The Arrow Keeper’s Song (25 page)

“I never meant for things to turn out the way they did,” Tom said, staring at the bone-colored ground aglow in the moonlight.

“Yeah … well,” Willem said, “maybe it's just as well you did leave. Someone probably would have taken a shot at you by now. Hell, I figured Enos for taking the first crack.” Willem straightened and looked across the rump of the horse at Tom. “What happened between you two the other day?” Willem scratched his thick mop of red hair. “When I realized you were both gone, I figured only one of you'd be coming back.”

“We reached an understanding, at least for now.”

“Beats me how you did it,” Willem replied.

“Is that why you came along, to keep Enos out of trouble?”

“Something like that,” Willem replied, reining in his feelings of friendship for the man. Finally he kicked at a rock and continued. “Aw, hell, Tom. You sure screwed things up. How did you let Allyn Benedict turn you around like that? You couldn't see what he was up to?”

“All I saw was Emmiline Benedict.” Tom slapped the back of his neck as an insect tried to draw blood.

Willem nodded and sighed. “Seth managed to stake out the prettiest rangeland along Coyote Creek. That section you always talked about. Folks found it a mite queer how he managed to make out so good.”

“They won't have to think on it for long. He'll have probably traded it to the Tall Bulls for an extra bottle of whiskey,” Tom ruefully suggested.

“You never know. A man can change.” Willem walked around the horse and started back toward the wagon, then paused and added, “You did.” He reflected for a second. “And me. Funny thing. I never put much stock in all that talk of the Circle or the spirits and such. But lately … I don't know.” He ambled back the way he had come and rejoined the other men, who were already stretched out on their blankets. Conversation had died out as the day's effort took its toll. Up to now the patrol had been something of a lark. Suddenly, with their destination close at hand, the mood had become much more serious, as each man began to speculate on what tomorrow might bring.

Tom yawned and headed for his bedroll, then changed his mind and wandered off to the north overlook. Joanna heard him approach and greeted him with a tired but honest smile.

“You ought to be sleeping,” Tom said. “Sounds like we'll have a hard day tomorrow.”

“Spoken like a doctor.”

“Just some friendly advice.”

Joanna nodded. “You're right, of course. We'll have to push hard to reach Rosarita by nightfall.” She glanced toward the army mounts. Her own gelding was mountain reared and accustomed to the terrain. It was a compactly built, muscular creature, an ugly and cantankerous horse that had never let her down. The army mounts had been culled from the local ranches throughout the Southwest. They were plains animals, prairie stock. “How are your horses holding up?” she asked. “Will they do?”

“I can make them go,” Tom said with the air of an experienced ranch hand, “but I can't make them do.” He knelt and peered past the overhang into the valley a couple of thousand feet below, a place of stygian recesses and clearings the color of bleached bone. Tom glanced aside at the woman next to him, marveling at how unlike Emmiline Benedict she was. What a fool he had been to allow himself to fall under Emmiline's spell. Time and distance had left him wiser. Not that she was all artifice and pretense or delicate as a rosebud—indeed the Indian agent's daughter had known what she wanted and just how to get it. That was the measure of her strength. Joanna Cooper might not be as hands-down pretty, but she had one quality that outshone all of Emmiline's put together: She had honor.

“What are you thinking?” Joanna asked.

Tom, embarrassed, realized he had been staring at her. He coughed and cleared his throat. “I was thinking … how you remind me of a warrior woman. Among the Cheyenne there have been women who refused to remain in their lodges and wait for their husbands or lovers to return. They received visions calling them to ride into battle alongside the men. They are called warrior women.”

“What sort of visions?”

Tom shrugged. “I'm only recounting what my father told me when I was a child.”

“I'm intrigued. Have you ever had a vision?”

“No,” Tom replied after a momentary pause that gave away his lie. He could feel Joanna's eyes boring into him, her features moonlit and disturbingly attractive.

“
I
have,” she admitted. “I may not be an Indian, but it's true. Well, to be truthful, I didn't exactly see so much as hear it.” She told him of the drums she had heard on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, on the back lawn of her father's estate. Once begun, the words poured out of her as if the secret she had nursed for almost two years had suddenly burst through the dam of her self-imposed silence to come flooding forth. “I heard those same drums again in Daiquirí, that night you joined me on the beach and taught me the prayer song. I haven't forgotten.” Joanna closed her eyes and recited. “May the heart of the panther be in us. Our song rides upon the smoke of our fire.”

“You are a strange woman, Doctor Cooper.”

“Stranger than a man who calls himself a ghost?”

Tom had no answer. He merely nodded and rubbed his jaw and tried to think of a way to change the subject. Of course, Joanna wouldn't let him off the hook that easily. She tied her hair back with the leather string and then scrambled to her feet and fell in step alongside Sandcrane, who had begun to amble along the length of the overhang.

“What are you doing here in Cuba, Mr. Sandcrane?”

“You can call me Tom,” he said. “And I could ask the same thing of you.”

“Fair enough,” Joanna nodded. “Antonio Celestial managed to escape the island and come to the United States to buy guns and munitions and drum up support for the revolution. He visited the university and the medical school I was attending and made an appeal for medical help. I was moved by what he had to say.” Joanna's voice grew wistful as if remembering something pleasant, an innocent time before the ideals of a revolution had been replaced by the grim and bloody reality of the struggle she had witnessed. “Mother and father always expected me to quit school. They were certain I was just being headstrong and foolish. When I arrived for Christmas dinner as Doctor Joanna Cooper, my parents became more determined than ever to marry me off. They figured a husband would bring me to my senses.” She glanced aside and met his dark-eyed stare. “I just couldn't remain in New Orleans, even if it meant breaking my father's heart. So I followed Antonio Celestial to Cuba. I came here because I wanted my life to count for something, I wanted it to matter … to me if no one else!” Joanna became aware she had raised her voice. The woman sheepishly glanced toward the grove of trees. Fortunately, her energetic remarks had gone unnoticed by the others. “And now that I've bored you with my story, I'll listen to yours.”

Tom liked this woman. Indeed, who wouldn't find her attractive, bathed as she was in moonlight, a gentle breeze tugging at her auburn hair? But he had built a wall around his heart. Still, Joanna's story struck a familiar chord, for Tom also had rejected his father, turning his back on the Sacred Arrows and the traditions Seth Sandcrane embodied.

Joanna was waiting for a reply. Tom was stoic: “I'm here for the same reason as many of the others. It seemed like the thing to do at the time.” Walking together, they continued along a winding path that fell and rose with the convolutions of the ridge.

“No,” Joanna said, stopping in her tracks. The man inadvertently halted with her. “I think something brought you to Cuba. And not for some silly reason like you were just looking for a fight. I've looked into too many eyes this past year not to have learned something about the human spirit and the human heart.”

“Don't make so much of my motives, Doctor.”

“Don't make less of them, either.” She looked over her shoulder and discovered they had come quite some distance from the grove. She turned and found he was still watching her. A breeze stirred, and the branches of a nearby cedar trembled. The wind carried the scent of mahogany and cedar, of unwashed bodies and cooling horseflesh, and from the valley floor the faint, sweet aroma of flowering shrubs and ripened fruit. Between the man and woman the air was warm and still. Joanna could sense the change and, trying to swallow, found her throat dry as dust. “Maybe we had better start back,” she said thickly.

Suddenly Tom reached out, encircling her waist with one arm, and pulled her to him. He acted on pure instinct, before his own sense of caution could intrude and bring him to his senses, letting the moment escape. His mouth covered hers. He was strong and demanding, the need in him both urgent and desperate. Joanna did not resist as his lips crushed against her own. Time paused, and the moon in its course, the stirring cedars, the twinkling stars, the gossamer wisps of clouds, all paused … and then resumed. The world spun on, the moon, the stars, the scudding clouds. Joanna backed away from Tom and caught her breath.

“Why did you do that?”

“Because I wanted to,” he replied, his breath on her cheek. “Maybe because you wanted me to, you and your drums … and your visions.” Overwhelmed by his own boldness, the Cheyenne turned to leave, stumbled and cursed his own clumsiness, then continued back to the camp at a brisk pace. Joanna called to him but he never broke stride. This was madness. He had no business being alone with this woman. He ought to have known better.

Joanna quickened her pace but could not catch up to him. Tom preceded her into camp by a couple of minutes.
My God
, she thought,
I think he's afraid of me. Why?

The other four men were fast asleep. Even Philo Underhill's robust snoring failed to rouse the others from their rest, which was testimony to the day's efforts. Tom stretched out on his blankets, propped his head against his saddle, and attempted to clear his mind.

“Savaa-he,”
Tom muttered in Cheyenne.
What was the use?
He turned on his side, pulled his blanket up, and peered surreptitiously at the woman as she climbed into the wagon and lay down on her bedroll. Joanna's head appeared above the siding for a moment, her chin resting on her folded arms as she studied him for a moment or two before quietly sinking out of sight. Tom breathed a sigh of relief as he settled down for the night. Gradually, his limbs went limp, his muscles relaxed. But his mind, beset with questions for which he had no answers, continued to race. And when at last rest came, he dreamed of mountains and moonlight, of flame and Sacred Arrow, of prayer smoke and thunder, of a woman with blurred features and a warrior whose identity was hidden behind a garish mask of war paint.

Dreams and nothing more. Mere images, harmless, signifying nothing. Those were his thoughts when Tom woke the next morning. Disbelief was the security he clung to, the rationale for his troubled heart. It took a few moments to realize something was amiss. Glancing down, he found Seth's medicine pipe cradled in the palm of his hand, the buckskin pouch in his lap, his saddlebags open beside his bedroll. Startled, he checked the other slumbering forms as if searching out the culprit who had approached him while he slept.

No. This is my own doing
.

He stared at the pipe and gingerly felt the bowl. It was still warm. Goose bumps formed on his arms and tingled the back of his neck. How? Had he walked in a dream? But that was madness. Surely such things could not be, such happenings were merely tales told by the elders, conjured for their own sake, to add to their stature and nothing more. He had tried to believe none of it.

Until now.

The Cheyenne tapped the bowl against his hand, and ashes spilled into his open palm. Tom Sandcrane shivered, despite the warm breeze, and his blood ran cold as the first faint blush of morning tinged the horizon and darkness receded from the mountains.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A
LONG A SEEMINGLY ENDLESS LABYRINTH OF SUN-WASHED
hills and broken ridges, a woman and five men came riding—watchful, alert, hemmed in by the unnatural stillness of the Sierra Maestra and sensing danger the further they progressed. A few hours earlier, while descending the ridge, they had nearly lost the wagon and its driver as the hillside path gave way beneath the iron-rimmed wheels. By noon the patrol had entered a series of narrow valleys strung together like emeralds on a lady's wrist. For several long hours they rode in the shade of trees whose trunks were banded with termite nests. Joanna recounted how the local farmers around Santiago used the chalky gray mounds for chicken feed, hacking a portion of the colony from the tree trunk and tossing it to the hens, who gathered at once to dine on the plump insects, scurrying about in a frenzy.

Where are the farms, where are the Cuban people?
the men of the patrol wondered, unnerved by the solitude they had endured for most of the day. First the deserted shore village of Daiquirí, and now this. Joanna explained to her companions that only a relatively small number of Cubans had ever chosen these lonely hills for their home. Unlike the rich central farmlands west of Santiago, the rocky soil of this rugged range wasn't meant for the plow.

But even those few hardy souls drawn to the mountain places had now fled to other parts of the island. They were unwilling to be mistaken for rebels. Joanna graphically related an incident she had personally witnessed. An innocent goat-herd unable to adequately prove his innocence had been summarily hanged by a Spanish patrol who made a habit of considering everyone in these hills an enemy.

“Rebels, then, what of them?” asked Willem, mopping his forehead on the sleeve of his shirt as he studied the brilliant yellow orb dominating the western sky.

“Killed,” Joanna said, “or gone to protect their families in Santiago or merely awaiting the arrival of the Americans. When the battle starts, the Cubans want to be in on the fighting. The Spanish army has much to answer for.” She paused to gulp her fill of water from her canteen, and some trickled down the front of her shirt, plastering the material to her bosom. The men tried not to look too interested.