Part 2
She did not decide. She was already moving.
She ran to the wagon for the long picket rope and took one of her gray mules by the halter and led him down toward the dugout through water to her knees, then to her waist, warm and pushing hard against her skirts. The lantern swung in her fist. The mule hated it and came anyway.
"Webb!" she shouted. "Cyrus Webb!"
Nothing. Only the roar of the creek.
She tied the rope around the mule's neck and the other end around her own waist, and she waded the last ten feet to the wagon-box door and forced it open against the water.
He was inside, half sitting in the brown flood on his bunk, with his head lolling against the wall. Burning hot when she touched his face. The cough, she thought. The cough that had kept her awake at night across forty feet of grass. Fever, and he had not said a word to anybody.
She got her arms under his and dragged.
He was a long man and heavy, and the water helped and fought her both. She hauled him through the door and up the slope, step by step, with the rope taut behind her and the mule leaning back on it like a good mule should, until they came up out of the water onto the wet grass by her shanty.
Then she sat down hard in the mud and put her head on her knees and shook.
At first light, across the flooded bottom, somebody was screaming. Ned Purdy's claim lay low by the creek, and his shanty was an island, and his young wife was on the roof with the baby in her arms.
Cyrus Webb got up off the wet grass. He could barely stand. He took the gray mules from Hester's hands without a word, and hitched them to her wagon, and drove them into the brown water like a man who had forded the Arkansas in flood more times than he could count. Hester rode beside him and held the lantern and did not argue, for once.
They brought the Purdys out. Then Cyrus Webb climbed down from the wagon seat and fell over in the grass, and did not get up.
He lay in Hester's bed for nine days with a fever.
She dosed him with quinine from her box and boiling sassafras tea and made him drink broth when he did not want it. He was out of his head the first three nights. He talked about freight wagons, and Council Grove, and a mule named Bishop. He called her ma'am. Once he called her Hester.
On the fourth day the fever broke. He opened his eyes and looked at the board ceiling of her shanty, and then at her.
"This is not my dugout," he said.
"Your dugout is in the creek," said Hester. "Along with your stove, your flour, and your dignity. Drink this."
He drank it.
On the sixth day, she read his book to him.
She had fished it out of the flood with the rest, soaked through, and dried it page by page in the sun. It was not a Bible, which surprised her. It was a big black ledger, of the kind a freighter kept his loads in. But the loads had been crossed out years ago. On every page, in Cyrus Webb's careful hand, there was a place and a year.
Council Grove, 1849. Santa Fe, 1852. Fort Union, 1858. Denver, 1861. And on, and on, forty years of places, and not one of them stayed in longer than a winter.
The last line said: Cottonwood Creek, 1889.
Under it, he had written, in fresher ink: Home, if she lets me.
Hester did not read that line aloud.
The first of October was a bright windy day. Hester and Cyrus drove into Guthrie together in her wagon, because his was in the creek, and they did not speak the whole way.
The land office was crowded. The register was a tired gray man named Mr. Garrison behind a long table heaped with papers, who had heard four hundred contests since April and believed nobody.
"Quill against Webb," he read. "Webb contesting. Northeast quarter, Section Nine. Mr. Webb, you claim you settled first?"
Cyrus stood up. He was still thin from the fever. He turned his hat in his hands.
"No, sir," he said. "I do not."
Mr. Garrison looked up.
"Mrs. Quill's stake went in first," Cyrus said. "By a breath. I saw it. I said otherwise because I wanted the land." He cleared his throat. "I withdraw the contest."
The room murmured.
Hester Quill got to her feet.
"That's a lie," she said clearly. "His went in first. He had his stake in the ground while I was still getting down off my wagon seat. I've known it since April. I said otherwise because I wanted the land."
The murmur became a laugh. Mr. Garrison put down his pen.
"In twenty years," he said, "I have heard every lie a man can tell to get a quarter section. This is the first time I've heard two people lie to give one away." He looked from one to the other. "Have you a witness?"
From the back of the room, Ned Purdy stood up.
"I'll witness," he said, red to his ears. "I didn't see the stakes. But I saw the flood. She went into the creek for him on a rope, Mr. Garrison. And when my wife and baby were on the roof, it was the two of them came for us. He was so sick he could hardly sit up." He swallowed. "I said they'd kill each other by fall. I was wrong."
Mr. Garrison sighed and rubbed his eyes.
"The law won't let me give one quarter section to two people," he said. "Not unless they're one household."
The room went quiet. Cyrus Webb looked at the floor. Then, slowly, he looked at Hester.
"Madam," he said, "I believe this claim is ours."
Hester Quill looked at him, with her mule's jaw set and her eyes very bright.
"You believe right," she said.
They were married that afternoon in the Guthrie land office, by a justice of the peace borrowed from the courthouse tent next door, with Ned Purdy and his wife for witnesses and Mr. Garrison for a congregation.
Cyrus withdrew his contest. Hester kept her entry, and in five years they proved up on it together.
That winter they built one house, on the high ground, out of the boards of her shanty and the wagon-box door of his dugout. The forty feet of grass between the two old places they turned into a garden.
He planted the north half. She planted the south. They argued every spring about whose rows were straighter.