The Preacher's Bride (Brides of Simpson Creek) (21 page)

“With God’s help, we’ll find them,” he promised again. “Please keep praying.”

“Oh, I will, of course. Go with God, Reverend,” Mrs. Bennett said. “Take some of my biscuits with you on the trail. You...you have a gun?”

He nodded. “Miss Milly wouldn’t let me leave without one,” he said, then left to go wake Sheriff Bishop.

In an hour, they rode out—Gil, Sheriff Bishop, Dr. Walker, Jack Collier, who’d been told of Faith’s being missing by Milly and had brought a couple of his ranch hands, and Andy Calhoun from the livery. Bishop left his deputy at the jail in case some sort of ransom demand was brought there.

Gil prayed they weren’t too late to save her. And that he’d be able to conquer his urge to kill the Georgian when they caught up to him.

Chapter Twenty-One

F
aith woke with a cramp in her left calf, but still bound hand and foot, she could do nothing but endure the stabbing pain. She gritted her teeth so she would not cry out and awaken the snoring Comanche woman sleeping a few feet away from her. Finally the spasm passed, leaving her with nothing to do but imagine what would happen today.

It might be her last day on earth. A tear slid down her cheek at the thought.

She had wandered far from the Lord, and had only made the first few steps back toward Him. She hadn’t had a chance to do anything that would make her worthy of forgiveness.

Gil had said that if she believed in God, she would see her brother in Heaven. But had the prayer she prayed been enough that He would forgive her for her past faithlessness? She still had so many questions—questions she’d planned to ask Gil the next time she could speak with him alone, and now she would never have the chance. She would never get the chance to show him how much she loved him, or what a worthy wife she could be for a preacher.

By now, she figured, it would have been discovered that she was missing. Someone would have ridden out to the Brookfield ranch to see if she’d merely stayed the night with Milly, and a search would have begun. Was Gil part of the search party? Was her father?

Her parents would be worried sick. She remembered what her father had told her about his heart, and her anxiety kicked up several notches. Would the stress of fearing for his daughter cause a fatal heart seizure? Her father did love her—she knew that now. True, he’d been clumsy at showing it for some time after Eddie had died, and he’d taken her for granted many times, but she’d begun to realize her father’s quiet pride in her when she’d begun helping him more at the newspaper office after Merriwell fled.

Her poor mother—losing daughter and husband at the same time.

Or this might be her first day of a long and miserable captivity. Gil and her family would never find her, for the Comanche camp was well hidden. How long had they existed here, with no one in Simpson Creek the wiser? And they wouldn’t stay here forever, wherever here was. The Comanches were a roaming people and would move on whenever they felt like it.

Then she became aware that the Comanche woman’s eyes were open, and staring at her across the floor of the tepee.

Once again, she was taken out to see to her needs, then given pemmican and water. Faith hoped this meant they did not intend to kill her today, for surely they wouldn’t waste food on her if she was to die within hours.

Then she was tied back up, and spent an endless day where she could do nothing but stare at the tepee wall or at a rotating group of women guards, who alternated staring back at her with scraping the flesh from hides, sewing pieces of tanned leather together into clothing, or stitching beading onto new moccasins.

Twice, the big brave who had captured her came in and stared at her, his eyes greedy and threatening, and she closed her eyes until she heard him leave. Once, she heard what she thought was his voice, raised in angry discussion outside her tent.

She spent the hours praying, napping and wondering what Gil and her parents were doing and what would happen to her.

* * *

Gil and the other men of the search party camped on the banks of the Colorado River that night, tired, saddle-sore and discouraged. They’d ridden miles in every direction around Simpson Creek and the rest of San Saba County and had found no trace of Faith or Yancey Merriwell, nor had anyone they encountered seen them.

“We’ll split up in the morning and go farther,” Bishop said, as they ate whatever food they’d been able to pack and bring along. “Half of us will go north, half south—”

He stopped as the braying of a mule and the creaking of wagon wheels announced the arrival of a newcomer, a bearded mule skinner hauling freight.

“Mind if I share yore fire, gents?” the mule skinner asked. “Got my own grub, but I wouldn’t mind some company, after what happened t’day a coupla miles southeast a’ here.”

“And what would that be?” Bishop inquired, gesturing that the mule skinner could come in and join them.

“Comanches burned a ranch, killin’ every soul there and drivin’ off their stock. So ya see why I ain’t hankerin’ t’camp alone. What’re you fellows out fer?”

Gil barely listened as the sheriff explained their purpose, for the mule skinner’s mention of an Indian raid had sent a chill skittering down Gil’s spine.

What if Faith had been taken not by Merriwell, but by Comanches?
The possibility that Merriwell’s recent flight had nothing to do with Faith’s disappearance on the way back from the Brookfield ranch had occurred to him before he joined the search party, but the rest of them had concluded Merriwell was the most likely culprit.

The longer Gil sat there, eating what Mrs. Bennett had packed for him while he listened to the mule skinner talk about the carnage he’d seen at the burned ranch, the surer he became that Faith had been taken by Comanches, not Merriwell. And he knew what he had to do.

Bishop looked thoughtful as the search party considered how the mule skinner’s report might affect their plan.

“Those redskins can travel like the wind,” Andy Calhoun said. “They could be fifty miles or more away by now.”

“Not if they’re driving cattle,” Jack Collier said.

“But they might have split up,” one of his ranch hands suggested. Faces around the campfire were somber as they all realized the very real possibility that Faith Bennett might be an Indian captive and never found.

“I’ll need a man to ride back to town at sunup and have my deputy contact the cavalry—they need to know what we just found out. We’ll keep searching, but if Miss Faith is a Comanche captive, they have a far better chance of rescuing her than we do.”

“I’ll go,” Gil said.

Bishop nodded, probably figuring a preacher not used to hard riding was the man they could most easily spare. “Let’s all get some shut-eye, then.”

Gil would have liked to leave right then, but he had no lantern to light his way as he had had the night he rode to town from the Brookfield ranch. And every bone and muscle he possessed screamed with exhaustion. He needed to sleep if he could, so when tomorrow came, he could do as he’d told Bishop he would, then get a fresh horse and ride off to where his heart told him Faith would be.

* * *

The next morning began as the previous one had, but as soon as she had broken her fast with the inevitable pemmican, she was yanked out of the tepee and lashed to the post in the middle of the camp.

Hours later, Faith winced as yet another round-faced Comanche woman poked at her with a sharpened stick in passing, then ducked as much as the leather thongs binding her to the pole would allow when the woman’s bright-eyed child chucked a handful of pebbles at her. One caught Faith on the cheek in spite of her efforts, and she bit her lip against the stinging pain.

Most of the tribe went about their business, however, merely giving her sidelong, opaque glances from time to time. There was no brush piled up around her feet as if they meant to burn her, at least yet. Perhaps the purpose of leaving her tied to the pole was to provide humiliation and distress for the captive and a source of amusement for the women and children—before escalating the torment.

Faith faced another post stuck in the ground. It was sharpened to a point at the top, and just below the point several scalps were impaled. She did everything she could not to look at that hideous sight, and hoped none of the victims had been people she knew.
Please, Lord, protect the people of Simpson Creek, especially Gil, Mama, Papa and all the Spinsters’ Club.

She’d been tied to the pole since early morning and not been given food or water since shortly after sunrise. The inside of her mouth felt dry as the middle of a haystack. Her head pounded dully as the summer sun beat down on her. At first, she’d been clammy with perspiration beneath her long-sleeved shirt and heavy skirt, but her sweating had ceased, and she could feel her skin of her scalp and cheeks being scorched with sunburn.

Once, she dozed, only to jerk awake when a stolid-faced squaw pelted her with rotten meat. Some of the stinking mess clung to her ripped, stained riding skirt.

Her captor passed by once, flanked by a trio of his friends. When he saw that she had seen him, he pulled out a knife and fondled it while watching her. He chuckled when she turned her head away.

Faith hadn’t seen the inquisitive Indian boy who had come into the tepee her first night again, although a half-dozen boys of similar ages had passed by carrying bows and arrows. At first she thought they might be preparing to use her for target practice, but they kept walking until they passed by out of sight of the camp. Where had the boy with the crutch gone? Something about him—the apparent fact that he had met Gil? The kindness in his eyes?—had been comforting. Maybe her captor had punished the boy for entering his tepee and looking at her, and he had been forbidden to come near her.

As the afternoon wore on, the tantalizing smells coming from the cooking pots began to taunt her, but no one showed any interest in feeding her or relieving her thirst. Laughter erupted from several sides when a boy walked past her, throwing a gourdful of red ants at her which he had apparently scooped up from an anthill.

Most of the ants bounced harmlessly off her clothing and fell to the ground. A few, however, found their way inside the neck of her blouse, and Faith couldn’t help flinching and whimpering as she felt their tiny, vicious biting. Her audience seemed to find her flinches and outcries the height of amusement.

Soon everyone took their cooked food and went inside their tepees, and she was left alone with her thoughts.

Lord, I don’t understand why this is happening. Please, let Gil find me...

* * *

As soon as he reached Simpson Creek, Gil lost no time in delivering his message to the deputy and checking on his father. He didn’t tell Faith’s mother that they now thought Faith might have been taken by the Indians. It would have given her added anguish for no good reason, and he would have had to stay longer to try to console her. Instead, he let her believe he was rendezvousing with one of the search parties, and went to retrieve Milly Brookfield’s now-rested horse from the livery.

What if he never found the camp? Gil wondered as he rode north out of town. He couldn’t be one-hundred-percent certain it wasn’t Merriwell who had taken her after all, and if Comanches had been the culprits, he had no reason to be certain it was even the same band he had encountered when he’d found the Indian boy. A raiding party from another band might be miles away with her by now.

Or it might not even have been Comanches at all, Gil thought. Kiowas, enemies of the Comanches, raided in Texas from time to time, too.

Lord, only You can help me find her, and only You can save her. Please lead me to the right place, even if it means I must die.

He figured there was very little chance he would come out of this alive if he found Faith, even if he did somehow persuade the Comanches to release her.

But if by some miracle I do survive—whether I’m able to find Faith, Lord, I know there is something I need to do—something I should have done a long time ago.

He needed to tell his father about his long-ago sin with Suellen, and then confess it to the congregation. The Lord had long ago forgiven him, but because he had kept his sin secret, perhaps there would be some in Simpson Creek Church who would feel he wasn’t worthy to be their preacher after they learned what he’d done.

But all that would take place in the future, he thought. He left the road and began to climb into the hills.

* * *

As the sun began its descent into the hills to the west, Black Coyote Heart took yet another look at himself in the mirror he had taken from the dead white eyes, and which he had yet to give Eyes of an Antelope. He was the best-looking male of his tribe, that was certain. No one had such a wealth of long, raven-black hair as he possessed. No one had such a fierce, eagle eye. He was taller than most and powerfully built. The many coups he had counted showed in his proud bearing.

Grinning at his image, he dabbed on another slash of crimson war paint. When the white woman saw him, she would surely faint from terror.

He heard the murmuring of the people outside the tepee, and the beginning throbs of the drum beating in a slow rhythm.

Crow Echo, his sister, lifted the flap of the tent. She had painted her face in slashes of black, as was traditional among the tribe’s women when the scalp dance was to take place.

“It is time,” she said.

He lifted the flap of the tent, and saw that Panther Claw Scars sat in the place of honor, as befitting a chief. Black Coyote Heart’s fellow warriors and the young women were already dancing and chanting around the pole to which the red-haired woman was bound. She hadn’t seen him yet, but she already looked terrified.

None of the warriors had died during the raid, so there was no clamoring for the captive to be killed. The purpose of the dance was to subjugate the woman with terror. After that she would be compliant and meek, always afraid that she could be tied to the pole again and killed the next time.

The drum beat sped up. All eyes were on Black Coyote Heart as he stepped into the circle of dancers, pulling his knife from its sheath with a ceremonial flourish. The woman saw him now and the knife he held, and shrank back against the pole, her green eyes impossibly wide in a face leached of all color.

Eyes of an Antelope saw him, too, he noted with satisfaction. She was staring at him as if she could not get enough of his magnificence, and her father also looked suitably impressed. Perhaps it would take only three horses instead of four—plus the captive woman, of course, to purchase his bride.

He began to dance, weaving closer and closer to the white woman each time he passed in front of her, feinting at her with the knife as if he meant to cut her throat, pantomiming the act of scalping. Once he lifted a lock of her dark red hair with the blade of his knife, then cut it off. She’d had her teeth clenched before that, but now she whimpered with fear.