The man drew a deep breath, but when he looked at her she saw the shame in his troubled eyes. "Ma’am, I am disobeying orders as it is. General Carleton issued orders that every—”
"I know,” she said. She remembered the previous year when she had first visited Fort Sumner and seen the barren, desolate Pecos prairie that was to be the reservation— and she remembered not really believing Grant’s words to Lario . . . that every man, woman, and child resisting the move to the Bosque Redondo would be killed.
The sergeant nodded his head toward one Indian, a wrinkled, bony old man with matted long white hair who wore chains at his wrists. "That’s Chief Manuelito’s father-in-law. Twice he tried to drive a knife into my men—and he would not move even after we subdued him. I had to threaten to take his grandson’s life—the papoose nursing there—to get the old man to accede.”
She looked over at the old Indian. Impassiveness etched the brown, aged face, but in the cavernous eyes lurked agony and sadness. "Perhaps it would have been kinder to kill him,” she said softly and looked up to see the surprise on the sergeant’s face . . . a surprise that slid into blankness as he suddenly toppled from his horse. She saw the brightly plumed arrow buried between the young man’s shoulder blades at the same moment the hideous screams, like those of a panther, exploded about them.
Instinctively she whirled, with Stephanie gathered to her breast, and began to run back toward the wagon. But even as fiercely painted warriors plunged down out of the wooded hills, Ignacio snapped the whip over the team’s rumps, and the horses jerked forward in galloping terror. She heard Jamie shout, "Mama! Mama!” in his little boy’s high- pitched voice.
The Indians did not bother to stop the fleeing wagon but swiftly dispatched the remaining four soldiers. The fight was over as quickly as it had begun. And she found herself standing among the former prisoners, the only white person.
As the warriors began removing the soldiers’ boots and rounding up the horses, strange harsh words of joy and relief broke about her, yet she could only hear the trip-hammer beat of her heart. She knew she could face death, perhaps not as bravely as the stoic Indian. Under torture she might die screaming until there was no voice left. But then death came to everyone.
What she could not endure would be to watch the death of her daughter. The mental torture of seeing those savages kill her baby would be as great as a knife-blade cutting out her own still-beating heart.
She clutched the child tightly to her as one brave in a military shirt and slouch cap bounded from his pony and advanced on her. No, dear God, no! she wanted to scream but found the words locked in her throat. She clutched the child tightly to her and began to back away.
The brave tore the baby from her grasp. Rosemary’s scream was wrenched from her lungs as he clasped the baby’s small, pudgy ankles in one hand and began swinging his trophy. She lunged forward, but hands grabbed her from behind, and she squeezed her eyes shut with another guttural scream that surely burst her own eardrums and burst her lungs. She could not watch Stephanie’s tiny head bashed against the rocks. She struggled, kicking and biting at the hands that held her.■
A harsh command ripped through the air. All movement ceased. Rosemary’s teeth clenched in the effort to force her eyes open. Her daughter still hung suspended by her ankles, crying. Then she noted the familiar chestnut Arab before her—and its swarthy rider. Lario.
His dark gaze swung on her, with an impact like the blow of a tomahawk. Unlike the warriors clad in the breechcloth and knee-high moccasins, he wore buckskin pants and a collarless blue velveteen shirt. But the red flannel bandana about his forehead was the same as those worn by the others. "You are as foolish as ever, Senora. Why did you not stay with your party?”
His dark eyes flickered to the brave who held Stephanie, then to the older Indian who rode at his side. The man’s face was massive with a heavy high-bridged nose and deep furrows confining the wide lips. From under the blue turban wisps of bone-white hair could be seen. Lario addressed the older man as "Manuelito,” and the Indian shook his head negatively to whatever it was Lario had asked him.
"They are angry, they want revenge,” Lario told her, his eyes on the child. "I don’t know what I can do to — ”
"She’s your daughter, Lario!” she screamed.
Lario’s gaze slashed back to her. It searched her face for the truth. His Navajo words, so foreign to her, were directed at the brave holding Stephanie, waiting. The still-wailing infant was passed up to Lario. She thought his face looked as Solomon’s must have when he judged the rights of the two opposing mothers for the child.
Lario noted the red hair, the same shade as her own, not Stephen’s. He saw the caramel skin, as dusky as dawn’s first pink streaks. Then his gaze halted on the black eyes—deep, deep black. Almond-shaped eyes of the Navajo people. His piercing gaze met and held that of Rosemary’s. After what seemed an eternity of slow-ticking minutes to her, he said, "You tell the truth.”
She released her breath, as Lario first spoke softly to the Indians the soldiers had captured, then rapped out a command to his own men. When he looked back to her, his eyes were as cold as the frozen snow on the Sangre de Cristos’ peaks. "You are to be released unharmed. The town of Las Vegas is not far. But the child goes with me.”
He whirled his mount, and she broke free. Her hands latched onto the horse’s bridle. "No!” she shouted as the horse danced about in confusion. "I won’t let you!”
Lario tried to shove her from him but was hampered by the child held in his arms. Something hit her head from behind, and she fell to the ground, dazed. For a few moments she lay there. Her vision was blurred, like the heat waves rising off the earth. She blinked her eyes. Her vision began to clear. The Indians, led by Lario and his braves, were already at least a quarter of a mile away, moving to the southwest, away from the wagon-rutted road.
She pushed herself to her feet. "No!” she screamed. "Wait!” Tears streamed down her face.
Las Vegas and safety — and Jamie.
But abandon Stephanie?
She began moving, sometimes trotting, sometimes stumbling on her cumbersome skirts, toward the southwest.
CHAPTER 17
Beneath the scanty shade of a white-flowered saguaro cactus Rosemary paused to rest. Her breath sounded ragged in her ears against the utter quiet of the empty country about her. Only an occasional greasewood bush, its rank, olive-green stems waving high yellow or orange blooms, added relief to the desolation. Immediately before her glided the shadow of a swooping hawk.
And far ahead moved the dark forms, gradually outdistancing her. How long had she been walking? All night and part of another day? A frosty rocking-chair moon had illuminated the band of Indians during the long night, but now the sun, glaring like a twenty-dollar gold piece in the sky, hurt her eyes, and she had to squint to follow their receding figures. Didn’t they ever stop to rest or eat, and what did they find to eat in that godforsaken wilderness?
The sole of one kid dress boot had worn through, and the heel of the other had snapped off. Her feet were a mass of bubbling blisters. The hem of her gray serge skirt was frayed by the pebbled floor of the plateau and torn in several places by the low-growing cholla cactus. Realizing that the skirt deterred her progress as much as her blistered feet, Rosemary ripped away the material below her knees where her high-top boots ended.
She drew a deep breath and straightened her shoulders. Stepping out from the lonely, protective shade of the saguaro, she forced one foot in front of another, concentrating not on the shapes she followed but only on each yard of ochre-hued sand directly in front of her. She would not allow herself the luxury of weakness, of fainting. Not with Stephanie stolen from her arms. She had experienced Lario’s underlying gentleness, but it did not stop the talons of anger and fear for Stephanie that clutched at her heart. How would he feed the baby? The one nursing mother she had seen had not enough milk for her own infant.
First one foot, and then the other, Rosem
ary repeated to herself in a drone, keeping her eyes on terrain that was slowly changing to a rough and stony landscape. The shadow that fell across the narrowed range of her vision did not at first seep into her dulled senses. But as the shadow moved steadily With her own shadow, so grew her perception that she was not alone. With an effort she turned her face upward, but the blinding sun hid the face of the phantom who rode at her side. A mirage? Determined not to succumb to collapse, she continued walking, a procession of stumbling steps, and focused her gaze once more directly before her. But the shadow followed along beside her.
As the afternoon wore on, her condition deteriorated. Her hair fell from its chignon to hang in lank strands about her shoulders. Perspiration soaked her dress. The skin of her face was burnt a bright pink. Her feet were raw flesh. She tottered, stopped, moved forward again. But now the mass of figures had disappeared from her sight.
"Are you ready to go back?” the voice at her side asked.
"No!” she croaked. Was she talking to herself; had she already lost her reason? No matter. Nothing mattered but that she continue moving. And Stephanie.
After a while she stumbled over a rock and pitched forward. The gritty sand abraded her face, and she lay there. She knew she could not get up again.
Arms encircled her, lifted her. She was once more cradled in Lario’s arms. A dream, she told herself—a recurring memory of the first time Lario had found her when she had run away from Stephen. But she said in a raspy voice irritated by its dryness, "If you take me back to Las Vegas, I’ll just turn around and follow you again.”
"You are stubborn, Turquoise Woman,” he said. But she noticed in spite of her lightheadedness that he did not leave her and that he had addressed her in Indian fashion. Then she let herself sink into a comatose sleep.
The jarring awoke her. Lario’s horse scrambled up the steep side of a barranca like a mule deer and followed a narrow trail hemmed in on both sides by sheer sandstone walls. The trail wound about, ribboning ever upward until it emerged into one of the many small canyons hidden in the Sandia Mountains. There, thickets of cedar, aspen, and pine partially hid the score or so of brush-covered shelters. The sounds of domesticity — children laughing, someone chopping wood, women calling to each other, and a dog barking — reached her ears.
Lario halted before one hogan nestled among a grove of firs. "You insisted on coming,” he said, his breath warm against her ear. "So you must be content to exist as we do. You will not be welcomed here by many because of the treatment suffered at the hands of your people. Never leave the hogan unless one of my family or Adala is with you.”
But Rosemary was impatient. "Stephanie—where is my baby?” she demanded.
Lario dismounted. "Our baby,” he corrected, "is within.”
He did not attempt to help her down but strode toward the hogan. She heard the joyous cry, "Lario!” and saw the young girl, Adala, step from the hogan’s entrance. Even in the evening’s dusk, she could see the radiance that suffused the girl’s face. Then Rosemary saw that Adala held Stephanie in her arms, and her anger exploded that another woman should hold her child. She tried to shove herself from the horse’s back, but her skirts impeded her. She fell to the earth with a thud that knocked the breath out of her.
There was a sudden silence, as if each Indian there saw the Anglo woman’s ignominious fall. Worse, when she scrambled to her knees she saw the laughter in Lario’s eyes.
Always those laughing mocking eyes. How she hated them now!
But his well-defined lips were straight and firm when he turned back to Adala and took Stephanie, sharing words with the Indian girl that made her smile before she re-entered the hogan. Then in English to the baby, "It is time you knew your father, Sin-they.”
"Her name is Stephanie!” Rosemary sputtered, advancing on Lario. A mixture of rage and indignation coursed through her. Lario held the chubby infant out of her reach, and Stephanie, unlike Jamie, laughed at the action. She held out tiny hands to clutch the bright crimson bandana about Lario’s head, and Rosemary was furious that her child should betray her by taking a liking for the enemy; for Rosemary, peeved, refused to admit that he was also the child’s father. He was simply The Enemy.
Lario handed the child to her. "Sin-they needs to be fed,” he said and pushed aside the blanket over the doorway, stepping inside.
She had no recourse but to follow, hobbling on painfully sore feet. She recognized Lario’s mother and grandfather, who were in the midst of eating, scooping with their fingers some kind of shredded meat and thick gravy from broken pottery. She nodded her head in response to their own polite nods and wondered if they realized she was to be their unwilling guest and if Lario had informed them for how long. His sister, Toysei, glanced up from where she spread a blanket over her son then looked away, her face as expressionless as Lario’s could be.
Two young braves, who Rosemary learned were Lario’s brothers, Hasteen and Guayo, reposed on the far side of the firepit, seemingly oblivious to her presence as they accepted the food Adala ladled into their bowls. The older, Hasteen, wore a mustache, which gave lie to the dictum Indians had no facial hair. Guayo possessed the same fine features as Lario — a younger version of Lario at eighteen and therefore lacking the strength of character found in Lario’s face.
Adala handed Lario a bowl of the delicious-smelling meat with a shy smile and looked to Rosemary in question. "Do you wish to eat?” Lario asked her.
She could barely control the saliva that threatened to overflow her lips. Sweet Jesus, was she hungry—and thirsty! "Aye,” she managed to whisper.
She settled herself far from the light of the fragrant fire that burned in the hogan’s center. As if in response to Lario’s question of eating, Stephanie began howling, and automatically Rosemary’s fingers went to the buttons of her blouse, only to halt. No eyes watched her, but suddenly she was embarrassed in front of Lario. This is ridiculous, she thought. I have known this man’s body. I have carried his child. Still, she maneuvered herself so that her back was partially to the others and put Stephanie to her breast.
Adala came over and silently placed a bowl before Rosemary. She forced herself to return the young woman’s soft smile. After all, it was not Adala’s fault that she and Stephanie were there against her will.
Soon Stephanie’s eyelids grew heavy. She laid the child on the blanket that Adala had provided and hungrily turned to her now-cold stew. When she looked up again, Lario and his brothers had gone and their mother and grandfather were already stretched out on the blankets to sleep, their feet toward the warming fire. Toysei and Adala talked quietly. Rosemary did not doubt but they discussed her. But she was too tired to really care what they said or what they planned to do with her. She stretched out alongside of Stephanie and, despite her painfully throbbing feet, was half asleep before her eyelids even closed.
She felt as if she could sleep for a solid week, but something awoke her during the night although there was no noise to interrupt the deep silence of the hogan. Embers smoldered in the firepit. From outside there wafted the sweet smell of the spring night’s dampness as the hogan’s flap fell in place.
She rolled to one elbow and glanced about the darkened shelter. Two blankets were empty. To her left lay Toysei. But among the sleeping forms clustered about the firepit that of Adala’s was not to be found . . . only two empty blankets.
Rosemary turned on her stomach and buried her face in her arms. If the other empty blanket belonged to Lario — well, it was none of her business. Soon she and Stephanie would be gone from those miserable hovels, would return to the secure warmth of her beloved Cambria.
CHAPTER 18
A hot, stiff August wind blew down through Arizona’s deep Canyon de Chelly, and Rosemary turned her face away from its fumacelike blast. She had just filled two large clay water jars, or tus as Lario insisted she call them, using the Navajo word, and they weighed heavily in her arms.
As she started back up the stream’s rugged, rocky bank
toward the newest rancheria, she reflected disgustedly that in the space of four months of living with the Navajo she was daily becoming more like an Indian woman. She wore the clumsy silver-buttoned knee-high moccasins with the calico skirt and hot velveteen blouse; she braided her hair in rolls over her ears; she was even learning to weave blankets and rugs on the upright loom made from the forked branch of a juniper tree, though she had not the patience to struggle with the stubborn warp or the monotonous spinning.
She crossed to the hogan Adala had helped her build. The young girl had worked patiently with her, showing how the thick evergreen brush was interwoven with the bent frame of stout pinon poles, leaving enough open space for the smoke hole in the roof’s center.
When she had finished the hogan, she looked in through the wide door, seeing the cool darkness flecked with tiny spots of light and the sun shafting warmly through the smoke hole, and she was proud of her accomplishment. The hogan had not the strength and security of Cambria, but nevertheless it was something she had made herself.
The hogan belonged to Lario, for it had become obvious the first week of Rosemary’s arrival that the one hogan would not be large enough to accommodate the entire family.
"But why must I stay in your hogan?” she had demanded of Lario after he had informed her of his plans. She had trailed him to a stump some two hundred feet away from his mother’s hogan, and they were alone for the first time, if the spotted dog that yapped at her heels and the three naked children that played in the stream just beyond could be discounted.
"I want my daughter with me.” He resumed sharpening his hunting knife with the whetstone, as if she were dismissed, and that irritated her even more.
"But I am not your wife.”
His keen eyes fixed on her. "I do not treat you as such, do I?”
Instantly she realized he had trapped her. "No. But others think that.”
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