by Anita Mills
The Kiowa woman nodded, then went back to her porridge—or whatever it was. Amanda moved around to face her. “Nahakoah? Where?” she shouted.
Walks With Sunshade came out yawning and addressed the older wife. Little Doe answered something, then shrugged. The Comanche touched Amanda’s arm, then pointed toward the spring path. At least she’d understood.
“Thank you.” Ducking away, Amanda raced for the water, heedless of the curious stares of half a dozen Indians.
But the man wading in the water was Two Owls, not Clay McAlester. When he saw her, he came out and covered himself with his breechclout. She backed away, afraid, but when he spoke, his tone was friendly, his hands outstretched, palm up.
She whirled and fled, running as fast as her legs could carry her. Sticking her head into the medicine woman’s lodge, she cried, “Where’s McAlester? Where’s Nahakoah?”
The old woman looked up and answered in quick, punctuated Comanche. The only word of it Amanda understood was Nahakoah. “Yes, yes,” she said eagerly, repeating something like what Nahdehwah had said. As the old woman frowned, she tried again, followed by “Where is he?” Getting no answer, she asked more loudly, “Where is he?”
Laying aside her medicine bone and four green sticks, Nahdehwah rose awkwardly, then padded outside on large bare feet. Amanda followed, thinking the old woman meant to show her where he’d gone, but instead Nahdehwah raised her hands, offering some sort of prayer to the rising sun.
Amanda caught her arm, shaking it. “He’s left me—he’s left me here! I’ve got to find him! Can you not understand either? I’ve got to find him!”
“Shhhhh.”
Tears were streaming down her face, but Amanda didn’t care. “Please—you’ve got to help me,” she pleaded. “Where is Nahakoah?”
The black, birdlike eyes fixed on Amanda’s. “Nahakoah—he go,” she finally answered.
“Where?”
This time the old woman responded in a spate of Comanche words. It was no use—whatever she was saying, Amanda couldn’t understand it.
“But I don’t belong here! Surely you can understand that, can’t you?”
It was still no use.
“Nahakoah—he come.”
“When?”
A short, ugly Comanche came to the flap of another tipi, peering cautiously at Amanda. If she didn’t calm down, she was going to waken the entire village. She had to get hold of herself before they all came to stare at her. Nahdehwah reached out to grasp her shoulder.
“You come,” she ordered.
Twisting free, Amanda turned and caught sight of McAlester. He was leading his saddled pony and the mule, and by the looks of it, he’d packed for a long trip. Instant relief washed over her. He hadn’t actually left yet—there was still time to catch him. But, not seeing her, he swung up into the saddle, adjusted the sheath holding the Henry, and nudged the horse with his knees, turning it.
She broke into a dead run, shouting, “Wait! Wait up! You cannot leave me here! Listen to me!” She ran so hard that she felt as though her lungs would burst. “I’ll see you hanged for this!” she panted. “Damn you, Clay McAlester! You have no right to do this!”
Clay groaned inwardly when he heard her. The last thing he’d wanted was a scene, and now there seemed to be no way of avoiding one. He gave the paint mare her head, thinking he could outdistance Amanda, that she’d give up when she saw she couldn’t catch him.
Two Owls blocked her path, trying to stop her, but she dodged beneath his grasp. Indians were pouring out of tipis as though they thought they were under attack, then stood watching the running white girl curiously. The Kiowa lunged for her, catching her this time, shouting at her in Comanche.
“No! He cannot leave me—he cannot!” Tears were streaming down Amanda’s face, but she didn’t care. “I’m a white woman! I don’t belong here!”
She took a breath, and Two Owls thought she’d come to her senses. As he relaxed his grip, she broke loose again. She could still see McAlester. Her bare feet pounded the hard ground and her elbows swung wildly as she ran so desperately she had no air left with which to shout at him.
Looking over his shoulder, Clay saw she still followed him, and he cursed under his breath. He kicked the paint’s flank, and the little mare trotted. When he looked back again, Amanda had passed the last tipi and she was still running. She stumbled once, then got to her feet again and kept coming. Damn her! She was going to make them think she was crazed, and Two Owls wouldn’t want her in his tipi.
He reined in angrily and waited. Tripping over a rock, she fell again, picked herself up, and stubbornly pursued him. She’d slowed, but still she came. He knew he ought to go on, to leave her, but he couldn’t. Not now that she’d made a fool of herself in front of half the camp.
She caught up, lunged for his leg, and held onto it, looking up at him, too exhausted to stand alone, too out of breath to speak. He fought the urge to kick her.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he demanded furiously.
Her head pounded. Dizzy, she closed her eyes for a moment to steady herself, then opened them. “You … you … cannot go without me,” she gasped. “You … you cannot.”
Knowing that everyone watched them, he clenched his teeth and tried to hold his temper. “Amanda,” he managed tightly, “turn loose of my leg.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Don’t you dare leave me,” she choked out. “Don’t … you … dare!”
“You are making a spectacle of yourself.”
“I don’t care!”
“Don’t be a little fool!” he retorted. “You’re a whole lot safer here than with me.”
“I’d sooner steal a horse and try to get back to Fort Stockton by myself.”
“You can’t.”
“You can’t just leave me here!”
As angry as he was with her, he was not proof against the tears that stained her upturned face. Leaning from his saddle, he reached to grasp her hand. “Swing up,” he ordered brusquely.
She felt a surge of relief. Bracing her foot against his, she let him pull her up, and throwing modesty to the wind, she slid her bare leg over the paint mare’s shoulder. But to her horror, he turned back toward the Indian camp.
“No!”
He didn’t answer.
She licked dry lips. “Please … I don’t want to stay … I’m afraid of these people.” Desperate, she grasped for some means to persuade him. “I …” Seeing that Two Owls’s tipi was ahead, she tried to swallow back the awful lump in her throat. He didn’t care, and nothing she could say was going to make any difference to him. “I’ll do anything you ask—anything!” she cried.
The horse stopped, and she felt the shift of McAlester’s weight as he swung down from his saddle. There was no help anywhere, and she knew it. Taking a deep breath, she decided there was no use crying or making a greater fool of herself. When his hands touched her waist to help her down, she pulled herself together and leaned into his arms.
Without so much as another look at her, he conferred with the big Kiowa, while Little Doe and Walks With Sunshade regarded her somberly. Two Owls barked out something, and his older wife disappeared behind his tipi. Resigned, Amanda took a step toward Walks With Sunshade. The woman put up both hands and backed away, shaking her head.
“Now you’ve done it,” Clay muttered. “She thinks you are possessed by a bad spirit.”
“Oh, for—”
“Don’t look at her,” he ordered. “They’ve already sent for Nahdehwah.”
The gathering crowd parted as the old medicine woman waddled through, and everyone watched silently while she circled the Kiowa’s tipi three times, stopping each time at the entrance to look skyward and call out. Raising what appeared to be a buffalo tail she moved it back and forth in front of the flap. The fourth time, she went inside, then came back out, trailing the tail on the ground behind her. When she saw Amanda, she held up two e
agle feathers and approached her, chanting something. Twice she circled, waving the feathers.
Nahdehwah was conducting the Comanche equivalent of an exorcism. Amanda’s disbelief must have shown on her face, because Clay McAlester nodded. “Yeah—you’ve made a laughingstock of me.”
“Right now I don’t care.”
Little Doe came back leading an Indian pony. The silent woman threw a bright-patterned Mexican blanket onto its back, followed by a wood and deerhorn saddle, then she stood there, her eyes averted, waiting while McAlester went to one of the packs on his mule. He drew out his old revolver from one of his packs, weighed it in his hand, then held it out to her. Digging into a pocket on his black frock coat, he pulled out a small leather bag and pressed it into Little Doe’s hand. She opened it, pouring a small powder horn and a dozen balls into her palm, then she smiled and nodded.
When McAlester turned back to Amanda, his expression was grim. “You’d better mount up,” he said tersely. “And if you fall behind, you’re on your own.”
“I can’t ride on—” As his expression darkened, she bit back her words and nodded. “I’ll manage,” she decided hastily. Moving to the brown pony, she patted its neck reassuringly, then stepped into a hide stirrup and swung her leg over. The animal moved skittishly, but Little Doe jerked the braided rawhide reins, pulling it up short.
While McAlester mounted, Two Owls took the reins from his wife, and as the ranger nudged his paint into a walk, the Kiowa followed him on foot, leading Amanda’s pony. It was a slow, silent procession passing back through the camp, and this time not even the children wanted to look at her.
At the last tipi the ranger stopped, and the Kiowa started to tie the reins to the mule, but McAlester shook his head. His face impassive, Two Owls silently handed them to Amanda, then turned back toward the uneven row of tipis.
“I hope you thanked him for me,” she said finally.
“After that little fit you showed him, he’d have known it for a lie.”
McAlester clicked his reins and the paint horse moved on slowly, sedately, until they were almost out of the Indians’ sight. Amanda’s horse jerked its head and reared, nearly unseating her. She struggled with the reins, shouting at the animal. Exasperated, McAlester turned back, leaned from his saddle, and yanked the reins from her hands. He tied them to the mule.
“I could have learned to handle him,” Amanda muttered. “He caught me by surprise, that’s all.”
“He doesn’t understand English.”
“There’s not much about ‘whoa’ to understand, is there?” she snapped.
Instead of answering her, he mumbled Comanche words under his breath, obviously cursing either her or the horse—or both. But it didn’t matter, she told herself. At least she’d managed to get out of the Indian camp with her hair and her nose still attached, and that had to be worth something.
At the crest of the small hill McAlester dug his moccasins into his horse’s flank, and the animal broke into a hard, bone-jarring trot. Behind him, Amanda bounced against the wooden saddle so hard that her neck, back, and bottom hurt. But hell would freeze before she complained.
Looking back, he could see her holding onto the carved pommel, her body jostling like a sack of meal. But she’d wanted to come so damned bad that she’d made a fool of him, so he was all out of sympathy for her. By nightfall, she wasn’t going to be able to sit or stand.
She clenched her teeth, but they still clattered against each other. Surely to God he was hurting himself as much as her. Finally, unable to endure any more, she decided hell must be freezing. She called out to him, “S-stop th-this!”
He reined in and turned in his saddle. “Want to go back?” he taunted.
“Of course I don’t! But I gallop a lot better than I trot, and I’ll be hanged if I’m going any farther like this!”
“I can take care of that,” he shot back. “In fact, right now I don’t think I’d mind hanging you.”
“You had no right to leave me there!” she shouted furiously. “What kind of man are you, anyway? You were going to abandon me!”
“Can’t you read?” he gibed. “I wrote I was coming back for you.”
“When? In two days? Two weeks? Two months? Or next year?” she demanded. “For all I know, your friend Two Owls might expect something from me—they share wives, you know.”
“Between brothers.”
“For all I knew, he counted you as a brother.”
Instead of answering that, he kicked the paint, and the mare settled back into the hard trot. This time, she gritted her teeth and hung on, swearing if he could stand it, she would manage.
It seemed as though they went for miles before he stopped again. When she was nearly too tired to care, he finally dismounted and walked to reach for her.
“Don’t touch me,” she gritted out. Pushing him away, she managed to slide from the wooden saddle and reach the ground. She swayed unsteadily on legs too sore to hold her. “Just now, I neither want or need your help. You’ve shown me what you think of me already. If I had any illusions before, they flew out the window when you left me.”
“Suit yourself.” Untying one of his canteens, he unscrewed the lid and drank. Wiping his mouth with his sleeve, he looked at her, making no move to offer her any of the water. “Going to be a long day,” he observed shortly.
The sun wasn’t high in the sky, and it was already so hot that it looked like steam rose in waves from the ground. She licked parched lips, her eyes on the canteen. Apparently, he wasn’t going to offer her any as long as he remained angry with her. She was going to have to eat a big slice of humble pie, or it was going to be a long, thirsty journey.
“Look,” she said, sighing, “I’m sorry for making a spectacle of myself before your Indian friends.” He didn’t even acknowledge that he heard her. “And I know you could have left me to die, and no matter what else has happened between us, I’ll always be grateful that you didn’t.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Mr. McAlester, I am trying to apologize to you! Isn’t that what you want?”
“No.”
“All right,” she said tiredly. “I can’t go on like this. What do you want me to say?”
He swung around, his blue eyes cold. “Why say anything? I’m not the sort of man you’d want to be around—remember? I just rank a hair above a Comanche to you.”
“I didn’t say that. I said you weren’t the sort of man I’d want to marry. There is a difference, you know.”
“Is there?”
“You can’t call saying, ‘I’ll marry you, if that’s what you want,’ much of an offer, either. What was I supposed to say to that?”
“Nothing.”
“All right,” she said, exasperated. “May I please have a drink of water?”
He held out the canteen.
“Thank you.” As she sipped from it, she looked over the rim at him. There was nothing in his manner or his expression to remind of her of the man who’d lain so eagerly with her in the grass. She handed the water container back. “Thank you,” she said again.
He regarded her soberly. “I just hope to hell you don’t get us both killed.”
“Doing what?”
“You’re going to have to stay out of my way. When the shooting starts, you’re on your own. I can’t look out for you and do my job.”
“Why can’t you just pretend I’ve got a price on my head and take me home to Ybarra-Ross?”
“You’re too damned self-centered—you know that, don’t you?”
“Because I didn’t want to live like a Comanche savage?” she asked incredulously.
“I’d have come back for you—you knew that.”
“What if you got killed? Then where would I have been? Answer that, will you?” When he didn’t respond, she persisted. “Well?”
“Where will you be if I get killed now?”
“I don’t know. You won’t even tell
me where we’re going,” she retorted crossly.
“Suppose I tell you I don’t exactly know. I’m thinking of going northeast to the Llano Estacado, then down toward Big Spring, where I hope to find Quanah Parker.” He gestured to what looked like a high mesa. “We’re going up there.”
She stared. “What?”
“Yeah. It’s a pretty rugged trip, even for me. See that mountain with all the boulders? We’ve got to cross it, and then there’s an arroyo that’s barely wide enough in places for a wagon. It’s a pretty good place for an ambush, but it’s just about the only way we’ve got to follow the old war trail up to the Llano Estacado.”
“You’re lying, aren’t you? You’re just trying to frighten me.”
“You’ll wish I were. It’s flat and grassy enough in places to lull you into thinking that’s all there is up there—until you find yourself on the edge of a canyon so steep-walled and deep that you’ll swear there’s no way but straight down. There’s a lot of those before we get to where we’re going.”
“It doesn’t make sense—why are you doing this?”
“A man named Sanchez-Torres is bringing a gun shipment across from New Mexico, and there’s a whole lot of routes he and his Comancheros could take before they reach the gap, but after that they have to cross the Llano to reach Quanah’s camp. I figure even if Quanah’s going down to the Big Spring, Sanchez-Torres will come this way.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Uh-huh. And the trick is going to be getting there before the Comancheros—I want to be between them and Quanah.” He took another drink, then screwed the lid on the canteen. “If I don’t make it, there’ll be hell to pay on every farm and ranch between here and the Rio Grande. Before Mackenzie and his buffalo soldiers can mobilize, the Comanche, the Kiowa, and the Cheyenne are going to be all over Texas. All they need are the guns.”
“But you’re just one man,” she protested. “You cannot be expected to stop them—not alone.”
“Oh, but I’ve got you with me,” he reminded her. “Not that I’m fool enough to believe that makes two of us.”
As the full import of the situation sank in, she regarded him soberly for a long moment “I won’t get in your way,” she promised. “And for what it’s worth, I’ll do what I can to help you.”