Shadow Riders, The Southern Plains Uprising, 1873 (24 page)

She stared down at her slim hands she was kneading in her lap. “There have been some. But Rebecca helps me send them away.”

“Why, none of them good enough for you?”

The way her eyes shot up and held his made him realize he had made a mistake in this crude attempt to prod her sense of humor. Instead, his thoughtless question had pricked her stiff-backed pride. Those eyes that looked back at him betrayed a deeply wounded and vulnerable woman hiding behind them at that moment.

“I so want to find a man who … who doesn't have dirt under his fingernails, Seamus. A man who doesn't have to grub in this soil or raise cattle for his livelihood. But that's the only kind of man that's here.” She ground a handful of her cotton skirt between her palms. “How I wish I could go east—to a …
city.”

He heard the magic inflection put on that last word. “You've never been to a big city?”

She turned to him in a rush and rustle of petticoats. “I'll bet you've been—I mean, coming from Ireland, you had to. Tell me about them, Seamus. Tell me about the cities back east. What the people wear and what they eat. How they ride around on the paved streets in their fine carriages … going off to plays and operas every night after dining on oysters and fish from the great oceans, even fish eggs.”

“Seems you know quite a lot about cities back east for so young a woman.”

Samantha Pike stared at the dark, north Texas sky for a long time before she answered. “I can imagine. That's all,” she finally said. “I hear something now and then about the busy, glorious life of folks on the East Coast. Never have I heard much about California.”

“What I saw of it wasn't all that different than Denver City.”

“So you've been to California too?” she asked like a wistful child, her face flush with excitement in the starshine.

“Yes—”

“San Francisco?”

He wagged his head. “Never made it that far.
*
Not to the ocean.”

“Oh,” she sighed. “You are so lucky—able to travel at your own whim. Where and when you want to go. A man can do … well, a woman just can't do that.”

“Saints preserve, Samantha—this is still a dangerous land for anyone. Especially a woman.”

“That's why I want so to go back east.”

“Truth be, the city streets are as unsafe as that open prairie out there.” He used the stem of his pipe to jab home his point. “And at least on that prairie you have a chance of hiding from the hostiles. In the cities, like Boston—you can't hide from the thieves and … the sort who would do a woman harm.”

“I can't believe you about that,” she replied, instantly haughty.

It struck him as strange, that she would change from woman to woman to woman in a matter of a few minutes before his eyes. Here so harshly defiant when moments ago she was a child filled with wonder, then a vulnerable young woman.

“Better that I don't tell you what I think of those cities back east then,” he replied, staring off into the night sky, refusing to look at the deadly mix of deep beauty and haughty fire that lit her eyes.

He listened to her sigh near him, a rustle of layers of cloth as she stood. When Seamus gazed up, Samantha was leaning back against a porch post, her hands behind her, staring longingly off into the distance.

“Will you tell me some more of your poetry, Seamus?”

“I'm not sure what I know is the kind of thing—”

“Do you know any love poetry, Seamus?” she interrupted him in a gush, swirling back down to settle beside him like a fluffy bird come to roost, bringing with her the heady rush of clean linen and lye soap, as much a perfume as any woman had used to overpower him.

He swallowed deeply, glancing only briefly at the heavy rise and fall of her breasts beneath the tight blouse. “Yes … I know—”

“Say it for me, please!” she begged, then did something surprising to them both in reaching without thought and took one of his hands in hers. “Please.”

In wide-eyed wonder he gazed down at her hands clutching his. Only then did she realize what she had done and quickly withdrew them.

“I got … a little, eager. I'm sorry.”

He smiled then, surprised himself as he reached out and caressed the back of her hand with his fingertips and said, “I liked it, Samantha. Liked your touch a lot.”

Staring at the big moon fully risen over the treetops, Seamus began his favorite James Clarence Mangan poem, an Irishman who lived the first half of this, the nineteenth century.

“This one's called: ‘The Nameless One.'

Roll forth my son, like the rushing rive,

That sweeps along to the mighty sea;

God will inspire me while I deliver

My soul of thee!

Tell thou the world when my bones lie whitening

Amid the last homes of youth and eld,

That there was once one who veins ran lightening

No eye beheld.

Tell how his boyhood was one drear night-hour,

How shone for him, through his griefs and glooms,

No star of all heaven sends to light our

Path to the tomb.

Roll on, my song, and to after ages

Tell how, disdaining all earth can give,

He would have taught men, from wisdom's pages,

The way to live.

And tell how trampled, derided, hated,

And worn by weakness, disease, and wrong,

He fled for shelter to God, who mated

His soul with song—

Tell how this Nameless, condemned for years long

To herd with demons from hell beneath,

Saw things that made him, with groans and tears, long

For even death.

Go on to tell how, with genius wasted,

Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love,

With spirit shipwrecked, and young hopes blasted,

He still, still strove.

Him grant a grave to, ye pitying noble,

Deep in your bosoms! There let him dwell!

He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble,

Here, and in hell.”

For long moments after he finished, she said nothing to disturb the heavy silence between them. Seamus finally turned to look at her and found her pretty, full mouth open in amazement. She blinked a few times, as if coming to after a lapse of consciousness.

“I never … never would have expected you to know such beautiful, powerful words. Words I'm sure you meant to stir my soul, Seamus.”

He felt uncomfortable at her praise, at her sudden declaration. “It is just a poem I like, and memorized many years ago to help fill some of the pain of my own—”

Seamus didn't finish. He could not, finding her suddenly at him—her soft, wet lips crushing his, her hands and arms encircling him savagely, pulling him against her.

When she withdrew slightly, Samantha was gasping as if starved for air.

“I've always wanted to do that to a man,” she announced. “To do that when I wanted to be kissed—not having to wait for a man to figure I need a kiss. I grew so tired of waiting for you to kiss me, Seamus.”

He ran the tip of his tongue across his lips, tasting her again before he said, “If I had known it would be so … such a treat—I would have done it long ago, Samantha.”

“Then—we're both happy,” she said, suddenly pressing herself into him again with a second embrace and a much longer, lingering kiss.

When she pulled away this time, Seamus was no longer suffering merely surprise, but intense arousal. The scent of her, the taste of her, the warmth of her full lower lip, which seemed to dominate the way she opened her warm, fleshy mouth to him. And the press of the firm, fleshy mounds against him. He glanced at them, almost unable to take his eyes off the way her chest heaved, rising and falling.

“You … you want to touch them—don't you, Seamus?” she asked in that haughty, husky voice of hers.

Her frankness startled him. Then his eyes found hers, and he realized she did not really know what she was asking of him, what she would be demanding of them both.

“As much as I would—I better not. Sharp's a friend and—”

“He's only my brother-in-law and has nothing to do with this,” she replied, flicking only a cautionary glance at the cabin window. “They've likely all gone to bed,” and she reached up to slip free the top button at her neck. A second came free as he watched her fingers at work, becoming aroused with the slow, sensuous movement of them on the bone buttons.

“We—we better not.” He swallowed hard.

“Yes—take me, Seamus. I've yearned for a man to be my first. Not a dirt-grubbing farmer. Not a crude, smelly buffalo hunter. But a man like you—one who would take my flesh this very first time—making us both crazy with desire.”

She pressed boldly into him again, there on Sharp Grover's porch beneath the Texas moonlight, kissing him fiercely, her breathing become shallow and rapid. His own grew difficult to catch with the sudden rise of heat from the core of him. Blood rushed, pounding at his ears when she took one of his hands and guided it inside her blouse.

As she let her head slip back, eyes half closed, Samantha Pike moaned low in her throat.

For Seamus it had been so, so long.

And he had never been more hungry.

Chapter 18

Moon of Leaves Falling, 1873

It had been a little more than a year since he and Big Tree had been taken north to Dall-ass and from there to stage and smoking horse and on to the white man's city in the east where they spent three happy days among their friends.

And now Satanta and Big Tree were again being told to lay down their shovels and drag their heavy chains across the broken ground, trudging down off the roadbed that would one day soon carry the white man's belching black monster of a train. The guards watched the Kiowa chiefs warily as the pair climbed slowly over the rear gate of an open wagon and squatted uncomfortably only a heartbeat before an impatient prison guard slapped his reins down on the rumps of two mules and the wagon lurched away into the unknown.

His chains rattled as the iron-mounted tires and springless wagon trembled over the rough ground. Three armed guards on horseback inched up on each side of the wagon, staying far enough away so they rode out of the dust kicked up by the wheels spinning the fine gold into the mid-morning sunshine this autumn. Down the ruts of the construction road, between the stands of frost-kissed trees, dressed in new colors for this brief dance of suspense before the coming of winter to the southern plains.

It was not long when he heard the driver calling out to the mules. Satanta turned laboriously in his shackles to look up the construction road at the intersection it made with another. There, sat an army ambulance and at least fifteen soldiers in dark blue tunics, rifles across their thighs or standing vertically plugged on a hip.

In a fevered rush of motion, the chiefs were pulled down from the wagon and hurried over to the ambulance without explanation. Satanta and Big Tree did not say a word, exchanging only glances again that said while they hoped this might be another meeting with the chiefs about progress made on gaining their release, there might be another reason for this journey.

Satanta saw in the eyes of the younger war-chief a doubt more than a fear—something that tugged at the heart of Satanta.

Perhaps they would not come back here. Perhaps they would not see their friends. Perhaps this was the time the white man chose to hang them.

With a hollow thud the ambulance door slammed shut and a white man called out to the rest. The driver set his wagon in motion as the soldiers once more formed their two columns. As the ambulance came around, Satanta saw the prison guards peeling off, escorting the empty construction wagon back down the road. Heading south to where the white man laid the track for his smoking horse.

“Do we see our friends this time?” Big Tree whispered later, miles down the road.

With a wag of his head, Satanta admitted he did not know. “If we are going to die—the white man has played a cruel trick on us: forcing us to work so hard.”

“Yes,” Big Tree answered quietly, aware as well of the need for quiet, and not wanting his voice to carry. “A man is not meant to work like this—at least not a Kiowa. If the white man wishes to dig at the earth with his iron tools, let him. But a Kiowa man is meant for the hunt and the chase, and to sit in the shade and tell stories.”

“And dream of soft-skinned women,” Satanta added, smiling with the thought of warm flesh beneath him. It would be so good to have a single night with one of the women who awaited him all this time on the reservation.

Big Tree leaned back against the padded leather seat. “Yes. I have been dreaming much of women, Satanta. You have been thinking of your wife?”

He smiled. “Her—and others. Any woman, Big Tree. I am so hungry now … it could be any woman.”

“Even a white woman?” Big Tree asked, a crooked grin on his face.

“Yes, perhaps that would be better. Especially a white woman—now.”

They were quiet after that. Each man somehow deeply content in his own thoughts as the ambulance rumbled along, the hooves pounding the hardened road surface outside, the driver calling out to his four-horse team, and the escort commander calling out to his cavalry. Satanta did not recognize these white men, nor the symbol on their clothing. These riders were so different from the buffalo soldiers with dark skins and short, coarse hair who patrolled the Kiowa-Comanche reservation.

Late that afternoon, the pair arrived at the busy place the white man called Dall-ass. The chiefs were taken to the local jail, where they spent the night behind the iron bars of a second-story cell. Most of the evening a lot of noise drifted up from the street below, even while they ate and tried to sleep—once the sun no longer shined through the open, barred window.