Sadie squirmed to avoid my grasp, blond braids flying. “I want to stay,” she protested. “I’m not a baby anymore.”
“No one said you were—” I started, but Merry skillfully cut me off.
“Look, there’s Pardon and Trinity.” She pointed to Sadie’s friends. They also lingered on the outer edge of the group, standing on tiptoes to catch what they could. “Did you hear, Trinity picked up five jacks last week? On just one swipe.”
“That’s impossible!” Sadie scoffed, eyeing her friend with outright suspicion.
Merry shrugged. “It’s what she said.”
Sadie reached into her pocket and removed a handful of metal trinkets. “I’ve got mine. Let’s see if she can prove it.” She always kept a set of jacks on her, and we all knew it.
I offered Merry a grateful smile as our little sister loudly challenged the girls to a game of jacks. They were soon out of earshot, spreading their lightweight voile skirts across the schoolhouse steps. Though Merry immediately joined their game, engaging and distracting them, I felt her worried stare like a tangible weight.
“You won’t! You won’t!” Molly screamed, railing at Elder Matthias Dodson and snapping my attention back. The blacksmith stood over her and the horse, pistol in hand. “Jeb would never allow it.”
“Molly, look at his leg. The bone is shattered. There’s no way to fix that. He’ll never walk again.”
“He came back here, didn’t he? It can’t be as bad as you think.”
My breath caught as I spotted the broken hind leg. It twisted to the side at an impossibly wrong angle. Matthias was right. The bones would never properly heal. Samson would have to be put down. It was criminal, allowing him to linger in such blatant misery.
Approaching thirty, Matthias was the youngest of the three town Elders, and he rubbed at the back of his neck like a little boy, clearly wishing someone else would intercede. “I don’t…I don’t know how he made it this far, but we can’t—”
“Jeb will never forgive me. No. No, you can’t.” Her hand ran across the stallion’s sleek black hide. It came away wet and red.
“Molly, it’s not just the ankle….”
“I said no!” She was on her feet in an instant, pushing at him, pushing at the gun.
The crowd took an uneasy step back. Molly had covered the worst of the stallion’s injuries, and the front of her dress was slick with the animal’s blood. His side was clawed open by four deep marks, revealing sinew and bone. Samson shifted uncomfortably, his breathing labored. Flecks of white foam gathered in the corners of his velvety lips.
Mama stepped in, her hands out to show she meant no harm. Her voice was low and soothing as she rubbed comforting circles across the woman’s back, just like when we were too sick to leave bed. “Samson is hurting, Molly.”
She nodded miserably.
“I know it’s hard, but he’s trusting you to be brave, to do the right thing.”
“I know.” Molly’s voice croaked out. “But Jeb…”
“Jeb will understand.”
Shivering, Molly threw herself into my mother’s arms, staining her dress. “He’ll want to do it himself. He has to do it. He’d never forgive me if…”
Mama turned, her clear blue eyes searching the crowd. They met mine for only a moment before shifting on, looking for a man who was not there. “Then, where is he? Was he taken to Dr. Ambrose already? Where’s the rest of the party?”
Matthias’s jaw clicked. “No one else came back. That poor horse came tearing down the road, eyes rolled nearly to the back of his head. Never seen anything like it…but Jeb wasn’t with him.”
I glanced toward the tree line as if the rest of the supply train might come bursting forth at any moment, racing away from whatever had mauled the fallen stallion. But the pines loomed over the Falls like watchful sentinels, tall and unmoving.
Molly fell to the ground with a violent shudder, grabbing at the saddle blanket and burying her screams within it. They welled up deep within her, as pointed and sharp as barbed thorns, tearing at everything they could on the way out. “He’d never leave that horse. Not if he were…” The sobs broke her words apart.
Mama knelt beside her, whispering things too soft for us to hear. Eventually she helped the suffering woman to her feet, and they slowly made their way up the steps to the general store. Before Mama disappeared over the threshold, she turned back with a firm nod to Matthias. “Do it.”
The bloody business was over before we had a chance to look away.
A tarp was thrown over the body so we didn’t have to look at the poor beast.
But I couldn’t draw my eyes away, watching four red lines bloom across the canvas, even as Samuel slipped in beside me, like a matching bookend. Though obviously not identical twins, with our fine golden hair and soft gray eyes, there was no doubt we were kin.
“What happened on that supply run?” I whispered, my insides turning and twisting. If there was something out in the woods that could have taken down a horse of Samson’s size, I shuddered to guess what it could do to a person.
He adjusted the brim of his straw hat, scanning the forest. “I don’t know.”
“The other men…do you think they’re—”
“I don’t know, Ellerie,” he repeated firmly.
“Where were you this morning?”
“I was…I was over near the shoreline, and we heard shouting. By the time I got here, Samson was already…” He pointed to the tarp. “With that gash, and the ankle…But it’s like Matthias said, there weren’t any others….Just him.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
He dragged his eyes from the trees. “Hmm?”
“You said ‘we heard shouting.’ Who’s ‘we’?”
A short, middle-aged woman pushed her way to the front of the crowd before Samuel could answer me. “It obviously was an attack of some sort,” Prudence Latheton, the carpenter’s wife, guessed. “Wolves, probably.”
“Never seen a wolf with claws that big,” Clemency Briard said, running his fingers over the tarp where the marks had bled through. Even with the parson’s fingers spread as wide as they could, the wound was bigger still. “Must have been a bear.”
“But the howling…” Prudence trailed off. Her faded blue eyes looked about the group, seeking confirmation. “You’ve all heard it too, haven’t you? In the night? It’s been…just awful. And so close to town.”