Cheyenne Captive (17 page)

“Poor Carolina Longworth! Her so high-class and caring of what everyone thinks. I’ll bet she wishes they’d never found her sister.”

“Wouldn’t you under the circumstances?”

Even the sister got to her feet, and assisted by her husband and father stood looking around uncertainly. The bent, gnarled father turned away with finality.

The man called Jake wiped the blood away where Texanna had lashed him. “Missy,” he drawled, “I reckon you’re upset, but if you’d consider marryin’ me, I’d forgive you for—well, you know.”

He looked over at Falling Star and the boy felt instant dislike for the man, knowing the scout did not want him.

“Forgive me?” Texanna threw back her head and laughed heartily while tears ran down her face. “Forgive me! How kind of you to overlook my loving a Cheyenne chief who’s twice the man you’ll ever be!”

The wind picked up a banner out of the dust of the almost deserted street and blew it toward them, spooking the horses.

Welcome Home, Texanna.

So the miserable life in the town of Fandango had begun, Iron Knife remembered now with a sigh. Carolina Longworth did what she considered “her Christian duty” in finding the two a small shack on the edge of town. Then the family ignored them pointedly. Only Pastor Schmidt and his wife were kind to Texanna and her half-breed son.

Texanna had inherited the nimble fingers of her father, an expert tailor who was now too crippled by age to sew. She supported herself and her son by making clothes for the women of Fandango. For the most part, the townspeople avoided the two except when they needed sewing done.

The white man named Jake Dallinger came to the house only one more time in the next five years and the boy was not sure what happened that night but Ransford Longworth had been in the parlor when the boy went to bed. He was awakened by loud, angry words and had peeked around the door to see his mother confronting the army scout. Texanna and he had backed Jake out of the shack with weapons.

Falling Star remembered the night the new baby was born. Not even the town doctor came. The minister’s wife delivered the baby while the pastor sat with the boy. Aunt Carolina had been conspicuous by her absence. As she told everyone in town later, someone had to uphold the morals of the family and she didn’t want anyone to think she approved of her fallen sister by associating with her. Texanna shrugged when she heard that gossip and retorted that Carolina was neither in charge of family nor town morals. She might think she was, but no one had voted her that position.

Texanna looked down proudly at the pretty girl child crying wildly in her arms. “She has a loud, lusty voice,” she said, smiling. “I will call her Cimarron, which means ‘wild one’ in Spanish.”

Falling Star reached out to touch the small fist and it promptly closed on his finger. “With a cry like that, ‘Wild One’ is a good name.” He nodded. “Father will like that.”

Tears came to Texanna’s eyes and she buried her face against the tiny head. “I don’t know what to do, how to find the Cheyenne again,” she sobbed. “There’s so much wilderness and if they catch us trying to escape, they’ll say I’m loco, send me to an asylum, and you children to some terrible orphanage.”

He reached out to pat her hand. “Someday, Mother,” he assured her, “someday, either Father will track us down or I will be big enough to rescue us all. We’ll wait for that day.”

So life went on for the small family for the next five years. Then, one fateful afternoon, when he was thirteen, a saloon girl had lured him up to her room. He had known then that the boys at school had said the girl belonged to the big army scout, that she slept with men and gave Jake the money.

Iron Knife sighed now, remembering. It had happened in the late afternoon, and before midnight his back would be scarred forever and his brave mother facing down a lynch mob with a shotgun....

He could remember vividly the events of that one day and night as if it had happened this morning although it was a long time ago....

He was unhappy among the whites because the adults called him “Injun bastard” and the other children at the one-room school teased and mistreated him. But he was big for his age, almost as big as some full-grown men and he had fought all the boys and whipped them so that they no longer teased him. They ignored him.

He remembered now that it had been a hot Friday afternoon and he was walking home alone as always from the school. His path led past the back door of the saloon. A smiling, red-haired woman in a scarlet dress had come out the door and called to him.

“Say, you’re Texanna’s son, ain’t you? Why don’t you come in for a minute? There ain’t nobody here but me right now. I been watching you walk past here for weeks.”

The only white woman who ever smiled at him was his mother, so he shyly followed the girl inside where she took him up to her room and gave him white sugar, which was rare and expensive. It was all his mother could do to provide the bare necessities with her sewing and there was no money left for fancy things. He hunted with his bow, of course, and tried to find work on the surrounding ranches. No one would hire an Indian even though he was bigger and stronger than most grown men.

He remembered even now the taste of the gritty sweet and the woman’s smile, both were so rare to him. He knew the other boys at school laughed about this woman. It was said she would let men mate her if they gave her money. The boys also said the scout, Jake Dallinger, claimed this woman as his own when he was in town and sometimes brought men to sleep with her and made her give him most of the money the men paid her.

Now the saloon woman stood very close to him, so close he could see that her neck was dirty and smell the strong reek of her perfume.

“My name’s Kate,” she said, and she moved closer, running her hand across his big shoulders and he didn’t move since he was not sure what she wanted.

“Have you ever had a woman?” she asked finally.

He shook his head, feeling foolish and embarrassed and wanting to run away. But she was stroking his arm in a manner that excited him as nothing had ever excited him.

He thought of what the boys had said.

“I—I have no money,” he admitted.

She threw back her head and laughed and he realized that her lips and cheeks were smeared with red color like scarlet war paint.

“You been talkin’ to the men, ain’t you? Believe it or not, I don’t always do it for money! Sometimes, I see a good-looking man and get to thinkin’ about how it’d be and invite him up. Have you really never had a woman?”

He bent his head feeling very young and stupid, wondering why she asked such a naive question. No, of course he had not yet had a woman. He’d been too young for the captive women the warriors occasionally took. And a brave could not take a proper wife until he had proved himself on the hunt and accumulated enough property on the warpath to offer gifts to the girl’s family. No Cheyenne girl would think of removing her protective string and letting a man mate her unless he went through the appropriate offer and marriage ceremony.

The dance-hall girl put her hands in the open neck of his shirt. “You look a lot younger up close than I thought you was from a distance, but you’re sure built like a man.”

Her fingers stroked his skin lightly, unbuttoned his shirt. “I like the idea you never had a woman before. Well, I’m gonna teach you about women, my young warrior,” she whispered.

He stood there dumbly, afraid and embarrassed, ready to run. Yet not quite sure of what she expected if he stayed.

By now, she had his shirt off and was running her fingertips across his nipples.

She took off the red dress and posed for him a long moment, then slowly removed her stockings and the rest. She was flabby and heavier than he would have wanted in his first woman, but still she seemed very desirable to him with her pale skin and the way her full breasts jutted against his chest.

To his surprise, his man’s thing came erect and hard and he felt an unaccustomed ache in his groin. All he could think of now was topping her as he had seen war parties do with captive women.

Kate stepped back and looked him up and down with appreciation in her eyes.

“Now, that’s more like it!” she purred as she came to him and pulled his face down to hers to kiss. He would always remember the reek of cheap perfume and the taste of whiskey on her lips.

Instinctively, his hands came up to pull her against him, for he was more a man than a boy. His arms held her tightly as he kissed her and she moaned against his mouth and pulled him toward the dirty, rumpled bed.

With his superior strength, he grabbed her and almost threw her on the bed, fumbling in his eagerness to mount her. But she resisted his attempts to open her thighs.

“Take it easy, my young brave,” she whispered, kissing him, “you’re not gonna get it off that quick like the animals who pay me for it!” She kissed the corner of his mouth. “I’m gonna teach you how to love a woman and make her like it! I’m gonna teach you what I want you to know from the best whore this side of the Mississippi. Then you’ll always know how to please a woman!”

And Kate did teach him
, he remembered with gentle affection. It was a long time that day before she would let him enter her and by then he was aching with his need for release and she was whimpering and gasping. Even now, he remembered the smell of her perfume as he finally took his first woman and became a man. He remembered how he had ground himself against her, trying to plunge even deeper as she made grunting noises and dug her sharp nails into his muscled back.

She locked her legs about his lithe body and arched her breasts against him and he could feel her deep sweetness locking on him as she came.

Finally, she released him and looked up at him. “You’re better than I dreamed you would be,” she whispered, “and virile enough and young enough to give me all I want. You drop by often, you hear? Just make sure that bum of a scout ain’t around when you show up. He’d be madder’n hell if he caught me givin’ it away, especially to an Injun!”

He was eager to take her again and she was eager to have him. He remembered now that they were locked in each other’s arms, intent only on the pleasure of their union, when, abruptly, there was someone else in the room.

He heard the door fling open and a cry of outrage as the big scout strode to the bed, jerking him up and slamming him across the face with a stick of stove wood as Jake threw him to the floor.

“You rotten Injun bastard!” Jake screamed as he beat him about the head. “It ain’t enough that your old man took Texanna from me, now I catch his bastard son toppin’ my fancy woman! Gawd almighty! I’m gonna kill both of you for this!”

Iron Knife winced even now, remembering the pain as the big scout slammed him hard against the wall and he could feel the blood from his broken nose and torn face dripping down his naked body.

He could remember the shrill shriek of the woman as Jake Dallinger uncoiled the big drover’s whip he always carried.

The woman backed away. “The kid was rapin’ me, Jake, honest he was! You know I wouldn’t let no Injun touch me, no matter how much he paid! You know that!”

Jake slapped the woman hard and the boy struggled to his feet. He knew he should help the woman, but he was no match for the big, hard-muscled scout and he had no weapons, while the bearded man had a knife and the giant whip. He swayed on his feet, fighting off unconsciousness while the man beat her.

Weakly, he managed to grab his clothes and stagger out the door toward home. Behind him, he could still hear the woman screaming, “It was rape! Honest to God, the kid was rapin’ me!”

He did not think he would ever manage to put on his pants and crawl home. Falling Star was almost unconscious when Texanna found him in the yard. He remembered his mother washing the blood off his face and dragging him into the house.

It was dark when the mob of drunken cowboys led by Jake Dallinger came with their torches. Kate had been found brutally raped and murdered, they said, and the mob dragged the boy away to tie him up in the town square to whip him....

Jake Dallinger
, he thought, grinding his teeth.
Jake Dallinger and his whip. . . .

That had been twelve years ago, he thought now as he stood staring into the darkness after Summer. He had never trusted another white woman after that or even told anyone outside his own family how he came by the terrible scars. He had never meant to tell Summer any of his past, and now he had blurted some of his secrets to her. Sometimes he was more white than stoic Indian after all.

His thoughts were interrupted by a small boy who ran up to him, speaking Cheyenne so rapidly he could not understand all the child said.

“Stop and tell me again more slowly.” He smiled gently at the boy.

The child glanced wildly behind him.

“Come quickly, great warrior!” he shouted, gesturing. “Your woman fights with the bad Arapaho girl and I think one is going to kill the other!”

Humiliated by Iron Knife and horrified at his confession about the murder of the dance hall girl, Summer fled blindly through the darkness toward the tepee. A shadow loomed across her path, someone blocking her way. She hesitated, her heart pounding as she recognized the voluptuous form.

Gray Dove put her hands on her hips and smiled. The full harvest moon lit her features. “Where are you going, White Girl?”

“None of your business!” Summer retorted. “Get out of my way! I know now you are my enemy and that you lied to me, sending me into a trap and trying to get me killed!”

“Have you told Iron Knife about our little bargain?”

“No!” Summer said. “I intend to deal with you myself and don’t need his help in this. No doubt he would do something terrible to you for tricking me and sending Angry Wolf to kill me!”

“Speaking of Angry Wolf,” the other glared back at her, “he has not been seen since that afternoon. I wondered what has happened to him?”

“Maybe he has gone off with the renegade Dog Soldiers!”

“Has he now? And no doubt, up at the Dog Soldier camps on the Republican and Smoky Hill rivers, they think he changed his mind and decided to stay here.”

“Perhaps a Pawnee war party—”

The other snorted derisively. “Not likely, although I’ve heard rumors that Pawnee have been sighted a few days north of here.”

Summer tried to shake her head casually. “Perhaps the forest fire . . . anyway, what is all that to me? I know nothing of Angry Wolf.”

“Do you not?” The dark girl peered threateningly into her face. “I say that you do know what happened to him. That somehow, as he was trailing you, you caught him by surprise and killed him.”

Now it was Summer’s turn to snort in disbelief. “No one would ever believe that. I am not strong enough or clever enough to kill a fierce Dog Soldier.”

Gray Dove gave her a long, searching look. “No, you aren’t. Not unless you had some help.” She seemed to be thinking aloud. “I saw you coming back to camp riding double with Iron Knife.”

Summer felt her pulse quicken. “Surely you can’t think he has anything to do with the disappearance.”

“He is strong and clever enough to kill the other. He must have been involved.”

Summer’s heart hammered, wanting to protect him even if he had murdered the saloon girl. “But you can’t tell the Council or anyone else what you suspect without revealing your part in the plot.”

The dark girl glared at her in fury. “You are right, of course! If I could put all the blame on you, I would have already gone to the old chiefs, but I will not endanger Iron Knife or reveal that I was involved. I love him too much to see him banished from the camp over his minor, passing fling with a captive.”

“I’m not a minor fling!” Summer argued. “He is serious about me. He intends to marry me!”

“Does he? I have not heard any such announcement. I think he only plays with you. But should he really think of marrying you, I will kill you or get you out of this camp somehow. Perhaps I will yet think of a way to blame you for Angry Wolf’s death without involving either myself or the man I love!”

Summer’s stubborn streak came out and she stuck out her chin. “You will never get me out of this camp. Do you hear? Never! I have changed my mind and have fallen in love with Iron Knife. I will stay with the tribe and be his woman forever! It will be me sleeping in his arms at night and bearing his children, do you hear? It will be me! Never you!”

Gray Dove attacked her in a sudden fury and they went down screaming and clawing in the dirt. The area had been deserted until now, but as they fought Summer saw sleepy heads poking out of tepees to see what the noise was about. Furious with the sly Indian girl who had caused her so much trouble and struck the first blow, Summer was past caring that they were drawing a crowd. She clawed and fought in a way that belied her genteel upbringing and she saw surprise in the other’s eyes.

“I’ll teach you to hit me!” Summer shrieked, giving the other girl a good whack.

Over and over in the dirt they rolled while they scratched and bit. A growing crowd surrounded them.

“White bitch!” Gray Dove spat at her. “When I finish with you, you will be so ugly and scratched up, he won’t want you and will send you away!”

“Look out for your own face!” Summer warned as she slapped the other. She pushed the Indian girl down in the dirt and sat on top of her, pulling the black braids.

Abruptly, she felt strong arms around her, lifting her off the Arapaho girl but she went right on kicking and fighting. “Let go of me!” she yelled. “Let go of me!”

“Stop! Stop all this!” his deep voice ordered. “What’s happening here anyway?”

She looked up into Iron Knife’s surprised face as she struggled and he lifted her lightly off the ground.

“The white girl started it!” Gray Dove sobbed as she scrambled to her feet. “I was just walking past her and she wanted to argue and she finally hit me!”

“Well, Summer Sky?” He put her on her feet.

She hesitated, unwilling to discuss it in front of the crowd of Indians. “Send them away!” she pleaded.

For answer, he turned and gave a curt command in Cheyenne and the people drifted back to their tepees or the big campfire.

“Now, Gray Dove,” he said in English, “I’m warning you to stay away from Summer or I will see you run out of this camp. I know you well enough to know you must have done something to start this!”

The girl started to say something as she brushed her disarrayed hair back and obviously thought better of it. With an arrogant shrug, she turned and walked off.

“Now,” he commanded Summer, “I want to talk to you, you little vixen!” He took her arm and steered her to the top of a nearby rise covered with a grove of blackjack oak.

He sounded stern, but she saw his white teeth flash a smile as they reached the hill. “You shouldn’t tangle with Gray Dove. She’s mean and she outweighs you.”

“I gave as good as I got!” she answered proudly as she sat down on the grass in the bright moonlight. “If you hadn’t come to her rescue, I would have yanked her bald-headed by now!”

“You know, I believe you would have at that! Maybe I underestimated you, Summer Sky!” He laughed and sat down himself against the rough bark of a tree. “What was that fight about, anyway?”

“You mostly.” She ran a finger down a small scratch on her face and decided not to tell him the rest. What good would it do to worry him about what the Indian girl suspected about Angry Wolf? And she could never tell him of Gray Dove’s involvement in her escape because then he would realize a third person had reason to know the dead brave had followed Summer. He would worry that Gray Dove would tell and Summer was sure she wouldn’t. The Arapaho girl cared too much for Iron Knife to report him to the Council.

“Gray Dove thinks I should step out of the picture so she can have you.”

He sighed. “I have never been anything but honest with the Arapaho girl when she talked of marriage. I think she is too much a whore to be true to any man anyway.”

“Have you made love to her as you have to me?”

“What kind of a question is that?”

“The kind every woman asks about a rival or wants to ask,” she said jealously.

He reached out and took her hand in his. “I have made love to many women, Summer. Surely you realized that?”

She felt tears well up in her eyes. “No, I suppose I didn’t think of it since you were my first man. I thought what we had was special.”

“It is, Summer, it is!” He kissed her fingertips. “I have made love to many women but I have never been in love with them as I am with you.”

She felt the need for reassurance. “Did you make love to the dance hall girl?”

His face became a cold, inscrutable mask. “Yes, I made love to her. She was my first woman, since you insist on discussing that which does not concern you. I did not kill her. I was almost whipped to death because they
thought
I had killed her.”

She caught the pain in his cold eyes. “And that is what happened to your back?”

He nodded very slowly and she knew he had never discussed that with anyone. “Yes, they whipped me.” His voice was low and angry. “They whipped me and hung me up like a dog in the town square where everyone could see my humiliation. The man most involved would not have stopped until he killed me but my mother came to my rescue with a shotgun.” He sighed and leaned back against the tree. “That night, Texanna and I fled the white village forever, leaving behind my sick little sister who was too ill to travel. We wouldn’t have made it if War Bonnet and his small raiding party hadn’t ridden in to grab us up off the street at the very last minute.”

“Your mother was a white captive like me?”

“Yes. My father, War Bonnet, stole her from a Texas wagon train. He was down there warring against the Comanche.”

She knew from the tone of his voice he was revealing painful things that he had never discussed with anyone before.

“Texanna must have loved him very much,” she whispered. “And did he love her, too?”

“He loved her so much that he never took a second wife.”

Summer thought a minute, puzzled. “But if they loved each other, why had she left him in the first place to go back to the whites?”

“She didn’t leave willingly. I was a small boy and the band was camped near the Red River. Most of the men were gone hunting when the Texas Rangers rode in and recaptured us. She fought like a she-bobcat but she was heavy with the baby that was due soon and the white men took us away by force.”

“Did you both never try later to escape?”

“We tried.” He sighed tiredly. “But all during that next five years, we never made it. I might have made it alone but I wouldn’t leave her behind to deal with the hostile whites by herself. Her family decided she had gone insane from living with the Indians and threatened to put her an asylum and her children in the orphanage. After that, Texanna quit trying until the night we ran for our lives after the whipping.”

There was a long silence and Summer could read by the pain of his face that he was reliving all the hurt and humiliation of his miserable life in civilization.

“. . . she was wearing a red dress,” he muttered.

“Who?”

“The dance-hall girl.” He shook his head as if to do away with the memory. “It was almost exactly like the one you had on when I took you from the wrecked stage that morning.”

Things became suddenly clear to her. “And you thought I was that same kind of woman, one who sleeps with men for money?”

He nodded and looked into her eyes. “I knew from living with the whites that only whores and easy women wore a dress like that. Where did you get it, anyway?”

She smiled. “I traded for it in Fort Smith. I knew everyone would be on the lookout for a rich girl dressed all in blue so I traded with a dance-hall girl. Then I sold all my jewelry to get enough for my passage to San Francisco. Father had not given me much money to start with. I think he knew I might run away.”

“You had a reason for going to this place called San Francisco?”

“No,” she said, smiling. “I don’t know a soul there. It just seemed like it was far away enough that Uncle Jack—”

“Who is this ‘Uncle Jack’?”

“A relative. One of those very strict preachers. Father was trying to get me out of Boston for a while until the gossip died down and he thought Uncle Jack was a logical choice. The old man was due to pick me up in Fort Smith the next morning, but I caught the 3:30 a.m. stage out instead.”

“You did something to anger your father?”

“My goodness, did I ever! It started out as a small protest over suffrage for women.”

“What?” His face showed his puzzlement.

“You know, the right for women to vote!”

He laughed heartily. “You must think me a fool! Even having had only five years in the white school, I know that women cannot vote.”

“That’s exactly what I mean!” she snapped. “I had been reading the
Lily
, the suffragette newspaper, and decided I should do my part. So I organized and led the other girls from Miss Priddy’s Academy to demonstrate for women’s rights at the Boston State House.”

“This alone angered your father enough to send you away from the family?”

“I’m afraid there’s more.” She giggled in spite of herself. “Someone at the capitol called the police and they came to talk to us, rather condescendingly, I might add. The police sergeant told us to behave like well-brought-up young ladies and go home. When I decided they weren’t going to take us seriously, I lost my temper and hit the sergeant over the head with my parasol.

“Parasol?”

She smiled at the memory. “That’s an umbrella. Then the other girls followed my lead and started hitting the police and screaming. To make a long story short, they hauled us all off to jail. All that is but Maude Peabody. She had chained herself to a door and forgot to bring along the key.”

Iron Knife looked at her in disbelief. “You spent time in the white man’s jail? No wonder your father was angry!”

“That wasn’t what made him the maddest!” Summer chuckled at the memory. “We were out within an hour, as soon as Father could reach his lawyer. That is, everyone but Maude who was still back at the State House, chained to the door while the police tried to cut the chain. What made him furious was that someone notified the newspapers and the reporters were at the jail when Father arrived.”

“I can imagine a great chief was not happy at having the story in the newspapers.”

“Well, I think more than that, Father thought he had enough power to keep it out of the press, but he didn’t after all. It was spread over the front pages and Father was furious, especially when the papers told about the bloomers.”

“
Bloomers’?” He looked confused. “What is this word,
bloomers’?”