This Savage Heart (18 page)

“I was not on watch then,” Derek growled, “and we can do without your interference, Elisa.”

“I’ll go after him,” Thomas offered quickly. “I’ll find him, Arnhardt, I swear I will.”

“You damn well better,” Derek told him, turning away. “I’ll scout that blasted pass alone today, but don’t you come back to camp without him.”

“I’ll go with you.” Julie started away to dress, but Derek caught her and spun her around.

“You aren’t going anywhere!”

“He’s my brother,” she cried, and didn’t wilt before his glower. “You can’t stop me.”

He was suddenly cold. “Yes, I can, Julie. It’s part of my job. You may not leave this camp. I’ve enough troubles without you causing more.” He went for his horse.

Julie turned to go, but Elisa’s fingers clamped down hard on her shoulder.

“Don’t you dare look at me with that self-righteous face, Julie Marshall. I was only doing what you’ve been doing, and you should know how wonderful it is,” she added with an arrogant toss of her head.

Julie retorted hotly, “I wouldn’t think it was wonderful if I were married to another man, Elisa. I would think it was shameful—and so should you.”

She walked away, wishing she had not said even that much. She kept on going, pretending not to hear as Elisa screamed, “You’ll wish you’d never said that, Julie! I’ll see you pay for that! You’ll wish you’d never said it!”

Chapter Sixteen

They rolled over the prairie, steadily jarred by deep-baked ruts. The air was thick and still, permeated by the tension that held every man, woman, and child old enough to comprehend the precarious pass just ahead.

Derek had scouted among the rocks and inclines and found no sign of Indians, but he knew this did not mean they were safe.
The Indians knew the terrain much better than he did and if they didn’t want to be seen, they wouldn’t be.

Thomas Carrigan had not returned. When the wagons pulled out, he had been gone over twenty-four hours.

Julie guided her team, felt the firm leather in her hand through her thick gloves. Derek hadn’t liked it, but there was no available man, so she’d had to take the reins.

She and Derek had had one brief, fierce argument before pulling out.

“I don’t see how we can leave without Thomas and Myles!” she’d said.

He had no patience left. “I told you and everybody else, we can’t wait. We’ve just enough supplies to see us to Tucson. Thomas knows the way. They can catch up with us. There’s no choice, Julie.” He didn’t voice his fears that Myles had gotten too big a start and was farther away than they’d figured.

The pass loomed ahead, and soon proved to be awesome and frightening all by itself, without the anxiety that the Apache might be hiding there. Shadows played against the high walls of jutting rocks. Scrubs grew among the crags and stones. The wind whistled, bouncing from side to side like the songs of mournful ghosts singing their laments.

The first wagon entered the pass and disappeared. The second, with Jasper Jenkins’s wife, Esma, at the reins, rolled inside. Julie was third, and she pulled back on her team to slow them down. The path ahead was littered with fallen rocks.

“I do not like the smell of it.”

Julie whipped around quickly to stare at Sujen.

“I do not like the smell of it,” she repeated quietly. “It smells…of death.”

Julie shivered. “Please, Sujen. It’s going to take most of the day to get through here, and it’s spooky enough without you saying how spooky it is.”

Onward they plodded, horses and oxen moving cautiously through the narrow, twisting, winding walls. A shroud of silence prevailed. They did not stop for lunch, or even to water the animals. That would have to wait. It had been decreed that once they began the journey through the pass, they would stop for nothing until they’d reached the other side.

The day wore on. Julie winced with pain each time the wheels jounced over a rock, because the reins were pulled tighter, aggravating the blisters on her hands.

Derek rode beside her for a brief spell. She had seen him that tense only once before, when the
Ariane
was running the Yankee blockade out of Wilmington. His face was tight, set, eyes narrowed, all his senses keyed to the slightest hint that anything was amiss. She knew he needed Thomas more than ever but stifled the impulse to say so, even as an attempt at comfort.

It was Sujen who finally broke the silence to say again, “It smells of death. I smell death many times and never forget—”

Her voice was drowned out by a loud, tortured scream. Stunned, Julie jerked the reins suddenly, stopping the horses. The scream echoed, bouncing from one rocky wall to another, filling the pass until it sounded like an entire choir shrieking in rounds.

As Julie sat there, frozen, the screaming woman came running into view from around the bend just ahead. It was Violet Callahan, waving her arms, her face a mask of horror. Her husband, Daughtry, was right behind her, his face white.

Violet Callahan’s wail reached them. “It’s Mr. Carrigan…dead!”

Julie scrambled from the wagon and ran toward the bend.

“Don’t go in there, Miss Julie,” someone cried.

Julie didn’t hear. She stumbled, righted herself, and was just rounding the bend when Derek caught her. He gripped her arms tightly, refusing to let her move. Straining, she twisted her body and looked beyond him. What she saw stunned her with horror.

Thomas was hanging upside down, a rope tight around his ankles, attached to a rock or a tree out of sight. His arms hung loosely over his head, and his body swayed slowly from side to side in the moaning wind. His mouth hung open. His eyes were wide open but unseeing. The agony of his final moments before death was reflected in those sightless eyes.

Arrows, thick with dried blood, riddled his bare back.

The flesh upon what had once been his warm, living chest had been peeled and hung in ragged strips of pulp. His heart was visible through the strips of gore.

Derek held her around her waist until she had finished vomiting, then led her back to her wagon.

“Take the reins, Sujen,” Derek commanded. “As soon as I get everyone back to their wagons, we’re getting out of here.”

“No.” Julie straightened, snatching the reins from Sujen. “I can do it.” Later, there would be time for grieving, but right now there was a job to be done. She would not yield to either weakness or terror.

As Derek prepared to address the others, who were gathering around Julie’s wagon, exchanging frightened murmurs, Elisa dashed to the other side of the Callahan wagon, out of Derek’s reach, and darted toward the bend. When she looked up and saw Thomas’s body, she simply fainted.

Derek got her and tossed her into the back of the Callahan wagon. Then, with swift movements, he scrambled thirty feet up the rocky wall and caught the rope that was holding Thomas’s ankles. With a quick flash of his knife, the rope was cut. Gently, he lowered the body to the arms of the three men who had run over to help. Then he roared, “Get the hell out of here as fast as possible, and when you hit the open spaces, just keep going till I catch up to lead you into a circle.”

Julie watched as he mounted his horse and waved the first wagon on, urging the Callahans to follow. He looked at Julie anxiously. “Are you okay?”

“Of course.” Her voice was high, unnatural, but she was fighting terror. Casting a fearful glance behind her, she wished she could see the Bascomb wagon, wished she had little Darrell with her.

Beside her, Sujen whispered tightly, “Chiricahua. I see the body. I know it is work of Chiricahua—and Cochise.”

Julie turned away from Sujen, watching as the wagon ahead moved. Julie popped her reins and the wheels jounced up and down on the rocks. She and Sujen looked upward at the endless walls of rock, wondering if they would ever leave the pass.

The first wagon plunged out of the pass, then the second, and then Julie’s. Dust from so many madly turning wheels masked the sinking sun in a cloak of deep burnt orange. One wagon veered from the line, heading north to a mountain ridge that appeared close but was at least ten miles away. Derek rode out after the wagon and turned them back, cursing them for their hysteria.

“You’ve got to keep your heads,” he bellowed. “Join the others, make a tight circle. It’s our only hope.”

A sharp zinging sound knifed through the air. Bobby Ray Jeeter’s arms were flung skyward. He screamed, an arrow sinking squarely between his shoulder blades. He fell to the ground, his neck snapping as he landed. Derek charged over, realized that he was dead, and rode on, screaming for the others to make a circle. Bobby Ray’s wife, Susanna, reined up her team and was scrambling from the wagon, shrieking Bobby Ray’s name over and over. Derek scooped her up in one arm and grabbed the harness of her lead horses, pulling them into a gallop.

He led the wagons into a circle, and when they were tightly together, the men quickly began to unharness the horses and pull them inside the circle. The women pulled out boxes of ammunition, yelling for the younger children to get out of the wagons and take cover behind barrels and cartons, which the older children were lowering from the wagons.

Julie left Sujen to the task of the horses while she ran into the wagon for weapons. There were five Henry .44 rifles, confiscated from Arlo’s cache, and two pistols, Starr Double-Action Army .44s.

Derek’s face appeared at the rear of the wagon. “You remember how to use the guns?” he asked, cursing himself for not asking before.

“I don’t think I’ll have any problem with the rifles, but these pistols—”

“Save them for close range. Get the rifles loaded and then come down here.” He grabbed the ammunition box and pulled it toward her, then disappeared.

Julie joined the other women, who were positioned behind a square barrier made of boxes and barrels, in the middle of the circle. Derek had told them their job would be to keep the rifles loaded. As each man emptied his, he would toss it down to them and take a loaded one.

Julie hurried to take Myles’s baby from Louella, who was juggling him as well as her own infant. Derek roared, “Hand the small babies over to the older children. You women keep busy loading those rifles. That’s all that matters!”

Colby Bascomb rushed up to give his wife some guns, and she asked him if he thought the Indians would attack the whole train. Colby nodded. “The captain said he spotted two Indians watching us from above the pass. They could have massacred us right there. I don’t know why they didn’t.”

“Sujen know why.”

Everyone within hearing turned to stare at Sujen.

She declared softly, “Cochise delights in torturing his victims. I have heard this said many times. He watches us as we make ready. He is confident he will overpower us, so he takes his time.”

Esther screamed indignantly, “We might have known you’d take their side! Why don’t you go join your murdering friends? It’s probably you they’re after, anyway.”

Sujen blinked, then understood what she was saying. “Sujen not Chiricahua. They maybe take me for slave and not kill, but they do not come to get me. How could they know I am here?”

“You…you probably sent up smoke signals,” Esther blustered, knowing she sounded ridiculous.

“Esther, please,” Julie murmured. “We’ve other things to do.”

The bickering ended as Derek joined the group, looking calm and unruffled. Only Julie, who knew him so well, could discern the hint of fear in those dark eyes. He glanced briefly, silently, at the dazed Elisa, his brow knit in vexation, then beckoned to Julie. She walked away with him, so the others couldn’t hear them.

The distant mountain range was shadowed in the purple of early evening. It looked like a painting, but it wasn’t a painting, this desert wilderness. It was an arena of death.

“It’s bad,” Derek told her, his gaze sweeping their pitiful little compound where the men were taking up their positions, lying down on their bellies behind barrels and anything else they could find. “It’s almost sundown. They won’t attack at night. They have some idea about their gods not being able to find their spirits if they’re killed in the dark. Dawn will be another story.”

Julie leaned against him. “So we’re just waiting to die?” she asked bitterly.

He gave her a fierce shake. “Don’t talk like that. Don’t give up on me. We’re going to fight. Do you hear?”

She nodded. Of course. She would be brave—for him, for Darrell, for herself, but her courage felt like a very small thing.

“Right now I need your help. I want you to see if you can do anything with Susanna Jeeter. Bobby Ray was killed and she saw it happen. Give her a drink of whiskey and see if you can calm her down. There’s no time for tears, not now.”

No time for tears.
The words echoed in her mind. No, there would be no time for crying in the hours to come…but there would be time later. “What about Myles?” she forced herself to ask, fearing the answer. “Is there any chance he’s alive?”

“A very good chance. He must have left early in the night and had several hours’ start on Thomas. There’s no telling where he is, but I’ve a feeling he’s safe.” Then he looked down at her, eyes hungrily, lovingly devouring her face. “I’m not going to let you die. Or the baby. I’m getting the two of you out of here somehow.”