Nicolas was finally able to pry Summer loose from around his neck, but instead of setting her on the ground, he hoisted her onto his shoulders. “Yes,” he answered. “Some better than others.”
Anna looked back at the children. Most were still standing quietly, as if her presence frightened them.
“Who taught them?”
He cleared his throat. “Some spoke it before—”
She turned to look at him. “Before what?”
“Before they came here,” he finished.
“And why did they come here?”
Just then one of the children shouted and pointed toward the tall, black mountain. “Nick! Look! Look! The Spirit has a fire in his wigwam!”
Anna’s head turned along with the others, and she missed the relief that spread over Nicolas’s face at the interruption. Instead she watched as smoke curled out from the snow-covered crater.
After Nicolas had sent the children off to do their chores, she started the walk back to her cabin. The tour had been sadly enlightening. She was burning to know why the children had been so abused. “What happened to those children?”
He gave her a vague look. “Which ones?”
“You know what I’m talking about.” Her voice was tight with suppressed anger.
He was quiet a long time. “They’ve been hurt.”
“By whom?”
He threw her an angry look but said nothing.
She read his look of annoyance and knew she was being meddlesome. “I … I hadn’t meant to imply that you—”
“You’d better go back inside,” he interrupted sharply, nodding toward her cabin.
She immediately felt claustrophobic. “I don’t want to go back in there.”
Nicolas sighed. “Until you freely agree to stay with us you’ll—”
Anna whirled and glared at him. “What would your father say if he knew you had done this? Aren’t you the least bit concerned about what he’s feeling? Have you seen him?” She shook her head with dismay. “By now he must be concerned about what’s happened to me.” Her face was drawn. “What if he thinks I changed my mind about coming and didn’t even have the decency to let him know—”
“He’s dead.”
“What?”
“My father died of a heart attack two weeks ago,” Nicolas stated flatly.
“Oh …” She swallowed the lump in her throat and sank to the bench beneath the wide umbrella of an oak tree. “I … I didn’t know …” She threw him a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry … I’m so sorry. In his letters he … he seemed like such a nice man.”
“He was.” Nicolas turned to watch the activity in the compound.
Anna looked at him, noticing his scar pulsing red as blood. It seemed to change color with his moods. Suddenly, something became clear in her mind. “You wouldn’t have kidnapped me if he were still alive, would you?”
His eyes narrowed, but he didn’t look at her.
Anna shook her head and answered for him. “I don’t think you would have.”
Nicolas turned on her sharply. “The people in Pine Valley can get another teacher. But I can’t!” He looked beyond her, toward the mountains in the distance. “You have no idea how many times I’ve tried to figure out a legal way to get someone up here to teach these children to read and write English without giving away—” He stopped and pulled his gaze back to her.
Anna leaned forward, eager to supply him with a solution that would set her free. “Why can’t you teach them yourself?”
“I don’t have the time.” He answered her quietly, reluctantly.
“Must they learn? Some of them speak English so well, surely they could—”
“Yes!” he interrupted, his eyes burning. “They must. If they don’t learn everything they can about the white man’s world, they won’t survive in it. Don’t you understand? My people are dying because of the white man. Their land has been stolen, their rivers polluted …”
He stared off into the distance. “When I was a boy, before the miners came, the rivers were so thick with salmon, there were times it was impossible to forge the streams on horseback. Our nets would pull in so many fish, we would have to throw them back. … We didn’t kill what we couldn’t eat.” His voice was filled with quiet anger.
“Now,” he said, looking at her, “the animals, the game my people have hunted for centuries, are being killed off by the thousands, and their carcasses left to rot in the sun. And the … the … children—” He stopped and massaged his shoulder. “The only hope they have is to change. To learn skills and fight for jobs. Otherwise,” he said, looking toward the long building where the children slept, “their ignorance will kill them. Just as it has killed most of their parents.”
He laughed, a dry, sad sound that seemed to come up from his soul. “And I had the perfect plan to change everything.”
“Kidnapping a woman against her will isn’t the answer,” Anna said softly.
His face hardened. “Would you have come otherwise?”
She shook her head and shrugged. “No … I mean, I don’t know … I—”
“Of course not,” he interrupted. “No self-righteous little Christian girl would stoop to teaching a bunch of savages.”
What sympathy Anna had had for him disappeared. Clenching her jaw, she said tightly, “Perhaps you should lock me back in my jail cell, Mr. Gaspard. I think I’ve had enough.” As she turned to leave, he grabbed her shoulders.
“Well, I haven’t.”
Startled by his touch, she looked up at him. His eyes were filled with the same gray heat she’d seen in them yesterday at the river.
He dragged her to him. His mouth ground against hers and he pressed his tongue against her closed lips.
She struggled, pushing at his chest and kicking his shin with her soft-toed shoe. When he released her, she ran into the cabin and slammed the door behind her. Somehow she knew he’d follow her inside, but she wasn’t prepared for the look of fury on his face when he kicked open the door. Shaking her head wildly, she stumbled backward, putting distance between them until she hit the wall.
He stalked her, his eyes hard and his face chiseled with an angry scowl. “Playing games, are we?”
She shook her head, her heart bumping wildly. She hadn’t been kissed in years, and she certainly didn’t want him kissing her.
Then he touched her, pressing his body into hers, pushing her against the rough boards of the wall.
“Kiss me,” he ordered.
“I … I don’t—”
“You don’t want to? So, that’s the game, is it? I know this one well, white girl.”
He kissed her again, softer this time, then pulled back. “Open your mouth.”
Opening her mouth to protest, she innocently allowed his tongue access. She stood stiffly against him, her arms hanging loosely at her sides, hoping her unresponsiveness would make him lose interest.
But somewhere in the recesses of her mind, a long forgotten reaction flickered in her memory, and she felt a tiny quiver of heat in the pit of her stomach. His mouth moved slowly, expertly over hers. His tongue teased the tip of hers, sending fresh heat to her pelvis. Suddenly she was clinging to him, kissing him back with unsophisticated eagerness, and his response became harder, stronger, more intense, pulling feelings from her she didn’t know existed. Tiny, artless sounds came from her throat as she timidly reached up and draped her arms over his shoulders.
He groaned into her mouth and pressed her against his groin. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. He drew back, his breath as harsh as if he’d just run a mile.
“You play the game well, white girl.” He strode to the door, threw it open and stormed out, locking it behind him.
Shaken, Anna crossed to the mirror above the commode and looked into the glass. She put her fingers to her lips, noting how swollen and red they were. She stood and stared at herself for a long time before walking aimlessly around the cabin.
She’d never known kisses coul
d be both punishment and pleasure. David’s had been sweet, gentle, and, compared to the one she’d just had, very benign. No kiss ever before had resulted in the vulvate burst of warm wetness in that secret place between her legs. A thrill shot through her as she remembered the wild, abrasive feeling of his stubble against her face.
The memory of that hard part of him that had pressed against her stomach made her ache, and she sat down at the table, squeezing her legs together, trapping the memory where she felt it most.
No! She pushed herself away from the table and went to the window, intent on forgetting the brutal kiss. Some of the children were at play again, running and tumbling as though they hadn’t a care in the world. So different from the quiet, wary faces that had stared at her only moments ago.
Leaning her forehead against the cold, round bars, she confessed to herself that she understood Nicolas’s anger and frustration. She had even felt herself softening when she was surrounded by all the children. Sweet heaven, how could she not? They were so … sad. So incredibly sad, and so serious, as if they’d only known pain, not love and laughter like the other children she’d taught. White children.
She didn’t believe for a minute that these Indian children were different, except, perhaps they’d somehow lost their innocence. Instinctively she knew that what she’d told Nicolas yesterday about Indians not having the ability to learn was wrong.
She dragged herself to the overstuffed chair and dropped into it. If Nicolas had been truthful about his plight from the very beginning that day at the stage, would she have agreed to come? She had to be perfectly honest with herself. She wasn’t sure what she would have done. She sat a moment, visualizing the scene in her mind. Her initial reaction to him as an Indian, her disbelief that he could possibly be Jean-Claude’s son …
Those two things, she thought sadly, would have sent her scurrying into the home station in search of protection. She was, like any normal, poorly informed person, prejudiced against something she didn’t understand. She wasn’t any different than her frightened mother.
She laughed, the mirthless sound splitting the quiet air. Who was she kidding? She was nothing like her mother. Her sweet, obedient mother would never have allowed a half-breed to get close enough to touch her, much less kiss her. And what made it all even worse, she had enjoyed it.
Pressing her hands against her face, she prayed that God would help her make a decision she could live with.
Chapter Five
There was a fragile, tentative peace hovering in the air over Pine Valley. The shopkeepers who had built their businesses on the flat tracts they now called West Vallejo, Pine Valley Plaza, and East Main Street, constantly looked up from their daily chores, as if expecting trouble.
The ranchers, who had swallowed the Indian land that spread for miles over the valley, sat on their well-muscled, well-fed mounts, their eyes darting nervously over their vast empires of fattened cattle and sheep. Their little-used senses, those which kept an Indian alert to even the smallest change about him, were dull and slow. But as unaccustomed as they were to having to watch their backs, they still sensed something or someone was behind them, watching … waiting …
They all agreed there would be no true peace in California until every filthy, dirt-digging savage was dead.
In the back room of Mueller’s General Store, the owner, Dolf Mueller, poured each of his guests a glass of fine whiskey.
“Mein Gott!” he spewed, his heavy jowls shaking beneath his long, bushy sideburns. “If they can’t learn to live mit us, they can go to hell. Nicht wahr?” His guttural English typified his Germanic heritage as much as his corpulent frame exemplified his rich eating habits.
Marcus Gaspard, leader of the local vigilantes, gave his father-in-law a look of disgust and pushed his drink aside. “A little early for whiskey, don’t you think?”
Dolf ignored him, tossing his own liquor down in a single gulp. “We’re going to kill every stinkin’ savitch,” he growled, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.
“I don’t have no trouble with that logic.” Brad Dickson, Chief of Indian Affairs, scratched his flaky, balding scalp, downed his whiskey and shoved his glass toward Mueller for a refill.
Marcus swallowed his revulsion as he watched the other two swill the liquor. He’d never been much of a drinker, and drinking before lunch turned his stomach. Besides, as long as both Dickson and Mueller were so quick to turn their hatred for the Indian into action, Marcus knew he had to keep his head.
He unbuttoned the cuffs of his white linen shirt and rolled up the sleeves. His forearms were covered with reddish-brown hair, the color much like that of his Scottish mother. The thickness of the hair on his head, his arms, and everywhere else, was a gift from his French-Canadian father. Marcus had always been pleased that he’d taken after his fair-haired mother, for to him, his father, with his thick black hair, had always looked like a gorilla.
He picked up the newspaper and glanced at the front page. A sardonic smile spread across his handsome, ruddy features.
“It looks like Washington is sending in the cavalry to make quick work of the Indians.”
Mueller spat a guttural German cuss word. “What we need them for?”
Dickson shook his head. “Goddam government, always stickin’ its nose in where it don’t belong.”
“Jawohl,” Mueller agreed. “Sticks the nose in.”
Marcus looked up from the paper, his mouth twisted into a derisive smile. “Considering that we’re now part of the Union, they probably feel they have a right to interfere.”
“Who the friggin’ hell needs them?” Dickson added. “Who needs a government that’s on the other side of the goddam continent? What do they know about our troubles?”
Marcus nodded. “I agree, Brad. But there’s no way to stop them. They’ve got it in their stupid, eastern heads that rounding the savages up and sending them to those worthless reservations is going to be the answer to all our problems.”
“More savages to die of starvation on government land,” Dickson said on a disgusted grunt. “I’ll have to let Washington know I need more money.”
Marcus was incredulous. “You’re living like a king as it is. Why, even your wife is getting paid for a job she isn’t doing. Teaching school on the reservation? There aren’t any children there to teach. And those nephews of yours. Aren’t they on the payroll, too? What’s their job, Brad? Chasing gophers off reservation land?”
Brad simply glared at Marcus, for everything that had been said was true. “What the hell do I care? No one from Washington believed the stupid savages when they tried to complain.”
“They might have if there had been someone to translate for them,” Marcus said, cringing as his father-in-law emitted a long belch.
“I had a translator there,” Dickson defended.
Marcus snorted. “Of course. And you made damned sure he translated all of the savages’ complaints about you into compliments.”
“So what?” Dickson groused.
“So,” Marcus said, putting down the paper and standing up, “you’re careless. You’re a fool to think you won’t get caught with your hand in the cookie jar.”
He walked to the window, remembering to hold his head high and his shoulders back, knowing that this stance made him appear taller. His lack of height had always been the one thing he’d hated about himself. He’d never envied either of his half brothers the impure blood they’d gotten from their mothers, but he’d never understood why both of them had gotten so tall and he hadn’t.
“So what?” Dickson repeated. “Don’t I deserve somethin’ for doin’ this shitty job?” He pulled the bottle of whiskey from Mueller’s loose grip and filled his glass again.
“You’re a poor excuse for a public servant,” Marcus said on a harsh chuckle.
“Hell, what kind of an Exterminator are you?” Dickson swore again. “I suppose you’d give the savages the goddam money.”
Marcus bristled. “Don’t call me that
here, you stupid bastard. What if someone’s listening? That’s all I need,” he added under his breath. He ran nervous fingers through his sandy-colored hair, then lifted the dark flap covering the window and glanced out into the alley.
Marcus had taken on the leadership of the vigilantes to rid the area of the filthy savages, but he had often wondered why he couldn’t find an intelligent man to work with. The only thing he had in common with any of them was that they all despised the Indian and were intent on exterminating the lot of them.
“Brad,” he said, dropping the flap and turning back to his companions, “you should at least make it look good in case your superior comes around to check on you. We don’t need any suspicion thrown our way. It wouldn’t hurt you to actually distribute that load of blankets you’ve been hoarding.”
“I have buyers for those blankets.”
Marcus’s eyes narrowed. “You have the spine of a weasel. At least take half of them and distribute them like you’re supposed to. Or cut them in half, like you did the last time.” He watched the man fidget. “Well?”
Dickson scratched his head. “I suppose I could cut some of them in half again. The Indians don’t need a whole blanket anyway.”
Marcus waved the response away. “Do whatever you have to, but see that some of those supplies are dispensed, and make sure your records indicate it.”
Dickson nodded, but still didn’t appear happy. “What about Mueller, here? Shouldn’t he start paying his Indian help instead of just giving them bad whiskey?”
“Nein, ” Mueller argued. “They’d spend it on whiskey anyway. I just get rid of man in middle.” He took a long pull on his whiskey, then pointed a fat, stubby finger at Dickson. “I don’t take government money meant for savitches and spend it on myself.”
Dickson swore. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t do it if you had the chance, you fat Deutsch swine.”
“Gentlemen.” Marcus didn’t shout, but his voice held authority, and the other two settled back in their chairs. “We didn’t meet this afternoon to squabble about our virtues or our vices,” he said sarcastically. “We have more important things to discuss.”
Secrets of a Midnight Moon--The Moon Trilogy--Book One Page 7