Now this filthy scum had dared to touch his beautiful wife. Shaking his head to clear it, Shrady struggled to his feet. He flashed a smirking grin as he advanced in a crouch, a hunting knife in his hand. “I’m gonna rip yore guts out, Roberts.” He flung himself forward.
Blade twisted, striking the man’s sternum with the full force of his cocked elbow, and the knife flew from his hand. The trapper fell with a crash, grabbing Blade’s shirt on the way down. They collapsed together and rolled in the dirt. As he scrambled to his feet, Shrady smashed Blade’s head with one ham-sized fist.
Blade tossed his hair from his eyes and smiled. He was going to enjoy beating the sonofabitch to a pulp. Light-footed, he circled his opponent. He knew the man. Big Joe Shrady was a bully. It was lucky they were so close in size, for it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun to wallop a smaller man. And Blade was itching for a fight.
As Shrady swung again, Blade dodged, feinted, and landed a blow to the midsection that rocked the trapper on his heels. Shrady doubled up with a grunt. Without hesitating, Blade followed up with his other fist in his opponent’s face, and the feel of cartilage crunching beneath his knuckles was as satisfying as Shrady’s outraged howl of pain. Blood spurted from the broken nose and rained across the mountain man’s greasy buckskin shirt.
By now they were ringed by a crowd of men. Trappers, soldiers, half-breeds, and Indians circled them, shouting out bets and encouragement. From the corner of his eye, Blade saw Theodora leaning on Haintzelman’s arm. She held her torn nightgown pressed tightly against her breasts, and the sight of the tattered white lace fluttering over her dainty hand enraged him further. By God, he’d kill the bastard!
The two men slowly circled each other and searched for an opening. Holding his injured nose with a beefy hand, Shrady suddenly lashed out with one foot, using all of his massive weight to propel himself toward his opponent’s groin. In one fluid motion Blade feinted and sidestepped. Shrady fell with a crash. Blade pulled him up by the front of his filthy shirt. Viciously, he smashed his fist into the homely, bearded face again and again. A gash split one bristly eyebrow and blood streamed down from Big Joe’s nose. With the strength of a giant, Shrady broke his captor’s hold and rolled free. He lunged for Blade’s shins and brought the captain to the ground on top of him.
They rose slowly, locked in deadly embrace. Shrady held Blade in a bear hug, squeezing the breath from his lungs like a blacksmith’s bellows. The veins in the mountain man’s neck stood out like thick ropes with the awful exertion. The super human pressure against his newly healed ribs brought a jolt of excruciating pain to Blade. Desperately, he pushed up with the palms of both hands against Shrady’s jaw, but the brute continued to squeeze. At last Blade grew limp against his captor, and Big Joe grinned and relaxed. He lowered Blade slightly. In lightning motion, the captain thrust one leg between Shrady’s two massive thighs, diverted his own weight, and toppled the trapper to the ground. The force of their fall knocked them apart. Blade somersaulted, recovered, and turned. Never losing the force of his momentum, he jumped on Shrady feet first. There was the cracking sound of bone sundering from bone. As Blade pulled him to a sitting position, Shrady’s right arm hung uselessly at his side. Holding him up and hitting him over and over, Blade pounded the thick features with his fist till the unconscious man’s head flopped back and forth with each savage blow.
Through a haze of total, blinding rage, Blade heard someone shouting at him. “That’s enough, Blade. He’s had enough!” Blade felt his arms being imprisoned from both sides. He was unceremoniously dragged from the trapper’s crumpled form by Zeke and his father, who held him in a relentless grip. Even as they pulled him across the grass, Blade continued to struggle, trying to get back to the man lying motionless on the ground.
“It’s okay, Blade,” Zeke shouted in his ear. “He cain’t feel nothin’ nohow. Might as well wait till he’s healed, and ya can whop him ag’in, if ya want ta.”
“Let go. I’m all right.” Blade shook off their arms and steadied himself. Panting, he looked around at the crowd, now silent with awestruck admiration. His voice was hoarse and rasping when he spoke, but loud enough to be heard by his entire audience. “If any man here so much as touches my wife, I swear to God, I’ll kill him.”
He turned and walked toward her. She stood beside Peter, watching his unsteady approach, her green eyes enormous in her pale, terrified face.
Theodora looked up at her battered husband. He was bleeding from a cut on his cheekbone; one eye was already starting to swell. Splotches of blood and dirt were liberally spattered across his deerskin shirt and leggings. His knuckles were raw and split. The sight and sound of the two big men fighting with such terrible violence had shaken her deeply. Her heart thumped against her ribs as she took a step toward him and lifted her hand to his face. “Blade, you’re h—”
He jerked his head back to avoid her touch. His eyes glittered with a rage born of fear for her. Grabbing her upper arm, he pulled her roughly along with him. When he reached his empty tent, he shoved her through the open doorway. “Get the hell in there and stay in there,” he shouted in fury as he entered behind her.
Theodora stiffened at his words. Head high, she stared at him in indignation. “How dare you speak to me like that!”
He met her challenge head-on. “I’m sleeping in your tent with you, Theodora, whether you like it or not. By God, it’s no wonder you were attacked! You can’t set up in a separate tent! Every man in camp saw you ride in beside me. They know damn well what happened while we were gone. If you’re not considered my woman, under my protection, every horny male in camp will be after you. You can’t possibly believe you can come back after all those days and pretend nothing’s changed. Even you can’t be that naive.”
She felt the blood drain from her face. She tried to speak and almost choked on her fury. Hauling air into her suddenly empty lungs, she straightened to her full height. “Very well, Captain Roberts. You can stay in my tent, giving me the benefit of your generous protection. Though after what just happened I can’t really believe anyone would be crazy enough to try such a thing again. You may be able to intimidate every man in this camp, but you’re not running my life and you’re not making my decisions for me. From here on out, you’ll sleep in your own bedroll and I’ll sleep in mine.” She turned to face the wall of the tent and then swung back. Her lower lip trembled when she recalled the fact that he’d just prevented her from being brutally raped. Her voice softened. “And thank you for saving me. That much I do appreciate.”
A muscle jumped in his cheek as he clenched his jaw in an apparent effort to regain control of his temper. His voice was low and terrible, and he spoke through gritted teeth. “Sit down, Theodora. And don’t say another word.”
He strode to the tent opening and stood just outside. “O’Fallon,” he bellowed. When the sergeant raced up to him, he spoke more calmly, though his clipped words were still raw with anger. “Raise my wife’s tent again.”
* * *
In Captain Blade Roberts’s tent the next morning the collapsible table was covered with papers and maps. Camp chairs were scattered across the grassy floor, attesting to the meeting of the expedition’s commander and his staff that had just broken up. Now only two men, Bonniville and Blade, remained seated at the table.
“How’s the beaver trade going?” Blade asked as he puffed with enjoyment on his cheroot.
His guest shrugged in resignation. “For two years now the Saint Louis prices have remained too low to pay a profit.” He smiled suddenly. “But you and I both know that wasn’t why I came to these mountains in the first place.”
“I take it you’ve been able to gather the information the War Department sent you out here to get?”
“Not quite all of it, but enough to have made this venture well worthwhile. The site of my fort was carefully chosen. It’s in the strategic center of the mountain area. Any expedition into British territory would start from right here.”
&n
bsp; Blade flicked the ash from his cigar and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “And you’d be directly in the path of any campaign moving out of the Columbia region toward the Americans’ trapping grounds. Your fort can hold the western approach to South Pass and cover all the routes to Pierre’s Hole, the Snake River, and the Great Salt Lake. Not to mention the route to California.”
Blade stood and wandered around the table to peer down at a large map. “The War Department has no information whatever about a pass through the Sierras. Our knowledge stops at the Great Salt Lake. The Secretary of War has ordered me to discover if such a route even exists.”
Bonniville looked up at Blade. “I’ll be sending a communique back to General Macomb at the War Department. One of my men, George Warfield, will hand carry it all the way to Washington. You can send your report to the Bureau of Topographical Engineers with him.” He rubbed his short, stubby hands across his knees. “Everything go all right on the way here?”
“Not quite.” Blade leaned over the table and rested his hands on the map. “As you know, we lost our cartographer less than four weeks after leaving Leavenworth. He died of cholera—I think.”
“What makes you question it?”
Blade scowled. “It’s not common for only one man in camp to come down with cholera, even though we were extremely careful. Gordon drank from a buffalo wallow while he was lost on the prairie. It’s possible he was the only one exposed to tainted water. If it weren’t for the mysterious accidents, I wouldn’t have questioned it.”
“Accidents?” Bonniville’s brow furrowed in a deep frown. The captain stood back from the table, picked up a wooden ruler, and tapped it thoughtfully against the map. “Yes, to my wife. A cut saddle strap while she was crossing the Big Blue, a rattlesnake on her bedroll at Fort Laramie, and a buffalo stampede on the Laramie Plains caused by a sudden, unexplained noise. Even the attack on her by Shrady could have been a setup. I was so damn mad yesterday, it didn’t even occur to me until I’d almost killed the sonofabitch that someone could have paid him to rape and murder her. He’s under guard right now. Unfortunately, he hasn’t regained consciousness since the fight. As soon as he does, I’ll find out whether or not he was a hired assassin.”
“Jesus!” Bonniville stood up. His chair teetered back and forth behind him. “Why would anyone want to kill Theodora Gordon?”
“Roberts.”
At the blank look of confusion on Benjamin’s face, the captain added, “Her name is Roberts now. We were married in my village.”
“Yes, of course. I heard. Congratulations.” The stocky man paced across the tent floor, then turned. “Do you want to send her back? I have a pack train of furs leaving for Saint Louis tomorrow morning.”
Blade came around the table and sank into a chair. Holding the butt of the cigar in his fingers, he rubbed his eyes with the palms of both hands. “I don’t know. I suspect the bastard is a soldier from a heel mark we found at Laramie. But I can’t be sure. It’d be possible for one of the rear guard to sneak back and get to her once the pack train leaves, though not likely. I feel most comfortable when she’s within eyesight, but I can’t watch her twenty-four hours a day.”
“Why not let her decide?”
“She doesn’t know about my suspicions. As far as she’s concerned, they were just unlucky accidents. I don’t want her living in fear.”
“I see.” Bonniville sat down beside him. “Why not just give her the option of returning with the fur train? Then make sure that after it leaves tomorrow, every man in your expedition checks in every four hours for the next two days.”
“You may be right. I hate like hell to think of sending her back, but if I were certain it was for her own safety, I wouldn’t hesitate to do it.”
Benjamin clapped the captain’s shoulder. “Let’s hope Shrady regains consciousness. And if he does, that he’s willing to talk.”
“He’ll talk.”
Bonniville met Blade’s cold, hard eyes and shuddered.
As wide as seventy miles across in some spots, the valley of the Green River was a sagebrush plain, treeless except for the cottonwoods that lined the riverbanks. Now, on the twelfth day of August, though many of the trappers had already departed, enough remained to continue to give the rendezvous site the appearance of a shivaree.
Because of this rowdy atmosphere, Theodora was confined to her quarters, except for breakfast mess, unless accompanied by Peter Haintzelman. Blade had been busy all that morning with the job of reprovisioning the expedition. Following his work on the maps with Zeke and his father the night before, he’d come into her tent after she’d fallen asleep. He hadn’t disturbed her and was gone when she woke. After the midday meal, a second meeting with his staff, in which Peter was to be included, was scheduled. It was expected to stretch well into the afternoon. But Theodora’s father-in-law offered to take her on a plant-collecting excursion. Jacques Roberts seemed to delight in the idea of spending time with her and sharing her interest in the flora and fauna of the valley.
“Call me ‘Father’ or ‘nihoe’ or ‘mon père,’ ” he told Theodora in his booming baritone as they rode out of camp together. “Use whatever language you want. I’ll answer to any of them.”
As they rode, he was full of questions about her. How she had come to be part of a scientific expedition, where she was raised, who her parents were. Every answer she gave seemed to please him. “Well, if you aren’t just about perfect, mafille, I don’t know who is,” he shouted at her from his mount, riding beside her. The fact that she and his son weren’t speaking to each other didn’t seem to bother him in the least.
He led her up the sheltering slopes of the Wind River Range foothills, past scrub oak, piñon, and juniper trees to groves of small ponderosa pines. Jacques Roberts showed the same love of the land as his son. He pointed out a young kit fox, its fur still reddish in the late-afternoon sun, and a prairie falcon, its spotted plumage almost unnoticeable as it sat on a high rock and watched for its prey.
They rode higher, through the needle and buffalo grass into stands of white fir and blue spruce. Far off, they saw a small herd of mule deer at the edge of an aspen grove. “The grass between the large trees offers the mule deer the best forage,” he explained to her. “Then, when enemies come near, they can bound off into the shadows of the forest. In another hour or so they’ll come out and feed on the meadow clover.”
He helped Theodora gather juniper berries and wild rose hips, alum root and kinnikinnic for her collection. She plied him with questions, committing everything he told her to memory so she could write it down in her journal.
Coming back from the ride elated with her new treasures, Theodora saw Whirlwind Woman riding through camp beside a trapper. The young woman was mounted on a spirited black and white pony, with a high pommeled saddle decorated with beading, fringe, and rows of brass tacks.
“I know that girl,” Theodora said softly to her companion. “She’s married to a brave from Blade’s village.”
“Not anymore,” Jacques replied in his loud voice. “Andy Pickens bought her last night from a nasty young buck called Black Wolf. Paid four horses, a pack mule, two rifles, and a fine hunting knife for her.”
Theodora stared in shock as the couple drew near. Whirlwind Woman sat straight and tall, her beautiful pitch-black hair flowing down her back, her dark eyes flashing with pride and happiness. The young, sandy-haired mountain man beside her watched her with unconcealed lust. He had dressed her in a blouse and skirt made of imported St. Louis broadcloth, for which he must have paid an exorbitant price. She was covered with necklaces of elk teeth, and her accessories included scarlet leggings, new moccasins with intricate beading, and even a silk handkerchief tied loosely around her neck.
“That trapper bought Whirlwind Woman?” She couldn’t keep the astonishment from her voice.
Pickens and his new bride were right in front of them by now. “How can she look so happy after her husband has just sold her to anothe
r man? When her family finds out about this, they’ll be humiliated.”
“Not likely,” Jacques replied, as he scratched under his long black beard. “Her status with her people is higher than ever now. She’ll be treated well by Pickens, and I got the feeling Black Wolf wasn’t too good to her. Divorce is accepted by the Cheyenne. Since a man can beat his wife to discipline her, divorce allows the woman a way out of an abusive situation. If she finds a man who’ll treat her better, she can leave and go with him. Seems only fair to me.”
“What about Mr. Pickens? Will he treat her well?”
“Oh, Andy’ll treat her like the queen of England. He’s only been out here a year. This’ll be his second winter. In the months to come she’ll help him repair his traps, show him where to place them, clean and tan his hides, cook his meals, and sew his clothes. During the long winter nights, when they’re snow bound in her lodge, she’ll keep him company. She’ll probably teach him a little Cheyenne and he’ll teach her English.” Jacques’s voice held the mellow sound of sweet reminiscence. “That’s what it was like with you and Blade’s mother wasn’t it?”
He smiled at her perceptiveness. “His mother was the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen. She had hair the color of midnight that hung down past her waist. Tiny feet and hands. And bright black eyes.”
“What was her name?”
“Morning Sun Comes Softly. I just called her ‘Morning.’ ” His hearty laugh burst out suddenly. “When we got out of bed, I’d say ‘Morning, Morning.’ ” Then his smile was gone, and a faraway look came over his strongly chiseled features. “But mostly I’d talk to her in my own language. When Blade was young, he’d speak French during the winter in our lodge and Cheyenne in the summertime, when his mother would take him to visit her family. She died when he was twelve. That’s when I took him back to New Orleans.” Jacques gave a deep sigh.
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