Forgiven Read Free

hands, balled up my fingers, raw and callused. Whatever start I made would be fashioned by me.
    “Hiya!”
    Gus galloped away north, snow and mud spitting up behind his mount’s heels. Carrying Pa’s message to Mrs. Gale, no doubt.
    I turned back toward the camp to make my preparations with an unsettled mind.

Chapter TWO
    November 28, 1905
    “She had thrown the dice,
but his hand was over her cast.”
    —The Golden Bowl, Henry James, 1904
     
     
     
     
    MIN WAS THEONLY CHINESE I’D EVER MET.
    I didn’t live in the camp most of the time. Pa’d reared me and schooled me in my letters and numbers, and his men were like a passel of uncles teaching me this or that about hunting, or scouting, or sensing change in the weather.
    He’d seen to it I’d never met a true threat. At least not until recently.
    Once I’d reached an age where my two good hands could be of service, Pa’d found me work here and there in the park. Someone was always looking to have their clothes washed and mended, or their tea served, and I’d scrub the sour look off my face and pull back my hair in my blue ribbon, and they’d pay the poor sweet Indian-looking girl to take care of their things. Even house me pretty nice, some of them, so I didn’t have to stay in Pa’s camp.
    Min showed up in Mammoth Hot Springs a few weeks earlier, and I noticed her right off. She was like me, foreignlooking. There weren’t many of us in Mammoth itself.
    She floated in and out of Yellowstone Park, from Mammoth to Gardiner and back, picking up chores, washing, and mending. We’d exchanged only a few words, but straight off I thought of her as kin. Both of us wore our skins like they didn’t quite fit.
    Now, in the railway station in Gardiner with travelers and tourists, Min came to my mind as I felt the appraising stares, the bold ogling looks, the recognition that I didn’t fit, and I shrugged in my discomfort.
    An animal that shows fear is easy pickings.
    Kula Baker does not show fear.
    The train from Gardiner to Livingston was near empty, and I sat alone by the window with my gloved hand pressed flat against it. The valley rose hard and knifelike to either side of the train: it rose steep, offering the way forward or back, and I was going forward past the edge of known territory.
    When that valley broadened out under a gray sky, under the snow-covered hills and flanking mountains, the Yellowstone slowed as it tumbled out of the mountains, easing out into the plains and into the broad unknown beneath the bare cottonwoods and perching bald eagles. I tried to slow my own breath and let myself flow out with the river, even while my heart was galloping down the vertical face of a cliff.
    I’d learned a thing or two from my employers, and most from Maggie, who had tried over the last year to school me in worldly things. Now she was off at that college of hers, and I hadn’t seen her since summer. But it didn’t matter what she’d taught me; I’d never ventured this far out of Mammoth, out of the park. Terror blazed through my innards. And then I tucked in tight.
    I touched the cameo that had been my present from Maggie, and beneath it and hidden by the placket of my shirtwaist I felt the small key Pa had given me just before I left. “Keep this key close,” Pa’d said as he slipped the chain around my neck in the early morning light. “You may have need of it.”
    At the ticket window in Livingston, I asked after the Bozeman train.
    “Three o’clock,” the man replied, his head bowed over his paperwork. “One way or round-trip?”
    “One way.”
    He glanced up at me through the iron bars, and I could feel his eyes take in my features. “Second class’ll be a dollar fifty.”
    I glared. But I curbed my tongue, wishing I had the money to demand first class. I slid the coins across the wood counter and took my ticket and sat on the oak bench near to the door with its arched sign: LADIES’ WAITING ROOM.
    I would’ve gone into the Ladies’ to