“Yes, I’m Monroe,” he answered. “And you’re safe now. We’re gonna take you home.”
“Jamie’s dead,” she said, then lost control of her emotions again.
“I know,” Monroe said, and put his arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry for what you’ve had to go through, but you’re safe now.”
Standing silently watching the dramatic meeting, Hawk felt compelled to remind them both. “I’m thinkin’ there’s a war party of Sioux warriors back yonder that might start wonderin’ what happened to that buck that was lookin’ for you. We’d best start back down that valley and put some distance between us and them before they find him.” His warning served to immediately bring their attention back to the business at hand and the danger lying about a hundred and fifty yards away.
“You’re right,” Monroe said, and hurried back to lead the horses out.
Hawk waited until Monroe was up in the saddle before sweeping Rachel up and placing her behind him. “Here,” he said, “you can ride behind your brother-in-law. As light as you are, I doubt that roan will notice the extra weight. He’ll just think Monroe musta ate an extra biscuit for supper.” Talking to Monroe then, he said, “We’ll head out that way,” pointing toward the south. “We’ll stay in close to the east side of these mountains in case we have to ride up in ’em if we get anybody hot on our tails.” He hopped up to put one foot in the stirrup, swinging his right leg over to settle in the saddle as the buckskin loped along the base of the hills beside them. If they were lucky, he thought, it would take a while before anybody found the body of the warrior he killed. Chances were good that they wouldn’t be able to pick up their trail until morning, when it was light enough to see. By that time, they should be resting their horses at Rubin Fagan’s trading post.
* * *
They had been in the saddle for the better part of two hours before a three-quarter moon rose high enough over the mountains behind them to lighten the shadows somewhat. It had been Hawk’s intention to push the horses on through the night, but he changed his mind when the buckskin began to show signs of tiring. If his horse was tiring, then Monroe’s would definitely be also. Hawk allowed that the horses had already been ridden a sizable distance during the day just past, and without adequate rest. It was his estimate that it was still twenty miles to Fagan’s and the temporary cavalry fort established there since the increase in hostile attacks during the past year. So when they came to a rapidly flowing stream, he pulled up to allow Monroe to catch up to him. “I reckon if we don’t rest these horses pretty soon, we’re liable to end up walkin’ to the Clark Fork. I’m thinkin’ we oughta follow this stream back up the mountain and find a good spot to camp till daylight. I expect we’ve got enough lead on those Sioux to take a little rest and be gone from here at sunup.”
There was no argument from Monroe—he had already begun to wonder if his horse was going to make another twenty miles. They followed the stream for a good one hundred yards to a narrow gulch up through a hillside covered with lodgepole pines. Climbing up the gulch, they reached a point where the stream formed a small pool before continuing down the slope. “This looks as good a place as any,” Hawk decided. They pulled the saddles and packs off the horses and let them drink and nibble on what grass they could find around the pond. There was very little, but they would be fed when they reached the river.
“Can we risk a fire?” Monroe asked. “I don’t know about Rachel, but you and I haven’t eaten anything in quite a while. Even a cup of coffee would be enough to keep me alive.” He looked at her. “That would be good right now, wouldn’t it, Rachel?”
Still insecure at this point, she had not spoken a word during the long ride down the valley. “Oh, it surely would,” she replied. “If you have the coffee and a pot, I would be happy to make it for you.” Even though Monroe was her brother-in-law, she felt very much in the company of strangers. It was difficult to dispel a feeling of being lost. She had known her late husband only a few months before finding herself in this dangerous and awkward situation. The Indians that had captured her were a frightening and vicious lot, and the picture of them riding after them still dominated her thoughts. Yet, she could not deny a feeling of confidence in the strange man called Hawk.
“I expect it’ll be all right to build a little fire,” Hawk said. “It’d be hard to see the smoke come up outta these trees, as dark as it is, even as much smoke as pine makes. And we’ll be long gone at daylight. I’ll get my coffeepot and you can make us some, long as you make it strong enough,” he added with a smile. “Might as well eat something, too; salt pork or deer jerky, we’ve got both.”
Monroe studied his sister-in-law as she went about the business of making the coffee. He had long since resigned himself to the notion that his brother was dead, even before Rachel confirmed the fact that the skeletal remains he and Hawk had buried were Jamie’s. There was no question but what the thing to do was to take her home to the family ranch in the Bitterroot Valley. He wondered if that was what she would want, or would she prefer to return to her family in Minnesota? Hell, I don’t even know the woman, he thought. He realized that he was seeing her at what could hardly be described as her best, but she looked to him to be a little older than Jamie. If he had to guess, he would say she was at least twenty years old, maybe a year or two older, and Jamie had only been eighteen since January.
As if sensing his concentration upon her, Rachel turned to smile at him. “I think the coffee is ready,” she said, and filled the two cups he had provided. She waited a moment while Hawk extended his cup to be filled as well. “I guess we should get to know each other,” she said, looking back at Monroe. “There’s not much I can tell you about myself. I don’t know what Jamie might have told you from the letters we exchanged. But when he arrived that day, sitting like a soldier up in the wagon seat, I knew it was the right decision for me. I guess he felt the same because he asked me to marry him. But I don’t think it would be fair for your family to make a place for me.”
“And do what?” Monroe replied. “Send you packing? Don’t you worry, little lady, when Jamie asked you to marry him, that was as good a way as any I know to prove you belong in the family. So I’m planning to take you home.” He paused, then said, “Unless you just don’t wanna go. Are you aching to go back to Minnesota now that Jamie is gone?”
“No,” she quickly said. “I was living with my uncle and his family—six children, all of us in a two-room cabin. They were more than happy when I moved out.”
“Well, I guess that settles that,” Monroe said. “It’ll be real nice to have another woman in the house. I know Ma will be glad to see you. She’s gotten too old to do much but sit in her chair and talk. And the only female she’s got to talk to is your sister-in-law and the cook, a Salish woman named Lily Bright Bird. So you see, we need you to keep my brother, Thomas, and me from getting too rough around the edges and unfit for company.”
An interested spectator to the seemingly cordial inauguration of Rachel into the Pratt family, Hawk sipped his coffee from the one cup he owned. It appeared that Monroe and his new sister-in-law were prepared to do the best they could to carry on after the tragedy of Jamie’s death. He saw it as his responsibility to get them safely to Rubin Fagan’s trading post. That should remove the threat of an act of vengeance from the Sioux war party because of the soldiers close by. He considered the possibility that his services would no longer be required once they reached the trading post. In that event, he strongly contemplated taking up his hunt for Walking Owl’s village. It might be too late to think he had any chance of warning them about the Sioux war party trailing them. It all depended upon what the Sioux did when they found the body of the warrior he had killed and discovered the white woman was gone.
“You are as kind and gracious as Jamie said you were,” Rachel said, a trace of moisture forming in her eyes as she spoke. “I thank you for welcoming me as a member of your family and I thank you for saving me from a fate I fear would have been m
ost horrible.”
“I reckon we’ve got Hawk to thank for finding you,” Monroe said. “But you oughta know that we would have searched for you till we did find you, no matter how long it took. You’re a member of my family, no matter if Jamie is still with us or not.” He gave her a warm smile and said, “It’s bad enough to see your husband murdered by savage Indians without being captured by them.” At once confused by the change in her expression, as her smile suddenly faded to a frown, he was totally astounded by her next statement, as was the ever-stoic Hawk.
“Jamie wasn’t killed by the Indians,” she said, her expression one of surprise now, having assumed they already knew that.
“What?” Monroe blurted, his confusion complete now. “Whaddaya mean? Who killed him?”
“Why, Jamie was killed by that evil wagon master, that man who lied to everyone on the wagon train, that Roy Nestor!” She looked from one of them to the other, astonished. “I thought you already knew that.”
“I sure as hell didn’t,” Monroe replied, still shaken by this stunning revelation. He was sick with anger when he recalled the meeting he had had with Nestor in Helena when he seemed so sorry to hear that Jamie had not made it to the Bitterroot. From there, his mind went immediately to the encounters he and Hawk had had with the vile murderer and the opportunities to have killed him, only to let him get away. If he had known that day when Hawk had backed Nestor out of the street, he would have shot him down. Devastated with the realization that he had been given several chances to avenge the murder of his brother, but had not known to act upon them, he turned to Hawk as if to ask for help.
Stunned as well, Hawk, however, was not as devastated as Monroe. Accustomed to unexpected twists of fate, he accepted the startling news as a sign of unfinished business that now had to be taken care of. “I’ll see to Mr. Nestor,” he said.
“I wanna kill him, myself,” Monroe uttered through a tightly clenched jaw, his hands trembling with the rage inside him.
“I reckon you do,” Hawk said. “But first, you gotta find him and that ain’t gonna be easy.”
“I don’t care,” Monroe insisted. “I’ll keep looking for him till I track him down, no matter how long it takes.”
“What about Rachel, here?” Hawk asked. “You gonna take her with you while you’re trackin’ Nestor down?”
His questions caused Monroe to stop and think. Suddenly his speech before about welcoming her into the family lost its sincerity when revenge for his brother took over his mind. Glancing at her now, shivering in fear that she had somehow cast herself in disfavor with an innocent remark, he sought to set her mind at ease. “Hawk’s right. The most important thing for me is to see you safely to your new home in the Bitterroot Valley. And that’s what we’re gonna do. Right, Hawk?”
“If you say so,” Hawk replied. He was still interested to hear about the murder of Rachel’s husband, however, so he questioned her directly. “How did you end up with that war party if it was Roy Nestor that killed your husband?”
Rachel related the events that led up to her capture, starting with the day she and Jamie loaded the wagon with supplies to replace those consumed on the long trip from Fort Benton. After saying good-bye to some people they had befriended on the journey, they pulled out of Helena late one morning and headed back to intercept the Mullan Road. It was close to sundown when they approached Mullan Pass and met Roy Nestor sitting on his horse in the middle of the road. He called out a friendly greeting, or so it seemed, and rode up to them. He said he had heard that they were pushing on to Missoula and he was concerned for their safety. “Jamie didn’t have any use for the man and told him so,” she said. “Still he insisted that we would need his protection and said he would take us to Missoula for two hundred dollars. Jamie told him we didn’t have two hundred dollars, so he might as well leave us be. It musta made Nestor mad. He pulled his horse back to let us pass, but when we went by him he pulled his pistol and shot Jamie in the back.” Her voice rose in pitch as she seemed to be reliving those frightening moments. “Jamie fell over against me. I didn’t know what to do. He was hurt so bad, so I grabbed the reins and whipped the horses as hard as I could. I wanted to get away from Nestor, but he jumped off his horse onto the back of the wagon. That’s when all those Indians appeared, from nowhere, yelling and screaming and shooting. I couldn’t hold the horses. They went crazy and all of a sudden we were flying through the air when the wagon hit something and threw all three of us out.”
“So you made it to that gulch, then,” Hawk commented. “You and Jamie?”
“Yes, that’s right, we were trying to find a place to hide. When we were thrown from the wagon, we didn’t have time to get Jamie’s rifle or his pistol.”
“But somebody had a rifle in that ravine,” Hawk said, remembering the spent shell casings he had found.
“Nestor!” she exclaimed. “He came running in the ravine after us. He had a rifle and he tried to hold the Indians off until he ran out of cartridges. When he quit shooting, the Indians crept closer and closer till they were sure he had no more bullets. As soon as he saw what was going to happen, he started crawling up the side of the gulch. Jamie tried to stop him, but he was so weak from his wound he couldn’t. That’s when Nestor stabbed him with his knife and killed him.”
“Well, I’ll be . . .” Hawk muttered softly as he put the whole picture together. “So it was Nestor that scrambled up over the side of that ravine. I’m pretty good at readin’ sign, but I sure didn’t come up with that.” He shook his head slowly, thinking about the horrible experience the woman had lived through.
“I couldn’t leave Jamie,” Rachel said, “even if I could have climbed up the side of that gulch. I thought the Indians would surely kill me but they grabbed me by my hair and dragged me away from him. I begged them to let me bury my husband, but they only laughed.”
Hawk pictured the scene. He could pretty well guess why her life was spared. “I expect one of ’em put his rope around your neck and led you like a dog.” She nodded, surprised that he knew. “Was that the one you were hidin’ from when I ran into you?”
“Yes,” she answered meekly, as if ashamed to admit it.
“Ain’t no use to hang your head over that,” Hawk said. “Wasn’t much you could do about it. It’s a sorry thing to have to go through, but Monroe and the rest of his family know it ain’t no blame on you.” He glanced at Monroe, waiting for him to reassure her.
“Why, that surely is the truth,” Monroe said, picking up the cue. “You’re a part of the Pratt family now, and the first order of business is to get you home to the Triple-P to meet the rest of us. Like Hawk says, we’ll go to the trading post in the morning and see if they’ve got any clothes fit for a woman. We can’t expect you to ride all the way to the Bitterroot Valley in that one frock. Then we’ll go talk to the soldiers. They’ll know if there’s any danger in going on to the Bitterroot right away. Just don’t you worry your pretty head about it, Hawk and I will take care of you.” Hawk nodded, pleased that Monroe had seen fit to comfort her.
CHAPTER 8
The body of Kills Two Bears was discovered by Crooked Leg in the early morning light when the young Lakota warrior decided to search for chokecherries in the thick bushes along the bank. At once alarmed, he cried out to warn the others while looking quickly around him ready to defend himself, but there was no sign of enemy warriors. Looking more closely at Kills Two Bears, he realized that he had been dead for some time by then. He said as much to the other warriors when they came running to see for themselves. The first ones to arrive at the scene agreed with Crooked Leg that Kills Two Bears had been dead for several hours. They all turned to meet Spotted Pony, the dead warrior’s brother, when he approached. “It’s Kills Two Bears,” Crooked Leg said.
“What?” Spotted Pony responded, confused. Then he saw the body of his brother and sank to his knees beside it. His face twisted in agony, he moaned in his grief, lowly at first, but building until he could no longer hold
it inside him and he wailed out like a wolf howling. The others spread out at once, searching for sign of an enemy war party, thinking that the Blackfoot village they had been following must have somehow discovered them.
After a short time, they came back to Spotted Pony, who was still kneeling beside his dead brother, moaning in his despair. “It was only one man,” Running Bird said. “There is plenty of sign here where they fought. It was not a Blackfoot. This man wore white man’s boots. We found his tracks leading that way.” He pointed toward the south. “There are other tracks. We think he took the woman, for her tracks follow his.”
“I should have known something was wrong,” Spotted Pony lamented. “When he complained that his belly was too full and went to relieve himself, he took the woman with him. He didn’t come back for a long time. I thought he was with the woman and I went to sleep.”
“You could not know,” Crooked Leg said. “Someone of her people must have followed our trail and sneaked into our camp to take her. He would not have been able to take the woman if she had not been away from the camp.”
Spotted Pony heard the words, but he was not listening, consumed as he was with the growing flame of anger in his veins. He rose to his feet and looked in the direction Running Bird had pointed out. “I must kill this white man,” he vowed. “I will tear his heart out with my bare hands.” He turned at once to return to his blanket for the rest of his weapons.
“We will help you find him,” Crooked Leg said. “Him and the white bitch.”
“What about the Blackfoot camp and the horses we were going to steal?” This reminder of the purpose of their war party came from Running Bird. His question brought forth a scowl on Spotted Pony’s face. “I am grieved by the loss of your brother, just as every man here,” Running Bird went on. “I’m only asking if we should abandon our plans to kill our enemies and capture their horses now that we have come so far into their territory.” Seeing that he had caused the others to pause and consider the question, he suggested, “Since it is only one man, maybe only one or two of us need go with Spotted Pony. That is all I am saying.”
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