Felicia Andrews Page 12

  Mine, she thought as he lay drained on her chest; for whatever happens, this bastard is mine.

  But as soon as the vulgarity had made itself known, she frowned, turning her head so he would not see it. She had meant to say "man." And it was too late to change it.

  BOOK TWO

  Demon

  TEN

  The palomino was a magnificent beast, sleek and well groomed, with a searing white mane and tail that only served to deepen the luxurious golden tan of its muscled hide. It stepped proudly, almost arrogantly, across the sloping crest of the mountain, picking its way carefully through a maze of crumbled rock and wind-stunted shrubs with a familiarity that bordered on disdain. Its bridle was touched at headstall and cheek strap with circlets of silver upon which had been painstakingly engraved the symbols of Four Aces-the cards themselves, a soaring golden eagle with talons extended, a cougar perched on a spit of boulder, and a towering Douglas fir. Each of the disks had been placed in leather to prevent them from clinking as the horse turned its head, but their polished faces caught lances of the sun and cast them fiercely back into the sky.

  There was no saddle. The animal, called Wind, had never had anything more on its back than a carefully folded and softened blanket . . . and Amanda.

  She rode with the ease that marked a subtle and powerful relationship between horse and rider, and she seldom had to do more than twitch a knee or whisper to send Wind in the proper direction. This relationship allowed her to pay close attention to the land she rode over, seeing things that most others missed as they traveled beside her.

  It was one of the things that had lent credence to the label "mountainwitch," a name that had been given to her first by her Shoshone son, Alexander.

  Today, however, she rode alone.

  And when Wind reached the granite apron that signaled the beginning of the landfall that sloped steeply away into the valley, he slowed and stopped. Amanda slipped from his back, then, and dropped the reins over his head. She brushed a hand along his flank as she walked to the edge, sighed, and sat on a lightning-seared mount that had once been a massive black rock. She wore a wide-brimmed, low-crowned tan hat with a turquoise band, a loose-fitting deerskin blouse emblazoned with stylized figures of deer and stooping hawks, buckskin trousers that were tucked into knee-high deerskin boots fringed and comfortably well-worn. Her hair was massed in a single braid that hung down her spine, and she pulled it over one shoulder to stroke it absently while she stared virtually blindly at the view.

  Home. Four Aces.

  And yet she had had to flee the house, the people, and come up here before the sun had reached its midpoint. It was not that she was restless, she knew, nor was she dissatisfied with the way things were running as July faded into August.

  But she had been unable to speak without snapping at anyone, and when her cook, Fae Willard, practically chased her from the kitchen with a five-pound skillet, she decided it was time to take her troubles to the sky. To the mountain.

  So much had happened in the month since she'd left San Francisco that should not have touched her, and did, that she was growing increasingly confused. First Coreville received the news a week late that James Garfield had been shot by some madman who, it was being said, was angry simply because he had been passed over for some government job or other. No one could pronounce the man's name, much less spell it, and Amos Trowbridge, the wiry and hot-tempered editor of the Goreville Tribune had a field day railing about the foreigners the government was letting into the country.

  The fact that he himself had been born in Egham, England, was conveniently forgotten for the moment. There were specters, of course, of Lincoln and Booth, but few, if any, dared make a comparison between the two, totally dissimilar Presidents.

  On virtually the same day, July 11th, she had received a letter from Trevor. It was short, almost impersonal, stating merely that he expected to be in Denver sometime in early August and would "take it kindly" if she would agree to receive him at the ranch once his business there was done. Not a single mention of their last night overlooking the Pacific, not a hint of love. It might as well have been sent by a cousin, not lover, she'd thought bitterly; but she had stopped just short of burning it in the stove.

  And then, only yesterday, Doug Mitchell had ridden out to the ranch. Tall , his black hair and deep-color skin attesting to his Shawnee background, his broad chest and constantly narrowed dark eyes daring anyone to make him out to be anything more than what he was-a man whose job happened to consist of wearing a badge. The fact that he was an Indian, and in former Indian territory not far from the massacre at the Little Big Horn, made little difference to most of Goreville; and those to whom his presence was annoying or uncomfortable soon found simple and swift excuses to leave. For all its faults, and for all the grief that had accompanied its founding and struggle to survive in a hostile environment, Goreville was, to Amanda's way of thinking, remarkably color-blind.

  And for that she was more grateful than most.

  She had met him at the gate in the fence that surrounded the main house's lawn. She'd been waiting for a message from Carl Davis about rumors of rustlers working at the ranch's far reaches and had no time to retreat to the house without appearing as though she were running from him.

  As she knew she would be if she were given the chance.

  He stayed on his pinto pony, his hat pushed back on his head. He'd nodded once, and she smiled at him.

  "Back from the wilds," he said, his lips twisted in a sardonic grin.

  "I survived."

  He nodded toward the house. "Still there. Alex does a fine job."

  ''I'm proud of him, yes, if that's what you mean. " And immediately she'd spoken she wished she could have taken the haughty tone from her voice. But Mitchell did that to her. His manner, his diffidence . . . the way he had tempted h.er into thinking she had a future with him left her more frustrated than she cared to admit. She had hoped . . . she had prayed she would be able to cleanse her system of him with the trip to California, but as soon as she'd seen him riding up the dusty road, her heart had paused and her mind had blanked out with an overlying image of Trevor bending down to kiss her.

  She hated Mitchell, then, and despite herself, had been barely civil.

  "Got a telegram today," he said, reaching into his shirt and pulling out a damp, wrinkled sheet of yellow paper.

  She took it from him without comment, wondering what in hell could be so important that he'd ridden all the way out here just to hand it to her. But when she looked at him for some kind of explanation, she was startled to see fleeting glimpses of pain crossing his face. She frowned, looked at the paper, and read it.

  "God," she whispered. "God, they'll kill him."

  It was Sitting Bull. The stubborn leader of the combined nations against Custer had returned from his self-imposed exile in Canada and had turned himself over to the army in Dakota.

  "My God, Doug, they'll just wait for an excuse, and they'll kill him . "

  "Some folks in town are celebrating. They think the wars are over. " His smile was grim. "Someone should tell the Apache, then."

  Each of them had then looked away, not speaking, feeling instead a blood bond that she had not realized was so powerful. She did not condone the Sioux chiefs actions during the Plains Wars the previous decade, the killing of women and children who had done the Indian no wrong save follow the men who took first and asked questions later, but neither did she hold them at fault for wanting to keep what their gods and the United States government had told them was theirs. And when gold had been found in the Black Hills, only the most stubborn failed to see the handwriting on the wall: Sitting Bull, Black Kettle, Crazy Horse, and others.

  She had wept when she'd heard of Custer's defeat, because she knew that even the Sioux and Chevenne understood that the victory was only a hollow one, the end inevitable.

  And now the medicine man was back, the chief who had been broken by a sprawling nation's disinterest was in the clu
tches of the army.

  "I heard he wanted to come home to die," Doug said after clearing his throat. "He's a fool. But he knows where he has to die."

  He had touched his hand to the brim of his hat, · then, and had wheeled the pinto around to leave. She raised a hand to stop him, dropped it when he did not look back. Then she looked at the paper in her hands and tore it to shreds to give it to the wind.

  * * *

  The valley was broad and checkered by alternating stretches of heavy woodland and grazing land. Directly below her was Four Aces; further east, the Circle B; and beyond that a handful of smaller farms and ranches whose land spilled over the southern hills into the flatland where, in the hazy distance, she could see the slash of railroad tracks that curved inward to meet the sprawl of Coreville. The size of it all never failed to stir her, and despite the man-made inroads into the country nothing here seemed much out of place. All of it belonged. The men who depended on the land to enable them to survive knew what they were doing as they farmed, culled lumber, raised cattle and horses, and here and there searched for gold and oil. They knew what the limitations were, and they knew that the land could, at any time, rise against them and destroy them.

  Goodness, Amanda, she thought then, you're feeling awfully humble today.

  She smiled at herself, snatched up a stone, and tossed it over the edge of the bluff. But she understood immediately that the power she had sensed contained in the sea was really no different than the power that surged over the mountains into her valley. Different forms, perhaps, but the same source.

  Wind snuffled behind her, a hoof pawing impatiently at the rocky ground. He did not enjoy the laborious climb to this, her place. And he did not like her to stay here for very long. She knew it, and she fought it as long as she could before, sighing and kicking at the dirt, she rose with her hands on her hips and watched impassively as a single angry black cloud towered over the horizon, a stark and threatening intruder in a sky sharply blue. Like a bad-tempered grandfather, the cloud, she knew, would stalk after a few moments across the flatland south toward Colorado. It would bring no rain here; it would not even kick a gust into the wind.

  The palomino snorted, then, and tossed its head impatiently.

  "All right," she said. "Take it easy, take it easy. " She rubbed the horse's nose thoughtfully, lay a palm between its eyes, and pressed her cheek against his warm, pulsing flesh. "Tell me what to do, Wind, " she whispered with a half smile. ''I'm not seeing any more ghosts, but I don't like walking in the dark when the sun is still out."

  Fae Willard stood at the kitchen door and stared out over the broad dusty lawn toward the corral and stables. Her husband Bert, the ranch's carpenter, stood beside her with a plane in one hand, a hammer in the other. He had been making repairs on the roof when she'd called him down for lunch; and now, having eaten, he was stalling.

  "She out there?" he asked, pointing with the hammer toward the bald low peak in the distance.

  Fae nodded. "Went out this mornin'. "

  "That there letter have anythin' to do with it?"

  She shrugged her bony shoulders, her hands drying themselves on a coarse, food-stained apron. "Better she take a good look at the sheriff these days."

  Bert grinned. "You ain't givin' up, are ya?"

  She whirled around and punched him hard on the arm. He laughed and ducked away from another swing, leaping off the kitchen stoop and heading for the ladder propped against the outside wall. Fae watched him scramble up out of sight, then turned around and went back inside. It wasn't, she told herself as she busied herself with the makings for the evening's dinner, that she didn't like this man, Eagleton. She had never met him and knew only what Mrs. Munroe told her about him. But she had a feeling, a strong one, that her mistress had been more taken by the lure of the city than by the lure of the man, and as yet she was not aware of it. Fae did not want her hurt. No one on the ranch did.

  But, she thought as she slapped a fist into a mound of gray dough, it was none of her business what Mrs. Munroe did with her life. None at all. She had her own troubles, by God, and she didn't need to add any more.

  The sheriffs office was small, dim now since the front shutters were partially closed against the glare of the afternoon sun, and Doug Mitchell sat behind his battered desk with his feet propped into a bottom drawer. There was no one in the cells behind him, no one at the smaller desk on the fur side of the room where his deputy would normally be. Today, however, Cole Anders had ridden to a small farm just south of town, on the other side of the tracks. A report had come in from one of the hands the farmer's small herd of milk cows was being attacked, and Doug wanted to be sure there was no human agency involved.

  With hands laced behind his head, then, he leaned back against the wall and let his eyelids close halfway.

  Milk cows. Drunks from the Silver Palace and the Wooden Dollar. A stabbing or two when someone's cowpoke got out of hand. Petty thievery. Minor assaults.

  It was not, he thought, exactly the kind of excitement he had once seen in Wichita and St. Louis. But it suited his temperament just fine. Anything that moved too quickly bothered him; anything that popped up in front of him without a reasonable explanation was likely to be worried like an old dog with an older bone until some sort of solution satisfied him. In that respect Coreville was perfect for him. The only decent community within a radius of sixty or seventy miles enabled him to build a reputation that did half his work for him. Not a reputation of fast draws and ruthless justice but one of fairness and implacability. The few strangers who rode through were quickly and quietly informed that their sheriff was an Indian and if they knew what was good for them, they wouldn't notice it. It worked ninety percent of the time; and the other ten percent served as reminders to the townspeople of what he could do if he were riled.

  Nevertheless there were still puzzles.

  Carla Menoz was one of them.

  She claimed she was half Mexican, half Apache, that her parents had been murdered during a peasant uprising near Mexico City and she had fled into the United States through Texas, working her way slowly north until she'd arrived in Wyoming. Right now she was a waitress at a small, relatively clean restaurant several doors down from his own office. But in his talks with her he knew that there was ambition hidden deep within that full figure and half-mocking smile. She had obviously had enough of struggling for one lifetime and was looking to find herself someone who would make living immeasurably easier.

  She had, then, a rather mixed reputation. Most of the women did not like her, or the way she flaunted her physical assets without apparent shame; and most of the men didn't know whether she was truly urging them into her bed behind the restaurant or was simply providing them with a little harmless flirtation. Whore. Innocent. Too old for her age, or not old enough-it all depended on who was doing the talking.

  Doug, on the other hand, found her fascinating. And tempting. And since he had returned from Four Aces and the blatant rebuff Amanda had thrown at him, he was determined to learn which of Carla's many facets were bluffs and which were real.

  He smiled to himself, suddenly imagining the look on Amanda's face when she heard that he was seeing Carla. He wondered if she would care, how angry she would be, what she would do then to let him know finally exactly how she felt about him. It was frustrating, this silence that had fallen between them, just when it seemed as if all would be well. He did not kid himself about his own share of the blame, but neither did he believe that Amanda really understood how he felt, how much pride was involved.

  And just when he had decided that pride was something he could deal with rationally, she had returned from San Francisco, and the word spread through town that she had found herself a man.

  The door swung open slowly. He dropped his feet to the floor and sat up, a slow smile creasing his face when Carla walked in with a tray of sweetmeats in her hands.

  "I thought you might be hungry," she said, · her voice without a trace of accent, deep and sm
oky like a smoldering fire. Her flowered red skirt was full and deeply pleated, her blouse ruffled at the puffed sleeves and neckline. Normally she would push her sleeves high on her shoulders and keep the bodice close to her neck. Today, however, the sleeves were down to expose her shoulders, and when she placed the tray on his desk, he could see the shadows swirling around her breasts.

  "You read my mind," he said and dropped a silver dollar on the tray after removing his lunch. ''I'll get my change later. "

  Her smile was blinding white. "I know you will, Sheriff . You're an honest man . "

  He looked away from her quickly, suddenly wondering if he wasn't getting himself into something he would be unable to handle. She laughed quietly and stood on the threshold, looked back over her shoulder, and deliberately, slowly, rearranged her blouse.