The Endless Sky (Cheyenne Series)

by Shirl Henke

  Her voice was soft yet it cut like a knife. He felt the agony of it twist deep in his gut, almost unmanning him and he clenched his jaw until the tendons in his neck stood out. “No, I did not lie. But it's over now. My people mourn their dead. Tomorrow they'll pack up and scatter to the four winds with the bluebellies in pursuit. Custer' s ghost already mocks us. In death he'll achieve what he could not in life—the utter destruction of the Cheyenne and Lakota.”

  She felt the bitterness that radiated from every fiber of his being sting her like a desert sandstorm. “And so it's over, just like that,” she said hollowly. Could he blame her for the inevitability of history? Just because she was white? Or because she had first married one of those hated “blue-bellies” who would hound his people to their deaths? Looking into his face she saw implacable resolution. Whatever his reasons, there would be no changing them.

  Perhaps he was doing this because he loved her. That would hurt most of all. Unwilling to examine the unbearably painful thought, she simply turned and walked back to camp, her footfalls keeping cadence with the sounds of a wailing mourning chant.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Leaving the children had been the hardest part, Stephanie thought as they rode south toward the source of the Little Bighorn River, the name the white men gave to the Greasy Grass. Chase had informed her they would leave while the children were still sleeping. Smooth Stone would have borne his hurt stoically but Tiny Dancer would have cried and begged her to stay with them. Perhaps it was best to make the break clean. They would be assimilated into the communal life of the band, under Stands Tall's protection. Red Bead and Kit Fox would give them a mother's tender love in her absence.

  Stands Tall and Elk Bull would soon lead the people back to the mountain stronghold. Perhaps they would escape the terrible retribution to come. Even if they did, the price would be dear for they would be only a small group living without the buffalo which had provided sustenance to their kind for generations. Their tribal way of life, with its rich ceremonies and rituals, would be lost, eradicated along with the rest of the free roaming Cheyenne and the buffalo themselves.

  Stephanie would never again see Smooth Stone and Tiny Dancer or Kit Fox her friend and dour old Red Bead whose wry insights had often sustained her over the past months. With each plodding step of the horses, she was leaving so many loved ones behind. To keep the grief from overwhelming her, she turned over in her mind what she would do once back in civilization.

  Chase had informed her only that he was delivering her to some mountain man, a French renegade who traded with the Indians. Gaston de Boef would see that she was returned to Rawlins where she could catch the Union Pacific back east.

  They shared the implicit assumption that she would not return to Hugh Phillips. As if she dared, carrying an Indian baby. She had never been able to conceive Hugh's child and he'd accused her of barrenness. She had believed him. Now her fertility was yet another reason for him to hate her. Surviving an Indian captivity was an unpardonable enough sin. He would have been humiliated to accept back such tarnished goods, even if she were not pregnant. Chase was right that Hugh would kill her before he'd take her back. She shivered just thinking about it.

  Chase had given her some money taken from a stagecoach raid last winter, enough to see her back to Boston. But what then? The Summerfield wealth was Hugh's now. Once her past and her condition were known, none of her distant relations or former friends would take her in. Last night as she lay alone on her pallet staring at the endless starry vault of Montana sky, she had vacillated. Should she tell Chase she was destitute? Did she owe it to their unborn child to swallow her pride?

  But it was not pride which ultimately held her silent. She had listened to others around their campfire talking in hushed voices during the night. Each band of Cheyenne and Sioux would leave separately the following day, for scouts had already reported more soldiers at the mouth of the Little Bighorn. As soon as he rid himself of his white wife, the White Wolf would join a select group of warriors skirmishing with the soldiers, buying the rest time to scatter. Elk Bull's band would return to the mountains and wait for him there.

  The Cheyenne needed Chase. He had thrown in his lot with them since childhood and all the years sojourned among whites meant nothing when compared to his loyalty to his father's people. He lived a dangerous life which all too soon would be over. Chase Remington was destined to die by a bullet or a noose and there was nothing she could do to save him.

  Stephanie had lain awake thinking about the Freedom Woman whose liberation had, in the final analysis, been so ephemeral. At least Anthea had been given seven years, not just seven months with the man she loved. In the end, to save her child's life she had sacrificed herself by returning to the scorn and humiliation of Boston, returning to the Remington family she and her son despised. But if the old reverend had cared enough about preserving the family name to make Chase his heir in spite of his tainted blood, Stephanie knew what she would do. She would go to Reverend Remington and tell him she was carrying his great-grandchild. Surely he would take her in, for she carried the small gold locket with Anthea's picture which Chase had given her at their Cheyenne marriage.

  Jeremiah could do what she could not—secure the freedom and safety of her child from Hugh Phillips. After that it would be up to her to protect it from the rapacity of Burke Remington. Her resolve made, she rode toward the railhead and tried not to think of what might have been.

  They stopped that night at the edge of the mountains amid the splendor of spruce and aspen in a narrow ravine where a small stream ran swift and icy from the melt off of snow. The air was warm and redolent with the scents of wild grasses and summer flowers. As night fell, the sky overhead became an endless canopy of stars, winking down their cold brilliant light.

  Stephanie sat beside the campfire unconscious of the beauty of her surroundings, tending a pair of freshly killed rabbits spitted on the flames. She was too numb to think as her eyes followed Chase while he cared for their horses. He looked completely Indian now, dressed in breechclout and moccasins, his skin rippling with muscles and shimmering bronze in the firelight. There was such savage grace in every movement he made that she could not break the spell holding her in thrall as she watched him.

  All at once Chase turned and their eyes met. And held. The dun snorted softly as her husband dropped the hackamore onto the grass and walked slowly toward Stephanie. Her legs trembled as she stood up, waiting for him to touch her. There was at once a defiance and an acceptance in her stiffened spine and highly held chin. Her eyes never wavered under his compelling glittering gaze.

  “One last time, Chase.” She mouthed the words softly as her arms reached out and pulled him into her embrace.

  He did not answer with words but his lips came down over hers, ending the need for speech. She returned the voracious kiss with a feral savagery equal to his own. Questing deep inside each other's mouths, their tongues dueled until they grew breathless and desperate. She dug her fingers into his scalp, combing through his hair until his braid came unfastened and the thick night-dark curtain obscured his face. His arms pressed her tightly to his chest and his hips rocked against hers insistently. Her own rolled up in reply as he cupped a breast with one hand, sending a spiraling ache from her nipple down into the deepest recesses of her belly.

  Slowly they sank onto their knees in the soft grass. He lifted the fringed edge of her tunic, pulling it swiftly up and over her head. She was naked beneath, as was the custom of Cheyenne women. But she was not Cheyenne. Her body, lush yet delicate, bloomed milky pale where the sun had not touched it. His hands were dark against the satiny whiteness of her breasts, lifting the full soft mounds to his lips, suckling on one pink tip, then the other. She arched into his caresses, all the while her fingers tugged at his breechclout until it came unfastened. When she grasped the hard pulsing staff in her hand, he let out a ragged cry of pleasure.

  “I ache to bury it deep inside of you,” he said, pushing he
r toward the ground.

  But Stephanie surprised him, pressing her palms against his chest until it was he who lay down on his back beside the fire, looking up at her. She sat back on her heels and shook the long shimmering cascade of bronze hair away from her face. All the while her eyes looked down on him, devouring every long-limbed powerfully muscled inch of his naked flesh. Then she straddled his hips and positioned herself above his straining phallus. Slowly she impaled herself on it as he watched.

  Chase's hands bit into the curve of her hips and moved around to her buttocks, cupping them and kneading the soft flesh, lifting her as she rode him. Stephanie moved slowly and deliberately, setting an even rhythm to make their joining last as long as possible. Leaning forward she touched the washboard hardness of his belly, then moved her hands higher into the hair on his chest, digging her fingertips into the pelt, then feeling the jagged edges of his Sun Dance scars. The muscles of his chest bunched as his hips kept pace with hers.

  She could feel his heart slamming against her palm as she slowly lowered her head to his chest. Her long hair spilled over him, curtaining them from the dull glow of the firelight, the soft ends feathering against his skin in light wispy caresses that he thought would drive him mad. Her mouth made contact with his hot skin. He could feel his chest heave and tremble as she began to press kisses on his scars. When she opened her lips and traced the thick ridges with her tongue, he moaned her name and tangled his fists in the bronze sheen of her hair, pulling her closer, closer.

  This was her Indian lover, scarred in a pagan ritual. This was the father of her unborn child, the only man she could ever love. Stephanie gloried in these scars for they had given him his vision and she was part of it, even sharing the dream with him. That and the child they had made would bind their spirits together long after they would be separated. She kissed the rough knotted tissue, pressing tongue and lips to it, laving it as he groaned deep in his throat, a guttural cry of pleasure and longing. Her scalp stung from the tug of his hands in her hair but she felt no pain.

  Of their own volition, Stephanie's hips began to increase their tempo, taking him deep inside of her, then rising high, only to plunge once more. Chase kept sync with her, thrusting up on each down stroke. What had begun slowly now built to a desperately sought climax. He pulled on her hair until her head raised up to meet his and his lips could claim hers in another devouring kiss. When he felt the satiny flexing of her sheath and heard her low mewling cries deep in his mouth, he let go, swelling and pulsing his life-bringing fluids deep inside of her.

  Stephanie held onto him, riding out the maelstrom of anguished pleasure that filled her mind as well as her body. His heart slammed furiously against her palms as they crested together. The hot spurt of his seed sent her spiraling yet higher until the sky and all the stars dissolved and the earth beneath them melted away. They were the White Wolf and Eyes Like Sun, all there was in the universe at that moment, two lovers alone and utterly at peace in the warm sweet wash of satiation. But that peace was fleeting.

  Stephanie collapsed on top of him, pressing her face to his chest, feeling the roughness of scar tissue against the smoothness of her cheek. She felt his arms around her, one hand splayed across the small of her back while the other reached up to brush the heavy curtain of hair away from her face.

  “I will always remember this,” she murmured against his chest, letting the tears seep from beneath her lashes to touch his hot skin.

  “Don't, Stevie, don't speak, don't cry,” he replied softly as he stroked her hair. How can I give her up? She is my life. His vengeance against Phillips, his warrior's honor, even the Cheyenne themselves meant nothing compared to his love for her. And he had told her that was over. Such a paltry lie. Yet it was a lie he must live with until he died. For if he did not she would die with him and he could not bear that.

  So they held each other in the stillness of the night as a coyote howled on the distant plain and an owl hooted softly from the overhanging limbs of an aspen tree. After a while, their bodies still joined, Chase rolled them over and they made love again. Alternately through the night they slept and loved as if racing against the sun.

  But the sun did rise. Stephanie awakened to find Chase already up, saddling her mare as his big dun watched placidly. He was dressed in buckskin leggings but still bare chested. His hair hung loose, falling across his shoulders as he walked over and stirred the fire where another freshly killed pair of rabbits were roasting. Feeling her eyes on him, he turned his head and grinned. Absurdly after what they had done all night, she felt the urge to blush and cover herself. There had always been a magical newness about loving Chase Remington, from the first moment he'd kissed her so long ago in Boston.

  “We let the ones last night burn up so I snared us more. Hungry?”

  His eyes taunted her. “Starved,” she replied, reaching for her tunic, which lay discarded hastily beside their pallet.

  They ate in silence, then shared the simple tasks of breaking camp and mounted up, heading relentlessly south, to civilization.

  * * * *

  “I hate this place! The dust is thick enough to choke the horses and the mosquitoes could carry away a large dog!” Sabrina Remington slammed the lid of her traveling trunk with an oath and glared at her husband across the austere room in the Brunswick Hotel. “Why did you insist on dragging me into this hellish wasteland?”

  Burke studied her with a detached air from across the room where he stood sipping from a glass of brandy. “You're not exactly trustworthy, left to your own devices in Boston, much less Washington, while I'm traveling west on senatorial business.”

  “Why, Burke, whatever—”

  He cut off her indignant protest with a sharp bark of laughter, harsh and ugly. Then he fixed her with cold blue eyes. “The ‘whatever,’ as we both perfectly well know, is that damned Nevada congressman you've been fucking.”

  Sabrina's porcelain complexion mottled red with temper. “That's a vulgar and disgusting thing to say! Rory Madigan and I are merely social acquaintances. He's very wealthy and moves in our circles even if he is a Democrat.”

  “He's a crass Irish immigrant who managed to strike it rich. Just the sort of pretty face you've always fancied. If I weren't already assured of your barrenness, I'd have killed you long ago, Sabrina my pet, before I let you saddle me with a bastard from one of your indiscretions.”

  Her face quickly lost its rosy tint as the implication of his remarks sunk in. “Have we come here because of Chase, Burke?”

  “Of course. We have to verify that our beloved nephew has finally been laid to his well-deserved rest,” he replied with false geniality.

  “You don't need me to prove Chase is dead. I know you've hired men to track him down and kill him for the reward money you've secretly put up through various merchants.” In spite of her precarious position, she could not resist the hint of snideness in her voice.

  His icy blue gaze riveted on her. “You fucked him. That, I'm afraid, I shall never forgive—a dirty, filthy savage. You'll recall it was at the time you began your dalliance with Chase that I quit your bed permanently. I can stomach a great many things, even an Irishman, but the leavings of a red Indian are beyond the pale.”

  “You've scarcely noticed whether I was dead or alive since you married me, much less cared to bed me. All I ever was to you was a social ornament, a hostess for your political friends.”

  “And a splendid ornament you have been,” he purred, moving across the threadbare carpet to where she stood beside a hideous gargoyle of a settee. When he touched one bouncing inky curl, she flinched in distaste. “But you've grown indiscreet. I can no longer trust you to your own devices when I leave the capital. I will not have the political harpies gossiping behind my back, making me a laughingstock—an older man with a beautiful younger wife who's cuckolding him. Bad enough when it was the Indian but then he broke it off.” He smiled chillingly. “Imagine that, a savage with more conscience than the flower of Virginia aristo
cracy.”

  “Is that the real reason you're so obsessed with killing Chase?”

  He studied her as if she were a butterfly pinned on a velvet board. “My reasons are my own and you do not signify in the slightest. Although I daresay if Jeremiah did succeed in making our nephew his sole heir after I die, you'd be rather put out. I doubt he'd be so foolish as to marry an older woman.”

  She instinctively raised her hand to slap him but he caught her wrist in a bone-crushing grip. “Ooh! You're hurting me, Burke. Let go!” she wailed, rubbing her arm when he flung it away as if it were a viper.

  Disgusted with his faithless whore of a wife, Remington turned and walked to the window. The streets of Rawlins were thick with dust. If the pewter gray clouds gathering in the northwest were any indication, a torrential rainstorm would soon reduce that dust to knee-deep mud. God, how he hated Wyoming! He hated the whole windswept barren starkness that was the West with its bitter searing cold and intense blazing heat, its endless sky that stretched in every direction, limitless, soulless, empty. It frightened him with its immensity. But this was where Chase had fled and he must follow to see that Anthea's bastard died.

  He took another pull on the brandy in his glass. It was early, only four or so, but it had been a hellish trip and he needed the liquor, an indulgence Burke seldom allowed himself. “We're having dinner with Major Phillips tonight. He indicated in his wire that he finally has some news regarding your Indian. It's about time he did something to earn the major's bars I secured for him.”

  The way he said the words your Indian sent a shudder racing along her already overwrought nerves. “Why have you really brought me to Wyoming, Burke?”

  The cold dread in her voice amused him. Feeling expansive, he polished off the brandy and turned to her. “Why do you think, Sabrina?” A slight smile touched his lips but not his eyes.