The Endless Sky (Cheyenne Series) (48 page)

      
“Chase the Wind, now grown to be the great White Wolf. My band sings stories of your bold deeds which match those of your father, Vanishing Grass.” He clasped Chase's arms.

      
“It has been too long a time since last I saw Little Wolf,” Chase replied, returning the embrace.

      
“You were a young warrior then, when the buffalo blackened the plains of the Arkansas River. Now we live on the white man's handouts at the reservation,” Little Wolf said sadly. “That is where we have come from.”

      
Seeing that the White Wolf would vouch for the new arrivals, the Lakota braves made them welcome. Afterward, Little Wolf took Chase aside and said, ‘‘You have saved my band this day. I am forever in your debt.”

      
“There is a favor I would ask which would more than repay it,” Chase replied. “You know the Blue Coats will pursue us mercilessly after what has taken place here.” The old man nodded in agreement. “If the worst should happen to my band, I ask you to care for those who survive. My uncle Stands Tall will bring you our aunt Red Bead who is full of years and two young children whom I have adopted.”

      
“It shall be as the White Wolf wishes, but let us not dwell on the future which is in the hands of the Everywhere Spirit. I would see my old friend Stands Tall if he yet lives.”

      
Chase took Little Wolf and his people and headed for their new camp. Stands Tall was having a few minor injuries tended by Red Bead while the children watched gravely. Observing the bodies of dead warriors being prepared for burial all around them was another grim experience for Smooth Stone and Tiny Dancer, who had already seen too much of death. Stephanie stood off to one side, isolated in the midst of this grief. Chase watched his uncle greet Little Wolf and make him welcome. Then he walked up to her and took her hand. It was ice-cold in spite of the warm evening. “Come with me. We must speak,” he said, pulling her away from Red Bead's cookfire.

      
They wended their way through the makeshift open camp. No one had put up the lodges taken down after the battle. Family possessions were packed up with only a few simple cooking utensils and basic foodstuffs left out. Many made their pallets out in the open and some erected brushy arbors for the night's shelter. No one knew how long they dared remain in the Valley of the Greasy Grass.

      
Stephanie followed him, still numb with fright. Stands Tall had returned over an hour earlier, saying that Chase was alive. She had kept a vigil as more and more dead warriors were brought from the battlefields by their families, wondering if she, too, would have slashed her arms and legs to show her grief if he had been among the dead. But then he had come riding in, smeared with blood and dust, alien and deadly looking, a half-naked savage with feathers in his long braided hair.

      
She had started to run to him but something stopped her—not the newcomers whom he escorted to their fire but something in his manner. There was none of the triumphant blood lust that had so horrified her when he had returned to the stronghold from successful raids. Rather, he looked as bone weary as she felt. A cool dark distance seemed to separate him from her even when he took her hand. As soon as they reached the edge of the camp, he relinquished his grip, expecting her to follow him over the slight rise where a small copse of gooseberry bushes allowed them some privacy to speak.

      
She stopped when he did, feeling a chill of premonition as he turned to her in the twilight. The bleakness in his eyes robbed her of breath, yet there was also such stinging bitterness in the set of his lips that she dared not offer comfort. What was there to say? His people had killed hundreds of soldiers. The desultory firing from the small remnants in the timber to the south only served as a reminder. She hugged herself and waited for him to speak.

      
“I'm returning you to civilization,” he began without preamble. He'd spent hours hardening his heart, assuring himself that there was no other way. Yet just the sight of her standing alone so slender and lovely in her doeskin tunic had nearly cost him his resolve. He thought of her as his wife. But that was in the Cheyenne manner. In white society she would be legally bound to Hugh Phillips. Surely she would not return to him. Chase prayed it was so, but could not ask now, for to do so would reveal the depth of his pain, the irrevocable loss he suffered in sending her back to safety.

      
Stephanie could read nothing behind his terse statement. The message did not surprise her but the cold, clipped way he spoke did. “Why, Chase? Why now after all we've been through?”

      
“The army won't take a defeat of this magnitude lying down. That was Custer' s Seventh we wiped out on that ridge.” She gasped in shock but said nothing as he went on relentlessly. “The army will come after us with everything Phil Sheridan can muster.”

      
“But the children—they'll need me to—”

      
“They're Cheyenne now. You're white. They'll have Red Bead and Stands Tall to look after them while I fight. And I will fight your Blue Coats, Stephanie...and I will die, sooner or later. There's no future for us.” As if to punctuate his words another burst of gunfire erupted from the timber.

      
“I have no future without you, Chase. Don't send me away. I've made a life here—or at least I've tried to. We have been a family, the only family I've ever known. Please—”

      
“Cheyenne women don't beg,” he said coldly, turning away from her before he did something foolish, something he would regret.

      
Stephanie stared at his back, bare and bronzed, the hard muscles moving fluidly as he stiffened his spine and crossed his arms over his chest. His hair hung past his shoulder blades in a thick plait woven with eagle feathers. She ached to reach out and touch his barbaric splendor. She had lain with this man and even now carried his child in her womb. And like the enigma he had always been, he turned away from her.

      
Cheyenne women don't beg
. She would not tell him about the babe. Somehow she would protect her mixed blood child in white society. He would never know he was a father, for if that was the only thing to bind them together, the child would suffer as much as they would. “I love you, Chase. You told me you loved me. Did you lie?”

      
Her voice was soft yet it cut like a knife. He felt the agony of it twist deep in his gut, almost unmanning him and he clenched his jaw until the tendons in his neck stood out. “No, I did not lie. But it's over now. My people mourn their dead. Tomorrow they'll pack up and scatter to the four winds with the bluebellies in pursuit. Custer' s ghost already mocks us. In death he'll achieve what he could not in life—the utter destruction of the Cheyenne and Lakota.”

      
She felt the bitterness that radiated from every fiber of his being sting her like a desert sandstorm. “And so it's over, just like that,” she said hollowly. Could he blame her for the inevitability of history? Just because she was white? Or because she had first married one of those hated “blue-bellies” who would hound his people to their deaths? Looking into his face she saw implacable resolution. Whatever his reasons, there would be no changing them.

      
Perhaps he was doing this because he loved her. That would hurt most of all. Unwilling to examine the unbearably painful thought, she simply turned and walked back to camp, her footfalls keeping cadence with the sounds of a wailing mourning chant.

Chapter Twenty-Two

      
Leaving the children had been the hardest part, Stephanie thought as they rode south toward the source of the Little Bighorn River, the name the white men gave to the Greasy Grass. Chase had informed her they would leave while the children were still sleeping. Smooth Stone would have borne his hurt stoically but Tiny Dancer would have cried and begged her to stay with them. Perhaps it was best to make the break clean. They would be assimilated into the communal life of the band, under Stands Tall's protection. Red Bead and Kit Fox would give them a mother's tender love in her absence.

      
Stands Tall and Elk Bull would soon lead the people back to the mountain stronghold. Perhaps they would escape the terrible retribution to come. Even if they did, the price would be dear for they would be only a small group living without the buffalo which had provided sustenance to their kind for generations. Their tribal way of life, with its rich ceremonies and rituals, would be lost, eradicated along with the rest of the free roaming Cheyenne and the buffalo themselves.

      
Stephanie would never again see Smooth Stone and Tiny Dancer or Kit Fox her friend and dour old Red Bead whose wry insights had often sustained her over the past months. With each plodding step of the horses, she was leaving so many loved ones behind. To keep the grief from overwhelming her, she turned over in her mind what she would do once back in civilization.

      
Chase had informed her only that he was delivering her to some mountain man, a French renegade who traded with the Indians. Gaston de Boef would see that she was returned to Rawlins where she could catch the Union Pacific back east.

      
They shared the implicit assumption that she would not return to Hugh Phillips. As if she dared, carrying an Indian baby. She had never been able to conceive Hugh's child and he'd accused her of barrenness. She had believed him. Now her fertility was yet another reason for him to hate her. Surviving an Indian captivity was an unpardonable enough sin. He would have been humiliated to accept back such tarnished goods, even if she were not pregnant. Chase was right that Hugh would kill her before he'd take her back. She shivered just thinking about it.

      
Chase had given her some money taken from a stagecoach raid last winter, enough to see her back to Boston. But what then? The Summerfield wealth was Hugh's now. Once her past and her condition were known, none of her distant relations or former friends would take her in. Last night as she lay alone on her pallet staring at the endless starry vault of Montana sky, she had vacillated. Should she tell Chase she was destitute? Did she owe it to their unborn child to swallow her pride?

      
But it was not pride which ultimately held her silent. She had listened to others around their campfire talking in hushed voices during the night. Each band of Cheyenne and Sioux would leave separately the following day, for scouts had already reported more soldiers at the mouth of the Little Bighorn. As soon as he rid himself of his white wife, the White Wolf would join a select group of warriors skirmishing with the soldiers, buying the rest time to scatter. Elk Bull's band would return to the mountains and wait for him there.

      
The Cheyenne needed Chase. He had thrown in his lot with them since childhood and all the years sojourned among whites meant nothing when compared to his loyalty to his father's people. He lived a dangerous life which all too soon would be over. Chase Remington was destined to die by a bullet or a noose and there was nothing she could do to save him.

      
Stephanie had lain awake thinking about the Freedom Woman whose liberation had, in the final analysis, been so ephemeral. At least Anthea had been given seven years, not just seven months with the man she loved. In the end, to save her child's life she had sacrificed herself by returning to the scorn and humiliation of Boston, returning to the Remington family she and her son despised. But if the old reverend had cared enough about preserving the family name to make Chase his heir in spite of his tainted blood, Stephanie knew what she would do. She would go to Reverend Remington and tell him she was carrying his great-grandchild. Surely he would take her in, for she carried the small gold locket with Anthea's picture which Chase had given her at their Cheyenne marriage.

      
Jeremiah could do what she could not—secure the freedom and safety of her child from Hugh Phillips. After that it would be up to her to protect it from the rapacity of Burke Remington. Her resolve made, she rode toward the railhead and tried not to think of what might have been.

      
They stopped that night at the edge of the mountains amid the splendor of spruce and aspen in a narrow ravine where a small stream ran swift and icy from the melt off of snow. The air was warm and redolent with the scents of wild grasses and summer flowers. As night fell, the sky overhead became an endless canopy of stars, winking down their cold brilliant light.

      
Stephanie sat beside the campfire unconscious of the beauty of her surroundings, tending a pair of freshly killed rabbits spitted on the flames. She was too numb to think as her eyes followed Chase while he cared for their horses. He looked completely Indian now, dressed in breechclout and moccasins, his skin rippling with muscles and shimmering bronze in the firelight. There was such savage grace in every movement he made that she could not break the spell holding her in thrall as she watched him.

      
All at once Chase turned and their eyes met. And held. The dun snorted softly as her husband dropped the hackamore onto the grass and walked slowly toward Stephanie. Her legs trembled as she stood up, waiting for him to touch her. There was at once a defiance and an acceptance in her stiffened spine and highly held chin. Her eyes never wavered under his compelling glittering gaze.

      
“One last time, Chase.” She mouthed the words softly as her arms reached out and pulled him into her embrace.

      
He did not answer with words but his lips came down over hers, ending the need for speech. She returned the voracious kiss with a feral savagery equal to his own. Questing deep inside each other's mouths, their tongues dueled until they grew breathless and desperate. She dug her fingers into his scalp, combing through his hair until his braid came unfastened and the thick night-dark curtain obscured his face. His arms pressed her tightly to his chest and his hips rocked against hers insistently. Her own rolled up in reply as he cupped a breast with one hand, sending a spiraling ache from her nipple down into the deepest recesses of her belly.