Doobie had not been paying attention to anything but drinking the poison, but as the clawing got sharper, and it felt as if her insides were being ripped by claws and squeezed together at the same time, she happened to see a dead rat lying at the edge of the water, only a few yards away. Its mouth was open, and she could see its ugly teeth.

It lay with most of its body in the water, and its brown fur was wet. Maybe the rat had died from eating some of the very poison she was drinking down.

In just a few minutes, Doobie hoped, she would be as dead as the rat. She might roll into the river, just as it had. She might be wet too, when people found her. But she didn't want that, she didn't want to be found all wet and messy.

She began to crawl farther from the water. The bright sun began to affect her. She wanted to hide her eyes from the sun. She began to curl up, in order to hide her eyes. But when she curled up, the pain in her gut became unbearable. She tried to straighten up again, but the pain in her belly was now just as bad, no matter how she lay or sat, no matter whether she was curled or straight.

For a second, Doobie wanted to give up.

She wanted to run to a doctor and have him give her something to stop the pain. But she couldn't run, or even stand. She began to roll around and had soon rolled back down to the river's edge. One of her feet knocked over the can of rat poison, but not much spilled because there wasn't much poison left in the can. Doobie had eaten or drunk most of what had been in it. She didn't feel good at all anymore; she didn't feel anything but a clawing, needling pain. She tried to cry out, but the poison gummed in her mouth so that she could only make a weak sound, a sound no one pa.s.sing would even hear.

Doobie continued to make a weak sound, no louder than a rat's squeak, until her voice stopped and she made no sound at all.

On the coldest night, the night of the great ice storm, Maria thought she and all the women might freeze. The fires she made sputtered and blew out. The two old Mexican women were almost dead anyway. Maria had to go back and find them.

One of them had fallen three miles behind the group. Maria hunted wood and kept the fires going, but ice had covered everything, and her hands and feet got very cold.

"Don't make me go no farther. I'd rather give up and die," Cherie said. Her real name wasn't Cherie, but she was so cold, and had stopped using her real name so long ago, that it didn't matter what it had been. Patrick, the saloonkeeper, had brought her to Crow Town, only to abandon her for another woman. She had been there five years, and she'd had to struggle so hard that she lost her memory of other places.

The women were convinced that they would all die. They didn't believe they would live to reach the railroad, and several of them had ceased to care.

Gabriela and Marieta were numb, their feet so cold they couldn't feel them. Beulah kept trying to stop. Maria had to push her and prod her to keep her going.

They had not even crossed the Pecos yet; Maria kept angling away from it, hoping for a warmer day before she had to try to bring the women across.

She had fixed her mind on saving the women, though she didn't know any of them. Getting them safely to the railroad had become important to her. She had taken them out of the town, even though she hadn't wanted to at first. But she had accepted their need to go, and now she felt she must supply the will to keep them traveling, despite the bitter cold. She herself had often had to search for will, in hard times. When the men from Texas pretended to hang her, she had tried to make her will stop, so she could die. She had wanted to elude them, that way. Again, when they were degrading her, she would have liked for her will to stop. She would have rather not been alive anymore. And, as she had lost hope with her husbands, each in turn--except for Benito, she had never lost hope with Benito-- she had sometimes wished in the night that she could just stop breathing, and not be there in the morning and have to get out of the bed in hopelessness to deal with the man who was making her hopeless, week after week and year after year.

It was in those times that Billy Williams had proven himself a true friend. He would cajole her over to the cantina, make her drink until she felt like dancing, or dance until she felt like drinking. Somehow, Billy could make her laugh.

That was a rare thing too, for a man to be able to make her laugh. With women, Maria laughed; with her children, she laughed; but rarely did she laugh with a man. She only laughed with Billy Williams.

The lack of laughter in her life was a thing Maria held against men. She felt she had the temperament to be a happy woman, if she was not interfered with, too much. She knew that it was her fault that she let men interfere with her; yet if she didn't, there was nothing, or at least there was not enough. She wanted a man to lay with, except if she wanted a man once, she would want him many times. She liked to take pleasure from men, and liked to give it, but when she gave men that pleasure, they came to need it and then to resent her because they needed her. When that happened, the interfering began. Maria didn't know why men resented the very women who gave them the most pleasure, and gave it generously. It was foolish, very foolish, of men to resent the good that came from women. Still, they did.

Thinking of Billy Williams, and all the times he had made her laugh, kept Maria's mind off the icy ground and the sheaths of ice on the mesquite limbs she broke off to keep the fire going. She made three fires, and kept them all going herself. The women were too tired and numb to move. She put the women in a little triangle, between the fires.

But it was bitter cold, and even three fires were not enough. It was too cold, and the women were too tired and broken. Maria knew she had to do something else, or the women would give up and begin to die.

She thought about the things she talked about with the women of her village, when they were washing clothes together or cooking for a little fiesta. Those were times when she and the women were apt to get bawdy and talk about the embarra.s.sments or the rewards of love. None of the women huddled between the fires looked as if they had known love recently. Men might have used them, especially the young ones, but that was different. The women might not be able to remember a time when love had been an exciting thing, but Maria decided she wanted to make them try. It was a long time until dawn, and they had nothing but three small, sputtering fires to get them through the night. There had to be something more. Maybe she could get the women to tell stories about their lives.

Maybe the memory of times when life had been exciting would make them want to live through the freezing night.

"Tell me about your first man," Maria said.

She addressed the question to Beulah.

"What?" Beulah said. She thought she must have heard Maria wrong.

"I want to know about your first man," Maria said.

Then she looked at Cherie.

"I want to know about yours, too," she said.

"My first man was a vaquero. He came riding into town, and when he got off his horse and walked to the cantina, his spurs jingled. From the time I heard his spurs, I knew I wanted to be his woman." "Oh, Lord," Cherie said.

Maria waited. Marieta and Gabriela paid no attention; they had not even heard Maria's words. But the oldest woman in the group, a thin, old woman named Maggie, showed a spark of interest. Maggie had been one that Maria had to go back for several times. Once, Maria had found her kneeling by a little bush. She was crouched behind the bush as if she expected it to keep the cold wind from biting her.

Yet Maggie had recovered a little. She looked at Maria with curiosity.

"Did you get the vaquero?" Maggie asked.

"Yes, he was my first husband," Maria said.

"We had good times--but then, he got mean. I still remember the sound of his spurs, the first time I saw him. When I think of him now, it's the spurs I remember." "I was married to a circus man, first," Maggie said. "Mostly, he was a juggler. He could keep seven barbells up in the air at the same time, when he was sober." "Where did you live?" Maria asked.

"Boston, for a little while," Maggie said.

"Then he took me to New Orleans. He was going to marry me, but he never did. Them mosquitoes in New Orleans was bad. I'd get so I wanted to drown myself, rather than be bit by them mosquitoes." "They're bad in Houston, too," Beulah said. "It's swampy down there in Houston." "Jimmy drunk too much to be a juggler," Maggie said. "He'd drink all night and then the next day, he'd miss two or three of them barbells." Maggie chuckled, at the memory.

"Them barbells are heavy," she said. "I couldn't even juggle two. If one was to crack me in the head, I wouldn't be able to walk straight for a week." "You can't go off with men and expect them to marry you," Beulah said. "That's the mistake I kept making. Now, here I am, an old maid." Several of the women looked at her when she said it. Beulah realized that her last remark must have sounded a little odd. She smiled at herself.

"Well, I mean, I never married," she explained.

Maggie, now that she had begun to talk, wasn't interested in listening to anyone else.

"Jimmy cracked himself in the head so many times that he got where he couldn't walk the tightrope," she said. "He wasn't no tightrope walker anyway, but he wanted to be the star of the show. I told him to stay off the dern tightrope, but he didn't listen to me. I started up with a trick rider about that time. Jimmy found himself a high yellow woman, but she had a temper, and Jimmy didn't want nothing to do with women who had tempers." "Didn't you have a temper?" Maria asked.

"No, I was just a girl then," Maggie said.

"I was all in love, and I wanted to do whatever Jimmy wanted me to. I didn't put up no fight, but that high yellow woman did." All the women, even Marieta and Gabriela, were listening to Maggie. Maria had not expected it to be Maggie who talked; she thought Maggie was too far gone. But that proved to be a misjudgment. Maggie had some spirit left. She knew everybody was listening to her, and she liked the attention.

"What was the trick rider like?" Maria asked.

"He was just a trick rider," Maggie said.

"He could stand on his head on a horse, with the horse running full speed, but he wasn't no good with women. I got tired of the circus life and ran off with a smuggler. He was my first husband, and he took me to sea. We'd be rollin' around in one of them narrow bunks and sometimes we'd roll one way and the ship would roll another, and we'd go sailin' right out of that bunk." She cackled at her own memory. "That was forty years ago, that I married Eddie," Maggie said. "I'm surprised I can still remember him. He got caught smuggling n.i.g.g.e.rs, and they hung him." "Was it a crime to smuggle n.i.g.g.e.rs?" Cherie asked. "I thought back then you could buy them and sell them any time you wanted to." "You could, but Eddie wasn't buying them," Maggie said. "He was smuggling stolen n.i.g.g.e.rs.

I can still remember them n.i.g.g.e.r women, howlin' down in the bottom of that ship. Eddie and the boys would lash 'em good, trying to get them to shut up when they was coming into port. But they would keep on howlin'.

That was how Eddie got caught. I told him he ought to just smuggle buck n.i.g.g.e.rs. The bucks didn't howl as much. But Eddie never listened to me, and he got his neck stretched, as a result." "Men don't listen," Beulah agreed. "I could have made Red Foot rich, if he'd listened to me when we were in the saloon business, in Dodge. I told him it was time to go to Deadwood. They say nearly everyone who opened a saloon in Deadwood in those days got rich.

There's just more loose money where there's miners.

"But we come to Crow Town instead," she added.

"Red heard it was booming, but there sure wasn't no boom when we got there." Maggie was so eager to talk by this time that she could hardly check herself and wait for Beulah to shut up.

"The circus was in St. Louis when Eddie got hung," Maggie said. "I went up to Vicksburg on one boat, and then I rode on another boat that had a train on it." "A train?" Cherie asked. "Why would a train be on a boat?" She decided the old woman was telling lies and nothing but lies. She had thought as much back in Crow Town, too.