A Wolf in the Desert

by BJ James

  Speechless for once, Patience glared at the perfectly constructed lean-to and back again to Indian, not really sure how she felt or how she should feel. It would be a relief to be shielded from the prying eyes of the camp, but could she deal with the intimacy of the lean-to, where no camp fire would lie between them?

  “This is where we’ll spend our nights for the duration of our stay in the canyon. Where you’ll sleep with me.” There was no smile now to soften the subtle ultimatum. “You have until dark to come to terms with what the night will bring.”

  Sparing her the need to reply, Blue Doggie coughed and stirred and rose naked from his sleeping bag, stretching, yawning, and scratching immodestly like an old bear waking from a long sleep.

  Turning away, her face flaming and confidence flagging, Patience wondered how she would ever survive the days to come.

  Four

  Indian sat by the fire as Custer, Snake, Hogan, and the quieter Hoke played poker again. This fascination for cards escaped him, but he never missed sitting in, occasionally playing a hand. Always watching, always listening.

  He was torn now by the need to be with Patience, to ease her way, to serve as unwelcome protector should it be required. But this was a crucial time when he might discover some bit of valuable information. When all but one would be close enough to sober to speak sense, but drunk enough for loose tongues.

  He’d been with the gang only a short time when he’d learned that not everyone was part of the conspiracy. These four were the inner sanctum, and Hoke, not Custer, was the voice of authority in all things that pertained to the real purpose for the Wolves existence. Hoke, who was quieter and smaller, who held himself aloof from most of the interactions of the gang, speaking little in his ruined voice, was always cold sober, and by far the most dangerous.

  “Your woman keeps to herself.” Hoke spoke. The rasping whisper, emitted from a mutilated throat, strained to reach across the fire that was rebuilt in the morning chill, burned in the suffocating heat of the day, and would be their only light come nightfall.

  Indian looked up from his carving. Sliding the trinket in a pocket, but keeping the knife clasped loosely in his hand, he shrugged. “She isn’t accustomed to the desert, nor to our ways, but she will be.”

  Hoke lifted a quizzical brow in a face turned to a rictus by the play of flames. “You plan to keep her long enough for it to matter?”

  “She’s stubborn and trouble,” Indian admitted. “But, yes, I mean to keep her for a while.”

  “The other women are jealous. There isn’t one among them who didn’t hope Indian, with his pretty face and his fastidious ways, would choose her.” With his observation hinting of the culture and education of a past far removed from his current life, Hoke turned from Indian only long enough to toss a card on the blanket that served as gaming table.

  “They were taken,” Indian said succinctly.

  “We share,” Custer put in.

  “Or trade.”

  Indian’s dark gaze moved from Custer to Snake, sickened by men who traded the favors of their women with no thought at all. And by the women who allowed it.

  “Hey,” Hogan added, “you gotta admit, your little redhead is a number to make a man’s blood pump.”

  “What Hogan is trying to say,” Hoke interpreted in his more classical speech, “is that Miss O’Hara is like wine to men thirsting in a barren land. A tasty morsel for men who hunger.”

  “Tasty ain’t the half of it,” Snake groused, irritable as he always was when conversation moved past the basics. “I’ve seen her at night, staring at her own special fire, acting like none of the rest of us was good enough for her.” He clinched his cards in an brutal fist, crumpling a winning hand. “I get half a chance, she’ll know who’s good and who ain’t. She needs a real man.”

  Indian didn’t turn his black gaze from Snake, didn’t glance toward the separate fire. He didn’t need to look to know that Patience would be sitting alone and apart, with dusk falling around her. Her hair would be loose, stopping just short of her waist, drifting over her in a fiery veil as she brushed it. In the soft light, when there was languor in the shadows and a land ruled by the sun made ready for night, she found respite from the shocking turn of fortune in this hypnotic, healing, and uncannily feminine pastime.

  The lines smoothed from her face, the taut, watchful posture of her body eased. Stroke after stroke the brush slipped through her hair, taming it, turning it to silk as she lost herself in thoughts he couldn’t fathom.

  Absorbed, transported to a place deep within herself, she performed the elegant ritual, innocent of eyes that lusted. She moved with an unconscious grace, unaware that the very natural qualities were foreign to others. Heedless that this intimately personal act only fueled the lust of men who would strip from her every shred of the grace and elegance and innocence, destroying what they wanted most to possess.

  Caught up in her own diversion, with bright strands flowing under the rhythmic stroke of the brush, catching the light of the sky, the light of the fire, she became a tantalizing vision. An enchanting sorceress with secrets hidden in unfathomable depths. A beautiful woman, ever mysterious, ever alluring.

  In days past, when the people of his great-great-grandfather Cochise rose this land on steeds of flesh and blood, she would have been revered for her quiet dignity, respected for her enduring strength. Coveted for the blaze of her hair.

  She would be called Blaze by the Apache.

  “Sharing has been our custom, always,” Hoke whispered, and to Indian’s ears it was the scratch of evil at heaven’s door.

  “It isn’t my custom,” he said flatly. In the eerie silence that followed, his gaze touched lightly on each man, lingering only a fraction longer on Snake. His point was made.

  “I don’t share.” His stare challenged the undeclared leader, while in the quiet rang the unspoken warning, Not with any man.

  “That ain’t fair,” Hogan protested as if fairness were ever his concern.

  Hoke cut him off with a gesture. Folding his cards, he regarded the Indian. “A one-woman man.” His laugh was too much for a throat that could only issue a series of clicks and gulps. “That explains your immunity to the much plied charms of our ladies. And answers Snake’s question of your virility.”

  Indian didn’t bother to dignify the speculations of men who understood only wantonness and brutality. To whom gentleness was weakness, and men who did not think as they were suspect.

  Hoke’s garbled laughter ceased as swiftly as it began. His attention was riveted on Indian. The others might vanish from his side and from the earth, and in his concentration he wouldn’t notice.

  This was between the two of them. Himself and the Indian. His voice was weaker, punished by the effort of laughter. “You know she can never leave us.”

  “Yes.”

  “No one can. Not you, not her. No one.”

  “I know. I knew months ago when I joined you.”

  “Never is a long time.”

  Indian shrugged, but his grip tightened over the hilt of the knife half hidden in his lap.

  “When you tire of her, will you hand her over to the others?”

  “No.”

  “Ah.” Hoke leaned back, a low boulder supporting his shoulders. “So it’s like that? Your woman or no man’s.”

  “So long as she’s in camp, she’s only mine.”

  “Then when you’re through with her you intend to put her on the block to be sold?”

  In a fluid move, Indian rose from his cross-legged position. In buckskin vest and tall moccasins, a hawk’s feather dangling from his bound hair, neither his striking appearance nor his masculinity could be questioned. Nor his purpose. “Patience O’Hara is mine. When I tire of her, I’ll do with her what I must. When I must.”

  “A pity,” Hoke mused. “All that courage, the good looks going to waste. Worse is the mind, the years of study.” The grating whisper sank lower as if he were imparting a special secret. “Did you kn
ow our red-haired captive is not Miss O’Hara, but Dr. O’Hara?”

  “No one told me.”

  “From personal papers found in her car, we discovered she graduated cum laude from a veterinary college in the east.”

  Indian wasn’t surprised. Little Patience did, or had done, would be surprising. As she’d demonstrated, she was a lady of cool intelligence and innovative courage. Often with more guts than sense. “I take it the papers were retrieved shortly before the car was destroyed.”

  “It reposes in a canyon beneath a ton or so of rock and soil.”

  “She called it Beauty.”

  “What?” Hoke rarely missed a cue, possessing an uncanny ability to hone into the gist of the most confusing conversations.

  “She called the Corvette, Beauty. I don’t know why.” For two long weeks they’d shared a separate camp and fought. Eaten together and fought. Shared the same lean-to for the night and fought. But never talked. Indian realized he knew everything about Patience that was immediate, but nothing of her past. He hadn’t known her profession, or even that she had one. “She is, as I’ve said, difficult. I know little of her,” he said, “but I will.”

  “Hey!” Snake’s young face shone with ill-concealed lust as he leered up at Indian. “Maybe when you get better acquainted with your own old lady, you’ll find she wants another man. A real man, one not so much prettier than she is. What then, pretty boy?”

  Only a subtle shifting of Indian’s body warned of his readiness. Light glinted off the blade of his knife, polished and honed to a razor’s edge. He meant the attitude and the knife as a reminder, not a threat. Snake was hotheaded and priming himself for a move. One that would surely come. If not full scale across the fire tonight, then later. Only the devil knew when or where. It did no harm to let him know there would be a battle.

  “What will I do? Nothing. It won’t be her choice to make.” Indian asked the question that needed no answer, “Was it ever?”

  With a bow that mocked the younger man, he backed away. “If you will excuse me, there are matters that need my attention.”

  He was beyond hearing when Hoke turned to Snake. “Don’t let jealousy make a fool of you, kid. With his pretty talk and pretty face, Indian is a class act and a dangerous man. Custer.” The scar that crossed his throat from right ear to left shoulder contorted with his command for complete attention. “What do we know about him?”

  “Not a lot.” Custer braced himself for an interrogation he’d endured before. “Except he’s a good man to have at your back in a fight.”

  “That’s how he came to join us, isn’t it? Saved your skin in a bar when the odds were five to one. He made it five to two and even.”

  Hoke knew the answer, but Custer responded as expected. “The man moves like a cat and he ain’t afraid of poor odds. I was too drunk to ride and the little hick town was ready to lynch me, so he brought me back to camp.”

  “You showed him the way, you mean.”

  Custer squirmed under Hoke’s hard glare. “Well, yeah.”

  With sleeping doubts resurfacing, Hoke’s eyes narrowed, watching Indian approach the woman. “That was down in Mexico where you got too friendly with one of the señoritas, wasn’t it?”

  “It was a misunderstanding,” Custer protested.

  “One that would have ended with your liver being fed to the pigs. Indian rides in like the cavalry, plucks you out of trouble, brings you back to us, and never leaves,” Hoke mused aloud. “He’s a closemouthed son of an Indian. Three months and what do we know about him? Nothing! And that bothers me more now than ever. If he has nothing to hide, why is he so secretive? Who is he, really?”

  Custer scratched his head. “I dunno, all I ever heard him called is Indian.”

  “Did he tell you he was called Indian, or did someone here give him the name?”

  Uncomfortable with the angry disgust he saw in Hoke, Custer made a groveling, placating move of his hands. “I think it was Callie.” A light of relief sparked in his face. “Yeah, sure, it was Callie. You know how she is, calling them the way she sees them. To Callie he looked like an Indian. The name stuck.”

  “So, what you’re admitting is that no one here knows his name?” Hoke’s lips curled in a snarl, pulling the loose skin tighter, making the scars on his neck more gruesome.

  Custer knew that if there was blame for bringing Indian among them, it would lie at his door. “Hell, Hoke.” He laughed, making light of his worries. “You said yourself we needed window dressing. Someone to draw attention away from the four of us, characters like Blue Doggie, and Pritchard, the dwarf. Hey, who even sees us when we ride in with Indian. Can you name a better cover?” He was talking fast now, selling his excuse. “So, we don’t know his name. Who knows Blue Doggie’s, or Snake’s, or mine?”

  “I do,” Hoke said coldly. “Every name, except one. Three months and he still isn’t truly one of us. This with the woman proves he never will be. So, one wonders why he joined us. What he’s looking for?”

  “He’s a pretty, sissy boy looking for thrills. A rube who’ll try to go back to his real life one day, to brag to other rubes that he rode with the Wolves. What else do you want to know about him?” Snake asked.

  “A better question would be, what does he know about us?” Leaning forward, in a swift move, Hoke tossed his cards into the fire. Watching the king of spades twist and curl as if trying to escape the flames that scorched and blackened it, wondering if Indian had been a mistake, he muttered, “Maybe Snake’s right. Maybe he’s too soft for us.”

  Hoke’s look swept the camp, the refuse strewn around, the slovenly men, unkempt women. “Maybe he’s too decent. So, why did he stay? What does he want from us?”

  “You don’t think he’s trouble for us?”

  “I don’t know what the hell I think.” The raucous whisper interrupted Custer. Suspicions that had nagged for a long while burst into full growth. “Watch him. Watch every move, day and night.”

  “Hoke, you’ve got him wrong,” Custer insisted. “He’s a little soft about the woman, but that don’t mean he’s different than he was before. It ain’t just me he’s helped. He’s the best scout we have. Nobody finds better camps than Indian.”

  “Who was he helping, Custer? Us or himself?” Hoke watched Indian’s distant fire grow brighter as shadows lengthened and twilight deepened. “Watch him, then we’ll decide.”

  “Why bother?” Hogan demanded. “We can take care of him easy.”

  “Not before we know who he is and what he’s after.” Hoke spoke in a tone he would use with a simpleton. “Or before we know who else is involved.”

  “If he’s just a regular guy with a peculiar hang-up about broads? What then?” For all his faults Custer was loyal to the man who had saved his life. He would be until there was concrete proof he’d been a judas goat. But, if the unthinkable were true, Indian would need all his mental and physical strength to survive.

  “If he is what he seems then we don’t have a problem, do we?” Hoke leaned back against the boulder, rubbing his thumb absently over the face of his watch. “We have time, all the time we need. Watch him. For now it should be enough.”

  Grumbling at the turn of events, and over their spoiled game, one by one Snake and Hogan and Custer followed Hoke’s lead, tossing their cards into the fire. One by one they sauntered away, leaving their covert leader to his speculations.

  Cognizant of the sudden resurgence of suspicion, but unaware of how serious the doubt had grown, Indian covered the distance between the camps in long, muffled strides. His soundless approach offered no warning. Patience’s first inkling of his presence was the clasp of his hand at her wrist, stopping the motion of the brush.

  She whirled to face him, catching her hair in a low, swaying limb of the juniper that clustered at her back. “Indian! You startled me. I thought...”

  “That I was one of the others?” He knelt by her, taking the brush from her shaking fingers. “I could have been. Because of this.�
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  “Because of a hairbrush?” Color that had flown from her face began to return pretty degree by pretty degree. “I don’t understand.”

  Indian sighed and rubbed his temples with thumb and forefinger, wishing he could rub away the weight of his worries. “I know you don’t. God help us both, I know. Just don’t brush your hair by the fire anymore. Better yet, don’t brush it at all.”

  Patience’s temper flared unreasonably, burning hotter in the aftermath of shock. “You abduct me, destroy Beauty, keep me prisoner in this godforsaken land, insist that I wear this—” she clutched the thong he’d worn in his hair, crumpling turquoise and feathers in her fist “—branding me as your property. I’ve slept on the ground, freezing by night, sweltering by day. I haven’t had a real bath in days, and now you say I can’t even brush the tangles from my hair?”

  “You have them catalogued, don’t you?” Indian observed. “All my sins.”

  “I’ve only just begun.”

  “No, O’Hara, you’re all through.” Rising, he took her with him.

  “Ouch!” Patience pulled free of him as her head was jerked back by the juniper. “Are you in such a hurry to scalp me that you’re going to do it without a knife? The right way would be less painful.”

  Indian didn’t answer. His hand rested lightly at the knife once more in its scabbard in his moccasin. As she twisted and turned, trying to see, trying to untangle herself and only making matters worse, he drew the knife, lifting it over her head.

  Patience screamed and dodged again as the knife descended. ”Don’t you dare!”

  The knife cut cleanly through the limb, sending the fragrance of fresh evergreen wafting over Patience. The clean scent she forever associated with Indian. Her sudden release from the talons of the limb sent her stumbling into him. As his arms closed around her she fought, by instinct rather than thought, clawing and scratching at every inch of bare skin she could reach.