He rode up beside her. “Neither will I. Let’s get back to the house. We have some time to make up for, and a lot to talk about.”
They rode off, heading north toward the Lazy L, two people set small against the vast Colorado plains, two people who thought they were alone. They moved across the grassland, rising and falling with the sea of hills, never noticing that on another hill to their right eight Indian braves lay flat on their bellies, watching them.
“Only two,” one of them said to his leader.
The young Cheyenne warrior, Yellow Eagle, kept a steady eye on the man and woman, and their mounts. “Those are the same yellow horses like those we stole many years ago from the white man’s ranch not far from here. I have never seen such grand horses.”
“Now we will have two more, plus a woman for ransom,” one of the others said.
“Aye,” Yellow Eagle answered. “She has hair like the sun.” He stood up. The two riders were past them now, unaware the Indians were behind them. Yellow Eagle quickly put an arrow in his bow and drew back the taut rawhide string, letting the arrow fly. He grinned when it landed square in the back of the big white man who rode the golden stallion. He heard the woman scream out “Hank!” He watched the man fall from his horse.
Chapter Thirty-one
Irene heard the whirring sound, the thud. It all happened in a split second, so quickly she did not realize at first what had taken place. Hank had not made a sound. He simply slumped forward and fell from his horse, an arrow in his back.
“Hank!” She whirled her horse, looking around, seeing several Indians on the rise behind them. “Oh, dear God!” Her mind raced with horror and confusion. Hank! Was he still alive? She had to know, had to protect him, protect herself. Should she try to run? But Hank! What about Hank! If she left him here alive, he might be tortured! He needed help!
She dismounted, kneeling down beside him, groaning at the sight of the ugly arrow embedded in his back. There was hardly any blood. Somewhere, sometime, she had heard that if there was no blood, a person was already dead. Bleeding stopped once the heart stopped beating. No! Not Hank! Not now! Not when she had just found this happiness!
“Hank,” she screamed. “Wake up! Don’t die on me, Hank!” She tried to roll him over, at the same time hearing the war whoops of the Indians. They were coming! “Hank!” She had managed to push him up on one side. Horror engulfed her when she realized he was surely dead. He was so still, and the point of the arrow protruded from the middle of his chest, pieces of flesh on the end of it. “Noooo,” she screamed. “No! No! No!”
There was not even time to hold him, mourn him. The Indians were getting closer. She knew instinctively they were coming for her, that they would want her alive. She stood up and ran to Hank’s horse, pulling his rifle from its boot. She had never had to use a gun before to save her life. She cocked it, turning and taking aim as the Indians came closer. She had waited too long to outrun their swift ponies, but she was not about to go down without a fight; and there was Hank’s death to avenge.
She fired, and to her own surprise, one of the Indians fell from his horse. There was no time to think about the fact that she had killed a man, or to wonder why and how these Indians had come to be here. Everyone had thought this area was safe now. She fired again, but to her dismay she hit one of the Indian ponies instead of the man. The animal crashed to the ground, and the Indian went rolling off his dead mount.
She cocked the rifle again, but it jammed. She threw it to the ground, running to Hank’s body and yanking his six-gun from its holster. She raised it, firing again, but the shot missed. The Indians spread out, surrounding her. She fired at another one, and the man cried out as a bloody hole opened up in his shoulder. He flew back off his horse.
Before Irene could fire again, something hard came crashing down painfully across her right shoulder, making her drop the gun. She heard a loud war cry close to her, and someone grasped her hair, yanking hard. Irene’s first thought was that she was going to be scalped. How many times had she been told that Indian men loved to rape and scalp blond-haired white women? The warrior yanked her to the ground, keeping hold of her hair as he straddled her, sitting down on her belly. He placed a huge blade to her throat and began moving rhythmically on top of her, as though to hint at what he intended to do with her.
“So,” he said leaning closer, surprising her when he spoke English, “the white woman is very brave, very good with a gun, huh? Maybe she is good in an Indian man’s tipi. Maybe she would make a good mate,” he sneered.
She was shocked to realize he had blue eyes, eyes as blue as her own. His hair was not blue-black like the others’, but a dark brown, with streaks of blond in it. She had heard descriptions of Yellow Eagle more than once, the young half-breed who had wreaked so much havoc across the Colorado plains. She was at the mercy of one of the worst of the Cheyenne rebels!
“You’re Yellow Eagle,” she spat at him.
His eyebrows arched, and he grinned in a sneer. “And how do you know this?”
“I have heard about the half-breed snake who makes war on innocent people! Why did you have to kill him? You already made him suffer when you killed his wife and daughter six years ago!” Her eyes filled with desperate tears. Hank! Nothing mattered now that Hank was dead. How could it be that only minutes earlier she had lain in his arms, taken him inside herself? The shock was so great that she didn’t even care now what Yellow Eagle did to her.
“If I killed his wife and child, I did not know they belonged to this man. No white man—or woman—means anything to me! If you had been at Sand Creek, if you had watched your mother being raped and cut open, your wife and little son butchered, you would not care either!” He pushed at the knife so that it nicked her skin, and she gasped, sure her life would end any moment. “Before that, there were all the broken promises, and there was the white man, killing off all our game while our children’s bellies screamed with hunger! There are many reasons, white woman! Many reasons why my friends and I will take you to our camp and enjoy you before we sell you back to your family.”
He yanked harder on her hair, making her cry out, arching her head back to the side so that it was hard to get her breath. “What are you called? Are you worth food, many guns, horses?” He pressed the knife again. “Speak, woman!”
The others with him picked up their dead comrade and grabbed hold of the two Palominos. The wounded one walked around cursing in his own tongue, telling one of the others to tie something around his shoulder.
“I am…Irene…Jacobs,” Irene answered. “My father…is David Kirkland…Denver. He’ll pay you…much more in ransom…if you don’t hurt me. He’s—a wealthy man.”
Yellow Eagle’s blood ran cold. The knife came away from her throat. He shoved it into its sheath at his side and grasped her hair at both sides of her head, holding her head up so that she had to look him straight in the eyes. Yes! He saw it now—in the eyes!
Irene watched the expression on his face, that of a man in near shock. He suddenly leapt off of her. “This is true? You are the daughter of David Kirkland?”
She put a hand to her throat, rolling to her knees. “Yes.” She looked up at him, feeling a strange familiarity when she met his eyes again. Why was he looking at her that way? “Please let me go.”
His eyes moved over her in a kind of strange reverence, and Irene thought that, if he were not so wild and painted, he could be handsome. “I will not harm you, but I am taking your horses.” He backed away. This had to be the sister. He guessed her to be his age, saw himself in her eyes. She must not know she had a brother, or she would have said so. She would have shouted right away that she was his sister so that he would not harm her.
“You are free to go,” he told her. He turned and said something to the others in his own tongue, and they all looked at Irene as though she were some kind of apparition.
Irene watched in confused amazement as they mounted their horses. The man whose horse she had shot took the
dead man’s horse. They threw his body over the animal in front of him. Two of the other men each took the reins of the two Palominos. Yellow Eagle walked over and took a canteen from one of them, throwing it to Irene, then mounted up. “We need the horses. Ours are easily worn out from always running from the soldiers,” he told her. “I leave you water.”
Irene wondered why he was bothering to explain, as though he was suddenly sorry to leave her here without a horse. And why was he leaving the water? Their eyes held a moment longer, and then he turned his horse.
The Indians rode off, leaving her alone with Hank and the dead horse. Irene had no time to wonder why she was spared. She stumbled over to Hank’s body, trying to roll it onto its side again. She could feel he was already getting stiff, and she recoiled, a shuddering groan of horror engulfing her, rippling through her and coming out of her in vomit.
She threw up until it seemed her own stomach would come out of her throat. She finally calmed enough that she could rinse her mouth. She got to her feet and stepped away, staring at Hank, whimpering his name over and over. How could life end so quickly? How could a man be holding her and making love to her one moment, and be dead the next? Her body shook in bitter sobs, and she stumbled away. She had to get help. She had to get men out here to pick up Hank’s body before the crows and buzzards and wolves got to it.
She clung to the canteen and started walking, the hot sun beating down on her bare head. She remembered then that her hat was still tied to her horse. She felt a wetness at the collar of her dress and realized her throat must be bleeding where Yellow Eagle had cut it with his knife. She could hardly believe she had come face-to-face with the notorious warrior and had been let go with nothing more than the cut.
But Hank! Hank had not escaped! There would be no lovemaking in his bed tonight. Never again would he hold her! Never again would she hear his soothing voice or feel his big, strong hands moving over her. Never again would they go on a roundup together, go riding together.
She walked blindly toward what she hoped was the right direction. Someone had to come and get poor Hank’s body. She walked for what seemed hours, the sun beating down on her, blood soaking and drying on the front of her dress, a hot dizziness overwhelming her until finally she sank to the ground.
What did it really matter? Hank was dead, and she would probably die, too. Who would care? Her mother was busy with Kirkland Enterprises, the only thing she really cared about. Chad certainly didn’t care anymore. He had all his other women. Elly hated her. Hank was dead, and John was lost in his world of whiskey and self-pity.
But then there was Father. Kirk would care, and she was her father’s daughter. She had to be strong, a survivor, like David Kirkland. And there was Ramon—Ramon! Yes, there was always Ramon, faithful, loving Ramon. He would understand all of this. He would not blame her. Ramon. She could see his face, see him reaching out, telling her to be strong, telling her that no matter what happened, he would always be there for her.
She got up and started walking again. Maybe, she thought, she could walk all the way to Denver and to Ramon.
The doctor came into the main room to talk to Chad and Elly and John, who had been summoned from Colorado Springs by one of Hank’s men. Irene had been found lying on the ground a half mile from Hank’s ranch house. That had been yesterday. She had managed to tell the man what had happened, and he had sent a man riding hard to Colorado Springs to get a doctor and Irene’s family. Other men went searching for Hank’s body, while Irene was taken by wagon back to her own house, where Flor took care of her until the doctor came.
The entire atmosphere among the ranch hands was one of great sorrow for a good man lost, a man deeply respected in southern Colorado. In Colorado Springs wires were sent to the various forts to request that soldiers hunt down Yellow Eagle.
John sat in a big leather chair in the corner of the room, quietly drinking, watching Chad and Elly sullenly, angry with Elly for seeming so unconcerned, still suspicious of his sister and his brother-in-law. He couldn’t prove anything, but something about the way they looked at each other, the way they stood a little too close when working together, made him wonder if there was more going on than anyone knew about. He knew Elly, knew she had had a crush on Chad when she was younger, knew what a brat she had always been and how she felt about Irene.
“She’s going to be all right,” the doctor told Chad. “I cleaned and bandaged her throat. There might be a faint scar, but nothing dramatic. She’s been through a pretty rough time. I hope you realize how lucky you are. Anyone who meets up with Yellow Eagle, especially a woman, and survives the encounter with only a cut has walked away from a sure death. Seeing Hank Loring killed before her eyes was traumatic for her. Maybe you should send her back to Denver for a while.”
Chad nodded. “I’ll talk to her…see what she wants to do.”
The doctor frowned. “What I can’t understand is the bruises.”
“Bruises?” Chad glanced at Elly, who gave him a half smile. She knew what he had done, had delighted in the thought of Chad accusing Irene of infidelities, of Irene being beaten into submission.
“She has a lot of bruises, but not from this incident. They’re old bruises. I asked her where she got them, and she just said she fell; but the bruises I saw didn’t come from a simple fall.” The doctor held Chad’s eyes, noticing Chad’s look of sudden self-defense and near threat. Flor, who had come out of the bedroom, cast hateful glances at Chad, but she said nothing. These were matters for rich people. Old Mexican women did not get involved.
“If my wife says she fell, then she fell,” Chad answered. “If you’re through with her, I’d like to go talk to her.”
The doctor sighed. “I left some laudanum on the table beside the bed if she happens to need any for pain or to help her sleep. There really isn’t anything more I can do.” He put on his hat. “I’ll be going back to Colorado Springs now. I just hope the soldiers find Yellow Eagle and hang him by his heels. Hank Loring was a damn good man, a damn good man. This just makes me sick.”
“Yes. Us, too,” Elly purred. “I guess we’re going to have to find a new ranch manager, Chad. Mother might want to move quickly to merge the Lazy T in with the B & K. I can go back with the doctor and wire her, if you like.”
John thought how like his mother Elly was—in a time of such personal horror for Irene, Elly was already thinking about the effect Hank’s death would have on the business.
“Yes. It’s about time we let her know what’s happened here,” Chad told her. “Tell Mother not to worry about Irene. Tell her I’m bringing her back to Denver to recuperate. We can’t leave her here alone, and I have to get back to Colorado Springs as quickly as I can. I’ll leave things to you and John for a few days.”
Elly rose, walking over to get her cape. “Don’t you want to see your sister first?” the doctor asked her.
“Oh, she’s probably awfully upset. It won’t do any good for me to go in there. She needs Chad right now.” Elly glanced at Chad, giving him a half grin. “I’ll see you when you get back to Colorado Springs.”
Chad nodded, and John took another swallow of whiskey as Elly left with the doctor. Chad glanced at him, a look of disgust on his face. “Why don’t you quit the damn liquor?” he told John. “You’re ruining yourself, John, and I have to tell you I’m losing my respect for you.”
John snickered. “Seems to me, brother-in-law, you should be more concerned with Irene right now. Why don’t you tell me where she got those bruises? I remember one day you went home in the middle of the week, came back the same day with a bruised hand and strange-looking scratches on the side of your face.”
Chad held his eyes. “Your mother wouldn’t be very happy to know how bad your drinking problem is, young man.”
“I don’t give a damn what my mother thinks of anything. But you do!” John got up from his chair, his bloodshot eyes blazing. “You beat her, didn’t you?”
“You’re drunk,” Chad sneered.
Their eyes met in a challenge. Chad swallowed then, putting on a slight grin. “It was a one-time thing, John—a misunderstanding. I came back to talk to Irene about it, to make up for it if I could, but Hank wouldn’t let me in the door.”
“Good for Hank! I’m sorry as hell he’s dead. You’re the one who deserves to die.”
Chad sighed. “Look, John, don’t say anything to Irene’s parents. Surely you realize this is between man and wife, that it’s Irene’s decision what she tells them, not yours.”
“I won’t say a damn thing. I’m just telling you what I’ll do if you hurt her again!”
Chad nodded. “Then we have an understanding. I like you, John. I want to help you all I can. That’s why I’m concerned about your drinking.”
“Just go see your beloved wife. I don’t buy your charm anymore, Chad. Irene hasn’t been happy since the day she got married. I don’t know what all is going on, and I know some of the talk going around about Irene and Hank, but I’m betting that if she turned to Hank, she had damn good reason! She’s a good woman…too good for the likes of you!”
John walked to the door, going outside and slamming it shut. Chad glanced at Flor, who gave him a scathing look. He realized she must know what he had done. “You mind your own business, old woman, or you’ll be off this ranch and wandering the desert.” He turned and went into the bedroom, and Flor quietly began picking up the broken bottle.
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