Free Heart of the West by Penelope Williamson

Gus, he don't see it. Yet."
    "I cannot imagine what you are talking about," Clementine said, her mouth tightening around the lie. Somehow the mule skinner had seen the wildness in her, the wickedness. Just as her father had. As Gus had not, and never would if she could help it.
    "I am not like that. Like what you said." She smoothed her nubby wool skirt over her lap. She ensured that the pins were still in place in the thick Roman knot of hair at the back of her head. She felt disheveled... hot-blooded. "And as for Mr. Rafferty, he'll just have to accept the fact that his brother is married, and that is that."
    "That is that, hunh?" Nickel Annie brayed a laugh. "Hell, with Rafferty that ain't never that."

    They made camp that night on the side of the road beneath a lightning-scarred box elder tree. Nickel Annie fixed a supper of sowbelly beans and canned corn and showed Clementine how to bake biscuits in a frypan.
    Clementine ate her meal sitting on the wagon tongue, apart from Annie and Gus and a smelly fire of sagebrush and buffalo dung. She swung her dangling feet back and forth, back and forth, watching the toes of her high-buttoned black kid shoes make parallel ruts, like miniature wagon tracks, through the tall prairie grass. But these marks, she knew, would be only temporary. The land was so empty, so vast it could swallow a hundred Clementines and leave not a trace.
    The loneliness of the thought disturbed her, frightened her even. She set her empty plate aside, stood and stretched, reaching up with her hands as if to grab a piece of the sky. She sighed, breathing deeply the stink of burning buffalo chips and sweaty mules.
    She turned to catch Gus watching her. He sat on a log, his hands wrapped around a cup of coffee. With the steam wreathing his face and the brim of his hat shading his eyes, she couldn't read his thoughts. Her husband's moods could take a brooding turn, Clementine had discovered, when he wasn't smiling and laughing and spinning dreams with words. He hadn't opened his mouth in hours, and Nickel Annie, after that morning's loquaciousness, had also fallen silent.
    It was that quiet time of the day anyway, when the earth seemed to be holding its breath, waiting to go from daylight to darkness. The thick white clouds had acquired black streaks along the edges, like bands of mourning crepe, and the wind had died. There would be no stars tonight.
    Clementine settled onto the log beside Gus, not an easy maneuver in her narrow, looped skirt and the long-waisted, stoutly boned cuirass bodice that fit so tightly over her hips. She wished she could capture with her camera the way the box elder's black twisted branches clawed at the blanched sky. But she would have needed to set up a dark tent in order to develop the wet plate immediately after exposure—though she could have done that, for she had such a tent in her trunk. No, the truth was, she feared what Gus would say. She needed to accustom him gradually to the thought that his wife pursued an avocation most would call unconventional, even unseemly, for a woman.
    "I owe it to myself!" Nickel Annie said out of nowhere and so loudly that Clementine jumped. "By damn, I owe it to myself, and I ain't never been a woman to welsh on a debt."
    The skinner lurched to her feet and lumbered over to the wagon. Standing one-footed on the wheel hub, she hefted a barrel out of the bed. She rolled the barrel back over to the fire with the toe of her boot. She set the barrel upright, then hunkered down before it.
    Out of the cavernous pockets of her oilskin duster, she took a chisel and a nail. She pried one of the hoops out of place with the chisel, then bored a little hole in a stave with the nail. A tiny stream of brown liquid spurted out the hole and Clementine caught the tangy whiff of whiskey. Annie picked up her coffee cup, tossed out the dregs, then set the cup below the hole to catch the stream. The whiskey rang as it hit the tin.
    She slanted a broad wink over