by Janet Dailey
Lutero caught up a handful of the hunter-green skirt material. Hannah acted without thinking, pushing at his hand to get it away from her person and to free her skirts. Her show of resistance brought a snarl to his lightning-streaked face. He yanked violently on the material, throwing her off balance. The waistband fastening gave, the cloth ripping as she fell. She was tumbled out of the skirt and its slip, like a pillow turned out of its case.
Clad only in her blouse and pantalettes, Hannah clambered to her feet and backed warily away from the Apache, very much afraid. The rocks at the cliff’s base slid beneath the leather soles of her riding boots. Solid sandstone was behind her. Blood pounded in her ears as her breath came in fast, panic-shallow gasps. Her nerves were screaming with the tension, but Hannah fought to still the panic. When he took a step toward her, Hannah bolted for an open space that would give her maneuvering room, but he caught her, his fingers digging into her arms like ensnaring talons. The thin material of her blouse tore like paper under his grip as she struggled to break loose. The ache of her weary muscles was forgotten, renewed strength coming from the surge of adrenaline in her veins. Twisting and fighting, she kicked at him, the toe of her boot squarely hitting his shin and drawing an involuntary grunt of pain.
She was thrown violently to the ground, scraping her flesh on the sharp gravel. Her feet were caught, and after he made one abortive attempt to pull her boots off, a knife blade flashed in the sunlight. Her blood froze at the sight of it, all her limbs momentarily stilled. It sliced through the laces and the hard leather boots nearly slid off of their own accord. Her stockings were stripped off, and when he pulled Hannah upright, the stones cut into her bare and tender feet, the pain hampering her attempts at resistance. She couldn’t swallow all the anguished sounds that rose in her throat, while she tried to concentrate on the threat of the knife.
Continuing to struggle, she tried to avoid the blade as it came toward her, but there was no lasting escape. She eluded it here only to have it slice through a piece of cloth there. Her blouse and undergarments were quickly shredded to ribbons. She could feel the exposure, the sensation of air against her bare flesh. Hannah clutched at the scraps of cloth covering her private places, but she didn’t have enough hands.
The humiliation and indignity flamed through her body, fear always there but now coupled with a wild desperation. Her mane of red-brown hair tumbled loose, swinging forward to hide her breasts, but the rounded cheeks of her buttocks were unprotected, and the figleaf pose of her hand over the dark pubes was futile. In a fear-driven rage, Hannah struck out against this degradation, this awful helplessness.
The scaly roughness of his hands was abrasive against her soft skin, brutal in its intent to subdue. She was sickened by the strong smell of his body, revolted by the contact with his sweating flesh, grainy with dust and dirt.
By some accident, her pummeling fist got past his defenses, striking his high-bridged nose. A second later, exploding agony spread across her jaw and her lip was smashed against her teeth, splitting it open. The force jerked her head way around, a noise ringing in her ears. She reeled backward, staggering, belatedly realizing he’d hit her. She lost her footing on the loose rock and sprawled onto the ground, grazing her bare skin on the gravel.
Quickly she turned, expecting any second to feel the weight of his body pin her to the ground. But the Apache called Lutero was still standing a foot away, his legs spread in an arrogant stance as he surveyed the white smoothness of her nude body.
Some unintelligible comment was made by one of the others in the Apache tongue, seeming to urge Lutero into action—or so Hannah feared. Her glance darted around the watching band of warriors; she could sense their desire for the sport. A sickening fear curled through her stomach.
Speaking Apache, Lutero said something that held a note of finality, and a response was made by Juh, the malevolent, fat one, which seemed to amuse the others as they made sounds of approval. Hannah was afraid to move, and break whatever spell was holding the Apaches in their places. Then Lutero moved—away from her, rejoining his companions while he kept an eye on her.
When he squatted on his heels in their loosely formed circle, she cautiously sat up, drawing her knees tightly to her chest and hunching over them, hiding behind the curtain of her hair as much as she could. She kept glancing at the pile of torn clothes, wondering if she dared to retrieve them. A moment later he gathered them up and began stuffing them into a pouch on one of the packhorses.
“Por favor—“ Hannah began her protest with a tactful plea, but she fell silent when Lutero scowled at her, revealing his contempt.
The gelding stood in the shade, its head hanging in exhaustion. After a few halfhearted tugs at the hardy mountain grass, the horse had given up the task as too wearing. The Indian ponies chomped at the scattered clumps, their heads jerking to tear the tough stalks.
Lutero stopped beside the gelding and looked over the strange saddle with its arrangement of leg rest and stirrups all on one side. It did not win his approval. He unhooked the cinch and let the sidesaddle drop to the ground. Hannah wasn’t sure what all this meant, but she was still alive. She was still alive. Tears burned at the back of her eyes, but she managed to keep them there.
The lookout came back and spoke in that rhythmic flow of throaty sounds, and the others began moving toward their horses. But none of it carried any sense of urgency. Hannah sat quietly, hoping they might overlook her but Lutero did not do that.
“Ugashé. We go,” he translated into deep-voiced Spanish.
The mortification she felt at her nudity was an indescribably intense emotion. In her whole life, only her mother—and Stephen, in the dark shadows of the bedroom—had ever seen her unclothed. Now here she was, under a brilliant sun in the company of eight marauding Apaches without a stitch of clothes to her name. It stripped her of all dignity and pride.
Fear impelled her to obey him. Her shoulders hunched, her arms spread across her body in a covering gesture, Hannah rose and gingerly picked her way over the sharp-edged rocks, the mass of thick, darkly auburn hair tumbling about her white shoulders.
Impatient at her slowness, Lutero reached out and shoved her at the horse. The force propelled her into the animal’s hot flank, the horsehair coarse against the softness of her breasts and belly. All her life she had ridden sidesaddle, from the time she was seven and her daddy bought her first pony. Few ladies she’d met ever rode astride. It was considered indecent for a woman to spread her legs astraddle a horse. To do so now, when she was naked, seemed the greatest indignity.
Hannah levered herself away from the bay’s flank, hotly conscious of her bare bottom. She stiffened at the rough touch of Lutero’s hands, one grabbing her waist and the other a handful of round bottom. In one motion, she was heaved onto the horse’s back. Automatically she swung a leg over it to straddle the bony, hair-covered hump. The sensations of the horse’s coat beneath her made her rigid with embarrassment. Her degradation now seemed complete.
Single file, the Apaches moved out. A tug on the reins pulled the bay horse into a trot. Hannah had to thread her fingers into its black mane to hold on while she learned to grip with the insides of her legs to avoid the awkward and painful slap of her bottom on the horse’s back.
As the sun drifted lower in the afternoon sky, the rocky cliff cast a longer shadow onto the canyon floor at its base. The Apache scouts loosely sat their horses in the shade, awaiting the cavalry column riding up. The hooves of the army horses stirred up a dust cloud that could be seen for miles in all directions.
The collective sounds of jangling bridle chains, creaking saddle leather, and shuffling hooves covered the infrequent conversations among the troopers. Horse smell and body sweat combined in a rank odor that swirled around the column when the command to halt came down the line.
“Have the men dismount, Sergeant.” Cutter passed the order to his colored top sergeant, John T. Hooker. “We’ll rest here for fifteen minutes.”
�
��Yes, sir.” Hooker saluted and wheeled his horse around. “Prepare to dismount!” he called.
In between Cutter’s order and the shouted command, Stephen Wade muttered his discontent. “I don’t see that a rest is necessary, Captain. Those coloreds should be used to the heat anyway.”
“Dis-mount!” The bellowed command was followed by the combined creak of twenty saddles as the troopers halted themselves off their horses.
“It’s the hot of the day, Major,” Cutter said, unemotional in the face of criticism from his superior. “If our horses break, down, we will never catch up with those Apaches, sir.” No rebuttal of his reasoning appeared to be forthcoming, so he suggested, “Let’s see what the scouts have found.”
One-Eye Amos Hill was squatting on the ground in the shade of the cliff. When the two officers rode up, he passed the reins of his horse to one of the scouts and motioned for Nah-tay to join them.
“They stopped here.” Amos turned his one good eye on the officers as they dismounted and handed their horses over to the scout.
“How long ago?” Energy lay coiled inside Stephen like a spring, capable of carrying him for days without rest if necessary. It was this knowledge of his own stamina that made him impatient with weaker men.
“Better than an hour ago. Closer to two, I’d say.” Amos said, reconsidering.
“Dammit, we aren’t gaining on them,” Stephen protested.
“That’s kinda hard to do.” Amos scratched at his whiskers. “You see, Major, they got the advantage of knowin’ where they’re goin’, and we got to follow their trail to find that out—and make sure we don’t ride into an ambush in the process. It’s slow business, especially when an Apache don’t want you to follow him.”
“You hired on to do a job, Hill. I expect you to do it without a lot of excuses and bellyaching.” Stephen had little time for complaints on the job, especially when that job involved finding Hannah. The damned chief of scouts should be out there now, hot on the trail of those murdering Apaches, he thought.
“No excuses, Major,” Amos replied, stealing a half-concealed glance at Cutter. “The job comes with some limitations, and I just wanted to be sure you understood them.”
“I understand, Hill.”
“How many were here?” Cutter went back to the original subject as he opened his canteen to wet his bandanna and wipe his face and neck.
“Eight. Nine counting the woman.”
“Then she was here?” The idleness of Cutter’s tone did not match the sharp-eyed glance he sent the scout.
The hesitation lasted no longer than a pulse beat. “Yeah, she was here,”
A heightened tension in the air alerted Stephen to a missed significance of the question. “We’ve been following their trail, and it led us to this place. Why did you ask if she’d been here, Captain?”
“It’s a way of double-checking, Major.” He wiped out the sweatband of his campaign hat, his black hair pressed flat against his head where it had sat. “We can be certain we didn’t miss any side trips they might have made off the main trail.” The hat was set firmly onto his head and pushed back into position before he looked at the scout. “There was something you wanted to tell us.”
“No,” Hill said in a disgruntled, irritable voice. “But I reckon there’s somethin’ you’ve got a right to see.”
Cutter lagged half a step behind the major as he followed the whiskered scout across a graveled stretch of talus to a clear area next to some brush. It wasn’t the kind of ground that showed much sign, but the scrap of white cloth hooked to a low branch of a bush told part of the tale.
“That’s Hannah’s.” Wade snatched up the piece of cloth, a narrow ribbon woven along the top to make a neckline of sorts. “It’s her . . . camisole.” His voice faded and his fingers curled the bit of material into his palm, his jaw muscles working convulsively.
Cutter picked up a piece of pink ribbon, torn from the undergarment, and twined it around his forefinger. He stared at the kicked-up gravel and the gouges in it. He felt very flat and very cold inside.
“The ground’s purty churned up here,” Amos said. “It looks like she put up a struggle.”
“Damn them!” The words were an ominous rumble that came from deep within Stephen Wade.
“I seed Mrs. Wade at the fort a time or two. I always thought she was a fine lady,” Amos offered as a kind of final comment before he turned to leave Major Wade.
Cutter took a swift step after him and pulled him to the side, muttering under his breath so that Wade wouldn’t hear, “What did you mean by that? Is she still alive? Did she leave here with them?”
“Yeah, she’s alive.” The scout wiped at the sweat trickling down his temples, and his crazy, marble eye directed its gleam at Cutter. “And we both know she’d be better off dead about now. Hell, Captain, between here and Texas, you been fightin’ these ‘paches for a few years. You seen what they done to white women.” Cutter knew. He had buried some of them. Unconsciously, he wrapped the piece of ribbon more tightly rebbon his fingers. He hoped to God he wouldn’t have to bury her, too.
“Get your scouts out. We’ll be on the move in another ten minutes.” He dismissed Amos. As the buckskin-clad figure moved away, Cutter glanced back at Wade.
The piece of cloth was clenched in his fist and held tight at his side. He was staring at the patch of desert, the gravel all scuffled, and Cutter saw the wetness in the other officer’s eyes. A rage of anguish contorted his features, making his long jaw stand out.
A man was entitled to his private feelings, so Cutter walked away, a bitter gall sticking in his own throat at the whole sorry situation.
Fire burned all the way through her, until Hannah felt seared to the bone. The sun had beaten down on her naked skin for hours, the tender white skin that she had always protected with such care from too much exposure to the elements. She had only to look at her thighs and arms to see the redness and understand the searing pain.
Her body ached from riding, every muscle screaming its soreness; the insides of her knees were practically raw from gripping the horse, and her legs felt as if they were being pulled apart.
Her lips were cracked from the dryness and the heat. She’d had nothing to eat or drink since morning. She was on the verge of collapsing, yet some spark of life kept her going, kept her swaying to the horse’s stride, kept pushing her to continue.
Everything was a kind of haze, a shimmering agony of fire, thirst, and pain. Her face throbbed where Lutero had struck her, her lip was swollen, and her head ached. Dust and sweat had mixed to crease her skin with muddy rivulets.
They walked their mounts along a gully soft with sand, a single line of horses traveling nose to tail. The thick, fine sand muffled the thud of plodding hooves, a dully rhythmic sound punctuated by the odd snort of a pony clearing its nostrils of dust. The sound enveloped Hannah, coming from beneath her, behind her, and in front of her.
It was several beats before she realized it was also coming from another direction, and she roused herself from the stupor that claimed her to puzzle out the difference. The horses in front were angling out of the gully where a natural ford sloped the sides. Instead of following them, Lutero was riding straight ahead, the blood bay gelding in tow. The riders behind them turned after the others.
Confused and unable to think clearly, Hannah swung her dull gaze to her Apache captor and watched him lift a hand in farewell to his comrades. When he noticed her bewilderment, his mouth curved in a smile that seemed malicious.
“Scatter across desert,” he said in Spanish.
It took her a minute to unravel that cryptic message and to recall his earlier likening of the Apache to gains of sand. The band was breaking up, scattering across the desert to disappear one by one. In. the half of her mind that was functioning, the part not dulled by physical suffering, Hannah realized that any cavalry patrol following their trail would be unlikely to notice their tracks in this soft sand, splitting away from the main bunch.
&
nbsp; She cried out, but it was only a low moan. Her body hurt too much.
CHAPTER 6
THE SHOCK OF WATER AGAINST HER PAMCHED LIPS AND thick tongue lifted Hannah out of her stupor and awakened her pain-drugged senses. The smell of the tepid water, the sound of it trickling from a container made from animal intestines, and the wetness of it reduced her to a primitive drive. The rough hand that had twisted into her hair no longer needed to hold her head back. She clutched at the water bag, tipping it higher to increase the flow. More came than her dry throat could swallow and it slopped over the side of her mouth, its warm wetness cooler than her sunburned, dehydrated skin.
When the flow was cut off and the water bag withdrawn, Hannah greedily reached for it, her thirst not nearly quenched. “No, please.” The croaked protest was no louder than a whisper and it lacked strength.
No response came as Lutero walked, away from her kneeling form. Her outstretched arms fell limply to her sides, and a sudden gut-wrenching pain convulsed her stomach. The precious liquid she had so greedily consumed was disgorged in a violent upheaval. The desert sand instantly sucked up the watery vomit, leaving only a damp, dark circle to mark where it had been. Hannah wiped at the slimy spittle on her lips while her shoulders lifted with dry, hacking sobs.
She sagged into a sitting position, propped up by one hand, her legs curved to one side. The reviving influence of the water, however briefly enjoyed, had broken the stupor that had kept her from feeling the agony of her blistering flesh and screaming muscles. Salty sweat ran onto her cut lip, making it sting afresh. Prostrated by heat and exhaustion, Hannah felt incapable of further movement. With eyes that blurred and didn’t hold focus, she looked around.
They were in the midst of some sort of ruins. Behind her were the crumbling remains of an adobe wall, weathered and old. The area was ringed by trees and encroaching brush. Beyond lay a high range of mountains, the Mogollons. She noticed some broken shards of pottery nearby. But none of this was capable of rousing her interest. She was alive; that was all that counted.
