by Shirl Henke
* * * *
Chase recuperated in the small ramshackle cabin by the edge of the North Platte River. Although not at all the sort of place a city-bred woman like its new owner would enjoy, it was nonetheless a comfortable haven for him and Stephanie.
‘‘What are you doing out of bed? You're not supposed to walk by yourself. Dr. Kandell strictly ordered bed rest.” Stephanie stood in the doorway of the cabin's main room with an armload of firewood, glaring at Chase as he limped across the bare creaky floorboards and eased himself gingerly onto the battered old horsehair sofa.
He stretched his aching leg out in front of him after setting aside his cane which doubled as an iron fire poker. “I'm sick of bed rest. I need to start moving around more. I don't like the looks of that foreman Burke hired. The longer I stay here, the more likely it is someone will discover you're holed up with a wanted man. My luck hiding out hasn't exactly been the best the last few months. Sabrina told me how I was followed back to the stronghold last fall. She overheard Hugh and Burke discussing what that Ree scout had found, planning it all. I'm so sorry I thought you could’ve betrayed the people you loved.”
She touched his lips with her fingertips. “It's over now, Chase. We're safe. Hugh and Burke are dead. We can begin again.” A guarded expression came over his face. She felt him tense and he looked away for an instant. Her heart stopped beating as she asked, “What do you plan to do when you can ride, Chase?” They had both skirted around the subject for the past two weeks while he mended. Sooner or later she had to face it if he planned to leave her again. I won't let him do it!
Chase looked at her, seeing the vulnerability, the longing in her eyes. He had hurt her painfully, accused her unjustly, been unable to protect her from the monster she'd married...all because he'd left her in the first place. “Life comes full circle, doesn't it, Stevie?” he asked with a bittersweet smile, reaching one hand out for her to join him on the sofa.
She took his hand and sat down beside him. “Will you just ride off again? Go searching for the rest of our band?”
He covered her small delicate hand with his larger dark one and met her eyes. “You're carrying my child. I may be considered a bastard by white society's standards, but I won't let what happened to my mother happen to you. As soon as I can walk, we'll catch the cars heading east. We can be married in the territorial capital...then you can go back to Boston to have the baby—or wherever you want to live. With Phillips dead you're a wealthy woman even if you don't want to face old Jeremiah.”
“And you'll just leave us? Not this time, Chase.” She swallowed for courage, then played her ace. “I’m not wealthy. All my father's money went to Hugh. Now that he's dead it goes to his family. Josiah disinherited me for being born female.”
He sat back, stunned by her announcement for a moment. Then he took her in his arms, wincing as the ache in his side twinged.
“Damn the old fool.” He cursed Josiah Summerfield a thousand times more, thinking of how bitterly such a betrayal must have hurt his only child. “You never told me. At the stronghold when I made you promise to divorce Hugh, you knew you had no power to do it, yet you never said a word.”
“I didn't want your pity, Chase,” she said, pulling out of his embrace. “That's why I didn't tell you I was pregnant when you took me to de Boef. I wasn't going to keep you from your life with the Cheyenne because you felt sorry—or responsible—for me.”
“I love you! I don't pity you, dammit. But I can't go back east with you. I can't bear to look at the old man. I'll never be able to forgive what he let happen to my mother. I went to him, you know, told him the truth about his only son and heir. She was so ashamed she never dared. That's why she ran away to marry a white man she didn't love and join a wagon train bound for Oregon. But he wouldn't listen to me. Called me a spawn of the devil for inventing such monstrous lies.”
Stephanie could feel his anguish. What tortured black secrets were hidden behind the wealth and glitter of the Remington name. “And so you ran away to find your father's people, a fourteen-year-old boy alone and so frightened.”
“I hated her then, blamed her when they dragged me back three years later. But once I saw what she had suffered...hell, Stevie, she was a lot younger than fourteen when Burke started in on her...”
His voice choked with emotion as she held him. ‘‘She knew you'd forgiven her when she died, that you loved her. There was nothing you could’ve done. It all began so long ago, before you were born.”
“I couldn't stop it but Jeremiah could have,” Chase gritted out. “He knew, the bastard. He knew!”
“Something that terrible...I imagine his mind just couldn't accept it, Chase. He'd lived by such high principles all his life and raised his son to behave the same way.”
“I don't ever want to see him again,” he said flatly.
“But you'd send me to him, wouldn't you? You'd let our child grow up without a father. I'd planned to go to Jeremiah and beg help for his great-grandchild. I've been so careful with this,” she said, taking the beaded pouch with Anthea's locket from beneath her blouse. “It was my proof that I carried his heir. The idea seemed best at the time with Hugh still alive. But now everything's changed. You can't be the White Wolf any longer. The People are scattered onto reservations. That part of our lives is over, but we still have a future...and a baby who needs a father.”
She waited with suspended breath, watching him struggle with all the old demons of the past. He reached out and took her hands in his. “Stevie—”
Stephanie would have given a decade off her life to have heard him finish what he planned to say but the sound of several riders approaching interrupted them. Chase tensed, then reached for the poker, struggling to his feet.
“Get me the rifle,” he said, pointing to the loaded Winchester by the fireplace. “Those riders came in way too fast for a social call.”
Stephanie dashed over and handed him the rifle as footsteps raced onto the porch. Before he could cock it the door crashed open. Half a dozen soldiers burst into the room with their Springfields leveled on him. “Drop it, breed,” the lieutenant said.
Surrounded, with Stephanie in the line of fire, Chase had no choice but to comply.
“I tole you he wuz hidin' here. He's thet Remington feller they call the White Wolf. When can I get my reward?” the foreman Sug Nelson asked eagerly.
“He's our escaped prisoner, all right,” Lieutenant Grimes said. “Take him away. I'll see to Mrs. Phillips.”
“No! Chase is ill. He can't be moved—he's been injured,” Stephanie cried, throwing her arms around him.
Gently Chase disengaged from her embrace, giving her over into the young officer's care. “Go with him, Stevie. He'll see you get on a train to Boston, won't you, Lieutenant?”
Grimes's face was red with embarrassment as he watched Remington pry her arms from around his neck and urge her toward the soldiers. It was obvious that the major's widow loved the renegade. She'd probably even been with him when he killed her husband and the senator, although there was no evidence linking Chase to either death. The senator's foreman had drifted into the fort that morning and plunked down a wanted poster with the White Wolf's picture on it, saying he'd just learned about the reward and he knew where the half-breed was hiding.
Flustered by the woman's silent tears and the look of tender longing shared between her and the enigmatic renegade, Grimes said, “Yes, of course, I'll see that Mrs. Phillips is returned safely to the bosom of her family!”
Stephanie stood rigidly straight, certain she would shatter in a million pieces while Grimes stood deferentially at her side, watching his men drag Chase from the house and tie him on a horse. As befitted a Cheyenne warrior, he did not utter a sound in spite of the terrible pain from his injuries. She was a warrior's wife and must do the same. The tears poured like acid rain down her cheeks but she remained silent while the column rode off with their prisoner.
Grimes cleared his throat nervously. “Er, Mrs. P
hillips—”
“I haven't been Hugh Phillips's wife for a very long time. Chase Remington is my husband,” she said with quiet conviction.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The bosom of her family. Stephanie had no white family left. Certainly not the distant Summerfield cousins. Her Cheyenne family, who she loved so dearly, had been decimated and scattered to distant reservations. She prayed that Kit Fox would be able to care for Smooth Stone and Tiny Dancer. With Stands Tall to guide them and the protection of Blue Eagle and Plenty Horses, perhaps they would all one day escape captivity and return to freedom in the land of endless sky.
Feeling as much a prisoner as the Cheyenne, she blinked back tears as her hackney rattled over the narrow rain-washed streets of Beacon Hill toward the huge gray stone monolith. As a girl the mansion had always intimidated her. So had Jeremiah Remington. The massive austere house perfectly suited him. How ironic that he was the only family she had left—if he would consider her that. She was highly uncertain of her welcome. What if he refused to see her after she'd traveled over two thousand miles to confront him in person? Her mind simply shut down thinking about what would happen then.
Stephanie had sent numerous frantic wires to the reverend from Cheyenne, the territorial capital where the army had sent Chase for his mockery of a trial. None had been answered save for a terse statement from his secretary saying Reverend Remington was in mourning for the death of his son and had left Boston with instructions that no communications from anyone be forwarded until further notice. She knew he was well advanced in years and Burke's death, no matter that they had not been close, must have been a terrible blow. The bitter old man may have grieved himself to death without ever knowing Chase would give him another heir.
Dwelling on negative thoughts was useless. She assured herself that she would find him returned to Boston by this time or, failing that, be able to convince his officious secretary to relay her message to the reverend. She clutched the tiny pouch with Anthea' s locket as if it were a talisman to ward off evil. Wearing it next to her heart certainly had provided comfort during the past nightmarish weeks.
At least Chase is not dead, she repeated like a mantra. The military tribunal had been presided over by an official from the Interior Department who ruled in favor of incarceration instead of a death sentence. “Relocation” was the euphemism he used at sentencing. Since she and Chase were not legally married, the army refused to allow her visitation privileges. That terrible day at Sabrina's ranch was the last time she had seen him.
The court had sentenced the infamous White Wolf to twenty years incarceration at Fort Marion, Florida, a terrible tropical pest hole outside St. Augustine. Dozens of leaders from various western tribes were being imprisoned there in the hope of breaking the spirit of Indian resistance. Stephanie had heard stories about the horrible old fortress, a cavernous moldy stone facility built by the Spanish in the seventeenth century.
Chase's bullet wounds were barely healing and his back was still a mass of raw tender muscle and skin. Inside a dark filthy cell in the humid Florida heat he could easily die of infection. She had to free him as quickly as possible. The Remington name and influence, which Chase had despised all of his life, was now his only hope of salvation—if Jeremiah Remington could be persuaded to exert it on behalf of his renegade grandson.
Stephanie had agonized over whether or not to tell the old man the terrible truth about Burke. Did he have any inkling his grandson had killed his son? Once she began to unravel the ugly mess there could be no half measures. She would have to confess everything. She could not imagine anyone being able to lie with Jeremiah's steely blue eyes impaling him. Of course, Burke had been able to do so when Chase accused him. But then Burke had been a cold-blooded ruthless murderer, and utterly insane. Stephanie shivered remembering that awful confrontation on the banks of the Platte. Could Jeremiah Remington handle the whole truth?
The hackney pulled to a stop in front of the big house and the driver opened the door. She stepped down and paid him his fare. She had left her trunk at the railway depot, not daring to presume she would be welcome. Her meager funds were running low and she was uncertain where she would go if she was turned away. Nausea churned in her stomach as she walked up the steps and raised her hand to the heavy brass knocker. The sound of it striking the massive oak door was like the peal of judgment day.
After she waited an interminable time in the muggy August heat, the door swung open and a small fastidious looking man dressed somberly in black stood unsmiling. “Yes?” His mustache covered the corners of his mouth making it appear perpetually turned down. The wintry gray eyes inspecting her did not dispel the effect at all.
Stephanie knew she looked frightful after the long, arduous railroad journey. Her hair was frizzing in Boston's late summer humidity and her travel suit was dingy with soot. Thank goodness her pregnancy was not visible yet, but it soon would be. She must provide a home for her baby at any cost. Swallowing for courage, she fixed the butler with a firm look and addressed him with the imperious assurance of a Boston aristocrat. “I am Stephanie Summerfield and I'm here to see the Reverend Jeremiah Remington.” Without waiting for an invitation, she stepped into the marble foyer.
“See here, Miss Summerfield, the reverend is still in mourning and not receiving visitors except for close personal friends.”
“I am a close personal friend of his grandson Chase. I must—”
“What the dickens is going on down there, Thomas?” Jeremiah's voice boomed from the landing.
“Some young woman, Reverend Remington, says she's a friend of your grandson.”
“Chase?” Jeremiah walked down the steps surprisingly swiftly for a man of his years. He was still imposing with thick snowy hair and piercing blue eyes but his face looked haggard and his tall robust frame had grown thin, almost frail looking. He peered through the dim light of the foyer at Stephanie. “Miss Summerfield?” he asked incredulously.
“Yes, Reverend. Stephanie Summerfield. I'm here because of Chase.”
The butler looked from the travel-stained young woman to the old man. Before he could say anything, his employer waved him away, saying, “Bring some fresh lemonade into my study, Thomas.”
A small bit of relief energized her. At least she had gotten herself a hearing. She followed Jeremiah down the hall to a handsomely appointed room filled with books, most of them on religious subjects. He offered her a seat on a tufted back easy chair, then sat down on the large leather sofa across the tea table from her.
“The last I recall, Miss Summerfield, you were going to Baltimore to marry a young army officer about four years ago.”
She felt the heat stain her cheeks as she replied, “I did marry Hugh Phillips, but I'm widowed now.” She thought it prudent not to mention that she was responsible for her state, at least not yet. “I went west with my husband back in 1872.”
“And that's where you ran across my grandson again?” His eyes burned intently from deep, dark-ringed sockets. Chase had jilted her, causing quite a bit of scandal, yet she still seemed smitten with him. “I take it he must be in trouble.”
“Chase is alive, Reverend...for now.” She moistened her lips nervously, praying she could say the right words. “He's in prison in St. Augustine. I sent wires during his trial, appealing for your help, but you never received them. A man named Bartley said you were away, in mourning...”
“You asked my help in keeping Chase from prison and that fool never told me?” His eyes blazed with a bit of the old hellfire spark she remembered. “I'll deal with Bartley,” he added, dismissing the man. He leaned forward and asked, “How the devil did my scapegrace grandson end up in a Florida prison, not that I'm at all surprised? I always feared for his body as well as his soul.”
Just then Thomas knocked and entered bearing a heavy silver tray laden with a pitcher of lemonade and two frosty glasses. The reverend harrumphed, waiting until they'd been served before motioning her to reply.
St
ephanie tried as succinctly as possible to explain the tragic situation with Chase's people and his unorthodox means of helping them. It was difficult to determine how sympathetic Jeremiah was. Most people back east read the inflammatory one-sided accounts in the newspapers and simply assumed all Indians were savages preying on helpless whites.
“…So you see, they put a five-thousand-dollar reward on his head and tracked him down. He'd been badly hurt—whipped by...by the soldiers, then shot twice. He was only beginning to mend when they dragged him off to stand trial. It was a travesty. I'm desperately afraid for him. Fort Marion has a dreadful reputation. You must use your influence to get him released—a pardon, anything.” She looked at him with her heart in her eyes.
“You're in love with him, aren't you, child?”
“I always have been,” she replied, holding her head up proudly.
“He deserted you, same as he did me. You ought to hate him.”
“So should you but I believe you still love him, too.”
“Boy never believed I did. I...I suppose I wasn't very good at showing it. He was wild and filled with strange heathen notions and I was a preacher puffed up with vanity, full of himself.” He looked every one of his seventy-seven years at that moment. “I thought I'd never see him again. I imagine you thought the same?’’
“Yes...or maybe I unconsciously hoped I would find him out west. Perhaps that's why I married Hugh when I did not love him,” she confessed, admitting the truth to herself.
“Seems like you succeeded. You've apparently spent some time learning about those people he lived with.”
“Chase kidnapped me when I recognized him in a small Wyoming town where he was gathering information for a raid.” Now came the hardest part, telling him about their relationship, the Cheyenne marriage and the baby. She took several swallows of the lemonade to moisten her dry mouth, then plunged into the story of her months with the Cheyenne.