Chapter 15 #3
“Maybe in that fight, you will be a warrior again,” Ice Raven said, and smiled suddenly.
“I remember being boys. There were so many buffalo then. They roamed as far as we could see, and we never thought that there might not be enough forever. But there is only one way now. The White way. President Grant told Red Cloud that survival for us would be victory. So some of us will survive. And some of us will fight and die.”
“What is your choice?”
“I’ve not yet made my choice. Where do you go from here, Cougar-in-the-Night?”
Sloan smiled. It was becoming stranger and stranger to hear his Sioux name. It sounded good. Seeing Ice Raven was good.
“I’m going back. I’ve learned what I came to discover.”
“I’ll ride with you for a way. I have done my duty to the people here, and now I must do my duty to myself.
I want to see my White cousin before I make my decisions.
Do you want the company of a full-blooded Sioux?
Perhaps your soldier friends will see you and shoot you down, thinking you are one of us. ”
“If we ride, just the two of us, it’s unlikely that we’ll be discovered.”
Ice Raven smiled. “Then, for just a while, perhaps we can turn back time.” He stood suddenly. “Let’s hunt a deer. I’ve not eaten much lately. Too many women and children to feed; too many dead, wounded, and dying warriors.”
Sloan rose as well. “Let’s hunt a deer,” he agreed.
“Well, it’s tomorrow,” Norah informed Sabrina.
“What?”
Engaged in keeping a journal, which she had begun to do since she’d discovered that Sloan wrote down events upon occasion, Sabrina was startled when Norah walked in without knocking and came to stand behind her chair.
“Tomorrow—our outing. Our picnic.”
“Picnic?” she said, frowning.
“Picnic! If the weather holds, it will be lovely. We’re just going to ride out to a really beautiful stream that’s about five miles away. We’ll spend the night with the water and the wildflowers…and head back the next day!”
“Spend the night out? Won’t that be dangerous?”
Norah shook her head. “Where is your spirit of adventure? We spend the night out when we travel to Mayfair or into some of the surrounding towns. Weil be well protected by the soldiers. Officer’s wives often accompany their menfolk on their first night out on a campaign. Camping is quite wonderful.”
Sabrina wasn’t so sure she agreed, but that wasn’t why she hesitated. “Norah…well, I’m not so sure I should go,” Sabrina said uneasily.
“Why not? Even Libbie will come.”
“Yes, but…” She hesitated. Sloan was far away. God alone knew when he would come back.
If.
She gave herself a vehement shake; she would not think in those terms. And yet, in the meantime…
She sat here, day after day. Waiting. Growing more and more restless. Even Libbie Custer was going.
“You must come!” Norah insisted. “Please! Please, say that you’ll come.”
“Well…”
“Weil have a wonderful time.”
“Sleeping in the woods?” she mused doubtfully. It didn’t sound terribly comfortable, and she’d been very tired lately. The harsh winter with its constantly changing temperature was sending numerous cases of influenza around the fort. She wondered if she was coming down with something.
“Sissy!” Norah teased her. “We’re adventuresses! We’re military women,” she reminded her gallantly.
Maybe it would be good to get out, away from the fort for a while. “Is…Marlene coming?” she asked.
“Why, hadn’t you heard? Marlene isn’t here.”
“Oh? Where did she go?”
“I’m not sure. It seems that she received some kind of a wire and left here for Gold Town.”
Naturally, for Sabrina, the concept of a picnic sounded a great deal more fun without Marlene. And she only allowed herself a moment’s pause, worrying that Marlene might have gone to Gold Town—because Sloan might have sent the wire.
Just because he didn’t seem to want her anymore....
Still, she needed to quit spending her days brooding and worrying.
“A picnic sounds wonderful,” she told Norah.
Sloan enjoyed spending time riding with Ice Raven.
They hunted deer.
They fished on the way, rode over ice on a few of the rivers, even though the daytime temperatures began to rise to fifty and sixty degrees.
Ice Raven rode with Sloan toward the fort, planning on swinging southward to reach Hawk’s property after they had ridden westward.
Sloan briefly considered riding the distance with Ice Raven, but he had to report back to Terry, and he considered it very important to authenticate the rumors they’d heard that it had been a Cheyenne camp—and not Crazy Horse’s—that had been attacked.
He was also anxious to return to the fort. And Sabrina.
All right, so she was taking her time coming to him.
He was obsessed with his wife, and he was not handling the obsession well.
She could, it seemed, quite easily keep her distance.
What had he expected? She’d been honest. She didn’t want to be married to him, and she didn’t want children.
She probably viewed his keeping his distance from her as a blessing.
In fact, she was probably happy as a damned lark.
She’d been charming lately—the very best of wives, cooking, mending, tending to their quarters.
Yet he’d been going crazy, sleeping beside her in such torment that it had been a relief to be sent out on the trail.
Well, now he’d been gone. And he thought that he was ready to go crazy from wanting her.
Yet in his very next thought, he reminded himself that he still didn’t want to spend his life forcing her to be with him.
He wanted her to smile at him the way she smiled at the soldiers she danced with; he wanted her to laugh with him the way she laughed with others.
He wanted her to look at him with her blue eyes shimmering the way that they could. He wanted…
To be wanted. And yet, he wanted a son as well, and it seemed an ironic jest from the powers that be that she should have conceived so quickly before their marriage, and failed to do so now as the months passed them by.
Of course, those nights when he lay in self-imposed celibacy didn’t help, but then again, he was determined that she should come to him.
Ice Raven, who knew Sabrina through Hawk and Skylar—and had seen her with Sloan at Mayfair before their trip to Scotland—was amused that the two had married.
Though Ice Raven refrained from saying so, Sloan knew his friend had surmised that there had to have been a reason for the marriage, and that would have been a child.
Ice Raven apparently realized that the child had been lost, because he spent part of the trip telling Sloan about friends who had suffered a similar loss and gone on to have many children.
Coming westward across the hills, Ice Raven and Sloan reined in together, seeing a cloud of vultures circling high overhead. They glanced at one another, then moved cautiously forward again, over the next rise.
The hill sloped gently downward to a trickling stream. Miners had recently worked the stream.
From a distance, Sloan and Ice Raven could see partially stripped bodies, the naked flesh very pink.
There were four of them, shot through with arrows, then formed into a line.
Sloan and Ice Raven rode down the hill to the bodies.
They dismounted and studied the scene of the carnage.
Flies buzzed around the slashed and disfigured bodies of three men.
The fourth body, left unmolested, was that of a woman of perhaps thirty. Her features were attractive, even in death. She had been a clean kill, an arrow through the heart.
Ice Raven wrenched out one of the arrows protruding from the chest of a dead man.
“Cheyenne,” he said after a moment. “This was done in retaliation. They might not have intended to kill the woman; she would have made a good captive. Perhaps she tried to fight them, which would have made sense. The Indian way is not to mutilate those we respect.”
Sloan felt a raw edge of pain and fear circling his heart. They were far too close to the fort and to the trails that led from Gold Town and to Hawk’s house. The woman’s death deeply disturbed him.
Ice Raven was looking at him. Sloan shook his head in disgust. “An overeager commander butchered peaceful Cheyenne—and these people have paid for it with their lives.”
“They shouldn’t have been searching for a living in the Black Hills,” Ice Raven said grimly.
Sloan didn’t argue. He strode to the miners’ ramshackle hut and found a spade. Ice Raven watched him dig graves for a moment, then went to the shack, found another spade, and returned to help him.
“Thanks,” Sloan said quietly.
Ice Raven dug, then paused, looking at him. “I don’t simply hate all that is White. I don’t condone murder, my friend. What happened at the camp was murder on a large scale. This is murder as well. Neither is right.”
Sloan nodded, and they finished their task quickly. Sloan was anxious to ride again.
Ice Raven said nothing, but Sloan was certain that his friend understood his hurry to return to the fort.
As they neared the fork in the. trail where they had intended to part company, they both reined in, aware of conversation, laughter, and commotion ahead of them on the trail. English was the language being spoken.
Ice Raven brought a finger to his lips, indicating to Sloan that he would slip into the foliage. Sloan nodded, frowning, motioning in turn to Ice Raven that he wanted to see what was going on before making himself known as well.
After dismounting, he inched through the foliage and paused in its thick cover. Ahead, on the banks of the stream, sat a number of soldiers—along with their women. Scanning the area quickly, Sloan decided that there were five soldiers and several women.
His wife among them.
Perhaps it was the length of his ride, the time he’d spent away. Perhaps it was simply that she had chosen to defy him so openly and completely.