The Pride of Hannah Wade

by Janet Dailey

  Critical Acclaim for Janet Dailey’s THE PRIDE OF HANNAH WADE...

  “Readers who love Janet Dailey will no doubt ve THE PRIDE OF HANNAH WADE. ailey’s novels have always been marked by strong stories that barrel along at full throttle. ... An atmospherically charged, action-filled story.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Janet Dailey weaves a wonderfully romantic tale, and THE PRIDE OF HANNAH WADE is no exception. . . . A spellbinding story.”

  —Chattanooga Times

  “A double-barrelled melodrama. . . . The reader . . . is in for a galloping adventure.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Janet Dailey’s ability to recreate the West is enhanced by a courageous heroine and a ruggedly appealing hero. . . . THE PRIDE OF HANNAH WADE IS JANET DAILEY AT HER BEST.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Books by Janet Dally

  Calder Born, Calder Bred

  Stands a Calder Man

  This Calder Range

  This Calder Sky

  The Best Way to Lose

  Touch The Wind

  The Glory Game

  The Pride of Hannah Wade

  Silver Wings, Santiago Blue

  For the Love of God

  Foxfire Light

  The Hostage Bride

  The Lancaster Men

  Leftover Love

  Mistletoe & Holly

  The Second Time

  Separate Cabins

  Terms of Surrender

  Western Man

  Nightway

  Ride the Thunder

  The Rogue

  This book is a work of historical fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents relating to non-historical figures are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance of such non-historical incidents, places or figures to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1985 by Janet Dailey

  Cover art copyright © 1985 Lisa Falkenstern

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce

  this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue

  of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 1-416-58878-7 ISBN: 978-1-416-58878-8

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-4037-3

  First Pocket Books printing November 1985

  15 14 13 12 11 10

  POCKET and, colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  CHAPTER 1

  March 1876,

  Apacheria Country

  Near Fort Bayard,

  New Mexico

  Territory

  “OUT HERE, A LADY HAS TO SURVIVE THE BEST WAY SHE can,” Hannah Wade offered in droll sympathy to the young woman showing her dismay as she looked about the huddle of adobe buildings, stacked with pottery and wares inside and out. “Sometimes that means enduring unladylike conditions.”

  Suddenly the hot stillness was broken by the clatter of unshod hooves pounding across the hard desert floor. One minute the only dust that stirred in the nameless, half-Mexican settlement of straw-and-mud-brick adobe buildings was raised by the trailing hems of the fashionably bustled dresses worn by the three army officers’ wives—and in the next dust swirled in a low-hanging haze around the scrawny piebald ponies and their Apache riders.

  Hannah Wade stiffened at the sight of the Indians charging toward them. No shouts or war cries shattered the air; that was not the Apache way, which was a practice of stealth, silence, and surprise. Two long years of watching her husband ride out at the head of cavalry companies had taught her that much.

  In the seconds they had before the Apaches were on them, Hannah glanced at their escorting officer, whose rough features were shaded by the brim of his campaign hat. “Captain?” The thread of alarm, in her low voice demanded his instruction and guidance, but her poise remained as smooth as the coil of mahogany hair at the nape of her neck.

  His hand was already lifted, forestalling any action by the black sergeant and the two black troopers waiting by the army ambulance, the military conveyance that had brought the women to this trading settlement. “Be at ease, ladies.” Captain Jake Cutter raised a long, thin cigar to his mouth, his narrowed and keen blue eyes showing a watchful calm. The gauntlet-style gloves were tucked through his belt, leaving his large hands bare.

  The Apaches halted their ponies in the small clearing, filling it with billowing alkali dust. Four of them dismounted and advanced toward the brush-roofed ramada where Hannah stood. Lieutenant Sloane’s young wife was at her side and somewhere behind her was Ophelia Bettendorf, wife of the commanding officer at Fort Bayard.

  Mrs. Sloane, who was new to the territory, gave a little cry of fear at the approach of the unkempt-looking savages. At the same instant, Hannah noticed the small band had isolated them from the army ambulance and the soldiers—and any protection they might lend. Captain Jake Cutter continued to occupy a corner of her side vision, the pungent smell of his cigar mixing with the raised dust in the air.

  No war paint adorned the blunt-featured faces of the Apaches, and the weapons they carried were held in loose readiness, not brandished in a threatening manner. Some of the high tension left Hannah as she recognized that the captain’s split-second reading of the situation had been accurate; they were not being attacked.

  With an effort, Hannah ignored the silent menace of the Apaches’ presence and turned from the stare of the Sat black eyes to the young wife of the recently transferred Lieutenant Richard Sloane. “Do you suppose the Apaches guessed you are a new arrival, Mrs. Sloane, and staged all this for your benefit?” The lightness of her voice assured the newcomer that she had nothing to fear.

  “Wh—what do they want?” Rebecca Sloane shrank against Hannah as a lithely muscled Apache brave walked toward them.

  His shoulders were wide and his chest deep. Bared to the waist, his dark copper skin was covered with a fine, dulling film of dust. A breechcloth was wrapped around his waist, the front hanging to his knees and extending over the buckskin leggings of his high moccasins. His ageless, heavy-boned features had a brutal quality, their harsh composition aggravated by a knife scar across the right cheek.

  For a brief instant, contempt showed in his expression as he noted the fear in Rebecca Sloane’s voice and eyes; then he rudely shouldered his way past the women to enter the trader’s small store. Two other braves followed, pushing their way past as well. The rank odor of their bodies was so strong that Hannah pressed a lavender-scented handkerchief to her nose to block out the smell. She was barely able to disguise her disgust for these vile, filthy savages, who bore no resemblance to the “noble red man” that she’d read about in the eastern newspapers before coming west.

  “After all these years on the frontier with the colonel,” the matriarchal Mrs. Bettendorf murmured, “I still find the manners of these heathens insufferable.”

  Fear continued to edge Rebecca Sloane’s expression, but it was overcome by an uneasy worry that she might not have acquitted herself well in the eyes of the commander’s wife. “I. . . I’ve never seen a wild Indian before,” she stammered out in her defense. “Only the scouts at the fort. It was rather frightening when they rode up like that.”

  “It gave us all a start,” Mrs. Bettendorf assured her, although Hannah personally doubted if anything was capable of shocking this iron woman, a staunch supporter of her
husband and his career and the occupant of the female side of the fort’s throne, ruling over the officers’ wives. “As long as those Indians are in that store, I don’t intend to go inside.” With a regal swish of her skirts, the commander’s wife turned and marched to a corner of the shady brush arbor, her amply rounded figure emphasizing the wig-wag of her swagged bustle. “You’ll need some of these clay jars, Mrs. Sloane.”

  Ollas were suspended from a corner post of the ramada. Hannah drifted after her companions, not listening to the lecture about the dual use of the containers, which kept water cool by evaporation and also provided a cooling effect on the surroundings by the same method. Her attention remained with the Apache warriors left on guard in the clearing. She was curiously repelled and fascinated by them at the same time.

  Short of stature and honed to a tough leanness, they wore a ragtag collection of clothing. Two were dressed in the loose-fitting shirts and pants of white men’s attire, and a third wore buckskin pants and a plaid shirt. One of them, Hannah noticed, was quite heavy for an Apache. Lank black hair hung to their shoulders and below, faded sweatbands around their foreheads. Except for the lizardlike awareness of the eyes catching every movement about them, the Apaches appeared indifferent.

  The dust had settled, although the smell of it remained in the still air ... the smell of dust and cigar smoke. She glanced at the holder of the long brown cigar, skimming briefly that hawkish face leathered to a smooth shade of brown by constant exposure to the harsh desert elements. Small seams showed around his features, lines of experience drawn out from the corners of eyes that were as dry and blue as the desert sky—quick eyes that missed nothing, including her glance.

  “Are they Chiricahuas?” Although Hannah’s husband’s regiment, the Ninth Cavalry, had only been transferred from Texas to the District of New Mexico six months ago, she had quickly become familiar with the local Indian problems. Since the death of Cochise a year and a half ago, more and more Chiricahua had become discontented with reservation life and left the agency land in neighboring southern Arizona.

  “They’re Chiricahuas, but not from Cochise’s band.” From his position in the ramada’s shade, Captain Cutter had an unobstructed view of both the clearing and the crudely built adobe store. “More likely, the Nde-nda-i group.”

  For many newcomers to the Southwest, the Apache tribe was a confusion of smaller bands: the Lipan-Apache, the Kiowa-Apache, the Mescalero, the Jicar-illa, the Chiricahua, and the Western Apache. And each band was made up of groups that shared hunting grounds and cooperated in certain undertakings such as war and religious ceremonies. The groups were composed of scattered, extended families, the lineage reckoned through both parents although the culture was essentially matriarchal. Each group had leaders, but no chief could make commitments for the whole tribe.

  When Cochise made peace, he had spoken only for himself and promised to urge the rest of his group to agree to the terms. No treaty was made with the other Chiricahua bands, leaving them free to raid and war as they were wont to do, as evidenced by the frequent sorties they made against the miners in the Silver City area.

  Hannah had heard the frustration caused by the too-democratic system discussed too many times. He army didn’t know how to deal with it. But it wasn’t that knowledge that brought her attention to the captain now. He’d spoken with certainty rather than suspicion in naming the band. More than once her husband, Stephen, had complained about the difficulty of telling one Indian from another, yet the captain was claiming to distinguish one Apache band from a host of others.

  “How do you know this, Captain?” she challenged. He absently rolled the cigar along his lips, taking his time in answering. The action showed the angles and hollows of his jaw and cheek. Of all the officers at Fort Bayard, Captain Jake Cutter alone remained clean-shaven, growing neither whiskers nor mustache. It set him apart from the other men, as did many things about him.

  “See that dumpy, mean-looking one on the glass-eyed roan?” He spoke around his cigar, his lips barely moving while he clamped the butt between his teeth. “He fits the description of Juh, a leader of the Nde-nda-i group.” He pronounced the Apache’s name as Hwū.

  In her earlier perusal of the small band, Hannah had glossed over the fat one. This time her glance paused on him. Whether or not her impression was colored by Captain Cutter’s words, she sensed a malevolence behind those devil-black eyes, a base cruelty that brought a shiver to her skin and prompted her to look away.

  “What is he doing here?” She sought to dispel the sensation and rushed the question, giving it a tone of demand.

  “Shopping, the same as you, Mrs. Wade.” The dry reminder came with the hard gleam of a smile. “Although I expect they’re wanting to trade for something other than odd pieces of pottery and baskets to pretty their wickiups.”

  His comment obviously revealed his skepticism about the importance of this trip. They’d come to purchase some inexpensive Mexican goods that would be utilitarian as well as decorative for Mrs. Sloane’s quarters on Officers’ Row. Without some attempt to brighten it, army housing could be as drab and barren as the desolate land surrounding it.

  “Spoken like a jealous bachelor who has no woman to create a cheery corner where he can slip away from the army’s hard existence,” Hannah retorted, completely sure of her role and purpose in her husband’s life, which was to provide beauty and grace and to alleviate loneliness.

  “I knew I was missing something.” His jesting comment mocked her sentiment, but not unkindly.

  A flurry of movement distracted Hannah, checking her reply as the Apaches who’d been in the store came out. They moved swiftly, not appearing to hurry yet gliding across the ground. They swung onto the blanket-covered saddletrees strapped on their horses’ backs and each gathered up the single braided rawhide strand looped around the horse’s lower jaw that served as both bridle and rein. The shifting hooves dug up the dust layers, the horses snorting to clear their nostrils.

  The first Apache, the bare-chested brave with the scarred cheek, faced his tan and white pony toward the store. The look he threw at Captain Cutter was a killing one, but the border Spanish he called out was intended for the trader inside the adobe building.

  “He said he would be back when the ‘yellow legs’ and his ‘buffalo soldiers’ had gone,” Hannah translated. “Yellow legs” referred to the yellow stripe down the legs of a cavalry officer’s trousers, while “buffalo soldier” was the Indians’ descriptive term for the Negro troopers whose kinky hair reminded them of the shaggy mane of a buffalo.

  “I heard.” But he couldn’t guess the reason for a return visit—perhaps to complete a trade for illegal goods or to settle a score over some slight, or merely to talk big.

  In a scurry of ponies, the Apaches swept out of the clearing and melted almost instantly into the desert scrub that grew thickly along the dry wash. Cutter watched until there was no more trace of them, then brought his attention back to the party of women.

  A shaft of sunlight pierced the dried brush roofing the crude shelter and awakened fiery lights in the red-brown hair of Mrs. Wade. They caught his eye, causing his glance to linger on her. Slim and round-bodied, she had ivory-fair skin and heavily fringed brown eyes. Her smoothly refined features held a contented look, as of strong passions running a serene course. His attention centered briefly on the soft crease of her lips, a hint of will and pride at the corners. When her glance swung to him, it was full and direct.

  “You speak Spanish.” Cutter remembered the instant translation she’d made of the Apache’s words only minutes ago.

  “When we were stationed in Brownsville, I had a Mexican woman for a maid. And you, Captain, where did you learn?” The heat was already building, even in the shade beneath the ramada. She lifted a lace handkerchief to her face and delicately pressed it around her mouth to absorb the fine sheen of dampness.

  “I guess I picked it up during all those years on the Texas border, too.” Cutter observed her a
ction, so indicative of breeding and refinement. The lavender fragrance drifted across the heated air to him, stirring up memories and an old bitterness. Those were behind him—and better left there.

  So instead he considered the way the army could isolate a man. Even though he and Major Wade had served in the same regiment for the last four years, this was the first time they’d been assigned to the same post. Therefore he’d only recently become acquainted with the major’s wife. At some of those Texas outposts, months would go by without Cutter ever seeing a white woman. Few officers permitted their wives to join them, not necessarily because they were bothered by the hardships of the post or the threat of hostiles, but because they were concerned about their women living in close proximity to all the enlisted colored soldiers. Exceptions were the forts near centers of civilization, like Brownsville.

  The entire officer corps of the Ninth Cavalry Regiment was white. The Negro soldiers they commanded never advanced beyond the noncommissioned ranks. And few officers were happy about serving in a colored regiment, but Cutter had been with the Ninth since its inception after the War Between the States. Besides, he’d always had trouble fitting the mold.

  At the outbreak of the Civil War, he’d enlisted in the Union army at the age of eighteen. He was a natural leader, and all his promotions had come in the field, catapulting him up through the ranks and earning him an officer’s commission without the benefit of a West Point education, something the War Between the States had done with many a soldier.

  But that need didn’t exist after the war was won, and the army found itself with a surfeit of officers. Like many other officers, Mrs. Wade’s husband among them, Cutter had been demoted at the close of the war. But unlike Major Wade with his West Point ring, he didn’t insist on the observance of military courtesy that dictated his being addressed by his former rank. While the others scratched and clawed to regain their previous status, Cutter found no great difference between the major he’d been and the captain he now was. Having seen the army from both sides—officer and enlisted man—he was satisfied with the uniform and the job.