Native Gold (15 page)

But his interest in her ablutions waned quickly. By the envious glances he stole at his drawings, he obviously wanted to go back to the "toys."

"Shall we take them outside?" she asked, scooping up the pencils and several sheets of clean paper.

It surprised her to see how late the day had grown. Only an hour or so of sketching light remained. The sun cast long shadows from the swaying pines, and pie wedges of shade shifted across the flower-dotted meadow. Sparrows and finches flitted by too quickly to draw, making their last rounds through the branches. But Mattie had learned, if she sat still long enough, subjects would come to her. The boy sat beside her on the edge of the plank porch, pencil poised, mimicking her quiet vigil.

Sure enough, within a few minutes, a delicate buff-colored doe lifted her velvet muzzle at the far end of the clearing. Mattie touched the boy’s arm.

"Look," she whispered.

As the deer picked her cautious way across the grass, nibbling at the tender shoots, Mattie discovered the twins behind her, a perfectly matched pair of spotted fawns tottering on pencil-thin legs.

"
Tem-diyoki
," the boy whispered.

"
Tem
—"

"
Diyoki
," he breathed.

Moving as imperceptibly as possible, Mattie brought pencil to paper and wrote the word, TEM-DIYOKI. Then she began to draw, scarcely looking at the page, only watching the doe grazing with her two babies.

The boy did likewise, and when Mattie hazarded a glance at his paper, she saw that, though his work was rough and done with an untrained hand, he added details he couldn’t possibly see at this distance. The doe had long, curling eyelashes and the hint of a smile at the corners of her dark lips. The fawns’ spotted fur stood up a little on their back, and he drew the black hooves with a clear split up the middle.

Mattie smiled. This was his world. He knew it far better than she. She could illustrate what she saw, but he sketched what he knew.

All at once, the doe’s head lifted in alarm, her ears forward. She stood frozen for several seconds. Then, with a powerful bound, she fled with her babies into the woods.

Mattie wondered what had frightened them. She turned to shrug at the boy, but his attention was riveted elsewhere. He gasped, and Mattie followed his gaze. What she saw made her jaw go slack.

Death was coming. There was no other description for the grim beast that charged toward them. Another ten strides, and she’d be lucky to sputter out the Lord’s Prayer before he devoured them both with those snarling white teeth.

The boy trembled beside her, and before she could wonder at her own sanity, she thrust him behind her, placing her body solidly between the child and their attacker.

"S-stay back! I’m w-warning you!" she cried, painfully aware that stammering did nothing to enforce her threat. "Don’t come any closer."

The splayed hand she held in front of her looked pale and useless against the menacing beast, which loomed nearer despite her admonitions, and she suddenly longed to have the butt of Doc Jim’s rifle settled against her shoulder.

But it was too late. She couldn’t abandon the boy clutching in terror at her skirts. Instead, she clasped the lad’s arm with feigned assurance, squeezed her eyes shut, and prayed for a swift end.

He stopped mere inches from her, close enough for his warm breath to ruffle her hair. Lord, she could feel heat and strength and danger emanating from his body. And she could smell him. His scent was complex, as wild as the wood, a blend of sweet smoke and spicy laurel, of fresh trout and tanned leather. She dared not move. She dared not breathe.

As the seconds ticked by, measured by her racing heart, and no attack came, she finally risked peering through her lashes.

She wished she’d kept them closed. Her mouth went instantly dry. The savage towered over her, eclipsing the sun with his dark, shaggy head and leaving her eyes at the level of his formidable, muscular chest. He glared down at her with eyes as black as a raven’s wing, eyes so steadfast and deadly in their perusal that his sudden snarl of “Hintsuli!” made her start in alarm.

The boy jerked behind her. Mattie shook in her boots, but refused to budge.

Then the attacker grew even more menacing. A deep breath swelled his chest, and his hands curved into fists the size of roasting hens.

"Hintsuli!" he growled again, narrowing his eyes to angry slits.

The boy whimpered in panic behind her, a string of words Mattie couldn’t understand, but the pathetic sound plucked at her heartstrings and broke through her fear. She had no idea what the brute was demanding nor what he intended, but she’d be damned if she’d put up with his brand of bullying. She didn’t care that the half-naked savage was twice her size and meaner than a bear. He had no business raging about, frightening little boys and defenseless women half out of their wits.

"N-now, listen, you!" she commanded, garnering his full attention. She swallowed hard. His eyes chilled her like chips of black ice. "You just g-go on and leave the boy alone. He’s fine with me." She didn’t know what she was promising, but she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving the poor child in the hands of the vicious barbarian before her. "Go on," she said with a timid, dismissing brush of her hand. "Shoo."

The man’s eyes hardened even more, while Mattie’s knees turned to jelly. He slowly perused her face, tracing her hairline, lingering on her trembling lips, resting briefly in the hollow of her throat, where she was sure he could discern the fluttering of her heart. Dear God, she realized, the beast could probably snap the thin column of her throat in one of his great paws without a second thought.

Then, to her relief, the fury drained from his face. His brows still curved downward in irritation, but the cold fire disappeared from his eyes. He straightened and folded his arms across his chest.

The gesture should have eased her worries. After all, standing thus, he couldn’t very well engage her in fisticuffs. But the posture made him look even more forbidding. Strands of glossy black hair slashed across his shoulders, allowing taunting glimpses of the considerable girth of his bare arms. They might be idle now, but the pure strength in those arms was glaringly apparent.

"Hintsuli," he said once more, but now his voice was low.

The boy peered around her skirts, and his face couldn’t have looked guiltier if he stood beside a broken vase with a pea shooter. Slowly, he ambled forward, his head hanging low on his chest. He glanced balefully up at the stranger, then at her, and patted his chest.

"Hintsuli," he explained.

Mattie frowned. So Hintsuli was the boy’s name. The man was summoning him then, not cursing him. He was calling...his son. Of course. She should have guessed. The family resemblance was obvious. The two shared the same dark scowl and flashing eyes, the same coppery skin, the same astonishingly beautiful...

She hauled her gaze away from the Indian. It wouldn’t do to stare. The man clearly didn’t want his son socializing with a white woman, and no doubt he felt the same way about her himself. Which was fine with her. After all, a person of such a volatile temperament could hardly be enjoyable company. And if Mattie had just for a moment imagined the stunning portrait she could draw of the noble savage, it was only a ridiculous flight of fancy. There were plenty of subjects from which to choose among the miners. Besides, she doubted the man could sit still long enough for a decent portrait.

Father and son were speaking to each other now in their soft, guttural language, the boy pouting, the man biting out his words. She caught that word, Coh-ah-nuya
,
on Hintsuli’s lips more than once, and she noticed that the man actually looked discomfited at the mention of it.

With a scowl, he stooped to the boy and began unbuttoning the calico shirt.

"No," Mattie said, resting her palm for an instant on the back of the man’s hand.

He glanced at her fingers, and she pulled away as if she’d been burnt.

"I mean, he may keep it."

The man continued to unfasten the shirt.

She tried again. "It’s all right. I don’t need it. He can have it." She pulled the collar of the shirt back around Hintsuli’s neck. "Take it. Please. Take it."

The man looked up at her, and she wondered how he could still seem so overwhelming, crouching at her feet.

"I..." she said breathlessly, "I don’t need it. It belonged to my...my husband."

The man’s brows lanced sharply downward. He didn’t bother unfastening the rest of the buttons. He tore the front of the shirt, and the remaining buttons popped off like kernels of dried corn over the fire.

Hintsuli wailed, and the man muttered something in hushed anger.

Abruptly, the boy stopped his tears and looked askance into his father’s eyes. "
Hudesi
?" he asked.

The man shot her a disparaging glare and nodded. "
Hudesi.
"

The boy then let his father take the shirt from him. The man wadded it into a ball and cast it back toward the door.

Mattie knew she should bite her tongue. It was no concern of hers whether they took the shirt or not. It didn’t matter if she never saw the two of them again. Why should she care that Hintsuli’s father had looked at her as if she were the devil incarnate?

"You know, this wouldn’t have happened," she said, wagging a finger at him, "if you hadn’t let your son run around loose like a wild In—" She choked on her words.

The man gave her one last thorough inspection from head to toe that stole the breath from her before he grabbed Hintsuli by the hand and started off across the clearing.

She muttered after him. "And what kind of a mother is your wife to let a child his age gad about unsupervised?"

Mattie hadn’t noticed before, paralyzed by fear, but now that she had the leisure to look, she saw that the man was dressed in no more clothing than the boy. As he ambled off, she could see all too clearly the bronzed contours of his back, his narrow hips, his muscular legs. The edge of his loincloth flapped up suddenly, revealing the hollow of one buttock, and her heart leaped into her throat. Sweet Lord, he was magnificent.

"Wait!" she cried before she could stop herself. "Your drawings, Hintsuli!" She scrambled to gather them up from the porch, cursing the blood that rushed to her cheek.

For a long moment, no one moved to close the distance. The man stared at her, still clutching Hintsuli’s hand, while the boy looked up at his father for approval. Mattie felt something flow between her and the Indian, some current, some force like lightning that seemed to darken the rest of the world until there were only the two of them, caught in space and time. She heard her heart beating in a rhythm not of its own making. A breeze rustled the man’s sleek hair, and then swept her way, as if the wind carried his spirit to her, and she gasped as it enveloped her soul.

But then a hawk wheeled high overhead, splitting the silence with a hungry screech. The spell was broken. The moment was lost.

Sakote released Hintsuli’s hand, and his little brother raced to get his "toys." Sakote, of course, didn’t dare go near the property, the cabin, the woman again. That was not the wind of The Great Spirit that had brushed by just now. It was the ghost of the
hudesi
, the monster who had lived there, and he’d given Sakote a warning. How else could Sakote explain his sudden weakness when he looked at the white woman and the way his soul felt pulled from his body when she returned his gaze?

His heart shivered as he thought about Hintsuli wrapped in the
hudesi
’s garment. Didn’t the woman know that it was dangerous to keep the possessions of such an evil man? The Konkow would have burned all the
hudesi
’s things, forcing his condemned spirit to wander elsewhere.

He watched as Hintsuli took the papers from the white woman. All day he’d searched for his troublesome little brother. He’d driven himself half mad with worry, fearing the boy lost or mauled by a bear or shot by miners. To find him with the woman he’d told him was Coh-ah-nuya, the child-eater, happily whiling away the afternoon, had filled him at first with relief, then with the desire to turn the boy over his knee.

The woman stood not much taller than his little brother as he watched them together on the porch, and she could be no heavier than one of the fawns they’d seen earlier. With her delicate skin, pinkened now by the sun, and the wisps of tawny hair as fine as spider’s web circling her face, she looked about as defenseless, too. But she’d tried to protect Hintsuli. Despite her weakness, she’d stood bravely between him and harm. She had a brave heart, a warrior’s heart.

Sakote blew out sharply. He had to turn his own heart aside. Hintsuli’s life depended on it. The lives of his people depended on it. The Konkow must stay away from the
willa
and their evil ghosts. The woman was dangerous. To Hintsuli. To him. To his tribe.

The woman squeezed Hintsuli’s shoulders, and then sent him on his way. As she gave him a wave of farewell, Sakote noticed that the skin of her forearm was as pale as sycamore bark, and he wondered if it felt as smooth.