This was the same structure we had seen being repaired earlier by the boy who turned out to be Jac’s son Lucien. Sleeping on buffalo robes didn’t come easy after an extended period of city life, but I’d got along on worse and so had Hudspeth. We drifted off in short order—me from exhaustion after the unsettling activity of the past few days, the marshal after reacquainting himself with the flask in his pocket. It rained sometime during the night without our knowing it. There were puddles on the ground the next morning and the air had that damp metallic smell, but the sultry and unseasonal heat that had dogged me since leaving Montana had not been washed away. If anything, the atmosphere was more oppressive than ever. It hung from last night’s burned-out torches, beaded on the outside of the lodges in droplets of moisture, clung like moldy rags to our throats and the insides of our nostrils when we tried to breathe. The very act of taking in oxygen was exhausting. Two steps outside the shelter I felt as if I hadn’t slept at all.
