Читать книгу Sweet Sarah Ross - Julie Tetel - Страница 10

He might have predicted that the beautiful idiot would end up doing something idiotic while he was gone from the campsite. She was an irritating woman, no doubt about it. A tricky one, too, and he didn’t want even to begin to respond to the look in her big brown eyes, no sir, or imagine how many men had fallen victim to it. And although he was able to recognize the not-so-subtle manipulative intention of that look, its effect on him was in no way lessened. It reminded him that a year in the field was a long time—

He shook his head to clear it. “I object to wearing a shirt with a bird that belongs on a sewing sampler.”

“I think you should know, sir, that this pattern represents a skill level well beyond that of the sampler. It is found on parlor pillows in the best houses and on napkins, linen napkins.”

“Especially a bird that’s surrounded by all those curlicues.”

“Those are to become mimosa flowers,” she informed him. “I have hardly had time to finish the entire pattern, so perhaps it’s premature of you to judge it at this stage. The pink of the flowers will nicely complement the golden orange of the bird’s body, while the brown of the branch balances out the white and black of its head and wing feathers.”

“Does it have to be so big?”

“Well, this is about the size of the design as it figures on parlor pillows.”

“Ah, but I suppose that on napkins, it would be—” He broke off.

There it was again, that look. “You were saying, sir?” That voice, too. Sweet enough to melt a foolish man. “Something about napkins?”

This was a ridiculous conversation, and he wasn’t going to pursue it. He needed a shirt, and it looked as if he was going to have one with an orange bird, surrounded by pink flowers, poised to chirp its silent song across several square inches of his upper left breast. He exhaled gustily, slipped the suspenders hanging down at his sides over his shoulders and rose to his tender bare feet.

“Let me know when the shirt’s ready,” he said. “You can eat whenever you want.”

He retrieved his moccasins and was at the edge of the campsite when she stopped him with the words, precisely enunciated, “Do you mind telling me where you are going, sir?”

Yes, I do mind. “Is there a specific reason why you need to know, ma’am?”

“Since I wish to bathe at the spring, I would like to be assured that we do not get in each other’s way.”

He should have guessed. “I’m going to check out possible wagon tracks and trails. Since I can’t move out in the open for any considerable length of time, I’ll be gone several hours at least, but won’t be able to cover much more than a mile or so.”

“And if the prairie wolf comes, should I chip stones again?”

He nodded. “Keep the fire going, too, or start another one for practice. Remember never to make two fires in one place. That will make it easier to cover our tracks before we move on out of here later today.”

As he was leaving the campsite in a direction away from the spring, he heard her say, “If you’re worried about not quite striking the right fashion note with a beautiful oriole on your shirt, I might remind you that your present outfit is far more stylish than the one you were wearing when I first saw you.”

He crunched his way through the trees, grumbling to himself. This was hardly the best start to a day that was sure to be as grueling as the one before. He was in better shape, though, much better shape. After the beautiful idiot had fallen asleep the night before, he had boiled some water and put some snakeweed in it. Then he had soaked his feet in the concoction and slept with his soles wrapped in sage leaves. This morning, although his feet were far from healed, they were no longer stabbing him with pain. Since he wouldn’t be doing much walking today, mostly waiting, he figured his feet would be even better by the time of the evening’s trek.

As a man from everywhere and nowhere, he liked to plot people and places in precise positions on the various mental maps he held in his head, and he knew just where to put Miss No-First-Name Harris with her postures and her pretenses and her embroidery scissors. He knew her type. Hell, he had been given birth by her type. The lack of physical resemblance between Miss No-Name and his mother wasn’t going to mislead him, and he’d have to remember his mother’s jet black hair and sapphire eyes every time he looked at Miss No-Name’s golden curls and twist-a-man-around-her-little-finger brown eyes. He indulged fellow feelings for the poor fool who had extended her the supposedly excellent offer of marriage she claimed to have turned down—and even dared to wonder if she had received such an offer. But why had a farm girl from the Chesapeake taken a trip to England with a chaperon?

He didn’t know, and he wasn’t going to spend the day thinking about her, especially not thinking of her bathing in the spring. Better to think of where he was and what he was doing, and that was surveying the one hundredth meridian. Better to find a place to hide in the occasional sprigs of vegetation where he could calculate the slant of the sun and plan his moves to coincide with the slow shifts of shadows. Better to wonder why white men wore black trousers, the kind that didn’t blend into any daytime landscape.

Now that his senses were returning, he was interested to find out what happened to his telescope and his chain and his level, not to mention what might have happened in the meantime to the rest of his team of three other surveyors. However, he wouldn’t be able to retrieve his instruments in the Sioux camp or restore himself to his team until he had returned the beautiful idiot to her family.

Full circle. Begin by thinking about a woman. End by thinking about a woman. Maybe it had something to do with having been stripped naked, made to face certain death, and then being reborn. But how long was he—were they—destined to survive with almost no resources in the middle of hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness? Make that several millions of acres. He didn’t know exactly how many, and it was the job of the surveying team to establish that number. The odds against him accomplishing his part of the mission now were high, and here he was a good hundred miles east of where he had last seen his team, with no equipment, no horse, and in the company of an irritating woman who seemed to think that their life-or-death circumstances made a good occasion to embroider.

He eventually found a miniature scarp in the seemingly smooth grassland in which he could nestle himself. Lying horizontally, he shared this patch of earth with creeping critters and stared at the sky, which was three hundred and sixty degrees of clouds, packaged like a drawing-room gift assortment of mare’s tails and cumulus and cirrus, with an occasional dark storm cloud resting on a silvery gray pedestal of rain afar off to the west. He brought his gaze down to the horizon and chose a fixed point in the middle distance upon which to base his estimates of the wide spaces yawning around him. He took his time and arrived at what he knew would be a remarkably accurate estimate of fifteen miles to the slight rise of land on the western horizon.

This neat trick of spatial approximations was one he had taught himself as a distraction during the regular beatings he brought upon himself at the military academy. Over time, he discovered that he was good not only at the small-scale calibrations he had performed in the confines of the Correctional Chamber but also at the mapping of larger spaces, where plane geometry no longer applied and the curvature of the earth came into play. When he had surpassed his cartography teachers in precision, the beatings stopped, and he was sent to the War Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C.

He calculated and waited, moved and calculated, waited some more and moved again. He spied what might have been fresh wagon tracks, but didn’t risk following them. Instead he simply calculated their direction and figured in the possible ground that had been covered in the past forty-eight hours. The possibility danced around the edges of his busy brain that Miss No-Name’s family had backtracked to find her. However, it seemed more logical, since she was the one who had been spared from attack, that her parents would do their best to arrive at the next meeting point and wait for her there.

That is, if they were still alive. And if they weren’t, he was stuck with her.

He had seen what there was to see, so he headed back to the campsite. This took enough time to imagine a variety of scenarios for how she had spent her day, which included her being foolishly preyed upon by the prairie wolf and bathing in the spring. The image of her bathing in the spring seized hold of his imagination but was instantly replaced, upon his return to the camp, by the combination of her with the prairie wolf.

He came upon the campsite from the direction he had left it, and the first thing he saw was Miss Harris standing in the center of the little clearing with her back to him. Her spine was rigid, and she was looking straight ahead of her. She was wearing her bonnet, and her clothes looked fresh but slightly rumpled in a way that suggested that she had washed them and dried them in the sun on rocks. Across from her and facing him was the prairie wolf, who had ventured right up to the edge of the opposite side of the campsite. He was a scruffy, pitiful excuse for a wolf, but he was more than a match for a human. His ears were cocked, his right foreleg was raised, and he had a wary look in his eye, as if he was waiting for his best moment to pounce. Or was he, incredibly, about to retreat?

In that first half second Powell realized that the beautiful, blessed idiot was trying to stare the damned prairie wolf down. In the next half second, he realized that she was winning the war of nerves.

The scene unfroze. Powell moved forward. The prairie wolf turned tail and ran. She whirled at the sound of his footfall behind her and clutched her heart.

“Oh, it’s you!” she exclaimed under her breath. “You scared me!”

“I scared you?”

“Sneaking up on me like that. I didn’t hear you.”

“A wise man doesn’t announce his arrival anywhere in these parts,” he replied, “but as for being scared, I would have thought our mangy friend did that for you.”

She let her hand fall to her side. “He was playing a game of hide-and-seek with me on the edges of the trees there for a good long while. I picked up my rocks, and I would have thrown them at him if I had had to.” She gestured to the rocks at her feet. “I decided not to go on the offensive, recalling what you said about your feeling, so I dropped them and figured that my best strategy was to stand my ground here in the center.”

“Why did you figure that?”

“To let him know that I knew he was there and that I wasn’t moving. I’ve been standing here immobile for an age and am heartily sick of it.”

He controlled himself to say levelly, “Since his teeth are much bigger than yours, that was a risky strategy to pursue.”

“What would you have had me do instead?”

“Climb into the safety of a tree, to name but one idea.”

Her brown eyes flashed with magnificent scorn. “I will not be treed by such a mangy creature, as you so aptly described him! I had no assurance that you would return to deliver me from the branches, and so I made my decision to die standing up. You will grant me that measure of dignity, surely, even in these thoroughly undignified circumstances.” With a lofty gesture toward his bed of leaves, she informed him summarily, “I have finished the embroidery on your shirt. I am quite pleased with the result.”

He wasn’t going to argue with her astonishing success in staring down that peculiar prairie wolf, who was either unusually cowardly or remarkably wise. He himself remembered that discretion was the better part of valor and concluded that he didn’t want to mess with her while she was in this mood any more than did, perhaps, the wolf. Nor did he think it wise to comment on the brilliantly hued bird that now adorned his shirt, so he put that piece of clothing on in silence.

At the moment he decided it was time to find some food and moved away from his tree, he was jumped on from behind. Writhing vigorously, he put his attackers to the test before his mouth was gagged and his arms were wrenched and tied behind his back. In his twisting and turning, he was able to see that Miss Harris had been set upon by three men, Indians by their dress and hair, and that she was being bound and gagged, as well. Their eyes met briefly. Hers flashed with surprise and terror. Raging against his helplessness, he redoubled his efforts, but he did not effect his release, since he had determined that not three but rather four men were holding him.

He strained to catch words or phrases from the language the Indians were speaking to one another. They hadn’t said enough for him to know whether the Teton Sioux had finally caught up with him, and he hadn’t had a close enough look at the warriors following him three days before to know whether they were the same ones now. All he could think was that either he had been careless and had led them straight to the camp or the prairie wolf had somehow alerted them to this human hiding place.

However the Indians had tracked them down, he and Miss Harris were in for it now. He was being pushed and pulled around the spring, and made to stumble up the rocks and over a ridge to where the Indians had left their horses. He wished he could see how it was going for her, but she was being kept out of his sight range. The Indians mounted their horses. One end of a rope was tied around his waist, the other end around one of the horses, which meant that he was going to be forced to trot along on the ground beside the rider. He imagined that Miss Harris was subjected to this same unhappy means of travel.

The party took off, seven men on horses plus a man and a woman on foot. Powell regretted that he wasn’t wearing the boots he had retrieved from the dead man. He regretted that she wasn’t wearing her ankle boots, even without the laces. He regretted that he hadn’t at the very least had the foresight to make them two new pairs of moccasins.