by Janet Dailey
“No. I’ll expect your written report.” Bettendorf dismissed him, apparently realizing how long he’d kept Cutter standing there listening to his defensive explanations of why he wanted to shut the book on Hannah Wade.
Before he reached his quarters, Wade was intercepted by the owner/editor of the Gazette in nearby Silver City. A derby hat was perched atop Boler’s head and his checkered jacket was unbuttoned around his large middle, his chest spanned by the gold watch chain hooked to his vest. His sideburns were long, flowing into his heavily jowled cheeks, a style popularly called Dundrearies. Shrewd and intelligent, Hy Boler had the look of a man who knew a good story was before him and intended to have it.
“Major Wade, I can’t tell you how badly I felt when I heard about your wife’s abduction by the Apaches.” He’d already run one story when the word had first spread to Silver City. Below the Gazette’s banner, the headlines had read, “Army Wife Carried Off by Savages” with the subheading, “Gallant Cavalry Officer Pursues Apaches to Rescue His Wife.” It was a sensational story, and the eastern trades had already picked it up. “What happened? Were you able to catch up with those murdering savages?”
“No. We lost the trail. The wind came up and wiped out their tracks,” Wade admitted tersely, in no mood for this questioning, yet aware that it was never wise for an ambitious officer to ignore the press.
“You didn’t find your wife, then?”
Grimly, Wade recognized this as a tactful way of asking whether she was dead. “No. The Apaches still have her.”
“You believe she’s alive?”
“Yes,” he said forcefully. “And I will not quit looking until I find her. Our scouts will be spreading the word to all the friendly Apaches that I’ll pay a ransom for her safe return. You can put in your newspaper, Mr. Boler, that I’m offering a reward for any information about her.”
“Will you be going out again to search for her?”
“Every time I leave this fort, sir, I will be looking for my wife. I will not be content until I have her back,” Stephen asserted. “Now, if you will excuse me?”
Upon entering the rooms he had shared with Hannah, Stephen immediately felt the force of her absence, the sense of something vital missing. An emptiness seemed to ring through the place. His steps slowed, then stopped altogether as he looked around. He removed his dusty campaign hat absently and laid his gloves inside the crown, then set both on a side table.
Some invisible weight dragged at him, increasing the slant of his broad shoulders. Inside he was emptied, a hollow ache occupying the void. He looked at a framed sampler hanging on the wall, its finely stitched design all Hannah’s work, and thought of her soft, smooth hands, the gentle strength of their touch on his arm. So many memories came to him—the evenings they spent together when he read aloud the latest novel to come their way; the picnics she arranged, complete with wine and crystal, at some surprisingly idyllic site she’d found; the times they had raced their horses across the flats and she’d let him win.
How he adored her! She was more than an officer’s lady, more than his wife and companion; she was his island in a sea of sand, the one who made his life bearable. He needed her—her intelligence, her wit, and her love. She had believed in him, which had allowed him to believe in himself.
Stephen followed the narrow hall to the bedroom door and walked through it into the room where they’d spent so many nights together. The shock of seeing a woman standing in front of the wardrobe stopped him short. At first his glance couldn’t get past the gown she held, the brown one shot with gold threads that Hannah had worn to the party for Lieutenant Sloane and his bride. When he could drag his gaze from it, Stephen noticed the coffee-brown color of the woman’s skin and recognized the laundress, Cimmy Lou.
“I didn’t mean t’ startle you, Majuh.” Her voice was a throaty drawl, a match for those knowing eyes that watched him.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded, finding her presence disruptive.
“Miz Goodson asked me to come by an’ tidy up some.” She smoothed a hand over the shimmering gown. “What d’you want me to do with Miz Wade’s things? Miz Goodson said maybe you want ’em packed away.”
Turning, Stephen unfastened the front of his army Jacket and crossed to the vanity table and mirror. The table was nothing more than packing crates disguised by material from an old blue satin gown of Hannah’s, pleated and flounced to skirt the wooden boxes. Stephen picked up the gilded hairbrush, part of a vanity set of comb, brush, and hand mirror. A strand of dark auburn hair was caught in its bristles. Memory played a cruel trick, flashing him the mental image of a scalp he’d seen once—freshly taken and bloody.
“She shore did have some pretty things,” Cimmy Lou declared.
“No!” Mindless of her comment, Stephen shouted at the image in his head, a roar of pain and anger. It vanished.
“Majuh?” A long-fingered brown hand touched his arm.
He jerked away from the contact. “I don’t want anything done. Leave everything as it is,” he ordered, and finally looked at the colored woman. “Put the gown back where you found it. I don’t want you touching anything of hers.”
“Yes, suh.”
“Hello? Hello-oo?” A female voice trilled the questioning call, the sound seeming to originate in the vicinity of the front parlor.
Frowning, Stephen left the bedroom to find out who else had gained entry into his living quarters. In the parlor doorway he paused and refastened his uniform jacket when he saw captain Goodson’s wife standing by the side table, his hat and gloves in her hands. Her amber hair was arranged atop her head in rolled curls, a single ringlet dangling from the back, and a small navy blue hat that matched the trim on her serge suit in a lighter shade of blue crowned it all.
“Mrs. Goodson, forgive me.” He apologized for his disheveled appearance, belatedly noticing that he still held Hannah’s hairbrush in his hand. “I didn’t know who was here.”
“I knocked, but you must not have heard me.” Her hand made a small, graceful gesture toward the front door.
“I was . . . in the rear.” He glanced at the hairbrush, his hold tightening on it slightly.
Maude Goodson looked at it, too. A shimmer of tears glittered in her china-blue eyes when she lifted her glance to his face. “I knew you had returned and I—I wanted you to know how sorry I am about your wife.”
Her sincerity was unmistakable, but Stephen was conscious of her delicate phrasing, not actually stating whether Hannah was dead, missing, or captured. He knew that she and Hannah had been close, as close as any army wives could be, considering their peripatetic lifestyle.
“You are most thoughtful, Mrs. Goodson.”
“While you were gone, I had Cimmy Lou come by to clean.” She appeared hesitant. “I wasn’t certain what you wanted done with your wife’s things.”
“Nothing.” He was quietly emphatic about it. “Everything stays exactly as it is.”
Her expression grew tender. “Of course, Major,” She smiled in warm understanding and sympathy. “Would you care to accompany Captain Goodson and myself to chapel this evening?”
His hesitation was slight, “Thank you, yes.”
“We must remember, Major, that the Lord knows of our sufferings, and we must believe that Hannah is in his care.”
“Yes.” Stephen deferred to her faith, since she was the daughter of an army chaplain. Hard facts were more his line. As far as he was concerned, his wife was in the hands of the Apaches. And if that thought didn’t tear a man’s guts out, he wasn’t much of a man.
Mrs. Goodson laid his campaign hat and leather gauntlets aside. “We will come by to pick you up later this evening, Major.”
“I shall be waiting.” He walked her to the door.
Bathed, freshly shaven, and dressed in a clean uniform, Cutter angled his body against a post supporting the ramada roof outside the bachelor quarters. Water-filled ollas hung nearby, an occasional cool stir of air reaching him. Mess call
had sounded some time ago, bringing the soldiers to the hall. Retreat was over and stretching shadows covered more and more ground as the sun settled in the western sky. He smoked his cigar, the first one in four days that didn’t taste of desert alkali or salty sweat, and watched the flow of officers, especially those with wives, into the chapel. Wade was among them, in the company of the Goodsons and the Bettendorfs. Cutter made no move to follow them.
Not long afterward, he heard the muffled resonance of their voices lifted in praiseful singing. His cigar was smoked down to the butt, so he shoved away from the post and went down the steps to the walk. Strolling, Cutter made a slow circle of the fort’s grounds, the children playing and laughing along Suds Row drawing a rare smile from him.
When he reached the small cemetery that lay on the fort’s perimeter, he paused to search out the two freshly dug graves among the little mounds. They stood out sharply from the older ones. The elements here were quick to reclaim what belonged to them, the older mounds of disturbed sandy soil being slowly leveled by the desert wind until they blended with the rest of the ground, leaving only faint outlines of the graves’ dimensions. Soon, even those would be gone.
As Cutter stood by the new graves, he remembered how distraught Mrs. Sloane had been when he’d stopped by her quarters before supper to pay his respects. She had not wanted comfort. Sloane would live in his wife’s memory forever. But a time would come when no one remembered the way he laughed or recalled the firm way he shook hands. Just as the desert absorbed his grave, time would absorb him, too. Nothing would be left.
“Death makes it easier to forget.” Cutter recalled the essence of Bettendorf’s words during their discussion of Hannah Wade.
With an obstinate set to his features, he dug a heel into the sandy ground and drew a small trench around the oblong shape of Sloane’s grave, more sharply defining its outline. The desert would require that much more time to weather it away. The inevitable was merely postponed. He left the cemetery, taking the long way to his rooms. The evening wind lifted around him, scented with the night’s coolness.
Dark was settling and he felt the loneliness of his evening walk. On the edges of his mind were memories, still sweet, and wounds, still aching. He’d heard it said that when a man finds a woman, he finds his ambition, too. In his case, it worked the opposite, he supposed.
All by choice. And the decision was still one he wouldn’t change even if he could go back and do it over. There was too much hate—the hate of a high-born southern aristocrat’s daughter for a blue-bellied Yankee officer of the occupying army. Eventually she had been able to forgive him that sin, but the idea that his command would be a company of colored soldiers had been more than her plantation-bred heart could tolerate. She had issued an ultimatum—her or the army. In the end, it hadn’t been much of a contest.
The army hadn’t wholly satisfied him, but it fed his prime hungers: for the hard discipline and the thrill of action, of men riding, fighting, and sweating, and the wicked satisfaction that burns in a man when he’s in the middle of a good fight. But the army had disappointed him, too, with its politics and prejudice, its seniority system that put inferior men in superior ranks, and its bureaucratic corruption that put an ill-equipped, ill-supplied, and undermanned force in the field. Lately, he’d been giving a lot of thought to quitting the service. After twelve years in the cavalry, following the guidon had lost its glamour.
But if he left the army, where would he go? What would he do? The only knowledge that the army had given him that was worthwhile on the outside dealt with horses and the kind of remounts the army needed in large quantity. Cutter supposed that if he ever got his bellyful of the army, he might go into the horse business.
CHAPTER 8
GATITA APPROACHED THE MORNING FIRE WHERE HANNAH sat, absorbing some of its meager warmth. The Apache woman moved at the stately pace of a woman growing heavy with child. She stopped beside Hannah and dropped a worn pair of the distinctive curl-toed Apache boots on the sand next to her.
“N’deh b’keh, boots. Wear feet,” Gatita told her.
“Gracias,” Hannah responded in Spanish, and quickly gathered up the high moccasins with the red strip painted on the seams of the turned-up toes.
After a week of doing chores around the rancheria from dawn to dusk, she had almost reached the point where the bottoms of her feet were so callused she didn’t need shoes. Perhaps Gatita had noticed that and no longer regarded her bare feet as a guarantee that Hannah wouldn’t try to run away.
Her body had healed. Almost all the scabs were gone and her skin had turned a shade of toasted brown from the sunburn. The meager helpings of food she received were not sufficient to enable her to put back on the weight she’d lost, but she was acquiring a wiry toughness, a resilient strength that came back after shorter rests. The diet of the Apache left a lot to be desired. She kept remembering what a delicious turkey galantine Mrs. Bettendorf made, and Maude Goodson’s salmon croquettes.
“Is time of Many Leaves,” Gatita said.
“No comprendo.” Hannah shook her head, grateful for this second language they had in common. She could not imagine the terror of everything they said being so much gibberish to her.
“When things grow, Many Leaves.” Her explanations, if Gatita deigned to make any, were invariably curt. “Ugashi, we go—all women—gather mescal before flower come.”
This explained why she had been provided with the moccasins. But the expedition was not the simple foraging walk along the mesa top that Hannah surmised it would be. Supplies were packed to last for several days and loaded onto horses along with large baskets. Seven Apache women plus Hannah set out from the rancheria and took the rocky, boulder-strewn trail down the barranca. Three of the older women rode on horses.
Many exchanges were made in Apache as they traversed the rough trail, the voices pitched low but lilting with a gossipy flavor. Hannah listened to them, catching a feeling of sisterhood and a sense that maybe all women were the same when they got off by themselves away from the menfolk.
When they were out of the narrow, steep canyon, they headed in the direction of some dry hills. Gatita appeared to be tiring. When she stumbled, Hannah happened to be closest and steadied her with a supporting hand.
“Do you wish to ride the horse?” Hannah was leading the spotted horse. Always she seemed to be caught in a state of ambivalence toward Gatita, at one moment hating anyone who deprived her of her freedom and the next seeking a scrap of human companionship, Hannah didn’t understand it. This female Apache treated her like dirt, kicking and striking her; yet she also gave her salve for her burned skin, buckskin clothes and moccasins, food and water. Gatita was everything evil and everything good; she was the madonna with child and the mother carrying Satan’s seed.
“No horse,” Gatita said, and patted the rounded arc of her stomach. “Because of baby, no can ride horse, no can carry basket, no can eat piñon nuts, no can watch Ganhs—“ The list of restrictions placed on her was enumerated in fun.
“—and no can have Lutero’s pico,” one of the other women giggled.
“No can do that till baby stops sucking. Be crazy by then,” another declared, and laughed with a tittering sound.
The conversation lapsed from Spanish into Apache and Hannah couldn’t follow it anymore. But she’d gleaned enough from the previous exchange to realize that an Apache couple were not intimate during the term of the woman’s pregnancy or while the infant nursed. So all the lust Lutero couldn’t expend on his wife he had unleashed on Hannah those nights on the trail. The wrenching physical and mental agony of all she’d been through nearly swamped her. Her mood veered toward rage. She didn’t deserve any of this!
But it was all so much wasted energy. The sun and the heat and the walking soon drained her of her anger.
The plant the Apache called the mescal was the same that Stephen had once identified as the century plant or agave. The heart of it, which the Apache women had come to gather, was contain
ed within the basal cluster of leaves. And the stretch of hills where they stopped abounded with the desert plant.
Once the base of the stem containing the head was cut off, the sharp-pointed leaves had to be trimmed. Hannah soon learned to keep her eyes half-closed against the squirting juice from the leaves as the women were slicing them off. The end result was a mescal heart about the size of a cabbage head with the appearance of a giant artichoke.
Not trusted at this early stage of her captivity with a knife, Hannah had the task of carting all the mescal heads, as well as the edible stalks, to a central location. A huge pit was dug, roughly three feet deep and twelve feet long. She lugged firewood to the spot until the pit was filed, then helped to bring flat stones to lay on top.
After two days of gathering mescal, the Apache women made a ceremony of lighting the pit fire while praying to their gods. When it burned down, all of them hurried to throw a thick layer of wet grass onto it, followed by a layer of mescal, more wet grass, and a foot of dirt. Then another fire was built on top of that mound. And the mescal baked.
All one day and part of the next, they waited for the mescal to finish cooking. The time wasn’t idly spent, since Many Leaves was also the season when the first wild onions appeared and other edibles were ready, certain flowers and berries. Hannah’s inexperience made her useless at foraging, so her tasks were mainly camp chores, the hard menial work she had always hired someone to do.
Not far from where the baking pit and their camp were located, some rock tanks provided their water source, reservoirs carved out of solid stone by the elements eons ago, natural containers to catch and hold the rare downpours of rain in the desert. Steep walls leaned protectively over the series of three basins and shaded them from the sun, thus preventing rapid evaporation. They were completely hidden, no trees or green things growing within the barren tumble of stone and boulders to betray their presence.
Sent to fetch water, Hannah snaked in and around the maze of fallen rock worn smooth by time and the elements, following an unseen path whose twists she knew because she had traveled it so often these last few days. The natural tanks themselves were small, bathtub-size and almost that deep. The rock lip around them was smooth, a solid slab of stone. The stone retained a cool temperature, rarely getting much direct sunlight.