The Endless Sky (Cheyenne Series) (16 page)

      
She watched him turn his back stiffly and stare out the window at the undulating gold of fall grass billowing in the relentless wind. Swallowing the lump in her throat, she fought down panic. Back to that cold lonely house with Josiah who was gone even more than Hugh.
At least my husband loves me.
Somehow the thought rang hollow in her heart. She pushed aside the feeling and touched his shoulder. “No, Hugh. I don't want to leave you. I—I shall try harder to do as you wish.”

      
He gave her that same boyish smile he had the first night they'd met when he defended her honor so vehemently. She flew into his arms with a sob.

      
In the months that followed, the rigors of military life had not lessened. They were “ranked out” of their quarters when a superior officer arrived at the post and chose their home, forcing them to move to a less desirable location. Hugh seethed with resentment, but Stephanie took it in stride, learning military protocol, enduring outposts in Texas and Kansas. Finally they ended up at Fort Fetterman on the sagebrush-covered High Plains of Wyoming.

      
Hugh's restiveness grew with every passing month. Minor skirmishes with hostile Indians did not bring his dearly desired promotion. He had barely made first lieutenant after five years in the army, a fact he increasingly bemoaned especially the night he received word he had been passed over for a captaincy.

      
“I graduated from the Point in '68, Stephanie. Five years, five miserable years—do you realize during the war men rose from second lieutenant to full colonel in half that time?” Hugh sat at the kitchen table clutching a glass of whiskey in his hand. The bottle in front of him was well on to half-empty.

      
Stephanie had come home from nursing one of Mrs. Turner's sons through a bad case of croup. She was cold, hungry and exhausted from the ride across the river where the rancher's home was located. “You'll get the promotion, Hugh,” she temporized, “just not as quickly as you'd hoped. This is peacetime.”

      
“Peace, ha!” he snorted, draining his glass. “I was promised there’d be a damned Indian war out here. If only those fools in Washington would stop vacillating and turn Sheridan loose, by God, I'd make captain in a trice!” With that pronouncement, he looked at his wife, who stood by the kitchen stove, warming her hands.

      
He scooted his chair back, irritated with the way she held her distance when he drank, letting him rave as if he were a child on a tantrum. In fact, it seemed to Hugh that his cool Boston lady held herself aloofly superior to him altogether too often here lately. “I've been neglecting my little wife, haven't I?” he said, nuzzling her neck as he pulled the heavy pins from her hair with clumsy, drunken fingers.

      
Stephanie felt the sting on her scalp as he tore loose her chignon. “I feel a bit weary tonight, Hugh,” she murmured softly, hating the sour smell of whiskey on his breath.

      
He laughed mirthlessly. “Weary now, is it? You always have some excuse. How do you ever expect to have those babies you want if you're ‘too weary’ to do your wifely duty?”

      
Guilt overwhelmed her. From the first she had disliked what they did in bed, the perfunctory swift and silent way he took her, only to roll over after to snore softly while she stared off into the darkness and thought of Chase. Was that why God had not seen fit to bless her with a quickening? Was barrenness her punishment for the secret adultery in her heart?

      
She turned in his arms and let him pick her up to carry her to the bedroom…

* * * *

      
When the word arrived on the army grapevine that the “boy general,” Custer, had been commissioned by Sheridan to gather the scattered forces of the Seventh Cavalry and head for Dakota Territory, Hugh at once petitioned to join his old idol. He was jubilant when the transfer came through. Stephanie once again packed up what they could effectively transport and sold off the carefully acquired excess in household furnishings—for the fourth time in less than two years.

      
Because Fort Abraham Lincoln had been an infantry post before the arrival of the Seventh, it had no stables for the horses. When barracks were converted to that end, the shortage of housing on the upper end of the scale resulted in no remaining facilities adequate for the officers' ladies. Libbie Custer and several other wives in the Custer entourage, dubbed “the royal family” by those on the outside, decided to return East for the duration of the summer campaigns across Western Dakota Territory into Montana. Stephanie and a number of the other wives elected to remain in nearby Bismarck, the railhead from which the Northern Pacific's crews surveyed westward.

      
Now that Hugh had been reunited with his blond commander, Stephanie hoped his brooding silences and heavy drinking would abate, but they did not. She hated being cooped up in another hotel room in the rough frontier railhead after growing accustomed to the freedom of riding her own horse at their previous posts. The long separations from her husband she had grown used to. Indeed, at times she felt a small guilty relief when he was sent on an assignment, freeing her from his moods and demands. But then the hollow emptiness of her lonely existence returned to haunt her.

      
Hugh was expected to return to Bismarck within the week, according to the last brief letter he had sent to her. She was tired of spending her days at endless teas, piano recitals and dinner parties, but there was no alternative in Bismarck. Even if there had been, she knew what an ugly scene Hugh would create if he found her helping her striker in the kitchen or volunteering to nurse sick soldiers at an infirmary.

      
Mrs. Harris, the captain's wife, drove her home from a luncheon late one afternoon. As the small rig made slow headway through the muddy streets, Thelma Harris said, “I'm certain you'll be relieved to see your husband safely returned from the wilderness. One never knows what might happen with those bloodthirsty savages on the rampage.”

She shuddered and her gelatinously plump cheeks shook rather like a bulldog's jowls.

      
“Have you had much experience with the Indians? I must confess we've been posted West for nearly two years and I've yet to see any savages, only a few rather pitiful creatures who lived around the small posts where Hugh was stationed. He never even allowed me near his Arikira scouts.”

      
“I should hope not!” Thelma exclaimed. “They're all dirty and disgusting, even the tame ones. It will be a blessing when the army has them all secured on reservations in the Indian Territory down south. Then decent people can civilize this heathen land.”

      
A sad smile tinged Stephanie's lips. “That's my father's opinion, too.”

      
“Well certainly it's yours as well,” Thelma said with a hint of a question in her voice.

      
“I'm not so sure we have the right to take all the good land away from people who were here for hundreds of years before us.”

      
“Humph, you'd not say such a foolish thing if you'd ever seen white captives brought back from the hands of those sadistic miscreants. I for one would take my own life before I'd allow a filthy savage to touch me!”

      
Looking at Thelma Harris's fat, doughy white face, Stephanie experienced a twinge of doubt that any self-respecting savage, except for a cannibal, would want her, but forbore making such a shocking remark.
I wonder if Chase has ever taken any white captives?

      
The thought ambushed her, as thoughts about him always did, no matter how she tried to suppress them. Feeling suddenly uncomfortable with the self-righteous Mrs. Harris, Stephanie said, “My hotel is only a block away and I need to stop in the mercantile for some thread. Please, just let me off in front of it. I can walk the short distance from there.”

      
After thanking Thelma for the ride and bidding her farewell, Stephanie made her purchase in the store, then strolled toward the hotel. At the next intersection she spied a narrow back street that seemed a shortcut. On impulse, she started down it, passing a rather seedy looking saloon.
Well, it
is
broad daylight
, she assured herself, crossing the street to avoid the swinging doors. That was when she saw the horse tied in the alley.

      
There was no way she could mistake the big chestnut with the white star on his forehead. The powerful thoroughbred was Hugh's. The thought that he had come back from his western assignment early and sought solace in a bottle instead of her arms hurt, but she had admitted for some time that their marriage would never be the idyllic one of her girlhood dreams. Then another thought occurred to her. What if someone had stolen Hugh's horse? He could be lying in some gulch outside town or even in that very back alley, grievously injured or dead while some outlaw sat in the saloon drinking up his pay!

      
What could she do? If she called the corporal of the guard and Hugh was in the saloon, he would be humiliated and vent his spleen on her, especially if he was drunk.
But what if he
is
hurt?
Her conscience would not allow her to walk away. Clutching her reticule tightly to her chest, she crossed the street, hoping to peer into a side window of the drinking establishment and see if he was indeed at the bar.

      
Stephanie was not certain whether she wanted him to be there or not, but when she edged closer to the grimy window and gazed inside, her blood froze. Everything seemed to go black for an instant, then a harsh buzzing filled her ears. She watched Hugh bend a yellow-haired harlot over his arm, kissing her open-mouthed with passion. His hand kneaded one of her big white breasts, which he had pulled free of the scanty confines of her garish purple satin gown while two other laughing whores cheered him on.

      
Surely he must be so drunk he did not know what he was doing! But as Stephanie stood rooted to the rough wood planking outside, Hugh picked up the voluptuous blonde and walked straight as an arrow to the stairs at the rear of the room and climbed them with effortless ease. He knew which room was hers, too, kicking open the rickety wooden door and disappearing inside without hesitation.

      
By the time he returned to the hotel the next afternoon, Stephanie had considered her response carefully. Although his uniform was dusty from the trail, he was freshly bathed and shaven. No traces of cheap perfume or rouge betrayed his sins. She studied him with cool, remote eyes as he walked into the sitting room of their suite, a suite paid for with her dowry money. How handsome he looked standing there, hat in hand, smiling at her.

      
When she remained behind the drum table unsmiling, he asked, “What the devil's wrong, Stephanie? Aren't you glad to see me after I spent three weeks in the wilderness?”

      
“Not nearly as much as that yellow-haired whore at the Birdcage Saloon was,” she replied calmly.

      
Hugh blanched, then his complexion mottled and his jaw clenched as he ground out, “What the hell are you talking about? What does a lady like you know about whores?”

      
“Only what I see with my own two eyes, Hugh.”

      
“You spied on me!” he accused incredulously.

      
“Not on purpose. I was taking a shortcut on my way home from the mercantile yesterday afternoon when I recognized your horse. I thought someone had stolen it...” Her ironic smile crumpled. “How could you go to a place like that—to a woman like that?”

      
Hugh shrugged and walked across the room to the decanter of whiskey and poured himself a drink. “A man has needs that a woman like you wouldn't understand.”

      
“Make me understand,” she said, masking the pain that clawed at her.

      
He snorted in disgust and tossed off the drink. “I most certainly am not going to discuss such a vulgar topic with my own wife.”

      
“A vulgar topic—or your vulgar behavior? In spite of our differences, your unhappiness over the promotion, everything else, I believed you loved me, Hugh.”

      
He studied her with cold dark eyes, his gaze raking from her flushed face down to her plain brown skirt. “You're not going to let this drop, are you?” he asked with an air of disgust. Polishing off the drink, he sat the glass down on the cabinet with a sharp rap and turned back to her. “Love is an illusion for children and fools. It has nothing to do with what men do with their whores—or what they do with their wives.”

      
He watched her flinch as if he'd struck her and felt a vicious stab of satisfaction. ‘‘Believe me, you have a far better arrangement with me than Letty does.”

      
“Why did you marry me, Hugh, if you don't love me?” some self-punishing instinct forced her to ask.

      
“Why, to advance my career, of course. Your family name is not only prominent, your father is a very wealthy man. How many junior officers can afford the luxuries we have? Can entertain their superiors?”

      
If she thought the pain was terrible before, the queer hollowness that struck her now was perhaps worse. “You only wanted my money—like some—some cicisbeo!”

      
“Don't be so priggishly self-righteous, Stephanie. It was a fair exchange. The protection of my name at a rather vulnerable time in your life. After your little fling with that half-breed bastard Remington, you were a social pariah in Boston. Everyone believed you'd given yourself to him. The question did occur to me as well. I must confess I was relieved to find you a virgin on our wedding night. It would have been intolerable raising an Indian's brat, not that you seem to be in any danger of ever being able to conceive a child.”