Whitefeather's Woman

by Deborah Hale

  Especially if it meant marrying John Whitefeather.

  Maybe he had started out courting her for the wrong reasons, but the way he’d touched and treasured her during their night together told Jane his feelings for her went beyond lust and even beyond duty.

  In Lizzie Kincaid’s garden, he’d confessed himself as frightened of getting hurt as Jane was, if their relationship went wrong. For some baffling reason, John’s fear soothed hers. It meant she wasn’t the only one made vulnerable by love.

  “What do you think of this, Jane?” Lizzie unrolled a length of calico off the bolt.

  “It’s pretty,” said Jane. “Don’t you think it’s pretty, Barton?”

  More important, would Barton’s uncle find her attractive in a dress made from that cloth? The pale blue flowers on a cream-colored background reminded Jane of Mrs. Endicott’s china pattern. For the first time since coming to Whitehorn, she thought of Boston and Mrs. Endicott’s house without a qualm of panic.

  The bell on the door jingled again and Lizzie flashed a smile over Jane’s shoulder. “Hello, Ruth! I’m so glad to see you’ve got Mrs. Muldoon here at last. Now I don’t have to feel so bad for poaching Jane from you.”

  Ruth addressed her reply to Lizzie, but her eyes locked with Jane’s. “I’m happy she found such a good position to keep her in Whitehorn.”

  While Lizzie ordered the yard goods and Mrs. Muldoon took Barton to look at all the colorful wares around the mercantile, Ruth drew Jane off to a quiet corner.

  “John told me you overheard us talking and that’s why you left the ranch so suddenly. I’m sorry I made such a mess of this. All I wanted was for you to be happy and to have the kind of life you deserve. I should have been more forthright about it, I reckon. Please don’t blame my brother.”

  Taking Ruth’s slender, bronzed hand, Jane gave it a reassuring squeeze and whispered, “It was kind of you to want me looked after. I hope you won’t blame John for what happened between us. He wasn’t responsible—at least no more than I was. I know you think I’d make John a pretty poor wife, but I do care about him. Very much.”

  “I believe you do, Jane.” Ruth’s tone sounded sympathetic. And regretful. “Sometimes that isn’t enough, though. Out in a place like this, especially. I don’t want to see you hurt any more than my brother.”

  How could she persuade Ruth that she was strong enough to stick with a marriage even through tough times? Jane asked herself. And how could she persuade John?

  Those questions gnawed at her thoughts long after she and Lizzie had returned from the mercantile and begun making up her new dress. They haunted her when she went to bed at night, and stalked her through the next few days as she helped Lizzie prepare for the baby.

  Then one night she happened to look in the reticule she’d brought from Boston. The instant she spied the pawn ticket, she knew. If she was ever to convince John, and herself, that she wasn’t the same quivering bundle of fears who’d washed up in Whitehorn two months ago, she would have to confront her past. That would mean compensating Mrs. Endicott for the theft of the brooch and explaining why she’d taken it.

  Jane tried to think of some other way. Communicating with her former employer would mean alerting Emery to her whereabouts. And what if Mrs. Endicott did decide to press charges? Could a theft in Boston get her arrested out here in Montana? The very fact that she was afraid of doing it made Jane realize no other test of her precarious courage would serve.

  “Mr. Kincaid?” she asked William at supper that night. “Can you tell me how I’d go about sending a sum of money back East?”

  “Come by the bank tomorrow and we’ll arrange it for you, Jane,” replied Will Kincaid. “If you need funds, I’ll be glad to make you an advance of your salary.”

  “Thank you, but I believe I have enough from what your brother paid me.”

  Fearing her letter might fall into Emery’s hands, Jane addressed it to Mrs. Endicott’s solicitor instead. Writing the letter itself proved the most difficult part of the whole task. She sat up late one night at Lizzie’s writing desk composing her message.

  Revealing the shameful secret of Emery’s abuse to his aunt made Jane relive the dark, stifling atmosphere of that house. At times she had to lay down her pen because her hand trembled too badly to write. Then she thought of John. Of his strength and bravery. Of how he’d encouraged her in every tottering step she’d taken toward self-reliance.

  Jane forced herself to pick up the pen and keep on writing.

  Once it was despatched to Boston, however, a curious lightness of spirit came over her. As though, by writing about what had happened to her, she had trapped all her demons on the paper and mailed them out of her life. She could picture John standing behind her, appreciating the effort it had cost her, and radiating quiet pride in this modest feat.

  “A storm’s brewing, I think.” Lizzie looked up from her rocking chair when Jane returned to the Kincaids’ after posting her letter. “I hope we’ll get some rain to dampen that dust the wind is whipping around.”

  Jane’s thoughts flew immediately to John, out riding the range. Would Caleb call off the roundup if rain came? Might John’s experience with the harsh life of the trail further convince him she was too soft and spineless a creature to make him a good wife?

  “Lizzie?” she asked. “Would you mind answering a question…well…of a rather intimate nature?”

  Lowering the soft white baby blanket she was knitting, Lizzie flashed a mischievous grin. “Well, you have got my attention! As far as I’m concerned, there are few more amusing pastimes than talking over intimate matters with my lady friends.” She giggled. “Except enjoying them with my husband.”

  If she hadn’t liked this lively, generous girl so much, Jane feared she would have been eaten alive with envy of Lizzie. Not of her elegant home or her pretty clothes or her social standing in town, but of the way William doted on her. The sweet sly smiles they exchanged over the supper table that betrayed their anticipation of bedtime. Their joyful excitement over the tiny product of their love that was growing inside Lizzie.

  “I was wondering…” Jane’s cheeks tingled with a hot blush. Where had all the frank wantonness with which she’d seduced John Whitefeather gone? “How soon can a woman tell if she’s going to have a baby?”

  “Bless my soul.” Lizzie’s sparkling eyes widened. “You and…Ruth’s brother?” She fanned her face with her hand. “He is a handsome fellow. I’ve often thought what a criminal waste it is for him to stay a bachelor… Ooh!” She twitched in her rocking chair and laid a hand over her belly. “I don’t know whether I’ve got a baby in there or a bucking bronco! I have my doubts this rambunctious young fellow will be content to follow his papa into banking.”

  Jane began to wonder if Lizzie would ever give her an answer.

  “Oh, yes. About babies. Haley told me all sorts of interesting things. She’s a midwife, you know. I wish she lived handy enough to deliver my baby. Mind you, Dr. Gray is awfully nice. I wonder if he’ll ever get married?”

  Lizzie fell silent for a moment, perhaps weighing the local prospects of a match for the doctor. Then she remembered Jane’s question again. “Sometimes it can take a while to be certain you are going to have a baby, especially if…your courses don’t follow the moon too regularly.”

  Jane digested this information, wondering what exactly to make of it.

  “Mind you, it’s dead easy to tell if you aren’t expecting,” added Lizzie.

  Beckoning Jane to come closer, Lizzie whispered the secret in her ear.

  “Oh,” breathed Jane as understanding dawned on her.

  If she was going to have his baby, she knew John would put aside his misgivings and marry her. Then she would have a chance to prove her constancy and to make him love her. She didn’t want to hope too hard, though. She had known too much disappointment in her life for that.

  But there could no denying she was several days late.

  “It is too late,” Night Hors
e, son of Whitefeather, told the Sweetgrass Cheyenne around the council fire. “Ve’ho’e are here to stay. They are the new masters of this land. We are not prairie dogs who can hide in our burrows. We must seize this chance to help ourselves. Cows may not be as big as buffalo and their hides are not as rugged, but their meat makes good eating and they are not so dangerous. The buffalo herds are dwindling and they move where they will. We cannot follow them anymore. Cattle we can keep on our land.”

  John sensed their resistance. They wanted no more part of this than Caleb’s ranch hands did. Even if their combined efforts would yield benefits for both, they had lived too long in a climate of mutual fear and suspicion to suddenly embrace cooperation.

  “May I speak?” asked Ravencrest, one of the youngest and most recklessly courageous of the hunters. Bearspeaker nodded.

  “Haven’t we settled here in Sweetgrass to keep our people away from the whites?” Ravencrest challenged the council. “To protect our language and our beliefs, which they would steal from our children? For us to go and work with them might bring bad ideas among us, the way smallpox comes.”

  John wanted to stand and refute the young man’s fears, but a warning look from his friend Red Stone kept him silent.

  “I have met these cow herders,” Red Stone chuckled. “They don’t have many ideas, good or bad.”

  After the quiet laughter died, he added in a more serious tone, “Except perhaps the foolish idea that Cheyenne are killers and thieves. Maybe we can change this idea, a little, if we ride with them. Maybe if we open our hearts, we will learn more about them, too.”

  Bearspeaker nodded. “Learning is a slow way to overcome enmity. But there is no fast road. There can be no learning if there is no contact. Besides, cow meat is easy on my old tapeworks.”

  “One more thing we must consider.” Red Stone looked around the circle at each one in turn. “Think of all Night Horse has done for us. Without him and Caleb Kincaid, we would be on a reservation now. If they ask this of us, we would be ungrateful to refuse.”

  They continued to talk until everyone had his say, but John could tell Red Stone and Bearspeaker had turned the tide. John was wise enough to realize his closed mouth would draw no flies.

  Instead, as he looked through the rippling air above the fire, he pictured Jane sitting among the women, as she had on his last visit to Sweetgrass. Would she find the strength to keep her promise and wait in Whitehorn for his return? Had his seed taken root in her womb and begun to grow? And when he concluded that it must be so, was the bewildering feeling that pulsed in his veins elation, or terror?

  Bearspeaker seemed to sense his mood. When the council finally broke up with an agreement to Caleb’s proposal, the old man beckoned John away from the tepees.

  “Come walk with me, Taa’evâhe’hame. A devil hangs over you, I think. Tonight, the wind pushes the clouds and they hide the stars. Tell me what troubles you and hides the truth?”

  All his life John had kept his own counsel, dealt with his own problems. Who among the whites or the Cheyenne could understand more than half of anything that troubled him? Then he had bared his dark memories with Jane. She had shared his old pain and eased it in ways he could not have foreseen.

  “Tell me, old one, can a single woman be both completely right for a man and completely wrong?”

  Bearspeaker gave a gravelly chuckle. “Seheso?” he asked. The little snowbird?

  John’s reply caught in his throat. He had used exactly that endearment in a tender moment.

  As if catching his answer in John’s silence, Bearspeaker continued, “Who can say when two people will suit for life? Never tell Walks on Ice, but I only asked for her when my friend Whitefeather beat me to my first choice. But after so many years, her heartbeats in my chest and mine in hers.”

  John stopped in his tracks. “You wanted…my mother?”

  “No, no.” Bearspeaker’s voice moved away from him and John followed, stumbling on the uneven ground. “Your mother was not Whitefeather’s first wife, remember. Running Doe was killed with their two daughters at Sand Creek. When I saw how Whitefeather mourned them, I was happy the Great Spirit had denied me the woman I’d first wanted. Then Little Wolf led us north, back to our old lands, and on the way we found your mother. She had killed her evil coward of a husband when he was beating her, and she feared the white soldiers would hang her for his death. So she came with us and in time she healed Whitefeather’s heart.”

  So his Norwegian mother had battled her own Emery Endicott. Had John heard this story when he was too young to understand? Was that why Jane Harris had drawn him so?

  “I told Whitefeather he was crazy to take the white woman for his wife,” continued Bearspeaker. “But they were happy together and from their union our band gained you and your sister. You have both been a great blessing to us. Again I was wrong. Love is a trickster, Taa’evâhe’hame. Even wise men cannot fathom his riddles.”

  John clapped an arm around his uncle’s shoulder, partly to turn him back toward the camp, partly in fondness and jest. “For a wise elder, you haven’t been much help, Bearspeaker.”

  “Your doubts are like howling coyotes, Nephew. Throw a piece of meat to quiet them. Once they are silent, listen for the whisper of your heart and follow it.”

  “And if that whisper lures me away from my people and my duty?”

  “Are you so sure it will?”

  “I’m only one man, Bearspeaker. Some of what I give to the band now, I would owe to my family.”

  In silence they walked back toward the dying fire within the circle of tepees. At last the old man spoke again. “When a tall tree falls in the forest, saplings that were starved for sun in his shadow may rise to take his place. Maybe you have done too much for us, Taa’evâhe’hame, when we need to do more for ourselves. Don’t blame our people if you lack the courage to risk your heart.”

  An angry retort rose to John’s lips and died there. Could Bearspeaker be right? Could all his doubts about Jane and his duty to the Cheyenne simply be a self-righteous mask for the cowardice of his own heart?

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Chin up, Jane. No Cheyenne warrior wants a coward for a wife.”

  If she thought or muttered those words to herself once over the next week, Jane thought or muttered them a hundred times. Lizzie’s belly had expanded to such a size that she didn’t feel much like stirring outside her own house. She also had a touch of dropsy that swelled her delicate ankles and hands, and made Dr. Gray look anxious.

  So Jane had to run many errands around town. Daily trips to Mr. Lundburg’s meat market and Whitehorn Mercantile. To the little Chinese fish market built of oil cans. Into the post office to fetch the mail. Once to summon the doctor on account of false labor.

  When she’d first come to Whitehorn, such duties would have sent Jane into a swooning fit. Since she’d gotten to know so many folks in town, it had become much less of an ordeal.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Dillard. A pound of coffee, please, and a tin of baking powder. No sign of the baby yet, though Mrs. Kincaid sent for the doctor yesterday. Both Mr. and Mrs. Kincaid said to thank you for the chicken and dumplings you sent over last night. I don’t know when you get the time to cook with the mercantile so busy. Good morning, Mrs. Fairfax. No, the stork hasn’t arrived at the Kincaids’ yet. I hope your mother-in-law’s improving. Summer colds are the worst.”

  Leaving the mercantile with her purchases stowed in her basket, Jane savored a sense of belonging unlike any she’d ever known. She enjoyed recognizing faces and being able to call so many people by name. Having them take a neighborly interest in the Kincaids and in her.

  There was still one fly in the ointment, however. Jane had yet to discover a route for running her errands that did not take her past at least one saloon, and often more. The Double Deuce, where she’d first met John Whitefeather, was easily the largest and busiest. Gamblers congregated at the Four Kings, which belonged to Mr. Hill, the man she’d baptized with
creamed peas.

  The circuit judge held court in the Gribble and Warren Saloon. Jane had once heard a gunshot fired from inside that establishment. The Centennial catered to a somewhat better crowd. Even Will Kincaid went there now and then for a drink and a game of billiards. Big Mike’s Music Hall and Opera House, for all its fine-sounding name, was actually no more than a saloon with a stage, a banjo player and a few hard-faced dancing girls.

  Jane never walked past one of these places without her stomach seething and her palms breaking out in cold moisture. Between the fumes of alcohol and the frequent clamor of raised voices, they always seemed poised to erupt in violence. Each time she had to pass a saloon, she reminded herself that the Cheyenne prized courage above all virtues. Like some magical incantation, it always heartened her.

  Then one day, when she’d just left the butcher’s with a brown paper parcel of pork chops, the swinging doors of Gribble and Warren crashed open and two cowboys came flying out, fists flailing. Jane let out a terrified squeak and stumbled back.

  One of the combatants saw her and froze. The other glanced her way and his fist fell to his side.

  “Aw, Jeb, ye done scared the lady.”

  The two of them hung their heads like naughty schoolboys. On closer inspection, Jane guessed neither of them had ever seen the business end of a razor.

  “Sorry about that, ma’am.”

  “Like he said, ma’am.”

  Jane’s hammering heart slowed a little. A queer bubble of ironic humor swelled inside her.

  She shook her head in gentle reproach. “Gentlemen, what would your dear mamas think if they knew you were frequenting a saloon at this hour?”

  The one named Jeb looked ready to cry. They stammered an almost incoherent mix of excuses and apologies until she bid them goodday and walked on. Later, when she shared the story with Lizzie, they both laughed until their sides ached. Jane concluded that the Boston Ladies’ Temperance Society would have been proud of her.