Savage Beloved (3 page)

Holding back an even stronger urge to leap past his uncle and yank the soldier from his horse, then choke the life from the heartless man, Two Eagles gazed coldly into the soldier’s eyes.

“Why did you treat a helpless old man so inhumanely?” he asked, fighting hard to keep his voice
steady, while everything in him cried out to lunge at that soldier and pull him from his horse, but not kill him with his bare hands. Instead, he would wrap his neck with the bloody rope that had held his uncle prisoner.

“Why?” the soldier said tauntingly. “Why did we bring this old geezer home in chains?” He laughed and held his face down closer to Two Eagles’s. “Because we could, that’s why.”

That response made the heat of hatred rush through Two Eagles’s heart so intensely, he had to reach deep within himself for the willpower to refrain from acting out his anger.

Instead, he could only watch as the mocking soldier wheeled his horse around and cantered away with the other bluecoats. In the next moments all the Wichita came from their lodges, stunned silent by how Short Robe had been treated.

Short Robe gazed up at Two Eagles. “Two Eagles . . .” he said in a voice that was hardly discernible. He continued his communication in the silent Indian way, signaling the Indian sign for “Everything will be alright.” He held his right palm down, fingers extended straight out, with his arm in a horizontal position near his heart, then made a swift motion forward about six inches.

Fighting back tears, Two Eagles knelt down and picked up a handful of sand. He tossed it at his uncle’s feet, causing clouds of flies and gnats to rise in the air from them.

He gazed into his uncle’s faded, old eyes, and nodded in affirmation of what Short Robe had said
in sign language. Yet he knew that everything was not alright, for his uncle was too old to have been treated in such a way.

He knew that soon his uncle would die because of it!

A hunger for vengeance such as he had never felt before swept through Two Eagles!

Portraits are to daily faces

As an evening west
To a fine, pedantic sunshine
In a satin vest.
—Emily Dickinson

The sun streamed softly through the bedroom window as Candy Creighton sat on the floor in front of her travel trunk, neatly placing her folded clothes in it.

But she was only halfheartedly preparing herself for departure from Fort Hope with her colonel father. She just couldn’t get what she had witnessed these past few days off her mind.

It was the old Indian whose name she now knew was Short Robe whom she saw in her mind’s eye. She flinched even now as she remembered the snapping sound when the soldiers had taken turns lashing the old man’s bare back with a blacksnake whip, over and over again.

She cringed as she thought of the soldiers’ mocking laughter, proving how much they had enjoyed torturing the old Indian warrior. She couldn’t understand how anyone could enjoy raising the whip and bringing it down across another human being’s back.

And she knew the men
had
enjoyed it. They had tossed coins, gambling amongst themselves over who would be the next one to whip the old man held in bondage with chains.

It had taken all the willpower that Candy could muster up to keep herself from going out to the parade ground and grabbing the whip to give those who were beating the old Indian a lash or two. She longed to let them know just how it felt.

Instead, she had gone and asked her father why the elderly Indian was being treated so cruelly. Her father had given her an explanation that made her heart turn cold with horror.

She shivered as she again heard her father’s nonchalant reply: “To set an example.”

That seemed the worst reason of all, for it most certainly would be the beginning of trouble with the Wichita, and perhaps even before she and her father left the fort for Arizona. Her father was to be the colonel at a new fort built purposely for fighting the “redskin savages,” as most soldiers referred to the Indians.

Her father’s reason for whipping the old Indian made her skin crawl. Although her father would no longer be in charge of this area, he wanted to leave something behind for the Wichita to remember him by. He was angry that the Wichita had ignored all he
had urged them to do. What irked him most was their refusal to agree to reservation life.

Her father had so badly wanted to achieve that goal as a way to win recognition in Washington, and another medal on his uniform.

So, since the Wichita had showed her father no respect, he had decided to make this old man suffer.

Actually, Candy knew that Short Robe was lucky to be alive. In a sense, he had unknowingly tricked her father. Her father had thought he had abducted the Wichita chief, Moon Thunder, that day the soldiers found the old Indian praying on a butte, away from his village. Only later did he discover that his men had captured the chief’s brother, a man who had no power, or voice, when it came to decision making among his people.

And when he learned that the true chief had died, her father felt even more foolish.

He had told Candy that the old man was lucky he didn’t kill him with his bare hands, and the only reason he hadn’t done so was because he wanted to use Short Robe as an example. For that, he needed him to be alive.

Candy trembled again at how horribly the old man had been treated. Would those at the village retaliate once Short Robe was returned there and they saw the condition he was in?

More than once, her father had enjoyed lifting the whip against Short Robe himself.

When Candy had begged him to stop and expressed her concerns about retaliation, he had said, “Nonsense. The Wichita are too busy mourning their
chief to come and take revenge for what was done to one old man.”

Candy could hardly wait to leave this horrid place of bad memories. Surely when they arrived at the new, larger fort in Arizona, she could relax without fearing that an arrow might suddenly slice into her back at any moment.

Candy’s insecurity was not helped by the knowledge that her mother, Agnes, was gone now. She had finally had enough of the sort of life her husband offered and had fled to God only knew where.

Tears shone in Candy’s eyes at the memories of her mother. Oh, how she missed her, but she was glad that her mother had found the courage to follow her heart and go where she might find true happiness.

Candy pushed herself up from the floor and went to her dresser to stare into the mirror.

She gazed at her face as she slowly ran her fingers over it. She felt much older than eighteen after all she had seen at Fort Hope.

She was glad to be leaving.

Perhaps after she left Fort Hope and went to live at the new fort, she would find her white knight in shining armor, a man who would take her away from this military life that had been forced upon her from the day she was born.

But she knew how improbable that was.

The only men she would meet would be more soldiers, and she certainly didn’t want to marry her “father.”

No, she would never allow that to happen. Like her mother, Candy hated military life.

She had never understood why the U.S. government sent soldiers to fight the people who had owned this land long before the white man. The Wichita, one of the tribes that lived in this area, had always sought peaceful solutions with white people.

If it were up to Candy, these peace-loving Indians would still have all of the land that whites were now occupying.

When
she
saw Indians, she didn’t see savages. She saw a people who were standing up for their rights . . . their land . . . their freedom.

She wondered if the Indians in Arizona would be out for blood like the Sioux, who also lived in this area. Or would the Indians in Arizona be more like the Wichita, who always worked things out with white people in a peaceful manner?

Yet how would the Wichita behave when they knew how cruelly Short Robe had been treated during his incarceration in Fort Hope? When he was returned to them, one look at him would tell the tale of how his time at Fort Hope had been spent.

Oh, Lord, what would their reaction be?

Thinking of the possibility of their attacking the fort before Candy and her father left made her hope that their few remaining days in Kansas would go by quickly.

She gazed at herself again in the mirror and ran her fingers through her long, golden hair. She was tiny in build, so petite her father often referred to her as his “fragile porcelain doll.”

Her oval face
was
of a porcelain color, with a touch of pink at her cheeks, and with a nose slightly tilted at the end.

Her eyes were azure blue, shadowed by long lashes.

Today she wore a high-necked, beautiful delicate pale blue silk dress that fell in deep ruffles around her tiny ankles. Her waist was so small her father could fit his hands around it, his fingertips touching.

“And, Lord, my name,” she whispered to herself, hating the name Candy.

But her mother had insisted on it. She had said that the first moment she looked at her tiny newborn daughter she thought her as sweet as candy. Besides, her mother’s best friend, a woman she’d known before she had met Candy’s father and married him, was called Candy.

Candy had discovered only a few years ago that her mother had been a “dance hall queen,” and her friend Candy had been the same.

“But my father, as he put it, ‘saved’ my mother from sin by taking her away from such an ungodly place,” she whispered to herself.

But he could never change everything about her as he had hoped to do. From the moment her mother had married the esteemed Colonel Earl Creighton, she began to long for her former life as a dancer, and for her friend Candy—who, the young Candy had heard not long ago, had been run down by a team of horses on the streets of Laredo.

Candy prayed that her mother wouldn’t meet the
same sort of end, now that she had fled the life of a military wife.

Sighing, Candy went to a window and gazed out. She saw her pet wolf asleep not far away on the parade grounds.

She would never forget the day her father had brought the tiny abandoned animal home for her to raise. Candy had named the wolf Shadow, and now felt as close to her grown wolf as she would have any brother or sister.

She looked into the distance, beyond the fort where there were no protective walls. She gazed at the rolling hills, where she heard wolves howling even now in broad daylight.

The sound emerged from the forest, eerily low at first, and then grew.

It sounded as if the forest were teeming with wolves, but Candy knew that these howls were coming from a small pack that she had become familiar with.

She looked at Shadow to see if she had been awakened by the wolves. Candy sighed with relief when she saw that her pet was still sound asleep.

She looked again into the distance, glad that the wolves were no longer howling and had surely gone on their way.

She was sorely afraid of those wolves, even though she had one as a pet herself. But her main fear was not so much for herself as it was for Shadow.

Candy had seen this pack of wolves more than once, led by an animal with snow-white fur. It had
looked like a ghost with its white fur and mystical pearly blue eyes.

Those wolves had coaxed Shadow to join them more than once.

Candy had always been afraid that her wolf wouldn’t return, for surely the call of the wild was imbedded so deep inside her heart, she was destined to one day live among those of her own kind.

Candy returned to her half-finished chore of packing her trunk. Sighing heavily, she went and sat down on the floor before it, again carefully placing her folded clothes inside.

She then picked up a doll that her mother had given her when she was a small girl.

Tears glistening in her eyes at the thought that she might never see her mother again, she held the doll to her bosom and hugged it.

“Mama, I hope you are alright,” she whispered. “I . . . I . . . hope you are happy.” She swallowed back a sob. “I hope to one day find my own true happiness.”

The smitten rock that gushes,

The trampled steel that springs;
A cheek is always redder
Just where the hectic stings.
—Emily Dickinson

It took a while, but finally the bloody irons and chains were off Short Robe’s ankles and wrists. Short Robe was in his lodge now, where he lay unconscious, emaciated and weak, on a thick pallet of furs and blankets.

Two Eagles solemnly, gently washed his uncle’s wounds free of blood as Crying Wolf, his people’s shaman, prepared medicine for the cuts.

Two Eagles’s heart skipped a beat when he saw his uncle’s eyelashes flutter as he began to awaken from his deep sleep.

Two Eagles laid aside the soft buckskin cloth that he had been using to bathe his uncle’s wounds and
leaned down over him to hear what Short Robe was whispering.

Short Robe reached out a shaking hand and placed it on his nephew’s arm. “Two Eagles, my . . . life . . . was spared for a purpose,” he managed to say in his pain-filled voice. “After the pony soldiers realized they had captured the wrong man, they . . . they . . . took their mistake out on me and . . . and . . . beat and whipped me almost to unconsciousness. They . . . they only returned me home for one reason.”

When his uncle’s eyes closed and his voice faded, when his hand fell away from Two Eagles’s arm, Two Eagles felt panic rush through him.

He breathed a heavy sigh of relief when his uncle’s eyes opened again, his quivering hand again on his muscled, bronzed arm.

“I was brought back to my people to . . . to . . . set an example,” Short Robe said, his voice cracking with pain.

“An . . . example?” Two Eagles said, rage entering his heart. “They did this to you for such . . . a reason as that?”

“Listen while I can speak,” Short Robe said, his faded brown eyes pleading with Two Eagles. “There are not many pony soldiers left at the fort. Only . . . a . . . few remain, but even they are going soon, to another fort.”

Two Eagles saw a sudden panic in his uncle’s eyes, and felt his grip tighten on his arm as he again forced words from deep within himself.