Longshadow's Woman. Bronwyn Williams

be going back to jail, where they would probably hang him. She couldn’t allow herself to think about him as a man—as a real person. It hurt too much. “Then stay there,” she muttered, turning back to the ladder. “Drink yourself into an early grave. Fall down the ladder and break your fool neck, see if I care!”

      “Aah-choo!” The loud sneeze was quickly followed by three more. One hand on the ladder, Carrie froze. Hearing a brief scuffling sound, she squinted in the darkness and saw—or at least thought she saw—something moving in the small pile of hay that had been scraped into a corner to make room for Darther’s jugs of moonshine.

      Whispering.

      Whispering? He was talking to himself when he couldn’t even spare her so much as a single word?

      “Damn your sorry hide, if you can still crawl, then you’d better get yourself down this ladder! If I have to come after you—!” She’d give him one more last chance, and then she was leaving him to his fate. She had run plumb out of patience. And bellyache or not, she had a full day’s work planned for tomorrow. “You listen here, I don’t care how sick you are come morning, you’re going to be out in that field at first light, you hear me? I paid for your services, and I’m damned well going to have them!”