Big Wind Double Mouth made many promises he knew he would not keep; it would not be five days, but two years, before Geronimo would see his family again. And it would take a quarter century of imprisonment before the Apaches who surrendered themselves in good faith to the word of the Great White Father would be freed from the concentration camps to which he had already made plans to exile them.
So Hart learned soon enough that the proud people of the mountains and desert were to be imprisoned in Florida and Alabama, where the government devoutly hoped the heat, the damp, the inactivity, and the sorrow of betrayal would work upon them to decimate their number. They didn't know then that their beloved children would be taken from them and sent to Pennsylvania, where a third of them would die... and they didn't know that of the fifteen hundred Apaches Hart watched set forth into exile on that sad day in 1886, only one hundred and fifty-eight would someday be freed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
For that day would be twenty-seven years after the moment of Geronimo's surrender.
Chapter 99
Hart's Indian odyssey was over—his wife and children, gone forever, his blood brotherhood with Geronimo but a throbbing memory... for the Fates had decreed that the remainder of his journey be conducted in the white man's world.
To say that his heart was broken would do a staggering injustice to his sorrow. He brooded endlessly about his sweet Destarte and their courageous son; he searched the army records for news of his daughter and begged for information from the soldiers who knew of the raid. Had she died at the hands of the ones who'd killed her mother? Or had she been stolen, because of the blue eyes and Caucasian features that might have made her seem a white child? Hart found no record of her existence, but tracked down every rumor until there were simply no more roads to follow. In his nightmares, he saw them running from the blue-coats, pierced with bullets, fading forever into a world that had vanished into nothingness... sometimes, in order to stay sane, he told himself Destarte's death had saved her from the ignominy of living as a white man's "squaw" in a world that could never know her value. But in truth, he saw no good at all in what had been done to her and to him, only sadness and unutterable waste.
The blue-coats, angry at this white man who had fought so valiantly beside his red brothers, tried to hold Hart prisoner of war; but he had no intention of letting the bastards who'd killed his family wreak any more havoc in his life, so he wired Rut, informing him of his plight, and Canfield pulled potent strings in Washington to have him freed. He offered one last time to act as intermediary for the captured Apaches, but as his sympathies clearly lay with the People, Hart was given a wide berth by the troopers.
Gokhlaya and Hart took their final leave of each other at Bowie Station, as the great war shaman was about to be shipped out to Florida. The army band played "Auld Lang Syne," a tongue-in-cheek send-off to a hated adversary, and Hart was grateful his brother did not understand the irony. He was dressed in buck- skins, for he couldn't yet bring himself to don the white man's clothes; his wounds were too fresh, and his anger at his own kind too unrelenting. He knew as he saw the vanquished Apache leader, standing in chains on the train platform, that even if they ever met again, his friend would no longer be the great warrior he had known as brother, but only a man brought low by lesser men.
Gokhlaya's hands and feet were shackled; his stern jaw and slash of mouth were set in the ancient pattern of endurance the Apaches knew so well, but his eyes were another matter—in them Hart saw no semblance of surrender.
"I have done what I had to do, my brother," the Apache said as Hart drew near him on the platform, crowded with soldiers. The white man saw that flies were buzzing around the Indian's bloody wrists, rubbed raw by his shackles, yet Gokhlaya paid them no mind. Hart, angered by the needless cruelty, stopped and picked up a handful of sand from the side of the track and dribbled it over the ugly wounds to dispel the insects. This should have been women's work, but Gokhlaya smiled a little at Hart's efforts, for he knew the man meant it as a tribute, one warrior serving another.
"So Firehair, the Witness, is Apache at the last," he said.
"It grieves me that I cannot help you, my friend." Hart spoke in the Apache tongue to avoid the greedy ears of those nearby. "My heart is heavy for your suffering and for the injustice that has been done to the People. AH I can do is tell your story to the world."
"No one will listen."
"Then I will paint it, so they must see," Hart replied, angry and heartsick.
Gokhlaya's face was a mask of resignation to fate's arbitrary whims. "They will see only what they wish to see," he replied, and both men knew he spoke the truth.
Hart clasped the much smaller man in a warrior's embrace, and the milling soldiers snickered as they came to take away their prisoner. A guard took hold of each of Gokhlaya's arms and jerked him roughly out of Hart's reach; had the Indian not had Apache balance to steady him, he would have been knocked off his feet.
"Show respect for the prisoner!" a voice thundered somewhere behind Hart; he turned and saw that it was Tom Horn who'd spoken, the scout who'd breached the security of the Southern
Stronghold to trap the Apaches. The men grumbled at the rebuke, for they privately hated Horn and the turncoat Apaches who had done their work for them. The soldiers nailed shut the doors and windows of the train in the 110-degree desert heat, with no water inside, so many died before they reached their exile, but Gokhlaya/Geronimo survived for many, many summers.
Hart stayed on at Fort Bowie for nearly a month and attempted to reorient himself to the white man's world. It was terribly difficult to fit in with his own kind whom he had ample reason to think of as the enemy, but he needed the time to search the army records for clues about his missing daughter. The luxuries of running water, a clean bed, a meal of more than meager war rations... these remnants from the past both pleased and repelled him. Firehair, EE Matthew Hart McAllister, belonged in neither world, and the depth of his mourning made him give the soldiers a wide berth, for any one of them could have been the bastard who'd killed the ones he loved.
If he was ever to render on canvas all he knew of the Apaches, Hart saw he must find a place in which to work. He had no money, no clothes, and no clear sense of where he might call home; but he had pictures in his head, the like of which had never yet been painted. Somewhere far away, in a long-abandoned world, there was a fortune, a brother, and an old friend named Fancy. There seemed no way in which to reconcile his two realities... at least, not until he'd fulfilled his promise to Geronimo.
Hart went to the local newspaper and told them he would work as an engraver until he'd saved enough money to get to Denver; there was no need for them to know who he'd been, merely who he was now. He stayed two and a half years in Arizona, working like one possessed of a sacred mission, and trying to make an emotional and physical reentry into the world of the whites. He earned his keep, he sketched or painted what he'd seen and remembered; the dross was burned away by his passion and his pain, until only the memories and the man remained. He never asked Rut for the money that belonged to him, for he remembered Canfield's words too well: "I am precluded by my money from ever having the necessary requisite of genius," the man had said. "I can never be hungry." Hart knew he must stay hungry to paint what was in his soul; with every stroke of the brush he bore witness.
An artist knows in his heart when he has put truth on canvas; as Hart McAllister worked, he knew these were the paintings that would make him famous. There was anguish and expiation in the knowledge, for he'd painted the Apaches as they truly were, these friends of Usen, the Great Spirit... as men and women and children who loved and laughed and cried, who worked and learned, who lived by a code so ancient and so full of integrity that the most righteous white man would be hard-pressed to match its dictates or its decencies. He painted them as they had been in the beginning, before the yellowlegs had stolen the land they shared with the Great Spirit, when Grandfather Rock and Grandmother Earth were young and Usen had ne
wly flung the stars aloft—and he had followed their descent into exile, at the hands of unrelenting forces they could neither comprehend nor hold back.
It was the spring of 1889 before Hart McAllister boarded the train for Leadville, like Lazarus returning from the dead. He was a vastly different man from the one who had departed there, eight long years before.
Chapter 100
Allison Murdock rocked the little girl in her arms. She seldom let this gift from heaven out of her arms at all, she loved her too much and her arms had been empty too long. Eleven years of marriage and a barren womb had made her an object of pity among her friends; even her family tended to avert their eyes from her pain, as each new child was born to her sisters and brothers.
She stared at the shining jet-black hair and wondered if it could be curled with rags when the baby grew older. Straight as a die, it looked Indian, but curled, perhaps... she wondered, as she had a thousand times since her husband had sent the child, what the little girl's name had been and whom she'd been stolen from. John said the child couldn't be Apache because of the strange blue-violet eyes, but Allison wasn't at all sure. The little girl almost never cried; she'd heard the Indians taught their babies that by holding their tiny noses if they fussed. The child was outstandingly beautiful, but she wasn't exactly Caucasian; something exotic shaped her face and tinged her skin a pale rosy honey. What did it matter? Sally was hers now, and always would be.
Allison ached with the love she felt for her long-awaited daughter. There was no need for anyone in this world or the next ever to know the truth of where she'd come from.
Chapter 101
Madigan listened to Chance's newest tale of woe about finances with outward impassiveness. He needed to end the game that had ceased to amuse him.
"I'm sorry to have to say this to you, Chance, but you're not as good a risk as you once were."
Chance didn't have to feign surprise. "What the hell are you talking about, Jason? Are you forgetting I'm one of the richest men in Colorado?"
Jason smiled, an expression meant for a slow child. "On a certain level, that's true, Chance, but the fact is you're cash poor and that's a real problem. You own a lot of properties on paper, but they're not readily accessible. Those out-of-the-country investments, the smaller mines that haven't paid off, they've all taken a considerable toll on your liquidity." He cleared his throat. "I hate to speak of this, Chance, but I'm afraid the time has come when as a friend I just don't have a choice but to talk plainly. You gamble too heavily, you spend money like a drunken sailor, and you've speculated in a lot of areas where the risks were too damned high...." He let the thought hang, for he could see he'd provoked just the effect on Chance's temper he had hoped for. McAllister, like most men, was least rational when angry.
"Look, Jason. Nearly every investment I've made in the last five years was at your suggestion."
"And most of them are excellent, long term. But you have to have cash to keep going in the meantime, Chance, and you don't seem to be able to hold on to any."
Chance said nothing, although the color rose in his face and the hint of a scowl would have gotten further if he hadn't been such a good cardplayer. "If you think all these investments you've recommended to me are so good, how would you feel about advancing me money against them?"
Madigan played poker, too. He covered his elation with a cough and a thoughtful expression. "I might be willing to mortgage some of your properties. Your shares in the Fancy Penny, for instance." Jason knew it was a foolish whimsy, but he'd always hated Chance's ownership of the only mine that bore Fancy's name.
"No," Chance responded quickly. "Not that."
"That leaves the Denver house and the other mining properties more readily available than the foreign enterprises, Chance—besides, you've already borrowed against some of the foreign investments and I can't recall now which ones." He drummed his fingers on the desktop for emphasis. "If you're looking for advice, my friend, I'd say to sell the Denver mansion and move back to Leadville. I don't think you really have any other choice under the circumstances, and frankly, I don't think Fancy gives a damn about Denver."
Chance stood his ground without fidgeting and finally nodded grudging acquiescence. Madigan admired his adversary's ability to appear calm in dire straits; it had always been a thorn in his side that he rather liked the man despite himself.
"Look here, Chance. If you'll put the mansion on the market, I'll advance you the money for it, here and now, just to help you out of a bind. I'll draw up the papers and we can sign them over at Judge Krasky's tomorrow. You know he's opened a law office here in Denver as well as in Leadville."
Chance looked up questioningly. "We've never gotten anyone other than Henderson involved in our dealings before."
"Times are more precarious now... all this talk of silver versus gold is forcing me to secure my holdings more carefully. You of all people know how unpredictable those boys in Washington are. They could damned well pull the rug out from under all of us. There's a real battle heating up in Congress, Chance, and some pretty powerful fortunes are backing gold. I'm not as bullish on silver as I once was, I'm afraid, and Harrison is only good for four years, or I miss my bet."
Chance didn't really want to talk silver; he had what he'd come for, but the tone of the conversation made him queasy. His immediate financial problems would be solved by the sale of the house, but now he'd have to face the hurdle of finding a way to tell Fancy she'd have to give up her home. Chance finished the conversation with Jason as hastily as civility would allow and left his office.
The house of cards will soon be down around you, Madigan thought as he stood at the window and watched the man whose wife he coveted saunter down the street. Jason watched the wornen's heads turn as the good-looking man walked by, tipping his hat to them, with the flourish of one who knows himself to be handsome and desirable. But Jason was no longer concerned. Rich, handsome men were dazzling to women—poor ones were a drug on the market. He himself could never set any woman's heart aflutter with good looks, but he had something far more seductive and lasting. He had power... and the knowledge of how to wield it... and the money to make it permanent. These were the ultimate seductions, for men and women alike.
Fancy told Chance she couldn't be gladder to be leaving Denver for good; it was so obviously what he needed her to say. He must have been in terrible need of money to have sold the house; she'd suspected as much for quite some time. The stores where she shopped had begun to be less encouraging of her extravagances... a sure sign the bills were not being paid on time, and several of Denver's nastier wives had dropped snide hints that had puzzled her. Now the explanation was apparent.
Fancy swiped at her tears angrily and struggled for control after Chance left the room. She thought she'd been brave and loving toward him, in the face of her disappointment. Her acting ability had saved her in every crisis of her life; she almost smiled to herself at the thought, but she felt too awful.
What terrible arrogance made him make the same mistakes over and over? He'd rationalized about tight money and Jason's advice not being reliable. Had he forgotten entirely that she knew what business was all about, and that she damned well knew Jason Madigan?
Fancy blew her nose, dried her eyes, and stood up shakily. She struggled with two instincts: one, to delve deeper and find out the full extent of their troubles; the other, to let Chance take the consequences of his follies and carry the burden unassisted. What difference would it make, anyway, if she found out everything... she couldn't stop him from making blunders now any more than she ever could. It was probably best to accept his silly story and go back to Leadville like a dutiful wife—in truth, there was a great deal about going back to Leadville that appealed to her. She would be less lonely there... she'd have Jewel again, and Wu. In fact, she could take an active role in her own businesses, too, once she no longer was plagued by the social idiocies of Denver's rich. Life in Leadville would be far less pressured and, if she could go back
to work, far more satisfying. It might be better for the children too. The extravagance of Denver was making them arrogant.
Maybe Jewel would know what to do about the fact that Chance made love to her so rarely these days. Could it be that a deflated ego became a metaphor for other deflations... the thought made her sad for her husband.
You don't stop loving someone because he's a fool in some things, Fancy told herself with a sigh. You don't even stop loving a man because he risks your safety, she thought, but without much conviction. You simply say he gambled and lost. I knew he was a gambler... whose the responsibility, then? The gambler or the one who loved the gambler?
Fancy walked to the window of the grandest house in Denver. Assess the possibilities, she told herself forcefully, striving to think. Don't let this undo you. He always pulls the chestnuts out of the fire at the last instant. At least, he has so far...
Three gardeners in a covey were busy pruning at the border of the broad lawn—something about them put her in mind of Beau Rivage, and the thought nearly undid her.
Oh, Chance, my dear old love... she said somewhere deep in her own heart. Why couldn't you be what I needed you to be?
The furniture movers carted the last of the armoires down the long front steps of the mansion, grumbling as they went.
Fancy stood on the entablature, gripping the stone balustrade with both hands, her knuckles white with strain, her heart pounding in her throat. This is not important to me, she told herself sternly. I can damned well live without Denver, and the gossiping, backbiting wives of the stupid Sacred Thirty-six can just go stuff themselves. Leadville has sweeter memories for me and better friends.