A Wanted Man (21 page)

This was so much more important.

She closed her eyes briefly, conjuring that face as clearly as if she were back there that day, in the sunlight, waiting, hoping, praying for him to get away.

Yes
. Bent over the table, she drew rapidly, surely. The small scrap of paper limited her. The fragment of pencil was unfamiliar in hand, her fingers bent awkwardly around it.

And yet she was finished in moments. “Here. Do you know him?”

Jo Ling leaned over the table, bringing the candle close so she could inspect it, her expression intent. She did not touch it.

“No.” She let out a long, shuddering breath. Laura could not tell if it was disappointment or relief. “Not him.”

“Not who?”

Jo Ling straightened, but her gaze lingered on the sketch.

“Who?” Laura repeated.

The decision hung in the balance, as delicate and un
certain as a dragonfly wing. And then her expression closed off. “No one. No matter.”

Hope deflated.

“You go now.”

Laura nodded. She understood Jo Ling’s fear. Why should she trust them? She was clearly in a precarious situation, alone on this ranch so far from her past and anyone who might help her, unhappy and hopelessly trapped.

And she would remain trapped, as caught in her situation and life as Laura had been in her sickroom, as Sam had been in Andersonville. If she did not take this risk, with them, she would be confined here for a long time. Perhaps forever.

“Jo Ling.” Laura brushed her fingers over the surface of the cheap paper. “It really is very sad. He tried so hard to get away. We could tell that he was ready to sacrifice everything to escape or die trying. We could not help him then. I’d hoped we could help him now.”

Jo Ling’s eyes glimmered, liquid regret welling up.

“We could, you know. My father is very powerful, more so even than Mr. Crocker.”

“Not true! No one bigger than Mr. Crocker.”

“My father is.” Laura nodded emphatically. “And Mr…. Kirkwood out there, he is very skilled at rescuing people. I should know. He rescued me once.”

Jo Ling wavered, a tiny spark of hope flaring to hesitant life.

“We could help you,” Laura said. “This may be the best chance you ever have, the
only
chance, to get out of here.”

“Why you think I want out? Good food. Good house.”

She recited them automatically, as if someone had
told her just that. As if someone had tried to convince her that she should be
grateful
for being forced into whoredom.

“Jo Ling, does Mr. Crocker visit you?”

“No.” She chuckled, bitter and empty. “He have Lupe. No need to visit me.”

Lupe. She should have realized. “Then what about the man in that sketch? And whoever you thought that man might be? We can’t possibly help if we don’t know what’s going on.”

Inevitably drawn, Jo Ling’s gaze slid back to the sketch on the table. “Man Ho,” she murmured. “Thought maybe…thought it Man Ho.”

Careful, Laura told herself. Too many questions, push too hard, and Jo Ling would be scared off as easily as a frightened doe.

“Who’s Man Ho?”

“My…friend. Met on the boat to San Francisco. Kind to me.” She sniffled. “Did not see after they find out I was girl.”

“After they found out you were a girl?” Laura frowned, confused, disturbed.

“Decide I would be more useful…here than in mines. But did not know about the mines yet then.”

“Sam?” Laura said, a fraction louder. “Are you getting all this?”

“Yes.” Just the sound of his voice steadied her, familiar and smooth, comforting and exciting at the same time.

“I think maybe you should come in here. I’m not sure what to ask anymore.”

“I…”

Laura moved to the door—quickly, only two steps, and eased it open a fraction.

“Have you seen anyone out and about?” she asked him.

“No. It’s been quiet.”

“We’d better get you in and the door shut, though. It’s either that or douse the light, and it’s better to see her face.”

She heard him take a deep breath. “All right.”

The room seemed instantly smaller when he slipped in the door. He had to duck to enter, and his head must have nearly brushed the ceiling when he straightened, his shoulders as wide as the doorway.

He closed the door, leaning against the wall beside it. Jo Ling took a step back.

“It’s all right,” Laura promised. “You can trust him.”

As she did. Unreasonably, given what she knew of him: that he was willing to put honor aside in favor of expediency. That he had traded his loyalty for money, his principles for comfort. That once they’d settled this he would ride off to his next job, his next hired duty, and she would never hear from him again.

And still she trusted him, with a bone-deep belief, unreasonable but unshakable, that he would do his best for her during this time and that he would never hurt her needlessly or thoughtlessly.

“Why were you on the ship?” Laura asked.

The night ticked by, silent and waiting. And then Jo Ling nodded. “Parents sold me.”

“Sold you?”

“To merchant who needed a…don’t know the word.” Her smile was bitter. “I become same thing anyway, but for more than one.”

Horror washed over Laura. She understood that there were those in the world,
many
in the world, who were not so fortunate in their parents as she. They had confined her, yes, protected her so assiduously she
sometimes thought she might go mad with it, but they’d always had her best interests at heart.

To sell your own daughter into what amounted to a repulsive and intimate kind of slavery…it was so far beyond her experience as to be incomprehensible.

“So I run away,” she continued. “No place to go. But there was foreign man.
American
man. He take students to America. Young men only. I braid my hair and change my clothes and say I boy.”

“Sam?” It made no sense to Laura. She looked over to Sam to see if he could sort it through. He leaned against the wall, his head back, and even in the flickering candlelight she could see his forehead gleamed with sweat. “Sam?” She took a step toward him. “Are you all right?”

He held up a hand to halt her progress. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.” His voice was thin with strain. “Just having a little relapse of whatever I had in Silver Creek. I’ll be okay.”

“Let’s get you back to the house.”

“No!” he said sharply, worried that, if they left now, they might never get Jo Ling to speak to them again.

“Do you know what she’s talking about?”

“Exclusion Act,” he said. “Eliminated all immigration from China except for a couple of exceptions. Mostly students.”

“Yes!” Jo Ling said. “Said we could be students, come to America to study.”

“How many?” Sam asked.

“Boat full.” She shrugged. “Hundred? Two hundred?”

“What happened to them all?”

“Oh, there more. Many more than that, here already when we got here. Put us on trains, come here.” Her voice slowed. “No school.”

“Only mines,” Sam said.

“Yes. Only mines.”

“Sam, I don’t understand. Why would they bring all those students here?”

“He’s bringing them in illegally, Laura. Forcing them to work in the mines.”

“But…but…” The picture was coming into focus, sharp, painful fragments of a truth she did not want to see. “But how?”

“Probably not that hard,” Sam said. “Have to have somebody on the payroll at the docks where the ships come in, of course. Somebody else to look the other way at the rail yard when you load them up. A private train, most likely. But beyond that…it’s pretty simple. And you’ve got all the cheap labor you need.”

“Like
slaves?
”

“Yeah.”

Sam’s breathing grew labored, loud enough that it seemed palpable, taking up its own space in the small room. Anger, Laura thought, roiling up, blasting like a hurricane from within. Because she felt it, too, as powerful a thing as had ever gripped her.

She spurted for the door. Sam caught her arm, a quick strike of his own while he remained leaning against the wall. But despite the sudden reappearance of his mysterious illness his grip was strong, stopping just this side of painful. “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to go break Haw Crocker’s miserable evil head, that’s where I’m going.”

“Yeah, that’s a good plan.”

“I thought so.”

“Laura.” He met her gaze. The strain of it showed on him. The sharp directness that usually marked his eyes was absent; instead they were glazed and unfocused.
His mouth was thin and tense, and a bead of sweat trickled down the side of his lean cheek. “You’ll never get to him. And if you do, you’ll never get
out
of here safely afterward.”

Laura wasn’t sure she cared, as long as she could make sure Crocker suffered along the way.

“It won’t do them any good,” he told her.

Darn it. “Do you always have to be restrained and reasonable and
right
?”

“I try.”

“So what now?”

He sucked in a breath through his teeth, as though he had to struggle to bring in enough air, and pushed off the wall. “Jo Ling. There was a man who was here. Maybe six months ago. Griff Judah.”

“I—” She hesitated. “Lot of men. Don’t know many names.” She frowned. “Why?”

“Please try to remember. He wasn’t here long. He’s tall, even taller than me, but thin. Brown hair.”

She closed her eyes, as if mentally sifting through a pile of photographs. Faces, Laura thought. Faces of men. Faces she’d seen above her in the dark, men she’d…Laura forcibly shut down the images. If she dwelled on that she was going to be ill.

“Don’t know,” Jo Ling said. “Sorry.”

Sam swayed. Laura stepped closer, afraid he might faint. And then he opened his eyes, looking directly into hers, and it seemed to steady him.

“That’s it, then. We’d better be getting back.”

“Yes, I—” She stopped as an idea bloomed. It was a long shot. A
very
long shot. But maybe…She dashed back to the table and flipped over the scrap of paper.

“Can you describe him to me? In detail?”

“I don’t know,” Sam said.

“It’s worth a try.”

Laura’s hand hovered over the page as she waited expectantly for him to begin. And Sam just wanted to dash out of that cube of a room and keep going, out into the open range, where a man could breathe, where he could run a day, two, and never run into something that would cage him.

He closed his eyes, trying to conjure Griff. His image sprang up immediately, the details piercingly clear: a narrow, hollow-cheeked face, dull eyes sunken deep and encircled by purple, more dead than alive.

Griff, in Andersonville. But that wouldn’t do any good; he didn’t look like that anymore, thank God.

Nobody should
ever
look like that.

He struggled to recall the last time he’d seen Griff. It bothered him that he didn’t know. Why hadn’t he noted it at the time, just in case? How could he have forgotten that tomorrow was never promised?

He had vivid memories of the last time he’d seen his family. Of his brother, serious and determined, heading off to war as Sam and his parents waved from their doorstep, his mother gulping back tears, his father with his arm around her shoulders. And his parents, not long after, in almost the same position as he himself trod down that path.

But Griff…

Ah yes. Virginia City, the Red Garter saloon. Griff, laughing at him over a table as he laid down a full straight and hauled in a hefty pot.

“He looked—
looks
—younger than me. Though he’s not. Got that kind of face, like a kid who grew too fast and never filled out all the way.” He waggled his chin. “A lot of chin. His nose is sharp at the end. Deep-set eyes.”

“Wait. Just a minute. I can’t keep up.”

He heard the furious scratch of lead on paper. In the small, steamy room, Laura’s fragrance bloomed. Exotic flowers, kinds he’d never smelled before, no doubt gathered in faraway places that he didn’t even know the name of, distilled to elemental sweetness just for her.

His breath came just a bit easier. It helped, to concentrate on her instead. She was so far away from prison, untouched by brutality and darkness.

“Hair?” she murmured.

“Brown.”

“What kind of brown?”

Her voice reached him through the night, a soft and gentle tendril like a spring breeze.

“Dark. Ah…like turkey feathers? I’m not used to thinking about things like this. Do you study everything in such detail?”

“Mmm-hmm. Hush now. You’re distracting me.”

He could almost forget where he was when he concentrated on her, the sound of her voice and the scent drifting from her skin and the fact that she was mere feet away.

“Texture?”

“What?” If she’d studied him as carefully…what had she seen? He couldn’t hold up to such scrutiny.

“Of his hair. Straight, curly, frizzy?”

“Oh. Peg straight. Clipped above his ears last time I saw him.”

“Good.”

He was not an artist, and yet he was certain he could describe her face down to the last freckle.

The scrape of lead slowed. One more quick stroke, then all was quiet.

“Might as well look,” she said. “See if I’m anywhere close. It’s an odd way to draw, and I’m not used to it. It might be very far off.”

She held the paper tilted to capture the flare of the sputtering candle. And he had to stare at her for a moment first, her face a study in fierce concentration, her skin glowing in the soft, fluttery light.

“It’s…” He squinted, trying to figure it out. “It’s not that far off.” But it wasn’t that close, either, though it was very difficult for him to pick out exactly what was wrong. “His forehead…broader, maybe.”

She’d no rubber, and so blurred the lines with her forefinger, drawing in sharper lines a fraction outside the originals.

“Better?”

“Yes.” He could see Griff in the face now, a suggestion of his features in the pale gray lines. “Deeper hollows beneath the cheeks.”