature of property, and wondering why none of those rules now applied. She jumped down, and tipped the fruit from her skirt into one of the sacks in the wagon. She held one out to him, but he turned his head away, pompous. She dug him in the ribs and began to tickle him; he was terribly, hysterically ticklish. When his mouth opened as he began to cackle with laughter, she shoved the fruit inside. The noise he was making startled the horse, which began to move off suddenly, and as the wagon made a violent jolt forward, they both fell over backwards, their legs in the air. They lay on their backs and roared, which caused the horse to bolt. Pandemonium ensued as they attempted to quit their laughter, right themselves and get hold of the reins once more. For the rest of the ride into town, they dissolved into occasional guffaws.

Still, whatever her strange behaviour toward their neighbour, when Gunn stepped back down off the stoop that afternoon, he moved even slower, as though she had stuck a splinter in his joints, which was reassuring. And yet his visit unsettled her, for that evening, when John Evert took a pot shot at a bobcat that was creeping up on one of the chickens, and missed, she stalked out to his side, carrying a leather pouch of paper-wrapped black-powder cartridges, a ram rod clamped under her arm. She ranged three cans on the fencepost a long way off, returned to his side, snatched the Enfield from him, bit open a paper cartridge, poured the gunpowder down the barrel, reversed the cartridge and placed the bullet in the muzzle, rammed the cartridge down and then, fully cocked, swung it up in one smooth movement to her shoulder. She set her sight, paused for a moment, then fired, knocking the first can high into the air.

She was an extraordinary shot, an unnatural gift for a woman. It was why she so rarely handled a gun. He began to smile, but her return glance snuffed out the attempt. ‘You don’t come in for dinner until you have hit those other two,’ she said.

He knew she was not joking. He was not a bad shot, but he did not often practise, and he could not vouch for himself at such long range.

A while later, his right cheek was smeared with powder residue from firing cartridge after cartridge, and his frustration began to make his aim wild.

Silently, she reappeared at his side. ‘Remember what I have taught you,’ she said. ‘Never lose control.’ She took the rifle from him and reloaded it. ‘Mira. Breathe,’ she said, taking a deep breath herself. ‘Aim, but don’t think about it. Not too much. Feel it. Breathe out, halfway. Go still. Totally … still.’

She squeezed the trigger, and the second can disappeared neatly. She did not look at him through the tendrils of smoke that hung in the air from the shot, but handed the rifle back to him and returned to the house.

John Evert kept trying but still he could not do it. He became hot with frustration, even firing into the ground in his rage, taking a savage delight in the clod of earth thrown up by the blast. The light was fading when he took the rifle from his shoulder and held it loosely at his side. He put it on the ground, closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. Then he leaned down, picked up the rifle and reloaded it slowly, with beautiful care, as though this was the first and last time he would do so. Without looking at the can, he mounted the Enfield up smoothly to his shoulder, breathed in, breathed out, and only brought his sight to bear at the last moment. Time seemed to slow as his eye travelled from the back sight to the pip of the foresight and on to the can. He squeezed the trigger, and the can spun over and over on its end into the grass.

When he returned to the house, there was no sign of her, but on the table was a scalding-hot bowl of stew. He ate it, alone and lonely, thinking that if he had won something, the prize was not the one he wanted.

Not long after this, one of the horses went lame. John Evert brought it in from the front pasture to take a look at it, and found a festering boil in the soft part of its foot. He tied it up close in the barn, but did not use the twitch, his feeling being that it was better to risk a kick than to force an animal into obedience with pain. He whispered to it and ran his hands along its neck and back, massaging its hot skin. The horse exhaled deeply. Its head bobbed up nervously as he felt around the frog of its foot, and it trembled as he lanced the boil and drained it, but it did not pull away, merely releasing a grunt deep in its throat.

‘Good boy,’ John Evert whispered, ‘good boy.’

He poulticed the foot with a paste of herbs that would draw out the rest of the poison, and tethered the animal out of harm’s way. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and felt his hair stick up wet with it.

He walked slowly up to the stoop and filled the scoop at the water barrel, pouring it over his head, running his hair back smooth against his head. Droplets hung upon his lashes. As he blinked them away, his gaze was arrested by a small puff of smoke that had appeared on the plain beyond the ranch boundary. He replaced the scoop and the lid of the barrel, and whistled for his dog, which skittered round the side of the house at speed and came to his heel. He reached down and stroked one long ear as he waited for the riders to appear.

As it turned out, it was a lone rider on a red horse that had clearly covered some ground for the lather at its sides ran in long white stripes, froth dripping from where the heavy bit wrinkled the corners of its soft mouth. ‘Morning, son. Is there a Mrs John Burn here?’

‘Who’s asking?’ John Evert replied.

The man tilted his head back to get a better look at him from under the brim of his hat, as his horse twisted about. ‘Somebody who’s used to being addressed more courteous is who’s asking.’

‘Who’s asking, sir?’

‘Marshal Randall,’ was the curt reply. The man swung his leg over the back of the saddle, and dismounted heavily. ‘Is there any chance of some water and food for my horse?’

‘Yessir,’ said John Evert as he came down off the stoop to take the horse’s reins.

‘And to whom do I owe it?’

‘John Evert Burn.’

They walked together toward the corral, the man leaden-footed after his ride. ‘That’s a fine horse,’ John Evert said. The man grunted in reply. John Evert got a sideways glance at the marshal, whose beard covered the greater part of his face beneath his wide-brimmed hat. His gaze trickled down to the twin Colts that swung at the back of the man’s belt.

When John Evert removed the horse’s saddle, he found it had two sores. ‘You want me to put some aguardiente on those?’ he asked.

‘That ain’t the customary use for it,’ the man replied as he pushed his hat back on his sweat-sodden head.

‘No, sir, but it’s the best thing for those sores,’ John Evert replied, and then added awkwardly, ‘I’d be glad to offer you a cup of it too.’

The man let out a bark of laughter. ‘Well, and I’d be glad to accept one.’

With the horse watered, they took a seat on the stoop in the shade. ‘Just you and your ma out here?’ asked the marshal. John Evert nodded. ‘You know why I’m here?’

‘No.’

The man chewed the end of his cigarrito and spat. ‘There’s been some trouble over at the properties east of here. Raids.’

‘By whom?’

‘Indians. Paiute, I guess.’

‘But there’s been no trouble with them for years now, I thought.’ John Evert frowned.

‘No. But something or someone’s put the wind up them.’

‘Much taken?’

‘Cattle, horses, anything they can carry with them. But it’s more the manner of the raids I’m concerned about. Listen, is your mother going to be back any time soon? I should really be talking to her.’

‘We’ve a couple of rifles and a pistol. I’m the only one able to shoot them,’ John Evert lied – he would never have betrayed his mother’s ability to a stranger. ‘There’s the few Mexicans who work on the ranch, but I wouldn’t trust them with a firearm – they’d be as likely to shoot themselves with it. So, if you don’t mind my saying, sir, it’s best you just tell me whatever it is you need to tell.’ John Evert blushed at the length of his own speech.

The marshal looked out at the pastures and leaned back in his chair, so that it balanced on two legs. He rocked back and forth a little. ‘You got any brothers or sisters?’

‘No.’

‘The places that were raided, things were done. Two girls were taken.’ John Evert said nothing. ‘Could you go to town for a visit, or is there a neighbour you and your ma could stay with for a while? Over at the Gunn place, perhaps.’

‘No, sir. I know my mother and she won’t go staying someplace else and leave the ranch unprotected.’ As far as John Evert was aware, his mother only went to Los Angeles under sufferance: to consult a lawyer, for medicine, or to attend the occasional funeral.

The marshal dropped the butt of his smoke on the floor, and brought his heel down upon it. ‘I hear there’s a writ out on this property,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir, but the lawyers are taking care of matters, and we’re sure to be winning on that score,’ John Evert said firmly.

‘I’m glad to hear it.’ The marshal stood, and pulled his belt up a little. ‘Give my regards to your mother. I’m headed to the Gunn place now. I’ll ask for some men to be sent over here.’ He put up a hand to silence John Evert. ‘That’s my decision as marshal.’

‘Yessir,’ John Evert mumbled.

The man saddled up his horse and John Evert handed up to him a full canteen. He looked down at John Evert. ‘Keep your eyes open, son. The first sign of trouble, you and your mother get out of here, you understand? No playing heroes. The trouble with dead men is, they may feel mighty righteous themselves, but they’re not a whole lot of use to the living no more. You catch my meaning?’

John Evert nodded. The marshal swung his horse’s head about and loped away at a slow canter, his blanket roll bouncing behind the saddle. Soon, horse and rider returned to the shifting heat haze whence they had come.

John Evert went into the house and shut the door behind him. On sunny days, the inside was dark as pitch and might have been called oppressive, but at night, with the fire alight, with every door and window sealed tight, and the place smelling lye-scrubbed clean, it was the happiest of refuges. But just now, he could barely make out the black stove as he passed by it to take out a key from where it was hidden in one of the storage jars. He went through to the back, unlocked the cupboard and then the trunk inside. He took out the rifles and the pistol, and brought them back to the kitchen, where he laid them side by side on the table while he went for the wire brush, patches and some boiling water.

The door opened and his mother was framed in the bright rectangle. She must have been unable to see him for it was not until she was inside and had deposited the packages she held that she became aware of him. ‘John, what are you doing?’ she asked in surprise.

‘Cleaning the rifles.’

‘Ya veo.’ She tutted with a toss of her head as she moved her packages about upon the long shelf at the side of the room. ‘I see that,’ she repeated in English, as was her habit. ‘Why now?’ She began to untie the string on a parcel.

‘The marshal came by.’

She turned. ‘Why?’

‘There’ve been raids at some places east.’

‘What kind of raids?’

‘Paiute.’

‘Strange,’ she said, with a frown. ‘Some quarrel between them and a landowner, perhaps. These things don’t flare up for no reason.’ She returned to her package.

‘They kidnapped a couple of girls,’ John Evert said.

She walked over to the table where he sat. ‘What? Which families?’

‘He didn’t say.’

‘Madre de Dio.’ She took a seat at the table, folding her arms so that her hands cupped each elbow. She wore a cotton dress of very fine blue and white stripe that was full in the skirt, fitted in the bodice, and buttoned all the way up to her neck. Her dark eyes gleamed black and anxious. John Evert’s eyes were not dark, they were green. This was considered an oddity, for his father’s eyes had been dark also. It seemed he had inherited this rarity from some distant ancestor. ‘The Changeling’, his mother would call him, in moments of levity.

‘The marshal wanted us to go over to Gunn’s.’

She was up on her feet again in a flash, with the celerity of movement that was hers. ‘Under no circumstances.’

‘I told him no.’

‘Good.’

‘But he’s sending some of Gunn’s men over here. Said there was nothing we could do about it.’

The quiver of her nostrils was the only indication of the hard-mastered temper beneath. ‘Well,’ she said, severing the string on a parcel as she might break the neck of a chicken.

Two men came riding in that evening. ‘A couple of scrawny burros that will be about as much use as a stick,’ his mother put it, as they watched them dismount. Despite this opinion, she greeted the men graciously and led them inside.

While they ate the cold meats and bread she had laid out for them, she asked them about their work and the state of Mr Gunn’s grapes that year. Jack and Aubrey were their names. Aubrey was small and wiry, with a foxy face that seemed to be glancing in all directions at once. The one named Jack was nice-looking, with very straight black eyebrows that framed wide-set brown eyes. He had a quick smile that would flash across his face sometimes, disappearing just as swiftly.

The two men were very polite to John Evert’s mother and seemed a little in awe of her. John Evert could hardly have been described as worldly, but he was not stupid to the fact that many more men called at the ranch than women, and the men who did would sit around dumbly, like they had a dumpling stuck in their gullet. All except Phineas Gunn, who never ran out of things to say.

When John Evert was much younger, he had overheard Gunn and his mother discussing the legal contest relating to the Burn land, land, Gunn claimed, that was rightfully his, due to the way the boundaries had been drawn up when it was first settled. John Evert had not understood much of what Gunn said, but he remembered the conciliatory tone in which he had spoken when he had told John Evert’s mother what a great thing it would be if they were to combine their land, how with one fell swoop it would make them both rich and cause all the legal questions to disappear. At the time, John Evert had figured that Gunn wanted to go into business with her. It was only when he was older that he understood he had accidentally witnessed a marriage proposal. John Evert thought again about how tired his mother had looked after Gunn’s last most recent visit. A quiver of anxiety fluttered through him as to whether she was not, quietly, by slow degrees, being worn down. What would happen when the day came that she was simply too tired to say no one more time?

John Evert and Gunn had had dealings once. He had never spoken of it.

He had been way out, on the trail of some cattle that had broken off from the herd, when movement caught his gaze far down the track that led toward the Gunn boundary. He rode there, and found a mule deer that had got its antlers caught in the whippy branches of a tree. The animal had been that way a while; a wolf or coyote had had a go at it and its haunches bled from ragged wounds. It trembled at his presence but it was so exhausted that it could do little more than sidle its back end to and fro, its head held fast in the vice of greenery.

John Evert dismounted slowly and removed his knife, with a view to cutting the animal free. The vegetation was so thick that there was no way to get to the other side of it; he would have to go up close to cut it loose. He made soothing noises and was taking his time in approaching it, when a shadow fell across the animal. Startled, he turned about quickly. His sudden movement alarmed the deer, which bucked and caught him in the side with its hoof, felling him to the ground.

From where he lay, he looked up at Phineas Gunn, astride his horse, laughing.

‘Haha!’ Gunn chortled. ‘What are you about, young John Evert? That beast’ll kill you given half a chance.’ Gunn studied the animal critically as John Evert got to his feet. ‘You’ll never get in there to cut it loose,’ he said. ‘Make it do the work.’ He unfurled the long bull whip in his hand and cracked it on the deer’s flank. The animal reared up and backward, lost its footing and fell over, only its head held up by the branches, its legs galloping air. Heat flared in John Evert’s belly. Without thinking, he shot forward and grabbed at the length of the bull whip and yanked on it as hard as he could. Unprepared, Gunn was half unseated but, quick as a flash, he righted himself, snatched further down on the whip and pulled back with all his force. A yard or so of rawhide whistled through John Evert’s tight-closed fist, taking the skin with it. He cried out at the pain. Gunn’s face was contorted with anger. He took out his pistol and shot the deer in the back of the neck. It struggled no more, just lay heavy, swaying slightly, hanged by its crown of green.

‘Why’d you have to do that?’ John Evert said, his fire gone and turned to pity.

‘Those wounds were rotten,’ Gunn snapped. ‘It would have died anyway.’

‘You had no right,’ John Evert said. ‘Not on our land.’

‘Your land?’ Gunn said. ‘My land,’ he objected, pointing at a marker post hidden among the trees. ‘My land. My deer. To do with as I choose. You want this to be your land? It can be, easily – if you persuade your mother to consider my suit.’

He returned the pistol to its holster and studied John Evert with his pale, mocking gaze. He picked up his rein and began to move off. Over his shoulder, he called back, ‘Take that deer to your mother – a gift from me. The hide’ll make fine shoes and breeches for winter.’

John Evert had kept his fist closed. When he looked down, he saw blood trickling from it.

He had given his mother some excuse about his hand. She had been glad to have the deer and had shown him how to tan the hide. He had been reluctant to do it and she had chastised him for being soft. He was still not sure why he had never told her how he had come by it. Maybe it was that her protectiveness worried him sometimes; what she might do if she found out someone had hurt him.

When it was time to turn in, John Evert took the two men to the barn and showed them the rough beds that had been made up for them there. ‘Shall I take first watch?’ he asked them, as they tossed their blankets on to the beds.

‘You sure?’ Jack said. ‘Mr Gunn said it was for us to do the job.’

‘You’ve been working today,’ John Evert said.

‘Sure.’

‘I haven’t. You could get some rest and I’ll come wake one of you in a few hours.’

‘Thanks, kid,’ he said gratefully, as he took off his boots. J