Jack Marston is at a low point in his life. His family is dead, Beecher's Hope is in ruins, and he has nothing left to live for. Most days he spends so drunk he can barely remember anything, he kills and robs people at will, and there isn't an ounce...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
If he was being honest with himself, Jack could not understand a single word of the Mass on Sunday. The whole church service was performed entirely in Spanish, a language he had a barely rudimentary understanding of, and his mind raced the whole time with thoughts of Eva and with preparation for the journey ahead of them.
The past few days had been largely uneventful. Since his talk in the courtyard with Mother Superior Calderon, Jack had been taking plenty of time to become aquainted with life around the convent, and to procure the necessary provisions for the journey to West Elizabeth, starting with a mount for Eva.
As he expected, it was not easy, and the animal he chose was a mule by the name of Amarillo, named for his odd, yellowish-brown coat. He was a large mule, likely bred from a mammoth donkey and a draft horse, but he was calm and even-tempered for a mule, perfect for someone like Eva. Jack had no doubt she'd have the beast eating from her hand in no time.
Buell certainly seemed to worship the ground she walked on. Eva would visit him often to give him carrots or apples or small lumps of sugar, whenever she could get them from the kitchen. It had gotten to the point where Buell would nicker when he heard the stable door open, and then immediately snort in annoyance when he saw it was Jack or somebody else coming to visit him, and not her. It was really starting to annoy Jack, in a good-natured sort of way.
But Eva had also seemed to take to Amarillo the mule just as easily when she met him. She and Jack had even been out riding through the desert around Las Hermanas a few times to get her used to it, and she had an undeniable knack for horses and riding that seemed to peek out from her hardened exterior the longer she spent in the saddle. Those early horseback rides were the first time Jack ever felt that he truly saw a bit of the real Eva, if she had not been subjected to such horrible things throughout the course of her life.
She still hardly ever smiled, at least not when she thought Jack might be looking, but he could tell by the light in her eyes and the tender way with which she handled the animals that she wasn't entirely consumed by fear anymore, at least not as much as she had previously been.
There was still a look like a frightened deer that crossed her face, however, when Jack accidentally made a sudden movement in her immediate vicinity, or if he got too close to her. But also, curiously, she had the same look when she lost track of Jack and thought she was alone and exposed. It seemed she would be equally frightened either way if he tried to touch her or left her alone completely.
They still slept in the same room at night, although Jack often left midway through his slumber to take a quick smoke break or drink some whiskey out in the courtyard. It was often the only way for him to calm down when he was strung out from his nightmares. They still occurred every night, and he had no idea how to make them stop.
Take the previous night, for instance. He'd barely been asleep for an hour before his brain recalled the memory of the first time he'd seen Edgar Ross, that day by the Dakota River in 1899. He could feel Ross's eyes watching him with a beady, evil light as his dreams turned to memories of hearing men shout at each other, of his father wearing a striped prison suit as he and Uncle Arthur shouted at Uncle Dutch. Then, the dream had turned, again, to the riverbank a year ago, when Jack had shot Edgar Ross. As it always did, the dream then caused Jack to wake up in a cold sweat.
