Ellen's Arc

Chapter 4 of 45

By morning Ellen stood outside the red barn with a full canteen and healed skin. Two of Vincent's men leaned against a dead fence a hundred yards off. They did not hide. One chewed a matchstick and watched her the whole time. Vincent's words still sat in her ears. Clear the barn today. Any help to the squatters, and the water stops. She pushed the door open and stepped inside. Six women sat in the loft and the stalls. Thin, sunburned, watching her hands. One held a rusted pitchfork. They had come to the same dead plain she had, cast out the same way. She had walked all this distance to save women like these. Now the men outside waited for her to throw them out. "You're his," the woman with the pitchfork said. "He sends someone new every week." "I'm not throwing you out," Ellen said. The words felt like stepping off a ledge. "But he's watching. We have to make him believe I did." A man's voice cut across the barn. "Won't work." A stranger sat in the shadowed corner, a rifle across his knees. A worn coat, a low hat. Two pistols on his hips and a sawed-off slung on his back. He had counted them all before Ellen ever saw him. "Marconi's men see you talking. Not fighting. They'll know." Ellen's chest went tight. "Who are you?" "Cade." He stood. "Hunting men who burned my town. Marconi's not one. But he trades in scared people. I've seen it." He looked at the door. "You want them out safe, you need a reason he'll buy." Ellen looked through a gap in the wall. The matchstick man was walking closer now, hand near his belt. She had no fight to show him. So she made one. She grabbed the pitchfork and shoved the nearest woman hard toward the rear door. "Out! All of you, out!" she screamed it loud enough for the plain to hear. The women caught it fast. They stumbled and cried and ran for the back, clutching bundles. Cade slipped out with them, quiet as smoke, into the dry brush behind the barn. Ellen stormed to the front door and threw it wide so the men could see the empty stalls. "It's done," she called. "They're gone." The matchstick man stopped. He studied the open barn, the fleeing shapes shrinking into the far scrub. Then he nodded, turned, and walked back toward Vincent's place to report. Ellen leaned on the doorframe, breathing hard. She had kept the water and kept the women both. But the women were loose on the open plain now, with no shelter, hunted men in the brush, and a giant scorpion's tracks she had seen crossing the dirt at dawn. She had lied to Vincent. When he found out, the debt would come due with teeth.