Dust Devil (19 page)

Rapidly she folded it and tucked it under her arm. It would never go beneath Lario’s saddle. She would have to destroy it. Her feet slowed as she made her way from the ramada back toward her hogan. She could hear Lario’s hammer ringing against his anvil.

As she topped the slight rise, she saw him working just outside their hogan. He was clad only in the Indian breech-cloth, and the sun glistened off the sheen of perspiration that coated his coppery skin. As always now, when she would see him after an absence of a few hours, excitement bubbled up deep within her like a creek from under desert sands.

She knew that w
ithout looking, the Indian in was nonetheless aware she was there watching him. He put away his hammer and crossed to her. He ignored the blanket rolled under her arm. "You are the
bik'e hojoni
, Turquoise Woman,” he said quietly. "The Trail of Beauty.”

The tension and frustration eased from
her, and her hand came up to caress his strong jaw only to drop in case strange eyes watched. As if by mutual agreement they began walking toward their hogan together. Their conversation seemed banal enough. "Where is Sin-they?” he asked casually even as his black eyes boldly made love to her breasts.

"With your sister’s child,”
she replied, blushing still after more than a year of living with this remarkable man. "You know how much Stephanie adores Lucero. She follows the four-year-old everywhere.”

At the doorway
he took the blanket from her and held it up, and Rosemary cringed, shutting her eyes. "The skill is something that must be mastered with much work, as a mustang must be mastered,” he said softly. "But you have an eye for design and color. One day your blankets will bring much wampum.”

Rosemary looked up at
him through narrowed lids, but he was not mocking her. She saw only love for her in his serious expression. Then his maddeningly sensuous lips curved slightly. "1 can think of good use to put to this blanket.”

She
grinned. "But ’tis only the middle of the day!” she said with pretended shock. Nevertheless she took the hand he held out to her and let him pull her inside the cool dark shelter into the welcome security of his embrace.

* * * * *

September brought news to the steadily growing, peaceful rancheria — the War Between the States was over, had been over in fact almost five months. At every station the telegraph wires linked, there had been celebration. Except when the news was relayed to Lario Santiago.

During the night the news of the War’s end had come, Rosemary turned over on the blanket several times only to find that
he had left their bed and not yet returned. At last she could pretend no longer to be the dutiful Navajo wife. Rather than wait passively for her man’s return, she rose, checking first to see if Stephanie slept, and went in search of him. She knew many things weighed heavily on his heart, the largest, most difficult burden being the defection of Hasteen shortly after Guayo had taken Adala for his wife.

Rosemary had hoped that the happiness obvious in the faces of the youngest brother and Adala and the fact they expected a child in the spring would ease Lario’s despondency over Hasteen’s disappearance. She even blamed herself for the friction which had erup
ted between the two older brothers. She should have told Hasteen at once she could never be his wife rather than allow him hope.

The air was warmly spiced with the scent of the creosote bush and the late-night dampness, and the crystal-clear sky seemed to snap and crackle with a thousand stars as
she made her way down toward the arroyo, the only place she knew to look for Lario. In the darkness her moccasined feet lightly sought the sure footholds of the shale-covered slope. Except for the heavy blanket which lent a peculiar stiffness to her slender body, she moved as quietly and surely upon the rocks as a mountain goat.

Still
he was aware of her coming. "You would never surprise a deer,” he said.

She spun to her left, her eyes searching among the overgrowth of the cedarbrake. She heard the smile in his voice and could well imagine his laughing eyes. Then he stepped out of the shadows of a boulder, and she ran to him.

"Don’t leave me alone like that, Lario. If you must leave, wake me and tell me. I no longer have family or friends. I have no one but you and Stephanie.”

He tilted her chin up. "You know I cannot always be with you, that I will not always be with you.”

She wanted to cry out, "No!” But she only nodded her head, whispering, "I know.”

It was the fatalist in him. He knew the path he had chosen and where it would probably lead, and they both knew he
would not desert the path. And she knew her love for him would not be as great were he to be any other way. She would accept the joy she was given for the moment. Later . . . later when the will of Lario’s gods was carried out . . . then she would begin the task of living without him.

Together they sank to sit on the pebbly bank,
her back against Lario’s chest, his arms about her. "You worry about the news today?”

"With the war over, the Star Chief
— General Carleton — will have more men available to hunt us down . . . more soldiers than stars in the sky.”

It was something that
she could not understand — the two-faced policy of the United States government, protecting the Indians through the civilian Department of Interior and exterminating them through their military Department of War. She longed to be able to offer a solution — and there was none; to say that everything would work out all right — when they both knew it probably would not.

She turned her head so she could look up into his dark face. "The
gahan
have given us these moments, Lario. Let us not spoil the gift by demanding more.”

She saw the gentle curve of the lips she loved so much. "
Lih
,” he said softly, using the Navajo endearment, “you are my life. You are a survivor. You are much more accepting than I. You should have been born an Indian.”

She
turned, nestling in the crook of his arm, and pressed her head against his chest. The steady beat of his heart was reassuring. She reached up and touched his face, wanting to remember its line and texture if the day came when . . .

And she did not let herself think beyond that or the gentle kiss that
he pressed upon her each of her eyelids. "Boy Chasing His Arrow has moved far across the sky,” he said. "We should return.”

But neither made a move to leave. Lario pulled
her against him, his body and spirit seeking hers. And she gave him of herself, taking him into her, clutching him to her as she gave him the release he sought. She wanted to keep him with her, to be filled with him.

The second time, as his hands slowly stroked and caressed each part of her and his lips tasted of the warm nectar of her loins, loving her with a passion she had never experienced
— this was his gift to her.

* * * * *

The attack, when it came three months later in the semidarkness of an early January dawn in 1866, was so unexpected, so swift, that the ninety-five unarmed women, children, and old men asleep in their hogans had little chance to escape the slaughter that followed.

Rosemary, whose hogan was away from the others, almost out of sight of the rancheria, was awakened from an already troubled sleep by the heartrending screams. Her first incoherent thought was the men were returning from their hunting expedition, for with the winter the antelope and deer had migrated further south again.

By the time she reached the hogan’s doorway, soldiers swarmed over the rancheria like ravaging locusts. They were all black men, the first Rosemary had ever seen, from the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry Regiments. These Buffalo Soldiers, as the Plains Indians called them, used their rifles and pistols on the women and children who tried to flee into the surrounding mountains. The camp became a shambles. Wounded children cried for mercy, and Rosemary, paralyzed by horror, watched as one soldier with black woolly hair swung a rifle butt against Lucero’s head. A spray of blood blanketed her world.   Where was Toysei, she wondered wildly, and Adala and War Blanket? Within mere seconds the ground was strewn with Navajo dead. Crimson decorated the snow-covered ground.

Intruding into the scene of horror rode Hasteen, and
she knew at once how the Buffalo Soldiers had found their camp. Even as she whirled to gather up a crying Stephanie, Hasteen charged his horse toward her hogan. Half-sliding, half-slipping, Rosemary fled down the slope of the arroyo with Stephanie in tow. On the stream’s other side was a crevice in the canyon wall that opened into a narrow passageway. If she could make it there before Hasteen, there was a chance.

The water was shockingly cold when she and Stephanie plunged into the stream and waded across. As she pushed her way through the greenbriar that patched the far bank, she heard the scraping of horse hooves descending like a rolling boulder down the slope and into the stream. Then she felt the pain as her hair was jerked suddenly from behind.

"Run, Stephanie!” she yelled and tried to twist loose from Hasteen’s grip. His horse lost its footing on the slippery shale, and Hasteen fell upon her, knocking the breath from her lungs.

"Murderer!” she shouted when she broke free, gasping. Then she glimpsed the pain that stamped his face and knew in that instant he had not expected the carnage to accompany his betrayal.

She turned and scrambled upward, but he grabbed at her legs, and she slid back down. Sharp rocks gridded her thighs. At the same instant she kicked out at him, Hasteen went rigid. He pitched forward, not crumpling but falling like a toppling statue. At the far side of the bank a bewhiskered soldier quickly reloaded his Springfield, and she realized the man had not recognized Hasteen as their informer.

She struggled out from under his body and threw herself into the greenbriar-covered crevice as the rifle cracked. The bullet impacted with rock just beyond and above her head. An arm’s distance away Stephanie sat whimpering, her forefinger jammed in her mouth.

"For God’s sake, hush, pet!” Rosemary begged. But the din of massacring drowned out the child’s hiccoughs of tears.

Little by little
she edged forward on her elbows until she was next to Stephanie. "We’re going to race, all right? When I tell you to go, you must run as fast as you can.”

The two raced down the narrow corridor of redstone. Rosemary, hearing the laughter of her daughter, thought how macabre and ironical it sounded as it mingled with the screams and gunfire behind them.

CHAPTER
21

For three days Rosemary and Stephanie existed on pinon nuts and juniper berries. Exhaustion showed in Rosemary’s face, the hollow cheeks and the shadows beneath the eyes. She slept in snatches, awakening at the rustle of leaves or the snap of twigs. She couldn’t stop shivering, weather from the bone-slicing cold or the relentless images of carnage she wasn’t sure which.  Maybe both.  Sometimes a tree popped with the cold, cracking like a rifle shot. Immediately she would gather Stephanie’s little body close to her for reassurance.

Where was Lario? And the fear that haunted her returned —
dead!

She kept moving, confining her steps to the rocks and
icy streams by instinct. She was a hunted animal with no thought to the future. Only the survival of the moment. And that looked doubtful to her as she watched the tiny snowflakes begin to fall again the afternoon of the third day. The sawtoothed peaks of the Chuska Mountains nearly blocked off the gray shafts of the winter sun, her and Stephanie to huddle in chilling shadows of approaching night.

Wedged between a boulder and a trachyte-porphyry ridge and banked by rabbit brush
she and Stephanie were partially protected from the fierce winds that drove down the canyon that night. But it did not stop the icy moisture that numbed her hands and feet. She stretched out her hands for Stephanie and looked in horror at the blue that colored them. Next black and then frostbite, she thought.

Her hands felt alien as she gathered Stephanie against her to conserve their body heat and tried to rub her daughter’s tiny
feet and hands, which fortunately still had some color in them. Rosemary’s movements decelerated as she grew sleepier with each passing moment.

I must not sleep!

"Stephanie! Stephanie!” She shook her daughter. "Wake up!” The child’s heavy lids lifted and then closed, and Rosemary shook her again. "I have a story to tell you —a bout the Gate of the Clashing Rocks and the Slayer of Enemy Gods.”

Once more the little girl’s eyelids fluttered open. Rosemary began the Indian tale of how the bear, Usen, had been the ruler of all the earth he walked, but soon she heard her voice slur. Stephanie was curled up against her, asleep. What is the use? Perhaps ’tis easier this way than what we face if we are caught.

She let her eyelids fall. Curiously, the cold no longer bothered her.

* * * * *

Heat. The heat stung. Rosemary opened her eyes. She was still alive! The falling snow almost obliterated the patches of sky visible through the brush above her. Slowly she turned her head. She was lying in a lean-to, hastily erected, from what her recent experience could discern. Nearby a fire burned. A small smile touched her lips. Pinon —t he Indian panacea. The resinous wood would bum in the wettest weather.