Chapter 10: Souls Gather

When Sam's group rode out of Kent, they left a lot of bodies, and they left them where they lay, except for two. Conway Kendall was buried in the old ghost town's cemetery with no service and little ceremony. They left a simple wooden marker that gave his name and the years he was born and died. Only Taegan spent any time there once the marker had been placed with Jenna waiting patiently for him behind the low wooden fence whose worn and falling pickets marked the edge of the town's plot.

Elder Hobson was left strapped to a post in the center of town in front of the church. There was a note on this body, one from Sam Kendall.

When you thought to terrorize my family, I KNEW.
When you thought to subvert my grandson, I KNEW.
When you were chosen as the agent who opposed me, I KNEW.
When you sent your demon to take me, I KNEW.

Come for me then where you know you must.
There will you see, and then will you KNOW.

"That seemed a bit of a taunt, don't you think?" Carlos observed when they had a moment alone on the road.

"It was what it had to be," Sam answered after much thought. "He has his voices to listen to as I have mine."

"You know I hear echoes when you speak, but I don't know what they have said or what they will say."

"They have stopped speaking ... I've told you that, but what I didn't say before now is that they no longer needed to speak for me to hear."

"What have you heard with the echoes silent?"

"The future, the present, the echoes of the others and the echoes of someone I haven't spoken of before. I'll speak of that one soon enough."

"I will remain patient."

"As you always have, my friend."

The road out of Kent danced between canyons and ravines to the east and west, threading their way south and west to the town of Shaniko. This ghost town was no bigger than Kent had been, but here the road south split. They could go straight south on highway 218 to Antelope before turning west and following what had been called the Antelope Highway, or they could continue to follow highway 97 to the west through Shaniko Junction to Axford, where 97 turned south, eventually meeting up with the Antelope Highway just north of Willowdale.

The way was flatter and straighter following highway 97, and Sam and his riders had chosen it without hesitation, setting a hard pace, wanting to put some distance between them and the massacre in Kent. They didn't keep anyone ahead of them as a scout, but Ghost did drop back and keep an eye and ear out on the road behind them.

Kent to Shaniko was more than a day's ride, even a hard day's ride. The pace was too quick, and the demeanor of the party too hard, to allow for idle talk. Now and then Carlos would point out something to those nearby. Something worth knowing about the trail or about the wildlife.

For a change they spent the night on the open plain, each of them in their trail blankets, a few with companions for warmth. For Jenna and Taegan, it was a chance to do a little exploring, their hands finding each other under the blankets, touching, probing, pleasing.

"Stop," Taegan whispered eventually.

"What?" Jenna asked, afraid she'd hurt him somehow.

"I'll make a mess in these blankets soon if you keep that up. Neither of us wants to have to get up in the middle of the night to get things cleaned up, do we?"

"No," Jenna giggled. "To be honest, You're getting me a little sloppy feeling down there too, and I was beginning to worry that I wouldn't have enough clean panties to make the trip."

"So, time out for now?"

"Yeah..." Jenna sighed, "but we're building up quite a stack of mutual IOUs."

"We'll just have to work hard to pay them off later."

"When we get someplace with hot water. Its hard enough to go as far as we have and stop. I want to do more but I want to be able to feel clean after."

"Okay," Taegan said with a slight giggle of his own. "I'll wash your back and you can wash mine."

"Oh yeah, that too, but I'm thinking of clothes washing more than bathing. Opportunities to do laundry have been a little hard to come by out here. I've been enjoying this enough that the pair of panties I'm wearing are going to need changing in the morning for sure, and I don't have many clean pairs left."

"And that's my fault?" Taegan teased.

"Truth? It's been your fault pretty often since I was about twelve."

The conversation died out, as they snuggled together to sleep. A keen-eared observer might have noted that theirs was not the only whispered conversation that night, nor were they the only two whispering promises of what the days ahead might bring.

-oOo-

The climb up out of the canyon and back onto the plains was complete by the time the train reached the ghost town that was Gateway. The engine had been running almost non-stop for three days and there was some concern about running out of water for the boilers once they left the river. The engineer figured they could reach Bend without a problem, and in fact they had topped off their tanks hours before while they were still running alongside the river.

"We should stop here and let everyone off to stretch their legs," the firetender relayed this message back from the engineer.

"Ask Walt if it can wait until we get to Madras," Greta asked him. " That's where we need to be before we can feel safe."

"Okay," the young man disappeared back towards the front of the train.

Madras was where they would meet Sam, she knew. Madras was where they would find freight cars that could carry the horses of those who would be joining them. Madras might be where the newest member of their group would be born. They had two women nearly at term in their pregnancies, and one of them was threatening to deliver early.

Few of the passengers were soldiers, but everyone of a certain age in Columbia had undergone the PMR training. Beyond that, the Kendall Clan and their associated friends and allies were pretty serious about requesting additional training and volunteering for the minimal two years of service. It was a sign of the times that most of them completed that service by the time they were fifteen. It was also a sign of the times that the clans didn't distinguish between genders when it came to that service.

Greta had no problem finding people qualified to stand a watch with a weapon in their hands at the Madras train station. Walt Samuels, the engineer who led their train crew took six armed young men into the train yard to find the freight cars they would need, and in some ways they were lucky, they found freight cars very quickly, and a good number of those cars were equipped for cattle. It took very little to make them ready to hold horses.

"We've got the cars Mrs. Kendall, but we don't have the hay for feed or bedding. What was in the cars was pretty well rotted or dried to nothing."

"It shouldn't be a problem, Walt," Greta told the older man, "we'll be able to stop wherever we need to to feed the horses, and they'll be happy to eat whatever wild grasses and other ground cover we can find."