“She won’t,” Matt vowed. “I promise you that. But I’m still sending for her, Chee. She’d never forgive either of us, or herself, if…” God, he still couldn’t say aloud what he knew was happening to his friend.
“How?” Chee demanded. “How can anyone protect her from what the United States is doing to us?”
“I don’t know. But we’ll find a way,” Matt promised grimly. “We’ll find a way.”
Chapter One
“Caught your lecture this morning, Colton,” Hiram Devonshire said from beneath his drooping mustache.
Caught it, but didn’t agree with it, Spence thought. “I’m honored you took the time to listen.”
“Honored, hah.” Dr. Devonshire chuckled. “Don’t pull that humble routine with me, my boy. You’re one fine physician, and you know it.”
Spencer Colton didn’t know any such thing, not anymore. He’d thought, for a few years, that he was good. Maybe he really had been. But in the end it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. Any fool could sit beside a bed and watch someone die. It didn’t take a doctor for that. Yet as a doctor, one with extensive training in diseases and surgery, he was, more often than not, reduced to doing just that.
Godamighty, he was supposed to be able to help people!
Real funny, old man. You can’t even help yourself anymore.
“You really believe what you said about a patient’s state of mind?” Devonshire asked with deliberate casualness.
Well, Spence thought, maybe his words had gotten through to a few, anyway. “I’ve seen it too many times not to believe it. You have, too, if you think about it.”
Hiram Devonshire shook his head. “I’ve never worked with people like the Apaches you talked about. People with no hope, no spirit left.”
Spence leaned over and stubbed out his cigar in the crystal ashtray on the table beside the sofa. Smelly habit, cigars. In fact, the smell of them was the reason he’d lit his first one, that time back in medical school. Most students took up smoking in self-defense. It was the only way to survive the odors of the dissecting room.
“Sure you’ve seen people like that,” he offered to Devonshire.
Three more colleagues joined them in the corner alcove of the elegant hotel drawing room. Dozens of physicians from across the country had gathered in Philadelphia for the medical convention, and Spence knew many of them if not by name, then by reputation.
“People like what?” a surgeon from Kansas asked.
“People with no will to live,” Devonshire explained. “Colton seems to believe I’ve seen them.”
“You have. We all have,” Spence offered. “How about when an old woman dies of illness or accident? Her husband, while old, is in excellent health. Yet for no apparent reason, he follows her to the grave in less than a year.”
Devonshire frowned. “Hmmm. I see what you mean.”
“When a patient loses hope,” Spence added, “he loses strength. He gets weaker.” And when a doctor loses hope, he thought, it was time to quit before his patients paid the price of his hopelessness. Today’s lecture had been Spence’s last official act as a doctor. Tomorrow he was going home to the Triple C.
A uniformed bell captain tapped Spence on the shoulder. “Excuse me, Dr. Colton, but this telegram just came for you. It’s marked urgent.”
Spence tensed. Urgent telegrams seldom, if ever, brought good news. He took the telegram from the man and dug through his pocket for change. “Thank you, Joe.” He passed the tip to the man and rose from the sofa. “If you gentlemen will excuse me a moment?”
Without waiting for a reply from the men around him, Spence stepped away toward the relative privacy of the window overlooking the busy street outside. With a feeling of dread stirring in his stomach, he opened the telegram.
TO DOCTOR SPENCER COLTON, GRAND HOTEL STOP. URGENT STOP. CHEE DYING STOP. GET DAUGHTER LARISA FROM CARLISLE STOP. BRING HER AT ONCE STOP. CAPTAIN PRATT ADVISED STOP. MATT STOP.
Spence was on the train headed east within an hour of receiving the message from Matt. The telegram in his pocket weighed on him through each one of the one hundred miles from Philadelphia to Harrisburg, the nearest depot to Carlisle.
Spence didn’t want to go back to Mount Vernon. Sitting Woman’s death had been the final straw. The young expectant mother should never have counted on his help. She and her unborn baby should never have died. The tragedy, on top of so many, many other tragedies, had been more than he could cope with. He’d fled Alabama for Washington, with no intention of returning.
Now, he had no choice. He couldn’t let his brother or Chee down. He would get LaRisa Chee and take her to her father.
It never entered into Spence’s mind to question the seriousness of Chee’s condition. The Chiricahua were all dying, in one way or another. If the government didn’t get the Chiricahua out of that deathtrap of a camp, the prisoners really would all die, from malaria or tuberculosis or typhoid or any one of a dozen other diseases that infested that hellhole.
Chee’s dying did not come as a surprise. The former warrior’s bouts of malaria had been coming more frequently of late, instead of less, as should have been the case. Each time, Chee grew a little weaker, the disease a little stronger. The mere reminder had ice forming along the edges of Spence’s soul.
He tried to tell himself that he’d done all he could by going to Washington six weeks ago to testify before the Congressional subcommittee that was trying to decide the fate of the Chiricahua. Spence had gotten his parents to come, too. Not that it had taken any urging. Travis and Daniella Colton had lobbied in Washington on behalf of the tribe many times over the years.
When Spence had arrived in Washington, he’d made the mistake of letting his hope build, hope that this time, someone would listen. Listen, he thought as he stared out the train window at the passing landscape. Hell, the damn subcommittee, whose sole purpose it was to draw up recommendations for Congress regarding the Chiricahua, had put him off for three weeks before allowing him to testify on current conditions.
But he hadn’t wasted the time. The American Medical Association’s headquarters was in the nation’s capital. Part of their job was to improve medical conditions across the country. Officials there had listened with growing horror to Spence’s information. They had immediately sent someone to Mount Vernon to investigate.
By the time Spence was finally able to testify before the subcommittee, the AMA was lined up right behind him, demanding to be heard, demanding action. If the Chiricahua were not to be set free and allowed to return home, they should at least be moved to a more healthful location. The AMA agreed that Fort Sill in Indian Territory would be infinitely better than Mount Vernon.
In the week since Spence had left Washington for the medical convention in Philadelphia, where he hoped to gain even more support, he had thought—hoped—to get word from his parents. They were still in Washington, and had promised to notify him at once when the subcommittee formulated its recommendations and presented them to Congress.
No such word had come. The hope had been another exercise in futility. He should have known better than to let it build.
The train jerked and screeched to a stop at the Harrisburg depot. Spence got off and rented a buggy for the twenty-seven-mile trip to Carlisle, not at all eager to see the condition of the children there. Too many of them contracted tuberculosis and were sent back to Mount Vernon to their parents to die.
He stored his baggage behind the buggy seat. On the way out of town, his fingers clamped around the reins. God help him, he didn’t want to see any dying children today.
The Carlisle Indian School surprised him. Having seen and shared the deplorable conditions under which the Army had forced the Chiricahua to live, both since their surrender in ‘86 and before, on the reservation, Spence had tried to prepare himself for the worst. After all, these were only children. Who would listen to or care about their complaints?
But unlike their parents, the children were not housed in
dirt-floor shacks with leaky roofs, or in tents of rotted canvass. The old Carlisle Barracks, which housed the school and students, was clean and solid and three stories high. It was in good repair, and really quite nice to look at, with balconies running along the front, fresh paint, and a neat yard scattered with tall shade trees.
Inside the building where he’d been directed by a groundskeeper, the oak floor gleamed. The smells of beeswax, lemon oil, and fresh paint mingled with the ordinary school smells of chalk dust and sweaty children.
Not bad, Spence thought as he made his way to Captain Pratt’s office. If the children had to be taken away from their parents—and Spence had yet to find the logic behind that particular piece of cruelty—at least the facilities housing the kids were decent.
It was after four o’clock. The halls were deserted, making Spence wonder where the students went each day when classes were let out. For that matter, it was June. School was out for the summer. He’d heard the kids worked on neighboring farms during summer to further their education. Would Chee’s daughter even be here?
A civilian secretary, a starched woman in her mid-fifties, sat behind a small desk just outside the office of the man who ran the school. Spence introduced himself and asked to see Pratt.
“I’m sorry, Doctor, but Captain Pratt is on leave until the end of next week. Our headmistress, Miss Latimer, is in charge during his absence. She’s with a student just now, but if you’d care to wait, perhaps she can help you.”
“Thank you.” Spence took a seat on the bench at the other side of the office door, hoping the wait wouldn’t be long. If he could get LaRisa Chee and be on his way, they might make it back to Harrisburg in time to catch the midnight train headed south. The trip to Mount Vernon, Alabama, would take them nearly four full days.
What the hell was he supposed to do with a young girl for four days on a train? He tried to remember if Chee had mentioned his daughter’s age, but couldn’t. He knew she’d been among the first Chiricahua sent to Carlisle around eight years ago, so she couldn’t be too young. At least fifteen or sixteen, he guessed. Any older than that, and she would have finished school and been sent back to Chee.
Of course, the Government didn’t consider what happened to those children who did survive school and were returned to the tribe. Carlisle was supposed to prepare Indians for life in the white world. The plan was a joke. A sick, cruel joke. Teaching children how to read, write, and speak English, how to milk a cow, tend a field, shoe a horse, or any of the other practical things the school taught, could never prepare an Apache soul for lies and deceit and rigid, white society.
Then, too, there was no opportunity for the “graduates” to use their new-found knowledge and skills, because when released from school, they were sent back to their parents, still prisoners of war, not allowed to live in the white world at all. No cows to milk or fields to tend. No books to read. Hell, the farrier at Mount Vernon probably wouldn’t even let one of them shoe a mule.
Oh, yeah, Spence thought with disgust. Captain Pratt had great plans for his Carlisle students. In reality, those who left the school were unfit and unprepared for life in the white world, and no longer belonged in the Indian world, either. Taken at an early age, the children no longer thought like their parents, like Apaches.
What a damn, stinking mess.
Spence took a deep breath and forced himself to stop thinking about things he couldn’t change. He had a girl to fetch. He wasn’t too keen on the idea of playing nursemaid and chaperon to a kid, but for Chee, he would do it. And he’d pray every minute of the way that he would get her there in time.
The door to the office beside him was cracked open a couple of inches, letting out the harsh voice that Spence assumed belonged to Miss Latimer. He concentrated on her voice, figuring eavesdropping, while not polite, would keep him from wondering if Chee would live long enough to see his daughter again.
The name plate on the big oak desk may have read “Captain Richard H. Pratt,” but everyone knew that in his absence, she was in charge of the Carlisle School for Indians. She, being the woman who occupied the stuffed leather chair behind the desk—Headmistress Geraldine Latimer.
Geraldine tapped the arms of the chair with fingers that had never known manual labor in all their thirty-two years. Quite elegant-looking fingers, she acknowledged to herself. But then, compared to the little tramp seated across the desk, a gutter rat would look like a queen.
Not that Geraldine thought for a moment that her own looks might be lacking. Why, she was considered a lovely woman by all who knew her. If she hadn’t spent her prime years caring for her dying sister, Geraldine would have been married years ago.
But it wasn’t too late for her. Or hadn’t been, until the little heathen before her had interfered. Geraldine had had William Schultz dancing to her tune for three months, just on the verge of popping the question, until that disastrous dinner party last weekend.
Blast Captain Pratt, anyway, for making her agree to let LaRisa Chee help serve the dinner Geraldine had planned in order to impress dear William with her domestic capabilities. The captain had held out the carrot of leaving Geraldine in charge while he was on leave. She had argued for months that she was capable of running the school in his absence; she hadn’t been about to pass up her first chance to prove herself right.
LaRisa, one other girl, and two fifteen-year-old boys from the school had been enlisted to serve in whatever capacity necessary for the Saturday evening affair. Aside from a broken tureen in the kitchen—her mother’s tureen, to Geraldine’s great dismay—things had gone well. Geraldine had used the excuse of LaRisa’s clumsiness, for it was she who had dropped the prized bowl, to banish the little slut to the library with orders to remove every speck of dust before the end of the meal. The girl had actually possessed the effrontery to claim the calamity had been an accident, that Sally, Geraldine’s Negress cook, had bumped into her, causing her to drop the tureen and scald herself. The library at the back of the downstairs home Geraldine had lived in all her life was dark and oppressive. The perfect place to banish the little liar.
Unfortunately, dear William had discovered LaRisa alone in the library. Before he could retrace his steps in his search for Geraldine—she was certain he’d been looking for her while she’d stepped into the kitchen for a moment—that dark-skinned, black-eyed Jezebel, the bane of Geraldine’s genteel existence since the day Geraldine had come to Carlisle to teach five years ago—used her heathen tricks and threw herself at poor William.
The mere memory of walking in on the sordid scene, of hearing a filthy Apache claim that a fine, upstanding man like William had attacked her, fueled the murderous rage that had brewed in Geraldine’s breast these past four days since the…incident.
But Geraldine had gotten even, yes she had. Captain Pratt’s pampered little pet had surely never received such a beating in her life. It had been well deserved, but it wasn’t enough, would never be enough to compensate for Geraldine being forced to experience the sheer humility of seeing William’s hands touching—
No. She would not think of it. Instead, she would get even again, and again, by extending the girl’s punishment until the trollop stopped insisting she was the innocent victim of a man’s lust. Lust! William? Hah! William would never lust after some brown-skinned savage. Never! No decent white man would.
“Are you ready to confess the truth now?” Geraldine demanded.
With her gaze deliberately lowered, LaRisa felt the harsh, grating voice scrape along her nerves. Hate, strong and hot, surged through her blood. Miss Latimer’s hate for her, and hers for the woman Captain Pratt had left in charge during his leave.
LaRisa had learned long ago that showing her hatred to whites got her nowhere. With her hands purposely relaxed on her lap, she took as deep a breath as the pain in her injured ribs and back would allow and kept her gaze firmly lowered. “I have told you the truth. I have nothing new to say.”
Without raising her gaze, LaRisa knew
the woman’s lips were pursed as though she’d bitten into a green persimmon. “Then your punishment shall continue. When you get hungry enough, you’ll confess the truth, young lady.”
LaRisa’s stomach chose that exact, humiliating moment to audibly protest the announcement. The bread-and-water diet to which she had been restricted for the past four days was wearing on her, yet her fierce Apache pride would not let her complain. Captain Pratt would be back in eight more days. Surely she could last that long. He would not withhold food. He would not call her a liar. He was white, and he was a hated Bluecoat, but Captain Pratt was a fair man who recognized the truth when he heard it.
“Nothing to say for yourself?”
“No, ma’am,” LaRisa answered, forcing the polite words through the ball of hatred in her throat.
“Then get out of my sight and go to your room. You’re not to leave there until I say so.”
Startled, LaRisa looked up at Miss Latimer. “What about the infirmary? The children—”
“Will be just fine, better than fine, without you to tend them. You’ll do as you’re told.”
LaRisa lowered her gaze again. She knew from past experience with this woman that if she sneaked into the infirmary to help care for the sick children, Miss Latimer would take it out on the children as well as on LaRisa.
She concentrated on keeping her hands relaxed, instead of forming fists and pounding on something, as she longed to do. “Yes, ma’am.”
LaRisa got up to leave the room, but in the doorway she nearly collided with a man rising from the bench. A white man. He was tall, with broad shoulders and thick golden hair the color of summer sunshine. And, she thought with growing amazement, he looked just like…“Uncle Matt?”
Spence felt a catch in his breath. Eyes as black as the deepest night stared up at him, mirroring the emotions revealed on her expressive face. She’d gone from the fire of hate to sheer joy in less than a wink. The magnitude of the pleasure in her eyes stunned him. What would it be like to have a woman see him, and not mistake him for his brother, and be that glad?
Apache-Colton Series Page 149