Brides of Prairie Gold (19 page)

First she'd had to promise a whole day of driving the oxen in exchange for Bootie driving them without relief this morning. Then she'd had to convince Miles Dawson to lend her the use of a horse. Finally, and by far the most difficult obstacle, she'd had to persuade Webb to let her ride with him out in front of the wagons, just for a few hours.

"I feel as if I've been what's the word?" he asked, still frowning at her.

"Bamboozled," she supplied with a laugh. "And I'm so glad. This is absolutely glorious, Mr. Coate. I thank you from the heart for making it possible!"

The land that looked so drab and flat when viewed from the seat of a rocking wagon stretched toward the horizon like an immense rippling blanket woven from threads of green and gold and brown. When her borrowed horse topped a rise, Mem gasped and believed that she could see the far edges of forever. The vast empty spaces exhilarated her, awed her, diminished her to a speck of human insignificance. Measureless quantities of air and earth lifted her spirit, glorious and frightening in the same instant.

"I wouldn't have missed this for the world," she said softly. "I see why you like riding point. There's no dust and nothing to block your view. You can pretend you're the only person on earth."

"Except for the people in the train ahead of us," he said dryly.

Until he mentioned them, Mem hadn't noticed the white specks crawling across the landscape far in the distance. "The eyes of an experienced scout," she murmured, wondering what else he saw that she couldn't.

Long before this morning she had noticed that Webb Coate was not only the handsomest man she had ever met, and the most interesting, but his senses were sharper than those of most people. Webb could smell rain when there wasn't a cloud in the sky. He could determine the distance between himself and a coyote solely by listening to the animal's bark. Mem had seen him place his hand on an old campfire and sift the ashes, then state when the ashes had been flame.

Everything about him fascinated her, from the sensual curve of his lips to his blue-black hair to the way he walked, with liquid grace and a soundless step. His voice and the strange blend of accents delighted her ear like a symphony. And she could have listened to his stories about growing up in a Sioux village for the rest of her natural days.

To her utter delight, she and Webb had fallen into a habit of meeting at Smokey Joe's fire pit late at night while the rest of the camp lay sunk in slumber. Like her, he didn't seem to require much sleep, and he appeared to welcome her company as much as she anticipated his.

Sometimes Webb talked about his boyhood with the Teton Sioux, sometimes Mem talked about growing up in Chastity, Missouri. Her contributions to their conversations seemed extraordinarily dull compared to the richness of experience that he had lived. Mostly, what she brought to their nightly meetings was her own viewpoint of the day's happenings, and a mishmash of opinions addressing everything under the sun.

"I love this," she said with a smile and a sigh of pleasure, squinting toward the curving edge where earth met sky. The air was so clear that she swore she could see for thousands of miles.

The trip to Oregon was turning out exactly as she had hoped, a grand adventure even more exciting than she had dared imagine. And she was wresting every pleasure and new experience from the trip that was possible. After much wheedling, Heck Kelsey had let her pound out a horseshoe, Miles Dawson had shown her how to tie a lasso, Smokey Joe had taught her the fine points of dressing out an antelope.

Exhilarated, she had recorded each fresh experience in her journal. She didn't want to forget a single moment of this remarkable journey.

Occasionally, it occurred to her that she was probably the only one of the brides who preferred travel to arrival. She dreaded the day, thankfully still far away, when they would finally drive their wagons into Clampet Falls, Oregon.

"The sky, the air, the river" She inhaled deeply and smiled with joy, wishing the journey would never end. "Are you sorry this is your last trip across the continent?" she asked, enjoying the gleam of sunlight that slid through Webb's black hair. Today he wore it tied at his neck with a strip of rawhide. A dark curl swayed down the back of his buckskin jacket.

"I have promised myself that I'll return someday," he said quietly, his eyes scanning the wide vista, alert to movement. "My father made the same promise," he added after a moment. "But he never returned after the trip to fetch my mother and me."

"Do you miss him?" Mem asked, curiously. She knew Webb's father had died in England earlier in the year. He would return to Devonshire at the conclusion of this journey. Webb was so at one with the land, so natural a part of Mem's vision of the West that she couldn't imagine him living in England.

The strips fringing his jacket and leggings stirred in a meandering breeze. He shifted the carbine to his shoulder.

"My father was a great warrior." When he saw her eyebrows lift, he smiled. "He was an Englishman through and through, but he possessed the qualities of a Sioux warrior. Fearlessness, bravery, intelligence. His fighting ground was Parliament."

Mem urged her horse to keep pace with his, riding close enough that her skirts almost brushed his beaded leggings. "Is your mother still alive? Will she ever return to the American West?" It was rude to ask such personal questions, but she couldn't help herself. She hungered to know everything about him.

Sunlight burnished his face to tones of bronze and copper. "My mother is very much alive, and still beautiful." Then he laughed. "I doubt she has any interest in returning to the West. She's become very attached to English comforts."

Mem pictured a slender graceful woman with large black eyes and Webb's classically sharp profile. Someone beautiful. A sigh twitched her shoulders.

Occasionally she noticed how the teamsters looked after Perrin Waverly and Augusta Boyd when they passed. And she wondered how it might feel to be so beautiful that you turned men's heads. Would it be gloriously satisfying to gaze into a mirror and observe an exquisite creature looking back from the glass? Would it feel exciting and powerful? Saucy and fun? She would never know.

"What is your mother's name?"

Webb glanced at her with an indulgent expression. Her endless curiosity about his native upbringing seemed to amuse him. "Her name is Spring Wind, Miss Grant."

"Spring Wind." She liked the way the name sounded on her tongue, liked how the words fit together and dangled images in her mind. "Do you have an Indian name?"

"Tanka Tunkan. It means Big Stone." He laughed at her puzzled expression, showing a flash of white teeth. "The first time I was allowed to accompany a raiding party against the Crow, as a lowly moccasin carrier for Snow Bird, I had the misfortune to stumble over a large stone and pitch headfirst down the side of a bluff. The noise alerted the Crow hunting camp. Consequently our party returned to the village without having struck a blow. On that day I was named Tanka Tunkan." He smiled at the memory, then explained that a Sioux was given several names during his lifetime: his childhood name, his adolescent name, his adult name, and his true name, which was never shared with anyone. "Had I remained with the village, I would have spent the next years striving to earn a name more worthy of a warrior."

Entranced, Mem studied his strong wide-cheeked face, thinking about the story and trying to picture him as a boy living a life she could only imagine. She wished she knew what his true name was. He was the most exotic man she had ever met.

"While we're speaking of names," she said, taking the opportunity to address something she had been considering, "I think we know each other well enough now that well, I'd like it if you'd call me Mem instead of Miss Grant."

Unexpectedly, he looked away from her and didn't answer. When the silence lengthened and became awkward, she added quickly, "When we're alone together." That comment sounded so much like something Augusta might say that she cringed and hastily amended, "Please call me Mem anytime."

This, she realized at once, would never happen, not in an age when couples married thirty years referred to each other in public as mister and missus. Not at a time when an Indian might be flogged merely for looking too long at a white woman.

Her cheeks heated beneath the brim of her borrowed hat. If she hadn't been astride a horse, knowing she was blushing would have prompted her to throw out her hands in exasperation. She couldn't recall the last time she had blushed.

The longer Webb's silence continued, the hotter her cheeks became and the deeper grew her mortification. Too late she realized she had invited an unseemly and brazen intimacy. He would think less of her for this mishap. Worse, he might decide she was throwing herself at him.

In an agony of embarrassment, she finally made herself break the miserably uncomfortable silence. "Of course if using first names would make you uncomfortable" She spoke in a voice so low that only the sharp ears of a scout could have heard.

Finally he answered, but without looking at her. "I doubt the captain would approve a show of familiarity between his passengers and his men." His expressionless eyes scanned the horizon, lingering on something Mem couldn't see.

Abruptly the pleasure vanished from the day, blotted by the swift descent of excruciating humiliation. The vast open spaces offered a person no place to hide; she had nowhere to turn away from him. Staring straight ahead in a paralysis of embarrassment, she bounced up and down on the silly horse, her cheeks on fire as she realized their hours beside Smokey Joe's embers had meant one thing to her and another to him.

Mem had believed they were developing a rare friendship. Now it seemed obvious that Webb had merely been passing the time by visiting with a foolish woman who couldn't sleep and so had imposed herself on his place by the fire. She had mistaken politeness for pleasure in her company.

With all her heart Mem wished the raw earth would open wide and swallow her whole. One minute there would be a tall plain virgin clinging to a skittish horse, scalded with embarrassmentthe next instant, she would disappear and Webb Coate would sigh with relief and ride on blessedly alone.

Suddenly he leaned forward and his mustang shot ahead. The horse sped away so swiftly that Mem almost missed his shout.

"Get Cody!"

Startled out of self-absorption, puzzled, she jerked on the reins of her own horse to stop him from sprinting after the mustang. Her horse wheeled in a circle, fighting her control and giving her a scare before she finally managed to bring him to heel or whatever it was called. When she felt secure enough to look up and ignore her pounding heart, she spotted Webb, already half a mile in front of her, riding hard toward a white dot.

Squinting through the dust kicked up by his horse, she finally recognized the white dot as a lone wagon turned out of the tracks that followed the Platte. Distances were deceptive on the plains, but she guessed the wagon was about five miles ahead.

Even to her inexperienced eye something looked amiss. Wagons seldom traveled alonehad this one been abandoned by the train ahead? Curiosity and an adventurous spirit urged her to follow Webb and discover the situation for herself. But practicality won out as it usually did.

Reluctantly pulling her horse around, she flapped her bootheels against his side and hoped she could stay on his back long enough to carry Webb's message to Cody Snow. Actually, she was grateful for an errand to divert her mind from her humiliation and a disappointment that cut to the quick.

"Mem Grant," she muttered between her teeth, "You are a foolish, fanciful old spinster. Haven't you learned anything in twenty-eight years?" Next year she would look back and laugh at herself for ever thinking that a man like Webb Coate might have considered her interesting or worthy of friendship. She would remember today and she would squirm and chuckle at the brazenness of inviting him to address her familiarly.

But right now, his rejection hurt as badly as the headache that had reappeared to stab the top of her spine.