He growled, and an instant later, his open hand cracked across her face. She cried out and would have fallen if not for his cruel grip on her arm.
Her plea did no good, either. A strip of cloth was put over her eyes and knotted painfully tight behind her head. She couldn’t see a thing. Her arms were jerked behind her back and her wrists lashed together. The only thing speaking up had gotten her was that vicious blow.
It felt good to stop moving, though, while the other men carried out the leader’s order. All too soon, they were tramping onward again.
The first part of that journey seemed to take an eternity. Blindfolded as she was, Katarina couldn’t tell how much time had passed before they stopped again. She and the other women were allowed to sit down and rest for a few minutes. Someone held a tin cup of water to her lips. She sucked thirstily at it, but it was taken away too soon.
Katarina forced herself to listen. She heard men talking to each other, their voices too low for her to make out the words. Then something crashed through nearby brush. Wild animals?
No. Something worse. More men.
A lot of talk went on. Again, close enough for her to hear but not for her to make out the words. Katarina thought the conversation was in English, which puzzled her. Why would the Blackfeet converse among themselves in the white man’s tongue? Why not speak their own language?
Someone grabbed her arm and jerked her to her feet again. A different man said, “You go with me now.” He hauled her along beside him.
She tried not to stumble, but sometimes she did. That earned her a cuff to the head or a punch to the body.
Had the prisoners changed captors? That seemed like what might have happened. She had heard that Indians sometimes traded captives from one tribe to another. According to Herr Coburn, this was all Blackfoot country through here, and the Blackfeet didn’t get along much better with the other tribes than they did with white men. Would such a trade even be possible?
And what did it matter which band of savages held them in their power, she asked herself as despair threatened to overwhelm her.
No matter who their captors were, she and the others were doomed.
* * *
After several more hours of misery, the group came to a halt again. Someone yanked the blindfold off Katarina’s face, taking her by surprise enough to startle a gasp out of her.
She found a savage, coppery, hawk-nosed face glaring at her from only a few inches away. Fear clutched Katarina’s throat. Her heart slugged heavily in her chest.
At the same time, her keen brain realized that she recognized the man. He was Stone Bear, chief of the Blackfeet who had confronted the party the previous day, then promised them safe passage through the Blackfoot hunting grounds—a promise that obviously hadn’t been kept.
He stared at her as if daring her to show some sign of defiance. Even though anger blazed inside her, she dropped her gaze and stood meekly with her head down. She didn’t want to be slapped or kicked anymore.
Apparently satisfied, he turned her around and cut the rawhide strips binding her wrists. It was a relief to bring her arms around in front of her again.
“We go,” grunted Stone Bear. He put his hand on Katarina’s shoulder and shoved her.
She stumbled forward. So did the other female prisoners. The men tied to the saplings had been dropped on the ground while their blindfolds were removed. The Blackfoot warriors picked up the tree trunks again and resumed their march.
None of this made sense to Katarina, but she couldn’t summon up the energy, mental or physical, to ponder the situation. She concentrated all her efforts on moving her legs and putting one foot in front of the other.
Late in the day, they had been walking for what seemed like an endless time, with only occasional and very short halts to allow the prisoners to rest. As far as Katarina could tell, Stone Bear and the other Blackfeet were made of iron and never tired.
Every stumble, every fall, every complaint brought a swift and brutal response from their captors. Once, Gerda had fallen to her knees, and the Indian walking beside her began kicking her.
Katarina had acted without thinking and sprang forward, exclaiming, “Stop that!”
Stone Bear hit her in the small of the back with a club he carried, knocking her to the ground and smashing several blows on her shoulders. All Katarina could do was cover her head with her arms and cry out in pain as the club landed.
After a moment, Stone Bear stopped beating her and jerked her to her feet again.
The other Indian had stopped kicking Gerda long enough to watch what his chief was doing, and that gave her time to scramble up. As they moved on, Katarina was glad that her action had spared Gerda at least a little pain—for now, anyway.
The male prisoners had regained consciousness during the day. Peter von Eichhorn had raged at his captors in German and English until they stopped and beat him back into insensibility. Lieutenant Barton cried and begged for mercy, but that just got him kicked. Walter had said nothing, and Katarina couldn’t tell from the dazed expression on his face if he even knew where he was or what was going on.
Reese Coburn had been stonily silent, and so were the two dragoons. Katarina didn’t know if they were more courageous or simply resigned to their fate.
The sun was about to dip behind a mountain in the west when they came to a Blackfoot village. Dozens of conical lodges made from some sort of animal hides were scattered along the bank of a creek.
Dogs charged out to greet the new arrivals with a chorus of strident barking. Women clad in buckskin dresses, old men, and children swarmed around the returning warriors and their prisoners. Several women came up to Katarina and poked her painfully with stiff fingers until Stone Bear roared at them and ran them off.
The smell of wood smoke and several rancid odors blended together and filled the air. Katarina felt ill as she breathed in the stench, but fought down the reaction. She didn’t want to give her captors the satisfaction of seeing her get sick.
All the women were herded to one of the cone-shaped lodges, as an Indian woman pulled aside the hide flap over the entrance. More of them lined up and formed an aisle through which the prisoners had to go. The Blackfoot women clutched sharp sticks and jabbed viciously at the prisoners. Marion, Joscelyn, and the servants sobbed and screamed as they stumbled through the gauntlet.
Katarina kept stubbornly silent except for urging her companions, “Go on, get inside. They’ll stop if we go inside.”
She wasn’t sure how she knew that, but as it turned out, she was right. The torment stopped once they were inside the lodge. All six women dropped to the bare ground in exhaustion as the entrance flap closed and shadows filled the lodge.
Katarina lay in the dimness for a while, listening to the others whimper and sob, but eventually her resolute nature forced her to roll on her side and push herself to hands and knees. Her eyes had adjusted to the gloom well enough for her to see Gerda lying a few feet away. She crawled over to her maid and sat down beside her.
“It will be all right, Gerda,” she said as she put her hand on the servant’s shoulder. “You’ll see. We just have to remain strong—”
Gerda heaved herself up, threw her arms around Katarina, and buried her face against Katarina’s shoulder as she cried and shook. Katarina held her and patted her on the back now and then, trying to be reassuring although it didn’t seem to be working.
Finally, Gerda choked down her sobs enough to say, “B-But, Countess, how . . . how can we be strong? Those savages are going to k-kill us!”
“No, they won’t,” said Katarina. “They would not bring us all this way simply to kill us. They could have slaughtered us back there at the camp where they attacked us.”
But had it been the Blackfeet who attacked them, Katarina suddenly asked herself. They were the prisoners of Stone Bear and his warriors, no doubt about that, but she remembered how they had been blindfolded early that morning, as if there were something their captors didn’t want
them to see.
Then, later, that rendezvous had taken place, and even though Katarina hadn’t been able to see what was going on, it had seemed to her that the prisoners had changed hands. They had been turned over to Stone Bear and the Blackfeet.
If that was true, who had attacked the camp and carried out the bloody slayings? Who had taken them prisoner and marched them across the wilderness?
And who, she suddenly thought, had breathed the smell of sausage in her face as he was threatening her? That was what had bothered her at the time, she realized. The smell had been all too familiar to her, and now she understood why.
“Gerda,” she whispered, “it was not Indians who attacked us. It was white men!”
Gerda sniffled, frowned at her in confusion, and said, “But Countess, what does it matter? It is the savages who have us now!”
The servant was right, Katarina realized. What did it matter?
Their fate still lay in the brutal hands of Stone Bear and the Blackfeet.
Chapter 10
Reese Coburn wracked his brain, trying to come up with some way he could attempt an escape.
Not that he actually believed he could get away from the bloody-handed varmints who had taken them prisoner. But maybe, with any luck, he could force them to kill him quick.
It was hard to think when his head still ached so blasted much. He had been knocked out during the battle, and for a while after he’d regained consciousness, he’d had double vision, which made him sick to his stomach.
The problem with his eyes had cleared up finally, and after that, his belly gradually settled down.
His arms, shoulders, legs, and hips ached abominably, though, from supporting his weight as he was carried along, dangling from that sapling. It was a great relief every time the Blackfeet put him down, even though they just let go of the tree trunks and dumped the male prisoners roughly on the ground.
Reaching Stone Bear’s village, the six white men were cut loose one at a time, then their ankles were bound again and their wrists were tied together behind their backs. They were picked up once more and carried to a lodge, where they were tossed inside unceremoniously.
Coburn had heard Stone Bear giving orders outside. Two warriors were to remain on guard at the entrance all the time, and a man would be posted at the back of the lodge in case any of the prisoners tried to crawl out like a worm in that direction.
He had to get his hands and feet loose somehow, Coburn told himself. That was the only way he could put up enough of a fight to make them kill him.
In the thickening darkness inside the lodge, Graf Peter von Eichhorn asked, “What are they going to do with us?”
Coburn said, “I reckon you know the answer to that as well as I do.”
“Torture, then.”
“More than likely.”
That curt exchange made Lieutenant Barton start sobbing again. The young fella never was going to get that chance to become a good officer, thought Coburn. How it happened sometimes on the frontier.
“Lieutenant, you’d best get hold of yourself,” Coburn told him.
“Yes,” von Eichhorn added sharply. “It is unbecoming for a man of your rank to be conducting himself in such a craven manner, Lieutenant.” He pronounced Barton’s rank in the British fashion, leftenant. He had been taught English by Britishers, so his speech carried that accent.
Von Eichhorn’s reprimand didn’t do any good. Barton continued whimpering in terror.
The nobleman turned his head to look at Coburn and asked, “Will they torture him all the more because he is weak?”
“Well, probably not,” the frontiersman admitted. “In fact, they won’t consider it such good sport because he’s already broken. They’ll get tired of him sooner.”
“And thus kill him sooner,” von Eichhorn said quietly.
“Could be.”
“Whereas you and I will be more stubborn, Herr Coburn, and provide them with more . . . sport . . . prompting them to take their time killing us.”
“That seems pretty likely.”
“So we must choose between our honor . . . and a quicker death.” Von Eichhorn sniffed. “I do not know about you, mein herr, but I know which I prefer. I will never give them the satisfaction of screaming and begging for my life, no matter what sort of fiendish things they do.”
“Let’s just wait and see how it plays out,” said Coburn, thinking that von Eichhorn’s arrogant confidence might vanish pretty quickly once the Blackfeet started working on him.
Or maybe he was wrong and the Prussian would stand up to their torture. Time would tell.
Coburn turned his attention to Baron Walter von Stauffenberg. The man had seemed to be in a stupor for most of their captivity and hadn’t really said anything, only letting out a few groans from time to time.
Coburn scooted over closer to him, as best he could, and said, “Baron, can you hear me? Walter?”
Von Stauffenberg shifted slightly, then moaned. It was difficult to tell in the gloom, but Coburn thought the man’s eyelids fluttered a little as he tried to open them. Finally, von Stauffenberg rasped, “Herr . . . Herr Coburn?”
“I’m right here, Baron.”
Von Stauffenberg said something in German. Coburn couldn’t make out any of the words. Then, “Wh . . . where are . . . ?”
“We’re in Stone Bear’s village. The Blackfeet have us. You’ve lost a lot of blood, Baron, but you need to hang on. I’m tryin’ to figure out a way—”
“Do not listen to the man, Walter,” von Eichhorn broke in. “There is no reason for any of us to hold out false hope. We are doomed. It is only a matter of time until we die.”
That callous declaration made Barton wail even louder.
Coburn turned his head to glare at von Eichhorn and said, “Damn it, mister—”
The hide flap over the lodge’s entrance was swept aside. Twilight had settled over the village, but it was still bright enough for Coburn to recognize Stone Bear as the chief strode into the lodge.
Stone Bear regarded the prisoners coldly. “You will be given food and water. Do not try to escape.”
“You expect us to believe anything you say,” said Coburn, “after you promised us safe passage through Blackfoot hunting grounds and then attacked us?”
“My people did not attack you,” Stone Bear responded with a scowl. “I kept my word.” He paused, then added, “I made no promises about not bartering for you once you were already prisoners.”
Based on everything he had observed that surprising statement actually agreed with a vague theory that had begun to form in Coburn’s mind. The existence of a second group of enemies would explain the blindfolds and the mysterious rendezvous that had taken place earlier that day. “Who did you barter with?” he asked.
Stone Bear shook his head and declared, “That does not concern you. You are in the hands of the Blackfeet now. My hands. The spirits have delivered you to me, and I will deal with you as I see fit.”
One of the dragoons surprised Coburn by speaking up for the first time. “Hey! Injun!”
Stone Bear turned toward him. “You speak to me?”
“Damn right I do, you filthy redskin heathen.”
Coburn said, “Take it easy—”
The dragoon ignored him, saying, “Come on over here, you dirty savage, and I’ll tell you exactly what I think of you. You want to hear, Injun?”
Stone Bear stepped over to him. With a terrified expression on his face and tied the way he was, the other dragoon tried to edge away as best he could.
“What do you have to say to me, white man?” asked Stone Bear.
“Lean over here,” the dragoon urged. “I’ll tell you.”
Instead of bending, Stone Bear hunkered on his heels next to the dragoon.
More words spewed from the man’s mouth—obscene, outlandish, and probably physically impossible suggestions. He followed them by jerking his shoulders up off the ground and craning his neck to bring him closer to Stone Bear. He s
pat as hard as he could, the white gob flying through the air to land on the chief ’s cheek.
Stone Bear flicked the spittle away, pulled a tomahawk from the loop at his waist, raised his arm, and brought the flint head down in a powerful stroke. The blow landed on the dragoon’s forehead with a crunch of bone and split his skull open, killing him instantly.
And more than likely, that was exactly the result the dragoon had sought, thought Coburn. He was dead, and nothing the Blackfeet could do would hurt him anymore.
Judging by the angry look on Stone Bear’s face, the chief had realized the same thing and was upset with himself for giving in to the violent urge that had come over him. He wrenched the tomahawk free from the dead dragoon’s brain and stood up. Blood and gray matter dripped from the weapon.
“This man was a fool,” he said. “He threw away a chance to live.”
“What chance?” von Eichhorn asked. “We all know you plan to torture us to death.”
Slowly, Stone Bear shook his head.
“The pledge I made did not keep me from accepting you as prisoners and bringing you here, once you were already taken,” he said. “But even so, honor demands that you be given a chance to redeem your lives.”
Coburn’s heart started to beat faster. “How do you figure that?”
“Tomorrow,” Stone Bear said, “each of you will fight one of my warriors. Prevail, and you will live. But if you are defeated, you will either die in battle or, if you yield, will be burned at the stake.” A grim smile curved his mouth. “So rest while you can, white men. Tomorrow, you will fight for your lives.”
Chapter 11
MacCallister’s Valley, 1852
Once the decision was made that Jamie and Preacher would accompany Colonel Finlay Sutton on his quest to find out what had happened to the Prussian expedition five years earlier, they wasted no time in getting ready to set out on the journey. The three men, along with the small detail that had served as Colonel Sutton’s escort on his trip to Jamie’s ranch, would depart the next day and head for Fort Laramie, where they would rendezvous with the rest of the dragoons as well as the party of Prussians going with them.
When All Hell Broke Loose Page 7