Читать книгу Sweet Sarah Ross - Julie Tetel - Страница 8

Powell rose to his full height, tested his weight first on one sole, then the other. His feet were still torn and sore, but the covering of wet rabbit hide made it easier to stand on them. He flexed his knees and felt the ache of muscles in his calves from the awkward way he had walked trying to spare his feet over the last few days. Still, his condition was no longer bad enough to warrant the risk of playing the role of sitting duck another day.

The trousers were a definite inconvenience. The Widower Reynolds had evidently been a much shorter man than he, for the pant legs reached only to his midcalf. The suspenders did not adjust and were, therefore, unusable. The trousers were too short in the crotch, too, but the waist was snug enough so that he didn’t have to waste one of the precious strips of petticoat cloth as a belt. If the beautiful idiot hadn’t been with him, he would have preferred to go naked. However, since she was with him, something about keeping to the conventions of dress seemed like a good idea.

He had already packed up the sack he had made from one half of her petticoat. It now held the suspenders, the torn shawl, the strips of cloth retrieved from the traps, and the beautiful idiot’s shoes. Her scissors he carried in one of his back pockets. He had already dismantled the rocks he had used for the two fires he had made, the one for the tree frogs, the other for the jackrabbits, which he had built a few feet away from the first. He had scattered twigs and leaves over the warm ground where the fires had been and had disposed of the jackrabbit remains. All day long he had been rescaling the map of the territory in his head to fit the proportions of crossing it on foot. He had charted their course.

He figured they were ready to go.

When he took his first tentative steps toward the riverside edge of the trees, he became aware that the beautiful idiot had not moved. He looked over his shoulder and repeated, “It’s time to move on.”

She remained seated and motionless at the base of the tree. The twilight silvered the golden hair that was swirling about her heart-shaped face and shoulders like a fallen halo. The soft half-light paled her rosy skin, giving it the texture of flower petals. Her big brown eyes were luminous with a feisty mix of emotions, and her pretty lips were set in a line oddly expressive of seduction and obstinance at once. She had crossed her arms under full breasts and crossed her legs at their shapely ankles. Her feet peeped out from under the flounces of her petticoat and overskirt. The moccasins lay untouched in her lap where he had tossed them.

“You cannot be serious,” she stated in that falsely pleasant voice that grated on his nerves.

It took him a moment to absorb the impact of that statement, then another moment to suppress the desire to strangle her. He shifted the sack on his back and demanded, “Are you always like this, or only when survival is at stake?”

“Always like what, sir?”

Why mince words? “Always idiotic.” He saw the flash in her eyes shift from seductive obstinance to outright anger. “We’ve done fine for the day here, but I’ve no desire to linger longer and make myself easy prey for either man or animal. And I’m assuming you see the advantage of traveling at night, so that I don’t have to spell it out for you.”

“No, you don’t have to spell it out for me, but I’d like to point out that I’m the one who’s been working all day while you’ve been sitting around.”

He gave her a very deliberate once-over. “You look like a healthy woman, and the amount of ‘work’ you did is nothing compared to the physical demands that will be put on both of us tonight—which is why I gave you half an hour to rest. We need to move, and the time is now.”

She didn’t budge.

It would take only one more idiotic word from her for him to leave her here to her own devices. Let her die, for all he cared. But then he thought of her scissors in his pocket, the valuable cloth in his hands and the fact that she had fetched him water more than once today, and he realized that it wouldn’t be fair to leave her. But when was life ever fair? Besides which, it was her choice, after all, to stay or come. You could lead a horse to water…and all that.

He turned to go.

“I need my shoes,” she said. “I don’t see them lying about, so I’m guessing that you have them in the half of my petticoat that you have slung over your shoulder.”

“Wear the moccasins I made you.”

“I want my shoes.”

“Moccasins don’t leave the same footprints as white man’s shoes, and I had to cut up the laces of your ankle boots to make four ties for our two pairs.” He saw her lift the rabbit skins and examine the ties. He saw her jaw drop. He cut off whatever idiotic thing was going to come out of her pretty mouth by saying swiftly, “They’ll fit you perfectly. I measured them against your shoes. Now, let’s go!”

He slipped through the trees and stepped out onto the riverbank, half hoping she wouldn’t follow him.

No such luck, but, then again, that was just his luck. He hadn’t gone ten paces before she was behind him, asking, “Where are we going?”

“To deliver you to your family.” He added, with feeling, “And without delay.”

“Oh! Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” When she caught up with him, she said, “You know, we might get along much better if you would explain yourself to me instead of making me out to be an…an idiot! And I could think of you less as a man-beast and in a more kindly manner if I had a name to call you.”

At that he stopped in his tracks and looked down at her. She was looking up at him, her beautiful eyes wide and almost beseeching, but not quite. Her practiced social smile held a hint of something else that he wasn’t willing to examine just yet. Instead, he pinned his thoughts on the incredible idea that she had called him a man-beast, and he almost laughed. Good God, she was an irritating woman, but she had a way of diverting his attention from the pain in his feet. He’d grant her that much.

“I asked you your name, sir,” she repeated.

“Powell.”

“Just Powell? Only that?”

“Wesley.”

“Well, which is the first name and which the last, sir? I’m afraid I cannot distinguish.”

“Wesley Powell,” he said slowly. “My name is Wesley Powell.”

“Very well, then, Mr. Powell.” She nodded her head graciously. “I am Miss Harris.”

He regarded her a moment longer, then grunted and began walking again. Really, she had expected no better from the man-beast, but she found that it humanized him to have a name, and such a perfectly ordinary one, although he had pronounced it with a kind of reluctance. Or did his tone hint of challenge?

No matter. Since their immediate goal was to find her family, she was content—if content was an appropriate word to describe her emotional state in a situation where her survival was not assured from one hour to the next—to walk along beside him. She hardly needed to be told that he didn’t like her any more than she liked him, and she didn’t need to be told twice, no, three times, that he preferred her silence to her conversation. However, since she saw no reason why she should behave according to his preferences rather than hers, she continued chattily, “So, Mr. Powell, can you tell me how we are going to achieve the very worthy goal of finding my family?”

“First, tell me whether, before embarking on this journey, you and your family established a meeting place in the event you should become separated.”

She had to consider that question at length. She did recall her father and mother discussing such a situation, but she hadn’t paid attention to what the outcome of the discussion had been. At the time, she had been thinking it would be a mercy to be separated from her bratty little sisters, but now, imagining that they had met some unspeakable fate—but, no, she turned her thoughts from dwelling on horrors and bent them toward remembering the names of the various stages of the journey that Morgan Harris had recited on more than one occasion. It seemed logical that her father would have decided that, if separated, the family would meet up at the next landmark.

She said, “Chimney Rock,” since that was the only landmark she could recall, and if she didn’t say something soon, Mr. Powell would think her an even bigger idiot than he already did—not that she cared.

“Chimney Rock?” he repeated under his breath.

Hoping that the landmark was ahead of them rather than one they had already passed, she repeated with confidence, “Yes, Chimney Rock. Is there something that troubles you in that, sir?”

“Nothing beyond the fact that it lies some two hundred miles and more to the west of here. Did you not identify more proximate meeting points? Windlass Hill, perhaps? Ash Hollow?”

“Ah, yes, Windlass Hill,” she said, picking the landmark that sounded the closest. “I had forgotten.”

“You don’t have the faintest idea of a meeting point, do you?” he snapped. “No, don’t answer that question! Tell me instead whether, in one of your two trips to the Widower Reynolds’s wagon, you bothered to notice the direction of the tracks of the wagons that had fled the scene?”

She interpreted this question as just another one of his gratuitous attempts to expose her ignorance. She composed herself before answering, “The character of the know-it-all is one of society’s least attractive types, in case you didn’t know it, Mr. Powell. Now, you might have asked me to notice the direction of the wagon tracks earlier in the day, if you had wanted the information, and you will not waste your breath asking me any more questions of this type if you know—and I make no secret of it—that I didn’t want to make this trip in the first place and would far, far rather be in Baltimore!”

He grumbled inarticulately, but she caught several syllables. Although her lady’s ears were offended, she guessed that he was cursing himself for having failed to ask her to investigate what seemed, to his mind at any rate, important clues left at the previous day’s wagon site. After a few more paces he turned away from the riverbank and made his way up the slope. She supposed she was to follow him, but his long legs scissored through the tall grasses at a faster clip than she could sustain, so she stopped not far from the top of the slope and hung back while he tramped around the wagon site, his head bent toward the earth. After a while, he stopped that activity and stood looking into the distance. He was facing toward the sun, which had set beyond the horizon but which was still streaking the open sky with broad strokes of pink and orange, while the earth below was bedding down in layers of gray shadows.

She refrained from calling out and asking him if she should come over to him or if he was going to return to her or what she should do. She was rewarded for her forbearance when, about ten minutes later, he returned to her side and said, rather grimly, that they would follow the river only for another mile or so. She also forbore to ask what they would do after that, thinking she’d find out soon enough, which she did. A mile, she had already learned, was not a considerable distance in this part of the world, even when one was on foot.

They traipsed along at the water’s edge, hidden from sight by the slight slope that rose on either side of the broad river. The air was getting chillier by the minute. She knew that although the temperature had dipped into the cool range the night before, it had not become uncomfortablycold. She was hungry, having only nibbled at a little jackrabbit all day, but she refrained from asking about food on the perfectly good grounds that if she brought up the subject, the perverse Mr. Powell was sure to concoct something disgusting to eat. She would wait until he got hungry, then eat what he ate.

At length he stopped abruptly. Looked down at her. In the light of the rising moon the planes of his face were sharp-etched, his expression somber. He nodded to the slope of the bank, which was steeper at this point than at their hiding place downriver. He climbed up high enough to be able to toss the sack over the edge, then moved back down and offered her a hand. She accepted his strong clasp gratefully, didn’t protest at the harsh squeeze he gave her or the rough tug that got her up and over the top of the slope.

Once again on her feet, she brushed her skirts off at her knees. He picked up the sack, shouldered it. They were looking out over the valley of the Platte, an enormous table of land that rolled away and merged with the whole of the darkened horizon. By day she knew the land was tufted with green and yellow grass. At night it looked to her more like the surface of the moon, cratered with every shade of gray, or a paradoxically dry ocean, whose dips and rises had been made solid.

When she noticed the direction of his gaze and followed it with her eyes, she saw two patches of white, not far off, crowded up against a slight rise in the landscape. The patches looked like the broken sails of two shipwrecked vessels. Her heart caught at the implications of that pathetic scene.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t look at her. Nor did he immediately move. It was as if he was allowing her to come to terms with the possibilities of the scene that lay ahead before actually confronting the reality of it.

After several long moments passed, he said quietly, “It’s as I thought. Back at the wagon site, I saw the two white dots in the distance and suspected something like this. Tell me when you’re ready to go over there.”

She summoned strength from the General, the father she had never known. She straightened her backbone, squared her shoulders. “I’m ready now.”

Together they crossed the open expanse. She feared. She hoped. As they approached the pitiful remains of two covered wagons, she experienced a kind of death herself. Resisted it with every particle of her being. But she didn’t resist looking upon the brute scene of the bodies of her former traveling companions, which littered the ground around the two disabled wagons. There were five, stretched this way and that. Some facedown, some faceup, caught in their scattered, equally ineffective paths of flight. Without blinking, she looked at each body in turn. Every moment that passed brought her new life and new hope.

She made the gruesome rounds twice, just to assure herself that hope and the moonlight weren’t playing tricks with her eyes.

She pronounced, “So far, so good.” Then she laughed at what she had said. “Of course, nothing good has happened to these poor folks, but at least none of them are from my family! It’s awful to say such a thing aloud, but I’m happy that if misfortune was to visit our wagon train, it has fallen on others.”

Powell didn’t reply. He had put his sack on the ground and climbed into one wagon wreck, then the other.

On a hope and a prayer she repeated, “So far, so good. At least as far as I know for now.”

He climbed back out of the wagon nearest her, jumped down on the ground. “Nothing,” he reported. “Not a pot or pan or sack of flour to be found.” He walked over to her. “Don’t feel bad about being happy your family isn’t among the slain, although it may feel odd to be so happy in the midst of this misery.”

She nodded and voiced her puzzlement about another matter. “Two others from this wagon are missing. You see, here are the Kelly brothers.” She gestured toward a trio of bodies. “They were traveling together and had left their aging parents behind in Ohio. Now, beyond the second wagon lie Mr. Clark and his grown son Jack, but Mrs. Clark and her daughter aren’t there. I’m wondering whether they might have escaped.”

“Possibly.”

“Which means they might be roaming the hills,” she said. “Perhaps we should look for them.”

“They might have been captured,” Powell replied. “Or they might be lying dead yonder, out of our sight.”

“Still, I’m wondering why it is only the men who have been killed outright, and none of the women.”

Powell walked around the large dispersed triangle that was formed by the Kelly brothers, studied the sprawled attitudes of the dead bodies. “Do you know whether all three were carrying firearms?”

“I would suppose they did. Every man on the wagon train had a rifle, sometimes two. Why, even Morgan—my father—had a rifle for shooting game.”

“Judging from the way these bodies lie, and adding the Widower Reynolds into the equation, I would say that those who were killed outright were the ones doing the shooting. From the placement of their arms and hands, it looks as if each one was holding a rifle that was subsequently taken.”

“You must have had a rifle when you were captured, no? Why didn’t they kill you outright?”

“My rifle was on my back,” he said, “and I wasn’t shooting at them. At the time I was sorry to be so defenseless, but perhaps not anymore.”

“They were going to kill you anyway,” she observed, “and I don’t like to think of Mrs. Clark and her daughter facing unspeakable torture. I doubt the two of them would be able to escape the way you did.”

“How old is the daughter?”

“About ten.”

He considered the matter. “The Teton Sioux might currently have a shortage of women. A ten-year-old girl who could be taught their ways and a woman perhaps still of child-bearing age might be prized rather than killed.”

At that Sarah’s mind boggled. The phrase “Fate worse than death” drifted into consciousness but just as quickly drifted out. Her thoughts easily embraced the idea of her sisters, if captured, remaining alive, and her mother, too, but stumbled against the notion that they would be condemned to live an Indian life. Condemned? Her thoughts bumped uncomfortably into the image of her father, Morgan, and her brother, Laurence—that is, her stepfather, Morgan, and her stepbrother, Laurence, child of Morgan’s first marriage to an Iroquois woman.

Laurence had lived with them since Sarah was a baby, but he had left the Maryland farm already thirteen years ago. Sarah had always been in awe of the remarkable Laurence Harris, who was fifteen years her senior, and she had always been angry at anyone who might have called him half-breed behind his back.

At the same time, she had always been…well, not ashamed of his Indian heritage and the life that Morgan had lived before he had married her mother, but maybe rather confused by it. Or alienated by their background, which had so little in common with hers, and conflicted with hers. Their background was a complication in her life, another strike against her, although few people had ever dared refer to her own background or the disadvantages it had brought her. She had sometimes felt like a stranger in her own country, in her own family. And she had been there first—before Morgan or Laurence or her bratty half sisters!

“You said that even your father had a rifle. What did you mean by that?”

Sarah’s tangled musings were cut short. “Only that he’s a peaceable man and wouldn’t shoot at another person.”

She waited for the retort, “Not even at an Indian?” But it didn’t come. Instead Powell said, “All right, then. One wagon remains back at the original site and one body. Two more are here, five bodies, minus two women. The other six wagons—”

“Seven,” she corrected. “We were ten in all.”

Powell paused, then said, “I must have miscounted the tracks. In any case, the other wagons dispersed more to the north than the west. What I don’t know is how many warriors descended on your wagon train and how many were spread out looking for me in other parts of the territory. Covered wagons move a lot slower than horses, so in order to get away, the men in those wagons must have killed some of their attackers. I can’t be sure of the number, of course, because those bodies would have been long since returned to their villages by their tribesmen to be given a proper burial.”

“We don’t know that all of the seven other wagons escaped in the end, do we?”

“No, but they made it at least two or three miles, which is a rough estimate of the distance I could reckon from the wagon site.”

“So which way do we go now?”

He pointed in the northwesterly direction they would travel for the night. “It will be slow going to put the complete puzzle together, but with luck we’ll have it solved in the next day or two.”

“Speaking of proper burials, do you think we should do something about—” She broke off and gestured vaguely about her.

He shook his head. “No good reason to advertise that anyone has been through this territory, which is what we’d be doing if we buried the bodies but didn’t dispose of the wagon wrecks.”

She saw the wisdom in that.

“And we don’t have any shovels.”

“True enough,” she agreed. “Then you might wish to choose a pair of trousers that fits you better.”

Powell nodded. When he began to walk around the bodies, sizing them up for the best fit, she looked away from the scene and out over the darkened infinity stretching before her, trying to keep fearsome thoughts at bay. She asked quietly, “Do you think we should take another pair of trousers, just in case?”

He didn’t immediately respond to that, which made her think he hadn’t heard her, but when he came up behind her several minutes later, he said, “I’d like to, but I don’t want to have to dispose of another body.”

She turned and saw that he was fully dressed. White shirt, torn and bloodied over the left breast. Trousers that fit. Leather suspenders. A pair of boots laced together and slung over his shoulder. She glanced around and saw the body that had been stripped down to long Johns, the arrow still sticking straight up from the heart.

“I see what you mean,” she said. “We can hardly leave him out in the open, can we?”

“I’m thinking of dragging him into the wagon. If any Sioux pass by here and bother to inspect the wagon, they might think he got caught sleeping. We’ll leave the other bodies the way they are. As much as their boot laces would be useful to us, I won’t risk taking them.”

Together they dragged the stripped-down body into the nearest wagon and dressed it in the ill-fitting trousers Powell had cast off along with the Widower Reynolds’s suspenders. When she was climbing out again, her eye was attracted by a flash of moonlight caught in some small object that was lodged under the wheel of the other wagon. When she bent down to inspect it, she was delighted to discover a new-fangled tiltedged razor.

She held up the miraculous object. “Look, Mr. Powell. I have found a tool perhaps even more useful than my scissors. Why, I’m sure you could put this to use as a fine weapon.”

Powell approached her and ran his hand over his chin and neck. “I think it’ll make a better razor than weapon, and I can certainly use that.”

Annoyed, once again, by the way he seemed to have put her in the wrong, she handed him the precious object, saying pleasantly, “How sorry I am, Mr. Powell, that I didn’t discover a comb and a brush beneath the wheel, since we are apparently not in dire need of weapons. It seems that I am not to be credited with any good ideas—not that I am expecting a thank-you!”

He had the grace to smile, and the harsh lines of his face were transformed into a surprisingly attractive arrangement. She dismissed this unexpected effect as a trick of the moonlight.

“Your excellent find of the razor, Miss Harris, will be useful in a variety of ways, and allow me to compliment you on your suggestion that I choose a better-fitting pair of trousers. It was, perhaps, your first good and useful idea,” he said with a slight bow, “but I am confident that it will not be your last.”

“It was my second,” she corrected. “Remember that I had the idea to bring you the first pair of trousers last night, although I suppose you’ll only say now that in taking the Widower Reynolds’s clothing, I have left evidence that white folk have come through the area.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything of the kind, Miss Harris,” he said. He picked up the petticoat sack, tied it around the boots hanging over his shoulder so that the ends of the cloth were balanced front and back, and struck out in the direction that he had earlier indicated they would take for the night.

Sarah had no choice but to follow him.

After what seemed to be several miles of walking, they came upon what Powell identified as the tracks from several of the fleeing wagons of the day before. They strained to find signs of wreckage or dead bodies but saw nothing. They were inclined to take it as a good sign.

They followed the tracks, although they had no assurance that the ruts had been made by her family’s wagon. The moon rose. They walked. The moon traversed the sky. They walked. And walked until she could feel every step through her soles to the muscles of her calves and thighs and back. To take her mind off her aches and hunger and thirst, she fixed her thoughts on an image of Morgan Harris confronting his Sioux attackers without raising his rifle to them. In her vision the Widower Reynolds fell to the ground. So did the Kelly brothers. Mr. Clark and Jack, too. But Morgan remained standing.