Colter's Path (9781101604830) (32 page)

None of those other mentally disintegrating and desperate women, though, had been what Emma Wickham was: the essence and summation of feminine beauty…perfection. He'd had other women be drawn to him in a wild hope that, somehow, he would turn from captor to benefactor for them. Yes, but none of those had been anything close to what it would take for him even to consider taking them for himself in anything more than a momentary, lust-venting way.

Emma Wickham, however, was different than any
other. She was one, the only one among all he'd seen, whom he might consider as a woman he could make his own, in some personal and permanent way. He might actually, at some previously unexplored level of himself, be able to love her. Love. Not a word or concept he was accustomed to thinking of, even believing in. For him there had never been anything but power, domination, violent passion…never love. Love was a fiction of fools.

He was not fool enough to believe he was at this moment in love with this imprisoned beauty. But he did see in her something that made him think love might actually be a real thing, after all, something at least possible between two people. That alone was enough to set her apart and make her special and important and worthy of his attention.

As he pondered all this, he moved toward her, eyes locked on hers. He reached her, leaned forward, felt her bound hands groping at him to embrace him as best they could within her rope-limited range of motion. She could not achieve it, of course, but the resolve with which she had tried actually moved him. A man who had thought himself beyond the reach of normal human emotion…he had been
moved
. It was a novel and somewhat unsettling experience.

She was trying to reach him, trying to kiss him, but again her restraints kept her from success. He looked at her deeply, smiled, then pulled away, not even kissing her or even wanting to. He had already vented his carnal passions upon this woman. Now he wanted something more, and different. And higher. That had never happened before, and it was more than he could deal with.

He turned away from her and wordlessly left her alone in her log prison. He closed down the door and barred it shut, then moved on to the pen of another woman, one he felt free to use and treat in the way he was accustomed to using and treating women. Women who did not waken things in him that had nothing to do with power and lust and domination.

It would be another two hours before he noticed that, somewhere along the way, the knife he carried in a
sheath on his belt was gone. He looked for it in a wild fashion, appalled that it was missing, but try as he would, he could not find it, nor imagine how it could have been released from its holder without his awareness.

He'd dropped it, he finally decided. It lay somewhere amid weeds or stones, out of sight, lost by accident. It had to be. Had to be.

She could not have said exactly how she'd done it. She'd followed her instincts, used subtle shifts of her body, her head, to cause him to move responsively, and she'd thus managed to maneuver him, without his awareness, into a place where she could knock the knife he always carried free of its sheath. It had fallen beside her leg and she'd managed to mostly cover it with her skirt. Turner had left her pen without awareness that his knife was missing. An hour, then two, had passed without him returning to look for it.

Amazing. She'd prayed for a rescuer to be sent, and it appeared that the rescuer who had come had been…herself.

But merely having that tool in her prison was hardly a guarantee of escape. Her tied hands would not quite reach the knife, and even if she managed to get it in hand, she was unsure of being able to work into a position allowing her to apply blade edge to rope. The way these men bound their prisoners was diabolically clever and thoroughly thought out. The bound ones were allowed just enough range of motion to keep them always trying to wriggle out of their cords, thus preserving their muscles and bones from the atrophy that would come if they were held utterly still. Yet the range of movement was so small that almost nothing could be actually achieved. Even eating required bone-straining effort.

Emma had moved her skirt enough to expose the knife to her view again, and had changed position as far as it seemed possible to let her come close to reaching it…but close was not enough. Straining, exerting, she tried to will her bones and joints and muscles to achieve impossible levels of flexibility, movement, and range…her
fingers creeping closer and closer, but never quite reaching…

And suddenly a scuffling and scrabbling above, on the top of the pen, told her he was back, and it was too late. He obviously had discovered his knife was missing and realized where he'd lost it. No hope now. He would retrieve the knife, probably punish her violently, maybe tighten her bonds, and she'd have lost the only feeble chance she'd found to help herself.

She closed her eyes as the trapdoor folded back and feet thumped down on the floor of the pen. She waited to feel his rough hand grasp her. It did not, and Emma dared to open one eye….

It was not Turner who had entered, nor was it Paco. The person was Rosita, Paco's daughter, the crippled girl whose duty it was to crudely bucket-wash the soiled bodies of the prisoners after they'd voided themselves.

Emma opened both eyes but did not look directly at the girl, whose age was hard to guess. She supposed Rosita, who appeared half Mexican, half Anglo, to be perhaps fourteen or fifteen years of age. Despite her youth, her eyes had the hard glare of an older, life-toughened female. She stared unflinchingly and silently at Emma.

“He has killed one of you,” Rosita said, her voice soft and her Mexican accent light. It surprised Emma to hear her speak; her impression had been that Rosita was a mute, Rosita having never spoken in her presence earlier. Emma had not even known the girl's name until she'd heard one of the other prisoners call to the girl while she was leading Emma to the place where she “washed” the women with hard-dashed bucketfuls of water.

“Who has been killed?”

Rosita knelt before Emma. “She was a young woman, like you. Gringo like you, with hair like the silk of corn. But she was crippled, as I am, with a badly formed foot. Senor Turner went to her pen to make his use of her, and he had not known she was crippled. When he saw her withered foot, he cursed her and hit her and called her a ‘twist-foot hen.' She tried to rise and he hit her harder.
There was a broken splinter of wood on the wall of her pen and she pulled it free of the wall and went at him with it, hoping in her anger to stab him. He kept her from it and pushed her to the ground, and hit her about the head again and again with his fist. She cried out for a time, and then she was silent.” Rosita paused. “She will be silent forever now.”

Emma had no idea who the murdered young woman was, having barely caught glimpses of the handful of other prisoners in this compound of covered log pens. Even so the fact that someone in the same victimized position as she had fallen victim to such purposeless violence moved her, and a tear rolled down her dirty face. There were tears in Rosita's eyes as well, but her look was less a sad one than one of determined fury.

“A ‘twist-foot hen,' he called her. ‘Twist-foot hen.' As if she had chosen it for herself. As if she had made herself crippled just to give him annoyance. Damn his devil's soul!”

Emma was growing puzzled. “Why have you come to me to tell me all this?”

Rosita drew closer, eyeing the space between Emma and one corner of the pen. Emma scooted over some to make more room, and Rosita sat down beside her, their sides touching.

“I tell you because you are his favorite. I always can tell the favorites of him and my father….” She paused and spat as though admitting her kinship to Paco made her mouth taste foul. “There have been many favorites among the ‘product' for both of them. But for Senor Turner there have been none like you before. He looks at you in a way different than he has looked at any other woman or girl ever held here that my eyes have seen.”

“But why have you come to me?”

“Because he killed the crippled one. The one who was like me. And because he called her what he did. It fires a fury in my heart—‘twist-foot hen.' Damn him! May the mighty God damn his soul to the eternal flame!”

“Even so, why have you—”

“I have come to set you free,” Rosita said in the faintest
of whispers. “Because if you are free he is deprived and made sad. He does not deserve to be happy. If I take you from him, his happiness is gone. And…” She paused and looked earnestly at Emma. “…and you can take me away from here, hide me, and help me escape them. I hate them, hate them both…what they do, what they say, what they are. I hate my father, but Senor Turner, Diablo Turner, him I hate most. He is the one who led my father into such dark ways.”

This was all stunning and fully unexpected, despite whatever prayers she had prayed for rescue. Emma could hardly find her voice, but did. “Yes, Rosita. We will both get away from them and this place. First you must cut the cords on my hands and feet. There is a knife beside me that I have been unable to reach.”

Rosita quickly found and picked up the knife. “This is the blade of the diablo,” she said, astounded. “How do you possess it? He is never without it.”

“I was able to knock it free of its sheath when he was in here. I pretended to want him to come to me, and when he reached me I was able somehow to free the knife. I hid it beneath my dress but was not able to reach it with my hand, because of my cords. But you are here now, and you can use it.”

Rosita was deft and fast, and within a minute Emma's bonds were severed. She had hardly realized how tightly she had been tied until the pressure of the cords was released. The relief was sufficient to bring tears to Emma's eyes.

“Bless you, Rosita…. God bless you! Now we will leave this devil's ground behind us, together.”

“Adios, Diablo! Adios,
mi padre
!” Rosita whispered.

“Yes,” Emma said, nodding and smiling at the teary-eyed girl. “Let's go, Rosita.”

T
he human devil named Turner was ruthless and without morals, but not without sense. He'd been at his trade long enough to know that such activity could not forever be kept hidden, particularly in a place where every piece of land was destined to be scoured over by gold hunters somewhere along the way. The ruse of also using the pens to hold bears trapped for the violent bull and bear fights that were common entertainment in the mining camps had proven, so far, a successful one. Profitable, too, though at a lesser level than the trade in women.

All past success in covering up the truth aside, Turner was aware of the recent increase of rumors regarding the use of the site as a way station in human trafficking. The secret could not be kept much longer. He thought it likely that the women held here now would be the last at this particular station.

No matter, really. There were other such stations across the frontier and even in the big cities back East. Some were remote clusters of cabins and pens like this one; others were underground in the literal sense, built in caves and tunnels and the like. Turner knew of one station in Kansas that was located beneath an esoteric, purportedly “religious” community that excluded outsiders
and was known for its eighteenth-century style of life and the habit of its members of excavating huge cellars beneath their homes, churches, and even barns.

The real purpose of those cellars was known only to a few, and even in a case or two where word had gotten out where it should not have, the damage had been controlled by the network of traffickers of which Turner was but one part. Turner knew that at least two county sheriffs in Kansas were possessors of “cellar maidens” provided to them in exchange for averted eyes and closed mouths. Turner knew this because at one time he'd been a part of the “religious” community with the prison cellars for unwilling females destined for hard lives and harder deaths as the chattel of rich and depraved men. Turner sometimes referred to his time in that strange little Kansas community as his “religious days.”

Turner had moved on to his “business days” by now, and as a man of business, he attended his share of meetings. One such was to happen this day, in an empty cabin near an already played-out parcel of mining claims that had been abandoned to the Mexicans, who in turn had abandoned them to the Chinese. Turner was to meet with a certain Chinese gentleman who had hinted he could provide Turner with some of the finest “Celestial” maidens to be found outside the old nation itself. If all went well, Turner and his network of fellow traffickers would be able to offer up a new and profitable line of “product” to those around the world with a taste for the Orient.

Turner trudged through the little basin with its smattering of log pens, halfheartedly casting his eyes about for his lost knife as he went. He'd stopped expecting to find it; probably it was simply hidden beneath brush, leaves, and the like after an accidental loss, but it wasn't worth the effort to turn over every bit of rubbish in this camp to find one knife. He could tell by glancing through the unchinked pen walls that all the women were still in place…all but one, that is. The crippled girl he'd beaten to death earlier obviously was no longer part of the count. He grimaced as he thought of her, not because of
regret, but because faulty “product” always set his teeth on edge. Not much chance for profit in cripples, blinders, deaf-mutes, and the like. The demand for such was simply not strong enough to make it worthwhile to waste time and pen space with them. Good riddance as far as Turner was concerned.

Thinking of the gimp-footed girl whose life he'd ended caused him to think of the polar opposite of flawed “product,” the lovely Emma Wickham. He was still debating inwardly about whether to go ahead and send her on through the trafficking pipeline or keep her as his own personal trophy and toy. The latter option had its appeal but would present challenges, too. He would have to guard her, protect her, keep her hidden…almost impossible for a man in his position to do. Any of the other captives he would be ready to abandon at any time, if flight was necessary, but Emma would be in a different category. Still a captive she would be, but no longer “product.” She would be
his
captive,
his
possession.