“One of our cows. She broke a leg and I had to shoot her.” He grunted as he tugged at a knot with numb fingers. “Thought you could use the meat. It was either that or stick some poison in her for the wolves to eat.” He straightened and looked expectantly toward the house. The door was shut. “Isn’t your husband coming?”
There was a long pause before she answered him. “He isn’t here.” The blue of her eyes seemed to dare him to say something. Her eyes were all he could see of her face, the rest of it hidden by the dark shawl that covered her hair.
“The horses are here. So’s the wagon.” He didn’t want to be accused of coming here with the foreknowledge that her husband was absent from home. “Where is her?”
“He went hunting this morning and hasn’t come back yet,” she said.
“He went hunting in this weather?” Webb frowned. The cold was a frigid band of steel across his forehead.
“Yes.” She became apprehensive at his reaction.
“All the wild game will have taken shelter with this storm coming. I didn’t even see a jackrabbit on the way here,” he stated, impatient at the ignorance of a homesteader who had no practical knowledge of living on the land. “Babes in the woods” was a mild description. “Where do you want me to put this carcass?” Then he realized Lilli wasn’t any more knowledgeable than her husband about such things. “It needs to be in a building of sorts where the wolves can’t get to it. Is the horse shed all right?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “Can I help?”
“I doubt it.” It was easier for him to show anger toward her; it kept his other feelings at bay. “You can open the door to the shed.”
Without another man’s muscle to help him, Webb knew, it wasn’t going to be an easy trick to get this carcass inside. The simplest way would be to cut it up out here, but it was too damned cold. He checked the lashings to make sure they were still secure and walked to his horse’s head, taking the reins to lead it as close to the shed as possible.
He rolled the carcass off the travois directly in front of the door and glanced at Lilli, all huddled inside her shawl. “Go back inside where it’s warm,” he ordered.
“You’ll need help.” She showed no signs of leaving.
“Do you know anything about gutting, skinning, and butchering an animal?” he challenged and watched her gaze drop under his piercing look. “That’s what I thought. Go inside.”
“I can learn,” she argued.
“Have it your way.” Webb shrugged.
Between the two of them and a rope slung around a rafter beam, they dragged the carcass inside the shed and strung it up. When Webb disemboweled the dead cow, Lilli felt queasy. It was so much larger than the few chickens she’d cleaned. For a few minutes, she thought she was going to throw up. When Webb challenged her to haul the gunnysack of entrails out of the shed and some distance away, she managed to swallow the nauseous lump in her throat and drag them out. The trek into the sharply cold air had a reviving effect. When she returned, he was half-finished skinning the cow, and she was not exactly sorry she had missed the beginnings of it.
“That’s good enough for now.” Webb stepped back, looking weary and cold. “I hope you’ve got some coffee hot.” He attempted to flex his gloveless fingers, but they resisted closing into a fist. There had been enough body heat left in the animal to keep his hands warm while he worked, but they were chilled and stiff now. He pulled on his gloves before going out in the cold to the shanty. “After I warm up some, I’ll go look for your husband.”
“You don’t think anything has happened to him, do you?” Lilli raised the heavy shawl over her head. Stefan had said he’d be back by suppertime, which was still a couple of hours away, so she wasn’t alarmed that he hadn’t returned yet. Stefan had gone hunting on other winter days and come back safely. Even if a storm was coming, it wasn’t here yet, so she didn’t understand why Webb appeared concerned.
“He’s probably all right,” Webb conceded as he opened the shed door and waited for Lilli to go first. “The Lord has a way of looking after babes and pilgrims.” The last was muttered to himself as he stepped outside into a thickening snowfall, stirred now by a fluctuating wind.
Inside the shack, Webb began peeling off his outer garments while Lilli stoked the cooking and heating stove with more coal. He rubbed his arms briskly, trying to stir up the circulation, as he moved to the source of heat. Lilli poured them both a cup of coffee, and Webb warmed his hands with his, aware of the strained silence and quietly studying her.
“You’d better take off that shawl,” he advised. “Or you never will get warm.” She seemed reluctant to forsake the protection of the shawl, but it could hardly have been for the warmth. When she did remove it, she was wearing a long and heavy, high-necked sweater. “That, too,” Webb stated.
She darted him a wary glance that resisted his suggestion. “I always wear this inside. The cold seeps through the walls and I—”
“You can put it back on later, but take it off for now,” Webb insisted. “It’s blocking out the stove’s heat, so it’ll take you a lot longer to get warm.”
Following his sensible advice, Lilli tugged the sweater over her head and folded it to lay it aside. Then she was taking up her cup of coffee and crowding close to the stove. There was a high color to her cheeks, nipped by the cold, and her dark auburn hair was attractively disheveled. Webb wanted to run his fingers through it and remove the loosened pins that swept the mass of it atop her head. He stared at his cup. His limbs were starting to tingle with needle-sharp jabs radiating from his nerve ends as the cold-induced numbness began to wear off.
“Thank you for the meat.” Her voice came to him, soft and clear, unaffected by any coyness. Webb shut his eyes, tortured by the things he wanted to say and had no right to voice. He breathed in and caught the disturbing scent of her, so near to him.
“Like I said, it was either bring it here or turn it into wolf bait.” He sounded gruff. He had to, or he’d find himself regretting the alternative. He downed a quick swallow of coffee, letting its heat thaw his insides. “Do you know which direction your husband took when he left?” Webb deliberately mentioned Stefan Reisner to remind himself of the man’s existence.
“He headed west—toward Franz Kreuger’s place.” She wouldn’t be surprised if Stefan had stopped there for the noon meal and gone out hunting with Franz in the afternoon.
Webb tipped back his head and drained the coffee from his cup, then handed the empty tin mug to Lilli, his glance sliding away from her. “I’d better ride out a ways and see if I can find any sign of him before the storm breaks.”
“Will you come back?” She held the cup, looking at it instead of him, but he sensed the tension and let his gaze wander over her profile for a long second.
“I guess it will depend.” But he didn’t say on what. “Hand me the coal buck