Annabelle Murdock

I huddled in my bed, the quilt drawn tightly around me. My scrapes and bruises hurt, but not nearly as much as my conscience. For a while after we got back from Crucifixion River in the peddler’s wagon, I’d cried and felt sorry for myself, but I wasn’t feeling sorry for me any more…

A tap on the door and Mother came in. I asked her how Dad was, and she said she and Mrs. Devane had gotten all the buckshot out of his arm and shoulder and she’d given him some laudanum for the pain.

“He’s going to be all right, isn’t he?”

“Of course he is. He and Mister Hoover both.”

I said: “It’s all my fault.” And then—fool that I am—I started crying again. “If I hadn’t fallen for James Shock and hidden in his wagon, Dad wouldn’t’ve been shot. I did an awful thing, and he could have died and so could I.”

Mother sat beside me and patted my back, just as she’d done when I was a little girl and had hurt myself. It only made me sob harder. I felt like a child right now. A bad one.

She said: “That’s true enough. But we’ve made you live such a sheltered, isolated life, you couldn’t possibly know what a wicked man that peddler was. And you’ve never made a secret of how much you want to leave the delta.”

“Maybe it’s not so bad here, after all.” But I didn’t really believe that. Did Mother? I didn’t think so, but she’d made the best of the past eight years in this place. So had Dad. The least I could do was the same while I was still living here.

I wasn’t crying any more. I wiped my eyes with a corner of the sheet and said: “Someday I may still want to go to San Francisco, have a different kind of life. You’d understand, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course we would. But you’ll tell us when the time comes, let us help you? You won’t try to run away again?”

“No, Mother, I’ve learned my lesson,” I said, and I meant it. “I’ll never run away again, not ever.”