Sundancer (Cheyenne Series) (26 page)

      
“Did he make you feel your Cheyenne blood was savage?” She intuited the answer and wanted to draw him into thinking about it.

      
“No. He found much to admire among all the plains tribes—their morality, their sense of honor, the way they care for children and the elderly, even some of their religious beliefs.”

      
“Then why do you feel your mother's people are savages?”

      
His expression darkened. “You don't know what it's like growing up in an Indian camp. You only spent a few weeks with them as a guest. But you saw what Weasel Bear did to me.”

      
“And I also saw how the rest of the people felt about his treachery too. He broke their laws and he was forced to flee in disgrace.”

      
“Could you live like a squaw—dress game and scrape hides, haul water and dig roots, perform all the heavy, endless chores a Cheyenne woman must?” he asked scornfully. “You'd have to survive on the thin edge of danger, where a Pawnee raid could mean kidnapping or death. Could you live with people who believe coyotes talk? Who recoil in terror from the ticking of a timepiece? Quake in fear at an eclipse of the sun?”

      
Scorn turned to anguish now, as he recalled the ten-year-old boy at the mission who threw Enoch's timepiece across the floor when the sound of the mechanism made him believe that it was alive with white-eyes magic. All the other children had laughed at him until the headmaster had stopped them and taken the frightened new boy under his wing.

      
“The way they live is hard and dangerous,” Roxanna conceded. “I know I wouldn't choose that life, yet there is much to admire in it and in those people. I admit they sometimes seem superstitious, even childlike regarding things they don't understand...but there are things whites don't understand either.” She struggled to explain the feelings she had about Sees Much and his visions. “Sees Much has an understanding of people that is beyond perception...almost magical. There. Does that sound superstitious? He knew we were going to marry while we were first in their camp.”
He told me to love you. And I did.

      
Cain remembered the old man's uncanny knack for knowing what others thought, disconcertingly often before they thought it. “Sees Much is perceptive, shrewd,” he said dismissively. “He understood that I didn't fit in, never would. When my grandfather insisted I join in the Sun Dance ceremonies at puberty, Sees Much said I was not ready. Luckily my father came along and took me to the mission before I reached the vision quest age.”

      
Roxanna had become all too aware that her husband rejected his Cheyenne blood. It would do no good to argue about the Indians or Cain's place with them. Instead she focused on the life he had assumed at Enoch Sterling's mission. “It must have been hard being torn from one world, then left rootless in another.”

      
He reminisced about growing up at the mission, adolescent pranks, the rigorous curriculum he followed, his quest to find a niche for himself as a mixed-blood among whites. How different his life might have turned out if not for the hatred of High-Backed Wolf and the death of Enoch Sterling. One day she would get him to explain more about that awful tragedy, but not yet. First he must learn to trust and, in that trusting, to heal.

      
Of course if he learned of her secrets, could he ever again trust her? Or would he become even more the bitter loner who never let love touch him? Roxanna clung to Sees Much's dream that had brought them together. Surely it must mean that Cain was fated to return her love.

* * * *

      
The group of Union Pacific directors and influential politicians the young couple were to escort west on the sightseeing junket had all assembled at the elegant Tremont House in Chicago. When Cain and Roxanna arrived, the illustrious—or infamous, depending on whom one asked—Dr. Thomas C. Durant sent his personal carriage to transport them from the train to the hotel. That night there would be a lavish dinner party, then in the morning the entourage would embark on their grand adventure.

      
Roxanna took special care with her toilette, using the services of a well-trained hotel maid who pressed her pale blue satin gown and assisted her in arranging her hair in a fashionable chignon, smoothed high atop her head with a few delicate curls escaping in wispy corkscrews around her temples.

      
Cain entered the room after a perfunctory knock just as she was dismissing the maid. The large Polish woman sidled past him with a nervous curtsy, then made a hasty exit. He ignored her and turned his attention to his wife. “You look delectable,” he said hoarsely, drinking in the way the low-cut satin gown shimmered in the light, molding sensuously to the subtle curves of her body. The royal blue lace trim on the bodice and hem matched the rich twinkle of sapphires at her throat and ears.

      
Roxanna smiled and returned his perusal, stepping closer to adjust the charcoal silk tie at his neck with wifely propriety. “I see you're wearing my little gift,” she said, pleased, ever amazed at how startling his elegant transformation was each time she saw him in formal clothing.

      
“I’d scarcely call a set of diamond shirt studs a ‘little gift,’ ” he replied with a lazy drawl, tilting her chin up for a soft brushing kiss. “You must've used up half the trust money buying them.”

      
“There is much more,” she said airily, although she had about exhausted what funds were left in Alexa's account on the purchase. “You'll be the handsomest man at the party tonight.”

      
He chuckled. “Hardly difficult considering that Durant is a dried-up old piece of rawhide and Seymour is hog fat and combs his hair in a swirled pompadour to hide his bald spot.”

      
Roxanna burst into laughter. “I take it you've met them before.”

      
“Not really. I've been in the background when the vice president and his consulting engineer came to do battle with Jubal over surveys and building plans. They're a pair of highbinders who'll milk the Union Pacific for every cent of profit they can squeeze out of it.”

      
Roxanna digested this, fitting it into the information about railroad politics she was accumulating in her mind. “I take it my grandfather doesn't care for them. What about Oliver Ames? As president of the Union Pacific, is he above profiteering?”

      
“He's not as blatant about it as Durant and Seymour, but yes, he and his brother Oakes have made a few million on construction contracts. He's a glib New England charmer, though, in a grandfatherly sort of way.”

      
She sniffed. “Then there'll be no man worthy of working my wiles on but you.”

      
“I'm certain you'll find some men to charm,” he replied dryly. “Between the factions of Durant and Ames, they've invited half the Congress on this little junket. Jubal wants me to feel them out about subsidy increases, more rigorous inspection standards, and government intervention to set a meeting site for the Central Pacific and Union Pacific.”

      
He obviously did not relish the assignment, she thought with a wry smile. How ironic that this was precisely the sort of dinner table intrigue at which she excelled. “Perhaps I'll overhear something of value. I shall keep my ears open,” she said, gliding out the door on his arm.

      
By the time they were halfway through the interminable dinner's sixth course, Cain realized Alexa had made no idle promise. Sitting between the garrulous old fool Seymour and the chairman of the Senate Railroad Oversight Committee, she extracted useful tidbits of information with such effortless ease that the two were completely unaware they were being “milked.”

      
Burke Remington, the senator from Massachusetts, leaned back after the poached salmon course was served and observed her with unsettling blue eyes. He was of middle years, tall and well built with a thick head of graying blond hair and enough vanity to believe himself irresistible when he turned on his charm. “As consulting engineer, Silas, you're most informative about survey plans through Wyoming, but I suspect the lady would rather discuss something a bit less technical,” Remington interjected just as Seymour finished describing his plans to circle around the Dale Creek Canyon area instead of building across it. Although he did not say it, this would add nearly fifty miles to the route and over two million dollars in federal subsidies.

      
Roxanna realized Remington was too shrewd for open flattery and decided it was best to try another tack. Smiling, she nodded. “Although some ladies do have a difficult time comprehending gradient quotients and soil density, as the granddaughter of a railroad builder, I confess to a rather unfeminine interest in how the transcontinental is being constructed.”

      
“For myself, I find all this talk of routes and subsidies a crashing bore,” the senator's young wife Sabrina said in her whispery Southern drawl. “Do let's change the subject.” She leaned closer to Cain, affording him an ample view of large milky white breasts barely concealed in raspberry velvet. “Tell us about the West, Mr. Cain. Will we see a buffalo stampede...or wild Indians?”

      
She was a beauty with lustrous sable hair and a magnolia complexion, but there was a brittleness in her smile and an avid gleam of hunger in her china-blue eyes that set his teeth on edge. He'd seen it all too often before. “Sorry to disappoint, Mrs. Remington, but the buffalo are all pretty much to the north of our route this time of year. We might encounter a few, but believe me, you wouldn't want to be caught in a stampede any more than you'd want to meet any wild Indians.”

      
“I should hope not!” Horace Scoville, an Ohio congressman, said with a shudder. “I hear the savages torture and kill decent God-fearing surveyors and workmen whenever they can slip through the army patrols.”

      
“And abduct innocent white women for their fiendish debaucheries,” Hillary Seymour added, shaking her triple chins, as the horror of such “debaucheries” reddened her already florid complexion.

      
“You wouldn't know anything about those fiendish debaucheries, would you, sugar?” Sabrina Remington whispered so low no one but Cain could hear her. Her foot, free of its slipper, caressed his leg in a swift, unsubtle gesture.

      
Cain felt an urge to grab her by the ankle and haul her over to her husband, who seemed, for all his shrewd political instincts, to be oblivious to his much younger wife's sexual overtures. Or perhaps he simply did not care. Worse yet, was he using her in the hope of obtaining some information? Regardless, her expectations would be dashed, Cain thought grimly.

      
Once he might have cynically taken what she offered, telling himself that he didn't care that he was an exotic forbidden curiosity to her. To him, women like her had also been trophies, wives and daughters of rich white men, creatures of the world which had shut him out. But all that had changed. Sabrina Remington's little games were repellent. He was a married man now. The realization that he desired no woman but Alexa shocked him right down to the soles of his shoes.

      
Roxanna observed the subtle interchange between her husband and Remington's wife with seething fury, which she managed to conceal with great difficulty. If the oblivious senator was not so busy interfering in her attempts to ferret information from the railroad barons, he might have noticed what the little hussy was about! By the time the ladies excused themselves from the dining table, leaving the gentlemen to port and cigars, Roxanna was ready to dump the crystal vase filled with roses over Sabrina Remington's head. She pleaded a migraine to escape their dreary company and went in search of some headache powder.

      
“It was really surprising Mr. MacKenzie did not make this trip,” Hillary Seymour said, testing the waters as the ladies filed down the hallway into a parlor for their coffee.

      
“I confess I was shocked that he sent this Cain fellow,” Cordelia Scoville whispered, taking the bait.

      
“Not half as shocked as I was that he permitted his granddaughter to marry such a person—why, he's no more than a savage in evening clothes, a gunman of mixed blood,” Congressman Kittery's wife intoned in a scandalized voice.

      
“I heard rumors that she'd been ruined and no man of good family would marry her,” Mrs. Seymour said. “Carried off by the savages, then escaped somehow.”

      
Roxanna was not the only one bored with the women's backbiting gossip. Sabrina Remington was far more interested in meeting the mysterious Mr. Cain face-to-face than she was in talking about him—or his washed-out skinny stick of a wife. After enduring fifteen minutes or so of catty exchange about Cain and his wife, the garish ball gown General Grant's wife wore to President Johnson's gala and other tedious eastern society topics, Sabrina slipped out.

      
Burke would be closeted with Dr. Durant discussing Crédit Mobilier affairs for hours. She smiled ferally and began her search. A pity Cain's wife had a headache. Sabrina felt perfectly marvelous. She intended to make Cain feel equally good.

      
Her prey had gone to the bar downstairs and ordered a whiskey on ice, a taste he'd acquired while living in San Francisco and seldom had the opportunity to indulge. The men had broken up into cliques quickly enough. Thoughts of Alexa in that blue satin concoction she had worn tonight played in his head, or rather thoughts concerning how delicious it would be to get her out of it.

      
He pulled his gold watch from his vest and checked the time, hoping the ladies had called it a night. His eagerness to bed his wife still worried him occasionally, but he was growing resigned to the marriage. She was beautiful and responsive. He'd be a fool not to desire her, he reminded himself as he polished off the last of his drink and made his way out of the bar.