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He didn’t answer for a long time. Then, as if from far off, came the answer, “All day…and day before. All night, too. I’ve covered…maybe fifty miles…barefoot.”
She reassessed the gravity of his physical condition and wondered if he’d survive the night.
“I’m mortal thirsty. The river tempts me…but I’ll not risk an arrow through my heart…after all I’ve done…to stay alive.”
“You didn’t drink when you, were running through the river?”
“Didn’t want to waste time…. Stuck my tongue out and caught what drops I could…splashing along.”
“But that’s nonsensical to run through water and come out of it dying of thirst!”
“I chose the water route…to lose my scent. Not to drink.”
“I suppose you’ve learned your lesson now,” she said primly, trying not to feel sorry for him, since he was the immediate cause of her misfortune.
“You could…fetch me water. It might be…worth the risk…to be rid…of your fool conversation…for a few minutes…or forever.”
She gasped at the insult and thought it mighty cheeky of a man-beast on his last legs who, now that she came to think of it, might just have to depend on her for survival—that is, if she was of a mind to help him survive, which, at the moment, she was not.
“And if you’re thinking…of leaving me…to my own devices…I’ll ask you…two questions.”
Since she was thinking just that, she swerved her head and found herself looking into a pair of blue eyes no longer glazed, but still rimed with red and shot with blood.
“Can you…kill and skin…a rabbit?”
“No, but—”
“And do you know…how to start a fire…with two sticks?”
“Well, I’ve never had occasion to try, but how hard could—”
“Then the scissors…in the bag…you’re wearing…just might save…the both of us.”
Surprised, she stared openmouthed at him until she recalled that when he had pressed her to him, he must have felt against his bare thigh the small metal shape in the reticule hanging from her waist. She flushed with embarrassment at the thought of that intimate contact, then turned back around. There was absolutely nothing to say to that, so she resolutely closed her mouth, until it occurred to her that his objective had been to shut her up. But when she opened her mouth again, no words came. So she sat there, speechless, her thoughts colliding so violently and her emotions roiling so precipitously that she was beginning to feel seasick.
The sun shifted. The shadows lengthened in the minuscule glade. The man-beast didn’t move from his seated position at the base of the tree. He might have dozed off. He might have died. Her first thought was that it would serve him right. Her second thought was that she would be without someone who knew how to make a fire and find food. She scooted over to him on all fours to see whether or not he was still breathing.
She peered into his face, which was streaked with dirt and sweat. His eyes were closed and lined with fatigue. His jaw was slack and stubbled with several days’ dark growth, as was his chin. His lips were so parched they were cracked and white in places. She couldn’t risk a glance down the length of his body to check out the feet wrapped in pieces of her shawl, but he was breathing. Definitely breathing.
He was also alert. She had hardly completed her inspection of his face when his hand shot out and grasped her forearm so hard that she yelped involuntarily.
“Don’t,” he said softly, without opening his eyes, “do that again.”
She wriggled her arm, and he let it go. She withdrew to her tree. “Don’t make sure you’re breathing?” she whispered in return. “Or don’t cry out?”
“Both.”
“I’m going to get you some water,” she said. Sioux or no Sioux, she was pretty sure that his body needed water desperately, and she saw the wisdom of keeping alive the means of her possible salvation. She began to rise.
“Not yet,” he said.
Thinking she had not heard him aright, she glanced over her shoulder and craned her neck to see that his eyes were open. He looked up at the sky, around their hiding place, over at the river. “Still too early,” he pronounced.
“But you’re dying of thirst,” she protested.
“I wasn’t kidding…about Sioux arrows.” He lolled his head on his shoulder and looked at her. His expression bordered on the grimly humorous. “I might need you…as much as you…need me.”
“It’s something that you admit it,” she replied, sitting back down.
He grunted. “Just…my luck.”
She was about to respond in kind when she recalled the fifty miles he had covered barefoot. With great restraint, she said, “I’m willing to allow that it is extreme dehydration that makes you disagreeable, so I’ll overlook that remark. About the Sioux, though, I judge it to be a few hours ago already that they came through here. They haven’t been down to the river, at least, not to this part of it, so it seems safe enough to venture out to get you some water and see the damage that has been done at the wagon train.”
“Might have gone…to higher ground…about a half mile away. They have eagle eyes.”
She wasn’t a complete dolt. “They certainly couldn’t shoot me at a range of a half mile.”
He regarded her balefully. “Don’t want them to discover…our hiding place.”
“Oh, I see,” she said. “I didn’t know you meant that the arrow through the heart would come sometime after the trip to the river.” At her most proper, she intoned, “You will let me know, sir, when it is time.”
“Until then, quiet. Just be…quiet.”
She was thirsty and irritable herself and mighty anxious about what lay beyond the grassy slope. But she held her tongue, although the effort nearly killed her. In truth, she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of speaking. He wouldn’t have to tell her twice to shut up, but then she remembered that he had, in so many words, told her twice to shut up.
Thereafter her brain was so busy picking the sore of her lacerated dignity—which another part of her brain knew full well was happily keeping her from contemplating worse thoughts—that she didn’t hear him the first time he said softly, “It’s time.” When he repeated it loud enough for her to register it, she looked around her to see that evening was stealing through their hiding place and veiling their surroundings in moving shadows.
It wasn’t until she was at the river’s edge that she wondered how she would transport water back to him. She looked around for some kind of hollowed-out vessel but no appropriate object caught her eye. She considered filling her bonnet but figured the water would drain out before she could make it back to him. So she settled on her ankle boots, figuring he was too thirsty to be picky. Sure enough, when she handed him two shoefuls of water, he accepted them gratefully and even seemed to acknowledge her resourcefulness with an approving nod.
It was less embarrassing being next to him in the gathering darkness, so she knelt beside him and noted that he didn’t gulp the water down. Rather he restrained himself to take it in measured sips. When he paused at some length, she asked, “Can I go over the slope now?”
He took another spare sip, shuddered with relief. He cleared his throat, then uttered his first full sentence. “It’s best to go before the moon and stars come out.” His voice was deeper and more resonant than she had expected. She moved away from him, and he said, “Crawl, don’t walk.” When she was at the edge of their hiding place, he added, “Watch out for rattlesnakes.”
She squeaked in horror and got down on her hands and knees to crawl through the cover of the grasses and the shifting twilight. The afternoon’s wait had been unbearable, but this last crawl up and over the slope was excruciating. She was hoping against hope that when she judged herself close enough to the scene and lifted her head above the grasses, she would find that—
All was well.
Her heart leapt with joy. The spot where her family’s wagon had been was empty. Meaning that they, and most of the others, had had time to flee. Her joy turned to sorrow as she recognized the one who had not been so lucky.
She had been traveling with her family in a train of ten wagons. Only one was left at the site, broken beyond repair, and the Widower Reynolds lay facedown on the ground next to the wagon, an arrow in his back. She went over to the dead man, bit her lip to stifle her sob, then did what she had to do.
She crawled back down the slope to the shelter of the trees. She made her way over to the man-beast, who had not moved from his seated position, and announced, “I’ve brought you some trousers.”
Chapter Two (#ulink_4a1978d3-778e-58e6-83c0-c2d7ad38b560)
Powell woke from fitful dreams of being chased by white-skinned women and red-skinned women around drawing rooms in Washington, D.C., and over the open prairie.
He cracked his eyes, his chest heaving from dream effort. His bone-dry eyes were soothed to perceive cool, blue moonlight after days of red-seared sunlight. He swallowed once over a painful knot in his throat, but he knew he had had water in the past few hours, and the pain in his throat this night was not as bad as it had been the night before. He figured he was ready for more water now without putting his battered body into shock. He needed a prolonged watering. Mmm. A thorough soaking would be nice.
In a hazy sort of way, he was sorry he wasn’t some kind of plant. He might choose to be a vine, and he imagined his legs, stretched out before him, turning into long tendrils. Then he would have only to wait for it to rain, and the backs of his legs could take root in the earth, and he could drink and drink and drink his fill without having to move an inch.
He breathed in. He breathed out. He came to the conclusion that he wasn’t a plant but an animal, and animals had to move around in order to find food and water. It was a pity. Especially since he had a fuzzy recollection that a source of water ran behind him quite a few yards away, and his feet were burning as if on fire and swollen to the size of huge squash. He couldn’t use his feet to get there, not a chance, but maybe he could slither over to the water. On that thought, he entertained feelings of deep envy for snakes who had no feet to plague them. Fish, too, who moved suspended in gallons and gallons of lovely water. And birds, who could get off their ridiculous unfleshly feet anytime they wanted—
Birds, fish, snakes, vines. He must be thirst-crazed to be having such thoughts, and the only way to restore his sanity was to get himself over to the water. He shifted from his seated position so that he could slide on his belly, and when he moved, he became aware of the lump of coarse material in his lap.
He fingered the lump and determined that it was some sort of clothing. Shirt. No. Trousers, maybe. Yes, trousers. He was reminded of something, and in order to discover what, he had a notion to look around the dark glade where he had taken refuge.
Moonlight dappled the dark and dotted a human form lying a few feet away from him. It was a woman, a white woman, to judge from the outlines of the clothing draped around her reclining body. Her head was pillowed on another piece of cloth—must be her bonnet—and long strands of golden hair turned silver in the moonlight had escaped whatever pins might have been holding them. As pretty as her hair was to contemplate, he was more interested in her skirts and underskirts. Not carnally but practically. He mentally cut up the superfluous yards of cotton she must be wearing and made snares and slingshots and bags and bandages.
He was so cheered by thoughts of all that good material that he began his slithery sliding toward the river. He thought of the woman and couldn’t for the life of him figure out what she was doing in the glade with him.
Then he remembered. She was the woman who had been wearing a shawl. Two things about her stood out in his mind. She was an idiot, and she was beautiful. A beautiful idiot. When he had first seen her, she had been bobbing around a tree, and if he hadn’t known better, he would have thought that she was trying to attract his attention rather than conceal herself. The tree she had chosen couldn’t have been much more than a foot wide, and with her skirts sprouting out on either side of the base, he wasn’t likely to miss her once he had come ashore. That is, if he hadn’t already spotted her when he had rounded the bend in the river.
The river. It was all coming back to him. He winced at the flood of memories of capture and escape, of the brutal bruising his body had endured during his two days of flight. He had come to the riverbank, fearing at first it was a mirage. He had been heading for the Platte River, knowing it was ahead of him as he ran, thinking it would save him if he could just get there before the Sioux got their hands on him again.
He held a pretty good map of the territory in his head, but his hobbling had prevented him from making an accurate estimate of the ground he had paced out on foot. He had had an even better map of the territory on paper, but that map was in the ashes of a sacrificial fire, and he didn’t want to think yet about what had happened to all his surveying equipment. Probably offered to the Teton Sioux god of Wandering Souls, for all he knew. Why hadn’t he had the good fortune to run across the Mandans or the Pawnees, instead of the Tetons? He wasn’t a fur trader or a bison hunter or even a settler. It was just his luck to have run into the Tetons on a bad day in a bad mood.
And it was just his luck to have run into a beautiful idiot who didn’t understand the first thing about life on the frontier. He might even have said as much to her. But she had a pair of scissors in her bag and was wearing yards and yards of useful cloth, and now he had dragged himself over the twigs and the rocks and the sand and was at river’s edge and didn’t have a thing to worry about anymore.
He put his face in the water and drank. It was cold and bracing and provided as exquisite a pleasure-pain as he had ever experienced. He drank some more and then some more. The more he drank the thirstier he became, and he doubted that he could ever drink enough to have enough excess to piss ever again.
When he needed air more than he needed water, he lifted his head, turned his entire body. He picked the absurd flower-printed bandages off his feet, rinsed them out. Then he flopped over so that he could immerse his blazing members in the cold. The sizzling sting of the water on the open sores of his soles nearly killed him, but almost as quickly numbed his wretched feet, so that the overall effect was mercifully, outrageously sensual. He lay on his back in the sand, his feet in the water, his eyes on the clouds drifting across the diamond dust in the night sky, and thought, It’s good to be alive.
With his return to life came the return of his ability to plan for the future. He knew where he was. He knew who he was with. He knew his resources. He knew what he would be up against come morning. His chances didn’t look good.
Still, it was good to be alive.
He yielded to the pleasure of bathing his feet in icecold water and of witnessing the magnificent spill of stars high above. His well-trained eyes picked out the constellations, and he reckoned the lateness of the hour by the hunter Orion walking stiff-legged across the sky. He tried to find the Little Dipper by climbing up its tail from the polestar but lost it in a sky too milky with moonlight.
He could think of ways to improve his lot in life, and the first would be to spirit away the woman with the shawl to the drawing rooms of Washington, D.C. He could picture her perfectly there, chattering all day long with every other woman he had ever known who was exactly like her. He had, alas, no magical powers to transport her from here to there, and the more he accepted her presence in his immediate circumstances, the happier he was that he had a pair of trousers to wear.
Lying naked on the riverbed, he made a mental note to put those trousers on before the first rays of dawn would illuminate him, once again, in all his masculine glory.
Sarah snuffled half-awake to a rumbling in her stomach and a crick in her neck. She squeezed her eyes shut tighter, but her room was flooded with disturbing daylight, suggesting that someone had forgotten to draw the curtains. And her bed was as hard as the earth. She groggily rehearsed the prettily worded complaint she would offer the hostess of the house party she must be attending.
Then she remembered that she was lying on the board she had for a bed in the wagon and regretted having turned down William’s offer of marriage. She sat bolt upright, put a hand to her neck and shook her head to alter the unpleasant illusion that she was seated directly on the ground in a clump of trees in the middle of nowhere and in the company of—
A man-beast who was sitting cross-legged with his back to her. He seemed to be tending something in front of him, but at the groan she emitted upon coming fully awake, he turned and looked at her. She was pleased that he was wearing the trousers she had retrieved for him, but the expression on his face did not encourage her to think that she would find him any more agreeable today than she had the day before.
Nevertheless, she greeted him properly. “Good morning, sir. I trust you are feeling better today than yesterday. May I ask if your feet are improved?”
A look of faint disbelief—or was it amusement?—crossed his features. “I’ll put it this way,” he answered her. “I’m no longer running the risk of fatal infection, but I’m not walking anywhere today. We’ll be staying put.”
The vision of a tedious day stretched before her. She sighed and felt the wreck of her coiffure, then patted the ground for precious pins that might have fallen while she slept. She picked up her bonnet, brushed it off, took out the stockings she had stuffed inside it. She folded these into the waistband of her skirts and rose to her feet, holding the bonnet by its ties so that it dangled from her hand.
“We’ve plenty to do,” he added, turning back around, “so don’t worry about remaining idle.”
This was not the first time he had accurately guessed her thoughts. “Do you fancy yourself something of a mind reader, sir?” she demanded, palming several hairpins.
He shook his head and occupied himself with whatever was in front of him. “No, but it’s plain you haven’t traveled much.” She was sorry that he had turned his back to her, for he missed her rather superior smile. “I’ll have you know that I’ve been to England and back.”
To that he made no response.
“Two years ago it was, and my chaperon was an elderly lady who needed more care than she gave. So I assure you that I have dealt with many demanding situations as a traveler abroad and proved myself equal to all occasions.”
“Ah. Now tell me. What language do they speak in England?”
Poor, ignorant man-beast! “They speak English, sir, and it is a version very similar to that which you and I speak.”
“The dwellings the English inhabit, what manner would they be? And what manner of conveyance do the English commonly use?”
“They live in houses, some of which are like palaces, and they often ride in carriages.”
“I see. Tell me something else. What language do the Sioux speak?”
“Indian, I suppose.”
“What manner of dwelling do they inhabit?”
“I have heard they live in rough tents called tepees.”
“And have you encountered any roads or carriageways in the past few days?”
She caught the man’s drift and was annoyed. “I gather it is your objective to emphasize the dissimilarities in my two traveling experiences,” she said evenly, “but I can tell you that crossing a vast ocean is a very demanding experience.”
“We’re not on the ocean now, we don’t enjoy the protection of a ship with a well-stocked hold, and we aren’t bound for familiar or friendly shores.”
Her response was frosty. “You have made your point, sir.”
This was hardly the ideal beginning to the day, which, she noted, had hardly dawned. She yawned, then stretched out the kinks in her back and neck. At that moment she caught a whiff of something malodorous. “What’s that I smell?”
“Breakfast.”
Approaching him, she looked over his shoulder and puzzled over the sight of a jumble of smoking rocks crisscrossed by sticks. “And what is for breakfast?”
“Tree frogs.”
She thought she detected a slightly gleeful note in his deep voice, like the kind a little boy might use when dangling a slimy worm before a little girl. Although her empty stomach recoiled when she perceived the outlines of the small, shriveled creatures skewered on sticks, she suppressed her revulsion in order to reply knowledgeably, “The French eat frogs. They are considered quite a delicacy.”
He took a stick and held up a wizened carcass. “Want one?”
She declined the French delicacy, citing customary lack of appetite first thing in the morning. She saw him take the frog off the stick and begin to eat it. Feeling nauseous, she looked away and announced her intention to go to the river. She added—with as much dignity as rumpled clothing and a ruined coiffure would allow—that she hoped she could be assured of her privacy.
To her back he said, “It’s all we have until lunch.”
She heard these words as a taunt and decided to defer the problem of finding suitable food in order to satisfy the most immediate of her bodily needs. She continued in the direction of the river. At the edge of the trees, a thought struck her. She paused and said, “You haven’t warned me about arrows in the heart and such, but I note that you’ve kept the fire low, which I suppose is to avoid giving the Sioux a sign that we’re here.”
“I’ve kept the fire low so as not to burn the frogs to a crisp, and I’m thinking the Sioux have no further interest in this area. But now that you mention possible dangers, keep your eye out for the prairie wolf stalking our campsite.”
