Winter's Touch (2 page)

Red Beard, thought Grandmother, had never been the same. Smiling Woman had been his wife for nearly fifteen summers. She had given him two fine children, and he had loved her deeply. Within a week of her death he had left Our People to roam the mountains, seeking respite from his grief. Leaving his children for her to raise.

He, too, had left during a storm.

Hunter had been so young, only five when his mother died and his father left. He still missed his parents, but not to the extent Winter Fawn did. Being six years older than her brother, she had suffered more from their loss. In her mind, Grandmother knew, storms were to be dreaded. Storms took loved ones away.

Someday, thought Grandmother, Winter Fawn would perhaps come to understand that storms were not evil. They were simply Man-Above’s way of cleansing the land and reminding Our People that nothing lasts forever. Sometimes they took, sometimes they gave. Rain was necessary to grow the grass that fed the buffalo that fed Our People. When brought on the wings of a storm, rain carved out new paths for rivers, tore down old trees that had lived too long, uprooted young trees that were too weak.

Storms, to Grandmother’s way of thinking, were merely a part of life. As was death.

“Look, Grandmother.” Winter Fawn touched Grandmother’s arm, excitement lifting her voice. “Hunter is going to race.”

“Is it him you look at, Granddaughter, or the one he races against?”

Winter Fawn made a sound of disgust. Until her grandmother had spoken, she had paid no mind to the other rider. “I assure you, Grandmother, I am not interested in Crooked Oak. It is Hunter I watch and none other.”

“You speak with such pride.” Grandmother smiled, for she did not intend her words to sting.

“I am proud.”

“One would think you were his mother rather than his sister.”

Winter Fawn smiled and stood to get a better view of her brother. “I suppose I have felt a little like his mother since he was born and I held him in my arms.”

“A child yourself at that time.”

Winter Fawn’s smile turned poignant, almost sad. “For a time. I was a child for a time.” There was no need for her to say more. Grandmother knew Winter Fawn’s sadness.

But Winter Fawn was never sad when thinking about her brother. “Look at him,” she said in awe. “All he has to do is lean down and whisper in his horse’s ear, and the horse will run his heart out for him. Look! He’s telling him to run like the wind.”

“He has a gift,” Grandmother acknowledged without looking up from the hide she was scraping. “And he uses it wisely for one so young. I trust that you are being as wise with yours.”

Startled, Winter Fawn gaped at her grandmother. Heat rushed to her face, and her heart leapt to her throat. “Wha—” Her voice croaked. She had to swallow and start again. “What do you mean? I have no gift.”

Dragging the scraper toward her across the hide, Grandmother arched a brow. “Has the warmth of your hand not taken the pain from my shoulder? Did you think I would not notice such a thing?”

Winter Fawn looked away quickly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She felt her grandmother’s stare, as if the old woman could see into her very soul.

“Very well,” Grandmother finally said. “Perhaps you are right. Perhaps your gift is better kept to yourself for now.”

A deep shudder tore through Winter Fawn. “I have no gift.”

When the Barlow, Sanderson and Company afternoon stage rolled to a stop at the depot in Pueblo, Carson Dulaney was the first passenger off. Despite the cloud of dust that had yet to settle around the coach, he took a long breath and smiled. It was good to be back. Better than he’d expected. Not that he was so fond of Pueblo—he’d only been there twice. No, it was simply good to be back in Colorado. He hadn’t realized how much he had already come to think of it as home.

The West was for starting over.

That’s what his father had done. That’s what Carson was doing. Starting over. Building a new life for himself and what was left of his family.

Turning back to the coach, he helped his thirteen-year-old sister, Bess, alight, then Megan, his six-year-old daughter.

“Ladies,” he said with a flourish, “welcome to Colorado Territory.”

“You said that two days ago.” Frowning, Bess studied the dust coating her skirt, then tried her best to shake it off. “I do believe I’m wearing a sizeable portion of this territory of yours on my skirt.”

Not for the first time since deciding to move what was left of his family to Colorado, Carson felt his gut tighten. Was he doing the right thing, uprooting two young girls from everything familiar and bringing them out here to this wild, unsettled land?

It had to be the right thing, he told himself for the hundredth time. The war had taken everything and left the girls and Aunt Augusta living off the kindness of friends, with barely enough food to eat. He couldn’t make things better for them in Atlanta. The plantation that had once supported more than a hundred people was gone. Atlanta, indeed most of the South, lay in ruins.

Carson’s father had been killed in the fighting. Megan’s mother was dead. Augusta’s husband.

So many. So many dead. The four of them, Carson, Bess, Megan, and Augusta, were all that was left of the once sprawling Dulaney clan.

All they had left was each other, and the ranch that Carson’s father had started just before the war.

Edmond Dulaney had lost interest in life when his wife died back in ‘54. He turned the running of the plantation over to Carson, and in ‘58, when rumors of a gold strike in Colorado made their way to the Eastern newspapers, Edmond had headed west.

Carson remembered the letters his father had sent home describing the bitter cold, the back-breaking work, the thefts, the murders, the claim jumping. The exorbitant cost of goods, so high that it took nearly every ounce of gold dust a man managed to find just to buy enough food to eat. Bad food, at that.

It hadn’t taken Edmond long to realize that a man could make more money supplying good beef to the miners than he could mining for gold. Carson was grateful for his father’s intuition on that matter. Edmond Dulaney had scrounged up enough cattle to make a modest start at a cattle ranch in the southern part of the territory. He’d been making a pretty good go of things until he’d headed east to fight for the Confederacy.

Carson had thanked God at the time that his father had arrived too late to join the 12
^th
Georgia Regiment until after McDowell in May of ‘62. Cocky sons of the Confederacy they’d been, those Georgia boys, Carson among them. They’d been assigned to the Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by General Lee himself. They’d fought at Rich Mountain that first summer, then Cheat Mount that fall. In the spring of ‘62, when Edmond had been on his way east to join up, the 12
^th
Georgia had joined General Jackson, ol’ Stonewall, on his triumphant campaign through the Shenandoah.

We were good,
Carson thought of the 12
^th
Georgia. Too damn good, and too damn cocky, as it turned out. At McDowell they were the only out-of-state unit with the Army of Northern Virginia, yet were given the most vulnerable part of the line to hold. The onslaught of Yankee fire had been terrible. When ordered to pull back to a more defensible position, the 12
^th
Georgia’s reply, to a man, had been, “We did not come all this way to Virginia to run before Yankees.”

They should have run, Carson had admitted later, but they’d held steady in the face of wave after wave of Union blue.

Yes, they should have run. Of all the Confederate casualties that day, a full third had been from the 12
^th
Georgia. There hadn’t been much left of those cocky boys by the end of that day.

Jesus, but Carson had been glad his father had not been there. Surely, he’d thought, nothing could ever be that bad again.

How naive he’d been. It was incredible how naive a twenty-three year old man could be, even after that month back in ‘62.

More men—including Edmond Dulaney—had poured in to fill the ranks decimated at McDowell. Side by side, father and son, along with neighbors, friends, and strangers who had come to rebuild the ranks of the 12
^th
Georgia, followed General Jackson to hell and back. Trouble was, far too many hadn’t made it back.

In the rare quiet times between the bloody battles at Sharpsburg, Chancellorsville, and the Wilderness, Edmond had talked of his ranch. Colorado was a splendid place, he’d said. Wild and free, with land for the taking. A huge land, with room for a man to spread out without worrying about neighbors. Air so crisp and clean you almost expect it to snap in the breeze.

He wanted Carson to join him. Wanted him to bring the rest of the family after the war. Wanted to build the ranch into a real showplace.

“Hey, Son!”

Standing shoulder to shoulder with his father, Carson barely heard the shout. Day after day of unrelenting, continual cannon and rifle fire had nearly deafened them all. “Yeah, Dad?”

“Did I tell you it was quiet in Colorado?”

Despite the hip-deep blood and gore and the threat of imminent death—or perhaps because of them—Carson chuckled. “What’s that? I can’t hear you! It’s too noisy!”

“I said—” Edmond Dulaney turned his head just enough to see his son’s grin, and laughed.

A volley of fire from the advancing Yankees had them ducking down into their trench.

“So,” Edmond called out, “you comin’ back to Colorado with me, or not?”

Carson, using the time to reload, glanced at the overcast sky, then at his father. “I suspect I’ll give it a try.”

“Good. That’s good, son.”

Reloaded, they stood and fired.

A minute later Edmond Dulaney had slumped against Carson’s shoulder, one more dead Reb out of the ten thousand who had died that May of ‘64 at that Godforsaken crossroads before the courthouse at Spotsylvania.

As soon as possible after Lee’s surrender, Carson had kept his promise and come west to see this ranch of his father’s. He’d found it abandoned, the house in desperate need of repairs, cattle scattered to hell and back.

But the possibilities…the possibilities, along with his father’s dreams, had infected him. After the devastation of so much of the South, this land was like heaven.

And it was quiet.

Not so much here, in Pueblo, but the valley where the ranch lay. A healing quiet he had desperately needed. Still needed.

Carson had spent the better part of a year fixing the place, rounding up stray cattle. He’d brought Frank Johansen and Beau Rivers with him to help. Like him, they had lost everything in the war.

At least Carson still had some family, he thought, looking down at Bess and Megan, thinking of Aunt Gussie.

Frank and Beau were there now, at the ranch, waiting for him. He was going to pick up where his father left off. He was going to build his father’s dream, a new home for the Dulaneys.

He wished Aunt Gussie had come with them. What the hell did he know about raising girls? Not a damn thing, he feared. Gussie, his father’s sister, had not been able to bring herself to leave her lifelong friend Lucille, who was dying in Atlanta, but had promised to join them later.

So here they were, Carson and Bess and Megan. It didn’t matter if he didn’t know how to raise girls. He loved them both, would do anything for them, so he guessed he’d be learning.

The problem with Bess, he knew, was that she hadn’t wanted to come. It was evident in the quarrelsome tone in her voice. Plus, he figured she was still in a tiff because he had limited her and Megan to one single trunk each for their belongings. Carson touched a finger to her chin until she looked up at him. “You promised to give it a chance, Bess.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it. Her shoulders heaved on a dramatic sigh. “You’re right. I promised. I’m sorry. I’m just tired, I think.”

“I’m thirsty,” Megan whined.

There was another one who was tired, Carson thought with sympathy. Traveling by stage, particularly for two young girls, was an exhausting experience.

“I think what we all need it a good meal, and something to drink,” he added, touching the tip of his finger to Megan’s tiny nose. “And a good night’s sleep in a hotel.”

“On a real bed?” Bess’s eyes lit. “Not a cot?”

“On a real bed. Not a cot.” Pueblo was a thriving community. Finding a decent hotel would be no problem.

The clerk at the stage depot pointed out three hotels down the street, any one of which, he assured, would serve their needs. Hoping the man was right, Carson arranged with him to have their luggage sent over to the nearest one. After taking the girls there and checking in, he escorted them to the restaurant three doors down for the promised meal. By the time they finished eating both girls were barely able to keep their eyes open.

Truth to tell, he was ready for a good night’s sleep himself. He’d learned during the war to sleep whenever and wherever the opportunity arose. Even afterward, when the nightmares started, he’d at least slept some. But on this trip, knowing the safety and comfort of the girls was his sole responsibility, his sleep at the various stage stops had been in fits and starts, and very, very brief. He didn’t like the girls sleeping on cots in the same room with a bunch of strange men. He didn’t much care for sleeping in a roomful of strange men himself, for that matter.

Tonight would be different. A bath, a private room, a real bed and a change of clothes would improve the girls’ moods better than anything else.

Not that he would be much more at ease about their safety, but at least they would be more comfortable than they’d been since they’d left the train in Kansas and had taken the stage the rest of the way.

If the talk he’d heard before he’d headed east to get the girls could be credited, there would soon be a railroad in Colorado. Someone up in Denver had supposedly formed the Denver Pacific Railway, with plans to lay track more than a hundred miles between Denver and Cheyenne, where it would connect with the Union Pacific. From there, a person could go anywhere in the world.