Climb the Highest Mountain (28 page)

“I love you too,” he answered quietly. “More than my own life. That’s why I can’t stand being responsible for your suffering.”

“But with you at my side it doesn’t matter.”

He turned away again and stood up, walking away from her. “What happened with Margaret? Did this Sam Temple hurt her?”

She looked at the bloody handkerchief. She had lost him again. Why was he so elusive now, harder to hold than ever? “I was so … so upset over LeeAnn, and Lillian was so sick after you left. Then she died. I guess with all those things happening, I didn’t notice the changes Margaret was going through. She said she didn’t want to bother me with her problems. By the time I found out, the damage was done.”

“He slept with her and then he left her—because she’s Indian and that’s all Indian women are good for, right?”

She looked up at him in surprise. “Yes! But how did you know?”

He smiled, a sneering smile. “Come on, Abbie. I grew up in Tennessee among whites, remember? White men murdered my first wife and our son, just because Ellen was white and she had slept with a half-breed! I know how they think!” He drew out his knife and threw it hard. It stuck in the cottonwood tree with a thud. “I’d like to get my hands on Sam Temple!” He turned to face her. “You have any idea where Margaret went?”

She wrung the handkerchief she held in her hands. “That’s the hard part.” She swallowed. “She was … so hurt, Zeke. He was her first man, and he had promised to marry her. She was so sure of him. And then he just… left. He told her Indian women were great for sleeping with, but white men didn’t marry them. It
made her hate herself, Zeke. She scratched half the skin off one hand, trying to scratch off the color, she told me. She was so … bitter. So full of hate. She got a wild look to her. I couldn’t talk to her. It was as though she wasn’t even Margaret anymore. She had a wicked look, like Dancing Moon had sometimes. And then she sneaked off in the night—even took some of our money. She paid a ranch hand to take her to Pueblo, paid with money and … and her body.”

He threw his head back and clenched his fists. “Damn!” he swore. “God damn all of it! How much is a man supposed to take!”

Abbie’s body jerked as she choked down a sob. “She told me before she left that she couldn’t live on a reservation but no white man would want her for a wife… so she’d have to seek other options.” She sniffed and wiped at her eyes. “And then a few days ago I got a letter … from … from Anna Gale.”

His eyes hardened. “She went to Denver? My daughter went to Denver?”

She nodded, breaking into harder tears. “Edwin had men search … all over Pueblo, but they found no sign of her, nor did they turn up a trace of where she might have gone. Then I got the letter. I was getting ready to go there myself before you came … to try to talk her into coming home. We had a terrible snowstorm right after the letter came, and I wasn’t able to go. But Anna said she’d keep an eye on her, that whoever comes should see her first. She said she’d help … talk to Margaret… because she knows what the girl is going through and because she can tell her how unhappy she will be in the end if she lives a life of… of—”

“Prostitution,” he said quietly, the word almost a groan.

She cried harder. “Oh, God, Zeke, I feel so … responsible! I should have seen what was happening. I
might have been able to say something… to stop what was happening, but Lillian—poor, sick Lillian …”

He was suddenly there, sitting down and facing her, pulling her into his arms and holding her tightly. “Stop it, Abbie. How can a woman who has just lost a child to death be aware of everything happening around her?” He rocked her gently. “Lillian was sick and dying, and for all you knew LeeAnn was dead too, or suffering. You can’t blame yourself. If anyone is to blame, it’s me.”

She rested her head against his shoulder, glorying in being able to share the burden, taking strength from him and giving it back to him. But his last statement alarmed her, and she tilted her head back to meet his eyes. “How on earth are you to blame, Zeke? You’ve been a good father to her.”

The slight sneer came back when he smiled at that remark. “That’s just it, Abbie girl. I am her father. I gave her that dark skin and those Indian looks that have her so confused. I don’t doubt the rest of the children have equal doubts. I should have listened long ago when a voice told me you belonged to your own kind. I had no right to drag you into this life, and now it’s affecting the children. Our little Lillian is dead because she wasn’t strong enough to bear this land; LeeAnn was taken from us by Comanches and her head is full of nightmares now; Wolf’s Blood is riding with the Sioux; and Margaret is selling herself to strangers just because a white man has told her she’s worthless.” The words stuck in his throat like stale bread, and he gently pulled away from her and stood up to pace. “I should wring her neck! Yet when I think about why she’s doing it, my heart bleeds for her, and I want to hold her and ask her to forgive me—ask all of you to forgive me.”

Abbie frowned and got to her feet. “Forgive you? What for?”

He stepped back from her. “You know what for. For allowing myself to weaken twenty years ago and marry you, just because I loved you so damned much and wanted you so bad!”

Her heart pounded at the words, as he walked to the tree and yanked out his knife. What was he telling her? He turned to face her, shoving the knife into its sheath. “The worst part is I still want you.” His eyes roved her body, seeing clearly what she could have been. “I will go and get Margaret. I will bring her home if I have to drag her by the hair of the head! Then we will make some decisions. I will make sure you are taken care of.”

She shook her head. “What are you talking about? We’ll go home, Zeke.”

“Home! We have no home! Face it, Abbie. It’s all gone to hell! Even Tall Grass Woman is dead!”

He hated himself immediately for saying it. She paled and stepped back. “But you said—”

“I found her at Sand Creek, Abbie,” he said in a more subdued voice. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you now … not this way.”

She turned around, staring out over the open plains where once the Cheyenne migrated on summer hunts. Tall Grass Woman! Her good friend, so jolly and happy and loving. She felt Zeke’s strong hands on her shoulders then.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated.

She turned to look up at him. “Why do you say we have no home? Why do you talk as though there is no future for us?”

He studied the lovely face he loved so much. “Look at you,” he told her, stepping back slightly. “You’re dressed the way you should be dressed. You fit this place. This is the kind of life you should be leading. I
don’t want the second half of your life to be as hard as the first half has been. Tynes loves you. Don’t deny it. I knew it when I left. I can’t imagine that he hasn’t told you so by now.”

Her eyes widened. “I don’t give a damn if every man in Colorado loves me! I love Zeke Monroe. Do you honestly think I could just forget you and go on with a new life and a different man after twenty years with you? After all we have been through together? After struggling to build that ranch, after agreeing to live out here with you—even among the Cheyenne those first years—after bearing seven children by your seed? How can you possibly talk this way? Do you want me to die, inch by inch, without you?”

He grasped her arm. “You won’t die. You have everything here. I want you to have peace and comfort and happiness, Abbie. I want you to have an easy life for your remaining years.”

“It would be no fife at all, and you well know it! I don’t give a damn about comfort and an easy life! I don’t feel any differently about you now than I did twenty years ago. You’re still my Zeke. I can’t survive without you.”

He squeezed her arms. “That’s the whole point!” he said urgently. “Look at the death all around us; then look at me! I won’t live to be an old man, Abbie. Can’t you see it? I’ve been damned lucky up to now, but violence and death stalk me constantly. You have a chance for safety and comfort here. You will be secure and cared for, and I won’t have to worry about what the hell you’ll do if something happens to me.”

“And just what would you do? Where would you go?”

He let go of her and turned around, rubbing at his eyes. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter what happens to me. Maybe I’d just go north and join Swift Arrow.”

“And ride into some battle where you know good and well you’ll be killed, because that is what you’ll want, isn’t it?” Her heart raced with aching love for him, hurt for him, yet she didn’t know how to help him. He was giving up! Zeke Monroe was giving up! She had to stop him somehow! If only Wolf’s Blood would come home! She suspected that would help.

He only shrugged. “Why not? It would be an honorable way to die.”

“Zeke, the children love and need you. Margaret is the only one who has had a real problem with her Indian blood, but we can work that out with her. She’s simply young and hurt. We all love you. You know how much I love you.” Her voice was breaking and she struggled for control. “Zeke, remember that day we were riding back to meet the wagon train, after you rescued me from those renegades? We made love the night before, and you were telling me good-bye then. I just realized it was almost the same when we made love before you left this time. You’re feeling the same way again—that you have no right to keep me. Do you remember what I called you that next day when you said we had no future and you were ending it once and for all?”

He remembered the day well, could still see her sitting on her horse screaming at him as he rode away from her, telling him what a coward he was, scared of loving again, scared to stand up to the challenges they would face. But memories of his first wife’s murder had haunted him then. He had not wanted to drag little Abbie Trent into a life like his. He turned to face her, a slight grin actually passing over his lips at the memory of her shouting at him, screaming that he could go against Indians and outlaws and fight several men at once, but that he was afraid of a fifteen-year-old girl.

“I remember,” he told her. “You said it could be
different out here, that a half-breed could marry a white girl and they could live happy and free.” His smile faded. “But I warned you how bad it could be for you. And you failed to realize that the whites back East would come here, Abbie, bringing their barriers with them.”

“And I said there are those who are strong enough to prove it can be different. I said you were that strong, and so was I. And we have been. We’ve survived many things, Zeke. We can survive this. I told you way back then that I didn’t care about a fancy house and fancy clothes, that I would live anyplace and put up with anything to be with you. I asked you even then what good a fourposter bed would be to me if I had to sleep in it with a man I didn’t love.”

He drew in his breath and she saw jealousy flash in his eyes. It was practically the only tool she could use to keep him—make him angry, make him jealous. That always stirred a fire in him. But this time he was even going to fight that. She could tell. Still, she was not going to let him give up. “Is that what you want Zeke? To ride off alone and lonely, while some other man takes his pleasure with your wife, and she continues to suffer because there is only one man she wants?”

“Stop it!” he growled. “I know what you’re doing. It won’t work this time.”

She stepped closer. “I told you way back on the day we argued that I wouldn’t let you out of my life. I belong to you, Zeke Monroe, and I won’t let you go now. I was fifteen years old when you branded me, and you can’t change that fact, nor can you deny our love. You tried once before, after Jeremy was born. It almost killed both of us. What makes you think it would be any different this time, that either of us could survive without the other!”

He swallowed and stepped back from her. “Maybe
we have to try.”

“Stop talking that way!” she said, her voice rising in panic. “I can’t believe what you’re saying. After all we’ve been through these past months, we need each other more than ever, Zeke! You’re my last remaining strength and hope—my last reason to go on living! My God, Zeke, we’re standing at our daughter’s grave! You’ve just brought another daughter back from hell, and Margaret is alone and afraid in Denver! If you intend to destroy me, you certainly picked the right way to do it. Your timing is … absolutely perfect!” She choked on a sob and hunched over, and then he was pulling her into his arms.

“Jesus, Abbie, I’m not out to destroy you. I want to save you. I want you to have the good life you were meant to have.”

“But it’s been a good life—a wonderful life! I have never regretted one moment of it!” She wept bitterly against his broad, muscular chest, against his self-inflicted wound. There it was. The Indian in him again. The side of him she could never fully reach. Indians had a way of doing what was right, foregoing all personal feelings. That was what frightened her. She could not be that way. He was turning to the Indian side of himself that was telling him it was best to leave her. And he might do it. But he was half white. There was a softer side to him that could not let her go. She knew that. She was sure of it. She must appeal to the Tennessee man who had settled down like a white man just for her, the Tennessee man who played the mandolin and sang mountain songs. She would find a way. She was sure she would find a way.

He stroked the long, thick hair that hung down her back and she felt him trembling as he tried to stay in control. She looked up at him and he pressed her close, meeting her lips with groaning hunger. She returned
his kiss with equal fervor, reaching up around his neck. How easy it was to be lost in him, to want him, to be hypnotized by his dark eyes and spellbound by his sweet lips. The kiss was long and heated, saying many things, expressing great sorrow and hurt, deep love, desperate needs. How good it tasted! How delicious! How comforting it was! He would take her to the house and make love to her, she was sure of it. Everything would be all right then.

His lips left her mouth and traveled over her cheek to her neck. There were tears on his cheeks. “I’ll leave right away, Abbie,” he told her, his voice strained. “There is no time to lose in getting Margaret.” His head rose and he kissed her eyes. “And it’s best I go before I… before we …” He kissed her again, and she could taste his tears. Then he released her mouth and just held her. “I’m sorry, Abbie. I don’t want to hurt you. But it seems like I will, whether I stay with you … or go.”