Wild Splendor (29 page)

“Tell me the good news,” Sage said, ending further talk of the imprisoned Navaho. “What news have you brought that will please me?”

Spotted Feather's eyes brightened, as though he felt relieved not to have to discuss further those who had chosen reservation life. “As far as the eye can see, and as far as my horse traveled, there is no one who will spoil our newly found peace,” he said proudly. “And I have news of Kit Carson and General Harold Porter.”

“What of Kit Carson?” Sage implored.

“He won a battle with prairie fever and is now far away, at another frontier outpost,” Spotted Feather said.

Leonida's breath quickened. “What about Harold?” she asked, feeling Sage's eyes on her.

“He is no longer among the living,” Spotted Feather said smugly. “Nor is Chief Four Fingers. Seems they had formed a partnership of sorts. They were searching for our new stronghold when they were cut down by a renegade band of Indians, perhaps Navaho, perhaps Kiowa. There were no survivors to point an accusing finger to those who are guilty of the crime. Kit Carson found their remains in the desert. Everyone had been killed by arrows and then scalped.”

A tide of light-headedness overwhelmed Leonida. She paled and reached for Sage's arm, for which to steady herself. “Dead?” she gasped. “Scalped? Good Lord. I terribly disliked Harold. But I would never wish that on him, or anyone.”

“It is best that he is dead.” Spotted Feather said. “The white leader, Harold, was intent on finding you, Leonida. And Sage. He would have never given up the search. Never.”

Thinking of the welfare of the baby, Sage swept an arm around Leonida's waist. He nodded to Spotted Feather, then walked Leonida into their hogan. There he eased her down onto a blanket. “Do not mourn the man,” he grumbled. “He was nothing, my woman. Nothing.”

Leonida reached her hands up to Sage's face. “Oh, darling, I'm not mourning him,” she said, her voice breaking. “But I can't help but be sad. I pity Harold for having turned into such a tyrant. He made his own life a living hell.”

Sage understood her feelings. The goodness in her caused her to react this way over his needless death. He took her hands and drew her to him and gently hugged her.

“If you must cry, cry,” he said softly. “It might be best to wash this man from your heart and mind forever. Then fill your thoughts with something more pleasant.” He placed a hand over her tummy. “Has our child kicked much today?”

His question brought Leonida back to her senses. Tears for Harold were not necessary. She should be relieved that he was no longer a threat to her family, her future, and Sage's people.

Leonida pulled Sage's head down, pressing his ear gently against her stomach. “Listen through the fabric of my skirt, darling,” she murmured. “Can you hear the strange noises as I am feeling them? That's our child, Sage. Our child! It is as real now as it will be when we hold him in our arms.”

Sage listened, then rose, his eyes shining. “Him?” he said, laughing softly. “Do you realize you referred to our child as boy child?”

Leonida giggled. She twined her arms around Sage's neck and brought his mouth toward her lips. “So I did,” she whispered, kissing him sweetly.

Chapter 34

We loved with a love that was more than love.

—E
DGAR
A
LLAN
P
OE

 

 

 

Leonida was sitting inside her hogan, finishing a woven basket with finely split yucca leaves. She held one leaf in her teeth as she looped another around the rim. Fresh green leaves provided the design against a background of sun-bleached white ones. She had learned the art of making lovely baskets to perfection. This was a diamond-patterned creation, perhaps her loveliest yet.

Pausing, she gazed over at her two sons—Runner and Thunder Hawk, touched by how ten-year-old Runner took such pains teaching Thunder Hawk how to read and write, having himself honed these skills from Leonida's teachings. She had no books. Everything that she and Runner were using as tools for teaching was either of sand, paints, or beadwork. Runner was painting numbers on stretched canvas at present, and Thunder Hawk's wide dark eyes took it all in.

Sage came into the dwelling after having council with his warriors. He sat down beside Leonida and also gazed at his sons, pride swelling within him. Runner had never been jealous that his little brother was Navaho like his father, perhaps because Runner looked Navaho in many ways himself now.

Sage reached for Leonida and drew her to his side. Together they looked over at their bright-eyed daughter, who was strapped to a hard-back cradleboard. She had been propped against the wall of the hogan, where she could look around while Leonida was hard at work.

“Pure Blossom is learning today also?” Sage said, laughing softly. “Look how she looks at you. She has been watching you make your basket. She will be as skilled as you, my wife, when she matures enough to use her fingers.”

“She's been the sweetest thing today,” Leonida said, laying her basketwork aside. She went to the cradleboard and began untying the thongs that held her daughter in place. When Pure Blossom was free, Leonida scooped her up and held her out for Sage.

Sage took his daughter, who was dressed in a fringed doeskin gown. “Is she not even more beautiful than the stars?” he exclaimed, smiling broadly.

Leonida stroked the eight-month-old baby's hair, thick and black already. “Yes, she is ever so beautiful,” she murmured. “I'm so glad that she has Navaho features. It is only right that she does since she bears your sister's name.”

“My sister would have received much joy from the children,” Sage said solemnly, gazing from child to child. “She so loved children. She was such a child at heart herself. So innocent. So lovable. She never seemed to be aware of her afflictions. She accepted them without question.”

“You still miss her, don't you?” Leonida said, taking Pure Blossom back as Sage handed the child to her.

“As you also miss her,” Sage said, smiling over at Leonida.

The baby began fussing, and it quickly turned into full-blown crying. Leonida rocked her back and forth in her arms. She gave Sage a glance. “Darling, take the boys out for awhile, while I feed Pure Blossom.”

Sage gathered his sons up into his strong arms, and even though Runner was much too big, carried them outside on his shoulders, leaving Leonida and Pure Blossom alone, to relish these moments as mother and daughter.

Leonida pulled her drawstring blouse down from her shoulders, releasing her milk-filled breasts. Laying Pure Blossom in the crook of her left arm, resting her child's tiny head there, she lifted her breast and placed the nipple inside Pure Blossom's tiny mouth. She watched her child taking nourishment. Pure Blossom's tiny hands kneaded the breast, and all the while the baby made soft, contented noises as she looked trustingly up at Leonida.

With her free hand, Leonida played with Pure Blossom's dark hair, trying to curl its ends, laughing when she found, as before, how impossible it was to do anything with her daughter's stiff, dark locks. It was made for braiding. And that was as it should be, since her daughter had all of her father's features.

Gazing into the baby's dark eyes, fringed by thick lashes, she could see her beloved husband's eyes. No one could look at the high cheekbones and the lovely smooth, copper skin and deny whose child she was. She
was
her father, except in the delicate lines of her face, and the tiny, perfectly shaped lips and her delicately pretty nose.

Leonida ran her finger over the bridge of her daughter's nose. “Just perhaps you have
one
of my features,” she whispered, smiling.

Becoming tense, Leonida shifted her attention from her daughter when she heard the sound of horses outside the hogan. She gazed at the door, wondering who had just arrived. She doubted that she would ever relax when she heard someone arriving at the stronghold.

She tried to force her thoughts back to her daughter, but she could not help but glance toward the door. She would hear someone talking, and then Sage responding, yet no matter how hard she listened, she couldn't hear what they were saying!

“It seems like an animated conversation,” she whispered to herself, becoming even more wary.

Knowing that Pure Blossom should have had her fill from this breast, she lifted her to rest against her bosom and began softly patting her back, glad when the child gave out a healthy burp. Then she placed Pure Blossom's tiny lips to her other breast.

Leonida's eyes widened when Sage came back into the hogan, the children no longer with him.

“The young braves are all right,” Sage said, seeing her anxious look as she looked past him. “They are playing with the others.”

“Who came to the stronghold?” Leonida asked.

“Scouts,” Sage said, his eyes troubled. “They brought news of Kit Carson, and news that I do not know to trust.”

“What sort of news?” Leonida said, glancing down when she no longer felt her daughter's lips moving on her breast and discovering that she was asleep. She slipped Pure Blossom away from the breast, and Sage took her and placed her on a deep pile of blankets in her crib, covering her then with a soft doeskin pelt.

“And what about Kit Carson?” Leonida prodded, pulling her blouse back up in place and retying the drawstring.

“After leaving Fort Defiance, Kit became Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Colorado Territory,” Sage said, settling down on the blanket beside Leonida. He stared blankly into the flames of the fire. “He was not there long.”

“Oh? He was assigned elsewhere?” Leonida asked, noticing some sort of book slipped into the waistband of Sage's dark breeches. She was puzzled, having never seen Sage with any books before, and wondering where he might have gotten it.

“Kit Carson was assigned to the Land of the Dead, it seems,” Sage mumbled. He looked slowly over at Leonida. “The great pathfinder is dead.”

“How terrible,” she murmured, torn with conflicting feelings about his death. She was both sorrowful that such a man as he was gone and worried that because of his death, Sage and his people would no longer have a protector.

Sage slipped the small book out from the waist of his breeches and gave it to Leonida. “This is a gift from Kit Carson to you,” he said.

Wide-eyed, Leonida accepted the booklet, stunned that Kit would think enough of her to remember her in such away. Yet in the short time she had known him, he had learned of her love of reading and storytelling. As she read the title of the book, she realized that she was not the only one who loved to tell a story. This book was Kit Carson's memoir, titled
Dear Old Kit,
published in 1856.

“What a wonderful thing to have,” she murmured, thumbing through it. “From what I know about Kit, he knew not how to read or write. He must have dictated this to someone.”

She closed it and held it to her chest. “This is such a treasure, darling,” she said, sighing. “One day soon let me read it to you?”

“That would please me,” Sage said, then frowned nervously. “But that reading cannot be done soon. I have other plans that must be carried out, although I somewhat fear them.”

Leonida scooted closer to Sage. She took his hand in hers. “Darling, you're frightening me,” she murmured. “Tell me what you're talking about.”

Sage placed a gentle hand on her cheek, then took both of her hands in his. “I did not mean to worry you,” he said. “And so much of the news that has been brought to me should make me rejoice. But I can never trust the word of the white man.”

He paused, then continued, Ulysses S. Grant is now the white father in Washington, and he has decided he will no longer negotiate with any Indian tribe. He plans to send them all to reservations, where he promises they will be cared for by the government. But I do not trust his promises. This chief fears it is more likely that Grant hopes to tame us, to take away the beliefs and traditions that make us who we are, to destroy our freedom, yet . . .”

Sage paused again. He eased his hands from Leonida's and rose to his feet, slowly pacing back and forth.

Fearing what else Sage had to say, Leonida rose quickly to her feet and put a hand on her husband's arm, stopping him. She gazed up into his midnight dark eyes. “Yet what?” she said, her voice stiff.

Sage lifted a hand to her hair and wove his fingers through her shoulder-length tresses, looking down at her with heavy lids. “Yet my scouts have brought news to me about
our
people, the Navaho who had been imprisoned in New Mexico,” he said thickly. “The United States government has signed a treaty with them, allowing their return to their homeland, yet cleverly assigning them a huge area of our homeland which no one else really wants. It is my duty to go and see if this is true. If it is, I must invite my people to come to our new stronghold, where no one wants for anything. They do not have to accept the poor land they have been assigned. We can share equally with those who wish to accompany me and my warriors back here.”

Fear suddenly grabbed at Leonida's heart. Now she knew why Sage had hesitated at being glad over this news. “This could be a trick to draw you from the stronghold,” she said, her voice breaking. She moved onto her knees before Sage, imploring him with anxious, fearful eyes. “Darling, Kit Carson is dead. Without him, can you truly trust to return to Fort Defiance? Perhaps what was told your scouts is all made up, to lure you from your stronghold.”

“I have thought of that and, yes, I do fear it,” Sage said, taking her hands and holding them to his chest. “But when my scouts were discovered hiding near the fort and invited inside, with promises that they would not be incarcerated, and were given this information, it did seem real enough.” He glanced down at Kit Carson's book, then up into Leonida's eyes again. “And there is the book. Kit had left it there for you, should the soldiers ever see you again. They were considerate enough to send it with the scouts to give to you. Does not that seem a sincere gesture?”

Leonida gazed down at the book, then back up at Sage. “It would seem so,” she murmured. “Yet it could be a part of the trick, darling. Please don't go. Why risk everything for those people who turned their backs on you? Why?”

“Because they have been forced to live a life of degradation long enough,” Sage mumbled. “This land they have been assigned to may not be fertile enough to raise crops. They might starve.”

He shook his head slowly back and forth. “Yet I still cannot understand why the white leader would imprison one Indian and let the other go, except perhaps to see them die slowly because they do not have enough food due to the land being too poor to raise it.”

He frowned down at Leonida. “That has to be the answer,” he growled. “So you see, my wife? I must go and do what I can to help my people. It is time for me to forget the past and their lack of faith in their leader. It is time to give them a new purpose in life and cause to see how wrong they were ever to walk away from what I had promised had they stayed.”

“I know that you must,” she murmured, flinging herself into his arms, hugging him tightly, as though it might be the last time. “I never doubted that you would.”

She closed her eyes, trying to blot out doubts that she would have to carry with her the whole time he would be gone, yet unable to. She doubted she would ever learn to trust her husband's safety on her own.