Comanche Sunset

by Rosanne Bittner

  “Yes, it’s too bad. But otherwise you look lovely, Jenny.”

  Jennifer met her eyes. “I’ll miss you, Alice, and I won’t forget you. I’ll write and let you know what happens to me.”

  The woman smiled softly. “I’d like that.”

  Jennifer walked to the bed and picked up her purse. “I’d like to pay you something.”

  “Mr. Morrow already did that, remember? He gave me more than was necessary. I don’t need any more from you. You keep what you have. You might need it.”

  Jennifer sighed. “Yes, I suppose I will.” She walked up to Alice and embraced her. “Good-bye, Alice. God be with you.”

  “You’re the one He needs to protect,” the woman answered, giving her a tight hug. She pulled away, dabbing at her eyes. “Do you want your crutches?”

  “No. I couldn’t hang onto them anyway with these hands. I can get along fine without them now.”

  Alice nodded quietly. “I’ll carry your bags for you. Lord knows that would be painful, too.” She turned and picked them up. There was nothing left to be said, and the driver was waiting. Jennifer followed her out, ignoring the fact that half the men at the fort were standing around watching her, wanting to be sure that she got on the stage, no doubt.

  “It’s about time, lady,” the driver told her as he took the bags. Jennifer could see he was no Nick Elliott.

  “She’s no lady,” one of the soldiers called out. “She’s an Indian lover, a white squaw.”

  Jennifer held herself proudly as she turned to Alice. She hugged the woman once more and climbed into the coach, refusing to cry—not here, not now. She sat down across from two men. Another sat in her same seat. She knew they had heard the remark by the way they looked at her now, and she knew that this journey was going to be miserable, both physically and emotionally. She said nothing to the men, deciding there would be no use in trying to explain what they had heard. None of it would make sense to them, and they would keep their opinion no matter what she said. There were no Adam Hugheses or Frank Griffiths among these men.

  She settled into a corner, looking out the window at Alice as the driver threw her baggage up top. The man riding shotgun caught them, and the driver climbed aboard. Alice dabbed at tears and waved, and Jennifer waved back as she heard the snap of a whip. The coach lurched away.

  Wade gritted his teeth, refusing to cry out, determined to show Wild Horse he was a man of as much courage and stamina as his twin brother. The Comanche women danced around him, while he stood helplessly with his arms tied above his head to a pole, wearing nothing but his long johns.

  The women jabbed and poked at him with blunt poles, some with knives tied to the ends of them, their points exposed just far enough to draw pain and blood, but not long enough to cause serious injury. The blunt poles were jabbed mercilessly at his privates, the sharp poles all over his body except his face. It was obvious this was an enjoyable game for the women, and for Wild Horse, who sat nearby with Aguila, radiant in the captivity and humiliation of his “other spirit,” feeling stronger with every jab and poke. He suddenly barked an order to the women, and they drew back, standing silently while Wild Horse approached Wade.

  “Maybe now, my brother, you hate me enough to fight me,” he sneered.

  Wade breathed deeply against the pain. “Why can’t you respect my own beliefs, my brother,” he sneered. “I believe it is wrong to kill your own brother, just as strongly as you believe one of us must die at the other’s hands. If you…wish to torture me…then you will torture me to death before I will fight you. Death by torture would not serve your purpose, and even if…you torture me more to make me fight you…I would be too weak and beaten to make it a worthy battle. Either way…you will not make me give in…nor will you hear me cry out, like I know you’re hoping for.”

  Wild Horse’s eyes blazed with indignation and frustration. He pulled out a knife and held it under one of Wade’s eyes. “I will find a way, Wade Morrow. You have not yet seen or felt the worst!”

  For a moment Wade thought the man was going to gouge out his eye, but he suddenly reached up with the knife and cut the rawhide strips that held his arms to the pole. Wade slumped to the ground and Wild Horse backed away. The women approached with their sticks and poles.

  “Leave him,” Wild Horse ordered. “Let him rest again. I do not want him too weak. In another day we will begin again.” He turned and walked away, and the women gathered around Wade shouting insults and making jokes about him.

  Wade curled up on the ground, his arms screaming with pain from being over his head for so long. He decided there wasn’t one inch on his body that did not hurt. He erased some of the pain by shutting out the women’s voices and Wild Horse’s threats, turning his thoughts to Jennifer, and how nice it would be to lie in her arms now, to have her soothingly tend to his wounds and tell him she loved him. “Jenny,” he whispered.

  The coach rocked rhythmically, reminding Jennifer of another journey, a fateful one that had led her into Wade Morrow’s arms. Now she was headed even farther west, toward a town called El Paso, moving through not only Comanche country, but headed into Apache country—not that it mattered to anyone what happened to her.

  She gazed out at far horizons, more mountainous country ahead. Somewhere out there Wade could be suffering. Perhaps he was being tortured, or had fought Wild Horse and was badly hurt. His last visit seemed so long ago, so unreal. She knew Alice was probably right. Some day all these things would seem like a strange dream, if she survived at all. But right now it was painfully real. She felt like a deserter. What if Wade was alive? What if he lived through some terrible torture and made it back to Fort Stockton, only to discover she was gone? Would she be able to get hold of his family and make contact with them?

  She jumped when someone touched her shoulder. “You feelin’ a little lonely right now, missy,” the man next to her asked. “Name’s Jason.”

  Jennifer glared at him. “Get your hand off my shoulder!”

  The man grinned, pulling his hand away. “Looks like some Joe clobbered you good. What’d you do to make the man so mad, hmmm?”

  She turned to look back out the window. “None of your business.”

  This time the man laughed, and the two sitting across from him grinned. All three men looked like drifters, with unshaven faces and soiled clothes. “You hear that, boys? It’s none of our business.” They all chuckled, and the man beside her sidled closer. “We heard what that man said back at the fort,” he told her. “Some Indian buck get his hands on you, did he; made you his squaw? You have a soldier boyfriend that got all heated up about it?” He inched a hand toward her knee.

  Jennifer quietly grasped an extra hat pin that she had pinned into her cloth purse. While all eyes were on her face and breasts, she pulled out the pin and suddenly jabbed it into the back of Jason’s hand. The man cried out and jumped away from her, rubbing gingerly at the painful, bleeding wound.

  “You goddamn bitch,” he snarled.

  Jennifer’s fury knew no bounds. She faced all three men boldly. “The last man who touched me wrongly is lying near death back at Fort Stockton with third degree burns over his face and upper body. I put them there, with boiling water!” She pulled off a glove, revealing the gauze on her hands. “I got burned myself,” she said, holding out the hand. She reached into her handbag then. “I am carrying a pistol in this bag,” she lied. “The next man who touches me wrongly will get more than just burned!”

  They all glanced at the handbag, deciding maybe they had better believe her. Jason scooted even farther away, and the other two men leaned back in their seats.

  “Don’t get all lathered up, lady,” one of them told her. “We didn’t do nothin’.”

  “Then I would suggest you keep it that way and mind your own business,” Jennifer told him. She looked back out the window, keeping her hand in the purse in spite of the pain it brought her. She wanted them to think her finger was on a trigger ready to pull.

  Sh
e realized more than ever that in this land it was survival of the fittest, and maybe the meanest. She didn’t want to be so cold and callous, for it was not her nature. But out here there seemed to be no room for kindness and friendliness and trust. She decided that for this trip to be bearable, she had to get on a coach with passengers who didn’t know anything about her brand as an Indian “squaw.” These men could be put off only so long before they realized she was lying about having a gun. Even if they didn’t touch her, she was not about to finish this long journey with their sinister eyes drilling into her the whole way. She determined she would get off at the next home station and wait for another coach, no matter how crude the station, and no matter how long the wait.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Jennifer soaked her bandaged hands in a bucket of cool water. The wet gauze felt better than dry, and the cool water soothed her pain. It was all she could do to lift her clothes at the outhouse or carry a bag. She was glad that at least this home station was shaded by a few cottonwood trees, and a stream flowed nearby. The building was as much a shack as the first ones she had encountered on her earlier journey, but the bedding seemed cleaner, and the lone man who worked here, Seth Tyler, had a Comanche wife.

  She was grateful that the driver had said nothing about what he had heard about her while they were stopped there, for she sensed that even though Tyler had an Indian wife, he would frown on a white woman being with an Indian. The other three men who had been on the stage also said nothing. Whether it was because they were afraid of her retribution, or because Seth had a Comanche wife, she couldn’t be sure. She only knew that at least now no one on the next stage would look at her as a branded woman.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” she had told Seth. “I’ve decided I want to go back to San Antonio.” When he had asked why she was on the stage at all, she told him she had come to Texas in reply to a soldier’s ad for a wife, but that he turned out to be a brutal man, who had left the bruise on her face. “I picked up a pan of hot water and threw it at him,” she had told him. “I didn’t do him much harm, but I burned my hands. Needless to say, I decided not to stay at the fort a moment longer. I thought I might go farther west, but I think I prefer the Gulf Coast.”

  Seth, an ageing, bearded man who looked more like he belonged in the mountains hunting bear than running a way station, had listened nonchalantly, seeming not to care one way or the other. “It’s your business,” he had told her.

  She appreciated his disinterest, at the moment preferring an uncaring attitude as opposed to staring, accusing eyes and ugly remarks. The driver of the coach on which she had arrived had whistled and shouted orders to the horses that morning and the coach had clattered off without her. Now it was late afternoon, and the air hung heavy and quiet, with only the occasional noise of one or two birds, here and there the croak of a frog along the creek bed. Tufts of fuzz from the cottonwood trees floated in the air, some of them getting caught in her hair.

  Jennifer sat alone near the creek, holding her hands in the bucket and feeling strangely at peace. For the first time in several days she was not under the scrutiny of judgmental eyes. She was just Jennifer Andrews again, a woman traveling to San Antonio when the next stage going east came along. There was no more explaining to do. Seth had assured her that the next stage coming through was not one that would stop at Fort Stockton.

  Seth was reasonably personable, although his Comanche wife was silent, seeming sometimes bashful, other times looking at her as though she was the woman’s mortal enemy. Watching her made Jennifer think of Wade, and brought back aching memories, especially when she set eyes on the woman’s son by Seth, a dark, handsome little four-year-old with eyes as black as any Comanche, but who had sandy-colored hair.

  She wondered what kind of emotional problems lay ahead for the child, who would apparently not have the advantages Wade had had. And she thought what a loving and understanding father Wade would have been to a child of his own. Maybe some day people’s prejudice against someone with Indian blood would disappear, and they would be accepted like any other human being. When she watched the Comanche woman with the boy, quietly disciplining him in the Comanche tongue, never losing her temper with him, occasionally picking him up and giving him a hug, she could see the same motherly love as with any white mother.

  Surely, even though he had been raised differently, Wild Horse had the same human emotions and deep feelings that Wade possessed. Maybe Wade had found a way to reach the man and was still all right. She had to hope, or lose her mind in this remote, lonely land. She wished she could talk to the Comanche woman about Wade and Wild Horse and get her opinion, but the woman spoke very little English.

  The day had been long and hot. It was only the second day after leaving Fort Stockton, which was now just a day’s ride away; yet it seemed like hundreds of miles. She missed Alice and was sorry for how lonely the woman surely was. But who was she to say what she would do herself if she could be near Wade’s grave. Was there a grave, or perhaps just a mutilated body left for the buzzards? She could not forget what had been done to some of the passengers on the first stagecoach she had taken. To think of Wade suffering only made her lonely heart ache more.

  She heard the sound of horses then, and she sat up straighter, expecting perhaps soldiers or travelers. Instead, eight Indians were approaching from the north. Her first thought was to hope Wade might be among them, but as they came closer she realized they were wilder looking, their faces and horses painted. She rose from where she sat by the creek and ran to the station, hurrying inside. “Indians are coming,” she told Seth.

  He looked up at her from where he sat brushing a pair of boots. He seemed totally unconcerned, twitching his gray mustache when a fly buzzed near his nose. He rose, a tall, lanky man whose head seemed to nearly touch the low ceiling of the small enclosure. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “They’re probably some of my wife’s relatives. She’s got a couple brothers who ride with Wild Horse.”

  “Wild Horse!” Ugly memories came rushing back, and she moved farther toward the back of the small room.

  “They won’t bring you any harm, long as you’re with me. How do you think I’ve survived out here, bein’ a white man? They trust me—consider me a friend.”

  By the time he finished the Indians had burst into the little cabin without so much as a knock. They looked around uneasily, as though they didn’t like being inside the enclosure. One of them rested his eyes on Jennifer, and she gasped, recognizing him as the man who had brought the water to her and Wade at the cave. She stared at him and he at her as one of the others began conversing with the Comanche woman in their own tongue. She smiled and said something back, handing him some bread. Another was saying something to Seth.

  “Rest easy,” Seth told Jennifer. “They just want some food and some tobacco. Fast Horse and Two Hawks, they came to see their sister.” He indicated the one Jennifer recognized when he mentioned Two Hawks.

  Heart racing, Jennifer moved a little closer. “Seth,” she said, her eyes on Two Hawks. “Would you…would you ask this one…Two Hawks…if he knows anything about a man named Wade Morrow? If he doesn’t understand the name, tell him the one who is Wild Horse’s brother.”

  Seth scratched his thinning hair. “Now what would a pretty little thing like you know about Wild Horse or any brother he might have—which he doesn’t?”

  “Just ask him—please. Ask him if Wade Morrow is still alive.”

  Seth shrugged and spoke to Two Hawks in his own tongue. Jennifer watched the Indian as Seth talked. Two Hawks’s face was covered with tiny pitted scars, and she guessed he had had smallpox at one time. She had heard of waves of smallpox and cholera wiping out whole tribes. The man’s dark skin and hair were greased with something that did not smell too pleasant. Two Hawks gave a short, grunting reply to Seth, and Seth turned to Jennifer. “He says yes, the man called Wade Morrow still lives.”

  Jennifer felt faint with relief. She closed her eyes and breathed dee
ply, tears coming to her eyes. “Ask him when they’re going to let him go.”

  Seth relayed the message, and Jennifer could tell by the look in Two Hawks’s eyes and his inflections and almost angry reply what the answer was.

  “He says Wild Horse will never let him go—says one of them has to die—they have to fight. What’s goin’ on here?”

  Jennifer faced him. “I met a man on the way to Fort Stockton. He’s a half-breed. He was on his way to find some of his family. The soldiers told him he looked like Wild Horse. He went to find the man, but people told me that if they should happen to be twins, Wild Horse would not allow him to live. But Wade doesn’t want to kill his own brother. The last we knew, he was with Wild Horse. I feared he was dead by now.”

  Seth eyed her closely. “Sounds like you took a personal interest.”

  “I did,” she answered without a flinch. She looked at Two Hawks. “And now that I know he’s still alive…”

  “It won’t be for long if what you say is true. Comanches kill twin babies. It’s bad luck to let them grow into adults. I reckon Wild Horse is pretty upset by it. Your Wade Morrow is probably in pretty sorry shape by now.”

  Two Hawks spoke up to Seth, finally taking his eyes from Jennifer. He rattled on, waving his arms, pointing at Jennifer.

  “No, no, no,” Seth answered, shaking his head and trying to wave the man off. Two Hawks seemed to become more angry. He said something to Seth’s wife, and the woman started yelling at her husband and waving her arms, nodding toward Jennifer. Seth turned back to Two Hawks, who drew a knife. Jennifer gasped and shrank back, while Two Hawks barked at Seth again. Seth sighed, glancing at Jennifer. “He wants to take you off with him—to Wild Horse’s camp.”

  Jennifer’s eyes widened, as a mixture of emotions swept through her. The thought of going off with Comanche men, of being taken to their most notorious leader, knowing what usually happened to white women, made her feel faint with fear. She felt numb and sick, remembering the awful day of the raid on the stagecoach.