The Endless Sky (Cheyenne Series) (24 page)

      
She could feel the bitterness emanate from him as he sat behind her and they rocked with the steady cadence of the horse's gait. “So you chose to fight back—even though you must know it's hopeless. All you're doing is giving men like Custer and my husband the excuse to kill you.”

      
“They don't need excuses, Stevie. I'd rather die quick and clean as a warrior than slowly as a beggar.”

      
“That's why you masquerade as a tame Indian to learn where best to strike. What are you doing with all the gold you've stolen? Buying more guns?”

      
“Sometimes. We can't fight Henrys and Winchesters with bows and lances. We also use the money to buy food, blankets and medicine when I can't steal them directly. White men's diseases kill my people even faster than bullets or starvation.”

      
“I know,” she said softly. “I nursed the prisoners at Fort Steele. A remarkable Quaker woman named Hannah Wiette recruited me to work in her hospital.” His harsh mocking laughter surprised her.

      
“You always were tough and resourceful, even though you are a rich man's daughter.” He paused, scrutinizing the black dress she wore as a thought suddenly occurred to him. “Is Josiah dead?”

      
“He died several months ago,” she replied.

      
“I'm sorry,” he said, feeling awkward, knowing there had been no love between father and daughter.

      
“Don't be.” Her voice was cold now. She would never reveal to him that she had been disinherited by Josiah. Shifting the subject back to her nursing skills, at which he had scoffed, she asked, “Don't you think I'm capable of nursing sick Indians?”

      
“I don't doubt you're capable of a great many things, Stevie.”

      
“Now who's playing the bigot? You obviously think the worst of me simply because I'm white, don't you, Chase?”

      
“I think you and all those do-gooder Quakers and others like them simply don't understand. You can't make red men into white. We can't live caged. Even if you keep our bodies alive, our spirits will die that way.”

      
She had no answer.

      
They rode in silence until the first faint streaks of dawn reached across the eastern horizon, shafts of breathtaking pink and golden light. Chase veered from the direction they had been traveling for the past several hours, heading for an outcropping of shale surrounded by a scraggly copse of alders. Reining in behind the shelter of the trees, he slid from the horse and lifted her down, then began to unsaddle the gelding.

      
“A buck riding with a white woman would get himself shot, if we happened on anyone. So, we'll rest by day and travel by night,” he said tersely. His back was turned as he slung the heavy saddle onto a boulder beside the dun. “You can wash up in the stream over there if you want. I have some food here for us to eat.”

      
She saw the small clear creek gurgling just beyond the rocks. “Do you know every water hole in the territory?”

      
He shrugged as he knelt with his back still to her, fishing something from the leather pouch. “This territory and several others. The Cheyenne once ranged from the Canadian border all the way onto the Staked Plains of Texas following the buffalo.”

      
Stephanie glanced at the earth which was strewn with small hunks of loose shale interspersed with several solid rounded rocks, any one of which might bash out a man's brains. Perhaps she could just stun him and make good her escape before he could signal the horse.

      
As if reading her mind he said, “I wouldn't try anything foolish, Stevie.”

      
When he heard her stomp off to the water's edge, he let out a sigh. What insanity had he committed? She was right, the army would hound him relentlessly if they ever found out he had taken her. Of course, he was certain Rocky Rhoades would not incriminate herself by revealing it, but there was always the possibility someone else might add up her mysterious disappearance and Asa Grant's sudden absence and put the two together.

      
He cursed his rotten luck, then considered the options. Leaving her to reveal his identity would mean giving up his disguise as the bounty-hunting Osage and that he could not do. It was an edge his band had that no other Cheyenne or their allies possessed. He provided essential survival tools and valuable information to use against their enemies. The only alternative to bringing her with him was to kill her...and that was really not an option, for he knew he could never harm Stevie Summerfield.

      
You still want her.
He tried to deny the nagging voice in his head but could not. What the hell would he do with a spoiled, beautiful rich girl when he reached their camp?

      
As if echoing his thoughts, Stephanie walked back from the stream and stopped beside him. Using every ounce of the courage she had worked up, she asked, “You still haven't said what you plan to do with me, Chase.” He stood up and faced her. Her face paled as she stepped back, wide gold eyes riveted to the scars on his bare chest. He had not been marked that way when he undressed the day they were snowbound. “What...what happened to you—did the soldiers do this?”

      
Chase smiled grimly as she stared, horror-struck. “I imagine this seems a barbaric disfigurement to you,” he said, striking his chest with one fist, “but among my people these scars are a badge of honor.”

      
Over the years spent at half a dozen frontier posts, Stephanie had overheard talk about the savage self-mutilation rituals performed by the Indians. “The...the Sun Dance. You underwent the Sun Dance?” she asked incredulously.

      
His eyes narrowed dangerously on her as a sudden surge of anger coursed through him. “Difficult to believe, isn't it? That a Harvard man would participate in something so primitive and offensive to civilized sensibilities,” he sneered.

      
She swallowed her gorge as images of his flesh ripping free of crude rawhide bindings flashed before her eyes. “I didn't mean to sound superior,” she said defensively.

      
“Yes you did. Everything I am has always offended white people. Even when I dressed in silk shirts and Oxford tailored suits I was still nothing more than a stinking dirty redskin to the good people of Boston.”

      
“Not to me, Chase,” she replied defiantly. Still afraid of the half-naked scarred stranger who had once been her love but unable to stop her yearning to touch him, Stephanie reached out tentatively and grazed the raised welts of scar tissue on his chest.

      
At once his hand came up and seized hers, pressing the palm flat against the swift thudding of his heartbeat. “I feel anything but civilized right now, Stevie,” he said raggedly as they stood motionless, facing each other.

Chapter Eleven

      
He could feel the pulse in her wrist racing as wildly as his heart. This was insane. She was another man's wife—a bluebelly' s wife. She was forbidden to him. But she was Stevie. He forced himself to remember how he lived now, the path he had chosen. She could never survive with the Cheyenne—even if she wanted to. Would she want to share his lodge, bear his children? The sudden thought shook him to the core and he angrily shoved her hand away as if it bore a rattler's sting. “Use the chokecherry bushes over there to relieve yourself. After living out west this long I assume you know to watch for rattlers.”

      
Stephanie glared at him. Then, red faced, she headed for the shelter of the bushes, too desperately in need for pride to rule. As she struggled with her skirt and petticoats, she heard the unmistakable sound of him making water a few yards away on the opposite side of the shrubbery.

      
Memories of their childhood suddenly flashed into her mind and she cringed, recalling the forthrightly curious little girl who had asked him how he could pee so much faster than she could when they were romping in the woods behind his grandfather's country place. When he was too embarrassed to explain, she had spied on him the next time but could see nothing from her position behind him. He simply stood with his drawers still up...doing it. She had thought it mysterious and frustrating because girls couldn't perform such a basic act of nature with that ease and she told him so! Afterward he had teased her, knowing she had followed him. Still red faced, Stephanie wondered if he was recalling the same incident right now.

      
As she straightened her clothing, she muttered to herself, “I can't cower in the bushes until he comes looking for me.” Steeling her courage, she walked back to the stream where Chase waited.

      
“I've laid out the food. Not lobster bisque, I'm afraid, but you'll eat if you're wise,” he said, gesturing to the parfleche packed with pemmican and a dozen hardtack biscuits all carefully placed on a clean piece of cloth. Then he stalked to where he'd thrown the saddle and began to unroll some blankets.

      
Still trembling, she sank down in front of the meager cold food, humiliated by her forwardness and his rejection. What had possessed her to touch him like that? Placing her hand on his scars seemed even more intimate than the moments they had spent in his bed together so long ago.

      
Her stomach growled and cramped, reminding her that she had skipped dinner last evening and spent the night bouncing madly on horseback. Gingerly she reached out for a biscuit, eyeing the strange grayish looking substance he called pemmican with uncertainty. The biscuit was hard and salty, difficult to get down without something to moisten it. She broke off a piece of the soft greasy stuff and placed it on the bread. It had the tang of chokecherries and other wild fruits, combined with the almost buttery flavor of well-refined white lard. All in all, not too unpalatable.

      
Chase watched her eat, surprised that she would not find camp food too repulsive to taste. But Stevie had always been a game one, even as a kid, he mused as he spread his bedroll on a bit of moss growing in the shade beside the stream. Then he rejoined her, grabbing a couple of hunks of hardtack and making a sandwich with the pemmican as she had. “White man's biscuits and red man's suet and fruit. Half-breed food. Fitting, don't you think?” he asked, taking a bite.

      
“Why do you blame me for what's happened to your life, Chase? I didn't leave you—you left me. I never cared a fig about your mixed blood.”

      
“That was back in Boston...before you saw me as I am. And I am Cheyenne, one of those savage inferior people who require enlightenment and inspire pity.”

      
Her cheeks flushed as she remembered just those very feelings the first time she had seen red men and women after coming west.

      
“You'd have made a good Quaker yourself,” he said scornfully, taking in her guilty expression. He finished off the last of his food and washed it down with a draught from the canteen, then offered it to her, as if daring her to wipe off the rim before she drank.

      
“Damn you,” she muttered, taking it and gulping down several fulsome swallows.

      
He tsked mockingly. “Well, perhaps you wouldn't have made a good Quaker after all.”

      
“I could never exercise enough Christian charity to be like Hannah. She would forgive you for abducting her.”

      
He laughed darkly. “What makes you think a bloodthirsty savage like me would have taken some homely old Quaker woman captive? I might have scalped her and left her in that alley.”

      
Stephanie studied his expression—what there was of it to read. Did he make some sort of ghoulish jest or had he changed so utterly from the man she had loved back in Boston that he could actually do such a thing? She shivered in spite of the warm morning air, then noticed the bedroll he had spread in the shade by the stream.

      
Chase followed her eyes. “I don't know about you, but I need some shut-eye after riding all night.”

      
He gestured to the pallet, which looked suspiciously narrow to her. “Where do you propose to sleep?” she asked with feigned innocence.

      
“I'll use one of my saddle blankets as a hammock,” he replied dryly. Then his tone became firm. “We sleep together.”

      
“No!”

      
“Yes. After all, you might bash my brains in with a rock...or try for my gun this time.” When she refused to move, he walked over to her and reached down for her hand as if she were a recalcitrant child. She snatched it away. “Are you afraid of me, Stevie?” he taunted.

      
She shot up and glared harder. “No.”

      
“Liar,” he said softly, taking her arm forcefully and compelling her to step over to the pallet. “Now lie down and go to sleep. You have my word of honor that I won't ravish you. Oh, but I forgot, you don't believe bloodthirsty savages possess any honor, do you?”

      
Stephanie had never been so physically aware of her husband as she was of the man standing in front of her right now. At first, Hugh had never even bared his chest in her presence, but come to her in the dark, clad in a nightshirt. In the past years as he began to drink more, he had stripped in front of her but she had never looked at his body, had never wanted to see it or feel it. But perversely, she still longed to touch Chase whenever he came near her, to sink her fingers in the springy black hair on his chest, to feel those alien and frightening scars. She could smell his scent, horse, leather and male sweat all blended together. It should have offended her sensibilities but it did not. Maybe Chase was right. She was no lady at all.