Deep as the Rivers (Santa Fe Trilogy) (41 page)

   
“Then what?” he asked impatiently, slapping a low branch out of his way.

   
“There’s a beaver dam in an embarras on one of the tributaries, just below where we landed. I saw it as we were coming upriver.”

   
Shelby looked at her oddly but said nothing, then scanned the woods for more hostiles. “So, if we find this embarras, you figure we can hide in it until they give up looking for us? Pretty dangerous with savages popping up all around the damn thing. I think we’d be safer to keep running. We may lose them in these woods.”

   
“I did manage to lose them for nearly a day but they still caught up to me.” She flinched as a jagged piece of rock bit into her instep, but kept on jogging beside him.

   
For the first time he looked down at her feet and cursed. “Why didn’t you say you were barefooted?”

   
“It didn’t exactly come up in the conversation,” she replied acerbically. “If you recall, Pardee kidnapped me from bed. I was wearing only a night rail.”

   
Our marriage bed,
he thought guiltily. And he had left her there for Pardee. “How did you acquire these clothes then?” he asked at once.

   
Her eyes met his as the implications of the question struck her like a lightning bolt. “Damn you? You think I went willingly with him?”

   
“No, not now,” he said sighing wearily. “I’ll confess it did occur to me at first. There were no signs of a struggle.”

   
“He slipped in with an Osage warrior while I was asleep. They both had me before I could make a sound or even move,” she said bitterly. “Pardee gave me some of his old clothes. He left me barefooted thinking I couldn’t run that way. I took a page from your book and fooled them.” She had a look of grim pride on her face.

   
“You sure as hell did, Livy,” he replied softly.

   
“About that embarras,” she said, returning to the subject doggedly, unwilling to let him know how much his continuing suspicions could still hurt her, or how much his implied praise pleased her. “If we can make it to the river, we can hide in the beaver lodges—some of them looked pretty big from what I could see.”

   
“Well, hell, I guess it’s a better chance than thrashing around in this brush. How far downriver?”

   
“Half a day...I think...on foot.”

   
He stopped and she followed suit. They listened for any sounds to indicate the presence of men in the surrounding woods. They had zigzagged and changed course since killing the last of the Osage whom they had seen. Nothing disturbed the low hum of nature.

   
“Time to take a breather—and see to your feet,” he said, pulling her down beneath the cover of elderberry bushes beside a small trickling creek. They both quenched their thirst before he raised one of her small feet by a delicate anklebone and inspected it with a grimace.

   
“Not half as bad as yours were,” she said as he checked the other foot. “No thistles sticking out thick as porcupine quills.”

   
“But you are cut and bruised. Damn, if only we hadn’t lost the horse. My saddlebags had medicines.”

   
“If I just bathe them in the cool water, it’ll help. Some yarrow would be good to stop the cuts from bleeding.” She glanced around the creek bank.

   
Samuel saw the tall gold-crowned weeds the same time she did and walked down a few dozen yards to cut some.

   
“Becoming a regular woods-lore expert, aren’t you?” he asked as he began pounding the flower tops into a powder on a smooth rock.

   
“I have already survived a revolution, a cholera epidemic, several attempts to kill me, even one to sell me,” she could not resist adding. “I’ll survive this, too.”

   
He quirked one eyebrow. “If you had been sensible enough to come to me with the truth when Wescott tried to sell you, you could’ve saved us both a lot of trouble.”

   
“So very simple,” she scoffed. “The only way you accept the truth is when it stares you straight in the face—with incontrovertible bloody evidence.”

   
He thought of her ripped maidenhead and the blood smeared on the sheets afterward and his face darkened with a guilty flush as he shrugged off his shirt and began ripping it to make bandages for her feet. “I’d give you my boots, but they’re so much too big you’d break your neck trying to walk in them,” he said gruffly. Taking one slender foot that she had been dangling in the creek, he dried it off, and applied the yarrow paste. Then he began swaddling it with long strips of the heavy cotton cloth.

   
All the while he worked, she watched the play of bronzed muscles rippling across his chest. Olivia remembered how the crisp black hair there had felt when she pressed her face against that warm solid wall, listening to his heart slam furiously when he had made love to her.

   
They spoke no more as they resumed walking, following the small creek which would eventually empty into the river. When they reached a rocky area where they had to ford the creek, he gave her his rifle, scooped her up in his arms and carried her.

   
Olivia let out a squeak of surprise as his arms lifted her against his chest. “Put me down! I can walk. You’re not fully recovered from your injuries. You need to save your strength.”

   
“I’m fine. I don’t need you to lay open one of your feet and undo all my careful bandaging. After all, I don’t happen to have a spare shirt on me,” he added dryly.

   
Olivia was all too aware of that as she held onto the smooth muscles of his shoulders. He was as powerful as a great black panther. She was acutely conscious of the heat of his skin, the male smell of his bare upper body pressed so closely to hers. Her stiff resistance quickly gave way to acquiescence as his long easy strides ate up the ground.

   
She always felt protected and safe when he held her.
Fool. He’s a greater danger to you than the hostile Osage and Pardee combined!

   
He stayed in the creek bed shallows for a mile or so saying, “This should keep them from tracking us quickly even if they happen to see signs farther back. How far do you estimate to the smaller river with the embarras?”

   
“If we cut overland to the south, maybe another mile, but you can’t—”

   
“Yes, I can,” he replied, holding her fast as he jumped from the creek across several flat rocks, careful to leave no sign of where he left the water. “Of course, this will make it damned hard for Dirt Devil to pick up our trail if Micajah is following.”

   
“If he is, that dog will find us,” she said with assurance, praying that they would all be reunited safely.

   
Within an hour they had reached the confluence of the small river and the larger Missouri. As Olivia had observed, a large thicket of driftwood and other debris floated at the mouth of the lesser body of water. Near one end a sawyer bobbed precariously, beating time on the rippling current. At the opposite end a huge complex of beaver lodges stuck up, giving the impression of a small city. Several of the lodges were a goodly size.

   
Samuel set Olivia on her feet, on a long flat stretch of rock, and relieved her of both the rifles she had been carrying. “I vote for that big one in the center,” she said, pointing to one huge brown dome that rose above all the other surrounding lodges. “The trick will be finding a way in,” she continued, starting to roll up her pant legs.

   
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “If I recall correctly, you can’t swim.”

   
“I can now,” she replied calmly. “Like a fish.”

   
“More like a beaver, I hope.” Then he hesitated again, weighing the options.

   
“If we do this, we lose the use of our rifles,” he reminded her, but already he had concluded that they were both too exhausted to go any farther.

   
Olivia shrugged. “We’re almost out of powder anyway. There wasn’t much in Pardee’s powder horn to begin with. He’s a careless woodsman.”

   
He tied their shot pouches and powder horns to the weapons, then carefully submerged them in murky water beneath the brush snarled undergrowth of the embarras. Hopefully they could retrieve them when they left. Then they waded out into the river, diving into the cold green current. Samuel kept an eye on Olivia, moving close to her. She swam with graceful ease, slithering past slow-moving mudcats who drifted along the silty brown bottom. Underwater weeds undulated around them, twisting like silken gauze in a summer breeze.

   
When they moved beneath the shadow of the embarras, all light vanished and the only source of reckoning was pure instinct, as they aimed for the center of the largest beaver lodge. Both prayed they could feel its underwater entrance.

   
Groping along the tightly meshed network of twigs, wood and hard-packed mud, Samuel found an opening big enough to stick his head into. Fitting his shoulders would be a tight squeeze. His lungs were beginning to scream for air. He turned, reached out for Olivia, not sensing her nearby at first. Then suddenly the current surged and he felt something brush his arm.

   
Confused by the inky blackness, Olivia grasped for something to orient herself. Although she had become a strong swimmer over the summer months, she had never spent this long underwater, beneath light breaking cover such as this. All sense of up and down had vanished and she fought panic. Perhaps using the beaver lodge had not been such a great idea after all. Then she felt Samuel’s hand grasping her arm and shoving her into an opening. She was half-pushed while she half-propelled herself upward until she suddenly broke through the water. Blessed warm air rushed into her strained, burning lungs.

   
Quickly shimmying up into the dim cavern, she felt Samuel right behind her. He struggled to work his way through the funnel-like opening. Frantically, she reached down into the water and tugged at his shoulder, pulling with all her strength beneath his armpit until he, too, surfaced, filling his lungs with huge gulps of air.

   
“Damn, I thought I’d never work my way through that pinhole opening,” he gasped, coughing up water as he blinked to acclimatize his eyes to the faint light filtering into the lodge from a narrow air hole in the center of the dome-like roof. He could make out Olivia’s shadowy outline as she huddled across from him.

   
“For a while there I was reconsidering the wisdom of trying to find this place,” she said.

   
“Hell, I don’t know. If they trail us this far, they’ll have no way of being sure that we entered the river on this embarras. I expect it’ll take them a day or two to split up and look for a sign before they get close. Meanwhile we can rest.” He could see that she was shivering in spite of the stuffy brackish air inside the lodge. “Best we get out of these wet clothes,” he said, beginning to pull off the sodden britches and boots he’d hurriedly secured from the Ste. Francoise mercantile.

   
Olivia sat very still, suddenly aware of how intimate their circumstances were in spite of the size of the lodge. She looked nervously around, gauging the ceiling to be ten feet at its apex. The round room was perhaps as large as forty feet across at the base. The floor of the lodge was sturdily built of painstakingly layered roots, twigs, wood shavings and moss, so tightly packed as to be rock solid, but wet from seepage from the river bottom. “Will the beavers come back at dark, do you think?” she asked nervously.

   
“I doubt they’ll want houseguests. They’ll avoid this lodge and use the others until we’re long gone.” He, too, studied their quarters, noting the sleeping loft the beavers had built a foot or so above the wet floor. Walking over to the surface that ringed the perimeter of the circular room, he tested its sturdiness. “Alder bark. Soft and dry. Should easily hold our weight, too. Good carpenters, these beavers. At least we can sleep in comfort.”

   
He looked at her again, noting that she had made no move to get out of her wet clothes. Suddenly their proximity struck him, too. Clearing his throat nervously, he said, “I’m going to search for dinner. You’d better shuck those clothes or you’ll catch your death.”

   
“Dinner?”

   
“Yes, if I remember correctly what Santiago and his trapper friends have told me, the tunnel opening over there should lead to a food cache.”

   
“Oh.” She could think of nothing else to say. Her throat was suddenly dry. With trembling fingers she began to unfasten the laces on the filthy shirt. Relieved when he turned his back to go into the adjoining lodge, she pulled it over her head, then lay back and skinned off the sopping britches. At least the light was faint. He would not be able to see much of her naked body...she hoped.

   
In a few moments Samuel returned with the bounty from the beaver’s cache—berries, iris bulbs, sedges, watercress and mushrooms. “Not exactly a banquet but it’ll fill us up,” he said, setting down the vegetarian delight.