Mountain Magic

by Simmons, Trana Mae

  "I asked you who he was, damn it!"

  "Forget it, Jon," Silas growled. "I know who he was, and Cat wasn't in any danger from him."

  Jon whirled on Silas. "And is there some damned reason neither one of you want to tell me his name?"

  "Yes," Silas said as he stood. "Now, we got some plans to make. I want to get our tradin' done and leave day after tomorrow."

  "Silas...."

  "Day after tomorrow?"

  Jon and Caitlyn spoke simultaneously, both with shock on their face. Caitlyn won the battle for speech when she plunged ahead with her words.

  "You can't possibly get everythin' done by then. Why, we've got to get some meat in and you said you need new clothes. They can't be made in just a day. And it'll take you more than a day just to dicker with the traders and get a good price for your furs. You got the best bunch of furs I've seen in ages. You can't just take the first offer they make."

  "Day after tomorrow," Silas said in a grim voice. "Anythin' not done by then can be done in the mountains. And we can stop on our way to hunt. There's buff'ler northwest of us — heard it from the Nez Perce. Figured we'd head up to your old cabin, Cat, and winter there."

  "Oh. Well, if that's where we're headed, then I don't mind getting an early start," Caitlyn said with a nod of agreement. "I got everything I need there to fix you both up with whatever you'll need this winter. Paw and I even left a few deer hides there for our own selves to use when we got back. Ought to be cured right soft by now."

  "Wait a minute. Don't I have anything to say about this?" Jon put in.

  "If you do, say it," Silas replied. "Any reason you can think of we should hang around rendezvous any longer?"

  None, except it means I'll be out there a good month longer with no distraction except Silas from that luscious little package of curves. Jon shook his head in defeat. He wasn't about to voice that reason, and if he refused to go when Silas was ready, he'd have to follow through on the vague notion of striking out on his own.

  And he owed Silas. Owed him for all the wilderness lessons the old man had taught him last winter. Showing him how the traps worked, the scent used to attract the beaver, the proper way to walk across the snow with the snowshoes Silas had helped him make. Hell, even where to place the traps, not only for beaver, but mink and ermine, fox and an occasional wolf. Jon wouldn't even have had enough furs to buy shot for his rifle this summer, if not for Silas.

  And his blond scalp might be decorating a lodge pole right now if Silas hadn't passed on at least part of his vast store of Indian lore. Even at that, Silas had gotten him out of a couple jams when Jon unintentionally insulted an Indian leader. Too, there was that time a chief's daughter had matrimony on her mind....

  "Day after's fine with me," Jon gave in. "But it's your turn to stay in camp this evening, Silas. I've got a couple things to do."

  "Suit's me," Silas agreed. "Me and Cat'll get somethin' to eat at one of the tents, then come back here and sort the furs, so's we won't have to do it in the morning."

  Jon propped his rifle against a tree. "Where's the knife I got from Tall Man? I left it there by the fire."

  Caitlyn walked over to the downed log. "I was sharpening it for you," she said as she picked up the knife and returned to the fire. "Got a good edge on it now."

  "Thank you," Jon said gruffly. "You didn't have to do that."

  "Told you I pay back." She reached down for the knife's sheath on a small rock by her feet and handed it to him. "Washed out that shirt you lent me, too. It's clean, when you want to wear it again."

  Jon tucked the knife into the sheath and fastened it to his belt without responding. He didn't care if he never saw that damned shirt again. It carried memories of Virginia — Roxie — his brother, Charlie, whom he had thought not only his brother, but his best friend.

  And wet, it had clung to shapely legs and high, tilted....

  Jon swung around and strode from camp. "I'll be back in the morning in plenty of time to help with the furs, Silas," he called over his shoulder.

  Caitlyn stared after him, pain shadowing her blue eyes. She was pretty darned sure Jon didn't know anyone else in camp well enough to share their fire all night. He hadn't spoken to any of the people they met that morning as if they were friends. He had to sleep somewhere and, if not in their camp, only one other place came to mind.

  It wasn't any of her business, she reminded herself. So what if one of those women for hire spent the night curled up in Jon's strong arms — like she had done almost the entire night before? So what if the woman did more than curl up with him? So what if Jon undressed the woman and himself by the light of a fire inside a wigwam, stroked her body, kissed her....

  Caitlyn unconsciously pursed her lips and a yearning need filled her. Her hands clenched and her nails bit into her palms. Her breasts grew heavy, the nipples puckering and scraping against her deerskin bodice when her breathing quickened.

  "You ready to go eat, Cat?"

  "Yes!" she snapped.

  So what if he snuffed and snorted over that poor woman's body? That sort of thing got a woman with child, trapped her, lost her forever the freedom Caitlyn valued so highly. She had always avoided the young children in the Indian camps — never cooed over the babies, never chucked them under the chin or offered to watch them while their mothers did chores.

  Thank goodness Sky Woman had never had a child with Paw. Caitlyn would have been hard pressed to show any interest in the new baby. Sky Woman was wrong when she told Caitlyn the day would come when she'd want to show her beauty to a man and share his life.

  Marriage meant babies, unless she was lucky enough to find a man who didn't seem able to make them, like her Paw must have been after all the years he spent with Sky Woman.

  She couldn't imagine a man like Jon not dropping babies behind him, though. Shoot, he could probably just park his britches near a woman, and if a breeze was blowing in the right direction she'd start swelling right away.

  Somewhere in the restricted portion of Caitlyn's mind a baby cried, the sound cut off abruptly. She firmly clamped the door shut on the memory as she followed Silas from camp.

  Now why the hell had he been stupid enough to let slip that he didn't intend to return to camp that night, Jon chastised himself. He paused a few feet from one of the liquor tents, his stomach roiling as the thought of forcing down any more of that rotgut. He might as well have admitted to Silas and Caitlyn that he intended to find a whore to spend the night with.

  Well, he might as well get it over with. Twelve more lonely months stretched out ahead of him, and a man's body needed surcease to keep it going. He'd barely been fourteen when the young widow on the next plantation introduced him to the pleasures he'd only fantasized about until then. And he'd never lacked for sex after that, although he had steered clear of virgins, until Roxie.

  Virgins were for marriage and families. At least, he'd always told himself they were. Wonder what his brother thought on his and Roxie's wedding night?

  Jon turned away from the liquor tent without ordering a drink. His steps were strangely reluctant as he headed for the edge of the huge campsite where the wigwams he sought were placed, affording those who had a desire for it a measure of privacy. Plenty of other men didn't give a darn, he realized as a high-pitched peal of laughter split the air, followed by a bass rumble.

  Jon glanced at the campfire as he passed. The woman sat in the bearded trapper's lap, her dress hanging around her waist and the man's lips slobbering over her bare breasts. The woman met Jon's glance with a sly look and dropped one eyelid.

  "Plenty more here after he's done, honey," she called in a drunken voice. "It don't wear out — just gets juicier!"

  Jon shook his head and his steps faltered, but not before he was well past the scene. Get it over with, his mind repeated.

  Get it over with?

  Jon came to a complete halt and stared ahead of him at the circle of wigwams. Was he really that desperate? Even at the whorehouses he had v
isited in Richmond, the women washed between men. And even there a man could close his eyes and make believe he hadn't paid for the pleasure. Woo her with a few well-placed caresses and soft words. Pretend it wasn't just straight-out sex — lust to be relieved.

  How many of those men he passed all day had already visited those wigwams — left behind their seed to mix with the next man's in line? And lines there were. Some short, others longer. As Jon watched, a man emerged from a wigwam, adjusting himself under his loincloth. His words carried on the air as he spoke to the next man in line and told him just what tricks the woman waiting inside knew. Two of the men in front of the next wigwam left their line and joined the other one.

  Jon snorted in disgust and turned away. The swelling between his legs protested mightily, rubbing against the buckskin and demanding release. He ignored it as best he could and headed back for the liquor tent, his mind filled with the images of the wigwams and a new pity in his heart for the women inside.

  Men had stood at the door of each wigwam — some of them white, others Indian — directing the men in and out and collecting the furs.

  It wasn't really much different back in Richmond. Almost all the houses were run by men, who raked in most of the money and paid a couple bouncers to control the rowdy men waiting their turn. Occasionally, the bouncers even sprinted up the stairs to one of the rooms, if the noises inside grew too violent. They weren't really protecting the women, though, but the merchandise the house sold — the women's bodies. A beaten woman had to rest a day or two — couldn't serve the customers.

  "Clay! Hey, Jon Clay, over here!"

  Jon turned toward the voice and saw Pete Smith motioning him to his tent. As Jon approached, Pete dug in his pocket and pulled out a stained envelope.

  "Got to talking to a man from one of the other companies," Pete said. "Told me someone back in St. Louis asked him to bring this with him, in case he ran across you. I told him you'd be coming back for the music box and he gave me this to pass on to you."

  Jon reluctantly accepted the letter and held it beneath a lantern to read the scrawl on the envelope. He should have known Charlie wouldn't let him go so easily. Hell, his half-brother had talked himself blue in the face, demanding to know why Jon refused to stay for the wedding — assuring Jon that nothing would change, even though the will left by Charlie's father had specifically disinherited Jon and left the plantation to Charlie.

  Maybe that would have worked. There had never been any problem between him and Charlie — just Jon and his stepfather. But not with Roxie in the picture. Not with the master bedroom, which Charlie had moved into after his father's death, only two doors down. Not after Roxie announced she had accepted Charlie's marriage proposal.

  "You want a little privacy to read that," Pete said, "you can go on over there."

  "Thanks."

  Jon walked over to the far end of the tent and settled on the bench beneath another lantern. He stared down at Charlie's scrawl another moment, remembering how their tutors despaired of ever teaching him and Charlie both to take their time and learn to put the stylish flourishes on their letters and words. Too many other things had demanded their attention during their lessons — tales of ferocious battles and conquering heroes, descriptions of lands and people they couldn't wait to visit.

  And always, the plantation fields beckoned. Shoes and shirts came off immediately after the noon meal, tossed onto a hay bale in the barn. Barefoot and tanned, Jon and Charlie trudged the plowed fields in the summer, learning every step of the tobacco-growing process. By the time they were ten, they were both experts at sorting the cured leaves into piles by quality.

  "Lord, Charlie, but I miss you," Jon breathed as he ran a finger beneath the envelope flap.

  ****

  Chapter 8

  One Week Later

  Jon lay on his stomach on top of the ridge and lined up the sights on his rifle before he gently squeezed the trigger. The buffalo dropped without a quiver, killed instantly by the bullet through its brain.

  "Good shot," Caitlyn whispered beside him, a slightly amazed look on her face.

  As he reloaded his rifle, Jon shot her a wry grin. "You sound like you thought I'd miss. I've been handling guns since I could walk."

  Caitlyn giggled under her breath. "Stay out here much longer, and you can enter the liar's contest at rendezvous next summer. Rules there say you have to take a tale with a smidgen of truth and see how far you can stretch it. I reckon that one you just told would earn you a spot in line, 'specially if you hunker down like you're two years old and carry that there buffalo gun on your shoulder."

  "Hum," Jon mused as he lined up his sights again. "Seems like I'm remembering it a little better now. I was actually only crawling the first time. Had to brace the butt of the gun against my crib slat, and Nanny stuck her head in the nursery door just about the time I figured out where the trigger was. Poor Nanny. We had to retire her on a pension, since she couldn't even change a nappy after that, her hands shook so bad."

  Caitlyn's burst of laughter was drowned by the boom from the rifle. She shook her head, and her blue eyes sparkled merrily as she glanced from Jon toward the other shaggy brown body lying in the little valley.

  "That's enough meat for now," she told Jon. "Time I get all that fixed for us, we'll have a load on the horses."

  "You sure two tongues will be enough?" Jon quirked an eyebrow at her. "For you and Silas, I mean. I'll leave that delicacy to you two."

  "You just wait 'til you taste it," Caitlyn said with a pat on his arm. "You didn't think you'd like Wagmiza Wasna, either, until you tasted it. You thought it'd be like regular pemmican."

  For the life of him, Jon couldn't remember the Wagmiza Wasna on his tongue, but he had a untarnished recall of the taste of Caitlyn's finger. He supposed he might sample a piece of buffalo tongue, if she offered it to him the same way. Giving a muffled snort of disgust at himself at the turn his thoughts were taking, Jon jerked his eyes away from Caitlyn's slender fingers on his arm and stared back down into the valley.

  "First," he said in a gruff voice, "we have to get down there and clean those animals. Why isn't the rest of the herd running off after those shots?"

  "Buffalos are stupid critters," Caitlyn explained. "Sometimes they'll stand there milling 'round for hours while a person's shooting them. Other times one of them'll spook at a shadow when a cloud covers the sun, and the whole herd'll take off and run 'til they drop. That's why Silas didn't want you picking off our meat out of that big herd yesterday. You never know which direction them skittish things will run, so we needed to wait 'til we found a small bunch off by itself."

  "Those skittish things," Jon corrected her.

  "Those skittish things," Caitlyn repeated agreeably. "Anyway, we'll have to go down there and chase them off soon as Silas gets here. He's heard your shots back where he's fixing up our camp, and he ought to be here with the pack horses in a while."

  Caitlyn tossed her long, ebony braid back over her shoulder and sat up to stretch. Her breasts strained against her doeskin dress bodice, and she reached for the back of her neck to massage a small ache in her muscles. Glancing down, she brushed at the dry grass clinging to the doeskin, and pulled out a long piece of dried weed that had somehow worked its way inside her neckline when she and Jon belly-crawled up to the ridge top.

  Unaware of Jon's hungry gaze, she slipped a finger beneath her neckline and scratched a nail over the tickle the withdrawing weed left behind, while she stuck the weed in her mouth to chew on it. Jon give a hiss as he scrambled to his feet, and the weed fell unnoticed to the ground when Caitlyn stared at him in astonishment.

  "Where you going?" she demanded.

  "Down there and chase off those buffalo so I can start butchering the dead ones," he tossed over his shoulder as he strode down the hillside toward where they had left their horses.

  Caitlyn shrugged her shoulders and rose to follow him. They could probably handle the two hundred or so animals down there by them
selves, she guessed. And the sooner they got the meat back to camp, the sooner she could start smoking and pickling it. The cabin she and Mick had built was still another week's journey away, and it would take her at least three days to cure the buffalo meat. They had already been travelling a week, and if her calculations were right, August was already upon them. She had seen snow as early as the end of August in these mountains.

  Jon passed her without a glance as he rode toward the ridge top, and Caitlyn hurried over to the pinto Silas had traded several ermine furs for. Good grief, she hoped Jon at least had enough sense to wait for her before he rode down into that valley. She checked the noose around her pup's neck — she didn't need to be worried about him following them down there and spooking the herd. Then she grabbed a handful of mane and leapt onto the pinto's bare back. Her dress skirt barely covered her thighs, but she ignored the cool breeze on her legs as she urged the pinto up the hillside.

  "Wait!" Caitlyn called, but Jon disappeared over the ridge top. Caitlyn swiveled around to glance behind her, but she saw no sign of Silas coming to help. Thinning her lips in a gesture of both worry and displeasure at Jon's foolishness, she kicked the pinto into a canter up the hill.

  Jon reined his horse in a sweep around the buffalo herd when he reached the valley floor. Several shaggy heads topped by sharp horns rose to watch his approach, but not one of the animals moved away.

  "Get!" Jon shouted. "Get out of here!"

  Jon's horse balked when one huge bull lowered its head and pawed the ground. Tightening the reins in one hand, Jon picked up his rifle in the other. He kicked the horse in the flanks, but it sidled sideways instead of ahead.

  The breeze blew the herd's scent to him, and Jon opened his mouth, trying not to breathe through his nose. God, they stank. But stink or not, he had to get them moving — and to do that he needed to get closer.