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carried their meager personal gear, food for the six of them and Jackson's store of trade goods. They helped with the cattle, hunted game and dug the latrines for the camp. They took turns standing guard during the night.
    Maddy was still staying in the Reverend True's wagon, and it seemed that it would be her permanent home. The Trues had sheltered her the first few days out of charity, but that soon changed.
    The Reverend Gabriel and Marguerite True appeared to have no idea of the simplest housekeeping tasks one needed to survive in general, let alone in a wagon train crossing thecontinent. Marguerite had never even seen a campfire, certainly never cooked over one. She had a book called
The Pioneers’ Guide to the Oregon Trail
that told how to bake biscuits in a Dutch oven, but she didn't even know how to make biscuit dough. “A minister's wife has so many other duties to attend to,” Marguerite explained vaguely. The first time Aiden brought her a pheasant he had shot, she took great delight in the beautiful feathers, apparently without realizing there was actual meat under the hat decorations.
    And so the misplaced pair was completely willing to let a thirteen-year-old girl take over their care. Maddy built the fires, cooked the meals, plucked the pheasants, carried water and mended the reverend's clothes. He tore something every other day, for he was as awkward with the ox and wagon as his wife was with the domestic chores. There was barely enough room in the little wagon for the couple to sleep, so Marguerite piled up a nest of quilts underneath each night for Maddy.
    “Those quilts smell so good, Aiden,” she said as she picked up another buffalo chip. “Everything in her chest smells of perfume.”
    Aiden also slept outside, though the blankets Jackson provided were not so plush and hardly perfumed. He didn't mind. He liked falling asleep under the stars. After just this one week of simple food, corn bread and porridge and salt pork, Aiden was starting to feel strong in a way he could barely remember. Jackson led them to creeks or springs each day, so there were wild greens to be had, which quickly cured his bleeding gums. The aches in his knees and shoulders were almost gone too; so much for the scurvy. Maddy's facewas filling out and there was color in her cheeks. The skin around her fingernails, which had been split and bleeding all winter, was now smooth. She looked like a girl who might even be pretty someday.
    “Oh, and listen,” Maddy went on as she slung the bag over her shoulder. “You know those Thompsons? In the two blue painted wagons, with all those children? They have no dead ones at all! Isn't that amazing? Ten alive—Therese, Peter, John, Joseph, Rose, Paul, Monica, Matthew, Catherine and Andrew. Not even any born dead!”
    “There's only ten?” Aiden laughed. Children swarmed around those two wagons like a mess of tadpoles. It really was amazing, though. Aiden didn't know of a single family, even rich people back east, whose children had all lived. Two out of three was thought lucky.
    He saw Doc Carlos walking alone up ahead. Aiden had not talked to him since the first morning they'd met. Carlos hardly spoke to anyone. He traveled with a man named Joby, and the two of them always camped some distance from the rest.
    “What do you know about him?” Aiden asked, nodding in the doctor's direction.
    “Nothing much except that he hates dogs.” Maddy frowned. “The Thompsons’ dog—you know, that spotted hound—was just sniffing round his feet and he went and kicked it clear into yesterday.”
    “That isn't much to know.”
    “I tried to talk to him. I asked him could I read his medical books, but he didn't seem like he was even hearing me.”
    “What about his friend? The one that drives the cart?” Carlos didn't have a proper wagon, just a two-wheeled cart pulled by a pair of mules.
    “That man Joby? Likes to talk well enough but has a brain deficiency.”
    “Like a slow mind?