Apache Caress (15 page)

“Hang on, Dark Eyes,” Cholla shouted, and he crawled over next to her, put his big arm across her back.

Immediately she felt safe, remembering the strength of the man. With him hanging on to her, protecting her, she wouldn’t fall. Then she had mixed emotions as she reminded herself that if it weren’t for the Apache, she wouldn’t be in this mess.

The landscape whizzed by in a dizzy panorama of green trees, gold and scarlet leaves, and bright red sumac bushes. Up ahead she could see the twisting, snakelike path of a river. At the same time, she saw two heads as the railroad bulls climbed the ladder at the end of the car ahead, gestured and shouted.

The roaring train swept their words away, but their angry frowns left no doubt the two men were coming after them. They not only had pistols, they had billy clubs. They climbed to the top of the swaying car and, obviously used to walking on the roof of one, started toward the couple.

They would be crossing the river bridge in another half-minute. If the men threw them off, would she die when she hit the water?

Her heart was pounding like a hammer. She turned her head to Cholla. “What now?”

“Right now,” he shouted in her ear, “they think we’re just hitching a ride. If I shoot one of them, the telegraph system will have the whole railroad looking for us. Besides, they’re armed.”

Sierra glanced at the two men balancing on the top of the next car as they gradually worked their way along it. The train was almost at the river bridge now. South Canadian River, the sign on the bridge read.

“Sierra,” Cholla shouted in her ear, “I think we’d better take our chances and jump!”

“Jump?” Maybe she hadn’t heard him right. She looked from the water running below her over to Cholla. “Are you crazy?”

But he was already standing up, reaching for her hand.

“No! I’m not going to jump!”

He pulled her to her feet, and she fought to keep her balance atop the swaying car. She looked at him, at the men coming toward her, the black water running below her.

“Better to jump than get thrown!” he shouted. “This is no place to fight two men! Come on!”

She shook her head at him. He could be a rugged individualist if he wanted, but she’d stay and try to reason with the railroad bulls.

“No!” She shook her head again.

Cholla had hold of her wrist. “Jump wide;” he shouted, ”or you won’t clear the bridge!”

Sierra fought to get out of his grasp, but his expression told her he meant to take her with him, even if they both died.

“Damn you!” She shouted as she struggled to break free, saw his muscles tensing for the jump, heard the sudden crack as one of the railroad men took a shot at them.

“Wait!” she screamed at the men. “There’s a mistake! You don’t know who I am!” The roaring of the train carried her words away as the men raised the pistol again.

The river or a bullet
. Even as Cholla tensed, she knew he was taking her with him whether she wanted to go or not. In that moment, Sierra jumped, putting all her strength into it, hoping in that split second when she began to fall that she had jumped far enough to clear the bridge.

It seemed forever she fell screaming toward the fast-rushing river swollen by all the rains. Her skirt was up around her waist as she descended, and she remembered that she wore no underwear. The water wasn’t pretty and blue; it was dark like coffee. She hoped Cholla would drown. As she hit the water and it closed over her head, she suddenly remembered she couldn’t swim.

Merciful heavens.
She was going down and down in the water, holding her breath automatically. It was dark and muddy and cold, so Sierra vaguely realized it couldn’t be heaven or hell. She felt herself being swept along by the current and wondered if it would hurt to drown?

Drown? She didn’t intend to die in some cold river below a railroad bridge in Indian Territory. Not unless she got to see her abductor die first!

Sierra fought and struggled toward the surface, her lungs on fire.
The light
. She must make it up to the light. She had to take a breath, and when she did, all she got was a mouthful of water. Panicked now, she began to fight her way to the surface, choking and coughing.

Hands were reaching for her, big, strong hands. Cholla. She saw his face in the water. He was trying to finish her off.
Damn
. She began to fight him.

He shouted something, but she couldn’t hear him. She didn’t know whether the roaring in her ears was due to fading consciousness, the rushing river, or the train above. She struggled to get away from him and went under again. Around her, branches and leaves floated by, frothy foam lay like brownish cream on the coffee-dark surface.

Then a hand clipped her across the jaw and she stopped fighting because she couldn’t seem to move and the light grew dim. The river bank looks so far away, she thought, and then his arm went around her and he swam strongly through the water.

She was on her back, looking up at the sky and thinking how blue it was and how interesting it was that the smoke from the train still hung in the air over the bridge even though the train now crawled, like a black snake, over a distant rise.

Then Cholla stopped swimming, stood up as he touched bottom. He swung her into his arms, carried her to the river bank, set her on a dry place on the ground, then flopped down beside her, choking and coughing. “Sierra, are you all right?”

She wasn’t dead, but she was soaking wet and cold. “I ... I think so.” She managed to raise herself on one elbow. “You did this! You pulled me!”

“Oh, shut up!” he snapped as he sat up. “You’re alive, aren’t you? I could have let you drown!”

“Not as long as you need a hostage!” She screamed it at him. “Not as long as you can find a use for me! Give me that pistol. I’m going to kill you!”

He glared at her. “Sierra, the pistol was lost in the river, so were the bedrolls. All we’ve got is the knife, not even any matches.”

“Wonderful! I don’t have to drown, now I can starve or freeze.”

“If it makes you feel any better”–he frowned and flopped back down–“just remember I’m going to freeze and starve, too.”

“That might make it worthwhile. I hope those railroad men come looking for us.”

“Don’t count on it,” Cholla said. “They probably just saw us as a couple of Injuns, not worth the bother.”

She was already beginning to shiver in the cool afternoon air. “I’m going to live,” she said through gritted teeth. “I’m going to live so I can see you hang!”

Lieutenant Quimby Gillen hunched his shoulders against the cold wind, then looked out across the barren Kansas plains and back to the small railroad station. “Blast!” He slammed a fist into a palm so hard that Corporal Finney jumped. “Blast that sonovabitch! We’ve been all up and down the track, almost to Albuquerque and back, checking all along the way. Where in the hell do you suppose he is?”

The corporal cleared his throat. “Who knows, sir? Maybe you should ask General Miles about forgetting this assignment–”

“Hell, no!” Gill roared. “This is a personal thing, too! When Lieutenant Forester was killed under such mysterious ... Never mind.”

Finney stared out across the frosty prairie. “The Apache may not even be alive anymore, sir. We haven’t run across anyone who’s seen him or heard anything of him since he killed that banker.”

“If he’s dead, I want to see the body. I want to see his red carcass crawling with flies, you hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Besides he had a hostage–Mrs. Forester. It burns me to think what acts of violence that damned savage has done by now–raped and scalped her, most likely. If you hadn’t been such a dunce back there at the bridge . . .”

The boy didn’t say anything. It occurred to Gillen that Finney might be thinking if his superior officer had been on duty where he belonged instead of lying between a whore’s legs, Cholla wouldn’t have gotten past them in that wagon. But of course the freckled-faced corporal didn’t say that, he wouldn’t dare.

The question was what to do now? The brass was already wanting him to give up the search and go back to the fort. He’d probably face a demotion and a transfer for letting the prisoner escape. So far, a major who owed him a favor for introducing him to Trixie had kept the Army off his back, but that couldn’t last much longer. If he didn’t come up with something soon, his Army career was finished.

He reached for his bag of candy, crunched a lemon drop between his teeth, and put the sack back in his jacket without offering the boy a candy. “Maybe we should go back to Saint Looie and start over again.”

“You really think there’s any point in that, sir?”

“You questioning my judgment, Corporal?”

“No, sir, but we’ve checked all the railyards and even along the Mississippi, just in case he drove the wagon off into the water before he caught a train.”

Gill looked beyond the windswept tracks, out across the prairie. Blast it all, he really didn’t know what to do next. He’d stalled Trixie about going to Arizona with him. In truth, he was beginning to regret his involvement with the little tramp. She always smelled like stale smoke and medicine. Anyway, smoking was for men, and women ought to stay in their places and not try to take over men’s rights.

A bushy, dried weed blew past them, so round, it rolled over and over, like a ball, across the prairie. “What is that blasted thing?”

“A tumbleweed, sir.”

“A what?”

“A tumbleweed,” Finney explained patiently. “The German immigrants from Russia accidently brought them in.”

Gill watched the thing bounce along the barbed-wire fence. “Germans don’t come from Russia, they come from Prussia or some such place.”

“These do.” The corporal warmed to his story. “Seems these Germans have been raising wheat in Russia for years and years. But the new czar decided to run them out, so they emigrated to here and Nebraska, looking for a likely place to grow wheat.”

“So get to the point,” Gill growled.

“The German women sneaked their best Russian red wheat seed into this country sewed into their petticoat hems, or so the story goes. Mixed in with that seed was the seed of the Russian thistle, we Americans have taken to calling it tumbleweed.”

“Which is one more thing I hate about Kansas!” Gill turned back toward the railroad station, reaching for his bag of hard candy. “At least we can get in out of this damned cold wind.”

The gray sky spat snow as they walked across the platform. The old telegrapher ran out of the station, waving a paper. “Lieutenant, a message just came through for you.”

“Gimme that!” Gill jerked it out of the old man’s hand, stared at it. “‘Apache and captive reported near Missouri Ozarks. Stop. Proceed to following location. Stop. See a man named Tiny Hankins. Stop.’ ”

Gill reread it several times. “Well, I’ll be damned. Cholla headed south instead of trying to follow the train tracks back the way he came. Round up the patrol, Corporal. We’ll catch a train east and then ride one down to see this hillbilly.”

“But, sir,” Finney protested, scratching a freckled ear, “Cholla could have traveled a long ways by now, depending on how long it took this Hankins to decide to go for the law.”

“At least we’ll be out of Kansas,” Gill barked. He turned to the telegrapher, waved the paper. “Can we get a train directly to this location?”

The elderly man pushed back his green eyeshade, shook his head. “Nope. You’ll have to wait for a train heading east, then catch another south.”

Gill grumbled under his breath about the delay, then headed back toward the warm shelter of the railroad of fice. “At least I’ll have seen the last of Kansas and its bare plains and blowing tumbleweeds!”

Trixie stared out the window at the snow falling on the street below. She’d been waiting for word from Gill for several weeks now but hadn’t heard anything. She’d even bedded that Army major he’d sent to her just to keep the brass from yanking his lieutenant’s bars over his mistake.

“Maybe I owed the bum that,” she said doubtfully to her reflection in the dirty window glass as she pulled the soiled green satin robe closer around her. “Yeah, I’m a talented singer, not a whore,” she reassured herself. “All these guys promise everything, then don’t give a girl nothing but a hard time. Maybe I should have stayed at Miss Fancy’s or the Gilded Lily, but I was meant for the big time.”

At the Gilded Lily, she had starred as the naked girl in the punch bowl when the rich gents were throwing a party. She’d sit in the bowl and let them pour champagne all over her as they filled it. Like naughty little boys, the men seemed to get a kick out of dipping their punch cups in the bowl. “I got talent,” she told herself. “I look just like the Cameo girl, and I can sing, too.”

She cranked up her phonograph and sang a few bars of “Beautiful Dreamer” as she went over to the table, took a big swig of patent medicine. Almost immediately, she began to feel better. That cocaine stuff was the latest craze, and Trixie preferred it to booze. People were already starting to talk about cocaine being dangerous, but everyone was using it. Now if it was bad for you, would they be allowed to sell the stuff? She took another long drink, walked uncertainly over to pick up her pack of Cameos and a silver matchbox, struck a light against the bottom of the table. “No, I’m prettier than the Cameo girl.” But older–much older, her mind said.

Trixie took her cigarette and ashtray, walked unsteadily to the sofa, flopped down. “Yeah, I’m a real talented performer,” she told herself, and giggled a little. Who would believe she’d first begun her career singing in the choir at the church where her stern father was pastor? “Pa, you said I was going to end up in a den of iniquity, a Sodom or Gomorrah.” She giggled. “I wouldn’t mind if money and glamor and excitement went with it, but East Saint Louis has to be the dullest, most backward place in the world. Where I want to go is ’Frisco or New York.”

She took a deep puff and blew a smoke ring, watched the smoke drift. The wind rattled the window. Trixie was running low on money and had gone back to her old pursuits temporarily to get enough to travel on. She had told her lover about Otto Toombs accidental death, knowing in advance that no one at the big mansion would shed a tear.

Julia Griswold Toombs was swathed in black widow’s weeds when she went out driving with her father and brothers in the family carriage. All three men had a discreet taste for fast women, cards, gambling. Otto had told her he thought that was why the old man had pressed Julia to marry. In a banker’s family, there must be no hint of scandal, and evidently there were some whispers about Julia. But they were only gossip after all, Otto had said with a sigh of disappointment. Fashion and jewels were the only weaknesses the beauty had, as far as he could see. The Griswold men were discreet in their sinning. Was that why the servant girls at the mansion were unusually pretty?

Trixie smiled to herself and puffed on her cigarette. If only Otto had known he wasn’t the only occupant of that big mansion Trixie was accommodating in return for expensive items like jewelry and gold. Now, with even that source of income ending, she would have to move on, whether she wanted to or not. Maybe she could go to Tombstone, where it was supposed to be warm, then later on to ’Frisco. There was a well-known saloon in Tombstone, the Birdcage Theater. Maybe they could use a singing star.

The elegant and secretly sinful Griswolds
. Trixie had known her lover would tire of her sooner or later, and the family was so powerful, she was afraid to try blackmail. She might end up dead in the river. Maybe some folks would think what her lover wanted was unusual, but it didn’t matter to Trixie. She had done and seen everything in the past few years since leaving Texas, and nothing surprised her anymore.

Still, her pride was hurt at being replaced. She reached over, picked the crumpled note up off the floor, reread it as if doing so would change the content.

Replaced
. That hurt Trixie’s pride. She took a deep drag on the cigarette, enjoying the taste of the tobacco, and read another line.

The note ended with the hope that Trixie hadn’t been hurt and the promise that there was going to be money for her in any case.

Her pride was what was hurt.
A French maid.
She wondered if the woman knew all the things that would be expected of her by the residents of that fine house besides looking after the aristocratic Julia’s clothes?

Trixie balled the letter up again, threw it on the floor. The small clock on the mantel chimed the hour. It was time. Would her lover come as promised?

Trixie got up, crushed out her cigarette, went to the window. The elegant Griswold carriage with its pair of matched black horses was just pulling up out front. She watched the cloaked figure get out, brave the wind to run for the doorway.