Heartbreak Creek (16 page)

Declan forked up another bite of sliced roast beef. “Work ashes into the dirt before you plant.” More chewing. Swallowing. Muscles moving under the sun-browned skin. His neck was surprisingly long, she realized. Not disproportionately so, of course, but with a nice slope down to those wide shoulders.

Realizing her mind was wandering again, Edwina reined it in. “And beetles. He spoke a lot about beetles. He even drew several on a scrap of paper and told me more than I ever wanted to know about dung beetles, and borers, and weevils, and grub worms and suchlike. He shows quite an interest in insects. And drawing. He’s an accomplished drawer. Artist.”

She knew she was babbling. But with Declan looking at her that way, and Thomas Redstone’s dark eyes boring into her like one of Lucas’s pine beetles, it was difficult to concentrate on what she was saying. “The point is, he’s talking.”

“He’s been talking since he was two,” Declan said.

“Not to me.”

“You weren’t even here when he was two,” Joe Bill reminded her in a churlish tone. “Our real mother was here then.”

Declan turned his head and looked at him.

Edwina didn’t see any change in his expression, but apparently Joe Bill did. He bent over his plate, a flush blossoming across his cheeks.

Hoping to lighten the tension, Edwina smiled at Thomas Redstone. “Will you be coming back to the house for supper this evening, Mr. Redstone?”

He gave it long consideration. “The dark-skinned woman will be there?” he finally asked.

His deep voice carried as much expression as his face—which was none—but those dark, intense eyes conveyed a message that roused all of Edwina’s protective instincts. “Are you referring to Miss Lincoln?”

He didn’t respond but continued to look at her until eventually his silence and the manners that had been beaten into her with a willow cane compelled Edwina to speak. “Yes. She’ll be there.”

“Then I will come,” he said solemnly. “I want to know her.” And he punctuated that announcement with a sudden and astonishing white-toothed grin that completely changed his face.

Goodness gracious. He’s as handsome as Declan.
Then on the heels of that thought came one even more shocking. Wants “to
know
her”? Did he mean in the biblical sense?
Oh, my Lord
. Edwina didn’t know whether to be amused or horrified
.
Thomas Redstone was after Pru.

As soon as his wife rode off, Declan sent the boys and Amos to drive the next batch of calves to be branded into the brush enclosure they’d built against the canyon wall, then he turned to Thomas. “How do you know it was Lone Tree who burned out the Cox place?” Just saying the Arapaho’s name made Declan so furious he could hardly think.

“He makes no secret of it. Colonel Carr’s Pawnee scouts killed his father and a son at Summit Springs last summer. He seeks revenge.”

“I had nothing to do with that.”

“You are white. All white men look the same to a man who is wrong in the head.”

Too restless to sit, Declan paced under the sagging canopy. “Lone Tree was at Summit Springs? I thought they were all killed or captured.”

“He had gone hunting and was not in the encampment when the blue coats came. He feels shame that he was not there to protect his family.”

The Dog Soldier leaned back against the wagon wheel, his forearms outstretched across his bent knees. In his right hand he held a spent and distorted fifty-caliber bullet that he rolled back and forth between his thumb and forefinger. “It is a hard thing to lose a child.”

Declan had seen him do that many times and guessed his friend was thinking about his own family, which had been lost years ago when that same bullet had plowed through his wife’s back and into his infant son’s chest. Thomas intended to find the trapper who had fired it and shove the bullet into his beating heart.

Declan resumed pacing. He wished he had it in him to do the same to Lone Tree. Not just because he suspected the Indian had killed his wife, Sally, but because by killing her, the renegade Arapaho had also robbed Declan’s children of their mother. Even though Sally had abandoned them, she loved her children and they loved her. She didn’t deserve the death that had befallen her.

“Lone Tree’s anger festered through the winter,” Thomas went on. “Now he gathers other angry warriors and vows to kill any whites and Pawnee he can find.” Thomas tipped his head back against the wheel and gave Declan that hard, fixed stare, reminding him that even though they shared a bond, there would always be barriers between them. “It is a common story,
hovahe
. One told many times around the campfires of the Cheyenne.”

Declan didn’t want to be pulled into that old fight, so he stayed on track. “Summit Springs is closer to Nebraska than these mountains. Why would he come this far west?”

“For you.”

“Me?” Declan stopped pacing. “Just because I put him in jail once?”

“Because he has a fear of closed places, and you locked him in one and watched him howl like an animal.”

“I had no choice, Thomas. He almost beat a man to death.” Even so, and because of his own aversion to high places, when Declan had seen the Arapaho’s irrational behavior, he had gone against the judge’s ruling and had released him early. No man should have to suffer that kind of fear.

“Better for his honor to kill him.”

“Hell.” Declan stalked the length of the canopy and back again, his mind racing so fast he couldn’t slow it down enough to think clearly.

Locking up Lone Tree had been one of his last acts as sheriff in Heartbreak Creek. A week after the Indian’s release, Sally had run off, and within days, the rumors had started. It was only after the trooper brought news of finding the charred bodies of his wife and her lover, Luther “Slick” Caven, that the whispering had stopped. But by then, the damage had been done.

“And also because while he was in your jail,” Thomas added, “a flash flood washed out his village. His wife and daughter drowned.”

“And that’s my fault, too?”

Thomas shrugged. “Because of you, he was not there to protect them.”

“Another weak excuse.” Declan stopped pacing and idly watched a hawk float by, wingtips pivoting to guide its silent flight above the rocky ground. “Is it just me he’s after? Or my children, too?”

“He will take from you all that he can.”

Declan looked at Thomas. “Do you think he was the one who did that to Sally? I was never sure.” Even now he remembered his sick feeling when the trooper handed him Sally’s broken locket and bloody dress.

“He says no. But he had lived among whites long enough to learn how to lie.”

Son of a bitch!
Declan stared blindly down the valley that cradled his ranch—his home. Did he have to leave it to keep his children safe? He would, of course. He would do whatever he had to do to protect them. He just needed to figure out the best way to accomplish that.

Hearing a shout, he turned to see Joe Bill waving. His son pantomimed that the calves were penned and ready, and for Declan to come.

Declan waved back that he understood, but couldn’t make himself move. What did cows—or the ranch—or all his struggles to make a good life out here really amount to when a madman was stalking his family?

“Maybe he will take your new wife, instead,” Thomas said after a long pause. “She has a strong heart. She would not die as easy as the other one and Lone Tree would like that.”

An image of Ed flashed through Declan’s mind, her blue eyes snapping fire, her chin jutting as she threatened to come at him with a pitchfork if he raised a hand to his own children. Fierce, crazy, courageous Ed. No, she wouldn’t die easy.

Thomas rose. He slipped the bullet back into the small pouch hanging on a strip of leather around his neck, then tucked the pouch beneath the placket of his shirt. “I will help you, my white brother. I will stand beside you against Lone Tree. But then my debt to you is paid.”

Declan sighed and shook his head. “There is no debt, Thomas. You owe me nothing. Never have, never will.”

“I owe you my life.”

Declan regarded his friend, barely recognizing in him the same violent, crazed drunk he’d pulled from beneath a pile of brawlers in the Red Eye Saloon five years ago.

It had been a dark time for Thomas. A confused mixed breed caught between white and red and belonging to neither, he had watched his tribe head for extinction and the land he loved being eaten up one acre at a time by an endless flood of settlers, and he had no longer understood the world or his place in it. So he had taken his wife and young son into the mountains where they had lived a peaceful, solitary life until a trapper’s bullet had ended it.

Afire with grief and rage, Thomas had joined up with Black Kettle’s band, where he had earned his place as a Dog Soldier and had fought hard to protect his tribe and their way of life.

But the whites kept coming.

And the People kept retreating.

And the grief never went away.

Until finally, the only solace Thomas could find was in a bottle.

That’s how Declan had found him, under that pile of thrashing bodies in the saloon in Heartbreak Creek. Being the sheriff at that time, he had done his duty and had locked Thomas in jail for thirty days.

Hatred had kept the battered warrior alive. Hatred for the world he no longer fit into or understood—hatred for Declan for locking him up and depriving him of his alcohol—and especially, hatred for the trapper who had killed his family. Eventually the alcohol left his body. The rage didn’t. But by the time Thomas’s monthlong sentence ended, he and Declan had formed a wary friendship, which was tested a year later when Declan’s dark time came.

So to Declan’s way of thinking, he and Thomas had saved each other.

“There is no debt,” he said again, then smiled. “But if it will make you feel better, I’ll let you watch my back until Lone Tree is stopped.”

Thomas nodded solemnly. “
Nia’ish
, my white brother. Your goodness is as ever flowing as the great waters.”

Declan laughed. “And your compliments are as lasting as buffalo chips in the rain.”

Grinning, Thomas rested a hand on Declan’s shoulder. “Come,” he said, steering him toward the makeshift corral where Amos and the boys waited. “We will finish torturing your cattle, then we will ride to your tipi for a fine meal. And on the way, you will tell me about the dark-skinned woman.”

“Have your eye on her, do you?”

“She is a fine-looking woman.”

“And a hell of a cook.”

“Ho! That is a good thing,
nesene’,
because your new woman needs to eat. She is too skinny.”

“Maybe. But she’s mean, and with my kids to contend with, that counts for a lot.”

Thomas nodded sagely. “
Nehetome.
I know this to be true.”

“T
hose were his exact words, Pru. ‘I want to know her.’ ” Edwina mimicked Thomas Redstone’s deep, monotone voice. “That can only mean one thing.”

Pru shot her a look of exasperation in the mirror over the washstand in the water closet. “It can mean several things. Don’t make a simple statement into something it’s not. Can you spare any more pins?”

Edwina pulled a pin from her twist, passed it over, and watched her sister struggle for the umpteenth time to force the unruly curls at the back of her neck into her tightly wound bun.

Pru sighed. “This is hopeless. I should wear a scarf.”

“It’s fine. And anyway, what does it matter? He’s just an Indian.”

Her sister whipped toward her. “And what’s wrong with being an Indian, might I ask?”

Delighted to have pierced her sister’s calm façade, Edwina smiled sweetly. “Why, nothing at all. Except that he speaks a different language, lives in a house made of animal skins, has hair longer than yours, and wears trousers that don’t even cover his . . . upper legs.”

“They don’t?”

Having finally gained Pru’s full attention, Edwina happily expounded. “I saw it with my own eyes. When he walked up, I could actually see the muscles move in his”—she leaned closer to whisper—“fanny.”

Pru reared back to blink at her. “You saw his fanny?”

“His hip, anyway. Both sides. Right here.” Edwina poked at her own hip, which was discreetly covered by drawers, two petticoats, a gabardine skirt, and a calico apron that was only marginally tattered. “I tell you, Pru, I was horrified. Utterly horrified.”

“Horrified” might be an exaggeration. More like shocked. So much so that she had scarcely been able to look away. “He had very nice muscles,” she added, wondering if Declan’s would move and bunch and stretch in the same way, and if the skin there would be a paler hue than the sun-browned shade of his face and that shadowed V where his neck met the open collar of his shirt and where occasionally a few very black stray hairs would—

“How odd,” Pru mused, interrupting her imaginings. “I didn’t notice that before. Well, no matter.” One last pat on her hair, and she turned and headed toward the stairs. “It’s getting late. We’d best finish supper.”