Winter's Touch (13 page)

“No argument here. I’d just as soon not stumble into them in the dark again in case they haven’t gone far.”

“My thinking exactly,” Innes said.

After a few minutes of assuring himself that nothing more than a bird and a prairie dog stirred out in the open, Carson pushed himself to his feet. “I’ll go stretch out for a while. Wake me in a couple of hours.”

He waited until he had Innes’s agreement, then turned and helped Hunter finish rigging the tarp to keep the girls as dry as possible. Hunter had already cleared a few low branches from three junipers that stood close together. They pulled and tied several waist-high limbs together to form a living tent, then draped the tarp over the branches and tied it in place, anchoring the sides to the ground with the heavy packs from the mule. Beneath the crude shelter they spread Innes’s rubber ground sheet, then a blanket.

“Come on, girls,” he called softly to Bess and Megan as he approached them in the semi-darkness. “Crawl in here and see if you can stay dry. It’s going to rain any minute.”

Bess and Megan crawled eagerly into the small, living cave. “It’s like a playhouse,” Megan proclaimed, her blue eyes wide with wonder.

Carson shook his head at his daughter’s irrepressible spirit.

“What about Winter Fawn?” Bess asked Carson.

“I’m going to bring her in here with you, so make room.”

Carson crossed to the spot where Winter Fawn lay on the buffalo robe. He’d expected to find her asleep, if not outright unconscious, but her gray eyes were open and watching him. He felt her face and found it no warmer than it had been that previous morning. Relieved, he smiled. “How are you doing?”

“I’m all right. How are the girls?”

His lips twitched. “Megan is inspecting her new playhouse. You’ve been invited to join them.”

“Oh, but you should be the one—”

“I won’t leave you out here in the rain,” he interrupted.

“Maybe it won’t rain. Sometimes it just blows—” A fat, hard raindrop hit her in the eye.

Carson chuckled and scooped her up in his arms. “You were saying?”

When he stood, his side reminded him of the newest holes there. He let out a slight grunt.

“I am too heavy for you to carry. Put me down. I can walk.”

“Your wound is much worse than mine,” he reminded her. “You shouldn’t be up walking around. And you don’t weigh as much as my saddle.”

“Ah,” she said with a slow nod. “So my father has spoken the truth.”

“What truth? That you don’t weigh much?”

“That white men lie. Your saddle. Hmph.”

Chuckling, Carson knelt and laid her on the blanket beside Megan. He ducked out of the shelter and retrieved the buffalo robe and tucked it over the three of them. It was raining in earnest now.

“You’ll be careful, won’t you, honey?” he asked Megan. “This is Winter Fawn’s hurt side. You won’t bump into her, will you?”

“Oh, no, Daddy. I might hurt her if I did that.”

He leaned down and kissed his daughter’s nose. “You’re a good girl, Megan Dulaney.”

Megan giggled. “You’re a good boy, Daddy.”

“We can make room for you,” Bess told him. “For all of you.”

Carson gave his sister a smile. “Thanks, but we’ll be fine. Don’t worry about us.”

“But you’ll get wet.”

“It won’t be the first time. Maybe I’ll find a bar of soap in one of those packs and get clean in the rain.”

Winter Fawn watched him leave. Through the opening of the shelter she saw him drape a blanket over his head and lay on the ground that was already wet.

She rolled to her uninjured side to make more room for Bess and Megan. The movement pulled on her wound. She bit her tongue on a moan. She lay still, and as one moment stretched into the next the pain eased.

Thunder crashed directly overhead. Winter Fawn flinched. Megan let out a faint squeak of fright, while Bess clapped her hands over her ears.

The three looked at each other in the dimness of the shelter, and smiled.

“It scared me,” Megan said.

“I think it scared all of us,” Winter Fawn told her. And if Winter Fawn didn’t distract herself somehow, it would scare her again. She hated storms, feared them. To her they meant something terrible was going to happen.

If she let herself think about it she would transmit her fear to Bess and Megan. She would think, instead, of the stories her father used to tell her when she was a child. Stories of a great wide ocean that took weeks to cross. Stories of huge cities full of people and buildings and noise and stench. Stories of white people and their odd ways.

Winter Fawn wondered if she might not have been happier if her father had never told her what life was sometimes like for white people.

He had told her that many white people never knew war, never had to watch their men ride out to fight and die. White people in general did not live at all the way Our People did. They lived in permanent shelters called houses. They did not move from place to place with the seasons, did not follow the buffalo. They stayed in one spot and raised animals and crops for their food.

All her life Winter Fawn had heard these fantastical stories from her father. From the time of around her tenth winter, she began to wonder what it might be like to stay in one place season after season. A home, that was what he had called it. A place that was all yours, where a man and woman raised their children and their children’s children. A place to plant seeds in the ground and watch them sprout and grow into food to feed your family. Land that another tribe or the white man’s Army or white settlers could never take away from you as long as you were strong enough to hold it.

Winter Fawn longed to know what that was like, staying in one place season after season. The little valley where her band usually wintered was her favorite place. She had dreamed of being able to stay there through the seasons. She wanted to know what the cottonwoods along the stream looked like in full summer. Were there wild flowers in the valley? Did it hold the heat in summer, or was there a cool breeze?

She had dreamed of her father taking her to the cabin he’d told her about, where he lived nearly all year, in the mountains called Sierra Blancas. Dreamed of learning all the different seasons of one place.

Maybe she would not like living in one place all the time. Maybe she was too much of her mother’s people to live in the way of her father’s. But she wanted the chance to know. In order for that to happen, they must elude Crooked Oak and get Carson and Bess and Megan to their ranch.

Being forced to ride into the mountains, then back down through the hills, was slowing them down. Winter Fawn herself was slowing them down because of her wound. Riding in front of Carson as she had been could have gotten him killed just now. He needed to have both hands free to manage the horse and perhaps his rifle. He did not need a weak woman draped across him who could not even sit a horse.

She glanced out of the shelter, but all she could see now was darkness. Inside the shelter Megan and Bess had fallen asleep.

No one was watching. No one could see her if they were. This was her only chance. She would not even try what she was about to try if not for the others. She may have slipped many times over the years and done what her father had forbidden her to do, but not for herself. For her grandmother. For Hunter once. For Bess. Never for herself.

This time, if it worked, would be for them, because the weakness caused by her wound was putting them all in danger. It might not even work. She’d never tried it on herself before.

With a deep breath for calm, she placed her hand over the thick pad covering the front wound. Closing her eyes, she concentrated, searching out the wound. She could feel it in her side, of course, and with her hand, but she needed to connect with it in her mind.

Concentrate. Concentrate.

The warmth was there in her hand, but the sharp stab of pain, twice as strong as it had been, broke her concentration. It was all she could do to keep from crying out, the pain was so great.

She took several slow, deep breaths, and, after a moment, tried again.

Once more the pain multiplied to an unbearable level. She clamped her jaw tight and tried to concentrate past it. Sweat broke out across her face. Black spots appeared before her eyes and grew until there was nothing but blackness. She fell headlong into it and passed out.

Innes kept his promise and woke Carson for his turn at guard duty. As Carson stood his watch, the clouds moved out and left the sky clear. He sat in the rocks and shivered in clothes soaked by the storm he had slept through. He thought about a warm fire, hot coffee, a soft bed. Clear gray eyes and womanly curves.

Enough of that.
Even if it did warm him better than his other thoughts.

He thought, too, of standing his watch until morning and letting Hunter sleep, but it was a bad idea and he knew it. After only about three hours, by his reckoning, he was already starting to nod off. That’s all they needed was for him to fall asleep on watch and let the Cheyenne—or the Arapaho—sneak up on them.

Besides, he thought as he climbed down to wake Hunter, the kid was young enough that he probably wouldn’t miss the sleep. Carson’s own twenty-eight years weren’t all that many, but on this night every one of them seemed to weigh on his shoulders like a load of bricks.

After waking Hunter, he stretched back out on his soggy blanket on the soggy ground and fell asleep.

He felt like he’d barely nodded off when Innes shook him awake at dawn. “Get everybody up and ready to ride,” he said in a low, urgent voice.

Carson sat up, instantly awake. “What’s wrong?”

“Riders heading this way. Looks like maybe half a dozen.”

Carson swore under his breath and got to his feet.

Hunter led the pack mule from concealment and tied her next to the canvass shelter.

Quietly Carson woke Winter Fawn and the girls. Everyone scrambled to help, even Megan, who held his canteen for him while he saddled his horse.

When the pack mule was loaded, Carson climbed into the rocks where Innes crouched watching the approaching riders through binoculars. Carson could see men on horseback, but as they were nearly two miles away, at the bend in the valley, he couldn’t tell anything about them. Except that they were getting closer to this scant hiding place by the second.

“Is it Cheyenne, or Arapaho?”

“Arapaho. That be Crooked Oak in the lead.”

“Take the girls and Hunter and go,” Carson urged.

“The hell you say.”

“I’ll hold them off from here. If you go now, you should be able to keep ahead of them long enough to get to that far ridge.”

“And be down to two guns? And expect me son to shoot at his uncle? Nae. If there’s gonna be any shooting at that bunch, it’ll be you and me wot does it. I’ll not ask that of the lad.”

“Dammit, man, you agreed yesterday that if I’m not with you there probably won’t be any shooting.”

Innes swore. “Winter Fawn can’t ride on her own.”

“She said they wouldn’t hurt her.”

“We’re all stayin’. If we have to make a stand, better here than out in the open.”

This time Carson swore. The hell of it was, they were both right. Carson did not have the right to determine if Winter Fawn stayed or went. But if he stayed, either she would have to stay with him, or Megan or Bess would, because Innes and Hunter could not carry the three females with them on two horses.

They could always put Megan with Hunter, and Bess on Carson’s horse, leaving Innes free to carry Winter Fawn. Of course, that left Carson afoot, something he did not care to be with a half dozen Arapahos after his scalp. Besides, Bess didn’t have the skill to ride alone on horseback during what would surely turn into an all-out run for freedom.

One of them could ride the mule, but they’d lose most of the supplies to make room for a rider. And again, Winter Fawn was too weak, and Bess too unskilled to ride alone.

As the sun started up over the trees, Carson crouched beside Innes and watched the riders draw closer toward their hiding place. Even the birds in the trees seemed to know something was about to happen, for they ceased their flitting and chirping.

It grew so quiet that Carson caught himself glancing over his shoulder to be sure Hunter and the girls were still there.

They were, of course, along with Hail Mary and the horses. Hunter was moving from horse to horse, stroking their muzzles and whispering in their ears. Carson wondered what the boy found to say to the animals that he spoke to them so often, and so privately.

“This time he’s probably asking them to be quiet.”

At the sound of Innes’s voice, Carson nearly jumped. “What?”

“You asked what he was saying to the horses.”

Carson shook his head. He hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud.

“’Tis said a horse understands the Arapaho tongue.”

“What about you?” Carson asked, returning his gaze to the riders now less than a mile away. “You speak Arapaho. Do horses understand you?”

“Not like they do him. ‘Tis a gift he has, the whisperin’.”

Down the valley, the riders slowed, but kept coming. They were only a half mile away now. Carson felt sweat gather between his shoulder blades. He felt the back of his head throb. He felt…he felt like a duck sitting in the middle of a pond surrounded by hunters.

He checked his rifle and made sure the percussion cap was over the nipple and ready to fire. The cartridge he’d loaded the night before was still in the barrel.

He glanced behind him and realized that Hunter had moved the horses and mule farther back into the trees again, where they would be harder to spot. Carson hoped that gift of his with horses worked and worked damn good to keep them quiet. He prayed the wind wouldn’t come up and carry their scent to the other horses.

Damn, he hated this. As much as he didn’t want to fight, this hiding was worse somehow.

Closer and closer the riders came. He could hear their voices now, but couldn’t understand them.

If they kept heading in the same direction to ride up and out of the valley, they would pass within two hundred yards. Too close. Too damn close.

Suddenly the warriors pulled their horses to a stop. They were close enough that Carson could easily identify them now. He eased the barrel of his rifle into a notch in the rocks.