The Endless Sky (Cheyenne Series) (34 page)

      
“Sometimes the Powers withhold the gift of children. I, too, was barren.” She studied Stephanie a moment as the young woman cleared away the simple breakfast. “I knew it was my lack, for my husband had children with his second wife. Perhaps your man, not you, was the one at fault.”

      
Stephanie colored with embarrassment at the matter-of-fact way Cheyenne women discussed such intimate matters. The first time her monthly flow had begun, Red Bead had explained to her about their custom of sequestering menstruating women in a “moon hut” for the duration of her cycle. The blood taboos of their society seemed primitive but she had been even more distressed by the open discussion of bodily functions. Yet in spite of their candor in regard to speaking about sex, Cheyenne women were every bit as chaste as the most moral of white society. Courting couples did no more than innocently share a robe the way she had seen Kit Fox and Blue Eagle do. There were no whores and no marital infidelities among these people.

      
She floundered for a reply to Red Bead's speculations about Hugh. “I...I don't know if my husband had other children.” Lord knows, learning of his repeated infidelities, he could have left a string of bastards from Baltimore to Bismarck. “We have only been married for three years.” She could not explain their estrangement or the humiliating reasons Hugh had quit her bed. It might well give Red Bead ideas about matchmaking between her and Chase.

      
“Three years is plenty time to make a baby,” the old woman said with a grunt. “Come, we work now.”

      
They stepped outside the lodge into the cold. A stiff wind had arisen with the hint of a few frosty flakes of snow in it. Stephanie did not look forward to working outdoors all morning. When they collected Tiny Dancer, the little girl seemed impervious to the icy wind, dressed warmly now in a long-sleeved deerskin tunic and high leggings. She skipped alongside Stephanie, chattering happily in a hybrid of English and Cheyenne. The latter she endeavored to teach Stephanie.

      
As they approached the place where three large hides had been staked out on the ground, she observed the women rigging a windbreak around the area. They drove lodge poles into the earth at regular intervals and stretched lodge rolls across the spaces between them. Inside the shelter several small fires burned, affording warmth in which the women could kneel on the cold ground to scrape and cure the raw skins. Red Bead handed her an adz made of bone and illustrated how to use it. Stephanie set to work, letting the hard repetitious task cleanse her mind of troubling thoughts about Chase Remington.

* * * *

      
Chase sat in the small shabby tent on the outside of the old frontier trading settlement of Fort Laramie, now the largest army post in southern Wyoming Territory. The waitress in the crude restaurant, an Arapaho woman, poured him a second cup of coffee as he scanned the newspapers in front of him. The information was several months old and not encouraging. Zachariah Chandler, former senator from Michigan and lifelong friend of George Armstrong Custer, had been appointed secretary of the interior. An avid expansionist, Chandler shared the views of Sheridan and Custer with regard to Indian removal. The Interior Department had been the last frail bastion against the onslaught of white settlers into the territories of Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

      
The net is tightening with the passage of each season,
he thought grimly. The Union Pacific Railroad ran seventy miles below the fort, effectively sealing off the Arkansas River hunting grounds to the south. Even though the stock market panic in 1873 had temporarily halted Jay Cooke' s plans for construction of the Northern Pacific through Montana, Chase knew it was only a matter of a few years before it, too, would encroach. When he first began raiding as the White Wolf, he had resigned himself to dying as a warrior, but he had hoped to preserve for a short while longer the freedom of his people, even though he knew their way of life was doomed.

      
But that was before Stephanie had come back into his life. He wanted to live for her, with her, to have children and build a life with her. But where? How? He could not turn his back on the Cheyenne and she could not live as his mother had. Even if she could, Stephanie was bound by her vows to the Blue Coat Phillips, the very man who had brought him to Fort Laramie. The man he planned to kill. And once he had done so, he knew she would never forgive him.

      
When Chase had left the stronghold, his original purpose was to scout out a likely target for his raiders. The army would not expect them to strike during the winter. However, the more he drifted, the more tales he heard of the intrepid Indian killer, Lieutenant Hugh Phillips. Chase's plans changed. Now, he stalked the two-legged predator who had slaughtered so many of his people.

      
He had spent the past month traveling from one small army outpost to another, always a few days behind the damned butcher, who had become a worse scourge on the plains than Custer, Crooke and Mackenzie combined. In his pursuit of the White Wolf, Phillips systematically hunted down, searched out and destroyed every Cheyenne, Arapaho and Sioux village he could find. Chase had to face the fact that abducting the man's wife had added to his fanatical zeal. Before Phillips had been politic and cautious, attacking only when there was some slim pretext of Indian provocation to justify the wanton slaughter, but now he charged in, saber drawn, to give no quarter as Chivington and Custer had done at Sand Creek and Washita. He was a mad dog and Chase meant to stop him. He knew it was something that needed to be done, a matter of simple justice, regardless of the old enmity he felt for Phillips, regardless of the woman. Yet he still felt guilty prosecuting a personal vendetta. This was a weight on his conscience he would have to bear the rest of his brief life, a life alone, apart from all others.

      
What will I do about Stevie? Once her husband was dead, Chase could send her home to Boston. Since old Josiah, too, was dead, she would be a wealthy widow with good prospects for remarriage, this time to a man of better character than Hugh Phillips. The idea of Stephanie with another husband did not sit well but he pushed the thought aside. Right now his task was to deal with Phillips.

      
The lieutenant was having dinner with the post commander after another “successful mission.” He had ridden in yesterday, herding with him the pitiful remnants of an Arapaho band. Chase had learned the lieutenant favored a bit of entertainment on the seamier side, frequenting brothels and saloons in the towns and outposts along his way. For some utterly perverse reason known only to the twisted workings of Phillips's sick mind, lately he preferred to use Indian or mixed blooded women and he used them hard. Like most army outposts in the region, Fort Laramie boasted several such establishments. Setting aside the newspaper, Chase tossed some coins on the table to pay for his meal, then left the tent. It was getting dark. Phillips would be on the prowl shortly. So would he. Within half an hour he had located the lieutenant in a big old two-story clapboard structure called the Burning Bush Saloon and Palace of Pulchritude.

      
Since Indians were not allowed as customers, he sneaked into the place through a back window on the second floor by climbing a rotted old trellis that had supported rose vines in the establishment's better days. Once inside the dim hallway, he wrinkled his nose at the smell of cheap whiskey and stale sweat. The air was heavy with the musk of sex, couplings done roughly and repeatedly by the occupants of the long rows of tawdry rooms. He had no idea which one belonged to Phillips's partner, but knowing the man's predilections, he figured he'd soon hear enough to give away the location. Grunts and moans sounded through the thin warped doors as he moved soundlessly down the hall. At the fourth door he heard a pitiful thin cry of a woman, pleading in the Lakota tongue and Phillips's muttered oaths as he struck her repeatedly. The ugly sounds brought no one from downstairs to intercede.

      
Chase tried the door, which was unlocked. Easing his knife from its sheath, he slipped noiselessly inside. In the pale green light cast by a cheap chartreuse shade on an oversized lamp, he looked at the hellish scene. Phillips had his back to the door, kneeling on a bed behind a slender dark-skinned girl with long black hair. She was naked, tied to the heavy iron bedpost facedown, on her knees, writhing in pain as her tormentor pinched and slapped her buttocks. His belt, lying beside him on the bed, had already left an angry crisscross of welts on her soft flesh.

      
“You like it—say it, dammit, you red-skinned bitch—say you want it,” he rasped out, pulling the turgid member from his open fly and ramming it into her anus. She screamed loudly, trying to escape from him.

      
Hugh was so intent on his lust he did not hear Chase approach the bed, but the shadow cast by the lamp alerted him to an intruder. He whirled around, pulling away from the whimpering girl and seizing his belt. In one swift movement he snapped it hard in Chase's face. Chase partially blocked the wicked blow with his forearm and reached for the belt with his free hand, trying to yank it out of Phillips's grasp. Refusing to release his end of the doubled up heavy leather, the lieutenant dodged the deadly arc of his foe's knife as he instinctively reached for his pistol only to find it was not there. The weapon lay beside his hat, tossed carelessly on the room's one rickety chair. He leaped from the bed, giving up the tug of war to escape his attacker's knife.

      
“You breed bastard! You won't escape this time,” he snarled, recognizing the man who had scarred his cheek.

      
“I don't think you'll be in any shape to stop me—or to abuse any more helpless women,” Chase replied, advancing with his knife.

      
Phillips lunged for the chair but Chase kicked it over before Hugh could reach the pistol. With a feral growl, the officer swung a looping right that landed high on the left side of Remington's head and grabbed his knife arm. They went down, crashing across the floor, struggling desperately for control of the blade. Used to the rough sport of wrestling among the Cheyenne, Chase quickly pinned Phillips's legs on the floor, then began to force the knife nearer and nearer his throat. The half-breed could feel the lieutenant's arm giving way and became a bit too confident.

      
Suddenly Phillips released his grip and jerked his upper body so the blade plunged into the rough wooden floor, missing his throat by a scant inch. Using Chase's momentum against him, he broke the hold pinning his legs and at the same time struck Chase's hand as it gripped the knife, trying to free it. The blade went flying across the floor, out of either man's reach.

      
Hugh caught sight of his gun which had fallen beneath the overturned chair. He rolled away from Remington and seized it, pointing it at his foe's chest. “Now, you breed bastard, I'm going to work my way up from your knees to your cock, then your gut. By the time I'm out of bullets, you'll be begging for me to kill you.” As he spoke, he lowered the gun slightly and aimed.

      
Neither man had paid any attention to the girl on the bed as she untied the ropes that bound her wrists, using her teeth. She huddled in the center of the bed for a moment watching the desperate fight. Then she inched her way to the edge of the bed and reached down to pick up the knife which Chase had lost. An instant before Hugh fired, she plunged the blade into his back. Hugh felt the knife sink in, too high to be fatal, deflected by his shoulder blade. His shot went wild, hitting Remington high to the right on his chest. With a gasp of agony he jerked around, almost losing purchase on the gun.

      
As Hugh turned, Chase lunged forward and pulled the blade free. The lieutenant whirled back but could not get off another shot before the knife bit into his belly. Chase would have pulled it up and gutted his hated enemy, but suddenly the door burst open. A burly guard from downstairs raised an ancient Walker Colt and fired at the intruder. As Chase rolled away, he could feel the scalding pain where Hugh's bullet had ripped through muscle and sinew, but he was up on his feet even as the guard fired a second shot and missed again.

      
Hugh lay deathly still as Chase dove through the window onto the porch roof. He slid to its edge, then dropped to the ground while the guard yelled for help and emptied his revolver. The raider ran into the dark alley where he had tied his horse, thinking,
That bastard Phillips will be the one begging to die by morning...if he's still alive.

      
The sound of women's high-pitched screams and men's curses filled the night air. ‘The lieutenant's dead! Some breed gutted him,” the guard yelled.

      
“Louie says Phillips nailed the bastard good before he died. He shouldn't get far,” another cried.

      
Chase dragged himself onto the dun's back, glad of the big gelding's endurance. He had a long hard ride ahead of him—if he did not bleed to death like Phillips.

* * * *

      
Stephanie was out gathering firewood when she and the other women with her heard the outcry. The few sentences of Cheyenne she had learned were insufficient to understand what was being said but she had picked up the words White Wolf. Anxiously she turned to Kit Fox and asked, “What are they saying?”

      
Her friend's face suddenly bleached of its natural coppery hue. ‘The White Wolf has returned and he is injured!”

      
Tossing down their bundles of wood, they ran toward the center of camp, soon spying Chase's big dun gelding walking slowly. His rider slumped across his neck, covered with blood, looking more dead than alive. As Chase began to slide from the dun's back, Stands Tall and Elk Bull reached up and lifted him down, then, each taking an arm, they half carried, half dragged him inside Stands Tall's lodge.