The Endless Sky (Cheyenne Series)
Page 11
“You didn't by any chance run across a small camp of Sioux yesterday, did you?” Chase asked.
“Ain't seen no Injuns till I run onta yew, I swear it!” he averred.
Chase was almost certain the man was one of the marauders but could not be positive unless they found the others with their stolen booty. He walked over to the man's horse and began rummaging through the saddlebags. With an oath of disgust, he pulled out a Lakota breastplate made of elk rib bones held together with elaborate beadwork. Unrolling the ceremonial piece, he threw it into the dust where the captive sat cringing. “I suppose you brought this along from the Red Cloud Agency when you came prospecting.”
”N-no. That is...” He wet his lips, looking from Chase to Elk Bull's impassive face, then back to Chase. “Listen, yer part white. You can't let them—”
“You will die as our friends the Lakota did, only without honor,” Pony Whipper said with relish as he knelt beside the captive. He and the others had watched the interrogation in silence up to this point.
“Wait,” Chase said in Cheyenne. “We need to ask him how many men were with him. If the army might—”
“No! You only wish to save another White Eyes' miserable life!” Pony Whipper snarled as his blade slashed across the captive's wrists, cutting the bonds but also scoring his hands in the process. He would enjoy toying with the miserable coward before he slowly cut him to ribbons.
Chase, too, freed his knife and pointed the wickedly gleaming blade at Pony Whipper’ s chest. “What is between us can be settled later. I can make him tell us who the others are who did this and where they have gone.”
“Chase the Wind speaks sensibly,” Elk Bull said, nodding to the half-blood.
“Now,” Chase said, turning his attention back to the captive. “You can do this easy...or hard...” He pressed the tip of his knife into the fat gut of the killer.
“I...I was only with ‘em. I didn't start it. It warn't my idea,” he begged. “It was that damn bluebelly, a shavetail who just made first lieutenant. He caught up to us two days ago. Said he had to ‘escort us’ out of here. Then we run across two young Injun gals. Nothin’ would do but that damned fool had to find the camp. Said he was here to kill Injuns first, not baby-sit miners. Damn if it warn't all his fault!”
“Damn you, indeed,” Chase said softly, knowing the prospector had joined in the looting and rape, even if he had no stomach for the actual fighting. “How did you come to get separated from this band of soldiers?”
Before the miner could answer, a shot rang out, then another. The soldiers rode into the clearing at a hard gallop, a whole column of them firing at the running Cheyenne. With a quick grunt, Pony Whipper slit the prisoner's throat, then ran for his horse along with the others who were scattering beneath the withering fire.
A young lieutenant with his saber raised shouted orders at his troopers who raced in pursuit of their illusive quarry as the light faded quickly into dusk. Chase felt a jolt of recognition. Could it be? The officer's hard features and cold dark eyes came into his sights as he drew a bead on the man. Just as he squeezed off a shot with his Sharps the lieutenant seemed to sense him and wheeled his mount around. Chase's shot grazed his cheek with a shallow bloody furrow.
Yelling wildly, the officer charged directly toward the man who had marked him, intent on cleaving him in two. Without time to reload, Chase reversed his hold on his Sharps, to use it as a club against the horseman's saber. Suddenly, he was struck from the rear. A blinding explosion of colored lights went off in his head. Then everything faded to black as he fell unconscious to the ground.
“I got one of them sons o' bitches, Lieutenant!” a grizzled corporal exalted.
“Tie him up and we'll take him back to camp with us,” his superior said. Fingering the wound on his right cheek, he yelled, “Where the hell's the damn surgeon!”
Chapter Seven
The rhythmic rocking of the railway car lulled Stephanie into pensive reverie as she stared unseeing out the window. So much had happened in the past two years since she left her father's home to build a new life with her husband. How naive and dependent she had been that night in Baltimore when she became Hugh's wife. The fumbling painful coupling of consummation had ended that naiveté. Two years as an army wife had taught her a self-reliant resourcefulness beyond anything even the intrepid Paulina could have imagined.
Her spinster aunt would indeed be proud of how her charge had adapted, but perhaps she would also be wistfully sad that Stephanie fared little better in love than had she. Am I doomed all my life to be an outsider looking for someone who will understand me?
Stephanie blinked back tears of regret for the kind of love she had never experienced. Perhaps her childhood fears were valid and she was truly unworthy of love. In spite of her best efforts to love her father and her husband, she had not been able to surmount the barriers around their hearts. With Josiah it had been his business, with Hugh it was the army.
She closed her eyes and laid her head back, remembering those first few months of marriage. Not even at the onset had it been idyllic by any stretch of her imagination. In spite of her dissatisfaction in the bedroom, Stephanie had believed Hugh loved her, and she felt crushing guilt for making silent invidious comparisons between the way she felt when he touched her and when Chase Remington had. She had continually reminded herself that Chase had deserted her and she had chosen to wed Hugh.
Her husband had been polite and considerate of her ladylike sensibilities during their long journey from Baltimore to Kentucky, letting her prepare for bed and douse the lights before he entered their private railroad car, a luxury paid for with her dowry. When they arrived at his post in Elizabethtown, he had spent profligately again, securing her quarters in the town's best hotel, which only majors and colonels could afford. In fact she soon learned that most junior grade officers, even first lieutenants, did not marry because their salaries were too meager to support wives. Stephanie was forced to live with the wives of ranking officers. She found them to be much like the ladies of Boston, insular, boring, and single-mindedly obsessed with the military protocol afforded the wives on officers' row. As the wife of a lowly second lieutenant, she was on the bottom rung of the social ladder and would have been content to spend her days with the hotel manager's sprightly young bride, but Hugh had been adamant that she must mingle only within their proper social circle.
“Hattie Wilcox is an Irish immigrant, for heaven's sake, Stephanie,” Hugh had remonstrated. “Being from Boston, surely you know what that means. Next thing I know you'll be having luncheon with the company laundresses!”
“But Hattie's bright and friendly,” she protested.
“She's still your social inferior,” he reminded her sternly. “You must associate only with my superiors' wives.”
“Captain Alexander's wife is insufferably pompous, telling everyone who'll listen how her great-aunt someone or other married into the Astor family. And Mrs. Reynolds, Hugh, she wouldn't even speak to a mere lieutenant's wife until Mrs. Custer told her my father owned Summerfield Mills.”
“I don't plan to be a mere lieutenant—second or first—for long, my dear. But in the meanwhile, don't dismiss the importance of having enough money to impress the likes of Major Reynolds's wife,” he added darkly.
“I don't care about money, Hugh,” she said, pressing one hand tentatively on his sleeve, needing reassurance, not chastisement.
He turned to stare down at her through eyes that had lost their earlier warm brown color. Now they looked pale and cold as frozen earth. ‘That's easy for you to say, Stephanie. You have always enjoyed the comforts of wealth. The Maryland Phillipses have not been so fortunate for a number of generations—in spite of the blueness of their blood.”
Stephanie was taken aback at his bitterness. “I'm sorry, Hugh. I didn't mean to sound flippant. I shall try to befriend the other officers' ladies. Mrs. Custer seems quite sweet...even if all she can speak of is her beloved 'Autie.' ”
/> At once Hugh recovered and warmth again suffused his face as he took her in his arms. ‘The general's lady is devoted to the army life. That's what it takes, Stephanie. I know you will not fail me.”
The “army life” had not proven to be an easy one. After a brief stay in Elizabethtown chasing Klansmen and moonshiners across Kentucky, Hugh became bored and restless. His discontent was greatly exacerbated by the departure on extended leave of his hero, the general, who was off to glittering New York City with his wife. Hugh at once requested a transfer west where the Indian wars afforded him greater hope for promotion.
The West. The sky might be endless, but oh how desolate the alkaline plains. Stephanie learned to face the vicissitudes of being an officer's lady, no easy task on the rough frontier outposts. Hugh's first duty station was a far cry from Kentucky and the genteel rusticity of the Elton Hotel. Situated on the rolling buffalo grass-covered plains of eastern Colorado, Fort Lyon was nothing more than a collation of bleak adobe buildings with heavy shutters over the doors and windows to keep out the stinging, choking misery of sandstorms, wind and rain. Unfortunately, they did not keep out rodents, spiders or other loathsome creatures.
The second morning when Stephanie went to the kitchen stove to oversee breakfast preparation, a large rattlesnake slithered down the vent pipe, its tail making a sinister click. Dropping the granite coffeepot, she shrieked as her striker O'Shaughnessy calmly cut off its head with a cleaver. The trooper explained that snakes often came in that way, seeking warmth from the stove on cool Colorado nights.
Stephanie had been determined to adjust to post life. Although Hugh was preoccupied with the search for hostiles, and often gone on patrol, he saw that she was provided what comforts an army post could afford. Enlisted men often worked as strikers for extra pay, doing all the cleaning, cooking and heavy work for the officers’ wives. Hugh hired a brawny Irishman for their household. O'Shaughnessy was a jewel for whom no task was too arduous. At Hugh's insistence, they also took on a laundress, a Chinese girl from the nearby mining camp, who worked for such a meager wage that Stephanie felt guilty. Hugh assured her it was all any Chinese expected and she should not cause trouble with the other ladies by increasing the pay scale of “menials.”
She acquiesced. But when he returned after several weeks on patrol to find her fishing clothes out of the boiling laundry kettle he was livid. “What the hell do you think you're doing?” he hissed, seizing the pole she was using and throwing it and a clean bedsheet into the dust while Soo Lin cowered against the wall.
Stephanie held onto her dignity in front of the servant, allowing him to take her inside their small adobe quarters on officers' row. Fighting back tears of weary frustration she shoved a heavy strand of hair from her sweaty forehead. This was not how she envisioned his homecoming at all!
Hugh studied her mended old gingham dress, liberally stained with soapy water. “No wife of mine will demean herself in front of the other ladies by doing laundry! Why do you think I hired that damned Chink! You look like a slattern on suds row.”
Shocked by his language and accusations, Stephanie's temper ignited. “I had to do something! The storm yesterday blew Lin's washing across the camp. What wasn't shredded to bits by the sand was gray with filth. She had to have help. Lord knows, with you gone for weeks at a time, I need something to do.”
‘‘Perhaps you'd prefer returning to your father's mansion in Boston,” he suggested coldly. “Lord knows, on a lieutenant's pay I can't provide you with the sort of life to which you're accustomed.”
She watched him turn his back stiffly and stare out the window at the undulating gold of fall grass billowing in the relentless wind. Swallowing the lump in her throat, she fought down panic. Back to that cold lonely house with Josiah who was gone even more than Hugh. At least my husband loves me. Somehow the thought rang hollow in her heart. She pushed aside the feeling and touched his shoulder. “No, Hugh. I don't want to leave you. I—I shall try harder to do as you wish.”
He gave her that same boyish smile he had the first night they'd met when he defended her honor so vehemently. She flew into his arms with a sob.
In the months that followed, the rigors of military life had not lessened. They were “ranked out” of their quarters when a superior officer arrived at the post and chose their home, forcing them to move to a less desirable location. Hugh seethed with resentment, but Stephanie took it in stride, learning military protocol, enduring outposts in Texas and Kansas. Finally they ended up at Fort Fetterman on the sagebrush-covered High Plains of Wyoming.
Hugh's restiveness grew with every passing month. Minor skirmishes with hostile Indians did not bring his dearly desired promotion. He had barely made first lieutenant after five years in the army, a fact he increasingly bemoaned especially the night he received word he had been passed over for a captaincy.
“I graduated from the Point in '68, Stephanie. Five years, five miserable years—do you realize during the war men rose from second lieutenant to full colonel in half that time?” Hugh sat at the kitchen table clutching a glass of whiskey in his hand. The bottle in front of him was well on to half-empty.
Stephanie had come home from nursing one of Mrs. Turner's sons through a bad case of croup. She was cold, hungry and exhausted from the ride across the river where the rancher's home was located. “You'll get the promotion, Hugh,” she temporized, “just not as quickly as you'd hoped. This is peacetime.”
“Peace, ha!” he snorted, draining his glass. “I was promised there’d be a damned Indian war out here. If only those fools in Washington would stop vacillating and turn Sheridan loose, by God, I'd make captain in a trice!” With that pronouncement, he looked at his wife, who stood by the kitchen stove, warming her hands.
He scooted his chair back, irritated with the way she held her distance when he drank, letting him rave as if he were a child on a tantrum. In fact, it seemed to Hugh that his cool Boston lady held herself aloofly superior to him altogether too often here lately. “I've been neglecting my little wife, haven't I?” he said, nuzzling her neck as he pulled the heavy pins from her hair with clumsy, drunken fingers.
Stephanie felt the sting on her scalp as he tore loose her chignon. “I feel a bit weary tonight, Hugh,” she murmured softly, hating the sour smell of whiskey on his breath.
He laughed mirthlessly. “Weary now, is it? You always have some excuse. How do you ever expect to have those babies you want if you're ‘too weary’ to do your wifely duty?”
Guilt overwhelmed her. From the first she had disliked what they did in bed, the perfunctory swift and silent way he took her, only to roll over after to snore softly while she stared off into the darkness and thought of Chase. Was that why God had not seen fit to bless her with a quickening? Was barrenness her punishment for the secret adultery in her heart?
She turned in his arms and let him pick her up to carry her to the bedroom…
* * * *
When the word arrived on the army grapevine that the “boy general,” Custer, had been commissioned by Sheridan to gather the scattered forces of the Seventh Cavalry and head for Dakota Territory, Hugh at once petitioned to join his old idol. He was jubilant when the transfer came through. Stephanie once again packed up what they could effectively transport and sold off the carefully acquired excess in household furnishings—for the fourth time in less than two years.
Because Fort Abraham Lincoln had been an infantry post before the arrival of the Seventh, it had no stables for the horses. When barracks were converted to that end, the shortage of housing on the upper end of the scale resulted in no remaining facilities adequate for the officers' ladies. Libbie Custer and several other wives in the Custer entourage, dubbed “the royal family” by those on the outside, decided to return East for the duration of the summer campaigns across Western Dakota Territory into Montana. Stephanie and a number of the other wives elected to remain in nearby Bismarck, the railhead from which the Northern Pacific's crews surveyed westward.
Hugh was expected to return to Bismarck within the week, according to the last brief letter he had sent to her. She was tired of spending her days at endless teas, piano recitals and dinner parties, but there was no alternative in Bismarck. Even if there had been, she knew what an ugly scene Hugh would create if he found her helping her striker in the kitchen or volunteering to nurse sick soldiers at an infirmary.
Mrs. Harris, the captain's wife, drove her home from a luncheon late one afternoon. As the small rig made slow headway through the muddy streets, Thelma Harris said, “I'm certain you'll be relieved to see your husband safely returned from the wilderness. One never knows what might happen with those bloodthirsty savages on the rampage.”
She shuddered and her gelatinously plump cheeks shook rather like a bulldog's jowls.
“Have you had much experience with the Indians? I must confess we've been posted West for nearly two years and I've yet to see any savages, only a few rather pitiful creatures who lived around the small posts where Hugh was stationed. He never even allowed me near his Arikira scouts.”
“I should hope not!” Thelma exclaimed. “They're all dirty and disgusting, even the tame ones. It will be a blessing when the army has them all secured on reservations in the Indian Territory down south. Then decent people can civilize this heathen land.”