The wagon train had been moving for three weeks when the merchant Holloway finally closed his ledger and admitted what everyone already knew — the drought had ruined them all.
Elias stood at the edge of the camp, staring up at the firmament, where a vast purple dusk swallowed the last light of the sun. No clouds. There had been no clouds for thirty days.
Behind him, arguments flickered like small fires. Several settlers demanded a refund from Holloway for the seed and grain they had purchased before departing Missouri. They wanted their money returned, every cent, claiming the merchant had guaranteed fertile land and reliable rains. Holloway shook his head and walked away.
What troubled Elias more deeply was what he witnessed at the evening meal. Without discussion or formal decree, the newer emigrants had begun to segregate themselves from the original settlers, setting their cookfires apart, eating apart, sleeping apart — divided by nothing more than timing and suspicion. Elias had seen this before. Fear always found a wall to build.
He filled his bowl with the thin rabbit stew and sat beside old Martha, who had crossed two frontiers already and feared neither drought nor men.
"Will it break us?" he asked.
She looked at the sky. "Nothing out there means to satiate our hunger or our pride," she said. "The land gives until it doesn't. But people — people can choose differently."
Elias nodded, scraped his bowl clean, and walked toward the divided fires. He sat down between them, exactly in the middle, and waited to see who would follow.