Dreams Beneath Your Feet (23 page)

Just as he reminded himself that today was an important day to live, Julia said, “Coffee's ready.”

Two hours later, under a bright summer sun, the tipi was
packed onto lodge poles, the packhorses were laden with other gear, the riders mounted, and their horses prancing nervously.

Sam said, “Let's move out.”

 

T
HE TRAVEL WAS
pleasantly boring, and time spread softly across the days like soft butter. Sam couldn't remember feeling mellower. As captain he kept up the usual precautions. He himself rode lookout ahead. On the left and the right flanks Hannibal and Flat Dog. Beside Julia and the kids, on the gelding that had replaced her dead mare, Jay always carried his pistol. Sam smiled and wondered if the Hawaiian would ever learn to use it. The first few days they were passing the farms of the retired Hudson's Bay Frenchies and then the farms of the Methodists. When Esperanza or Azul, who was now fully healed, wanted to ride along with one of the lookouts, that was permitted.

In the evenings Sam encouraged Jay, Esperanza, and Azul to practice shooting the pistol. Hannibal, an exceptional shot, instructed them. In real Indian country, they wouldn't have dared make that kind of racket or waste the gunpowder.

When they crossed over to the valley of the Umpqua, the country got rougher, and Sam cut out the pistol practice. He couldn't help thinking about Jedediah and the brigade and the massacre here by Umpqua Indians. Sam had ridden all the way from the Great Salt Lake with those men, and nineteen of twenty-two died here. Sam missed being one of them because he left the outfit at Monterey to find his daughter, over Jedediah's objections.

Jedediah, the best of captains. He might have been the best of friends, but his God kept him righteous and solitary.

On the Rogue River Sam's mind turned away from the past and toward the future. He looked every day for the way through the mountains to the south, Siskiyou Pass. That marked California.

About noon one day he saw it. Esperanza was riding with him at that moment. “Go tell everyone that notch in the mountains is it, why don't you?”

His eyes and his thoughts were on California all that afternoon. Maybe that's why, when he stopped the outfit for the night's camp, he hadn't missed . . .

“Where's Esperanza?”

“Must be riding with Flat Dog or Hannibal,” said Julia.

“I'll go see,” said Azul. He sounded uneasy.

Sam nodded to him.

No point in riding out to Hannibal on the western flank, though—here came the Delaware at a lope on Brownie.

Azul headed for Flat Dog.

“I haven't seen her since midafternoon,” said Flat Dog. “We walked along awhile and talked and then she rode off into the bushes to pee. I supposed she'd gone back to the main outfit.”

Sam, Julia, Flat Dog. Hannibal and Jay. The boys. Shadows of suspicion swam in everyone's eyes.

“Let's go,” said Sam to Flat Dog.

“I'm coming,” said Jay.

“You?” said Sam. “Why?”

He hardly knew himself, or hardly admitted it. He just said, “I'm coming.”

Esperanza's two papas and a Hawaiian woman they thought was a man rode back fast along Flat Dog's trail on the northern flank. The summer sun poured light onto the world late into the evening. Having a warrior's memory for terrain, Flat Dog was able to point out the exact spot where Esperanza had dropped behind.

They followed Vermilion's tracks easily. Saw where the girl-woman had dismounted and where she had relieved herself.

A strange pair of moccasin prints treaded to that spot. Sam could almost hear the silence of the foot pads. He felt like he was falling into the bottom of a well.

Where Esperanza had fallen, the lush grass was still crushed, and anyone could see how her feet dragged over to where Vermilion had been tied. The strange moc prints—no need for silence now—led Vermilion away. Soon the tracks led to the top of a
little rise. Beyond that a foot-wide stream flowed. A hole was visible where a horse had been staked. And from there two sets of hoofprints led up the creek away from the river, to . . .

Where?

Two men shared the identical thought.

Where has my daughter been taken?

Jay provided the answer to a different question, a more important one. “See this break in the left edge of the hoof? Kind of a quarter-moon shape? That hoof is Warrior's. Left front.”

He looked hard into the eyes of one father and then the other.

“Kanaka Boy has her.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Y
OU'RE STAYING HERE
,” Sam rasped out. He could barely keep from shouting. Rojo slid behind his mother.

“I'm going. She's my daughter,” barked Flat Dog.

“Dammit!” Sam spun all the way around on his heels. “Dammit! You've got to stay here! You have a family to take of. A whole outfit.”

“You're captain here. You take care of it, you and Hannibal.” Sam turned away and looked up at the North Star. The distant light had no guidance for him now.

“This is your wife. These are your other children. Three of them.”

Julia reached up and pulled Flat Dog's hand. He sat down beside her.

“I'll be ready at first light,” he declared.

Sam whirled on him. “I'm ordering you to stay here.”

“You don't give me no goddamn orders.”

“I have to take care of her.”

“I did when you didn't.”

“God awmighty.”

Sam strode to the edge of the light from the dwindling fire. He stared into the darkness. Somewhere out there things were happening to his daughter. He refused to imagine them.

He turned to the whole crew around the fire. Calmly, he said, “I'm going alone. End of—”

“My husband,” said Julia, “I am going to ask you something. Stay with us.”

Husband looked into wife's eyes, searching.

“Take us to California. Your wife and these children beside me. I ask you. We need you.”

Flat Dog couldn't speak.

“Sam will do everything that can be done.”

Flat Dog dropped his head. “Goddamn,” he whispered. He squeezed Julia's hand. “Yes,” he said.

Sam had never felt so relieved. He wished he could leave right now.

“But
I'm
going.”

Sam couldn't believe the voice. He jerked his head toward Jay. “No way on earth,” he said.

“Yes, I will. The reason is simple. I know where Kanaka Boy is going. You don't.”

“Jay is right,” said Hannibal.

Sam looked at his friend like he was a traitor.

“A
ba'te
on a war mission. If that doesn't beat all.” Sam walked off. Time to give Paladin some water and cool himself off.

“You need to learn something,” called Jay.

He turned toward the man-woman in utter disgust.

Jay crossed his arms, grabbed the bottom edges of his deer hide shirt, and lifted it up to his neck. She held the shirt there for a long moment. Everyone saw, and her small breasts were worth showing off.

Sam took a long moment to recover speech. “A woman and a liar. Even worse.”

Lei played her trump card again. “I know where he's going.”

“She's right,” Hannibal said.

It took Sam a moment, staring at Lei, to wrap his mind around the word “she.”

“Something else. It isn't Esperanza he wants. It's me. He'll never stop until he gets me.”

Lei let that sit and then added in a simple tone, “So this time I'm going to kill him.”

 

 

 

A
T DAWN THE
outfit rode out toward that notch in the mountains. “We'll meet you in Monterey,” Sam told Flat Dog. “All three of us.”

When they were gone, Lei unhobbled her gelding and lifted her saddle onto his back.

“We better stay here,” Sam told her.

She gawked at him.

“The son of a bitch will be waiting for us.”

Lei put the horse back on some grass and wondered what to do. She sat cross-legged near the dead fire and started drawing flowers in the dust with a stick. She drew an elaborate pattern of stems, leaves, and blossoms.

Sam looked toward the low mountains in the east. “I got no question he's set an ambush for us.”

“Don't talk about it,” she said. “It makes my bowels crawl.”

She devoted herself to her drawing. She had brushed a circle clear several feet across. The flowers grew almost like living things.

Sam stood and stared off to the east. “This is gonna drive me crazy.”

“I know where he's going,” Lei said again, her eyes on her moving hand. “It won't be hard to find him. Could be hard to do something about him.”

“He's clever.”

“He likes to hurt people.”

Sam grabbed the Celt and started toward Paladin. “I better get us some fresh meat,” he said.

Lei looked directly at him. “Don't leave me alone,” she said.

“Don't . . . ?”

“How do you know he's not watching us right now?”

Sam fidgeted and sat down at her side. “He must have been watching us right along.”

“He knew where we were going. His buddies told him we were taking the herd to Oregon City. We made no secret that we were going straight on to California. There's only one trail.”

Sam got the willies.
Watching us right along.
Watching Esperanza. Seeing when she rode along with her mother or rode ahead with Papa Sam or on either flank. Watching when she led her pony to the river to drink, morning and evening. Watching when she peed. Watching very closely when she was alone. Figuring out when she would be alone. Waiting for the right place and the right time.

Boy could have killed her easily. Could have killed any of them. But that wasn't his point. He wanted to inflict pain, lots of pain. Torture, then kill.

“Clever bastard.”

Lei looked at Sam like, “What's up with you?”

“He's smart,” she said. “He's strong. He's wild as can be. Plus all the way crazy and all the way mean. Don't underestimate him.”

Sam took it in and then shut his mind off that track. He made himself watch Lei draw. He needed some time to get used to Lei instead of Jay. He needed some time to get used to the idea that she was not a man, boy, or
ba'te
but a woman.

“Listen,” she said. “I don't want you to treat me any different, now you know what I am.”

“I was just thinking about that.”

“We have a way we are around each other, you and me. You've pissed right in front of me. Carry on with that. You cuss, that's fine. Treat me like your sister.”

Sam got it. She was worried about sleeping next to a man who might want to touch her.

“You're an attractive woman,” he said in a kind tone. “I wish I'd known all along that you are a woman. But the way we are together is set. No trouble.”

“You sure about that?”

“Maybe not,” Sam said. “I'm uneasy about chasing a killer with a woman, any woman.”

“Watch me,” she joked. She pulled the pistol Hannibal had loaned her out of her belt. “I managed to hit a big, fat cottonwood from three paces the other day.”

Sam chuckled.

“That was using Hannibal's shoulder to rest my hand.”

She mock-aimed the pistol and said, “Bang!”

He squatted beside her and studied the drawing. It was beautiful, really, the way she made a stem open into a leaf, a leaf give birth to a blossom. The whole pattern looked like an opening up of itself, an emerging.

“I like to do these,” she said. “One of the few things about the desert where the camp is—the only thing, really—is that there are a lot of different-colored sands and soils. I gathered them. I would spend a whole day making a drawing like this and then fill it in with lots of colors.”

Like a Navajo sand painting,
Sam thought. He said, “Where is he headed, exactly?”

Without looking up, she said, “To his main camp on the Owyhee River near the mouth of the Little Owyhee.”

“What's the route?”

“We came across to trade whiskey at Coos Bay. Give me a minute to remember.”

She thought it out by sketching it very roughly in the dirt. “From here over to Tule Lake, about four days. Beyond the divide it's dry, but there's an old trail. Then around the south end of a big mountain range, drier. Can't make it without carrying water.

“Then the hard part—you cross the Black Rock Desert. You have to know the springs. That brings you to the Humboldt, another week. Up the river about three days, then straight north to the Owyhee. About three weeks altogether, traveling steady the way men travel, not families. Most of it is old trails. Just on the Black Rock Desert you have to know the springs.”

“Do you?”

“No way to forget. It's the driest place on earth. My tongue remembers.”

“You sure he's going to the main camp.”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“He wants to give Esperanza to the men.” She looked directly into his eyes. “To use.”

Neither of them spoke.

“I saw a Digger woman die from being used that way, all those men in a row.”

Sam huffed a hot wind out of his gullet. He twisted the words as they came out. “He's using her himself every night.”

“No, he's not.”

“He's not?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

She took a moment to put the last touches on her drawing.

“Now I'm going to tell you why he hates me. I'm his wife. I
was.” She waited a moment for Sam to get that and be ready for the next. “He raped me, and he gave me to his men to rape.”

Sam looked into her eyes for a long while. They were steady. He understood some things about Lei but not why she was willing to go up against Kanaka Boy again. And not whether, when the moment came, she would cave in.