by Kaki Warner
He nodded.
“Good.” And wanting this to be over before she burst into tears of sympathy, Edwina quickly meted out his punishment: for the next two weeks he was to weed and water the garden, feed the barn cats, set and clear the table, and sweep the kitchen every night.
He accepted it with a quavery “Yes, ma’am.”
Edwina felt a bit quavery herself. And like a veritable tyrant. At the rate she was passing out chores, if either of the other two children required punishment, she and Pru would have nothing left to do but lounge on the porch all day, tatting doilies and sipping mint tea.
Lucas took to his chores without complaint. Joe Bill didn’t. But Edwina graciously ignored the rude looks he directed her way, and other than a lingering wariness between her and Declan, the incident passed and the house soon settled into a pleasant, although busy routine.
April ended with a hailstorm that left a new dusting of snow on the valley and four chickens dead. Edwina cooked them that night all by herself, including gutting and plucking them—which was absolutely the most disgusting thing she had ever done—rounding out the meal with mashed potatoes, turnip greens, and the last of the carrots in the bin under the house. No one except Pru seemed to appreciate her efforts, but Edwina thought it was delicious.
As the days stretched into May, dawn came earlier and dusk came later. By the end of the first week, roundup was in full swing, and with the two older boys helping their father and Amos gather cattle, the house seemed quieter and emptier. Taking advantage of their absence, Edwina and Pru did a thorough cleaning of both structures. The removal from the children’s quarters of several years’ accumulation of grime and clutter took longer than it should have, since Brin carried half of every load they took to the burn pile back into the house, insisting each item was too valuable to throw away.
Late each morning of that busy roundup week, Edwina would ask Chick McElroy to saddle a horse for her, and with her saddlebags loaded with foodstuffs, she rode out toward the swirling cloud of dust that marked the entrance to the box canyon where the men held the cattle.
It was one of Edwina’s favorite chores. She loved riding, and hadn’t had a chance to do so since she’d sold their ancient mare and buggy to meet the tax bill on Rose Hill the previous year.
But that was then. Today, she had a fine horse beneath her, and astounding vistas all around, and air so cool and crisp and thin it sometimes left her breathless. Happily she rode along, enjoying the solitude and marveling at this wild and lonely country that was so different from the place where she’d spent all of her life.
Back home, wisteria, and forsythia, and spindly snowball bushes would be in full bloom. Orange day lilies would be crowding the fence of the resting place, and wide-faced caladiums would be peeking around the raised stone vaults beneath the drooping limbs of ancient oaks and stately cypress.
How she missed it. Not the South as it was now but before the war. The tea parties, and country dances, and sweaty-faced boys. Frogs and crickets adding their voices to the music drifting up from the slave cabins down by the bayou. Hot, sultry, magnoliascented nights when she sat on the floor next to her window, her arms folded on the sill, listening to the Negroes sing and wishing she could escape her fine plantation home and be down there in those clapboard cabins with Pru, laughing and catching lightning bugs in ajar.
Gone forever.
Breathing deep to dispel those sad thoughts, Edwina looked around at this valley that might be her home for the rest of her life. It was a savage place. The very boldness and scope of it shouted a constant reminder that frail humans would never be more than visitors here, easily defeated by a harsh climate, hungry predators, and the inflexibility of rocky peaks and stone-walled canyons that even rushing water couldn’t wear away.
Savage, yet beautiful in a way that made her heart race and her spirit soar. Challenging. Untainted. A world apart from what she’d left behind.
Instead of azaleas and camellias, she saw bright yellow sunflowers, tall pines and pinyons, and blue-tinted junipers. Rolling, open hills, wooded canyons filled with birdsong, high ridges where only a few stunted trees curled in the wind beneath a sky so crisp and blue it hurt her eyes.
It might not have the gentle allure of the bayou country back home, but it was seductive, nonetheless. She might find a place for herself here.
She heard the cattle long before she reached them. A huge, bawling, milling throng of restless animals that kicked up so much dust it soon coated Edwina’s throat and left grit in her eyes. Cutting a wide berth, she angled upwind toward the wagon parked beneath a triangular canvas canopy tied to three scraggly pine trees.
As she approached, two smaller figures ran ahead of two others toward the wagon. By the time she reined in, R.D. and Joe Bill were waiting to help unload the saddlebags, while Declan and Amos washed in a metal bowl perched on a stump beside the wagon. Branding and castrating was stinky, dirty, noisy work, and the water in the bowl was a reddish black when they finished, yet neither man looked particularly clean.
Declan nodded in greeting, then hunkered on his heels in the shade while Edwina unwrapped the food. She was just starting to fill the plates when Joe Bill called his father’s attention to a rider coming in from the west.
“Tell who it is?” he asked his oldest son.
Lifting a hand to shade his eyes, R.D. squinted at the figure for a moment, then dropped his arm and grinned at his father. “Thomas.” His grin was wide and toothy, like his father’s. And even though he still had to grow into his nose and fill out through the jaw, he would be a handsome man someday. Also, like his father.
Declan went to meet Thomas Redstone. The Cheyenne dismounted and they spoke for a moment, then still deep in conversation, they walked slowly back to the wagon.
This was only the second time Edwina had seen Thomas, so she didn’t know what to read in his stern, sharply angled face when they walked up. But Declan looked worried. Edwina smiled in welcome.
“Haaahe,” Thomas said with a nod, taking a seat on the ground beside the front wagon wheel. He was dressed as he’d been before—a topknot with a feather attached and the rest of his long black hair hanging loose except for two small braids at his temples—a blue army jacket worn as a sleeveless vest over a faded pullover shirt with long sleeves and an open front placket—open-hipped leggings, rather than trousers, covering his legs down to knee-high, fringed leather moccasins—and a long rectangular length of soft leather hanging past his knees, front and back, held in place by a thick belt with a bone or antler buckle.
She had read about Cheyenne Dog Soldiers and how they proved their fierceness in battle by staking themselves to the ground with a lance or knife driven through that length of leather, then defending to the death the patch of ground on which they stood. Thomas Redstone looked the part.
He had swarthy skin, a broad forehead and high cheekbones, and eyes as dark and hard as chips of coal. And although he moved with measured deliberation and wasn’t as physically imposing as Declan, he radiated such restrained energy it seemed to hum in the air around him.
Uneasy under his stare, Edwina filled a plate and held it out.
He didn’t take it, but continued to study her, his gaze unwavering.
Edwina stared back, sensing he was testing her somehow, and if she looked away first she would lose. A gust of wind swept through, peppering them with grit and snapping the canvas overhead until the ropes binding it to the trees groaned. Her wrist began to wobble with the strain of holding out the filled plate, but she didn’t look away.
“Nia’ish.” With a barely perceptible nod, he took the plate from her hand and settled back against the wheel. The encounter had lasted mere seconds but had left Edwina feeling light-headed and shivery. It was an effort to keep her hand from shaking when she filled another plate and passed it to Declan.
He took it with a nod of thanks and sank onto his heels near Thomas, his hat pushed back on his head. “Come to eat? Or help.”
/> Thomas shrugged. “One follows the other.”
They ate in silence, as they did every day when Edwina brought lunch. Which always surprised her. Put three women and two girls together and the chatter would have been constant. But these five seemed to have nothing to say, despite the fact that they hadn’t seen Thomas Redstone for over two weeks.
Men. They were hopeless.
“Lucas spoke today,” she announced, both to break the lengthy silence and to show Thomas Redstone she wasn’t intimidated by his presence.
Declan looked up, cheeks bunching as he chewed. “Did he?”
She watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down as he swallowed, and saw that he needed a shave, and the black stubble of his beard shadowed his thick neck almost down to the shaded hollow at the base of his—
“’Bout what?” Declan prodded.
To cover her lapse, Edwina dabbed at her mouth with her napkin. She had brought a half dozen with her, but it seemed hers was the only one in use. “Worms. The ones that leave tiny holes in the radishes.”
Declan forked up another bite of sliced roast beef. “Work ashes into the dirt before you plant.” More chewing. Swallowing. Muscles moving under the sun-browned skin. His neck was surprisingly long, she realized. Not disproportionately so, of course, but with a nice slope down to those wide shoulders.
Realizing her mind was wandering again, Edwina reined it in. “And beetles. He spoke a lot about beetles. He even drew several on a scrap of paper and told me more than I ever wanted to know about dung beetles, and borers, and weevils, and grub worms and suchlike. He shows quite an interest in insects. And drawing. He’s an accomplished drawer. Artist.”
She knew she was babbling. But with Declan looking at her that way, and Thomas Redstone’s dark eyes boring into her like one of Lucas’s pine beetles, it was difficult to concentrate on what she was saying. “The point is, he’s talking.”
“He’s been talking since he was two,” Declan said.
“Not to me.”
“You weren’t even here when he was two,” Joe Bill reminded her in a churlish tone. “Our real mother was here then.”
Declan turned his head and looked at him.
Edwina didn’t see any change in his expression, but apparently Joe Bill did. He bent over his plate, a flush blossoming across his cheeks.
Hoping to lighten the tension, Edwina smiled at Thomas Redstone. “Will you be coming back to the house for supper this evening, Mr. Redstone?”
He gave it long consideration. “The dark-skinned woman will be there?” he finally asked.
His deep voice carried as much expression as his face—which was none—but those dark, intense eyes conveyed a message that roused all of Edwina’s protective instincts. “Are you referring to Miss Lincoln?”
He didn’t respond but continued to look at her until eventually his silence and the manners that had been beaten into her with a willow cane compelled Edwina to speak. “Yes. She’ll be there.”
“Then I will come,” he said solemnly. “I want to know her.” And he punctuated that announcement with a sudden and astonishing white-toothed grin that completely changed his face.
Goodness gracious. He’s as handsome as Declan. Then on the heels of that thought came one even more shocking. Wants “to know her”? Did he mean in the biblical sense? Oh, my Lord. Edwina didn’t know whether to be amused or horrified. Thomas Redstone was after Pru.
As soon as his wife rode off, Declan sent the boys and Amos to drive the next batch of calves to be branded into the brush enclosure they’d built against the canyon wall, then he turned to Thomas. “How do you know it was Lone Tree who burned out the Cox place?” Just saying the Arapaho’s name made Declan so furious he could hardly think.
“He makes no secret of it. Colonel Carr’s Pawnee scouts killed his father and a son at Summit Springs last summer. He seeks revenge.”
“I had nothing to do with that.”
“You are white. All white men look the same to a man who is wrong in the head.”
Too restless to sit, Declan paced under the sagging canopy. “Lone Tree was at Summit Springs? I thought they were all killed or captured.”
“He had gone hunting and was not in the encampment when the blue coats came. He feels shame that he was not there to protect his family.”
The Dog Soldier leaned back against the wagon wheel, his forearms outstretched across his bent knees. In his right hand he held a spent and distorted fifty-caliber bullet that he rolled back and forth between his thumb and forefinger. “It is a hard thing to lose a child.”
Declan had seen him do that many times and guessed his friend was thinking about his own family, which had been lost years ago when that same bullet had plowed through his wife’s back and into his infant son’s chest. Thomas intended to find the trapper who had fired it and shove the bullet into his beating heart.
Declan resumed pacing. He wished he had it in him to do the same to Lone Tree. Not just because he suspected the Indian had killed his wife, Sally, but because by killing her, the renegade Arapaho had also robbed Declan’s children of their mother. Even though Sally had abandoned them, she loved her children and they loved her. She didn’t deserve the death that had befallen her.
“Lone Tree’s anger festered through the winter,” Thomas went on. “Now he gathers other angry warriors and vows to kill any whites and Pawnee he can find.” Thomas tipped his head back against the wheel and gave Declan that hard, fixed stare, reminding him that even though they shared a bond, there would always be barriers between them. “It is a common story, hovahe. One told many times around the campfires of the Cheyenne.”
Declan didn’t want to be pulled into that old fight, so he stayed on track. “Summit Springs is closer to Nebraska than these mountains. Why would he come this far west?”
“For you.”
“Me?” Declan stopped pacing. “Just because I put him in jail once?”
“Because he has a fear of closed places, and you locked him in one and watched him howl like an animal.”
“I had no choice, Thomas. He almost beat a man to death.” Even so, and because of his own aversion to high places, when Declan had seen the Arapaho’s irrational behavior, he had gone against the judge’s ruling and had released him early. No man should have to suffer that kind of fear.
“Better for his honor to kill him.”
“Hell.” Declan stalked the length of the canopy and back again, his mind racing so fast he couldn’t slow it down enough to think clearly.
Locking up Lone Tree had been one of his last acts as sheriff in Heartbreak Creek. A week after the Indian’s release, Sally had run off, and within days, the rumors had started. It was only after the trooper brought news of finding the charred bodies of his wife and her lover, Luther “Slick” Caven, that the whispering had stopped. But by then, the damage had been done.
“And also because while he was in your jail,” Thomas added, “a flash flood washed out his village. His wife and daughter drowned.”
“And that’s my fault, too?”
Thomas shrugged. “Because of you, he was not there to protect them.”
“Another weak excuse.” Declan stopped pacing and idly watched a hawk float by, wingtips pivoting to guide its silent flight above the rocky ground. “Is it just me he’s after? Or my children, too?”
“He will take from you all that he can.”
Declan looked at Thomas. “Do you think he was the one who did that to Sally? I was never sure.” Even now he remembered his sick feeling when the trooper handed him Sally’s broken locket and bloody dress.
“He says no. But he had lived among whites long enough to learn how to lie.”
Son of a bitch! Declan stared blindly down the valley that cradled his ranch—his home. Did he have to leave it to keep his children safe? He would, of course. He would do whatever he had to do to protect them. He just needed to figure out the best way to accomplish that.
Hearing a shout, he turned
to see Joe Bill waving. His son pantomimed that the calves were penned and ready, and for Declan to come.
Declan waved back that he understood, but couldn’t make himself move. What did cows—or the ranch—or all his struggles to make a good life out here really amount to when a madman was stalking his family?
“Maybe he will take your new wife, instead,” Thomas said after a long pause. “She has a strong heart. She would not die as easy as the other one and Lone Tree would like that.”
An image of Ed flashed through Declan’s mind, her blue eyes snapping fire, her chin jutting as she threatened to come at him with a pitchfork if he raised a hand to his own children. Fierce, crazy, courageous Ed. No, she wouldn’t die easy.
Thomas rose. He slipped the bullet back into the small pouch hanging on a strip of leather around his neck, then tucked the pouch beneath the placket of his shirt. “I will help you, my white brother. I will stand beside you against Lone Tree. But then my debt to you is paid.”
Declan sighed and shook his head. “There is no debt, Thomas. You owe me nothing. Never have, never will.”
“I owe you my life.”
Declan regarded his friend, barely recognizing in him the same violent, crazed drunk he’d pulled from beneath a pile of brawlers in the Red Eye Saloon five years ago.
It had been a dark time for Thomas. A confused mixed breed caught between white and red and belonging to neither, he had watched his tribe head for extinction and the land he loved being eaten up one acre at a time by an endless flood of settlers, and he had no longer understood the world or his place in it. So he had taken his wife and young son into the mountains where they had lived a peaceful, solitary life until a trapper’s bullet had ended it.
Afire with grief and rage, Thomas had joined up with Black Kettle’s band, where he had earned his place as a Dog Soldier and had fought hard to protect his tribe and their way of life.
But the whites kept coming.
And the People kept retreating.
And the grief never went away.
