Night Song

  His “frankness” was a slap in her face. She knew he’d married her only out of obligation, but to hear him air his displeasure so emotionlessly had not been something she’d anticipated. She felt at once angry and humiliated. “So what are you proposing?”

  “I’m working on the arrangements now. I plan on rejoining my unit after the first of the year, but I’ll see to your welfare before I leave.”

  He wouldn’t be staying. She’d known it all along, so why did she feel hurt hearing him confirm it? “Will you be returning?” She could be just as distant.

  “Probably.”

  And he looked at her in such a way that she didn’t dare ask when. She debated whether to tell him of her own plans and decided she would. “I’m still planning on going to California.”

  “No, you’re not,” came the quiet contradiction. “You can either move to Fort Davis, Texas, with me, or you can stay here. Those are your options.”

  “But—”

  “No buts.”

  “Then I’ll get this farcical marriage annulled!”

  “Not while I’m alive.”

  Frustrated, Cara wondered what it would take to get through to him. “Then why do this?”

  “Pure selfishness.”

  Cara frowned in bewilderment.

  “Pure selfishness,” he restated.

  “What’s to keep me here once you go running back to play soldier?”

  His gaze hardened. “The fact that I’m the best damn tracker you’ll ever meet. I’ll find you no matter where, no matter what.”

  “But why? You don’t want me!”

  “Ah, but I do. That’s where the selfish part comes in. I do want you, Mrs. Jefferson, and I’m going to keep you.”

  His cold voice and eyes brought on an uncontrollable shiver, and now she thought she understood. “Is this your way of punishing me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Deadly.”

  “You’d condemn yourself to a loveless marriage?” she asked quietly.

  He didn’t answer.

  Instead, he redirected the conversation. “So decide. Are you living here or at Fort Davis?”

  “You can’t possibly want an answer now. At least let me think about it before—”

  “Now. Here or Davis?”

  Cara realized she truly did not know this man. “Here,” she stated in dignified surrender. “I’ll stay here.” As her husband, he had every right to make her follow him back to Texas. He could do whatever he wanted with her future, and no one would care. Besides, she didn’t know anyone in Texas.

  “Were you intending ever to tell me about the baby, Cara?”

  The question caught her off-guard. “Truthfully? I really don’t know.”

  His jaw tightened. “Didn’t you think I’d want to know? Had a right to know?”

  How could she explain to him all the turmoil she’d felt about the baby?

  “Didn’t you think I’d want to know, had a right to know was my question, Mrs. Jefferson.”

  “No, I didn’t,” she snapped, temper rising in response to his tone. “I said no ties, no commitments remember?” She then lowered her voice. “The pregnancy was my problem, not yours.”

  He reminded himself she’d been a virgin and had no other relationship to use as a standard against which to measure what had gone on between them. She’d no way of knowing that the care and tenderness he’d shown her in bed meant something. “Tell me about Miles Sutton and that night you fell.”

  “Sheriff Polk says it’s Miles’s word against mine since there weren’t any witnesses.”

  Chase had heard the story by way of the sheriff, but needed to hear her version. He coaxed her to tell it.

  When she finished, he was so quiet and still, Cara gave him a hesitant look over her shoulder.

  He turned his gaze on her slowly, evaluating, assessing. His attention went to the scar above her eyebrow, a parting gift from the shoe of Miles’s horse. It had taken six of Sophie’s best stitches to close the gash; three inches lower and she would have lost an eye. He touched the needlework lightly. When it healed, a crescent would remain.

  “I’m going to kill him, you know.”

  She trembled in response to that deadly soft statement. Then, as he brushed his fingertip briefly across her lower lip, she closed her eyes. Cara wondered if this was what it meant to die for love. Because she was dying inside. He was a man literally taking away her life, and all she could think about was how good it would feel to have him hold her while she cried out her grief over losing their child.

  Somberly, Chase placed a fleeting kiss on the injury. The scent and warmth of her skin were dizzying.

  “I would have wanted to know about the baby, Cara. I never would have let you face something like that alone.”

  Tears slid down her cheeks.

  “Never . . .” he repeated.

  She looked at him then. For one long moment she saw in his eyes the man he’d been last summer. The concern rang true, the returning gaze familiar. The pony soldier she’d given her heart to let himself be glimpsed only briefly, then retreated swiftly behind a mask.

  Chapter 11

  Even though Miles lay beaten on the ground, Chase still hadn’t vented all of his rage. He dragged the bloody-faced man to his feet and prepared to let fly another punch, only to have the blow stopped in midair by the restraining hand of someone standing beside him in the darkness. “That’s enough, Chase. You’ll hang if you kill him.”

  Chase turned to vent his anger on the newcomer but stopped short upon recognizing an old friend. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Like you, I’m here to pay a social call on Mr. Sutton. Pretty popular man.”

  Chase turned Miles loose to slump to the ground like sacked meal. Breathing hard, the cold air turning his breath to frost, Chase took a moment to collect himself. His right hand ached across the knuckles. He’d hit Miles so many times that his skin had cracked. He flexed the injured hand a few times, testing to see if he’d broken a bone. Tomorrow he’d know for sure. Right now it just hurt like hell.

  Dreamer of Eagles looked at his friend’s bloodied knuckles and said, “Just like you to count coup on my prey.”

  An exhausted Chase swung his attention to the Indian he’d first encountered on the streets of Philadelphia nearly twenty years before. “You’ve been after this bastard, too?”

  “For a few months now. He and a group of men ambushed a stage carrying some medicine we were expecting at Pine Ridge.”

  “When?”

  “This past summer.”

  “Are you sure it was him? The army’s been looking for some bandits all summer, too, but I can’t believe this one’s involved.” He spoke contemptuously. “He doesn’t have the balls to take on a man, only a woman.”

  Dreamer asked quietly, “Is that why you’re out here? Because of a woman?”

  “Yes. He injured my wife. She lost our baby.”

  “She’s recovering?”

  Chase nodded affirmation.

  Dreamer and Chase had not communicated for more than half a year. “News shared by old friends should never be sad. I’m sorry, Chase. However, I must ask, is this woman deaf and blind to want an old army dog like you?”

  Chase gave a bitter chuckle. “No, and right now she doesn’t want me at all.” In answer to the query posed by Dreamer’s raised eyebrow, he offered, “I’ll explain it some other time. Right now things are just too complicated.”

  “Chase Jefferson married. Amazing.”

  Chase steered the conversation back to the ambushed stage. “Why would Sutton and his friends ambush a stage carrying medicine?”

  “Because it also carried gold.”

  Incredulous, Chase stared at him. “Gold? Wait a minute, start over.”

  When Dreamer finished his tale, Chase realized the puzzle the banks and the army had been trying to put together all summer now had a few more pieces. Dreamer had se
en Miles Sutton with the men who’d robbed the stage. But how had they gotten hold of the route itinerary in the first place? Had Virginia been in on the plot? Chase tended to discount that theory; he couldn’t imagine Virginia robbing herself. Her outrage over the missing funds had seemed genuine when he’d spoken to her last August. Well, well, well, he thought, looking down at the prone and pummeled Miles. He then looked back to Dreamer. “So you saw them rob the coach?”

  “Yes. You see, the first shipment of vaccine we requested never arrived. When the agent told us the stage carrying it had been ambushed and that the bureau back East had arranged for more, I asked if he could find out the route it would be taking.”

  “Did he?” Chase began to feel the coldness of the wind swirling around him now that he no longer had the fire of vengeance to keep him warm. He looked around for the coat he had discarded upon challenging Sutton and found it lying on the ground nearby. Teeth chattering, he pulled it on.

  Dreamer, comfortable in the buffalo robe given to him by his wife, smiled at Chase’s attempt to warm himself.

  “What are you smiling about?”

  “Watching you trying to get warm in something made from a sheep.”

  When Chase told him to get on with his story, Dreamer did. The seriousness returned to his voice as he continued. “The agent balked at first—he didn’t want to give us the route information. Your government is always better at solving Indian problems than Indians,” he pointed out sarcastically, “but children were dying, old people were dying, and we refused to let the sickness run its course, as he suggested.”

  Chase shook his head sadly. The bitterness in the brave’s tone was truly justified. The government’s treatment of the native population had destroyed an entire way of life. Dreamer’s generation would probably be the last true Sioux. “Did he eventually give in?”

  “Only after much arguing. We took the information about the route and sent braves to position themselves near possible ambush spots along the way. We were lucky. My riding party came across them down near the Kansas-Colorado border.”

  “And you saw Sutton there?”

  “I didn’t know his name at the time, but, yes, he was there. In fact, he divided the strongboxes among the others as if he were the head man.”

  Chase looked down at Sutton, then back to the Indian painted for war. “Too bad that agent didn’t go along with you,” Chase said solemnly. The agent’s testimony could have given the U.S. marshal more than enough information to make sure Miles Sutton woke up in a jail cell in the morning. But because Dreamer’s eyewitness testimony would be viewed skeptically in a court of law, if viewed at all, due to his race, Chase could do nothing now except wire Colonel Grierson about Dreamer’s account and wait.

  “I’ll wire Fort Davis and see if Colonel Grierson has any ideas,” Chase said. “I’d love to see this yellow belly rot in territorial prison, but we’re going to need more proof to put him there. I just know it.”

  Chase felt no remorse for the beating he’d given Sutton; territorial prison wouldn’t even begin to compensate for the grief Sutton had caused. The rage began rising all over again. Dreamer obviously sensed it because he took Chase firmly by the arm.

  “Go home. Go home to this deaf and blind woman. Sutton won’t cheat his fate.”

  “She’s not deaf and blind.”

  “She has to be,” Dreamer said with twinkling black eyes. “In the spring I will return to see for myself.”

  The two men faced each other in the winter cold, both wishing for more time to renew the friendship forged in the wilds of civilized Philadelphia, but the snows would begin any day now, and Dreamer’s ride back to Pine Ridge in Dakota Territory would be a long one.

  “Did you ever think twenty years ago about where we’d be today?” Chase asked, thinking back on the past.

  “Frankly, I expected us to be dead already, killed by some outraged father or husband.”

  Chase had to smile at that. They’d been the educated, runaway Negro and the educated Sioux, paraded around the fundraising circuit as examples of why money should be raised for Indian and Negro relief. Two tall handsome exotics dressed in formal wear, drawn into bedrooms at every opportunity by dazzled society hostesses and their daughters. “We were lucky.”

  They smiled the smile of shared experiences, and then Chase held out his hand. Dreamer grasped it firmly.

  “We’ll talk next time,” Dreamer promised.

  Chase nodded. “Say hello to She Who Sings and to your sons.”

  “I will. You work on untangling the knots with the woman who is deaf and blind. You’re getting to be an old man. You need sons.”

  Chase grinned, shaking his head. Dreamer and his outrageous wit were always good for the soul. “I’m going home.”

  “Take care, my friend. I’ll stay awhile and wait for Mr. Sutton to wake up. I have a few words of wisdom to impart.”

  “Fine with me.”

  Chase started walking away, only to be stopped by Dreamer calling, “What is your blind woman’s name?”

  “Cara Lee,” Chase called back. “Cara Lee.”

  Cara raised up sleepily when he entered the room carrying her breakfast tray. For a brief moment she wondered if he could tell she’d spent most of the night crying over their parting.

  He could.

  When he set the tray down she noticed the bandage on his hand. He’d obviously injured it sometime between last night and this morning. She looked up at him questioningly.

  “Nothing for you to be concerned about. Eat. When you’re done, get dressed to go out. Something I want you to see.”

  She knew from his manner not to ask for any more information, but where were they going?

  He was now at the door. He stopped and turned back, saying, “And wear your drawers, Mrs. Jefferson. It’s cold outside.”

  Cara didn’t dwell on his cutting remark. Outside! She was going outside!

  It was a cold gray November day, and one would think that most people would be far more concerned with getting out of the biting wind than standing around watching the newly married Jeffersons, but the schoolteacher and her soldier were news. Speculation about the two was fueling gossip around dinner tables and the cracker barrels of general stores all over the Valley.

  Chase sat Cara carefully in the buggy beneath big blankets before rounding the back of the vehicle to get in on the driver’s side. He spotted the curious, staring townspeople watching from the walks and store entrances, but he ignored them and climbed in. He picked up the reins and set the team in motion.

  A small knot of people were standing in front of the charred and blackened remains of Miles Sutton’s Liberian Lady. Cara stared in surprise as the buggy rolled by. “When did this happen?”

  “Last night,” Chase answered, keeping the horse on pace. “Sutton wasn’t lucky enough to be inside, however.”

  “Does anyone know how it happened?” Cara asked.

  “Sheriff’s still investigating.”

  Chase said no more about it, though he had his own theory on what had happened to Miles’s saloon.

  A few miles outside of town Chase brought the buggy to a halt.

  Confused, Cara stuck her head past the awning and looked around. “Why’d you stop?”

  “Because we’re here.”

  He set the brake and jumped down.

  Puzzled, she placed her gloved hand in his, and he helped her step out.

  They were in front of the Pennyman place. Parker Pennyman had built the house for his wife, Victoria, during the first spring of the settlement of Henry Adams. When he died of pneumonia two winters back, Victoria and the three children moved East. The house now belonged to Virginia’s bank.

  “I figured you’d want a place of your own.”

  Cara turned to him and stared.

  “You go on in,” he told her. “I want to put the buggy and the team in the barn.”

  Speechless, Cara walked up the plank steps and onto the wide, welcoming front po
rch.

  Inside, she took a slow look around. It was a fairly large place for the plains, with a big parlor and an ample kitchen. The stone wall that ran the length of the front rooms held large fireplaces for the kitchen and the sitting room.

  Cara was only slightly winded after climbing the staircase to the upper floor. She found three well-laid-out rooms, and what looked to be a partially finished bathroom—what a luxury.

  Victoria Pennyman had left nearly all the furnishings, evidently not wanting to undertake the enormous logistics and expenses necessary to ship everything back East, so it all stayed except for a few treasured pieces. As a result there were beds and dressers, rough-hewn chairs and tables. With a little work Cara could make it a home again.

  Cara could hear Chase yelling from downstairs.

  “Up here,” she yelled back. She walked down the short hall and stopped at the top of the stairs. An obviously angry Chase stood at the base.

  “What in the hell are you doing? Are you supposed to be climbing stairs?”

  Cara didn’t know whether to be touched by his concern or angry because he was angry. She decided it would not do to have a fight their first day in their first home. “I’m fine. I just wanted to see what was up here.”

  “And do you approve?”

  She sensed he was asking about more than the house. Gun shy, she left it alone. “You truly want to do this?”

  Chase felt his mask slip in response to her sincerity. Her intensity made him answer in kind. “Yes.”

  “Then I approve,” she confirmed softly.

  “Well, then, come back down here before you hurt yourself. I want you to see the rest.”

  Smiling, she complied.

  With Asa’s help Chase readied the house in only two weeks. The windmill and some of the windows needed repair, and snakes and other varmints had to be cleared from the cellar and beneath the front and back porches, but the place proved to be in sound condition despite being vacant for so long.

  A little over a week after they moved in, Cara was in the upstairs bedroom reading by a lantern on the stand next to the bed, when the front door slammed so hard the house seemed to shudder. He was back.