Powder Keg by Ed Gorman Page B

our horses up the first slope. We’d already made our decision about that night. Jen talked about the cabin we could stay in if luck got us there before full night. We could travel in the dark, with or without moonlight, but the biggest part of the trip would be the next day and we would need a night’s sleep for that.
    Luck didn’t hold.
    Snow began to swirl again as the long shadows of early dusk began to stretch across the valley below us. The temperature was holding so we didn’t have to worry about frostbite but the cabin she’d talked about sounded a lot better than a jury-rigged lean-to.
    My horse began to tire. I held up my hand for us to halt.
    I fed my horse, cleaned off the snow, and then led him into some pines so he could get out of the slowly increasing wind for a while.
    “How far you think this cabin of yours is?”
    She smiled. “You sound like you don’t believe me.”
    “I guess I was under the impression that it was closer by than it is.”
    “An hour or two at most, if the snow holds off and the wind doesn’t get mean.” She put out her mittened hand. “Would you say a prayer with me? For Mike?”
    “You’ll have to say it. I haven’t been in a church for a long time.”
    “You never pray?”
    I shrugged. “Sometimes, late at night, I suppose. But it’s not exactly praying. I just try to figure things out more than anything.”
    “Figure what things out?”
    “I’m not sure you’d want to hear it.”
    “The war?”
    I hesitated. “Yeah.”
    “My Uncle Don is like that. My aunt says he still wakes up in the middle of the night. Sometimes he screams and sometimes he gets violent. Gets up and starts smashing things. But when she calms him down he doesn’t have any memory of it.”
    “I think you can see too much death and it changes you and you can never be right again.”
    She took my hand. “I’m sorry, Noah.” Then: “You ready?”
    “Let’s give it a try.”
    She said a prayer and she sounded like a little girlstanding on that slope with dusk revealing the stars that had been hiding there all along, bright and perfect and so above the misery below. She was sweeter in that moment than anybody had been to me in a long, long time. And afterward she slid her arm around me and we just held each other as wolves began to cry somewhere deep in the timber.
     
    There are Indian shamans who believe that you can tell a place where great evil has recently occurred. They say that they can see a glow around the top of the site. I’ve been told this by two or three shamans of very different tribes. Each time it was told to me in great earnestness.
    I thought of this when I stood on the hill overlooking the cabin in a small bowl-like valley beneath us. We’d worked our way up two long steep slopes, one of which was perilously close to the edge of the trail. Far below us, we could see a tiny cabin flanked by a stretch of pine trees.
    I took out my field glasses and looked the cabin over. For some reason, I remembered what those shamans had told me. About evil having a hue in the form of a halo effect.
    I didn’t see any glow but I did see a couple of things that simple deduction told me were way wrong.
    Two horses lay dead on their sides in front of the cabin. A wagon had been turned over. The storm had been bad in patches but not bad enough to kill horses or pitch wagons upside down.
    Before we started down the long slope leading to the flat below, I pulled my repeater from its scabbard.
    “Any particular reason for a rifle?” Jen asked.
    I told her what I’d seen. “I’d say we don’t need any more trouble but we have to rest the horses and sleeping in a cabin sounds mighty nice right now.”
    She nodded to the metal of my rifle barrel, gleaming in the moonlight. “I take it you expect trouble.”
    “Not expect, necessarily. But worry about. Something went pretty wrong down there.” I shrugged. “But maybe we’ll be surprised. Maybe the horses ate bad food. Maybe that