Deep as the Rivers (Santa Fe Trilogy) (28 page)

   
She reloaded at once, a precaution Micajah had drilled into her. As soon as the task was complete, she scanned the billowing clouds of dust looking for Johnstone’s huge figure. Stripped down to his breeches and moccasins, he looked almost as hairy as the bison themselves. Not only his chest and arms, but his shoulders and back as well were covered with a thick fuzzy pelt. She waved her rifle in a triumphant salute as soon as she spotted him.

   
Micajah had been watching her progress carefully as he rode down his own quarry and took it with a single shot. Damn if his Sparky didn’t do it just as well! One half the experienced hunters in the party took two or more shots to accomplish the feat. Just as he returned her wave, Against the Wind, a youth of fifteen summers darted in front of him, intent on finishing off a large bull he had already shot twice.

   
He fired again. The pain crazed animal lunged to gore the nearest thing to him—Johnstone and his horse. Against the Wind was swept along with the surrounding herd. The wounded buffalo grazed Micajah’s gelding, then went down directly in the path of galloping horse and rider. Johnstone’s mount stumbled.

   
Micajah vaulted from his horse as it went down, flinging himself onto the back of a big rangy old bull, digging his fists into the shaggy beast’s grizzled fur and holding on for dear life. Too busy racing to escape the deafening crash of rifle shot and terrifying bloody carnage around him, the bull ignored his passenger as he broke from the thick of the herd. Micajah heard Sparky’s scream and knew she was coming for him. Damn the fool girl!

   
Olivia kneed her mare forward, frantically working her way through the carnage toward her mentor, praying all the while that he would not be trampled before she could reach him.

   
Once she sighted him atop the big bison, she seized her chance. Clearing the herd, she paced the bull, keeping just behind his neck. He neither saw nor smelled her as she drew abreast, waiting for Micajah to jump, her rifle ready to shoot should the bull turn and charge him once he was afoot.

   
Micajah watched as the herd broke up and thinned out, scattering to the four winds as the hunters culled their prey from all sides now. When enough of a clearing appeared, he began sliding backward down over the bull’s great hump toward its small stringy hindquarters, holding hand over hand to patches of woolly fur until he could slide off the rump.

   
At once Olivia turned her horse and rode between him and several other stampeding animals headed in their direction. He sprang aboard the mare as she slid forward and kicked the black into a gallop. They rode several hundred feet until they reached a rise on the plain topped by several scrub pines.

   
“Whoowe, gal! Thet was th’ beatin’est damn ride I ever took!” Micajah bellowed as he slid off the lathered little mare who had labored beneath his considerable weight.

   
“Ride? Ride! You crazy
bouffon
, you missed being prairie paste by a gnat’s ass!” she shrieked, equal parts infuriated, amused and terrified as she threw herself into his arms and hugged him, still clutching the rifle. He held her up and swung her around as if she weighed no more than that proverbial gnat.

   
“Sorry I give yew sech a skeer, Sparky. Durn fool thang, I was watchin’ ta see no harm come ta yew ‘n purt’ near got myself pounded inta pemmican. But I’m nigh onta as good a rider as yew.” He put her down and fixed her with merry brown eyes. “Betcha yew never rode no buff’lo bull neither, did yew?”

   
“No, Micajah, and I never want to either.”

   
“Good. I ain’t ‘zactly fixed on doin’ hit agin myself!”

   
They both burst into gales of relieved laughter. Then the dust cleared as the herd raced over the horizon, leaving a field of dead buffalo to be butchered and carried back to the village. Micajah’s big gelding, none the worse for his spill and near goring, stood patiently beside the buffalo Against the Wind had shot. The mountain man whistled and the gelding trotted toward him.

   
After checking the shallow nick on the horse’s flank, he said, “C’mon. Let’s see thet fat young cow yew brung down.”

   
“Will they sing songs about Ember Woman’s hunting skill around the campfire?” she asked teasingly.

   
“More like they’ll sing songs ‘bout her stupidity—ridin’ inter a big stampede on a little bitty mare ta carry off an ole worthless grizzly th’ size o’ me,” he said warmly. “Yew saved my life, Sparky. “

   
“Perhaps, but that doesn’t begin to even the score. You’ve saved mine every single day since you rescued a silly, useless girl from a bear last spring.”

   
Together they walked toward the cow Olivia had shot, prepared to set to work.

* * * *

   
Time had no meaning. Samuel crouched in the welcome warmth of the sun, feeling it penetrate his bruised and lacerated flesh. Although it felt good, he knew in a few short hours when dusk came, the air would turn bitterly cold for a man clad only in the ragged shreds of britches. He had been forced to cut off most of his pant legs and use them to make coverings for his feet which had been so festered and sore from thistles and stone cuts that he could not walk on them for nearly a week.

   
He had managed to catch a few fish with his bare hands the first few days by the river. These he ate raw. However, once he was forced to leave the stream because of the proximity of Indians—hostile or friendly, he could not tell which—he found nothing to eat except a few handfuls of wild berries and some tubers he dug up with his knife.

   
That was about the time his head began to pound and his vision blur. The blow from that war club had done more damage than he had first thought. Only semiconscious and nauseously dizzy, he had spent countless days wandering in circles, reduced to crawling on his hands and knees at times when he was too weak and disoriented to walk. Several times he had slept through entire days. He was not certain how many.

   
Deep in the western woodlands that bordered the Great Plains, he had no idea how he could reach civilization before his badly drained reserves of strength utterly gave out. The slash on his side was steadily growing more painful and inflamed. Already he feared that the wound might prove fatal if not cleaned and treated. He had been avoiding Indian encampments, suspecting that they, like Man Whipper and his renegades, could be under the Englishman’s influence. But now he had no choice.

   
“It’s either possible torture and death or certain starvation and blood poisoning,” he mumbled grimly.

   
His tongue felt fuzzy and his mouth was dry and sour. Chills alternated with fever, but at least the damnable hammering in the back of his skull had abated. He could walk upright—if he had been strong enough to stand.

* * * *

   
The fire burned brightly, a huge blaze leaping skyward as glowing orange coals popped and hissed where the fat from the roasting buffalo sizzled and dripped. Several huge slabs of meat were spitted over the fire while dozens of big stew kettles around them gave off rich aromas. Everyone in the camp would feast tonight.

   
Olivia and Micajah were enjoying their last evening of celebration before packing up their share of the meat and heading east toward their cabin on the Gasconade. Much had been made of Great Bear’s ride on the huge bull buffalo, but even more was reserved for his “boy-daughter” whose medicine was spoken of with awe.

   
None of the warriors, however, had offered Micajah a bride price for her since she brought down the cow and rescued the mountain man from the stampede. Micajah told her that they feared being shown up by a slender wisp of a female who was a better hunter than most warriors. Such a wife might prove difficult to control.

   
Olivia looked forward to returning to the peace and privacy of their cabin, away from the crowded socializing and rituals in the Osage great lodges. Compared to the war and peace chief’s houses, which were twenty feet wide and over one hundred feet long, their simple log structure was small indeed, but then it slept only two, not dozens. Each night she shared one end of Chief Pawhuska’s lodge with half a dozen of his daughters. They snored worse than Micajah. And when they weren’t sleeping they were giggling.

   
The only subject young girls thought of, it seemed to Olivia, was men. Of course, she had never been so foolish. There had always been so many more interesting things to do as she was growing up than to moon over the gaggle of suitors who had pursued her. Things such as riding Wescott’s fine thoroughbreds or going to the gaming hells with her parents. Life had been filled with such promise then, she thought wistfully. She had always believed that someday she would meet a man, doubtless of noble birth and fine breeding, who would sweep her off her feet the way
Péré
had
Maman.

   
Without warning the swarthy rugged features of Samuel Shelby flashed into her mind, his beautiful lips dazzling her with one of those blinding white smiles. She tamped down the image, forcing herself to look away from the leaping flames which seemed to conjure him. Still a warm liquid rush filled her belly and made her breasts ache when she remembered that dark velvety night in the small tent when he had almost—
Stop it!

   
Restlessly, she stood up and made her way through the crowded center of the big village. Everyone congregated around the two chiefs’ lodges, which were built side by side in front of the great campfire, a sort of town square where all feasting and ceremonial events took place. She walked past the smaller lodges where women were busy finishing up last minute chores, feeding infants, putting away the skinning and curing tools they used to work the buffalo hides, and setting their homes in order before joining the great feast.

   
Several women called out greetings and she returned them in the Osage tongue. Micajah and Iron Kite had taught her the rudiments of the Sioux dialect. Having a natural affinity for languages, she had learned quickly. Now her Osage was nearly as fluent as the European languages she had learned as a child.

   
But Olivia St. Etienne was no longer a child. Feeling some strange compulsion drawing her, she walked toward the river. It would be peaceful down by the water. She needed to be alone, to think about the future, about what she wanted to do with her life. She stood by the bank and looked at her dim reflection in the twilight, running her hands over the butter soft buckskin dress Wind Singer, Iron Kite’s sister, had made for her. Suddenly a loud crashing noise coming from the brush caused her to whirl around and reach for her knife.

   
But she had come out unarmed, all tricked out like some fool Osage princess! Peering into the thicket of elderberry and willow saplings, she began to backtrack slowly.

   
Samuel stared through the gathering gloom at the apparition in front of him. Not ten yards away the fantastical creature stood poised for flight. She was breathtaking, garbed in an elaborately fringed and beaded dress, like the wife or daughter of some very rich Osage chief. But she was no Indian. Her long fire-red hair shown like a beacon in the twilight, bound in two fat braids which fell over her shoulders down to the tips of her pertly upthrust breasts. He blinked and squinted, certain the fever was causing him to hallucinate. It was Olivia St. Etienne’s face with that stubborn chin stuck out defiantly and those slanted green eyes peering warily at his hiding place.

   
“Well, if I’m that far gone with fever, I might as well show myself and see if there’s any help available,” he muttered, taking several more steps, wincing with every one, for his makeshift moccasins had been lost two days ago fording a creek. He leaned heavily on the stout birch pole he had hacked off a dead tree a few days back. Without the crude walking stick he would never have made it this far. He stumbled out into the open and tried to speak to the apparition that looked like Olivia.

   
This must be my punishment for past sins.

   
All that emerged was a dry raspy croak. The earth rushed up to meet him as he slid down the pole and sprawled on his knees, weaving back and forth, struggling not to lose consciousness.

   
Olivia did not recognize him at first. In fact, she was not even certain he was a white man but thought he might have been a captive of the Sioux or the Kaws who escaped and wandered into Osage territory. His hair, uncut since the previous spring, hung below his shoulders in tangled burr infested clumps and his skin was so sun darkened and covered with abrasions that the discolorations made it impossible to tell his race. He was virtually naked except for the ragged buckskins hanging on his bony hips.

   
He made an incoherent croak, then slid down the walking stick he had been using to drag himself toward her, head pitched forward. Olivia knew he was too badly hurt to be any threat to her safety. She started to walk toward him as he fell to the ground. When he rolled over on his back and the dying rays of light fell on his face, she gave a gasp of recognition.