Mountain Magic

by Simmons, Trana Mae

  Chapter 4

  "Silas, he's passed out again."

  "Yeah. Maybe we should leave him for a minute, Cat, 'til we git him stitched up. Then I'll wake him again. There's another bucket of water over by the fire there."

  Caitlyn filled a pan and set it to heat before she picked up the water bucket and retrieved the damp linen bath sheet and soap, then returned to Jon's side. With Silas steadying Jon, she cleaned the wound thoroughly.

  "Hand me that there likker jug," she said as she patted the bath sheet over Jon's head.

  "Don't use it all," Silas ordered as he passed the jug to her. "Stuff costs two arms an' a leg out here."

  "Harumph!"

  When Caitlyn tipped the jug and poured the whiskey over the wound, Jon's eyes flew open and he let out a howl of pain. She quickly fixed an innocent expression on her face and passed the jug back across Jon's chest to Silas.

  "What the hell are you tryin' to do?" Jon yelled at Silas when he could focus his gaze. "That rotgut's probably worse than dirt in a cut!"

  "You're right, boyo," Silas said with a smirk. He lifted the jug and took a deep pull. "It's better in a man's stomach than on his head."

  Silas chuckled again and stood. "Seein' as how you're awake again, you oughta be able to brace yourself on your own while Cat finishes up. I'm gonna fetch us some food."

  "Not before you fetch the needle and thread," Caitlyn informed him. "Drop it in that pan of water over there first. No tellin' where it's been."

  Silas scratched his beard and took another pull from the jug. "Oh, yeah, now I 'member. It's tucked away in my shavin' kit."

  "Shaving kit?" Jon blurted in astonishment. "You don't even own a shaving kit."

  "Sure I do, boyo. What you think we used all winter to scrap them there hides with?"

  Silas trudged over to the lean-to and dug in his pack. He gave a satisfied grunt and pulled out a deerskin pouch. After untying the drawstring knot, he removed another, smaller piece of deerskin and unwrapped it. Striding over to the fire, he dropped the needle and thread into the simmering water.

  "Silas," Caitlyn called before Silas could walk away. "Leave that there jug."

  "What for?"

  "To use on that needle, too. Might take more than water to get the dirt off that thread."

  Silas sighed deeply and set the jug down, then reached for an empty iron kettle. Carrying the kettle with him, he walked back to the lean-to and picked up the smallest bundle of furs lying there.

  "I'll be back shortly with some food," he said when he looked over at Caitlyn to see her studying him.

  "Yeah, and from the size of that there fur bundle, you'll probably have another jug with you," she said with a frown.

  "Need plenty of likker 'round," Silas informed her with a grin. "Case you find any more dirt to chase away."

  Whistling merrily, Silas strode from the camp.

  "Probably have to go fetch our own food," Caitlyn muttered as she turned back to Jon. "Be the last we see of him tonight."

  "Leave him be, Caitlyn. He worked hard as hell for those furs all winter. Guess he can spend them on whatever he wants."

  "You ain't tellin' me nothin' I don't know. I spent thirteen winters helping Paw scrape together bundles of furs. Just seems like there oughta be a little more to it than only gettin' enough to go back and start doin' it all over again. And the name's Cat."

  "You looked like Cat fit you before." Jon allowed his eyes to linger on her at last. "Now you look more like a Caitlyn. Bet you don't even know what the name means."

  "Ain't interested," Caitlyn said, trying to ignore the blue eyes that appraised her appreciatively. "You're bleedin' again. Best we get that wound closed."

  "Bring that jug back, too," Jon said as she rose. "If there's anything left in it."

  Caitlyn reluctantly did as he ordered, handing him the jug and dumping the water from the pan so she wouldn't burn her fingers when she reached in for the needle. When Jon lowered the jug from his mouth, she took it and poured a few drops of whiskey onto the needle.

  "You ready?" she asked.

  "In a second." Jon took the jug and drained the last swallow before he laid his head back and shut his eyes tightly.

  "All right."

  Caitlyn brushed at his wet hair, then moved away.

  "Now what?" Jon said as his eyes flew open.

  "I can't see."

  Caitlyn pulled a branch from the fire and brought it back with her, wedging it into a crack in the log, close enough so the flickering flames gave light for her to see the angry gash on Jon's head. He flinched away from the heat — she supposed it was the heat — and Caitlyn sighed and wrapped her fingers around the side of his face to drag his head back.

  "How do you keep your hands so soft?" Jon asked in a gruff voice after Caitlyn released his face to knot the thread on the end of the needle.

  "Somethin' Sky Woman showed me to use. She knows lots about the plants and healin' uses for them. It's good for all parts of a person's body."

  Jon groaned and raised his left leg, bumping Caitlyn's elbow with his knee. Opening his eyes a crack, he assured himself the fringe on his shirt covered his lap.

  "You're gonna have to hold still," Caitlyn fumed. "'Lessen you want your scalp sewed to your eyelid!"

  Jon clenched his fists and clamped his eyes shut again. "Just get on with it!"

  "Dash nab it, that's what I'm tryin' to do!"

  Despite the sternness in her voice, Caitlyn's fingers were gentle as she pushed aside Jon's hair and pricked his skin with the needle. She probably should have shaved a little of the hair away, she realized, but she managed to get two fairly neat stitches in the wound, leaving the thread hanging loosely. Bending forward, she snapped the thread with her teeth, and leaned back to drop the needle into the pan again so it wouldn't get lost. Needles were scarcer than hen's teeth in the mountains.

  Jon opened his eyes just as Caitlyn turned and leaned over him again, and clamped them closed again. "I thought you were done," he gritted.

  "Have to tie the thread. Just be a second."

  One eye peeped open all on its own. The other one quickly followed. Jon clenched his teeth over the tongue trying to flick from his mouth, toward that tantalizing breast. A long, fragrant lock of silkiness fell across his face and he curled his toes inside his boots.

  "Shit," he muttered.

  "Sorry," Caitlyn said as she sat back on her haunches. "I know it probably hurts, but I'm done now."

  "Good God, I hope so!"

  Caitlyn carried the pan with the needle in it and the branch over to the fire. She tossed the branch into the flames and turned back to Jon with a frown.

  "Maybe we should put a bandage over those stitches."

  "Or maybe not," Jon returned with a grimace as he scooted into a more upright position. Damn it, hadn't these mountain women ever heard of corsets? He had to admit, though, the firm breasts outlined by the flames flickering behind Caitlyn didn't look like they needed an ounce of support. And that itsy little waist — why, he could probably span it with his thumbs and forefingers.

  Caitlyn shifted uneasily. There he went again — probing those liquid pools of torquoise mountain water over her body like a starving man getting ready to dive into a buffalo steak. She glanced down at herself, then shrugged her shoulders. Heck, she was covered up plumb from her fingers, hidden by the too-long sleeves of Jon's shirt, to the tops of her bare feet, sticking out beneath Silas's rolled-up pantlegs. And he darned well better get used to her bare feet — she wasn't about to put on any moccasins until at least after the second frost.

  "Think I'll go see where our supper is."

  "Get your fanny back here!" Jon surged to his feet and stumbled toward the fire. The pain slicing through his head blinded his vision and he clasped his hands to hid skull, swaying in agony.

  "For pity sakes," Caitlyn murmured as she hurried over to help him sit back down against the dead log. "I oughta just let you starve," she said more loudly. "And I done t
old you I ain't no slave to be ordered around. I want to go grt me somethin' to eat, I'll do it."

  "Please," Jon pleaded. "Don't leave me right now."

  "Oh, all right," Caitlyn grumbled. "But it's your own fault your head's poundin' again. You need to rest. Heck, a day or two from now you won't even remember you hurt yourself, if you just take it easy for that long. Person's body, it suffers somethin', it 'spects a person to take care of it — let it get better an' heal itself. Person's only got one body. It ain't somethin' you can trade in when it gets worn a bit."

  "Quit talking about it!"

  "What?"

  "Your bo...never mind. Look, I think there's some pemmican left in my pack. Maybe that'll hold us until Silas gets back."

  Caitlyn nodded agreeably and walked over to the packs. The one that Tall Man's knife lay beside she already knew was Jon's. She dug in it and her fingers encountered a hard squareness.

  Caitlyn pulled out the book and stared in awe. She shifted it to her other hand and removed three more books of varying sizes, laying them reverently on the flap of the pack so the dirt wouldn't stain them. She found the bag of pemmican the next time her hand delved into the pack, and frowned, plucking something from her sleeve when she pulled her hand back out.

  "A comb," she said with pleasure. She glanced over at Jon to see him watching her closely. "You mind if I borrow this?" she asked, holding up the comb. "I promise I'll clean it out after I'm done."

  "Feel free." Jon watched her rise to her feet and approach him, reaching for the pemmican she handed him and keeping his eyes on her when she settled a little ways from him on the fallen log.

  Caitlyn swung her hair over her shoulder and started working on the ends of it, picking gently at the tangles in order not to break any of the teeth in the comb. While she worked, her eyes went yearningly back to the books she hadn't returned to the pack.

  "You're welcome to borrow the books anytime you like," Jon said. "I know how scarce reading material is in the mountains. It's one thing I've missed sorely."

  "Have you read all of them?" Caitlyn asked in quiet wonder.

  "About ten times over." Jon broke off a piece of pemmican and stuck it in his mouth, immediately spitting it into his palm. Maybe he'd wait until Silas got back with the food after all.

  Sticking the comb in her shirt pocket, Caitlyn walked back over to the books. Kneeling down, she picked one up and opened the cover. She reached out a tentative finger and traced the tip around the squiggles she found there. They were completely different from the lines she had studied over and over on the other book she always carried with her.

  "She's my mother."

  Caitlyn craned her head over her shoulder. "Who?"

  "The person who's name you're looking at. She inscribed the book before she gave it to me at Christmas one year."

  "Oh." Caitlyn gently closed the cover and laid the book down. "Figured it was some relative," she said as she walked back to the log. "Same last name and all. Clay, you said, didn't you?"

  "I didn't," Jon reminded her. "Silas did. But, yes, it's Clay. You couldn't have figured that out from the book's inscription, though. My mother didn't sign her whole name, just 'Evelyn, your mother'."

  Caitlyn blushed and dropped her head. Shifting around on the log so her back was to him, she pulled the comb from her pocket and reached for a snarled tress of hair. Working on it would give her something to do with her trembling fingers.

  "You can't read, can you?" Jon asked softly. "Look," he continued when her back stiffened, "it's nothing to be ashamed of. I don't suppose you've had much of a chance to learn out here."

  "Paw didn't know how, neither, and he got along right well!" Caitlyn said in an injured voice.

  "Would you like me to teach you?"

  "Would you?" She swung around on the log, blue eyes wide and sparkling with reflected firelight. "Oh, would you? I'd find some way to pay you back. I can sew up a real nice pair of moccasins, like Silas was askin' me to do. And shirts and britches. Heck, Paw never had to get his clothes from the Indian women. I always kept both of us fitted out real proper."

  "I hope what you had on earlier isn't an example," Jon said with a laugh as he studied her flushed cheeks and pink lips.

  "Naw. I was just wearin' that to try to make Tall Man keep his hands to himself." She saw Jon's eyes narrow at her words, but she prattled on. "That, along with the mud and wolverine scent on my legs. Worked pretty good, too, 'cept when Tall Man made me sleep outside the wigwam of a night. Sky Woman always called me in soon's he nodded off, though. Oh, darn!"

  Caitlyn jerked at the comb embedded in the tangle, then quickly slowed her movements. She might never be able to find Jon another comb if she broke this one, and it was snagged in a big clump of hair. The more she worked on it, the tighter her hair wound around it.

  "Here," Jon said, reaching toward her. "Let me help."

  Caitlyn scooted off the log to kneel beside him, and Jon realized his mistake at once. His fingers froze in the silky stands as she bent her head to watch him work and her scent surrounded him.

  He had given her the last bar of scented soap he'd bought in St. Louis before he left with a group of explorers headed for the mountains, but it wasn't soap scent that distracted him. Damned sure wasn't skunk smell, either. It was a special smell, hard to identify. Mountain meadows filled with flowers. Crisp fall days. The very essence of the mountains, everything he had stored in his memory these past months, filled his nose.

  Jon gritted his teeth and resolutely worked on the comb. It fell free at last, and he handed it back to her.

  "Don't reckon you could help me a little more, could you?" Caitlyn asked. "Me and Sky Woman, we always helped one another. It's sort of hard to reach back behind the shoulders."

  "I...I suppose," Jon agreed, almost biting his tongue over the escaping words.

  Caitlyn sighed in pleasure and turned her back again. "Paw used to help me, too," she said when she felt his fingers pick up a tress and lightly start working the teeth of the comb through it. "I threatened to cut it all off one day, and he told me if I ever did, he'd beat me black and blue."

  Caitlyn quickly glanced behind her at Jon, then turned forward. "'Course Paw didn't mean a word of it. He'd've sooner cut off his arm than ever raise it to me, though I 'spect there was a time or two I pushed him mighty close to losin' his temper."

  Jon grunted a silent agreement and worked quietly for several minutes, gently threading his fingers through some of the larger tangles, then following with the comb. The damp hair was quickly drying and tendrils curled around his hands, as soft as black silk. At one point Caitlyn dropped her head onto her chest, and he could almost swear he heard a soft purr coming from her throat.

  He couldn't imagine doing this for any other woman — not that any woman he had even known would ask him. They always appeared before him primped and cosseted, straight and proper, covered from head to toe with their hair bound and rolled so tightly he figured it probably took them all day just to do it. Couldn't have, he realized, since even his mother had came down to break the fast each morning with the only difference in her appearance being a slightly more modest gown than she wore in the evenings.

  Jon had never known a woman so free and immodest. It didn't seem to bother Caitlyn that the borrowed clothing hung and draped on her, miles too large for her slender body. And she obviously wasn't a bit selfconscious about letting him know she enjoyed his ministrations to her hair. That little purr....

  "Uh...," Jon began. Conversation, even if they started spitting at each other like they usually did, had to be better than the direction his thoughts were trying to take.

  "Hum?" Caitlyn purred.

  "Uh...Silas said you weren't Indian."

  "Huh uh. Leastways, I don't reckon so. Wasn't nobody left alive for Paw to ask when he found me, though."

  "I don't understand. If he was your father...."

  "Paw just took me in when he found me at that there fur post. Wasn't much else
he could do. Them Blackfeet — we suppose they was Blackfeet, anyway. Paw said the sign looked like Blackfoot sign."

  Caitlyn frowned and pushed the memories back before the shouts and screams could get a good hold on her mind as they sometimes did.

  "Them Blackfeet didn't leave no one else left alive," she told Jon. "And Paw said he was on his way back from his summer tradin'. Figured he'd bring me with him the next summer and' try to find someone to take me in. By that time, though, we was kind of attached to one another."

  "How did you escape the attack?"

  E"Don't rightly recall. I was only around five or so. And I don't like to think about it. Paw was the only family I ever needed."

  Jon felt her stiffen under his hands and a slight shudder run over her body. She probably did remember, he thought, but had buried it deep in her mind. If the stories he had heard about Indian torture were true, the people at the post hadn't died easy. He pictured a small, frightened Caitlyn in his mind, hiding in some safe place while the people she had lived with screamed out their agony and last breaths.

  "I'm sorry," he said softly. "About bringing it up and about your father, too. I lost my own father before I was even old enough to have any memories of him. The only picture I ever saw of him was one my mother gave me — their wedding picture. My stepfather didn't allow us to even talk about him."

  "That ain't right," Caitlyn said as she shifted to a more comfortable position and raised her head so Jon could reach the hair tumbling around her face. "Person wants to know, he oughta be able to find out. Me, I just ain't never had no desire."

  "Isn't, not ain't," Jon said.

  "What do you mean?" Caitlyn asked in a puzzled voice.

  "The proper word is 'isn't.' You'll understand when you start reading. 'Ain't' isn't really a word."

  "Don't see how that can be," Caitlyn replied. "Lots of folks use ain't. Can't not be a word if people speak it. Besides, 'I isn't never had no desire' makes me sound stupid."

  Jon's lips quirked and he searched among the tresses of hair for any tangle he might have overlooked, reluctant to admit his task was done.

  "In that sentence, you would use 'haven't,'" he explained. I 'haven't' had. And instead of no desire, it would be any desire."