Merline Lovelace (4 page)

That was where the heavyset soldier found her some moments later. She’d finished relieving herself and was on her knees, scrubbing her face with snow, when he stepped out from behind a tree.

“Well, well. When you come out from under all
that fur and hide, you’re a pretty enough little piece, aren’t you?”

She didn’t like this one. He looked at her with the eyes of a hungry wolf and spoke with a jeering tone. Turning her back on him, she wiped her cheeks with a corner of her robe, slung the garment over her shoulders and started back for the camp.

He sidestepped, deliberately blocking her way. “I’m talkin’ to you, squaw.”

“But me, I have no wish to talk with you.”

Her contemptuous glance raked a path from the burrs caught in his beard to the dirty buckskin shirt showing beneath his buffalo cloak. When her gaze lifted to his again, his mouth had tightened in anger.

“What do you think you’re about, turning your nose up at me like that?”

“If I turn up my nose, it is because you carry the stink of a dead skunk.”

The blunt response made the veins in his forehead bulge. “I’m thinking your man should have learned you a little respect.”

Louise stood her ground as he started for her, but her hand moved beneath her robe to the beaded sheath at her waist. “Henri, he teaches me to respect those who deserve it. You, I think, do not.”

His arm came up. “Why you little—”

“What goes on here?” The sergeant stomped through the woods.

Slowly, Louise loosed her grip on the handle of her skinning knife. How strange, she thought. Yesterday at this hour their paths had not yet crossed.
When they did, she believed him responsible for Henri’s death and viewed him through a blaze of hate and fear. Last night, she considered taking her knife to his throat if he lifted her skirts. Now she greeted his arrival with a shiver of relief.

So quickly do things change!

“What’s amiss here, Huddleston?”

The soldier hooked a thumb toward Louise. “She slipped out of camp. I followed to see what she was up to and she served me a field ration of sass.”

“That’s no reason to raise your arm to her. Don’t do it again.”

“Jesus! You’d jump me and the boys quick enough if we was to backtalk you or the lieutenant.”

“You have the right of it. I would. The difference is, you’re under military orders and Madame Chartier is not. Nor does she answer to you. I’ll tell you once more, Huddleston. Just once. She’s my responsibility. I’ll see to her.”

“Well, maybe you should keep a closer eye on her, then. Wind That Cries says she’s bad medicine. Real bad medicine.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I heard him and One Eye muttering and asked them what they was jawin’ on about.” He shot a glance at Louise. “They said there’s a legend. Some folderol ’bout a blue-eyed maiden bringing disaster to her tribe. They seem to think you showin’ up with this particular female in harness will bring disaster down on us, too.”

Daniel had a sick lieutenant to see to, a troop to
ready for the march and fresh meat to hunt. “If we believed in bad medicine we would have turned around the first time our canoes went under,” he snapped. “We’ve come too far to worry about such matters now. Go on back to camp and get your gear together.”

His mouth thin and tight, the soldier speared another glance at Louise. Daniel waited, keeping his own temper on a tight rein, until the man had shouldered past and was out of earshot.

“Don’t go wandering off again,” he instructed the woman curtly.

“Am I to squat right in front of your men, then?”

“Of course not. Just let me know before you go into the woods.”

He started for the camp, took all of two or three paces before he realized she wasn’t following. Swinging back, he saw that she was still standing right where he’d left her.

Well, hell! That’s all he needed. A female with sore feelings.

“I’m sorry I spoke so harsh,” he said, striving for patience. “I’ve got a load on my mind.”

“And I add to your burdens.”

There was no denying that. “You do, but you’re a burden of my own choosing.” Hoping he’d soothed her ruffled feathers, he swept an arm as if to usher her back to camp. Still she didn’t move.

“He speaks the truth.”

“Who does?”

“Wind That Cries. I am bad medicine.”

“How do you figure that?”

“There
is
a legend about a long-ago maiden with eyes the color of mine. She brought disaster to her people. As I did to mine.”

“What disaster? Our reports show that the Quapaw are a rich nation, with many fields of corn and squash, and rivers filled with fish.”

She took her lip between her teeth again in a gesture Daniel was coming to recognize. Stifling his impatience to return to camp, he waited.

“When my mother dies,” she said slowly, reluctantly, “I am taken to my uncle’s lodge. That year the hunt was bad and we ate little meat. Then, after his wife delivers a babe with no arms, people begin to speak of the curse. That’s why he sells me to Henri. Why—” She swallowed and forced out the words. “Why, perhaps, Henri dies as he does.”

Daniel had a healthy respect for the Almighty in all His shapes and guises, including the spirits worshiped by the various tribes. But his years in uniform had bred in him a gut-deep belief that death came more by chance than by divine intervention. How else could he explain the musket ball that had ricocheted off his powder horn and gone through the eye of the man next to him? Or a murderous fusillade that had dropped his captain’s horse but left the officer without a scratch?

He was no barracks-room philosopher, however, and all he could offer Chartier’s widow was the brutal truth. “Your husband died because a mountain cat ripped out his throat.”

“And if your lieutenant dies? Who will bear the blame for that? Your men will say it is the one who gives you the leaves of the moonflower.”

“If he dies, it will be because the cold went to his lungs. But his fever broke during the night. He’s better this morning.”

Her breath escaped on a sigh of relief. “That is good.”

“Very good.”

With a roll of his shoulders, Daniel pushed this business of bad medicine to the back of his mind. As he’d pointed out to Huddleston, they’d come too damned far to turn back now.

“The sun’s coming up over the trees. Let’s get back to camp.”

T
he lieutenant was sitting up when they returned to camp. Although his fever had indeed broken, he was still weak and fitful. So much so that it took some time for him to grasp the explanation Daniel offered for the addition to their small band.

“A Frenchman’s widow, you say?” Blinking owlishly, he gaped at Louise. “And you want to take her with us to the Quapaw winter camp?”

“Not just to the Quapaw camp. I told her she could travel with us as far as a settlement where she can trade her furs.”

“We’re weeks away from the nearest settlement. She can’t trek along with us all that way. This is a military expedition, not a walk through a country garden.”

As if Daniel needed reminding of that fact! Schooling himself to patience, he passed the lieutenant a tin mug of coffee.

“I promised her husband I would see her safe.”

Wilkinson thinned his mouth, obviously dis
pleased and not entirely sure what he could do about it. Like his father, he was small of stature, but he possessed none of the general’s blustery charm or immense self-confidence. Daniel supposed most women would consider the son more handsome than the father, though. He tied his fine, if now matted, brown hair back in a queue and looked out at the world with pale blue eyes. He wore his uniform well—when it wasn’t in rags—and could exude an air of sophistication at times.

This wasn’t one of those times.

Swallowing a sigh at the officer’s querulous expression, Daniel guided the coffee mug to his lips. “The woman won’t be any bother,” he promised, ignoring the fact that she’d already created a stir among the men.

“You know better than that. A woman in a military camp always spells trouble.”

“I’ve given my promise,” he said again, shrugging.

Young Wilkinson looked as though he wanted to argue the matter further, but gave way before his sergeant’s calm implacability. Daniel ended the matter by steering the conversation to the question that had been nagging at the back of his mind since last night.

“When we camped with the Little Osage a few weeks back, did the chief let drop anything about a Spanish agent operating in these parts?”

Wilkinson lifted a startled gaze. “A Spanish agent?”

“The woman, Louise, says the trappers have heard rumors the Spanish might send boats up the Arkansaw and try to reclaim this territory.”

The lieutenant buried his face in his coffee mug and took another swallow. When he lowered the battered tin cup, sweat dewed his forehead.

“If the Spanish are thinking to reclaim this territory, that’s all the more reason for us to finish charting the river. My father’s most anxious to know if it’s navigable by anything larger than a canoe.”

Terminating the discussion, the lieutenant set his empty mug aside and dropped back on his blanket. “I’m still feeling poorly. I don’t think I have the strength to walk today.”

“You’d better go by dugout.”

Pasty faced, he nodded weakly.

After a breakfast of fried beaver liver and coffee, Daniel loaded the girl’s bale of furs in their one remaining boat.

They’d started down the Arkansaw with a skin-covered canoe and a pirogue hollowed out of a log, both of which their small band had constructed. A submerged limb had ripped through the canoe and sunk it. The damned pirogue wallowed like a drunken sow, but at least it would carry the heavy bale of furs.

Daniel hauled the pelts to the boat and made a nest for the lieutenant. Hooking a shoulder under Wilkinson’s arm, he half walked, half carried the officer to
the dugout and settled him beside their remaining store of powder and shot.

“Boley, you take first shift at the prow. Bradley, you’ve got the rear.”

The two privates took their places and pushed away from shore. Boley had to use an ax to chop through the ice crusting the banks. Cursing and soon soaked to the waist, he and Bradley finally managed to get the dugout into the narrow, free-flowing channel at the river’s center.

The rest of the troop trudged along the banks. The snow was hard and caked enough to keep them from sinking up to their knees, but the march took a toll on their waning strength. To make matters worse, the air carried a dank bite and the sky turned an ominous gray. They’d have fresh snow to struggle through, and soon.

As if a sick lieutenant, surly troops and the weather weren’t worry enough, Daniel now had the added responsibility of the trapper’s widow. She kept up with the men easily enough, but where their eyes were red-rimmed from frost and their shoulders were hunched against the biting wind, she moved with the sleek, surefooted grace of an antelope. The cold gave her cheeks a pink glow. The wind tugged silken strands of black from under her cap.

Her youth and resilience showed more with every passing mile, and Daniel caught the glances his men directed her way. He didn’t like the idea of leaving her alone with them when he broke off to hunt. He’d kept John Wilson ashore for just that reason. The
lanky Kentuckian was the only one of the four privates he trusted to follow orders without question these days.

“Wilson!”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“I’m going out to hunt. I’m detailing you to keep an eye on Madame Chartier.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“See she comes to no harm.”

“And causes none,”
he added under his breath. With a last glance at the woman, he struck off on his own.

He ranged as far as he dared from the river in search of game, but bagged only one wild turkey. Dusk was falling by the time he caught up with his men and directed them to make camp for the night.

While Boley cleaned and spitted the turkey, Daniel saw to the lieutenant. Wilkinson hadn’t yet shaken his sickness. He took the brew Daniel brought him with trembling hands, but his gratitude toward the woman who’d supplied his troop with the beans for his coffee soon turned to peevishness.

“You should have traded with her for the beans,” he muttered, his glance going to the figure sitting alone across the campfire. “Not brought her with you.”

“Traded what? All we’ve got left are a few of the medals your father had struck to give to the chiefs of the tribes we encountered. A bit of metal wouldn’t have kept her alive through the winter.”

“Keeping her alive through the winter isn’t our responsibility.”

Since they’d already ridden over this ground once, Daniel saw no need to cover it again. Deliberately, he turned the subject.

“We passed a saline about noon and stocked up on salt.”

“Did you mark the location on the map?”

“Yes.”

Given the importance of salt to survival, the expedition had orders to take note of every natural deposit. They’d already charted the Great Saline, just west of the main branch of the Arkansaw, and the Grand Saline at the mouth of the Negracka. After watching the local residents use turkey feathers to scrape up the precious salt and deposit it in wooden trenchers, Lieutenant Wilkinson had made copious notes in his journal. The man lacked both maturity and leadership skills, but he had a keen eye for detail and a fine hand with a map. Daniel would give him that.

Tonight, however, the young officer couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for his duties.

“You’ll have to take the circumferentor and fix our location,” Wilkinson told Daniel listlessly. “I’m too weak to handle the task.”

“Yes, sir.”

Pushing his own fatigue aside, Daniel reached for the lieutenant’s leather pouch. Inside was a wooden box bundled in oilskin to keep its contents dry. A sort of portable desk with a sloping lid that could be
used to write on, the box contained Wilkinson’s journal, a spare compass and the expedition’s brass surveying instrument.

“Be sure to check the settings against the book.”

“Yes, sir,” Daniel drawled again.

As many times as he’d performed this duty in the past six months, he not only knew the circumferentor’s settings, but could recite Robert Gibson’s whole damned
Treatise of Practical Surveying
by rote.

He took the leather pouch to the edge of the river. The tattered treatise stayed at the bottom of the box while he fitted the rotating compass onto a fixed ring, then attached the four sight vanes into their dovetail slots. The two sets of graduated sights allowed him to measure angles independent of the compass’s magnetic needle and thus calculate heights as well as bearings. Daniel shot line of the river, the bluffs on the opposite side, the high ridges in the distance. Each measurement he recorded in the lieutenant’s journal with a blunt-tipped pencil.

When he lowered the instrument, his breath puffed on frigid air. Cold nipped at his ears and nose, but the vista held him motionless. The sky hung low and threatening. The broad Arkansaw moved sluggishly under the ice, showing only a narrow open channel in its center. Wind rustled through the bare branches of oak and maple and sighed through the pines. Despite the desolation, the beauty of the land pulled at his heart much as it had yesterday, when he’d stood beside Henri Chartier on that high ridge.

The woman was right, he thought. The Osage
would fight fiercely to keep intruders out of this wilderness, as would the other tribes who hunted here. President Jefferson would have a time of it convincing their chiefs to accept his proposed Indian Removal Plan. And if the president did push the plan through Congress, the troops assigned to remote outposts in Louisiana Territory would have an even tougher time keeping the peace between traditional enemies like the Osage and Choctaw.

Daniel might well have volunteered to be one of those troops if not for the woman waiting for him back in St. Louis. His chest squeezing at the memory of their farewell, he disassembled the circumferentor, boxed it and bundled the instrument in the oilskin. As he walked back to camp, the first white flakes began to drift out of the sky.

The snow fell all that night and for most of the next two days. Soft, fluffy flakes at first, the kind that looked powdery enough but soon soaked a man clear through to his skin and made lifting each foot and planting it down in front of the other a tiresome chore.

The snow by itself would have been bearable if the temperature hadn’t dropped clear to hell. Icy cold knifed in the lungs with every breath. Fingers, toes and noses soon went numb. Following fast-disappearing deer tracks through a copse of bare-branched oak, Daniel thought his eyeballs would freeze in their sockets.

Finally, he came upon an antlered buck pawing in
the snow for roots and acorns. Hoping his powder had kept dry, Daniel shouldered his musket and thumbed back the hammer. He shook so badly from the cold that he couldn’t get the animal in his sights. Swearing, he gritted his teeth, steadied his back against a tree trunk and fired. The recoil slammed the rifle butt into his shoulder and his back against the tree, but he brought the buck down.

It took almost all his remaining strength to drag the carcass up and hook its horns in a low hanging branch. Slicing open the belly, Daniel plunged his hands into the body cavity to thaw them in the steamy warmth. When feeling came back into his fingers in stinging spurts, he gutted the animal, hauled the carcass over his shoulders and started for the river.

The men had already made camp by the time he caught up with them. The snow was coming so thick and fast by then that he might not have found them at all if not for the sharp scent of their fire. Following his nose, Daniel stumbled into camp. Eager hands reached out to relieve him of his burden.

“Damn, Sergeant! We thought you was lost for sure.”

“You got us a prime one.”

“Enough meat to last a few days, anyway.” That came from Private Boley, the designated cook. He wasn’t any better at it than the other men, but liked being first at the fry pan.

The others huddled close to the fire, cursing the cold, the snow and the madness that had made them
agree to take part in this ill-fated expedition. Only the woman sat apart, as she always did. And as he’d come to do, Daniel cradled his coffee mug in both hands for warmth and went to join her.

Louise watched his approach with eyes that stung from the cold. It struck her again how quickly her life had changed. Three days ago, she’d had no thoughts in her head but cleaning the take from Henri’s traps and making sure he wore enough furs to still the cough that rattled in his chest. Now, she greeted the approach of this broad-shouldered American with a curious sense of anticipation. And relief.

It was his manner, she decided, as much as his wide shoulders and lean, muscled flanks. He brought his ragged band into order with just a word or a glance. She’d learned by now that the sick one, the lieutenant, was the chief. But this one, this rifle sergeant, was their leader.

He stayed with her throughout the meal. He even accompanied her into the woods when she went to relieve herself. And, as he had on each of the previous nights, he made his bed where she did. This time, though, he spread his blanket atop hers.

“It’s going to get colder than a grave tonight. I’ve told the men to huddle up. We’d best do the same.”

Her fingers tightened on the robe draped around her shoulders. She said nothing, could say nothing.

“It’s just for warmth,” he said gruffly.

Louise might have believed him if not for the way he held himself as stiff as a lodge pole when she
crawled into the cocoon made by their blankets. He didn’t bend, didn’t curve his body so much as an inch to fit hers. They lay with her back to his front, neither moving, until the cold seeped into her bones and she began to shiver.

“Here.” His breath was a wash of warmth in her ear. “Snuggle closer.”

Hooking an arm around her waist, he drew her into the cradle of his thighs. She wiggled her bottom to escape the prod of a broken branch and heard him pull in a sharp breath.

He jerked away, but not before she felt another prod at her rear cheek. Her womb clenched, a swift, mindless response that sent heat spearing through her belly. They lay stiff, their lower bodies angled away, neither speaking but each, Louise suspected, thinking the same thoughts.

The litany of Henri’s oft-repeated teachings drummed through her head. There was no shame in the pleasures of the body. No shame in the desire that joined a man and a woman. The only shame lay in denying those desires.