And beneath their callous exteriors, they held each other in a strange respect, tempered at times with a curiously erotic attraction. Wickedness attracted to vice.
“I need trackers, horses, supplies. He’s ahead of me, but if I can hire Hyde in St. Joe, he won’t get away. Neither will get away. Hyde can track anything.”
“Give me a figure and get packed. I’ll have the bank draft ready when you come down. They are not to escape this time. Understand?”
Yancy nodded briefly. He understood perfectly.
“How far ahead of you are they?” Millicent briskly inquired, already moving toward her desk.
“A day or so by the time I’m organized, but Hazard’s not going to be able to travel fast with her.”
Millicent’s silk skirt brushed the carpet as she half turned back. “What makes you so sure they’re heading west?” she pointedly questioned.
“He’s an Injun,” Yancy matter-of-factly replied.
Chapter 39
Blaze was the one who insisted they stay overnight in St. Joseph. She pleaded fatigue, the pregnancy, and a half-dozen other symptoms to make him agree. “I want to sleep in a real bed, not a poorly padded shelf attached to the wall.”
He didn’t want to stay. Speed was their only hope of staying ahead of Yancy, and he told her so.
“I’m so tired, Jon. Would one night really matter?” They’d transferred twice in the last leg of their rail journey—the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad first, and then the ferry to the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad—and the travel was beginning to exhaust Blaze.
They were standing in a sheltered alcove near the carriage stand, and the sight, sounds, and smells of St. Joe in the afternoon bustled around them. Hazard would only feel safe hiring a stage and leaving in the next five minutes. But he cast an appraising glance at Blaze and noted the smudged half-circles under her eyes, stark with fatigue, and the lack of color in her cheeks; swiftly calculating the possible danger against her frail health, he nodded his agreement.
He wasn’t expecting the sudden hug she gave him. If he had, he would have avoided it, as he’d deliberately avoided any physical contact with Blaze since New York. She felt warm and soft and very familiar against his body, and he only hesitated briefly before his arms closed around her back. He looked down at her in his arms and instantly felt desire burn his heart.
Blaze lifted her face, their eyes met, and she smiled. “Thank you,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” he answered, crushing the smoldering longing, offering only a constrained reply. Here he was in St. Joe, on the run, in broad daylight, on the busiest corner in town, his entire life in the balance, and all he could think about was wanting her. It was madness. He couldn’t afford it. “We should go,” he said.
Blaze shook her head, leaning into him, his arms around her giving her new strength and joy. Make it last.
The crowds of passengers pushed past them, church bells began chiming somewhere in the heart of the city. “It’s not safe here.” And she felt his grip slacken. “This is the first place they’ll look,” Hazard said in a tone calculated to persuade her of the danger. He extricated himself gently from her arms. “We have to go.”
NEITHER spoke in the carriage. Hazard’s rejection, while gentle, was obvious and Blaze, hurt at the rebuff, turned her head away while tears silently splashed on her cheeks. Hazard was being his most calculating self and in that mood was virtually unapproachable. For the first time since her happiness at seeing him in New York, she began to doubt her ability to move him. All the old arguments were still cogent, and now the additional one of her alleged complicity with Yancy was seeming insurmountable.
It was a subdued wife Hazard introduced to Lydia Bailey at her small farmhouse north of town. Subdued, paler than usual and looking fragilely small next to Hazard’s large form.
“Shame on you, Hazard,” Lydia said the second she met Blaze. “This poor child is practically falling over. I don’t know why you men never understand you can’t drive a woman like an Indian pony.”
Hazard looked sheepish for a moment. “I guess I need you to remind me occasionally,” he confessed with a penitent tip of his head.
“Darn right you do.” And Lydia Bailey, who even at sixty stood straight-backed almost eye to eye with Hazard, cast him a stern, scolding look. “Now you go unload that carriage and have something to eat,” she ordered, “and I’ll put this poor mite to bed.” And Lydia shooed Blaze down the hall. “Now you eat,” she said to Hazard before following after Blaze. “You look a bit peaked yourself.”
“I’ll wait,” Hazard said. “Is she going to be all right?” The taut nerves were explicit in his voice, and he was mentally cursing himself for being so obtuse.
“Nothin’ a little food and rest won’t cure.” Lydia placed a gentle hand on Hazard’s arm and she felt tense, iron-hard muscle. “Relax, Hazard, she’s going to be fine. Food over on the stove. You know where the plates are.” And she bustled off to see to Blaze.
She was in and out of the kitchen during the next twenty minutes, fixing a tray, fetching warm water; once she asked through the screen door to where Hazard sat immobile on the porch steps, “Does she have luggage?”
“No,” he said, turning, half rising. “I have some light baggage. Is there something—”
“Never mind. Eat now, Hazard, and that’s an order.”
“Thanks, Lydia, I will.” But he didn’t move. And it seemed a long time later that Lydia held open the screen door and said, “You can see her now.”
Blaze was propped up in a large feather bed clothed in one of Lydia’s plain cotton nightgowns and dutifully sipping the warm milk Lydia had instructed she drink before sleeping. “Now you can talk to her, Hazard, for five minutes; then she’s going to nap. Five minutes. Understand?” She waited for his nod before brushing past him and returning to the kitchen, with the same energetic stride Hazard had first seen ten years ago when he’d met her at a trading camp her husband, Joel, had set up near the Powder River.
Hazard stood in the doorway, his head only inches from the lintel, the width of his shoulders dwarfing the opening. “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I didn’t realize how tired you were.”
“It’s all right,” Blaze politely replied, holding the warm cup of milk between her hands and wishing they could stop acting like strangers. Into a deepening silence, she nervously stammered, “I … it came on suddenly … actually.”
Feeling the awkwardness as well, Hazard made an effort at conversation. “How do you feel”—he paused, searching for an appropriate word—“otherwise?” he finished lamely. “The baby … I mean.”
“Good, I think.” Blaze blushed. “I don’t know what to expect.”
She looked touchingly young, all in white, her flame-red hair falling loosely on her shoulders, the nightgown, many sizes too large, rolled up at the cuffs. It struck Hazard for the first time since New York that she was Blaze, his wife. He walked the few steps to the window overlooking the orchard and stared at the even rows of apple trees, at the glossy green leaves and shiny fruit turning a deep autumn red. Had it been a mistake going back for her? He wasn’t immune as he’d thought. He couldn’t carelessly discard her simply as the woman bearing his child—a notion conceptually viable back in Montana when he’d made the decision to go east—it was all eminently more complex here in her presence.
“You must be tired, too.”
He turned, hearing the sound but not the words, and Blaze was reminded of the first time at the cabin when he’d been silhouetted against the noonday sun. Dressed in black, affecting the white man’s world, Hazard looked as tall and straight and powerful against the sunny window as he had that first day on the mountainside. But his eyes were shadowed with the strain of travel now. And when he didn’t respond, she repeated, “You must be tired too.”
“No,” he said, “I’m fine.” It was an automatic reflex, schooled into him many years before, schooled by arduous migrations, and fortnigh
t-long raids and a man’s code of endurance. “But you should sleep now. Lydia says you must.”
“So I must?”
“Absolutely.” He smiled a little. “I’ve never dared argue with her.”
“Are you afraid of her?” Blaze playfully asked, running her fingertip around the rim of the plain pottery mug.
“I’m afraid of lots of things.”
“But not of me.”
“Oh, of you, too, bia,” Hazard said very very softly. Perhaps most of all, he reflected. “Now sleep.… I’ll see to the horses.”
Blaze finished the milk after he left, contemplating his softly worded reply. No sarcasm this time or anger as in New York. It was Hazard, honest and plain-speaking, and the words warmed her more than anything he’d said on the journey. She slept peacefully for the first time in weeks, buoyed by his soft disclosure, and dreamed glorious, luminous dreams of them as a family: she, Hazard, and their baby, somewhere in the mountains, somewhere safe with sun-dappled willows and clear running water.
AFTER Blaze fell asleep, Hazard ate.
“You can’t take her overland at the same pace you’re used to, Hazard,” Lydia was saying. She and Hazard were seated on the back porch. It overlooked the road and while Hazard didn’t anticipate anyone finding them here, it never hurt to be wary.
“I know. But it can’t be too leisurely either.”
“Why? Trouble after you?”
For a moment Hazard didn’t answer. He looked down at his hands, then out to the vista of ripening cornfields. “There’s always that,” he said into the warm evening air.
“Some dead husband’s relatives?” Lydia asked. She’d seen the mourning clothes and the first signs of pregnancy, and they both conjured up questions.
He shook his head. “The mourning’s for her father.”
“Is there a husband?”
“Not after us.”
“What sort of trouble, then?”
“A greedy mother with less than maternal feelings and her boyfriend, who’d kill his own mother or anyone else for a nickel.”
“Nice combination.”
“It encourages speed on one’s journey,” said Hazard drily.
“Where you taking her?”
“Back to my people.”
“Is she your wife?”
He nodded, then looked away.
“Problems?” Lydia said, the evasion too noticeable to miss. There was a short silence, and then she asked the question in the forefront of her mind. “Is the child yours?”
“Yes.” An emphatic answer, and this time he looked her straight in the eye.
“If you’re willing to take advice from an old lady who’s been married forty years to an irascible fur trader with an itch to travel, I’d say you can work out about anything … if you want to.”
“Thanks for the advice. I’ll think about it.” He was contemplating the dusty toes of his boots.
“She loves you, you know.”
His eyes came up slowly, questioningly.
“No, she didn’t tell me in so many words, but all you have to do is watch her eyes on you. That’s love, Hazard, and I hope you’re not too big a fool to know it. What with your child and all, she needs you. Now, more than ever. I should know. Had eight.”
It was an opening for Hazard to turn the conversation. Everything was too confused now for easy answers to anything. He knew Lydia’s favorite topic of conversation was her children and grandchildren. “How are your children?” he asked.
Lydia told him. In detail. Hazard knew all the children, although most were older than he. And when Lydia slowed occasionally in her recital of their latest experiences, he coaxed her with another question. Lydia’s family was all nearby, although the boys often accompanied their father on the trading journeys. So he posed the polite inquiries and Lydia talked. It pushed aside the issues and problems confronting him—if only for a time. They were still on the porch when Blaze woke from her nap, exchanging reminiscences with each other.
Hazard was incredibly handsome, lounging back in his chair, all dark elegance against the bucolic green countryside. Blaze was reminded afresh how much of a stranger he was to her, how little she knew of his past. It added another small sadness to the chasm between them. Squaring her fragile shoulders, she shook off the melancholy, her chin came up, unconsciously stabilizing her uncertainties.
She padded out the door and across smooth wooden porch flooring worn shiny by forty years of children’s feet, and the chatter abruptly ceased. The oversized nightgown trailed behind her, and Hazard, his eyes drawn to her fresh young beauty, had a glimpse of the girl she must have been long before he knew her.
“A swing,” she said, her voice liltingly light, as though dark thoughts were strangers to her soul. “I love porch swings.” She moved toward it, past Lydia and Hazard seated at a small table in the shade of a fruit-ladened grape vine. “Do you remember, Jon, the night of the Territorial Ball? There was a swing on the porch.” Sitting down, she pulled up the excess skirt and set the swing in motion with her bare feet. Small, high-arched feet. With soft, warm soles, Hazard recalled. Soft, warm soles that had teased him; soft, warm soles he’d kissed.
She looked up when he didn’t answer and smiled, a winsome, small-girl smile that tugged at Hazard’s rapidly beating heart. He remembered the night—and every day since first seeing her—vividly. “I remember,” he quietly said.
Lydia had never heard anyone call Hazard “Jon.” She’d also never seen him with his heart in his eyes. “Why don’t I let you two reminisce and I’ll start something for supper,” she said, and neither seemed to notice when she left.
“You look like a small child in Lydia’s gown.” He should have said something more neutral, mentioned the weather or the grapes or Lydia’s hospitality, but the words were on his mind and came more naturally than meaningless chatter.
“I don’t feel like one,” Blaze replied. “This gown makes me feel very pregnant. I hope you like a fat wife.” She smiled. “And you look like a misplaced hired gun dressed all in black on this sun-drenched porch. A thin hired gun … we’ll make a fine pair.” She spoke as she always did—spirited, frank—and memories of the mountain cabin poured over Hazard.
“That always came easy.” His dark brow rose. “The pairing.”
“And it doesn’t now?”
“It can’t.”
“What if I want it to?”
He smiled that lovely smile she would have walked through fire for. “You always want it to. That’s no reason.”
“It’s a start, Jon. It was before and it can be again.” There was quiet hope in her voice.
The smile had disappeared and he had slipped back behind the confines of his mistrust. “I don’t want it to start again. I had plenty of time in the weeks since the blast to think, and I couldn’t come up with one logical reason for being together.”
“How about an illogical reason like … love?”
“Grow up, Blaze. You’re using the wrong word. You and I are nothing but problems.”
“I don’t agree with you.”
“You never did, Boston.” He smiled halfheartedly. “That’s another problem.” Pushing his chair back, he rose. “I’m going to take a walk before supper.” Vaulting lightly over the spindled railing, he strode away.
Chapter 40
“Would you like some help?” Blaze asked, entering the kitchen. Then, more frankly, “I need advice.”
Lydia turned from the sink window where she’d seen Hazard disappear down toward the creek. “Lovers’ quarrel?”
“I wish it were that simple,” and Blaze outlined the last few months in succinct phrases.
“He came back for you, though.”
“Not me. He came for his child.”
Lydia knew love when she saw it, and Hazard’s feelings weren’t strictly paternal. “That’s what he’s telling himself,” she said.
“He won’t even come near me.”
“Skittish, like a wolf that got
hurt in a trap.”
“Do you think so? I can’t even tell if he cares anymore. I practically had to make a scene before he’d talk to me on the train.”
“Oh, he cares.”
Blaze smiled and pressed her palms to her cheeks; she could feel the warm glow rising. “If he still cares …” she whispered.
“No doubt there, child. He looks at you like … well, like I’ve never seen Hazard look at any woman.”
“Have you known him long?”
“Since he was about fifteen. He came with his pa and a party of bucks trading on the Powder River. The Crows usually don’t trade that area, but they’d heard Joel had some good repeaters. Hazard stood out even then in that bunch of young braves. The Crows are the best-looking nation on the Plains. But even then Hazard was just a little bit taller and a shade more handsome and dressed fit to kill. No other tribe can ever outshine a Crow warrior when it comes to dressing. That boy dazzled the eyes.” Lydia smiled even ten years later at the memory. “Well, we traded him his first repeater, and he smiled then just as nice as he smiles now. Gentle too—’course I expect you know that. Lost track of him then for a few years. Heard he married, then his wife died, and next thing you know he showed up at the Powder again … three, four years later, hair cropped, white man’s clothes on and wanted Joel to help him get east from St. Louis. Me and Joel had become sort of parents to him. The paperwork had all been done by some adopted uncle of his who married one of his kin, and his pa was sending him off to white man’s school. The kid was real unhappy, but he went. For his pa, I guess. Anyway after that, he’d visit with us coming and going to that eastern school each year. Liked us, he said, in that quiet way of his, because he could trust us. He didn’t say the opposite—but he didn’t trust most other whites.”
Blaze nodded, trying to visualize Hazard at fifteen or eighteen.
“And I told him already,” Lydia went on, snapping the green beans she was preparing for supper, “whatever problems you two have can be worked out. I should know. Over the years Joel and me have had a heap of problems. But once they’re over”—she shrugged—“they’re over and forgotten. Best thing in a marriage, if you ask me, is to have a poor memory for the bad times.”
Susan Johnson Page 41
