Early Dawn (8 page)

Much to Eden’s regret, when they finally halted to make camp, they built only a meager fire, no doubt because they feared a posse might be close and see the flames. Eden prayed they were right in that assumption, for it might be her only hope. The train had been robbed west of Denver in the foothills, a good day from the city on horseback, and the gang had been heading north ever since at a breakneck pace, covering as much ground as possible. With every minute that passed, they were taking her farther and farther from home and family. By tomorrow at this time, she would be three days out from Denver and four from No Name, located thirty miles south of the larger town. Even if she managed to steal one of the horses and scatter the others, the men might catch up with her before she could reach safety.

Eden’s silk traveling costume offered little protection against the cold, and she soon felt as if she were freezing. When the man named Harold tossed her a piece of jerky and handed her a tin cup of brackish water, she briefly considered refusing the food and drink. Women in such situations often sought death. But Eden rejected the idea. Her circumstances weren’t that dire yet. Determined to sell her across the border for a tidy profit, Wallace had made it clear that no one was to lower her value by raping her. Though Eden wasn’t certain what “playing with her” entailed, she figured she could endure it until she got an opportunity to escape.

Shivering with cold while she ate her meager supper, she peered through the darkness at the horses tethered to a high line between two stunted oak trees. She’d learned to ride at an early age, and though she was a bit rusty from lack of practice, she still felt confident in her abilities as a horsewoman. Maybe after the men fell asleep, she could make a run for it. If she took one equine and scattered the others, her captors would be left afoot and unable to give chase. She sent up a silent prayer that no one would think to bind her hands and feet.

God had turned a deaf ear. Eden had no sooner sent up that heartfelt plea than the man named Pete advanced on her with two thongs. Though all the brothers resembled one another, Pete stood out in her mind because of the meanness that glinted in his marblelike gray eyes. He jerked her arms behind her back and tied her wrists so tightly that the leather dug into her flesh. Next, he lashed her ankles together.

“There’s no need to bind me,” Eden tried. “Where have I to flee?”

He ignored her question. Hunkered near the fire, Wallace called, “Bring her over here so we’ll have light. Won’t be no fun playin’ with her in the dark.”

Pete grasped Eden’s left arm and dragged her toward the flames. Unable to walk with her feet bound, she gasped at the pain that lanced through her twisted shoulder as he pulled her over the rough ground, but Pete didn’t seem to care. He dumped her beside Wallace and then squatted to stare at her. “She ain’t so purty after the whalin’ you gave her.”

Wallace’s swollen lips twisted in a leer. “Ain’t her face we wanna play with.”

With that, he grasped the front of Eden’s bodice and drew his knife. With three slashes at the cloth, he laid open her dress. Then he went to work on her camisole. He didn’t bother with the corset because it didn’t cover her breasts. Eden felt the night air nip at her bare skin. Humiliation coursed through her. She strained against the leather that bound her wrists behind her back, but Pete had tied her securely. She was helpless to defend herself.

“Well, now, what have we got here, little lady?” Wallace asked with an oily chuckle. “It’s been so long since I seen me any pink tits that I plumb forgot how purty they are.”

“I want to go first,” Pete wheedled.

“Go ahead. We got all night. All of us will get a turn. Just remember not to mark her up, and don’t lose your head and give her a poke. I got plans for the money Estacado will pay for her. He’ll take one look at that face and red hair and froth at the mouth like a rabid dog.”

Pete jerked Eden to a sitting position, tossed aside his filthy hat, and bent to take one of her nipples into his mouth. The shock of sensation made her body snap taut, but the leather at her wrists and ankles was so tight that she couldn’t struggle. A scream welled at the base of her throat. She swallowed it down. She would
not
allow these animals to reduce her to that. She felt a filthy hand groping under her skirts.
Oh, God, no, please, no
. But the hand shoved her knees slightly apart, despite her prayers.

In that moment, Eden came face-to-face with the horror of her situation. All her life, Ace had drummed into her head the phrase
mind over matter
, his theory being that a person could live through anything if he had enough strength of will and a plan for survival. “When life kicks you in the teeth, you hunker down and keep going, no matter what,” he’d often told her and his younger brothers. Eden had once seen David walk home from a riding accident with a broken leg. He’d found a tree limb to use as a crutch, and he’d inched his way back for help, every step so painful that he’d almost lost consciousness.
Mind over matter
. Another time, Ace had taken a bullet in the thigh, and her mother had dug it out of his flesh with the tip of a butcher knife. With no coin for whiskey to dull the pain, Ace had clenched his fists around the headboard of the bed and asked Eden to talk to him about pretty things while Dory fished for the slug. In a quavering voice, Eden had described a meadow in springtime, how the wildflowers nodded in the soft breeze, how sweet the air smelled from their blossoms. Though her other brothers had been ready to hold Ace down, it had never become necessary, because Ace had lain there, perfectly still of his own accord, sweat streaming from his twisted face, his glazed eyes focused on nothing while he withstood the agony.

Mind over matter
. Eden had grown up seeing others in her family set the example, and now it was her turn. She fixed her gaze on the flames and forced her thoughts to faraway places, picturing her mother, brothers, and that meadow she’d once described for Ace when he’d needed something pretty to think about.
Let these men do their worst
, she thought fiercely.
I’m Eden Paxton. I come from good stock. No one is going to make me whimper and beg, least of all miserable worms like these.

While they groped and fondled her body, Eden remembered her early days and happy moments on her family’s sorry excuse for a ranch on the outskirts of San Francisco—like the time she’d gotten sick as a very small child, and Ace had hired himself out to empty spittoons, his most despised way of earning money, to buy her a doll. And the time David had bargained at the dry-goods store, swapping his only belt to buy her pretty silk hair ribbons as a birthday gift. For months afterward, he’d used one of their mother’s sashes to hold his britches up. There’d been sad times, too, of course, like the time her little dog, Sam, had been run over by a farmer’s wagon and died in the road. Afterward, her brothers had dug a grave, and then they’d held a regular funeral complete with handpicked flowers—mostly dandelions—and hymns, sung in a pubescent blend of breaking voices and deep baritones that Eden would never forget. Dory had culminated the ceremony by reading from the good book. David had followed the readings by assuring Eden that it wasn’t only people who could lie down in still pastures. He had claimed Sam was welcome there, too, and that, after a good rest, he’d be hale and hearty again, racing across the meadows after sticks thrown for him by the angels. As Eden looked back, even the saddest moments in her life now seemed bittersweet because she’d always had her family to love her, hold her, and ease her pain.

The memories calmed her, creating a buffer between her and reality. She thought of Ace’s wife, Caitlin, whom Eden so closely resembled, and the couple’s boy, Little Ace, who’d been a plump darling with dancing brown eyes and a mischievous grin when Eden had visited No Name seven months ago. Soon, she would get to see her niece, Dory, Ace and Caitlin’s baby girl, and she’d also be able to visit at length with Joseph’s new wife, Rachel, a lovely blonde with beautiful blue eyes. When Eden’s thoughts turned to her younger brothers, David and Esa, who still weren’t married, she had difficulty focusing. So she jerked her mind back to Ace’s children again.

Eventually the torture stopped. The younger Sebastian brothers grew so intoxicated that they staggered away to their pallets, leaving Wallace to drag Eden over to a patch of cold earth beside his bedroll. Before falling asleep, he drew a noose over her head and knotted the loose end of the rope around his wrist.

“You move while I’m asleep, and I’ll wake up. You hear?”

Eden rolled onto her side with her back to him and brought her knees up to her bare breasts in a feeble attempt to stay warm. Wallace didn’t even give her a blanket. Eden could scarcely conceive how anyone could be so uncaring of another human being. But there it was. He’d cut away much of her clothing, and now he meant to cozy down for the night under two layers of wool while she lay exposed to the elements on damp ground.

As the chill of the night air seeped into her bones, Eden stared blankly across the clearing. The small fire had burned down to a mere glow of embers now, providing little light, and the waning moon was hidden behind a layer of clouds that promised more rain. For an instant, tears gathered at the backs of her eyes, but her determination to be strong burned them away. Yes, she had endured the unthinkable tonight, but crying wouldn’t undo it or make her feel better. She thought of the wildflowers she and her mother had seen from the train—delicate blossoms surviving in a harsh, unforgiving terrain. She needed to be like those wildflowers. So what if life had brought a storm that threatened to flatten her? Eventually the sun would shine again. She just had to survive until then.

In the meantime, rescue was on its way. She knew that as surely as she knew her own name. Ace had recently gotten a telephone. Their mother could call him as soon as she reached Denver. Eden’s brothers would waste no time in riding out to find her. God help the Sebastian brothers. Eden hadn’t been lying when she’d told them they would come to regret the day they’d been born. Before this was over, they would be the ones who sniveled and begged for mercy. Her brothers weren’t cruel men by nature, but if someone dared to harm one of their own, not even the wrath of hell would hold a candle to their anger.

That was Eden’s last thought as she slipped into a troubled, restless sleep.

For Eden, the next three days passed in a nightmarish blur of brushland. In times past she would have marveled over the way spring had touched the rolling landscape with such vivid color. In the rocky gulches, Apache plume shared space with chokeberry, both blooming in abundance. The white blossoms of the plumes salted the wispy backdrops of dusty pink, the rosy chokeberry bushes bending under the weight of conical clusters of petals, which drooped from the branches like fronds of snowy grapes. Along the streams, false indigo lay like a fluffy purple carpet beneath brilliant green caps of bushy foliage. Wild plum blossoms filled the air with fragrance as exquisite as any French perfume.

With her pelvis rocking against the saddle horn mile after bruising mile, Eden tried to block out the discomfort by imagining herself on a walk with her mother to collect flowers for Caitlin’s table, but exhaustion had her thoughts circling in on themselves in fits and starts. In some distant part of her mind, she recognized the beauty of her surroundings, but it was like the touch of a feather against one’s skin, a whisper of sensation that she
almost
felt but couldn’t stay focused on.

Every joint in her repeatedly abused body ached. The cold, rainy weather had given way to bright sun, and by the end of the second day her face, hands, and exposed breasts were badly sunburned. At night, the cold returned. After the first evening the men built no fire when they made camp, giving her cause to hope that a posse might be close on their heels, but the lack of heat also left her suffering more intensely from the relentless cold and biting wind when “playtime” finally ended. She was given no blanket. Her daily rations consisted of one tough piece of jerky and three cups of brackish water. Wanting to conserve her strength in case an opportunity arose for her to escape, she consumed every drop and morsel.

But a chance to escape never came. When the men rested the horses during the day, she was tossed to the ground, ordered not to move, and was watched very closely. Once, when she dared to join the horses at the creek to get a drink, she was beaten for her trouble. Each night when they stopped, Pete, the cruelest one, assumed the duty of binding her hands and feet. After he’d finished cinching the leather so tight that her fingers and toes started to throb, he helped set up camp for the night. Then he returned to drag her over to the others.

After the men bedeviled her and drank themselves stupid, Wallace, the keeper of Eden, Estacado’s prize, maintained the precautions he’d established the first night, tying the loose end of her noose around his wrist so he would feel the tug if she moved while he slept. She huddled on the ground, chilled to the bone and filled with despair. Though Wallace had thus far saved her from being raped, he didn’t hesitate to take his turn playing with her in the evening. To these men, she was nothing but an object to be sold or used. If anything happened to make them question her eventual worth, she knew she would be raped and then killed.

By the end of the fourth day, Eden felt hollowed out. She was so far from home now, at least five days of solid riding from Denver, plus another to reach No Name. Even worse, the Sebastians were going northwest now instead of doubling back for the border, as law enforcement would undoubtedly expect them to do. She felt so alone—cut off from all that was familiar.

Since early childhood, Eden had clung to the belief, under Ace’s tutelage, that nothing could ever take her to her knees. But neither she nor her brother could have foreseen her abduction by these monsters. Her fiery temper and feisty nature had deserted her. All her high-flown ideals about strength and perseverance had become as elusive as dandelion fluff dancing on the wind. Slowly but surely, her primary emotions became terror and a debilitating sense of defeat.