Day Six

I spent today heading southeast. It’s not going to get me to Kentucky any faster, but yesterday’s fiasco with the shopkeeper shook me up. I wouldn’t put it past Will to go to Ciudad Pacheco after getting my letter, talk to the guy in the store and try and track me north. He’s a lousy tracker, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t try. And since Tennessee and Kentucky are the same general direction, it's not worth chancing.

So today I decided to pull an old trick we used in Unitas, and set out in the one direction that seems to make no sense. There are a lot of reasons Will wouldn’t expect me to go south, so that’s where I’m going, for now. In a few days, I’ll turn east to skirt the areas where the fighting is, and then I’ll head north again. If anyone tries to follow me, that ought to put them off the trail.














As I rode south today, I couldn’t help thinking about some things — memories stirred up by the guy who mentioned that stupid song yesterday. It’s been a year since the night me and my friends had the party for Robert and missed the trail back to camp. Ever since that night, I’ve Bella Diana, the heroic killer of mavericks and rapists, so why don’t I feel very heroic?

I’m not sure how the song got started. You can never tell with those folk corridos, but I blame Boeing, one of our sharpshooters, for telling tales in the town near our camp. The better the story, the better he liked it, and if the story wasn’t good enough to suit him, he’d add on to it until it was. I figure some bar singer liked the tale, added some stuff of his own, and it took off from there.

Most versions of the song say I killed twenty men. That’s a lie. I only killed two, and one was after what he did to us first, which hardly did me any good, other than that I was able to get Macy on my horse after that and bring her back to camp. If not for her, I would’ve stayed and tried to kill them all. I wouldn’t have succeeded, but I didn’t much care whether I lived or died at that point. I had led my friends into danger and I deserved to suffer for it. It was Will and the other guys who killed the rest of them.

It's funny that the three of us girls who survived the attack went on to marry the guys who avenged us. I guess we all felt vulnerable and figured they could take care of us better than we could take care of ourselves. In Macy’s case, it was probably true. She was just a camp supporter. But me and Sachi were well-trained and as tough as any of the guys. We didn’t need them. Maybe if we’d both realized that, we could’ve stayed friends.

I’ve tried not to think about any of this. I’ve been afraid it would be like digging at a snow bank on the side of a mountain and I would start a whole avalanche of bad memories. I’ve had plenty of awful things to think about this year besides that one night, but now I seem to have several hours a day where I have nothing to do but think.

I don’t want to spend my time in the past. I’m hoping the really good stuff is still ahead. Like Kentucky. Robert says the best horses in the world are in Kentucky. I can do anything with horses — train them, treat injuries, give riding lessons. I’ll even muck out stables, if that’s the only work they’ve got. I just know I’m going to be happy there.








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