Unforgettable

by Rosanne Bittner

  Being separated from Toby in different wings of the orphanage had been bad enough, but now they faced total separation. She knew Toby was just as frightened as she was, maybe more. Her brother was a slow learner, a quiet, reticent young man who often depended on her, even though he was a year older. Allyson was convinced he could not possibly survive without her, and although she hated to admit to any weakness, deep inside she was not sure she could survive without Toby. It was for his sake that she masked her own fears. She had no one else, and certainly no one else was going to love her the way her brother did.

  “Ally, even if we could get off this train, what’s out in the streets has to be worse than where we’re going,” Toby reminded her. “It would be harder for you now. You can’t be running the streets anymore. You wouldn’t last a day before you’d be dragged off by some gang of hoodlums who would take advantage because you’re a girl. If you were caught stealing, you’d be put in jail, or sent to one of them factories where they work you near to death. We got away with stuff when we were little, but it’s all different now. Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe we’ll end up on some nice farm, where it’s safe and the people are good. Anything is better than the orphanage, or the streets and alleys of New York. You know that.”

  Allyson forced back tears. She hated crying more than anything she could think of. “I just don’t want us to be separated. You need me, and I need you. Each other is all we’ve got.” She snuggled a little closer, keeping her voice even lower. “We’re getting off this train, somehow, somewhere. Maybe you’re right about there being a better life for us farther west, but we’ll make our own way, and we’ll do it together. Bartel is not going to separate us.” She kissed his cheek, which sported a mass of freckles and still did not need shaving. Her own freckles were limited to a few over her nose, the rest of her skin smooth as porcelain, as the nuns put it. Not like your brother, freckles from head to toe.

  Toby’s hair was even a brighter red than her own, and his eyes a paler blue, not the deep blue of Allyson’s. Now that they were older, they did not look so much alike. Toby was tall and gangly, but fast filling out into manhood. To her chagrin, Allyson had remained tiny, couldn’t seem to get past five feet and a couple of inches. If not for her full breasts, one would think she wasn’t even sixteen yet, and that angered her. She was going on seventeen, a grown woman, and she did not belong on an orphan train. Oh, how she wished she was a boy—no, a man! She would have so many more rights and privileges. She wanted to be big and strong, so she could sock Henry Bartel and march right off this train and fend for herself!

  The orphan train—that’s what people called it. She and Toby and twenty-two other children, most of them younger, had been ferried across the Hudson River to New Jersey, where they were herded all together into one train car. The locomotive pulling that car would take them to places west, and none of them knew just who they would be living with once they got there.

  Ally had watched the looks on people’s faces for the last half-hour as they walked past the coach, staring up at the windows and shaking their heads. One would have thought the car in which she rode was packed with some kind of strange, pitiful creatures. How many of those people knew the pain she and the others suffered? Why did they look at these children as though their predicament were their own fault? Did being orphaned somehow taint you? She felt a deep anger at their attitude, their unwillingness to take any of these children and give them a nice home, give them the love they had so long been without.

  It was Toby who needed that love and protection most of all. He was too willing to accept things and let people walk all over him. Who would be there to protect him if they were separated? He needed the security of his sister’s love. Maybe it was because he needed to know at least one person cared, at least one person forgave him. He had caused the fire that had killed their mother, but it was an accident. Allyson had never blamed him, but she knew he blamed himself, and their father also blamed him. The man had taken to drinking after that, beating her and Toby often, always reminding poor Toby it was his fault their mother was dead.

  Ever since then Toby had been a frightened, hesitant young man who considered himself worthless. She could not let him struggle alone with that. It might not be so bad if their grandparents had forgiven him, but they treated him like a murderer, and had allowed them both to live in the streets.

  She realized it was mostly her fault they were being sent west. She had caused the most trouble, tried to run away several times, complained to the priest whenever Henry Bartel abused her. It didn’t do much good, but at least it embarrassed Bartel and made her feel better. Lately she had been counting on their ages to mean she and Toby would soon be freed. She had not expected to be carried off into the Great American Desert, where they would both surely be forever forgotten, maybe captured and eaten by Indians or sold to outlaws. Who could say what would happen to them?

  She grabbed her brother’s arm tighter when the locomotive whistle startled her with three loud shrieks. Ahead of them were two cars full of regular passengers. Then came the car full of orphans. It lurched, and the train began to slowly leave the station. Allyson watched out the window as the train rumbled past the platform where people still stood, some just staring, others smiling at the “poor little children.” One woman had a rather pious, judgmental look on her face, as though everyone in the orphan car were some kind of criminal. Allyson squiggled her face into a hideous contortion and stuck out her tongue, then laughed when the woman’s eyes widened and she appeared to gasp as she pointed at her. She wiggled her tongue a little longer until the woman was out of sight. There came a sharp, painful rap on her shoulder then, and she quickly turned to look up into Henry Bartel’s dark eyes, which glittered with retribution.

  “What do you think you are doing, young lady?”

  Allyson glared back at him, keeping her chin raised in defiance. Oh, how she hated this man who often took privileges with some of the other younger girls, then threatened them with terrible punishment and embarrassment if they dared to tell the nuns or the priest. Allyson had told anyway and suffered often for it, but she didn’t care how many beatings she took or how often she was forced to stay in a room alone for days at a time with hardly any food. She had managed to make it difficult for Bartel to get away with things he had no right doing, and she gladly made the sacrifice. She hoped the fact that he had been given the assignment of accompanying the orphans to their various locations was in turn a punishment for him. The man did not seem to like this job one bit. He had grumbled constantly about having to accompany a bunch of “restless brats” into “wild Indian country.” The nuns had said they were sure there were no “wild” Indians left, that they were all tame now and living on reservations. Allyson hoped they were right. After all, this was 1889. The Indian wars were supposed to be over.

  “I was just smiling at the nice people on the platform who were waving to us,” she answered Bartel, keeping her voice firm and her eyes steady.

  Bartel took the cane with which he had hit her and poked it against her chest. “I saw what you were doing, you little troublemaker! I want no problems from you on this trip, young lady. We are away from the orphanage now, and you are under my complete authority.”

  Allyson studied the man’s long, thin nose, set in a thin face. Everything about him was thin—his lips, his build, the hands that held the cane…even his eyes were small and beady. Of all the mean, lawless people she had come across in the back alleys of the city, she hated this man most of all. She studied the bony hand that held the cane, felt sick at the memory of that hand touching her breasts.

  “Go to hell, Henry Bartel,” she sneered defiantly. She could hear the gasps of some of the other children around them, sensed the wide eyes and open mouths, but she kept her eyes on Bartel, whose face was beet red. She knew that if he could get away with it he would give her a good thrashing, but two volunteers who were active in the church that supported the orphanage had come along to help trans
port the children, and Bartel had been trying to present a picture to them of a kind, generous, caring superintendent. He knew his job was on the line because of allegations Allyson had presented to the Church over the last two years. She was glad to have made trouble for him.

  “Leave her alone, Mr. Bartel,” Toby spoke up. “I’ll make sure she minds her business.”

  Bartel turned the cane to Toby, touching his cheek with it. “You do that, boy. And you remember that if it wasn’t for your sister, you would still be in the safe confines of the orphanage and not being shipped off to strange people in a strange land.”

  The man walked away, and the train began to chug along faster, steam billowing up past the window where Allyson sat. She put her head on Toby’s shoulder. “We’re getting off this train and away from Bartel,” she told him. “We’ll make a new life for ourselves out there somewhere, Toby, but it won’t be with people who adopt us. We’ll do it on our own, just you and me, like it’s always been.”

  Toby reached over and patted her hand. “If you say so, Sis.”

  “I say so.” Again Allyson blinked back tears. This was no time to cry or worry about Henry Bartel. For the next few days she had to think hard, plan their escape. Surely the terrible dangers of the wild west couldn’t be any worse than the dangers that lurked in the streets of New York City…or in the dark hallways of the orphanage whenever Henry Bartel was on duty.

  2

  A weary Ethan Temple halted Blackfoot in front of civilian quarters at Fort Supply. The gelding shook a cold, wet snow from its black mane as Ethan dismounted. “I know what you mean, boy,” Ethan grumbled, removing his floppy leather hat and knocking it against the hitching post to get the snow off. “I hate this weather as much as you, but it’s a spring snow that’ll probably turn to rain by tomorrow. Won’t be long before warm weather is here.”

  He tied the animal, hoping he was right. It was unusual to have any snow this time of year in Indian Territory, and this sloppy, damp weather made his job more difficult, especially when it came to finding a dry place to make camp. It felt good to be back at the fort, where he could go inside and sleep in a dry bed for once.

  He patted the horse’s neck, looking over at a teenage Cherokee boy who was always hanging around talking about being a scout some day. “Jack, come on over here and tend to Blackfoot, will you?”

  Jack turned up the collar of his wool jacket against a stinging wind, grinning as he ran toward Ethan. He wore no hat, and his straight, black hair was wet from the mixture of rain and snow. The cold did not seem to daunt his youthful eagerness as he approached Ethan, ready to help.

  “I haven’t slept for a couple of days,” Ethan told him. “I’d appreciate it if you’d take Blackfoot here over to the livery and get him fed and brushed down. I’m too damn tired.”

  “Sure, Mr. Temple. You have any trouble this time?”

  “Just the usual. Those ranchers never seem to learn they’ve got to keep their cattle off Indian lands. I expect it will get worse this summer again.”

  “Maybe we’ll have another big Indian war, huh?”

  Ethan laughed lightly, patting his horse’s rump. “I don’t think things will ever get that bad again.” He turned to pull his Winchester from its boot, then removed his saddlebags from Blackfoot and headed inside. The mention of Indian wars brought painful memories to mind, memories of a place called Sand Creek and a three-year-old Cheyenne boy hugging his dead mother, who had been viciously murdered by soldiers. That boy was a man now, a half-breed, with no family left except his white father, whom he hadn’t seen in several months. He felt the recurring stab of pain at his heart remembering he’d had a wife once, had looked forward to the birth of their first child; but that happiness had ended four years ago when Violet died, taking their unborn baby with her to the grave. She was buried on the Cheyenne reservation.

  He strode on long legs into the building that held several cots for single civilian men who lived at the fort, most of them scouts. Only one, an old, full-blood Cherokee scout named Hector “Strong Hands” Wells, was inside. He sat on his cot, leaning against the wall and smoking a pipe.

  “’Bout time you got back,” Hector said with a scowl. “What’d you do, get lost? You Cheyenne, you don’t know how to find your way around.”

  Ethan grinned, his tall, broad frame blocking the doorway. He had to duck to come inside, then closed the door and walked over to a potbellied stove, leaning his rifle against the wall and hanging his saddlebags over a peg. “If it wasn’t for the government, us Cheyenne wouldn’t even be in Indian Territory. We’d be up in Colorado and Wyoming where we belong.”

  “Yeah, and us Cherokee would be back in Tennessee and Georgia,” Hector answered. He gave his pipe a few quiet puffs. “But there ain’t no goin’ back, is there?”

  The picture of his dead mother again flashed into Ethan’s mind. “No, there sure isn’t,” he answered. He removed his hat and wolfskin coat, revealing a fringed buckskin shirt beneath it. His pants were also of deerskin, and he wore fur-lined, knee-high moccasins, preferring them to leather boots in winter. He unbuckled his gunbelt, throwing it and the six-gun it held over onto his cot. He still wore another rawhide belt that held his hunting knife. He rubbed his hands together over the top of the stove, thinking how much more of his mother’s blood was in him than his father’s. His skin was nearly as dark as any Cheyenne’s, and he had never had the desire to cut his hair like the white man. It was a deep brown, not as black as his Cheyenne relatives’, and he wore it pulled back in a tail.

  “Any trouble?” Hector asked.

  Ethan shrugged. “Some. I caught some of Jim Sulley’s men trying to drag my cousin, Red Hawk, and three other Cheyenne back to Sulley’s ranch. I have a feeling they might have tried to hang them, accused them of stealing some of Sulley’s cattle. You know the story. Sulley’s cattle strayed onto Indian land, the Indians herded them together, and then they got caught. I managed to settle it without any bloodshed, but it was touchy.”

  “They probably were stolen,” Hector teased, a sly grin moving across his face. “You Cheyenne are just a bunch of thieves anyway.”

  Ethan chuckled, walking back to his saddlebags and reaching inside. “You’re wanting trouble, aren’t you?” He pulled out a pouch that held tobacco and cigarette papers.

  “Just enjoy gettin’ under your skin, Breed.”

  Ethan walked to his cot, perfectly aware that Hec’s use of the word breed was in jest. “If you weren’t so old, Hec, I’d show you what a Cheyenne can do to a Cherokee.”

  Hector laughed lightly. “In my good days there wasn’t nobody who could beat me.” He studied Ethan a moment. He was a handsome man with a nice smile. He liked Ethan. He was an able scout, good with his fists and his guns, but he was of an age when he ought to be settled with a wife and children. Too bad that wife of his had to go and die on him. Hector looked at Ethan almost like a son, and he owed him his life. Two years ago, while out scouting, Hector and his horse had taken a tumble down an embankment, leaving the horse with two broken legs and Hector with several broken bones of his own. They were in one of the most remote areas of Indian Territory, hidden in a ravine, where Hector was sure he would die of wounds or starvation. It was only because of Ethan’s uncanny skills at literally sniffing out trouble that he was found. When others had given up the search, Ethan kept on until he finally found him.

  “There’s gonna be more trouble this summer, and not from the trail herders,” he told Ethan as the man rolled himself a smoke.

  Ethan had already pulled off his moccasins and leaned back on his own cot. He lit the cigarette and took a deep drag. “What kind of trouble?”

  “Settlers. I’m told it’s all set. That Indian land they’re opening south of the Cherokee Outlet will be up for grabs come April 22. They’ll be mixin’ land-hungry whites with Pawnee, Sac, Fox, Potawatomi, Shawnee, Cheyenne, Arapaho—hell, the army will be wantin’ us to go keep watch, make sure the land-grabbers don’t go claimin�
�� sod that ain’t theirs, keep them off reservation land that still belongs to us Indians. Pretty soon there won’t be any of that left. For years we’ve been chasin’ out squatters as criminals, and now they’re gonna let thousands of them come in here and take what they want.”

  Ethan took another drag on his cigarette, then just stared at it as he held it between his fingers. “The way things are going, the entire Cherokee Outlet will be opened in a couple more years. The government is doing a good job of practically forcing it on every tribe involved.”

  “Hell, we’re all used to bein’ pushed from here to there. It ain’t never gonna stop, you know that. Pretty soon it will seem silly to call any of this Indian Territory. It will be white man’s territory. Trouble is, there ain’t no place else to send us. We been squeezed right down to nothin’.”

  Ethan nodded. “The white man calls it progress.”

  “Your pa, he shouldn’t have give up his tradin’ post along the Outlet. With these whites comin’ in, he’d do good.”

  Ethan leaned forward and crossed his legs, resting his elbows on his knees. “I guess it’s the same for whites as Indians. Pa missed his own people. He’s getting old and was feeling poorly, thought maybe he should go back to his relatives in Illinois and see them again before he dies.”

  “He ought to be with his son.”

  Ethan grinned against the pain. “I don’t belong there. Pa told me several times over the years that my uncle still thinks it was wrong for him to marry an Indian woman. I don’t expect I’d be too welcome in his house. But I don’t really blame Pa for going back. He hadn’t seen his brother in nearly fifteen years. According to his last letter he’s not been too well, so it’s good he’s got people to take care of him. I expect I’d better go see him later this summer.”

  “Hope you get the chance.” Hector took a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and wiped his nose. “All those new settlers comin’ in, it’s gonna be a busy spring and summer. Them people are gonna come swarmin’ in here like flies to horse dung, and you know how greedy the white man can be. Them that don’t get the best spots are gonna go tryin’ to take a little of what don’t belong to them. Then the Indians are gonna get hoppin’ mad. We’ll be busy, all right.”