“The storm’s getting worse. What if we can’t cross on the ferry…?”
“Hush up.” It was a command, not a soothing phrase.
The coach lurched once more, and Rachel Kraft stifled a cry. Her companion comforted her as he had before, then cast an oddly guilty glance at me. There was something wrong with the pair, I thought. She panicked at the slightest provocation, and he wavered between solicitousness and tense distraction.
I closed my eyes again. My fellow passengers’ troubles were of no concern to me, as mine were of no concern to them. Except for their sake and that of the driver, I would not have cared if we were cast into the slough and drowned.
Fallen woman, divorced woman, shunned woman. Woman deprived of her children.
It would have been a fitting fate.
James Shock
An hour after I was ejected from River Bend, the skies opened wide and it began to rain like billy-be-damned. Well, it had been that type of day. A slip of the hand, an angry citizen crying-“Cheat!”-a hard-hearted sheriff, and here I was, out on the lonely road again in the midst of a storm. Instead of a dry livery and a warm meal in that swamp town’s only eating house, Nell and I were forced to weather the weather, as it were-where and under what precarious conditions we’d yet to find out. Pity the poor traveling merchant!
The rain came busting down in side-slanting sheets, finding its way inside my slicker and chilling me to the marrow. Late afternoon and the sky was black as sin and the daylight all but blotted out by the deluge. The wagon lurched as Nell slogged on. Careful driving from now on, I reminded myself, to forestall an accidental plunge down the embankment to certain death. On both sides of the levee road, slough water boiled and bubbled up over the banks like soup in a witch’s cauldron. If the storm grew much worse, the road would be swamped. It wouldn’t do to be stranded out here at the mercy of the elements.