Those cool eyes touched Deborah again. A faint scar marked one prominent cheekbone. Straight black brows were bent in an accusing frown, but he took off his gray hat and bowed ironically.
“Then I must cry your pardon, Miss Whitlaw.” His tone dismissed her, hardened as he gazed at the man who kept his hold on Deborah till, angrily aware of it, she pulled away. “Perhaps, Rolf, you’ll explain what I’ve misjudged? I let you out of my sight five minutes and somehow, even on this prairie, you’re up to your old tricks!”
“God provides,” said Rolf piously. “Besides, honored brother and preceptor, it was more like half an hour than five minutes. Let you get your paints out and you forget everything but whatever weed or clump of grass you’re doing.”
The man on the steel-gray horse relaxed slightly, but his lean jaw was still set. “I’m waiting to be enlightened.”
Rolf’s dark green eyes widened for a moment, pupils swelling, before he shrugged. “The hounds ran a coyote into this wallow. He took refuge in Miss Whitlaw’s skirts. She fought off the dogs with more valor than discretion, as you can see by the condition of her … ah … sleeves.”
The newcomer’s gaze touched her again. His mouth tightened and he sprang from the saddle, tossing the reins in front of his horse. “Are you hurt, Miss Whitlaw?”
He wasn’t as tall or broad as his brother, but there was a leashed power about him, a driving but controlled energy that intimidated her, made her cross her arms in a shield, though there was nothing she could do to hide the blush that heated her face.
“I’ve been scratched worse picking blackberries,” she said briskly.
Rolf Hunter lifted an eyebrow. “You see, Dane? I was trying to be sure she wasn’t injured, she objected, and the result was what you saw.”
“I begin to understand.” Dane Hunter’s tone was dry. “Miss Whitlaw, my brother and I must be sure you’re unharmed and escort you home.” He had stepped in front of her as she moved for her shoes. “Please let me see those bites.”
“They’re nothing!” she insisted. “Thanks for your concern, but I really must hurry or my brother will be worried.”
“He might well be with a sister like you,” said the older Hunter. “Put out your arms, Miss Whitlaw. I’m no fonder of wasting time than you are.”
The cold remoteness in this man’s gaze said he thought her a crack-brained nuisance, but he’d do his duty for all that. Reluctantly, she held out her arms.
He examined them carefully, impersonally drawing back torn cloth when it concealed a graze. “You’re lucky,” he said with a nod of his black head. “Rolf, get some whisky to sluice over those scratches.” He glanced at her feet. “Were you bitten anywhere else?”
“No!”
Rolf rummaged in his saddlebag and produced a silver flask. He also had a rifle in a scabbard near the saddle horn, and a brace of rabbits on the other side. Deborah backed away.
“I—I don’t want to smell like a saloon!”
“You’ll certainly have to wash and mend the dress,” Dane said. “Your parents would rather have you reek temporarily than have you exude the stench of suppurating putrefaction. I’ve smelled it in field hospitals, my stubborn girl. One welcomes whisky to blot it out.”
At that withering derision, Deborah could do nothing but extend her hands and brace herself against the sting of the pungent rinsing. It hurt, but she suspected it was a wise precaution. She thanked Dane Hunter with as much graciousness as she could muster before she collected her shoes.
“You needn’t see me home,” she said. “I’m meeting my brother at the blacksmith’s near the river, not two miles away.”
“Young women shouldn’t junket about the prairies alone, as this afternoon’s happenings might convince you.” Why was Dane’s voice so brutal? “Your foolhardiness, thank Providence, is no worry of mine after today, but I’m going to see you home or to your brother. Put on your shoes.”
“You’ve no right to order me about in that offensive tone!”
“Put on those shoes or I’ll do it for you.” His lip curled. “I had expected American women to be sensible. Instead, you wrestle hounds bare-handed, tussle in the grass with my reprobate brother, refuse well-meant treatment, and now propose to gad off alone across the plains. I can’t alter your usual mode of behavior, but circumstances make me responsible for you till you’re safely with your people. Then, praised be a merciful God, you’re your family’s problem!”
Halfway through this flaying, smarting at Dane’s unfairness but sure that he’d carry out his threat, Deborah turned her back to the brothers and struggled into her stockings and shoes, concealing her feet and ankles with her skirts. Dane Hunter wouldn’t look, or care if he did, but Rolf had a different temperament. Or was it the same one, shaped and altered by different influences, just as Johnny took steel and made from it a knife or a plowshare?
With his scarred cheek, talk of field hospitals, and dominance over his giant younger brother, Dane seemed an outlandish choice for a painter of wildflowers, but perhaps he was one of those English eccentrics like Sir Richard Burton, Lord Byron, or William Blake. It was obvious from their dress, horses, and manner that the Englishmen were well-to-do—which still gave them no right to manhandle and insult people! Rolf may have first simply intended to flirt, but inexperienced as she was, Deborah sensed that the feel of her had ignited passion and her struggles had further aroused him.
What would have happened had Dane not interfered was vague and frightening in Deborah’s mind, mixed up with the times she’d seen animals coupling. Leticia had never explained such things to her, but Deborah had gleaned enough from remarks, reading, and observation to know that this hidden thing between men and women was potentially full of happiness or unspeakable shame. And she wondered how, after years of concealing her body and avoiding more than a handshake with men outside the family, she’d be able, even married, to let a man see her.
Well, she didn’t want to marry for a long, long time, if ever! As she started to rise, Rolf helped her. The clasp of his hand sent a wave of alarm through her, but with it tingled something keenly sweet, like cider on the turn.
As if he guessed the sensation, Dane jerked his head toward his handsome gray gelding. “Can you ride? Lightning’s gentle, but he won’t tolerate a heavy hand or sawing bit.”
“Thank you, I can walk,” said Deborah, though she longed to ride the magnificent animal. Rolf’s horse was also beautiful, but so big and given to tossing his head about that she was afraid of him.
Dane shrugged. “You’ll ride, either alone or up behind me.”
“But my skirt—”
“Oh, the devil with it! Here, you sit modestly in the saddle and I’ll hold you on.”
Before she could retreat, he’d swept her up and placed her in the saddle sideways, thrust a foot in the stirrup, and swung himself up behind, his arms encircling her as he held the reins.
“Dane, you pirate, I saw her first!” protested Rolf.
“Keep your hounds under control,” Dane advised. “Now, Miss Whitlaw, you say the blacksmith’s is near the river?”
The short ride was quickly over, yet it seemed very long to Deborah. Sit stiffly erect as she might, the horse’s motion brought her in rhythmic contact with Dane Hunter’s arms. She gripped the saddlehorn and gazed stonily ahead, but there was no way she could escape his closeness, the faint smell of bay rum and fragrant tobacco. She wanted to steal a look at the face, sometimes touching her hair, but was afraid of detection.
Why did he seem intent on disliking her? Clearly, he thought her hoydenish and rash. Did he think, too, that she’d somehow encouraged Rolf before taking fright?
Deborah lifted her chin, taking comfort in the thought that when this interminable ride was over, she’d never see these arrogant Englishmen again.
Or would she? Jolted into breaking silence, she asked urgently, “You—you’re just traveling through?”
“You could say that, though we’re taking our tim
e. We have lodgings in Lawrence, but we’ll spend most of our time on the plains.”
“Dane intends to paint his way across the Territory to the Rocky Mountains,” groaned Rolf. “And I had to either come with him or go to India and work for our uncle.”
“There’s still India,” Dane said unfeelingly.
Rolf shook his head. “I’ll stay with you,” he said cheerfully. “In spite of your trading your sword for a paintbrush, there’s a good chance we’ll meet some hostile Indians, and there are sure to be buffalo. I’ll find something of interest.”
“Something to kill?” Dane asked dryly.
Rolf chuckled. “Oh, come now, elder brother! If I hadn’t enjoyed other pursuits more than shooting, Father wouldn’t have banished me.”
“It’s a pity you couldn’t have been at Balaclava or Sebastopol. There’s nothing like real, dirty, unromantic war to tame wild blood.”
Rolf sobered. Again, Deborah thought he could have been young, proud Lucifer plotting rebellion. “The damned war ended before I could get sent down permanently from Oxford, but I’ll find a war someday, and it won’t, tame me! I know I was made for fighting, Dane, for hunting and wenching and riding the crest of the breakers.”
“That Viking nonsense again,” Dane snorted.
“The blood runs thin in you, not in me!” Rolf flashed. Hat off, wind tossing his rich golden hair, he could indeed have been one of the warriors so feared by the people of England that the Litany included a plea to be delivered from the fury of the North men. “You tasted war and found it bitter. It will be my wine. You paint Indians. Before this tour is up, I pray for a chance to fight them. When they see my scalp, won’t they want it?”
“A few weeks in an army hospital would purge you of this boy’s lunacy,” Dane said. “It’s a shame Mother wouldn’t let Father buy you a commission so you could have helped put down the Sepoy Mutiny.”
“Isn’t it?” agreed Rolf. “I’d love to have taught those niggers a lesson, slaughtering all those British women and children at Cawnpore less than a year ago, rebelling against their officers and Queen!”
“Niggers?” Deborah was startled into asking.
“It’s a term bigoted illiterates sometimes use for Indians,” Dane explained. “The Sepoys are native Indian troops, some of whom staged a bloody revolt that was put down last year. But I suppose you have read about it.”
“Yes, a little,” Deborah said apologetically. “We’re so beset with our own worries here in the Territory that I’m afraid we don’t pay much attention to what’s happening in other countries.”
Rolf chortled. “When we hear about your problems, we always say you’d have been much better off to have remained a colony. You’d have been saved this slavery row, for one thing, because it was abolished throughout the Dominions in 1840. And think of the advantages of having a government so far away to blame for everything while mostly you could do as you pleased!”
“My forebears were English,” Deborah said indignantly. “But they didn’t voyage here to submit to tyranny and perpetual interference!”
“That war’s over,” said Dane, almost jokingly. “Let’s not start another one.”
No one spoke the rest of the way to the forge.
Thos came forward to meet them and Johnny turned his hammer over to Maccabee, striding to the head of Dane’s horse. “You be all right?” he asked Deborah. Only when she nodded did he survey her escort and say, “Howdy, strangers.”
Slipping gladly down into Thos’s outstretched arms, Deborah introduced the brothers, then briefly explained that she’d tried to protect a coyote Rolf’s hounds were after.
“Good way to get mauled,” Johnny growled, taking in her torn sleeves and skin. “Lucky these gentlemen came along. Let Sarah have a look at those arms, Miss Deborah—no argufyin’, now! Gentlemen, why don’t you have a drink now and stay on for supper?”
“Thanks, Mr. Chaudoin,” said Dane. “You’re most hospitable, but we should be starting for Lawrence.”
“Then stop at our place to eat,” Thos invited warmly. “It’s on the way to Lawrence, and our parents would want to meet anyone who’d helped Deborah.”
She bit her lip, longing to say that Rolf had kissed her forcibly and his sarcastic, superior brother had seemed to blame her for it, but such accusations could provoke a fight. She wanted neither Johnny nor Thos to endanger themselves. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to reinforce Thos’s invitation. Turning away, she avoided his puzzled glance as she started for the house.
“You’re very kind,” Dane said to Thos. “We really should make for town, though. I hear the roads aren’t always safe after dark.”
“I’ll protect you,” Rolf teased. “And I shall sup at the Whitlaws’, brother, whatever you decide!”
Deborah couldn’t hear Dane’s response because Sara met her at the door and drew her into the house, wrinkling her nose. “You smell like a brewery! And your dress! What’ve you been up to, Deborah? Who are those men?”
Deborah gave an expurgated account while the Shawnee girl rubbed goose grease into her scratches and added her opinion to the prevailing one that Deborah was fortunate to have escaped serious injury.
“Was I just supposed to let the dogs tear that coyote apart?” Deborah asked hotly.
“No, meshemah.” Sara used the Shawnee word for sister. “But you must consider what an action may cost. Your life is worth more than a coyote’s.”
“Would it be, if I let an animal die like that?”
Sara kissed her. “You’re what you are, and my best friend. The strangers are handsome. Do you like them?”
“No! They’re patronizing, lordly, and so … so English it makes me want to kick them! Why ever did Thos have to invite them to supper?”
“You didn’t tell me everything that happened,” Sara observed with a slow smile. “But never mind now. Thos has Nebuchadnezzar ready, and you’d better go before he pretends to be lame. Here’s a loaf of bread for your mother, and give her my love.”
Deborah thanked Sara, who waved good-bye from the door. Thos handed Deborah their dejected-looking mount’s reins while he ran back for a few words with Sara. Deborah again faced the problem of what to do with her skirts. Drat Thos! If he hadn’t invited the Hunters to supper, she could have ridden with skirts to the knee, and no harm done! As Thos came back and started to climb into the saddle, she said under her breath, “I think you’ll have to let me ride in front. My skirts—”
“Your skirts?” he blurted out.
She pinched his arm, then noted that Rolf was quelling laughter, and even Dane’s eyes twinkled. Stung past modesty, she put one foot in the stirrup, gathered her skirt, swung her other leg over the saddle into the opposite stirrup, and settled her dress as concealingly as possible.
“Good for you, Miss Deborah,” applauded Johnny. “Now you’re showing sense!”
Thos gaped, shrugged, and clambered up behind the saddle, holding her around the waist. “See that you don’t make us both fall off,” he hissed in her ear. “What’s got into you?”
“I’m tired of being female!” she hissed back at him. “I’m tired of skirts and not being able to ride astraddle and … and lots of things! So you just hold on tight, brother, dear!”
What a shame that Nebuchadnezzar, unmoved and unknowing, couldn’t summon up a bit of dash and fire! But he plodded along, dreaming of the corn he got after being ridden, and Deborah gritted her teeth as the Englishmen rode on either side, holding in their horses and answering Thos’s eager questions.
Annoyed at his friendliness, Deborah dug her elbow into his chest. “Ouch!” he winced. “Why’d you do that, ’Borah?”
He plunged on, establishing that the brothers had crossed the ocean in ten days in a Cunard iron-clad liner, spent some weeks in the north and south, then traveled by steamboat to Leavenworth and spent a month there, acquiring horses and Rolf’s hounds and picking up information about their proposed route while Rolf hunted and Dane sketched. Th
ey had only last night arrived in Lawrence and had found, in the home of Mrs. Eden, a widow, lodgings much more comfortable and private than the hotel. Deborah stiffened at that. Melissa Eden acted demure, but she carried herself in a way few men could ignore.
When Rolf disclosed that his brother had fought in the Crimean War, Thos plied Dane with questions and refused to be daunted even when Dane pronounced the Charge of the Light Brigade to be the greatest folly in a war beset with blunders.
“Practically nothing was known about the Crimea—the terrain or conditions,” he said. “Lord Raglan, one of our two seventy-year-old field commanders, was so confused that he kept calling the enemy ‘the French’ even though the French were finally fighting beside us, not against. Half the army was wounded or sick during that first winter, and because the campaign hadn’t been intelligently planned or provided for, cold and hunger added to the misery. The only good thing to come out of the wretched mess was the way Florence Nightingale cleaned up the hospitals and saved countless lives. A lot was learned about military medicine and treatment. But so many were wasted, so many young men! And for what? The Turks made some dubious promises safeguarding Christians in their territories, and the Russians agreed to keep their ships out of the Black Sea.”
Thos frowned. “But, sir, surely the feat of allied arms was amazing! Invading an unknown region, defeating the enemy on his own ground with far fewer troops and those often ill and poorly equipped!”
“We had the Minié. The Russians didn’t.” Dane shrugged and the scar along his cheek seemed livid. “They bayoneted us and we blew them apart. Their priests blessed them, our chaplains blessed us, and we became a sacrifice, they protecting Holy Mother Russia, we defending, at bottom, our access to India.”
Thos ignored the moral for the unedifying facts. “A Minié, sir? What’s that?”
“It’s a conical bullet dreamed up by the French, weighing five hundred grains. It shoots harder and straighter, maybe five times as far as the old round ball, and is practically guaranteed to shatter any bone it hits, which the round balls seldom did.” Dane’s mouth turned down. “Is it progress, Miss Deborah, when weapons become more lethal?”
Daughter of the Sword Page 3
