Blue Hawk nodded, his anticipation and excitement fading a little as he considered the possible dire consequences of a seemingly harmless action.
“Are you ready?” Fox Hunter asked.
“Yes.” Taking a deep breath, Blue Hawk entered the hut. Undressing, he folded his clothes into a neat pile, waited for Fox Hunter to do the same.
Fox Hunter gestured for Blue Hawk to sit down on the blanket facing the doorway, a symbolic position for one who hoped to make a journey.
Fox Hunter lit his pipe and offered it to the four directions, to mother earth and sky above. He puffed on it four times, then passed it to Blue Hawk, who also offered it to the four directions, the earth and the sky before puffing on the pipe. When he was done, he passed it back to Fox Hunter, who laid the pipe aside.
Lifting his arms overhead, the aged warrior began to chant softly, praying that Heammawihio would grant Blue Hawk a safe journey.
As Fox Hunter continued to chant, he dipped a brush made from the beard of a buffalo into the bowl, then sprinkled the water on the hot stones. He did this repeatedly until dense heat and steam filled the sweat lodge.
Blue Hawk stared at the deer hide that covered the doorway, his heart pounding. Sweat trickled down his face, neck, and chest. His body felt as though it were on fire; he felt light-headed, and a little sick to his stomach.
Fox Hunter sprinkled more water on the stones and as he did so, his chant changed in tone, the sound of his voice fading.
Blue Hawk continued to stare at the hide, his eyes narrowing as vague shapes began to move on the deer skin. He saw men and women walking across the plains, their belongings loaded on travois and lashed to large dogs. The scene blurred and he had a sense of time moving forward and then he saw a handful of warriors riding across the prairie in pursuit of buffalo.
Fox Hunter’s voice grew fainter still.
A woman’s image appeared on the wall of the lodge. Her face was turned away from him, but Blue Hawk could see that she was tall and slender, with dark hair that reached past her waist. She wore a long-sleeved white shirt and a calico skirt. He willed her to turn around so that he might see her face, but at that moment Fox Hunter’s chant faded away into nothingness.
The stillness in the lodge was complete.
The image on the deer hide vanished.
Wanting to see the woman again, Blue Hawk turned to speak to the old man, to ask him to summon her image once again.
But the old man was gone.
Chapter 4
Blue Hawk wiped the sweat from his brow. Waiting for Fox Hunter to return to the lodge, he stretched his arms and legs, wondering how the old man had summoned the images he had seen, wondering who the woman was.
As the inside of the lodge cooled, it occurred to Blue Hawk that the old man had been gone for quite some time. Frowning, he moved toward the door of the sweat lodge and ducked outside.
He shivered as a cold chill slithered down his spine.
There was no sign of the old man.
Their camp was gone.
His horse was gone.
He turned in a slow circle, but there was nothing to see save for endless miles of undulating prairie grass, the vast blue vault of the sky overhead, and the sweat lodge.
Blue Hawk frowned. Where was Fox Hunter? And how had he left the lodge without being seen?
Blue Hawk was about to go back inside the lodge when the earth shuddered beneath his feet. A sound like distant thunder filled his ears. Looking away to the north, he saw a dark cloud rolling across the prairie floor.
Frowning, he shaded his eyes with his hand. As the cloud grew nearer, it broke apart and took shape and he saw a herd of horses running across the prairie. A blood-red mare led the way, but it was the stallion at the rear of the herd who caught his eye. The horse was the most magnificent creature Blue Hawk had ever seen, and that was saying a lot, considering that his own father raised some of the best stock in the country. The stallion nipped at the flanks of a mare who was lagging behind, ran alongside a young colt, encouraging the colt to run faster.
Looking past the herd, Blue Hawk saw a half-dozen men in pursuit.
It was, he thought, a beautiful sight to see, with the wild bunch racing ahead, manes and tales flying in the breeze, and the riders coming up hard behind. He could hear their voices now.
In minutes, the herd had passed by and the men were approaching the hill where Blue Hawk stood.
One of the men glanced up to where Blue Hawk was standing. Before Blue Hawk realized what was happening, the man reined his horse to a halt, and drew his rifle.
Blue Hawk reeled back as pain exploded along the side of his head and shoulder. He stared blankly at the blood dripping down his arm, felt himself falling into an endless black void.
* * * * *
Lynette Richardson drew her horse alongside Jase Abbott’s. “Are you crazy?” she exclaimed. “What are you trying to do, start another war?”
“Dirty redskin’s on our property, spying on us, probably planning to steal these horses.”
“You don’t know that. We’re supposed to be at peace with the Indians, or have you forgotten that?”
“I haven’t forgotten anything, Lynnie, least of all the fact that your father was killed by those damned redskins not so long ago.”
“I haven’t forgotten that, either.” If she had her way, every last Indian would be locked up where they couldn’t do any more harm, but there were still Indians running loose, and she didn’t want to give any of them cause to break the uneasy peace.
She blew out a sigh. “You’d better go up and see if he’s dead. If he is, we’ll have to take him to the village.”
“And if he isn’t?”
“We’ll still have to take him to the village.”
“Like hell! Now who’s trying to start a war? Dead or alive, the Cheyenne won’t be happy about this. That chief of theirs has been looking for a good excuse to start another war and you know it. Besides, you don’t even know if this redskin’s Cheyenne or not. If he’s dead, we’ll haul his body back to the ranch and bury it there.”
“And if he isn’t?”
Jase looked at her, his brown eyes hard and unblinking. “What do you think?”
“I don’t like this, Jase. I don’t like it one bit.”
With a shrug, Jase started up the hill.
Lynnie stared after him for a moment, then, following some inner prompting she didn’t understand, she urged her horse after his.
The Indian lay sprawled face down in the dirt in front of a brush-covered tipi.
Lynnie frowned. She didn’t think she had ever seen a tipi quite like this one before. Not that she had seen that many, but the ones she had seen had been cone-shaped and covered with buffalo hide, not squat and covered with branches and brush.
With a shrug, she turned her attention to the Indian. Blood had leaked from both wounds, making an ugly stain on the windswept earth. “I wonder where his horse is,” she remarked.
Dismounting, Jase glanced around. “Maybe he didn’t have one.”
“You think he walked up here?”
Jase shrugged. “Who knows? All I know is that I’ll have to pack his carcass behind me.”
“You can wrap him up in your blanket,” Lynnie said.
“Not hardly. I don’t want his blood ruining my bedroll.”
“Maybe there’s a blanket in the tipi,” Lynnie suggested.
“Yeah, maybe.” With a grunt of annoyance, Jase ducked inside the lodge.
Lynnie stared at the Indian, wondering what he had been doing up here, stark naked. Surely he hadn’t been planning any mischief while he was naked as a jaybird! She couldn’t help noticing that he was long and lean, his arms and legs well-muscled, his skin a dusky reddish-brown. And his hair; he had the most beautiful hair she had ever seen. It fell to his waist like a fall of ebony silk, the ends neatly trimmed, as if someone had cut his hair recently.
She looked away when Jase emerged from the lodge, her
cheeks burning when she realized he had caught her staring at a dead man.
With a shake of his head, Jase spread a blanket beside the Indian and rolled him onto it.
Jase jumped back, his hand reaching for his six-gun, when, with a low groan, the Indian’s eyes opened for a moment before he slipped back into unconsciousness.
Lynnie murmured, “Oh, Lordy, he’s not dead,” and wondered why she felt such a wave of relief. She had no love for the Indians.
With the death of her father, Jase had taken over the running of the ranch. She had no quarrel with that. He was the foreman, and a good one. But he had also decided it gave him the right to ride herd on her, as well. Sometimes he treated her as if she was fourteen instead of twenty-four.
Jase swore. “It would be a damn site easier on everybody if I put him out of his misery right now.”
“No!”
Jase might be the foreman, but she still owned the ranch, still had the final say in whatever decisions were made, though she usually acquiesced to Jase, since he had more experience than she did.
Muttering an oath, Jase rolled the Indian into his blanket and dropped him, face down and none too gently, over his horse’s withers.
“You’re gonna regret this day, Lynnie,” Jase said, swinging into the saddle. “See if you don’t.”
* * * * *
The horses were in the corral and the hands had all gone to wash up when Lynnie and Jase rode into the yard.
“Where do you want him?” Jase asked, jerking his thumb toward the still-unconscious Indian.
Lynnie nibbled on her lower lip. The spare bedroom was no longer usable, thanks to the Indian attack last year. What with one thing and another, the repairs still hadn’t been made. She could put the Indian in her room, but she didn’t like that idea, nor did she like the thought of bedding him down on the sofa.
“The barn’s the best place,” Jase said. “I can tie his hands and feet until you decide what you’re gonna do with him.”
She didn’t like that option, either, but it seemed the wisest. “All right. Ask Cookie to look after his wounds.”
Grunting softly, Jase lifted the unconscious Indian from the back of his horse and carried him into the barn.
Lynnie stared after him, then, with a troubled sigh, she went into the house. The housekeeper, Adele, met her at the door. Reaching into her pocket, Adele withdrew an envelope.
“From your mother,” the housekeeper said.
With a nod, Lynnie went into the parlor. Taking a seat in what had been her father’s favorite rocker, she stared at the envelope. Her mother, Jeanette, had never liked the West. She had come to the ranch as a young bride, and hated it immediately. When Lynnie turned eleven, Jeanette had insisted on taking Lynnie back east, declaring the West was no fit place to raise a young lady. Lynnie hadn’t wanted to go, and she had never truly forgiven her father for giving in to her mother’s demands.
Lynnie had hated the east as much as her mother hated the west. She had endured five years of schooling at Miss Pringle’s School for Young Ladies and on her sixteenth birthday, she had told her mother that she’d had enough, she was going home, with or without her.
Neither Jeanette’s temper or her tears had changed Lynnie’s mind. Six months later, she was back at the ranch. Her father had hired Adele Nolan to look after her and Lynnie had cheerfully cast off her fancy gowns and frippery and spent her days trailing after her father, whether he was riding the range or breeding his prize heifer.
Soon after Lynnie had returned to the ranch, her mother had sued for divorce and remarried. She lived in Boston now, with her banker husband, Horace.
Lynnie read her mother’s letter quickly. As usual, Jeanette rambled on and on about the parties she and Horace were attending, the new jewelry Horace had given her, the plays she had seen.
“I’ve hot water waiting for you in your room,” Adele called from the doorway. “You have just enough time to clean up before dinner.”
“Thanks, Addy.”
“Mr. Russell came calling while you were gone.”
“Again?” Lynnie rolled her eyes. Henry Russell was their neighbor to the south. He had been coming to call on Lynnie for the last few months, totally oblivious to the fact that she had no interest in him.
Upstairs, Lynnie sat on the edge of the bed and removed her boots. She glanced around, thinking her bedroom always seemed smaller after she had been out on the trail for awhile. It was a nice enough room, with a canopied bed and a pretty rosewood dresser. The walls were papered in a green and white stripe, the curtains were white, as was the spread on her bed.
Her thoughts turned toward the Indian while she changed out of her jeans and shirt and into a dress. She wondered what he had been doing up on that mountain all alone and where his horse had gone. And where his clothes had gone.
She felt her cheeks grow warm as his image sprang readily to mind – all long, lean, coppery skin and corded muscle.
She really should go out and see how he was, she thought. Yes, she really should do that.
Dinner could wait.
Chapter 5
Blue Hawk woke with a groan, his hand reaching for his head. He frowned when his hand refused to obey, only to realize, with some alarm, that his ankles were lashed together and his hands were bound behind his back. A rough, wool blanket covered him from the waist down. Someone had slapped a bandage on his shoulder, another was wrapped around his forehead.
Grunting softly, he tried to sit up but the movement sent a sharp pain through his head and he slumped to the floor, breathing heavily. Glancing around, he saw that he was lying on a bed of straw in a stall. He had no memory of how he had gotten there.
Caught up in a haze of pain, he closed his eyes. He was on the brink of sleep when a woman’s face rose in his mind. She had large gray eyes fringed with long, dark lashes and skin lightly browned from the sun. Her hair was black, or maybe dark brown, drawn back in a braid that reached her waist.
When he woke, the woman in his vision was staring down at him.
“It’s brown,” he murmured.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your hair,” he said. “It’s brown.”
The woman frowned at him. “You speak English.”
“Of course.”
When he tried to sit up, she put her hand on his chest. “Lie still. You’re badly hurt.”
“Where am I?”
“My ranch, the Slash Bar R.”
Blue Hawk blinked at her. “I remember now. That man who was with you, he shot me.”
“Yes. Who are you and what were you doing on our ranch?”
“I’m Daniel Blue Hawk, and I didn’t know it was your ranch.” Something had gone wrong, he thought. Terribly wrong. Instead of sending him back in time to the Cheyenne, Fox Hunter’s magic had sent him to this woman’s ranch. Judging from the way she was looking at him, and the fact that he was tied up, he’d be lucky to live long enough to return home.
“You don’t talk like any of the Indians I’ve ever met. Did you go school back east?”
He laughed softly. “No.”
“Why were you up on the hill nak…without any clothes?”
“We were…I mean, I was making a sweat.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s a Cheyenne ceremony, sort of a purification rite.” A rite that had gone terribly wrong. “So, how about turning me loose?”
“And have you murder us in our beds? I don’t think so.”
“Murder you! What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know who you are or where you came from. But one thing I do know is that you’re an Indian, and it was an Indian who killed my father.”
“Well, it wasn’t me!”
“So you say.”
Blue Hawk looked up at her, wondering how a woman who had eyes the soft gray of a mourning dove could be so hard-hearted. “Why did you bring me here? Why didn’t you just leave me up on the hill to die?”
“I t
hought about it.”
“But you decided you wanted to stick the knife in me yourself?”
Her face paled at his words. Rising, she left the barn without another word.
Blue Hawk stared after her, his thoughts troubled. He had expected to return to his father’s people, to spend time with the Cheyenne, to discover who the woman he had seen in the sweat lodge was and what part she had to play in his journey.
Now, not only had he been shot, he was being held captive by a woman who had no love for Indians, and apparently no intention of letting him go.
So, what did she plan to do with him?
A number of unpleasant possibilities followed him to sleep.
* * * * *
Lynnie sat at the kitchen table later that night, a cup of coffee cradled in her hands, her thoughts on the Indian in the barn. What was she going to do with him?
She wouldn’t have this problem if she had just let Jase kill him. She wouldn’t have batted an eye if the Indian had been a threat, but to kill a man, even an Indian man, when he was helpless, well, that just didn’t sit right. You couldn’t call killing an unconscious man self-defense. It was nothing short of murder, and she didn’t want that on her conscience.
Which left her with a wounded Indian who had to be dealt with, one way or the other. She supposed she could have Jase take him into town and drop him off at the sheriff’s office. Of course, that would be the same as killing him.
Why were there never any easy decisions?
If only her father was still alive. Even though she was capable of running the ranch, there were times when she thought how nice it would be to let someone else make the hard decisions once in a while. Thinking along that line brought Jase to mind. He would be only too happy to take control of everything, including her life and the ranch.
Rising, she went to the window and looked outside. Maybe she should just marry Jase and get it over with.
But she didn’t love Jase Abbott. Or Henry Russell. And since her disastrous affair with Patrick Rawlings, she wasn’t sure she wanted to get involved with another man now or ever again.
Tales of Western Romance Page 18