It was almost dark now, more shadows than light. They rounded the bend in the valley, and from behind, the thunder rolled closer.
Up ahead a horse whinnied.
Carson stiffened. It hadn’t been one of their horses. He didn’t know why, but none of their animals had made a sound louder than a soft blow all day. This had come from ahead of them, in the trees. And that could only mean trouble.
Innes, in the lead, pulled to an abrupt halt, as did Carson, and behind him, Hunter. The muscles across Carson’s shoulder’s tightened. He reached for the rifle in its scabbard.
In his arms, Winter Fawn stirred.
He leaned down to her ear and whispered, “Shh. There’s trouble.”
As quietly as possible, they started backing their horses and turning around.
Then came the murmur of a man’s voice, followed by a shout in a language Carson did not understand.
At the sound, Innes spun his horse around and urged it into a gallop. Carson didn’t wait for an invitation to do the same.
Behind them came more shouts and neighs, the sounds of startled horses, and men mounting to ride.
“Cheyenne,” Winter Fawn cried softly.
The escapees raced back around the bend and up the valley toward the only cover in sight, the stand of juniper and boulders where they had rested the horses only a short time ago. This time they didn’t bother keeping to the tree line but barreled straight up the middle of the valley.
Carson fell back, letting Hunter pass him. Ahead, Megan was protected by Innes’s broad back. Winter Fawn, too, was sheltered in Carson’s arms. But Bess rode behind Hunter, her back exposed to the pursuers. He angled to put himself between her and disaster if shooting started.
He swore silently as he clutched Winter Fawn tightly and urged his horse on. For now his rifle was useless. He couldn’t turn and fire at their pursuers while holding Winter Fawn. He crammed the carbine back into the scabbard and wished futilely for his pistol.
The ground stretched out before them, open and bare of anything to use for cover. Behind them the pursuers, shouting and shooting, were gaining. Ahead, the storm raced to meet them. Finally, in a flash of lightning, the tumble of rocks and juniper appeared out of the shadows. Innes reached the shelter first. Rifle in one hand and Megan tucked beneath his other arm, he scrambled from the horse.
Megan’s shriek of fear cut through Carson like a knife. Damn his hide, why had he brought the girls? Why had he let his father infect him with enthusiasm for a land and way of life Carson was obviously ill suited to deal with?
Why did it seem like everyone in this godforsaken territory was out to kill him?
He reached the dubious shelter of the rocks as Hunter leaped from his horse. The mule thundered in right after him.
The sound of rifle fire split the night as Innes cut loose.
The loudness of it shocked Megan into abrupt silence. Hunter took her from his father and handed her up to Bess, whom he ordered to stay mounted. Quickly the boy led that horse and his father’s, now riderless, deeper into the thick cover of cedars. Then he dashed back to hold Winter Fawn upright while Carson dismounted.
“I’m all right,” Winter Fawn said breathlessly. “Leave me. Do what you must.”
Carson took her at her word, grabbed his rifle and ammunition pouch, and crawled up into the rocks several yards from Innes.
The Cheyenne had scattered at Innes’s first shot, but they were still out there, slightly darker shadows flitting around other shadows.
Carson would have sworn—had sworn—that there was no cover out there for man nor beast, yet somehow the Cheyenne seemed to disappear before his eyes. But they were still there. He could hear them. Feel them.
While Carson and Innes crouched, rifles at the ready to repel an attack, Hunter helped Winter Fawn shift in the saddle until she sat astride. He led her horse back into the trees where he’d left the others.
In the dark shadows there, brother and sister shared a long, silent look. They did not need words to know each others thoughts in that moment. The Cheyenne were friends of Our People. Had always been their friends. The two tribes camped together, hunted buffalo together, fought other tribes and white soldiers together. They married each other, lived with each other, prayed to the same God.
Yet their father, to protect Carson and the girls, would shoot them.
The very foundation of Winter Fawn’s and Hunter’s world was crumbling around them. They had left Our People, and now fought their friends.
But in each other’s eyes they read the truth. They would go where their father led them. Anywhere. Any time. His world would become theirs. Maybe someday they would go back to their mother’s people. But for now, their people would be each other, and their father, Innes Red Beard MacDougall of the clan MacDonald from a place called Scotland that was so far away, they could not even conceive of the distance. Each, in that moment, felt that far away from the very world as they had always known it.
Around them, shadows grew deeper, the gray light darker as night slid down the mountain behind them. Thick clouds rolled in from the west and blocked out the sky overhead. Hunter moved away and whispered into the ear of each horse and the mule. Asking them to be silent, Winter Fawn thought, in awe of her brother’s magical ability to talk to horses.
A good thing, too, she thought. She was so tense she must surely be communicating her fear to the poor horse who had carried her extra weight all night.
Bess and Megan sat their horse in petrified silence. Winter Fawn ached for them. She, too, was afraid, but not for herself. Even if the Cheyenne were foolish enough to rush them, she did not believe that she or Hunter would be deliberately harmed. Bess would hold no such belief for herself or Megan. Winter Fawn ached for them.
And she ached for the way Carson worried over them, the blame he placed upon himself for their current circumstances. He had not admitted these things to her, but she read them in his eyes, in the grim set of his mouth. He seemed a good man, this Carson Dulaney. He must be a good man for her father to befriend him and risk so much for him.
The two of them stood now, rifles in hand, to protect their families. She wondered what Carson was thinking just then.
What he was thinking was that the Cheyenne really had disappeared this time. Maybe they hadn’t expected to be fired on. Maybe it hadn’t seemed worth the risk to cross that open ground and straight into gunfire. Carson didn’t care what their reasons were. He was just damn glad they were gone and hoped they stayed that way.
The small juniper grove, studded with huge boulders and flat rocks, butted up against the side of a high bluff. The trees weren’t thick enough to completely conceal them, but it was the closest thing to real cover unless they backtracked into the mountains. It would have to do.
Innes crawled down from the rocks, then, after a few minutes, returned. “Hunter is rigging up me canvass tarp for a shelter. It’s gonna rain like the great flood any minute. Willna last long, though. It’ll just give us a good soaking.”
“And wipe out our tracks.”
“Aye.” Innes grinned. “There is that. Looks like the Cheyenne decided to go look for easier pickins’.”
“Looks like.”
“We might as well all get some rest while we can. I’ll take the first watch.”
“Only if you promise to wake me for my turn this time.”
“Aye, I’ll do it. I’m thinking that if things stay quiet, we’d be just as well off staying here until morning.”
“No argument here. I’d just as soon not stumble into them in the dark again in case they haven’t gone far.”
“My thinking exactly,” Innes said.
After a few minutes of assuring himself that nothing more than a bird and a prairie dog stirred out in the open, Carson pushed himself to his feet. “I’ll go stretch out for a while. Wake me in a couple of hours.”
He waited until he had Innes’s agreement, then turned and helped Hunter finish rigging the tarp to keep the g
irls as dry as possible. Hunter had already cleared a few low branches from three junipers that stood close together. They pulled and tied several waist-high limbs together to form a living tent, then draped the tarp over the branches and tied it in place, anchoring the sides to the ground with the heavy packs from the mule. Beneath the crude shelter they spread Innes’s rubber ground sheet, then a blanket.
“Come on, girls,” he called softly to Bess and Megan as he approached them in the semi-darkness. “Crawl in here and see if you can stay dry. It’s going to rain any minute.”
Bess and Megan crawled eagerly into the small, living cave. “It’s like a playhouse,” Megan proclaimed, her blue eyes wide with wonder.
Carson shook his head at his daughter’s irrepressible spirit.
“What about Winter Fawn?” Bess asked Carson.
“I’m going to bring her in here with you, so make room.”
Carson crossed to the spot where Winter Fawn lay on the buffalo robe. He’d expected to find her asleep, if not outright unconscious, but her gray eyes were open and watching him. He felt her face and found it no warmer than it had been that previous morning. Relieved, he smiled. “How are you doing?”
“I’m all right. How are the girls?”
His lips twitched. “Megan is inspecting her new playhouse. You’ve been invited to join them.”
“Oh, but you should be the one—”
“I won’t leave you out here in the rain,” he interrupted.
“Maybe it won’t rain. Sometimes it just blows—” A fat, hard raindrop hit her in the eye.
Carson chuckled and scooped her up in his arms. “You were saying?”
When he stood, his side reminded him of the newest holes there. He let out a slight grunt.
“I am too heavy for you to carry. Put me down. I can walk.”
“Your wound is much worse than mine,” he reminded her. “You shouldn’t be up walking around. And you don’t weigh as much as my saddle.”
“Ah,” she said with a slow nod. “So my father has spoken the truth.”
“What truth? That you don’t weigh much?”
“That white men lie. Your saddle. Hmph.”
Chuckling, Carson knelt and laid her on the blanket beside Megan. He ducked out of the shelter and retrieved the buffalo robe and tucked it over the three of them. It was raining in earnest now.
“You’ll be careful, won’t you, honey?” he asked Megan. “This is Winter Fawn’s hurt side. You won’t bump into her, will you?”
“Oh, no, Daddy. I might hurt her if I did that.”
He leaned down and kissed his daughter’s nose. “You’re a good girl, Megan Dulaney.”
Megan giggled. “You’re a good boy, Daddy.”
“We can make room for you,” Bess told him. “For all of you.”
Carson gave his sister a smile. “Thanks, but we’ll be fine. Don’t worry about us.”
“But you’ll get wet.”
“It won’t be the first time. Maybe I’ll find a bar of soap in one of those packs and get clean in the rain.”
Winter Fawn watched him leave. Through the opening of the shelter she saw him drape a blanket over his head and lay on the ground that was already wet.
She rolled to her uninjured side to make more room for Bess and Megan. The movement pulled on her wound. She bit her tongue on a moan. She lay still, and as one moment stretched into the next the pain eased.
Thunder crashed directly overhead. Winter Fawn flinched. Megan let out a faint squeak of fright, while Bess clapped her hands over her ears.
The three looked at each other in the dimness of the shelter, and smiled.
“It scared me,” Megan said.
“I think it scared all of us,” Winter Fawn told her. And if Winter Fawn didn’t distract herself somehow, it would scare her again. She hated storms, feared them. To her they meant something terrible was going to happen.
If she let herself think about it she would transmit her fear to Bess and Megan. She would think, instead, of the stories her father used to tell her when she was a child. Stories of a great wide ocean that took weeks to cross. Stories of huge cities full of people and buildings and noise and stench. Stories of white people and their odd ways.
Winter Fawn wondered if she might not have been happier if her father had never told her what life was sometimes like for white people.
He had told her that many white people never knew war, never had to watch their men ride out to fight and die. White people in general did not live at all the way Our People did. They lived in permanent shelters called houses. They did not move from place to place with the seasons, did not follow the buffalo. They stayed in one spot and raised animals and crops for their food.
All her life Winter Fawn had heard these fantastical stories from her father. From the time of around her tenth winter, she began to wonder what it might be like to stay in one place season after season. A home, that was what he had called it. A place that was all yours, where a man and woman raised their children and their children’s children. A place to plant seeds in the ground and watch them sprout and grow into food to feed your family. Land that another tribe or the white man’s Army or white settlers could never take away from you as long as you were strong enough to hold it.
Winter Fawn longed to know what that was like, staying in one place season after season. The little valley where her band usually wintered was her favorite place. She had dreamed of being able to stay there through the seasons. She wanted to know what the cottonwoods along the stream looked like in full summer. Were there wild flowers in the valley? Did it hold the heat in summer, or was there a cool breeze?
She had dreamed of her father taking her to the cabin he’d told her about, where he lived nearly all year, in the mountains called Sierra Blancas. Dreamed of learning all the different seasons of one place.
Maybe she would not like living in one place all the time. Maybe she was too much of her mother’s people to live in the way of her father’s. But she wanted the chance to know. In order for that to happen, they must elude Crooked Oak and get Carson and Bess and Megan to their ranch.
Being forced to ride into the mountains, then back down through the hills, was slowing them down. Winter Fawn herself was slowing them down because of her wound. Riding in front of Carson as she had been could have gotten him killed just now. He needed to have both hands free to manage the horse and perhaps his rifle. He did not need a weak woman draped across him who could not even sit a horse.
She glanced out of the shelter, but all she could see now was darkness. Inside the shelter Megan and Bess had fallen asleep.
No one was watching. No one could see her if they were. This was her only chance. She would not even try what she was about to try if not for the others. She may have slipped many times over the years and done what her father had forbidden her to do, but not for herself. For her grandmother. For Hunter once. For Bess. Never for herself.
This time, if it worked, would be for them, because the weakness caused by her wound was putting them all in danger. It might not even work. She’d never tried it on herself before.
With a deep breath for calm, she placed her hand over the thick pad covering the front wound. Closing her eyes, she concentrated, searching out the wound. She could feel it in her side, of course, and with her hand, but she needed to connect with it in her mind.
Concentrate. Concentrate.
The warmth was there in her hand, but the sharp stab of pain, twice as strong as it had been, broke her concentration. It was all she could do to keep from crying out, the pain was so great.
She took several slow, deep breaths, and, after a moment, tried again.
Once more the pain multiplied to an unbearable level. She clamped her jaw tight and tried to concentrate past it. Sweat broke out across her face. Black spots appeared before her eyes and grew until there was nothing but blackness. She fell headlong into it and passed out.
Innes kept his promise and woke Carson for hi
s turn at guard duty. As Carson stood his watch, the clouds moved out and left the sky clear. He sat in the rocks and shivered in clothes soaked by the storm he had slept through. He thought about a warm fire, hot coffee, a soft bed. Clear gray eyes and womanly curves.
Enough of that. Even if it did warm him better than his other thoughts.
He thought, too, of standing his watch until morning and letting Hunter sleep, but it was a bad idea and he knew it. After only about three hours, by his reckoning, he was already starting to nod off. That’s all they needed was for him to fall asleep on watch and let the Cheyenne—or the Arapaho—sneak up on them.
Besides, he thought as he climbed down to wake Hunter, the kid was young enough that he probably wouldn’t miss the sleep. Carson’s own twenty-eight years weren’t all that many, but on this night every one of them seemed to weigh on his shoulders like a load of bricks.
After waking Hunter, he stretched back out on his soggy blanket on the soggy ground and fell asleep.
He felt like he’d barely nodded off when Innes shook him awake at dawn. “Get everybody up and ready to ride,” he said in a low, urgent voice.
Carson sat up, instantly awake. “What’s wrong?”
“Riders heading this way. Looks like maybe half a dozen.”
Carson swore under his breath and got to his feet.
Hunter led the pack mule from concealment and tied her next to the canvass shelter.
Quietly Carson woke Winter Fawn and the girls. Everyone scrambled to help, even Megan, who held his canteen for him while he saddled his horse.
When the pack mule was loaded, Carson climbed into the rocks where Innes crouched watching the approaching riders through binoculars. Carson could see men on horseback, but as they were nearly two miles away, at the bend in the valley, he couldn’t tell anything about them. Except that they were getting closer to this scant hiding place by the second.
“Is it Cheyenne, or Arapaho?”
“Arapaho. That be Crooked Oak in the lead.”
“Take the girls and Hunter and go,” Carson urged.
Winter's Touch Page 10
