After the Thunder (19 page)

He turned his horse and started moving in the other direction toward their meeting place, the grove of red oak trees outside of town. Staying apart seemed an unnecessary precaution now, considering that no one in this whole noisy town was paying him the slightest notice at all and no one seemed interested in Cotannah. If she wanted to go back to the newspaper office, though, for more information, it was good he hadn’t given her any Choctaw connection.

But she mustn’t go back, not to a place that had affected her so badly. On this trip, while they had so many hours together, he must make her see the truth, so she wouldn’t return to any part of this pursuit anymore.

W
hile she waited for Walks-With-Spirits, Cotannah slumped in her saddle and, on its horn, smoothed out the piece of paper she still held crumpled in her hand. Folsom Greentree.

The name sounded familiar, but she couldn’t place him. Was it possible that he was reading the
Star
to learn the white man’s ways, as Millard Sheets said? Or was Sheets working with the Boomers in some way?

Or had Folsom Greentree subscribed to the
Star
in order to read, as Tay did, the plans of the white settlers greedy for the land belonging to the Choctaw Nation and to the Cherokee Nation to the north and the Chickasaw to the west? Was Greentree plotting to counter those plans? Was he a strong Choctaw patriot or a man who would break Choctaw law?

Would he be courteous to her when she rode onto his place or would he run her off?

Millard Sheets was a horrible man. How could he hate Indians so much?

“You’re staring a hole into that paper,” Walks-With-Spirits said. “Does it have a secret written on the other side?”

Her heart leapt and started thudding against her ribs, she whipped around in the saddle to look at him. He sat his horse just a stone’s throw from her inside the little grove of whispering trees.

“Why in the world did you sneak up on me like that?” she cried. “Even Pretty Feather didn’t hear you coming.”

“To put the color back into your cheeks. When you came out of that newspaper office your face was the color of eggshells.”

“Eggshells?”

“Not birds’ eggs—chickens’,” he said.

“Some chickens lay brown eggs. Brown is a color.”

“I’m talking about white chicken eggs. Thin-shelled ones ready to crack into pieces at the slightest touch of a fox’s teeth.”

Her heart was slowing and tears were threatening, but she smiled at him, he was trying so hard to distract her.

“That Millard Sheets is so vile I can’t tell you—he’s a fox in the Nations’ henhouse, all right. Oh, Walks-With-Spirits, I felt ready to crack into pieces when I came out of there, cold all over and about to throw up.”

His face hardened.

“But now you’re all right? How is he vile, in what way? What did he say to you?”

“That Indians are savages, intruders on the land intended for white people, all the old insults.”

His shoulders relaxed, as if in relief.

“Nothing you haven’t heard before?”

That made her laugh a little.

“No,” she said, “nothing new to my ears.”

Her anger began to return.

“Just infuriating, humiliating …”

“Now, now!” he interrupted. “Let’s not give him
that power over us. He can’t take it if we won’t give it.”

The thought stopped her.

Walks-With-Spirits rode closer, his eyes warm and bright, almost smiling now.

“Who is he that we should take to heart his opinion?” he said. “He is no one to us, he is nothing but a scavenger with a withered spirit, who has no harmony with the earth.”

She felt warm inside for the first time since arriving at the office of the
Star
and the tension began to leave her. She smiled at him.

“Let’s ride through the woods and up along the ridges,” he said, “where we can see the mountains stretching blue and far and smell fall coming on the wind.”

“Oh, I wish we could,” she said, “but no.” She looked at him, straight and without a smile. “Don’t try to distract me,” she said. “Just because I didn’t find out very much from Sheets doesn’t mean I’m giving up, and you volunteered to come with me, so you can’t go riding the ridges, either.”

“I came because I’d never forgive myself if you got into danger on my account.”

“Well! You’re already in danger on my account, and I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t get you out.”

He nudged his horse and rode closer still. Peeved as she was that he was trying to stop her search for the truth, she still wanted to reach out and touch him, to lay her hand on his smooth, heavily muscled forearm beneath his rolled-up shirtsleeve.

“Cotannah. Don’t do this to yourself. It’s bad for you.”

She gathered her reins and pulled Pretty Feather’s
head around, turned her back on him and started trotting out of the trees.

“I’m going. You can come with me or not.”

From the corner of her eye she saw him begin to follow.

“This isn’t good for you,” he said.

“Don’t repeat yourself,” she said. “We’re going to see a man named Folsom Greentree, but it’s too far to get there before midnight. Tonight we’ll go as far as my old homeplace.”

He rode up beside her, his jaw tight and his eyes hard. He was angry. Really angry.

“All right, then. We’ll lie upon the ground when we get there and let the Earth Mother speak to you since you won’t listen to me.”

The hopeless fury she’d felt at the
Star
swirled up inside her again.

“Stop it! Just stop it! Nothing’s going to make me quit, can’t you see that? This is one time I’m not going to let them win, not if it kills me, too!”

“Let who win?”

“The wicked ones, the ones with the power! Fate, or destiny, or whatever it is that’s always making innocent people suffer. I’m sick to death of it!”

He stared at her and then gave an abrupt nod, agreement or understanding or acquiescence, she couldn’t tell. And she didn’t care.

“My cousin Robert lives in our old cabin now, but he’s gone to Muskogee to the Indian International Fair,” she said quickly. “Let’s get going so we can reach it before dark.”

She set her jaw and put her heels to Pretty Feather. Walks-With-Spirits followed.

Then, after only a mile or so, he was riding at her side, not looking at her, not saying a word. His huge
Shoulders were relaxed beneath the white cotton shirt, his body barely moved and only in keeping with the rhythm of the horse.

His presence began to soothe her.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” she said finally.

He glanced at her and nodded.

“I think I’m so upset because Sheets reminded me so much of Headmaster Haynes,” she said. “He despises our people—he thinks we’re savages who have no right being in the white man’s way to claiming every square inch of the earth and fencing it in. Like Haynes, he could, without a twinge of his conscience, take out a whip and use it to strip an Indian girl naked.”

He made a sound between a grunt and a growl, and she turned to see his eyes blazing and his face hard again.

“I want to protect you,” he said suddenly, fiercely. “Now. Forever. I want to protect you from ever again breathing the same air as men like Haynes and Millard Sheets.”

She gaped at him.

“I’ve had such angry, fighting thoughts of Haynes every time he crossed my mind since you told me about him,” he admitted, and then when he looked at her again, his eyes held as much surprise as she felt.

“What happened to the advice you just handed to me,” she said, gently teasing him. “Why do you give him that much power over you?”

He laughed, and her blood raced with delight. He cared about her. He really cared! That was why she felt she had come home when she was with him.

“I cannot tell you,” he said slowly, searching her face with his fierce topaz eyes. “All I know is that you have unbalanced my harmony, Cotannah Chisk-Ko, as no one
else has ever done. Before I saw you, I never had such thoughts of fighting other men.”

She smiled, but she didn’t know whether she wanted to or not. She felt elation and sadness for destroying his peace and guilt and happiness all rushing around in her heart.

“Nor did you have thoughts of putting death curses on them,” she said wryly. “It is all my fault, after all. Now you admit it.”

She grinned at him and asked, “Why do you give me that much power over you?”

He looked at her for a long, long moment, his eyes warm as amber sunshine.

“I never intended to give it,” he said. “You took it the first time I saw you, Cotannah.”

That melted her heart.

“I want to keep that power,” she said softly, through lips gone stiff with unshed tears. “And I want to keep you in this world. Don’t you understand? I could not bear it if the Court carried out your sentence.”

She held his gaze while she drew a deep, ragged breath.

“Cotannah,” he said, “you are breaking my heart.”

“Don’t worry about me. But tell me: what if I can’t prove that your curse didn’t kill Jacob before this next moon is past?”

“Then I’ll know that my passage to the next world is part of the harmony of earth and sky.”

He gave her a smile that stopped her breath.

“The Great Spirit and the Earth Mother, they have the power, Cotannah. The powerful people only think they do.”

She ignored that.

“How can it be part of the natural harmony for you
to die because the Judges mistakenly think you killed Jacob? That makes no sense!”

“Our spirits are not wise enough to know that.”

“Mine is! I know that!”

He laughed again, soft and low.

“Now that’s why I wanted so much to dance with you that night we met,” he said. “I could not keep my hands from reaching out to touch you, for the life force in you was stronger than in Long Man river.”

A sharp, sweet shock shot through her even though he’d told her that before. She hadn’t known that he had longed to touch her. Was he longing to touch her now?

“How did you know that my life force was strong?”

“Your eyes flashed like lightning looking for someone, searching, always searching. Your feet stomped against the face of the Earth Mother, trying to make her give you your wish.”

“You could see it that plain that I was out of my mind in love with Tay,” she said slowly, remembering. “When all the time he only loved me as a sister. How I could have been so unseeing, so stupid, I’ll never know.”

“That, too, was part of the natural harmony,” he said.

“No!”

Her cheeks flamed with hot embarrassment, even after all this time, recalling her devastated pride.

She looked down at the ground, watched Pretty Feather’s small hooves cutting into the grass, one swift, trotting step after another. When she glanced up at him again he was looking at her, his topaz eyes gone soft and dark.

“Yet it must be,” he said.

“How can you say that? How?”

“Because all that has happened to you has made you this Cotannah today.”

“What does that mean?”

“You are Cotannah: a beautiful body inflamed with a fervent spirit. You have bubbling passions brave with hope, right-loving thoughts bright with honor. Never have I known another woman like you.”

She would remember all of that forever, she would think about it time after time. She would remember the sound of his voice; it stroked her skin as if he had reached out his hand.

He said it again while his horse moved beside hers through the golden afternoon.

“Never has there been another woman like you.”

His affirmation sent her heart soaring to the sun.

They rode up to the cabin at dusk. It lay in the shadows, folded into the quiet valley like a bird in the nest. A horse ran along the crooked, split-rail fence, nickering, and Pretty Feather answered as they passed.

“Robert had better be gone for sure,” Cotannah said.

“Why?”

“I want us to be alone.”

The minute the words spilled off her tongue, she bit it, incredulous that again she had blurted out to him exactly what she was thinking.

“I can’t believe I said that.” She ducked her head, unable to meet his eyes.

“I can believe it,” he said, with a low chuckle. “Even on the night we met you were speaking bold and straight to me—but then you called me an old black crow and told me to get away from you.”

He threw her a glance, his eyes flashing bright in the dusk.

“Now you want to be alone with me. I like
this
straightforward talk of yours much better.”

She felt heat rising into her face.

“I only meant that it’s going to be a good evening to make a fire and sit and talk,” she said quickly, as he sidepassed his mount up to the gate and bent to open it.

“Of course,” he drawled, leading the way into the horse pen, “and if Robert were here, we couldn’t build a fire or speak a word.”

He laughed, and so did she.

“You know what I mean! You promised to tell me about your childhood, and you know you wouldn’t if Robert were here.”

“I might. For all I know, Robert is a rapt listener.”

“He isn’t,” she said, dismounting in front of the open-sided pole barn. “Cousin Robert is a bigmouth who has to do all the talking himself.”

Walks-With-Spirits stepped off his horse.

“Oh, now I understand. You want to do all the talking yourself with no interference from Robert.”

“What a thing to say,” she cried. “Just listen to you—you talk lots more than I do, and you know it!”

Laughing, they walked to the horses’ heads and stopped, facing each other, standing close, very close. He smelled the way he looked—like a woodsman—pines and mountains, and juniper, she thought. Like sweet, pungent cedar branches mixed with that special scent that was his alone.

“But I like to listen to you,” she said slowly, as she drank in the sight of the dusky light falling across his high cheekbones and straight, broad nose, across his full, sensual mouth and hard jaw and chin, “even if you do talk in riddles sometimes.”

“I like to talk to you,” he said, in a voice so low and smooth it sent heat moving through her flesh, “even if you are only interested in my childhood.”

“That’s not true!”

“What else?” he said, smiling, teasing her with his
eyes and his voice. “What else are you interested in, Cotannah?”

Without a thought, she lifted her hand and traced the line of his cheekbone, just with the tips of her fingers. A lightning strike of excitement ran up her arm, straight to her heart. He felt it, too—in the dusky, purple light his eyes shone like stars.

They stared at each other, stunned. For an endless moment she couldn’t take a breath, couldn’t move, could only press the tip of her finger against his warm, smooth flesh and feel his hot blood running like a river of enchantment through his skin to hers.