He tried to stop the picture that rose in his mind, but it stuck with him until his groin ached.
His belly told him it was suppertime long before he rode up to the chuck wagon. And when he did, Curly strode out to meet him, a scowl on his usually placid face.
“Ya gotta come deal with somethin’ that’s come up.”
“Yeah? What ‘something’?”
“You’ll see, boss. Damndest thing I ever saw.” He jerked his chin over his shoulder. “Over there.”
Chapter Nine
Zach rode up to camp and immediately saw an Indian child staring at the herd as it bedded down for the night. He drew rein and approached at a walk.
The bedraggled boy stood his ground, clutching the hand of a younger child, a girl from the look of her longish black hair and feathers. They were both wet and looked cold and hungry. The boy faced Zach and gestured with his hands.
“Cherry!” Zach called across to the wrangler. “Come on over here. You understand any of this kid’s lingo?”
Cherry listened to the boy for a few minutes and grunted. “Not a word, boss.” He tried a few words in Cherokee and was met with a blank stare. The wrangler shook his head.
Zach dismounted and slowly walked forward. The boy saluted. Saluted? This youngster must have had some dealings with soldiers. Zach returned the salute, then knelt down so they’d be at eye level.
“Come on, kid, say something I can understand.”
Words poured out of the boy’s mouth, but none of them made any sense to him until the little girl rubbed her hand across her belly. They were hungry!
“Roberto, give these two kids some tortillas and maybe some bacon.” He stood up and watched the boy carefully fold the warm tortillas, stuff them in the pocket of his ragged trousers and then point behind him, toward the mountains. He wanted to take the food back to his tribe.
“Skip, cut out a cow, a gentle one that’s nobody’s momma. Tie on a lead rope.”
“Sure, boss. Right away.”
While they waited, Roberto offered more tortillas and some cold chunks of leftover beef. When Skip rode up with the cow, Zach took the rope, laid it in the boy’s hand and pointed toward the mountains. The kid saluted and said some words, then he stepped forward and touched Zach’s fingers.
Zach resisted an impulse to reach out and ruffle the boy’s black hair. The little girl smiled shyly, and then both children turned away and started across the meadow toward the forest, leading the cow. At the edge of the trees, the boy and his sister turned and waved.
Zach watched until he could no longer see them. When he turned back to the chuck wagon he saw Dusty standing over by the campfire, her eyes shiny with tears.
“Who are they?” she asked.
“Indian kids. Don’t know what tribe.”
“What are they doing way out here? Where is their home?”
He snorted. “Home? Probably don’t have a home anymore since our army ran them off their lands.”
“What? Why would they do that?”
He stared at her. “You kidding? You mean you don’t know how we—us white men, that is—want everything we see, even what belongs to other people, for ourselves? Where ya been all your life, Dusty?”
Something struck her as odd about the scene. Two small children alone in this wilderness just didn’t seem right; her nose for news smelled more of a story. Later, Cherry took her aside and explained.
“Probably an Indian camp off somewheres in one of them woodsy glades we came past. Mebbe the boy and his sister are orphans. Mebbe their father was killed in some raid.” The wrangler went on to explain that Indian tribes made war on each other as often as white soldiers attacked. Alex wrote every word down in her notebook.
But she couldn’t stop thinking about those two Indian children.
* * *
It rained again the next day. By midmorning it was clearing up, but Alex found her horse struggling through what seemed like acres of sticky, hock-deep mud. The thick mess slowed the horse and made her hesitate to dismount for any reason, even to relieve herself behind a bush.
She prayed that Roberto’s chuck wagon was parked on a rise with a minimum amount of the chocolate-colored muck to slog through. The thought of crawling underneath the bulky wagon and rolling out her bedroll on top of this sticky, oozy ground made her shudder.
She glanced at the lowing herd. The men riding alongside were moving slowly, and so were the steers. Even Old Blue, the bell steer, plodded slowly through the sea of mud, and the horses... Oh, those poor beasts. She felt sorry for any animal getting splashed and splattered with this viscous black goo. It was thick as molasses. She prayed it would rain again and wash off all that sticky stuff.
Oh, no, maybe she didn’t. It would make more mud. It left her hat brim dripping water down her neck and her canvas jacket feeling steamy and crawly. What a truly miserable life this was! How did the cowhands stand it? One day they baked under a broiling sun and twenty-four hours later hail spit out of the sky and they had to struggle against rivers of raging water.
She marveled at these men. They simply ducked their heads, shrugged their jackets up around their ears and kept riding. And then at night they’d sing and tell more tall tales around the campfire. She couldn’t imagine how they kept their spirits up.
She drew in a huge breath and squinted her eyes to see through the mist. She could hardly wait to be warm and dry again, to reach Winnemucca and the railroad train that would take her back to Chicago and civilization.
Her horse sloshed into a brown, rain-swollen creek and slipped and scrambled up the opposite bank. She urged him on up a little lupine-covered rise and lifted her head to scan the horizon. Far off in the hazy distance she spied the chuck wagon and a blazing fire. Roberto already had the iron pot rack erected over the flames and a blackened Dutch oven dangling over it.
Her heart lifted. Bless that wonderful man! She kicked her heels into the sorrel’s side and rode straight toward him.
By the time the herd arrived in the relatively dry meadow of rain-flattened, yellow daisylike flowers, nobody felt much like talking, not even Roberto, who usually muttered to himself in Spanish as he bustled around his chuck wagon. Everyone was bone-tired and shivering with the cold.
Alex dismounted and turned the sorrel over to Cherry to rub down and feed along with the rest of the remuda. The air smelled of sagebrush.
The chilly wind had made her stiff, but she moved around the warm campfire to the cook’s side under the gray canvas tarpaulin. “Roberto, would you like some help?” Some nights she peeled potatoes or tried her hand at cutting out circles of biscuit dough, but tonight was different. Roberto took one look at her and clapped both hands to his dusky cheeks in mock horror.
“Ay de mi, señorita! No, I don’t need no help. You look like...muy cansada. Pobrecita.”
Alex deduced that pobrecita must mean some kind of chicken. Her feathers must look woefully bedraggled. She thought about what Mama would have said about her appearance and winced.
Roberto waved her away toward the campfire. Her boots squished at every step, and the minute she settled herself on a flat rock near the fire, she pulled them off, along with her socks, and flexed her half-frozen toes before the heat.
She hated being cold! In the wintertime back in Chicago, she left Mrs. Beekin’s Boardinghouse for Young Ladies only when she had to walk the two blocks to the newspaper office. When it rained she carried a big black umbrella. When it snowed she bundled up in her long wool coat with its cozy fur hood. She wasn’t used to being outdoors for hours and hours in miserable weather, and today had most definitely been miserable!
She felt sorry for whoever Zach would assign to night-herding. The rain had stopped, but the wind was sharp. Curly and rangy, work-hardened Skip tramped up, stomping their boots and beating their gloved hands together. Curly glanced down at her bare feet.
“Betcha never figured it’d be like winter on a summer trail drive, didja, Miss Alex?”
“No, I did not,” she admitted. “Sit down and get warm.”
“No need. We’re used to it.” He practically puffed out his chest, and Alex suppressed a grin.
“Why, I remember once—”
“Aw, dry up, Curly,” Skip grumbled. “You’re just showin’ off. Me, I’m colder’n a witch’s—”
“Whoa! You talk nice around the lady, or the boss’ll have your ba—I mean, your hide nailed to the chuck wagon.”
Alex perked up at that. Zach had ordered his cowhands to be polite around her? That made her pause. She thought he wanted her to be as uncomfortable as possible on this cattle drive to teach her a lesson. He’d made it plain as pudding he hadn’t wanted her along. Or maybe he didn’t like women?
Or maybe he just didn’t like her?
But he protected you during that dust storm. And he pulled you out of the river and dried your clothes by the fire. And he is protecting you from that lout Cassidy.
The truth was she couldn’t puzzle out Mr. Zach Strickland. One minute he was gruff and unforgiving, and then he thoughtfully stood guard with his back turned while she bathed in the creek and gave two hungry Indian children a cow. He ordered her around like a servant, but then he made sure she was protected at night.
The other hands straggled in and stood with their backsides to the fire, complaining about the weather until Roberto banged his spoon around in the iron triangle to signal that supper was ready.