“Rowena, don’t!”
“I want to go away, Mark,” I said stubbornly. “I need to get away for a while. I shall write to Mrs. Poynter tomorrow.”
Nothing he could say was able to change my mind. Perhaps I was running away. Perhaps all I needed was a change. Too much had happened in too short a time, and a holiday would do me good.
Sixteen
A young soldier from nearby Fort Thorn brought me Mrs. Poynter’s reply, and within a week I was ready to leave.
Mark went with me as far as Rincon, where I boarded the stage that would take me to Fort Selden, a little less than a day’s ride away. We had a small escort of soldiers from Fort Thorn.
Our small escort of soldiers was in high spirits. Most of them were young, except for an older man wearing sergeant’s chevrons. There were four other passengers. Two men; one of them a small rancher, a young army wife, going to join her husband, and another woman, a rather hard-looking female of indeterminate age, who kept to herself, her big, flower-decked hat shielding her face.
Mark leaned forward and kissed my cheek, his unusual demonstrativeness surprising me.
“Come back soon, Rowena. And take care of yourself.”
The driver cracked his whip meaningfully and spat a long stream of tobacco juice into the dust. A last-minute passenger, a short man with a round moon face, shouldered past Mark and climbed in, puffing noisily, slamming the door behind him. And then we were off.
I was fortunate enough to have a window seat, and I leaned forward, waving my gloved hand at Mark. The young woman seated next to me smiled shyly.
“It’s hard to say good-byes, isn’t it. Mama cried all night before I left, and I couldn’t sleep a wink myself, although I’d been so looking forward to seeing Johnny again.”
“I’m not going to be away for long,” I said. “I’m only going for a visit.” I believed it then. How sure I was!
I had chosen to wear a discreet, dove-gray dress for traveling, its bustle not quite as pronounced as on some of my other, more fashionable gowns. Trimmed with blue, it had long, tightly fitted sleeves and a high neck, with tiny blue buttons down the front of the fitted basque.
I had coiled my dark hair at the back of my head, in the Spanish fashion, and the small, modish bonnet that matched my gown sat forward on my head, with wide blue ribbons down the back. I wore no jewelry except for tiny sapphire studs in my ears.
I saw the men eye me, and then turn their eyes away. I was Todd Shannon’s woman and half owner of the huge SD ranch. I think everyone in the territory knew it by now. How many of them also knew that I had killed Gil Pardee?
The young woman next to me was friendly. The round-faced man fixed his eyes on the disinterested-looking woman with the large hat, who continued to stare steadily out of the window. The rancher, for the most part, stared down at his boots.
We were an ill-assorted collection of people, I suppose, but I had grown used to that, after all the traveling I had done already.
The young woman, who said her name was Emma Jensen, apologized for asking me so many questions. But once she learned that I had already visited Fort Selden before, she wanted to know as much as she could about it.
“Johnny warned me it wasn’t goin’ to be easy. I mean, the heat, and the Indians, an’ being cooped up an’ all. But I didn’t care. Johnny and I hadn’t been married long when he was transferred out here.” She blushed. “I guess I miss him something terrible!”
The rancher lit a cigar, after asking politely if any of the ladies would object. The round-faced man, fixing his small eyes on the tall woman at the opposite window, asked if she was going as far as El Paso.
“Goin’ there myself. Have lots of friends there. You know Dan Sutherland? Owns the Matador Saloon.” I could not help admiring her self-possession. Taking her eyes from the scenery outside, she looked him over without seeming to, responding coldly that she didn’t think so.
“I hardly think we’d have friends in common, mister. And I’m not making this trip to make new friends.”
He scowled, deflated. I think he would have said something else if he hadn’t noticed the unfriendly looks that Emma Jensen and I directed at him.
We traveled on in silence, while the sun grew hotter as it rose higher in the sky. There was a shotgun guard beside the driver because we carried silver on the coach. I could hear the voices of the soldiers calling to each other occasionally. I had traveled this road before and as it had been the first time, everything seemed peaceful. We were following roughly the course of the Rio Grande, the river that seemed to cut New Mexico Territory in two sections. This was cattle country too, the same kind of scenery I had grown accustomed to in our valley. I looked forward to arriving at the fort, to changing my clothes. I remember feeling thankful that I had not worn corsets in this heat. Why did women force themselves to put up with such discomfort in this climate? Perhaps I was fortunate that I was slim enough so that my figure did not actually need the tight constriction of whalebone and stays.
I remember thinking all these things while the sun rose higher overhead and even the swaying, jouncing motion of the coach seemed conducive to drowsiness.
One moment I had begun to nod, trying to ignore the perspiration which had already begun to bead my forehead. The next minute there was a loud thud against the side of the coach, which began to sway even more violently.
Almost simultaneously we heard shots and the shouts of the soldiers.
“What the hell!” the middle-aged rancher leaned forward to look out of the window, and I heard him give a strange choking sound. His body seemed to be flung backward, and Emma Jensen screamed, her mouth open. An arrow protruded from his throat, his eyes stared, and he continued to make those horrible, strangling noises for a few seconds longer.
“Better get down on the floor!” the older woman said and, hardly thinking, I dragged Emma off the seat, to crouch down as best we could in the cramped space.
The round-faced man was muttering to himself in a loud, wailing voice. “’Paches! Oh my God, my God!”
“No use prayin’—why don’t you get your gun out and start shootin’?”
It seemed as if the only calm and practical person in the coach was the woman who had been so silent.
Emma was still screaming; in fact I think she would have attempted to throw herself from the coach, which was now creaking and jouncing from side to side quite alarmingly, if I had let her. I tried to keep her still by throwing my body over hers, and now the other woman practically reached over and slapped the poor girl’s face.
“Only way to stop hysterics, and it ain’t going to help us any, her screamin’ her head off.”
I felt dazed myself. Meeting her eyes, I saw her give a slight shake of her head.
“Feel how fast we’re going? An’ the sound of shots is droppin’ back. Better brace yourself real good, because I think we ain’t gonna make the next turn in the road.”
“Woman, you don’t know what you’re talkin’ about!” the fat man panted, his eyes round with terror. “We’re gettin’ away from them!”
The dead man rolled off the seat onto him, spewing blood, and he screamed with fear.
“God!”
I think his voice was the last thing I remembered clearly for some time. One wheel must have hit a rock, or some other obstruction on the trail, for suddenly we were all bounced into the air, rolled helplessly against each other, and the next moment the coach tilted alarmingly. There was a tremendous crash, and I felt myself falling, rolling, screams echoing in my ears. The horses? Emma? Or had they been my own screams? I was never to know.
When had I closed my eyes? Why did my head ache so? Why hadn’t the screaming stopped? When I opened my eyes to a steady, monotonous screaming, I looked into a brown, expressionless face with painted stripes of black and white across it. I thought I was having a nightmare, and that if I closed my eyes again everything would disappear.
Someone said something in a deep, guttural voice, an
d even though I could not understand what he said I knew it was a command. And then there was another voice—female, urgent.
“For God’s sake, wake up! And try to pull yourself together, or they’ll kill you!”
I opened my eyes again and looked into the small black eyes of the Apache. His hair was black and lank, hanging to his shoulders. He wore a red headband. I noticed all this without taking my eyes from his face.
He said something to me and made a jerking movement of his head. I realized, even in my present dazed state, that he was telling me to get up. How many bones had I broken? I knew that I had fallen and had rolled for a long distance after the door of the coach burst open.
But I was alive. Why didn’t Emma stop screaming?
“Get up!” It was that other woman again. Why did she sound so angry?
I struggled to my feet somehow, feeling my hair slip heavily down over my shoulders. Oh, God—now they would scalp me. The Apache made a grunting sound and grabbed at my arm. Had they scalped Emma already? Was that why… and then, turning my head, I saw that it was not Emma who screamed in that terrible, animal fashion. Poor little Emma Jensen would never see her Johnny again. They had left her lying where she had been thrown, with a broken neck. But I would not—could not—believe what they had done to the men, two of whom were not yet dead.
I was thrown onto a horse, the Apache warrior who claimed me as his prize holding me with one arm around my waist. He had tied my wrists in front of me and I could smell the rank smell of his sweat and the oil he had used on his body.
My skirts were torn and bedraggled, I had lost my hat, and there were great splotches of blood all over me. Jewel was as badly off as I was, and she had a long scratch down the side of her face.
Shock has a dulling effect on the senses. I had learned that before. I did not move, I did not cry out, and perhaps it saved my life. It was a long time before I was able to feel sufficiently to care. For the moment, I found my numb mind trying to fasten itself on small things. The direction in which we were going, doubling back for part of the way over the trail we had traveled. The still, scattered bodies of the laughing young soldiers who had been so alive this morning, looking like ungainly, broken puppets in their blue uniforms.
The sun was unbearably hot, but we were moving towards the mountains whose shadows seemed to reach out menacingly toward us. Jewel was as stiff and silent as I was.
The ride became a nightmare in itself. The Apaches appeared to feel neither heat, nor weariness, hunger nor thirst. The horses became lathered, their breathing labored, and still they made no attempt to stop and rest them. Their faces were blank and ugly looking. They did not talk, and their silence was all the more unnerving.
I knew only that we were riding through what appeared to be a desert of desolation. Later I was to learn that this was the Jornado del Muerto: journey of death, literally translated from the Spanish. Had I known it at the time it would have made no difference to me. Perhaps death would have seemed preferable to thinking of what might happen to us when the Apaches finally halted for the night.
We had reached the forbidding-looking San Andres mountains when the first horse dropped in its tracks, its rider skillfully flinging himself from its back before the unfortunate animal fell. Our captors butchered the animal immediately; some of them stuffing hunks of raw meat into their mouths, chewing it, and then spitting it out.
From here on we were supposed to walk. Jewel and I were roped together and dragged over the rough, stony terrain, not daring to stop or to complain. “They’ll kill either one who couldn’t go on,” she warned me in a low voice, and their faces and attitude toward us led me to believe that they would indeed do so.
The surviving horses were also led, with the remains of the huge steaks the Indians had carved out of the dead animal wrapped in hide and draped across the light blankets which served as saddles.
I cannot remember how far we walked, or how often I stumbled; my captor turned around to scowl and mutter fiercely at me whenever this happened. My feet, in shoes hardly meant for walking, were blistered and swollen. Each step was agony, and still I knew that I had to go on. My lungs labored for breath, my hair hung in damp, straggly strands around my face. Nothing mattered except taking one more step forward, and then one more.
The trail we followed was tortuous and rocky, sometimes a deep cleft in the side of a mountain, and often a narrow indentation in a wild-looking, weirdly formed outcropping. There were times when we could not walk two abreast, and Jewel dropped behind me. I heard her breathing in great, heaving sobs.
We made camp for the night in a narrow, oddly shaped canyon with steep walls wider in the middle than at both ends. It was an easy place to defend, but who could possibly find us here? We had crossed a virtual desert, and these ancient volcanic mountains were composed mostly of rock and shale where the hoofs of the unshod ponies the Apaches rode would leave no tracks. No, both Jewel and I were lost, perhaps in more ways than one.
How could this have happened to me? How could I have been so unprepared for the violence that lurked beneath the surface of even the most beautiful morning?
Jewel and I had been made to understand, by gestures and guttural grunts, that we were to perform the duties of squaws. We were shown what kind of twigs to gather. When the small, smokeless fire was lit, we were given the horsemeat to cook. Jewel, half-crying, looked helpless. Thankfully I remembered how our cooks had prepared meals in India, when we had gone on tiger hunts. I had the strangest impression that my captor was rather proud of me when I showed Jewel how to sharpen a twig against a stone and skewer the meat on it.
The smell of cooking meat turned my stomach, and I had to bite down on my lip to keep from retching. It brought back the memory of the soldiers, skewered with arrows to hold them down, the terrible smell of burning human flesh. I knew that Jewel was thinking of the same thing, and we dared not look at each other.
The Indians ate, watching us covertly. I gathered that we would be allowed to eat what was left when they were through.
“We have to eat!” I whispered fiercely to Jewel. I was the stronger one now, I was younger, and she looked half-dead with exhaustion.
The horsemeat was tough and stringy, but not unpalatable, and the Indian who had taken me gave me a little water to drink from an old army canteen he carried slung around his neck. He was about to tie my wrists together again, but I made a staying gesture, and began to take off my shoes, feeling their eyes watching me. When that was done, with considerable pain and difficulty, for my blisters had burst and my stockings adhered to torn flesh, I looked him in the eyes and ran my fingers clumsily through my hair. They were all silent now, watching me closely as I begun to braid my hair in one long, single plait that hung down my back. I had to tear a strip of cloth off my already tattered skirt to tie at the end of my thick braid, something like a little girl’s hair ribbon. Finally, and more as a gesture of defiance than anything else, I tied another, slightly wider piece of material around my forehead, Indian-fashion, with the ends trailing down past my ear.
The man who had captured me gave an unintelligible grunt—whether of approval or not I did not know. But Jewel, I’d noticed, had begun to follow my example, pulling her bright hair, which was slightly shorter than mine, back from her face and tying a knot of cloth around it. I had no idea what we looked like. We were probably dirty, disgusting spectacles. And perhaps even the Apaches were fussy about the women they took. At any rate, they had decided to leave us alone that night. We were roped together again, a dirty blanket flung over us, and then we had to try and sleep.
Early the next morning we were roughly shaken awake and were each handed a pair of hastily contrived moccasins that we had to keep on our feet by tying each one firmly around the ankles with strips of torn cloth. My feet were swollen and sore and they oozed blood, but at least the moccasins made walking more bearable than my boots would have done.
We walked again, until my mind was a dull void, stopping for a
few minutes every two hours or so. This, I am sure, was more to rest us and the remaining horses, than because the Apaches themselves needed it.
Jewel and I were past making any attempts to talk to each other. When they stopped, we stopped, immediately falling onto the ground and staying there until we were dragged onto our feet again.
I don’t know how many miles we covered, pushing our way deeper and deeper into the rocky depths of the mountains. It seemed as if nothing could grow here except a few hardy, twisted shrubs for which I had no name, and the occasional, inevitable cactus plants.
The Apaches, who apparently knew the uses of everything in this godforsaken country, would sometimes cut off the top of a cactus plant and scoop out the pulp, chewing it until they had extracted all the liquid from it and then spitting it out. I was thirsty enough not to care, and it wasn’t, in the end, too unpleasant to taste.
We walked for hours, or was it for days? Is it possible to fall asleep on one’s feet and still keep on walking? We were climbing now, and amazingly, as the sun began to die, we began to come across signs of vegetation, especially where water had collected in ancient craters and scooped-out hollows in the mountain.
Our captors quickened their pace and began to talk to each other in their strange language that sounded like a series of grunts in varying tones. The two horses that carried the silver also quickened their pace. They had been the only ones fed and watered. No doubt if they had collapsed Jewel and I would have been forced to carry the heavy sacks until we, in our turn, also dropped in our tracks.
I felt my heart sink when another Apache rose suddenly from behind a ridge, his rifle ready. We were waved on with more grunts, and I saw his expressionless eyes touch me and move on to Jewel. No doubt he was used to seeing captives and plunder brought in here! I had gathered that there must be a camp of some sort here, and as we worked our way upward through a rocky cleft the ground dropped sharply down again, forcing us to scramble to keep our balance. Below were trees, thickly clustered along a small stream. Small fires glowed before strangely shaped brush structures, and dogs snapped and growled, not daring to bark, it seemed.
The Wildest Heart Page 23