Thunder on the Plains

by Rosanne Bittner

  She sank back into a chair. “Did Father…really love me?”

  Vince jammed his hands into his pockets, walking to a window to look out at the lights of Omaha. “He worshipped you. He would never have wanted you to know. We confronted him with it, and he threatened us with full disinheritance if we ever said anything about it, especially to you. After a while people never said a word about it. Your mother was dead, and you were sweet and beautiful and innocent, a child who won people over with just a smile. You looked just like Lucille, and you were the be-all and end-all to Father.”

  He turned to face her, but she kept her hands over her face. “Now maybe you understand the hard feelings between us and Father,” he told her. “And you understand why it’s so important, Sunny, that you do everything in your power to bring honor to this family and put an end once and for all to some of the ugly rumors that are still whispered. The few who know are waiting for you to make a wrong move, eagerly looking for a hint of your mother in your blood. Can you imagine what they’ll think if you bring that half-breed home? It’s bad enough, him being a worthless Indian. Add to that what some of them know about your mother, and they’ll think you chose him because he’s wild and wicked. They’ll think that when it comes to men you’ll sleep with anything. Why in hell do you think Stuart and I were so happy you finally got engaged to Blaine? You couldn’t have picked better. He might even end up governor of New York. He’s wealthy, educated, well-mannered, a man of the world. Marry Blaine, Sunny, and save your reputation. It will help salvage people’s memory of your mother. After all, she did treat Father well and was true to him. You can make up for all the shame, Sunny. And I think you owe it to me and Stuart. We didn’t intend to ever tell you, but when I found out where you’d gone, and then you told me you weren’t marrying Blaine, I knew I had no choice. Stuart doesn’t know what I’m doing. This is between you and me. I like you, Sunny. I always have. For God’s sake, my blood runs in your veins. I want only what’s best for you. If that means putting an end to this Colt Travis thing and you hating me again, then I’ll do it. Give it up! I don’t want any more shame in this family or any more hideous gossip. Can’t you imagine the headlines in the society pages if you tell the world you’re marrying a half-breed scout who’s worth no more than a month’s railroad pay? Give it up, or I’ll make sure there is no Colt Travis!”

  Sunny felt her blood going cold. She raised her eyes to look at him. “What do you mean?”

  His jaw was set rigid, a determined look in his eyes. “I mean that I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure you do the honorable thing. Colt Travis is out there facing a lot of danger. One stray bullet, and he’s dead. I’m sure I can find someone among all those itinerant railroad workers who would take a few thousand dollars to knock off a man whom no one would miss. With all the trouble out there, it would be easy to blame it on the Indians.”

  She slowly rose, shaking. “You wouldn’t!”

  He held her eyes firmly. “You’d better believe I would! Some men will take money for anything, Sunny. You know that firsthand. Take my advice and marry Blaine. Give up this thing with Colt Travis. I won’t say anything to Blaine. He’ll never know. Hell, it won’t be so bad. He’s a handsome, obliging man. He certainly isn’t the type to be cruel in bed. In no time at all you’ll forget Colt Travis, especially once you have a couple of kids. As far as Travis, what’s he going to do about it? You’re the one with the money and the power. You can shut him up plenty fast if you need to. But then, I imagine he won’t do anything anyway. He’ll figure you used him for a fling and gave him a damn good time for a day or two. A man like him should marry some common farmer’s daughter, or maybe an Indian woman. He’s not made for the likes of you, and you know it. And face it, Sunny. Even if you did marry him, the people in your circle would cut him down so fast he wouldn’t know what hit him. He’d never survive. He’d end up hating you and everything you stand for. Without even trying, you’d destroy him. Is that what you want?”

  She turned away, grasping the arms of a chair to keep from falling. All her fantasies about her mother and father were shattered, along with her own pride. She sank back into the chair. “Get out,” she told Vince, her voice low and firm. “I’ve never hated anyone as much as I hate you at this moment. Get out, and don’t ever step foot in this house again.”

  He let out a deep sigh. “Sunny, in time you’ll know I told you for your own good. You’ll realize I care about you. I didn’t want to do this. For God’s sake, you must know that, or I would have said something a long time ago, or when I sued you over the will. There are a hundred different times I could have told you, but I didn’t.”

  “And Stuart knows too, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “What about Vi, and Eve?”

  “No. We’ve never told our wives.”

  Sunny rubbed her forehead. Now she understood some of the looks she would get at times from certain of her father’s business associates. They had all been waiting, mouths watering, waiting for her to prove she was like her mother. So many things were clearer now.

  Colt! How could she bring him into her life! She already knew it would have been hard for him, but she never realized it would be this bad. Vince would surely tell him about her mother. After what she had let him do to her, he would lose his respect for her, think she was just a harlot at heart. But she would never get the chance to even know that. If she continued to see Colt, Vince would have him killed. Just knowing he existed, even if she could not have him, was better than Colt Travis being dead. She had no doubt whatsoever that Vince would hold true to his threat. She could never live knowing she was responsible for Colt suffering pain and death.

  Still, even alive he would be dead to her now. Her precious, beautiful, gentle, loving Colt. He could not hold her again, touch her again, be one with her again. She would never know the glory and ecstasy of belonging only to him. She would never again ride free and happy in the prairie sun with Colt at her side, the wind in her hair, joy in her heart.

  “Just leave,” she told Vince.

  “What are you going to do?”

  She looked up at him, a new coldness in her eyes, a hatred Vince never thought she was capable of showing. “You leave me little choice. I’ll marry Blaine, but I won’t do it for you.” She rose again, facing him boldly. “I won’t even do it to save Colt’s life, although you know I don’t want him to die. I’m doing it for my mother.”

  He frowned in surprise. “Your mother!”

  She swallowed at the pain in her throat. “I knew Father better than you or Stuart or anyone else. I don’t care what you say about her. Father loved her, and I believe she loved him, even if he did buy her! I know by the way Father talked about her, and by how fiercely he apparently tried to protect her! If he visited her mother on his trips to New York, it was because he was lonely after your mother died. He was just a man like any other. He fell in love with Lucille, and I imagine her mother, horrible person as she must have been, was the one who made him pay for her.”

  She rose, looking up at him with a tear-stained face. “I’ll marry Blaine to put a stop once and for all to the rumors about my mother. I’ll show the world what an honorable daughter she and Bo Landers had. I’ll give up Colt, not because he means little to me, but because he means everything to me! He’s the only man I’ll ever truly love, Vince, and no matter what you say, I know he loves me more than Blaine could ever hope to love me. Colt Travis is more man than Blaine will ever be, and certainly more man than you! You’re a man without a heart, Vince Landers, and apparently a man capable of cold-blooded murder! If you hire someone to kill Colt, his blood would be as much on your hands as the man who pulls the trigger!”

  He closed his eyes and sighed. “Sunny, I didn’t want it to be this way. I did everything I could to stop it. And I never, never wanted to have to tell you. Dammit, Sunny, I truly do admire you. I’m only trying to
protect you. Can’t you see that?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to hear your excuses, Vince. If you weren’t so arrogant and hateful of people you think are beneath you, we might have been able to work this out.”

  “It’s what other people would have thought, not me, Sunny. It isn’t just me Colt Travis would have to face and prove himself to. You remember that night he showed up at your dinner? Remember how some of those people looked at him? Surely you knew what they were whispering. Now you know why I was so upset by the way you took his hand and dragged him around. God only knows what some of them were thinking.”

  She turned away. “Just please go away before I scream. I can’t bear to look at you or hear your voice a moment longer. Get out of my house and find a hotel for the night.” She heard a deep sigh, footsteps. The parlor door slid open and was closed again, and the room was silent, except for the light crackle of a small fire in the hearth. Sunny went to her knees, wondering how such joy and ecstasy could so quickly change to such horror and despair.

  “Colt, Colt, Colt!” she wept, bending her head to the floor. How could she live without him now, yet how could she risk losing him to death, or risk him finding out about her mother? Was Vince right about what Colt would think of her? What did she know about men? The only kind of prostitutes a man like Colt might have experience with were the slutty whores of the railroad camp towns. She could never bear to have Colt look at her and see one of them. Neither could she bear to see his free nature and sensitive pride destroyed by her world; or to see him physically destroyed by someone Vince might hire to kill him.

  Colt Travis had belonged to her for two magical, wondrous days, and now she must set him free again. She would have to find a way to let him know that her decision was because she loved him so. She would have to find a way to convince him she was doing the right thing. He would surely end up hating her, but she could bear his hate and anger more than she could bear the thought of Colt being the one to scorn her and turn her away because of her mother; and she could bear his hate more than the thought of visiting Colt Travis’s grave.

  She got to her feet, deciding she had to be very strong, stronger than she had ever been in her life, even when facing down Vince or taking on the duties of her inheritance. She should never have invited Colt into her world, should never have allowed their love to blossom, should never have gone out to see him and build his hopes. He was too good and fine a man, proud and sensitive, worth so much more than the men in her world who boasted millions in the bank but were so lacking in matters of the heart. If she put an end to their affair immediately, most of the fine man that he was could be salvaged, and he would not be involved in ugly rumors or in scathing newspaper stories.

  She would have to end it quickly. She would wire Blaine to wait for her in Chicago, and she would go there in the morning. She would tell him she wanted the wedding date moved closer, get married before the Indian problem was over and before Colt had a chance to discover what was happening and try to come to her. He would think nothing of not hearing from her for a couple of weeks. By then she would be Mrs. Blaine O’Brien.

  She shuddered, grasping at the hot pain in her stomach.

  Chapter 25

  Colt approached the waiting band of Indians. It had taken him two full days to ride out here, and as he came closer to the area of the burial ground he saw a large circle of tipis, recognizing it not as a normal settlement of families with the men perhaps on a buffalo hunt, but rather the kind of village quickly set up by the few women who accompany and care for warriors ready to do battle. As soon as he got close, a line of at least thirty Indians formed. He knew he had been spotted much sooner by scouts, realized they could have already killed him if they chose, which was why he had tied a white shirt on the end of his rifle and held it up as a truce flag before coming any nearer. He could only hope they would honor the sign of peace.

  Much as he wanted to, he couldn’t think about Sunny now. He had to stay alert, for in spite of once living among these people, they were not the friendly, accommodating Cheyenne he had left six years before. He noticed they had camped just to the east of the burial ground, which he could see in the distance now, looking ghostly and foreboding in a morning mist.

  He urged Dancer cautiously closer, eyeing the apparent spokesman for the warriors, who rode out ahead of the others. Colt guessed him to be about his same age, and by the time he got within a few yards of the man, he recognized the face. He halted Dancer. “White Buffalo,” he called out in the Cheyenne tongue. He made the sign for friendship. “If you don’t recognize me, you must remember the horse I am riding. It was a gift from you.”

  White Buffalo stared at him a moment, then rode closer, his dark eyes losing some of their malice. “Colt Travis, my old friend.”

  Neither man smiled a full smile, each suspecting that after this conversation the friendship would be over, neither wanting it to have to be that way.

  “Yes, I am still your friend, White Buffalo. I looked for you once, but you are not easy to find. I have thought about you often over the years.”

  White Buffalo nodded. “And I have thought of you. Come and smoke with me. We will talk.”

  “I’m here on behalf of the railroad, White Buffalo.”

  The man nodded, a sad look in his eyes. “I thought so.” He turned his horse. “Come.”

  Colt followed him into camp, edgy at the looks on the faces of the rest of the warriors, most of them young, and eager for a fight. They reached a tipi with many buffalo painted on it, and White Buffalo indicated Colt should dismount and come inside. Colt obeyed, and a young Indian boy took hold of his horse for him.

  “He is my nephew,” White Buffalo told him. “Small Horse is fourteen, and my brother said he could come with us for the fight. I am teaching him the warrior ways. This dwelling belongs to my brother and his wife. I live with them.”

  They went inside, and old, familiar memories returned for Colt. He thought how much more he liked something like this than hotel rooms. The memory of Sunny’s mansion in Chicago flashed through his mind, how he had felt so suffocated in that huge, high-ceilinged room with a table so long one could hardly see from one end to the other. Yet in this simple tipi he felt free and alive.

  White Buffalo offered him a place to sit, and Colt obeyed, careful not to walk between the fire and another person, something that was not done. White Buffalo introduced him to his brother, Two Teeth, and his wife, Blue Bird Woman. “You did not know them when you lived with me and Sits Tall, because at that time they stayed with the Southern Cheyenne on the little bit of land the Great White Father gave us down near old Bent’s Fort,” White Buffalo said. “Since then your government has moved the Southern Cheyenne clear back to that hot and worthless place they call Indian Territory. Most of us will not go there. We stay to the north now, join the Sioux.”

  White Buffalo’s anger and agony were evident in his voice and his eyes. Colt waited quietly while the man lit his prayer pipe, offering it to the sky, the earth, the four directions. He took a puff, then handed it over to Colt. “Do you still carry the pipe that I gave you in friendship?”

  Colt nodded. “I’ve been through a lot since then, but I still have it. I even have those scalps.” He took the pipe, offering it himself to the God of heaven and earth, and to the four directions. He sucked on it a moment, then handed it to Two Teeth, who did the same as the first two men. He handed it to White Buffalo, who smoked it again, then lowered the pipe, watching Colt carefully. “I still carry the watch, but it stopped ticking long ago. Do you think that means something?”

  Their eyes held in mutual sorrow. “I hope it doesn’t mean the end of our friendship,” Colt told him.

  White Buffalo smiled sadly. “Sits Tall was killed at Sand Creek, along with our baby son and my father, Many Beaver, as well as the old medicine man, Dancing Otter and many others that you knew when you
lived among us. Zetapetaz-hetan, the squaw killer, Chivington, showed us that day how the white man treats even peaceful Indians. So we no longer try to be peaceful. We do what we must do.”

  Colt closed his eyes. “I’m sorry, White Buffalo. You know that I understand how it feels to lose a wife and child.” He met White Buffalo’s eyes again. “You told me once that time can heal many things.”

  “Ai. But now I better understand your hatred for the Pawnee. Now my hatred is also great, not for the Pawnee, but for the ve-ho-e. I do not think time will heal these wounds, because the white man keeps opening them again. It is not just because of Sand Creek that my hatred will not go away, but for everything else. They are taking it all away, Colt—the land, the buffalo, our freedom. We can no longer live as we once lived, and some of our people on the reservations die of nothing more than broken hearts. Now comes the railroad, the great iron horse with its belly on fire, its black smoke darkening the sky, its noise chasing away the game. We try to stop it, but we know we cannot.” He looked at Colt pleadingly. “Now all we ask is that it does not go through our sacred burial ground. It would be so easy for the powerful people who build this thing to send it around, far from this place that is beloved to my people. Have you come here to tell me they will think about doing this?”

  Colt felt almost sick at being so torn. He removed his hat and ran a hand through his hair. “I wish they would, White Buffalo, just as much as you do. But in their world their way of thinking tells them that to lay that many extra miles of track would be too costly and take too much extra time. There is only one of them who would agree to go around, but it is a matter of votes of all those in charge. The rest have voted to go through. I am here only to warn you that many soldiers are coming. You have a chance to leave now, White Buffalo, peacefully.”