by Nan Ryan
All the horses had undoubtedly made it, although the vaqueros were able to round up only half the remuda. The loss of pack burros and equipment was a heavy one, the unfortunate animals having been too weighted down to swim out of the canyon. Supplies had broken loose from packs and washed away, the biggest loss being that of the weapons. Of the many pistols and rifles brought along from Santa Fe, the only ones left were the Colt. 44 Grady wore strapped around his hips and the Winchester rifle Taos had snatched from his saddle scabbard.
Discussions of the day’s storm and the losses went on over a late supper. Listening quietly, Elizabeth inwardly cringed when she heard Grady say—again—that the cloudburst had started shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon and had lasted until exactly five-thirty-five. Which meant that she had spent four and a half hours making love to West Quarternight.
And it had not been enough.
Risking a glance across the campfire at West, Elizabeth caught him staring at her. She calmly looked away, held her head high, but the little muscles in her throat trembled. She looked at Edmund and was uneasy to find that he, too, was staring at her, a puzzling expression on his face.
She gave him a small smile, which he returned, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was on his mind. When, moments later, Edmund pleaded tiredness and said he was going to bed, she knew something was bothering him. Always before he had stayed up to the very last man, drinking his coffee, enjoying the camaraderie and the checker games with Grady.
Five minutes after Edmund had gone, West quietly rose and walked away. Grady called after him, “Now where you goin’, Sonny? I thought we’d all—”
“For a walk,” said West, and never slowed his pace.
Soon the Mexican helpers scattered and only Elizabeth, Grady, and Taos were left at the campfire. Chuckling, Grady produced the checkerboard, overjoyed that it had survived the flood. Elizabeth inwardly sighed. He would insist she play him, and a game of checkers was simply more than she could bear tonight.
Board and checkers in hand, Grady started toward her, grinning broadly. But Taos stepped forward, put a hand on Grady’s shoulder, and stopped him. Grady looked up at the big Navajo, frowned, and said, “What do you mean she don’t wanna play checkers? How do you know?” Taos gave his head a decisive shake, tapped his own massive chest with a forefinger, and Grady smiled again. “You’ll play me? Hellfire, you ain’t played me in ages. You wanna make a little bet on the outcome? Got any money on you?”
Chuckling happily again, Grady hunkered down close to the campfire to set up the board. Elizabeth exchanged glances with Taos, silently thanking him for intervening. Looking back into the brightly burning fire, she wondered if the mute Navajo, who seemed to see and know everything, knew about West and her.
Lost immediately in troubled thought, Elizabeth was hardly aware of Grady and Taos’s presence. After today with West, she was more confused than ever. There was, however, one thing of which she was absolutely certain. She couldn’t stay married to Dane Curtin. She could not be his wife. She would tell Edmund of her decision tomorrow and Dane as soon as they found him.
“Owww!” Grady’s loud yelp interrupted Elizabeth’s thoughts. “Damnation!” he swore.
“What is it?” she moved to him, her brows knit.
“A gol-darned splinter,” he told her, making a face, squeezing on his forefinger. “Came off this ol’ beat-up checkerboard.”
Taos, ever resourceful, had already gone for a needle and a salvaged bottle of whiskey. When he returned, Elizabeth volunteered to remove the pesky splinter. Nodding, the Navajo uncorked the whiskey, poured a trickle over Grady’s finger, turned him over to Elizabeth, and sat down beside her. Using the campfire’s glow for light, Elizabeth bent to her work.
“Hope the sight of blood don’t make you sick, missy,” said Grady.
Eyes trained on her task, Elizabeth idly replied, “Don’t worry, I saw plenty of blood in a field hospital in Shreveport.”
“Shreveport, Louisiana?” Grady said. “Why, Sonny was in Shreveport during the last days of the war.”
Elizabeth’s head snapped up. Grady was grinning from ear to ear and looking like the cat who swallowed the canary. Her aching heart plummeted. West had told them about her. Had told them everything, the bastard!
“He told you about me,” she said, “didn’t he! Didn’t he! Damn him, he told you about the night in the stockade and everything else!”
“Huh?” Grady said, still grinning, but puzzled.
Sure both men knew everything, Elizabeth said, “You knew West first met me years ago in the Shreveport stockade! Admit it.” She released Grady’s finger, handing him the needle. “He told you everything. He told you I’m a murderess, but he doesn’t know the whole story. I’m no murderess. I’m not, I’m not!”
The splinter forgotten, Grady stuck the needle in his collar, grabbed Elizabeth’s elbow, and made her look at him. He was no longer smiling. “Listen to me, missy. If West knew you back in Shreveport, he never mentioned it to us, did he, Taos?” The Navajo forcefully shook his head. Grady continued. “And he danged sure never has said nothin’ about you being no murderer.”
“He didn’t?” Elizabeth was skeptical, yet hopeful. “He didn’t say that … he never told …” Her words trailed away and she regretted she had jumped to conclusions.
She could feel Grady’s blue, questioning eyes on her face. And the unreadable black ones of Taos. When she heard Grady say, “Now, missy, I’d be the first one to admit that Sonny can be the bastard of all times when he wants to be. He’s willful and stubborn and it seems like there ain’t nothin’ means much to him. Lately, he’s been downright mean and inconsiderate. But he ain’t a man to go carryin’ tales. West is one close-mouthed feller, if ever there was one.”
“He is?” Elizabeth turned and lifted her eyes to his. “He never—”
“Swear to God,” said Grady. “He don’t talk much about hisself nor nobody else. Why, I’ll bet you don’t know hardly a thing about him, do you? He ain’t told you nothin’ about hisself, now, has he?”
“No. No, he hasn’t,” said Elizabeth. “Tell me about him, Grady. Please. Tell me about West Quarternight.”
“I’ll tell you all I know, which ain’t that much.” Grady smiled suddenly and added, “And it would be even less if I hadn’t a caught him dead drunk a couple a times and took to questionin’ him.”
Grady stroked his flowing white beard and began. “Weston Dale was born and raised back in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. He was the first of …”
Grady told her that West had been brought up in bone-crushing poverty on a sharecropper’s farm outside Hopkinsville by a shiftless father who rarely worked and a loving mother who was always tired and frail. From the time he was four years old, West was working in the fields from sun to sun. The oldest of six children, West took care of the family after his father ran off and left them.
When war broke out, West joined the Union Army and sent every penny he earned to his mother. Still, it was not enough. In the cold winter of sixty-three, the entire Quarternight family, without means to keep warm, came down with influenza and died. That same year, the young woman West had loved since boyhood married a wealthy landowner from Louisville without so much as writing to let West know.
Grady watched Elizabeth as he talked. He saw the many changing emotions march across her expressive features. Soon she was asking questions, and he supplied answers. Recalling the night in camp when she’d seen West awaken from a bad dream calling to a Captain Brooks, she said softly, “Grady, who is Captain Brooks?”
Grady didn’t ask where she had heard the name. “Brooks was West’s closest friend back in the army. They was like brothers, them two.” He shook his white head and added, “West saw every one of his best buddies die in the war. Sometimes I think he wonders why they died and he lived.” He again shook his head, contemplating. “I don’t know how Brooks died, but I do know that Sonny still has nightmares about it and I can’t
help but wonder if he don’t blame hisself for Brooks’s death. I’ve asked over and over, but he won’t talk about it.” Grady fell silent again, then finally added, “Guess lots a folks got somethin’ that bothers ’em.” He yawned and stroked his beard. “Sometimes the only cure is to face up to it.”
“Yes,” murmured Elizabeth thoughtfully, “I think you’re probably right.”
Before Elizabeth knew it, she was telling Grady and Taos about herself. How she’d been a pampered, happy girl in Natchez, Mississippi. How she had lost all her family except her father in the war. She told them of being accused of murder. Said she was innocent, that a drunken officer, Colonel Frederick C. Dobbs, had assaulted her outside a field hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana.
Tears sprang to Elizabeth’s eyes and she made no attempt to wipe them away. Her slender shoulders shook as she told how the colonel had dragged her into the forest and tried to rape her. She had picked up a rock and hit him on the head, but she’d never meant to kill him. The army tribunal had seen it differently. She had been accused of murder and sentenced to die. They threw her into a stockade cell with West Quarternight. Ultimately, West had saved her life.
Elizabeth paused and stared silently into the fire with tear-blurred vision, then continued. She went on to tell about teaching in New York and looking after her ailing father until he died. She said she had married Dane Curtin by proxy because she was tired of being lonely, tired of being poor, and she had nowhere else to turn.
“But it was a mistake,” she admitted sadly. “I did Dane a terrible injustice. I don’t love him; I never did.”
The silent Taos, who had listened as attentively as Grady, reached out and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. She slowly turned to look at him and was surprised and touched to see big tears swimming in his flat black eyes.
“Oh, Taos,” she said, pressing her cheek to his hand, “what would I do without you and Grady?” He squeezed her shoulder, smiled understandingly, blinked back his tears, and she could see in his eyes that he knew—had known all along—what had happened between West and her.
Looking straight into those intelligent black eyes, Elizabeth said, “Taos, you see everything. Please, tell me. How does West really feel about me?” Taos smiled, laid his big spread hand directly over his heart, and patted up and down in a rapid fluttering motion. Elizabeth’s own heart lurched with hope.
Behind her, she heard Grady say, “Sonny went for a walk, but I bet Taos could find him for you.” Elizabeth turned back to Grady. He stroked his white beard and added, “You might wanna tell him what you’ve been a-tellin’ us.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said, knowing suddenly it was the thing to do. She had to talk to West, to tell him the truth. To tell him everything. Even if it made no difference to him. Even if he remained cold and uncaring, she had to tell him. “I must talk to him.”
“Now, miss, you have to approach West without fear,” was Grady’s advice. “You have to be strong and totally honest with him. If you hesitate, well, you’re lost. Now go on, Taos will help you find him.”
West sat atop a jagged table of sandstone overlooking the starlit desert far below. Long legs dangling over the lip of the ledge, he was grim-faced and melancholy. To his left was an almost perpendicular dropoff of the boulder-strewn bluff. To the right was the path through thick cedars back to the camp. Below was the broad expanse of desertlands they would traverse come morning. Above was a sky filled with millions of bright, glittering stars.
But West saw none of it.
It made no difference where he looked, left, right, below, or above, he saw only Elizabeth Curtin. Her beautiful face was there before him, even when he closed his eyes. Try as he might, he couldn’t get her off his mind, out of his heart.
He felt like a foolish lovesick schoolboy, only he was a far bigger fool than any young boy. He was mooning over another man’s wife, a woman who was not only an adulteress, but a murderess as well. West ground his teeth.
The afternoon’s loving hadn’t cured him as he had hoped. West trembled as a longing that was deeply physical swept through him. He still wanted her. Wanted her now more than ever. Was sick with wanting her.
Lost in troubled thought, West didn’t notice Elizabeth when she stepped out from the dense growth of trees into the starlight.
Elizabeth paused, looked at the solitary figure poised on the edge of the rimrock cliff, and felt a wave of dizziness sweep over her. Before her was a very different West than the one she’d come to know. Gone was the cocksure, impatient, impervious Quarternight. Missing also was the fun-loving, tormenting, teasing Quarternight. Nowhere in sight was the sexy, hot-blooded, immoral Quarternight.
The man sitting on the rocky ledge with his shoulders slumped minutely and his head bent slightly, appeared to be vulnerable, lonely, and unhappy. Elizabeth bit her lip. She could stand to be unhappy herself, but she couldn’t bear to see him unhappy.
She hurried up the path toward him. West heard the pebbles crunch beneath her feet, turned his dark head, and saw her, but said nothing. Her heartbeat drumming in her ears, Elizabeth climbed up to him, sank to her knees beside him, and said nervously, “I’ve come to see you, West.”
“Well, now you have,” was his reply, but his voice was low, soft, and in his silver eyes was a sad, brooding expression. A forelock tumbled across his brow and for a brief moment he looked like a little boy. An unhappy little boy.
Elizabeth sat down beside him. “We have to talk.”
His head swung back around. He looked out at the shimmering desert. “Do we really have anything to say to each other?”
“Look at me, West,” she commanded, placing a gentle hand on his arm. He turned to face her. “You may have nothing to say to me, but I have plenty to say to you. Will you listen?”
He shrugged dismissively. “All the conversation in the world won’t change a thing.”
“Maybe not. But at least I can go to my grave one day knowing I tried.” She took a deep breath and thrust out her closed fist before him. Opening it, she lifted her hand up to his face and said, “Do you know what this is?”
West’s eyes fell on the shiny little object resting in her palm. “Looks like a button. A brass button.”
“Not just any brass button, West. It’s the brass button I pulled from your uniform jacket in my excitement that night in the Shreveport stockade. I kept it all these years and there hasn’t been one bedtime in my life that I haven’t looked at this brass button and remembered that night with you.”
“Oh, Jesus,” West said, shaking his head, his eyes closing in agony, “I wish I’d never seen you, kissed you, held you in my arms.”
Elizabeth couldn’t have heard him utter any sweeter words. He had given himself away. He did care. He couldn’t forget her, any more than she could forget him.
“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Please, West, open your eyes and look at me.”
He sighed wearily, lifted his eyes to hers, and said, “What do you want me to say? That it was all my fault. All right, I will. It was my fault and I—”
“No, it wasn’t. I’m as much to blame as you, if not more. What I’ve done was very wrong, unforgivable. But I’m not quite as bad as you think me. If you’ll give me the chance, I’ll explain what I mean.”
Before he could reply, she told him all about herself, leaving out nothing. It was the strangest of sensations. Suddenly she wanted them to know each other well. To understand their shared secrets. She started to move closer, warming to her story.
West listened in silence as she spoke. Elizabeth nervously fingered the ring old Micoma had given her; it rested in the hollow of her throat, a silk bandanna threaded through the shiny silver and deep turquoise band.
She told West she had accidentally killed Colonel Frederick C. Dobbs when he attempted to rape her. She swore to him that she had been a virgin that night in the Shreveport stockade. That she had married Dane Curtin by proxy, that the marriage had not been consummated. On hearing that, he l
ooked as if he were about to speak. She quickly pressed a finger to his lips. “Please, West,” she pleaded, “you have to believe me. Please listen.”
He kissed her finger, but his eyes remained brooding.
She hurried on, “The marriage will never be consummated; I am going to have it annulled.”
He looked at her for a long moment. “You’ll be making a big mistake if you do that.”
“No, I won’t. The mistake was marrying him when I couldn’t even bear to throw away a silly little brass button.” Her hand reached out to his dark, bearded face. The touch of love. Cherishing him. Sending a bolt of pain through his chest.
He took her hand and enclosed it in both of his. “Elizabeth, I’m all the things you’ve accused me of being.” He smiled fleetingly. “Worthless, heartless, selfish, no good—”
“I know about you, West. Grady told me.”
He stiffened. “What did Grady tell you?”
“About your boyhood when you were poor. About you losing your family. Of losing the girl you loved to a rich man. And of losing all your friends in the war.”
To her surprise, West began to talk about the past. He told more than Grady had known. He told her more than he’d ever told anyone else. He talked at length about his family, about the pretty young girl who had promised to love him forever and then had married a rich landowner’s son while he was away at war. Told her about the horrors he saw in war, the friends he had loved and lost.
“Sometimes I think,” he said wistfully, “all that was good and soft in me died in the war.”
“No, West, that isn’t true. I’ve seen you with old Micoma. No man could be more kind and gentle than you are to her. There’s still plenty of good in you.”