Chapter Eighteen

Robert had last been this way sixteen years ago, during the civil war. It was December then, there was snow on the ground, and his thoughts were full of Diana.

Well, his thoughts were full of her now too, but at least he didn’t have to contend with the snow, so he hoped finding the trail to Castaño wouldn’t be quite so challenging. He scanned the tree line as he and Sophie walked their horses single file up the rocky trail. The signs he was looking for were subtle and there were several false trails that he had to stay alert for. Some only went half a mile or so before dead-ending in the woods, but others looped around for several miles without getting any closer to the town.

From time to time he made Sophie wait while he trotted his horse to examine a trailhead, looking for tell-tale rocks and tree markings. Occasionally he even followed a trail a short way, checking to see if any hoof prints or cart tracks magically appeared a little way in, after being dusted away near the road.

But it was getting late and there was a line of dark clouds on the western horizon. It had been growing steadily for the past half hour and he knew it meant trouble. “Most storms in North America move from west to east,” he told Sophie after another fruitless effort to find the trail. “We’re definitely going to get some rain, so we should stop early and build a shelter.”

“But what if we don’t find it tomorrow?” Sophie asked. “You said this morning…”

Robert frowned. “I know what I said.” And he wished he could now unsay those words of concern about their rapidly diminishing food supply. “We’ll find it. We’ll probably be in Castaño in time for lunch. Now help me find some branches so we can make a shelter.”

He showed her the size of the branches he would need, then started looking for a likely place to build a small hut or lean-to. In Unitas, it was always his escort who made shelters and built fires while he helped only if he didn’t have other pressing work to attend to. But he reassured himself that a small structure shouldn’t be very difficult to manage on his own. It was just an engineering problem, after all. And a wedge-shaped shelter was merely applied trigonometry.

Robert ended up having to take a hatchet to some of the trees to get the last of the branches he needed, and there was only enough time to finish securing their tarps over the shelter and shore up the sides with stones, leaves and mud before the rain started coming down in fat, heavy drops. “I’m sorry we didn’t finish in time to build a fire and heat up the last of our Indian bread,” he told Sophie. “But maybe it won’t last long.”

“That’s okay.” Sophie gazed in wonderment at the network of branches over her head as the rain beat a pattern on the tarp. “I never knew you could build a house.”

“I can’t,” Robert assured her. “But a little shelter like this isn’t outside my capabilities. We had to do this sort of thing quite a bit during the war years.”

Sophie fell quiet and Robert got to work trying to arrange their packs within the tight confines of the shelter.

“What was the war like?” she finally asked.

Robert sat back and looked at her in the dim light of their lantern. “What do you mean?”

“Was it scary?”

“Sometimes.” He returned to spreading out their bedrolls. “We spent more time being bored, cold, hot, dirty or hungry than actually being scared, though.”

“How could you be bored during a war?”

“One spends a lot of time waiting for things to happen. You wait for news, you wait for reinforcements, you wait for someone else to make the first move…and you wait for better food and better weather.” Robert cast a quick glance at the roof of the shelter. “But that doesn’t mean you and I have to wait for food.” He reached for his pack. “How about some cold Indian bread, dried apples, and beef jerky?”

Sophie shrugged and said okay, but as she tore into her stale loaf of bread, Robert suspected what she really wanted was to hear more about what he had done in the war. Coordinating deliveries to refugee camps and talking to faction leaders probably didn’t sound very exciting. Children liked stories of gunfights, chases, wounds, and acts of bravery. Well, too bad for her that those were more her mother’s stories, not his own. Not that he intended to share any of Diana’s stories either just yet. There were some things a child just didn’t need to know.