Bronwyn Williams - Longshadow's Woman

Carrie had just hung the harness on a nail inside the barn when she heard a noise overhead in the hayloft. Dust sifted down through the cracks, drifting through the shaft of late afternoon sunlight that slanted in through the wide opening. There wasn’t a single thing in that loft but hay left over from last year and Darther’s store of whiskey.

“Oh, lordy, I don’t need this,” she muttered. Bracing her fists on her hips, she tipped back her head and yelled, “You up there—Kie-o-way, or whatever your blasted name is, you just get yourself down here right this minute, you hear me?”

She felt like crying. She felt like kicking something. Blast it all to blazes, she knew her emotions were all over the road, but she had trusted the man! And then, the minute her back was turned, he’d had to go snooping around until he’d found Darther’s jugs that Liam had toted up there last April when they’d won that big pot and spent every red cent of it on Buffalo City moonshine instead of the fresh cow she’d been begging for.

Since then, every time they came home from a successful trip, the two of them would bring down a few jugs and spend the first night celebrating. She would hear them all the way over to the house, laughing and singing and carrying on—shouting and whoo-hawing at one another. It got so she’d find herself wishing the next time one of them climbed up after another jug he would fall off the edge of the hayloft and break his miserable neck, and then she’d have to go and pray over her own wicked thoughts.

Hearing a rustling sound overhead, she set her foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. It might be rats. Usually they got to the grain and left the hay alone, but maybe they were holing up for the winter.

It wasn’t rats. She’d have seen signs of them, because she watched diligently for such things. Besides, she had two good rat snakes that kept the barn pretty well clear of rodents. Either her prisoner was up there, drunk as a crow in a barrel of mash, or Darther and Liam had come back and chased him off.

Or worse.

Carrie didn’t dare think of what worse might mean, she only knew she had another mess to deal with when all in the world she felt like doing was falling into bed and sleeping her miseries away.

There was no sound coming from Peck’s stall. No saddlebags tossed down on Liam’s cot. Liam’s mare wasn’t out back in the paddock, which meant it couldn’t be Liam and Darther up in the hayloft drinking themselves sick.

Which meant…

Well, shoot. She almost wished Darther had come back home. And that said something about her state of mind that didn’t bear close examination, she told herself as she began to climb the steep, narrow ladder to the loft.

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