Slocum and the Spirit Bear (9781101618790) (15 page)

The men put some distance between themselves, but not too much. As wary as they were of their surroundings, they were taking even more precautions with each other.

Slocum heard a shifting of weight against the dirt and reflexively turned toward Hevo.

The Indian responded in kind, pivoting toward Slocum while bringing the blade up over one shoulder like a pistol's hammer being cocked in preparation to fire.

They eyed each other intently for a few seconds, each knowing that one false move could result in one or both of them being killed on the spot. They'd seen each other fight enough to know they would only get one chance to come out on top of that equation.

Slocum's eyes were focused so much on Hevo, watching for him to either throw the knife cocked by his ear or make a reach for the other blade with his free hand, that he almost didn't pay attention to what his ears were telling him. When Hevo's eyes snapped toward the barely perceptible sound of rustling leaves, it was too late for either man to do a damn thing about it.

“Aw, hell,” Slocum growled as figures covered in leaves and dirt rose up from where they'd been hiding.

Not only was there a Dirt Swimmer in the spot Slocum and Hevo were looking, but three others made themselves known. All of them had weapons drawn, poised to kill their prey with arrow or spear.

Slocum might have been able to get the drop on one of them, but not before the others brought him down. He didn't like having his fate resting in the hands of lunatics, but sometimes those were the cards he'd been dealt.

16

A few minutes later, Slocum and Hevo were still alive and unharmed. Both of those things were a surprise, considering how bloodthirsty Spirit Bear's men had proven to be. Even more surprising was the fact that nobody had attempted to smear any of that peyote slime onto their faces. Instead, after a few grunted words from beneath the lead Swimmer's netted cloak, Slocum and Hevo dropped their weapons. If there had been any other option that didn't involve getting killed, Slocum would have taken it. Hevo had looked over to him for a moment, possibly waiting for a signal of some kind, but Slocum gave him none.

The Dirt Swimmers swarmed around their prisoners, bound the men's hands using lengths of rope, and escorted them back to the camp.

The chanting had stopped and many of the torches had been extinguished. Smoke still hung heavy in the air, but there wasn't anything Slocum could do apart from breathe it in. His eyes burned and his head spun a bit. Other than that, he'd either gotten somewhat used to the drug or the dosage was too small to take its full effect. He looked over to Hevo. The Indian hung his head low before finally turning to meet his gaze. Obviously, the smoke didn't affect him in the slightest. The defiance in his eyes made it clear he wasn't about to apologize for it.

They were taken to the side of the camp where two cabins stood like filthy edifices left by whoever had inhabited that patch of ground before Spirit Bear had come along. The bases of the cabins were piled high with charred bits of wood. Scorch marks rose up almost as high as the roof. Shards of broken glass were wedged in the window frames, and bullet holes had been punched through every wall. A woven blanket hung in the doorway. The lead Dirt Swimmer pulled it aside and shoved the prisoners past the cracked remains of a door that hung from one hinge.

Slocum and Hevo were pushed into one corner, forced to sit down, and held at gunpoint while their ankles were bound. Then, their arms were stretched over their heads, and the ropes around their wrists were hung over rusty nails protruding from the charred wall.

“Looks like we aren't the first prisoners brought here,” Slocum said after the Dirt Swimmers filed out of the cabin's single room. “Then again, I suppose I don't have to tell you that.”

“I did not mean for us to be captured,” Hevo said.

“I guessed as much. You had plenty of chances to stab me in the back. Of course, if you'd come clean earlier, we could have come up with a better way of getting this far.”

“No,” Hevo spat. “You would not have trusted me. If you hadn't killed me, one of the others would. Probably the old one with the loud mouth.”

“Yeah, I could see Josiah doing something like that.”

“And you would not have stopped him.” Closing his eyes and leaning his head straight back until it bumped against the wall, Hevo added, “None of them would.”

Slocum tested his ropes by wriggling so his arms and legs scraped together. There was some play in his bindings, but only due to his own flesh being pressed together enough for his bones to ache. “See, there's what I don't like. Before, you were talking as if you were on the same side as me and the folks in those wagons. You were real convincing, too. Then I hear you talk now and it's like you've decided to separate yourself from where you were before.”

“I ride alone.”

“That's your choice.”

“It is,” Hevo replied solemnly.

“When you came to our aid during that attack, it spoke volumes about who you are. Fact is, what you did to help drive those riders away is the only thing that kept me from putting you down like a mangy, double-crossing dog after the truth came out.” Continuing to rub his legs together like an overgrown cricket, Slocum said, “I still don't know if I can trust you all the way, but I do know you don't have any fondness for Spirit Bear. The hate in your eyes is too strong for that. What happened to turn you against him? Must have been something mighty awful to break the spell that would inspire all that goddamn chanting.”

“What I told you was the truth. Spirit Bear killed my people. Slaughtered my tribe. Broke my woman.”

“Broke her?”

Hevo did not speak and his silence billowed from every pore of his body like the sickening smoke that had rolled through the camp not too long ago.

Slocum nodded. “I understand now. It's about a woman. Always about a woman.”

“You must be deaf,” Hevo growled. “Do you not hear what I say about my people?”

“Yes, I heard. But you didn't sound angry enough to chew through those ropes until you mentioned the woman. What's her name?”

Hevo said nothing.

“What did Spirit Bear do to her?”

Although Hevo was quaking with rage and seemed ready to explode, he somehow kept those emotions in check.

“She's not dead,” Slocum said as if he was simply mulling over the clues to a riddle he'd been given. “Otherwise you would have said so. Or you would have said something along those lines. But you didn't. You said Spirit Bear broke her. Did he rape her?”

“Are you trying to torture me?” Hevo asked in a strained voice. “Is that why you ask me these things?”

“Not at all. I'm trying to find out what's driven you this far so I can know for certain if I've still got a partner or if I was just too stupid to realize I was on my own from the instant we rode away from the wagon train.”

Hevo's body convulsed as every one of his muscles strained to free him. The nail from which his wrists had been hung was just high enough to stretch out his torso and keep him from gaining any sort of leverage. It was also long enough to prevent him from sliding the ropes off it. At the moment, it seemed that he wanted to gain his freedom in order to get his hands around Slocum's neck more than anything else.

“That's what I was hoping to see,” Slocum said. “Now you know how I felt when I realized you'd been lying to me.”

Suddenly, like a sail that had lost every bit of wind, Hevo relaxed and dangled from his wrists. “You are a strange man, John Slocum. Going so far just to prove a point?”

“Actually, I was hoping you'd break free. Since you didn't, I'll settle for making my point.”

Hevo's chest rose and fell with his labored breaths. It seemed his short-lived effort to pull free had left him completely exhausted. “I would not have allowed harm to come to any of those women or children in your wagons.”

“I know.”

“I did not intend for us to get captured.”

Slocum's eyes narrowed as he considered that claim a bit more carefully. “Near as I can tell, those Dirt Swimmers found our horses and were just waiting for us to come back to them.”

“If I was to bring you to this place, wouldn't I be rewarded instead of hanging beside you?”

“Could be you're still trying to gain my trust,” Slocum pointed out.

Hevo's head lolled forward and then his shoulders began to jump. The sounds he made were a mix of dry, hacking coughs and some sort of wheeze. Turned out he was laughing. The expression on his face when he looked at Slocum again was almost childlike when he said, “That is funny. Why would I need your trust? What could I possibly gain by being in this cabin rather than pledging myself to Spirit Bear so I could get something to eat?”

“What's the matter? You don't think I've got a plan in the works to get us out of here, guns a-blazing?”

“I think you do, John. I also think that plan did not involve us hanging here waiting to be executed.”

“They want something else from us,” Slocum said. “Otherwise they would have killed us by now.”

“This is true.”

“So . . . what do they want?”

Hevo sighed. “See why I did not tell you about my past? You would never be able to look beyond it. You would always think I am a part of what Spirit Bear intends to do.”

“Or I might just think that you know him better than I do. After all, you did ride with him for a spell.”

Finally, Hevo admitted, “The only one who knows what Spirit Bear wants . . . is Spirit Bear. I did not ride with him for long, but a lifetime would not be enough to put myself into his moccasins.”

“Why would you ride with him at all?” Slocum asked.

“The same reasons most men ride with him. Greed and revenge.”

“Revenge against who?”

Angling his head away as if trying to hide himself from Slocum's sight, Hevo replied, “You.”

“Me? I never even heard of this crazy man until—”

“You and all white men,” Hevo snapped. “There are many within all tribes across this land who want to spill the white man's blood in retribution for all of ours that has been spilled. Even when I realized I was committing the same crimes by killing based only on the color of their skin, it was too late for me to change my path. I told myself blood was the only thing white men understood, but the truth is that it felt good to kill so that is what I did. I rode with Spirit Bear for only a few moons, but it was a whole other lifetime.”

“Yeah,” Slocum sighed. “I've had a few lifetimes like that myself.”

“I should have learned how wrong I was sooner . . . before the lesson needed to be taught to me by having blood that was precious to me spilled by the animal I had sworn to follow.” Despite the fact that he already hung from the nail between his wrists, Hevo somehow drooped lower.

“What happened to your people?” Slocum asked.

“Some from my tribe came looking for me. They tracked one of Spirit Bear's raiding parties after it had burned a small mining camp. After . . .
we
burned a small mining camp. The braves came for us in the night when we were riding back to the caves where we'd made camp. They attacked and tried to separate me from the rest of the group, but I saw only enemies.”

There was so much sadness in Hevo's voice that Slocum could feel it almost as powerfully as if he were experiencing it.

“I had not ridden with Spirit Bear for long,” Hevo continued. “The Dreaming Dust still made my thoughts rage behind my eyes and the visions appear among the people of flesh and bone. I was not told who was attacking us. Spirit Bear was there. He came to me and insisted I prove myself by killing anyone he pointed to. And . . . because my head was swimming and my heart was filled with hate . . . I did.”

Slocum wanted to ask what could fill Hevo with so much hate and such a thirst for revenge. But he could think of plenty of massacres committed by the Army, lynch mobs, or people who killed Indians for any number of bad reasons.

“Spirit Bear knew who I would be raising my blade against that night,” Hevo said. “He even howled with joy when the killing was finished.”

“What about your woman?”

“She was among the hunters from my tribe who came for me. She did not ride with the braves when they came to Spirit Bear's camp. She was found later, and by the time she was brought to me, she was . . . broken.”

“What does that mean?” Slocum asked.

When Hevo answered that question, it seemed as if the words he had to use were pieces of broken glass scraping against his tongue. “She was given so much of the Dreaming Dust that her thoughts were no longer her own.”

“Is that the same stuff that's in that smoke?”

“Yes. The Dreaming Dust can be burned, put into water, or mixed into a paste. Spirit Bear has made good use of a very bad idea stolen from many tribal medicine men. My woman was given the dust in its rawest form. After that, she was no longer the woman I loved.”

“Is that so?” someone said from the cabin's single door. The words echoed within the charred room.

She was a wispy reed of a thing with long hair that was so black it looked as if it had been soaked in sooty oil. Her skin was the color of cinnamon and covered in thick layers of paint that had been swirled into the circular symbols worn by many of Spirit Bear's warriors. Grabbing the edges of the doorway as if she meant to launch herself through it, she strode into the cabin with her eyes locked on Hevo. When she spoke again, it was in a native Cheyenne tongue.
“Look at me, my whirlwind, and tell me I am not more than the woman you remember.”

Hevo straightened up and bowed out his chest.
“The woman I remember would have come to her senses by now.”

“I have. You are the one who needs to be reminded of the true path.”

“Pardon me,” Slocum said, “but if you two would rather be alone, I wouldn't mind showing myself out.”

She approached Hevo and reached out to place both hands upon his. Her lithe body was covered by a minimum of clothing. Nothing more than a skirt made from oiled skins and a tunic stitched together from more scraps of animal hide that wrapped around her flat stomach and small, pert breasts. Both pieces of clothing were ripped in several places to show parts of symbols that, as near as Slocum could tell, were painted over her entire body. Even though she was barely over five feet tall, she lorded over Hevo as if she were the master of the entire camp.
“Will you come with me, or will you die with this . . . man?”
she asked, saying that last word as if it were a joke when applied to Slocum.

Hevo said nothing.

Unlike Slocum, this woman seemed to enjoy Hevo's silence.

“You are stubborn, as always
,” she said.
“I want to speak with you alone. Then, it will be seen if you chose to stand with your people or the white man.”

All this time, Slocum had listened to the mostly one-way conversation to see if he could pick up on anything. Even though he'd learned bits and pieces of a few Indian languages, he wasn't concerned with a translation. Instead, he paid less attention to the words being used and more to how they were being said. Like many women, this one figured she had an ace up her sleeve just by looking the way she did and putting herself close enough for a man to smell the sweat on her skin. Even though Slocum knew she wasn't there to help, he couldn't help being attracted to her. She brought a heat to the room just as surely as if the torches outside had been relit. Warmth radiated from her body and her hips swayed slightly as she lowered herself down to speak into Hevo's ear.