Free The Grass Widow by Nanci Little Page B

didn’t stop him.”
     
    “You didn’t leave me much room,” Joss said softly. “I opened every door I could think of, Aidan.”
    “And I didn’t take them.” She crossed her arms over her breasts, hiding them from the memory of Slade’s eyes. “I know. I’m not angry at you. I’m just—”
    Joss put the pistol on her chair; hesitantly, she touched Aidan’s arm. “Why’d you keep on with it? A few bullets wasn’t worth you goin’ through that.”
    “It had nothing to do with bullets. I had to know I could stand up to him. I felt—”
    Joss didn’t know what it was that flickered in her cousin’s eyes; she only knew that it was deep and cold. She touched her fingertips in bare suggestion to Aidan’s shoulder, but Aidan turned from her, refusing the solace of her arms. Joss stuck her hands into her hip pockets. “Well, I’m real proud of you,” she said roughly. “Took a parcel more’n twelve rounds ’fore I shot that good.”
    “I had to get away from him.”
    Joss snorted a humorless laugh. “You could rake out Hell with a fine-tooth comb an’ not find his likes in the lot.” She followed Aidan into the kitchen, hating Slade for his disruption of a morning that might have been so sweet, angry at herself for knowing no way to comfort her cousin now that her embrace had been rejected. “I won’t cry to see him off to Montana nor cry if he don’t come back. Pa hates him. Says if that’s what the Cavalry’s comin’ to we’re in for a hard go.”
    She got the kettle from the stove to heat up her dishwater.
    “Sit. I’ll do them,” she said, when Aidan reached for a dish towel; it sounded so abruptly like an order that meekly, Aidan sat. “They got no Goddamned business in the Black Hills anyway. They gave the Sioux that land, like it was ever theirs to give. Now they find gold an’ want it back. They act like that Roman god with two faces, an’
    talkin’ out o’ both mouths at the same time.” She banged the kettle back to the stove. “I got no damn use for soldiers. They’re for the most part young an’ drunken louts from the cities who can’t ride or shoot, but I never met a Indian I didn’t respect.”
     
    She sniffed the dishcloth, rejected it, got a fresh one. “The way folks keep comin’ round here tryin’ to get this place, I got a feelin’ for the natives. I’m a better farmer by a damn sight than ary o’ what’s offerin’ to buy me out, but the sons o’ bitches act like they’re God over me ’cause I’m a woman, same’s they act like they’re God over the Indian. I’m white so they prob’ly won’t just up an’ kill me for it, but they’ll try every other damn thing they can scheme up to get it.” She rattled dishes into the washwater. “I might win. But Crazy Horse is dead. So’s Sittin’ Bull. So are all their people. They just don’t know it yet.”
    Aidan had known Joss was angry beyond the unpredictable flares of her temper; she hadn’t known how deeply ... and it had never occurred to her that Indians might be more than the savages she’d been taught they were, or that Joss might know and respect them. “You’re not afraid of them? The Indians?”
    “They’re a clean, spare people. We’ve cornered ’em like cats in a stall, an’ that’s worth bein’ afraid of. Most cats got sense enough to back off from a fat-tailed tom in his own barn.” She jerked the rinsing kettle from the stove and thumped it beside the sink, and put the plates she had washed into the steaming water.
    “But a soldier’ll just shoot every cat he sees for knowin’ they all got claws.” Her words were part rage, part resignation. “The only land the red man’ll have left when the government’s done is the two-by-six he’s buried in, an’ the white man won’t respect that, just like if I took Ott Clark’s or Thom Richland’s money an’ lit out for California—hell, they’d have beans growin’ up top the Bodetts buried out there an’ them