No civilized man could indicate it—not even an army man.
“I wonder if I should go to the schoolhouse,” one shopkeeper mused, looking worried. “Davey can’t walk home in this alone.”
“They won’t let school out in this kind of weather,” someone assured him.
“But maybe they will. That damn schoolteacher’s from the East, he don’t know our weather.”
“I’m worried about my horse,” Johnny Swanson fretted. “I don’t like leaving her out there in this, if it ain’t blowing over. I’m gone, gentlemen.” And he threw on his hat and coat, opening the door and letting in a cold blast of air and snow that made more than a few swear. Others, thinking about their horses tied up to the hitching posts, too, followed him. So did Davey’s father, the shopkeeper.
“That sleighing party, that’s what’s on my mind,” Forsythe said quietly, as he drummed his fingers on the bar next to Gavin.
Gavin jerked his head up from his second shot of whiskey. “Damn. That’s right. They’re out there in this.”
The two men exchanged looks. Then Gavin downed that shot, threw some money on the bar, and shrugged his arms back into his coat as Forsythe pulled his on.
“You two are going out in this? What are you, heroes?” Ol’ Lieutenant snorted; the newspapermen were not exactly respected in a town like Omaha, where people were suspicious of those who made their living trading words, not goods. Gavin snorted. These rubes.
“Hardly.” He could already imagine the headline—Great Loss of Life! A Day of Pleasure Turns Deadly! Sleighing Party Becomes Funeral Party!
And he didn’t have to worry about Forsythe getting the headline alone this time; a storm like this was big enough for the two of them. Maybe this was it—maybe this was the event that would get Gavin back to New York, finally. A storm of epic, tragic proportions—the stories would write themselves! Pulitzer would have to bring him back to the fold; already he was thinking of how many ways he could describe what the wind was doing—roaring, blowing, pummeling, assaulting, punching, whistling, screaming…
The two prepared to head out into the storm that was not letting up, thank God; maybe this thing was going to turn out to be a tragedy, after all!
But as soon as he felt the first blast of ice slap his unprotected face, Gavin thought, once more, of that girl. How many ways could he come up with to describe what happened when young, hopeful—yearning—women were frozen to death out on the prairie?
Gavin looked up at the sky, hoping, to his own surprise, to see a break in the clouds, a glimpse of a fading sun.
But no such break occurred.
CHAPTER 7
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OLLIE TENNANT WATCHED THE MEN file out of his bar, successfully hiding his distaste. Not a one of them had mentioned the school where his children spent their days learning their lessons.
But Ollie was used to this; from the moment these idiots had mangled his name, assuming that he must be one of those Buffalo Soldiers whose legacies still loomed large in barely settled places like Omaha, he’d understood the way to deal with them. He’d understood that the only way to get a white man to respect you was to try to be as white as he was, at least in book learning. And you had to be braver, twenty times as brave as the average white gentleman, because the colored man was starting from a ways away from zero, in that category. At least in the white imagination.
So Ollie read his books, but he sometimes thought they were foolish—stories about the problems white people had, which couldn’t hold a candle to the problems darker people had. He mostly read for the show of it, although now and then a book—like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—surprised him. But his reading soothed the customers somehow. It made them feel more inclined to spend.