Savage Beloved (8 page)

She already felt the discomfort and feared moving; surely the metal would cut into her flesh.

She recalled the gnats and flies that had buzzed around the old man’s sore, bloody flesh.

Soon they would be on hers!

Rage replaced her fear and nausea. “You are heartless!” she cried out as she glared into Two Eagles’s dark eyes. “How can you do this? I . . . I . . . am not
guilty of any crime.” She lowered her eyes. “You are wrong to do this to me,” she sobbed out.

Two Eagles placed a hand beneath her chin and raised it so that she had no choice but to look directly into his eyes. “All you knew at the fort, especially your colonel father, were the heartless ones. They not only treated an innocent old man inhumanely, but also removed heads from red men they saw as their enemies!”

The horror of his accusation made Candy shiver with disgust. “No!” she cried. “Never! My father was a strict colonel, and he did despise Indians, but he could never do such a heartless thing as that.”

He gave her a long, last look, then stormed out of the tepee.

Candy sat there numbly, the chains weighing down her wrists and ankles.

Tears pooled in her eyes at the thought of her father’s death, as well as dear Malvina’s, and the deaths of all the men who had followed her father’s lead.

And then there was her beloved wolf, Shadow. Surely she had been killed by an arrow, too!

Candy hung her head, torn apart by grief and fear of where this would end for her.

What Two Eagles had already done to her was awful. Yet she knew it could get much, much worse.

Suddenly she was no longer alone. Candy was shocked to see a white woman who was dressed in Indian attire, and who had hair the same golden color as hers. The woman was calmly adding wood to the fire.

The woman ignored Candy when she asked who she was. “Why are you here?” Candy inquired. “Are you also a captive?

Hawk Woman, who was anything but a captive, frowned at Two Eagles’s prisoner. She had been in love with the handsome young chief ever since she’d joined the band, but he rebuffed all of her advances toward him.

Hawk Woman saw this woman as possibly a threat to her own standing among the Wichita.

Hawk Woman, whose real name was Sara Thaxton, had been rescued by these people and taken in. They welcomed her as a part of their lives and guarded her against the white man she had fled from.

Candy could not understand why this other white woman refused to speak with her. Bemused, she watched the woman place yet another log on the fire.

Before Candy could say anything else to this unfriendly woman, she was gone.

But to Candy’s surprise, she returned very soon with a platter of food.

“Ma’am, thank you for adding wood to the fire, and . . . and for bringing me food,” Candy said softly, trying once again to get the woman to speak with her. When the woman met her gaze, she saw instantly that this woman was going to be anything but a friend.

Candy knew resentment when she saw it, and she saw much of that emotion in this woman’s flashing
green eyes. It was hard to understand why the woman should resent her so much. Candy had done nothing to earn it.

“Will you please stay awhile?” Candy said, trying one last time to reach the woman’s heart as she gazed up at her, watching and waiting for her response.

“Would you want to eat with me?” Candy blurted out.

“Just shut up,” Hawk Woman said, her eyes narrowing angrily. “You will cooperate if you know what’s good for you. Chief Two Eagles, the warrior who brought you into this tepee, will kill you if you don’t behave.”

Hawk Woman’s eyes glittered even more when she reached down and ran her fingers through Candy’s long, golden tresses. “You hair would make a good decoration for Two Eagles’s scalp pole,” she said, laughing mockingly.

Horrified by what this woman had just said, Candy stiffened and leaned away from her. She was truly afraid now. It seemed that this woman hated her with a strange sort of passion.

Candy gazed at the woman’s beautiful golden hair, which was braided in a single long plait down her back. She wore a white doeskin dress with a flashing necklace of beads around her thick neck.

Candy could not help wondering how the woman had come to this village, and why she was free to come and go among the Wichita people.

Now Candy felt even more afraid than before, not
because of the threats that came from this spiteful woman’s mouth, but because Candy now knew that her captor was the chief of this village of Wichita. If
he
had such hate for her, all his people would feel the same.

Now she didn’t believe that she could possibly come out of this alive. Would her hair sway from Two Eagles’s scalp pole someday? Or would she be cast out of the village, to become food for wolves and birds?

She suddenly heard the baying of wolves from somewhere in the distance, reminding her of her dear Shadow.

Even though she realized how much the white woman obviously resented her being there, Candy tried one more time to gain her sympathy.

“You are white, I am white; how can you not want to help me?” Candy murmured. “Why do you resent me so much?”

Hawk Woman gave Candy a cold glare, stuck her nose in the air, then flounced from the tepee.

A moment later Two Eagles returned.

Candy noticed that he carried something covered by a piece of maroon cloth.

She was afraid to ask what it was, and didn’t have to. Two Eagles seemed eager to show her what he had brought into the lodge.

“Do you see what I am holding?” Two Eagles asked tightly. “I took this from your father’s dwelling.”

The color drained from Candy’s face when he
yanked the cloth away from the jar, revealing a head inside it. The eyes of the skull stared blankly back at her. . . .

She felt dizzy, then floated away into a dark, deep void as she fainted to the floor.

No sister flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley

Candy awakened with a start when she heard someone step up to her bed of blankets. She had no recollection of having unrolled the blankets. She had no recollection of having gone to sleep.

Then she remembered.

She had fainted!

And she shuddered as she now recalled why. The jar with the head in it.

Tears filled her eyes at the realization of who was responsible for such a ghastly act.

Her father.

She hated to think of the other horrendous acts her father might have committed while in command as a powerful colonel.

She had to put such thoughts from her mind or she just might go crazy.

She thought again of where she had spent the night; she knew it was morning now, for the sun was slanting its golden rays down the overhead smoke hole.

She looked up at the white woman who was standing over her, holding a bowl of food. Had this woman put her to bed the night before?

Or had it been Two Eagles?

If it had been Two Eagles, she was glad that he had not removed her clothes. She was still wearing the same skirt and blouse she had been wearing at the horrendous moment of the attack on Fort Hope.

Candy’s stomach growled at the thought of eating, for she had not eaten the food that had been brought to her the night before. Her stomach was too unsettled from the terrors of the day to even try to put food in it.

She had been afraid her dinner might come back up as soon as she ate it.

But realizing that she must eat to keep up her strength, she sat up and was crudely reminded once again of her bondage. The irons had already rubbed her wrists and ankles raw.

“Ma’am, I can’t eat with these irons on my wrists,” she said. “It is too difficult to move, and the dried blood on them sickens me.”

“First off, quit calling me ‘ma’am,’ ” Hawk Woman spat out. “My name is Hawk Woman. Do you understand? Hawk Woman!”

“Alright, Hawk Woman, I’ll remember to call you
that from now on,” Candy said, her voice breaking. She was still stunned by this woman’s attitude toward her and the fact that she seemed so Indian, not only in the way she dressed, but also in the name she was called.

“Hawk Woman, will . . . you please remove the irons?” Candy asked, hating the timidness of her tone.

Hawk Woman’s eyes glittered, and her lips twisted into an amused smile. Then she set the bowl down next to Candy.

She gave Candy one more mocking look, then spun around and left Candy alone again.

Candy wasn’t used to being treated so callously. But she now knew that she could not expect anything else from Hawk Woman. For some reason, the woman disliked her.

Sighing heavily and trying to put Hawk Woman from her mind, Candy gazed at the tempting food. Her stomach growled again as she spotted a piece of corn on the cob. It was one of her favorite foods. There was a small portion of cut-up meat, which she assumed was venison, and a ripe cantaloupe, which had been cut into slices.

The various aromas smelled delicious.

She couldn’t
not
eat.

She must at least try.

She grimaced as she tried to reach for the corn, then stopped and rested her hand on her lap. The irons rubbing against her raw wrists caused her too much pain to continue.

Tears filled her eyes as she stared into the fire.

Her tears sprang from many mixed emotions—her
feeling of total helplessness, her aching hunger, and the loneliness she felt as she missed her father, and also sweet Malvina and her beloved Shadow.

For the first time in her life, she was totally alone with no one to help, or love her.

She then remembered the head in the jar and the horrible sight of her father whipping the old man’s bare back for no good reason. He had done it just because he could, since he was in charge of Fort Hope.

She would never forget Short Robe’s silence as he had been whipped, too proud to let her father realize the pain that he was inflicting.

No.

He had never cried out, not even one time.

It was at that moment when Candy accepted the sort of man her father was. She had known for a long time, but just hadn’t been able to face up to it. He was her father, the person she had adored as a child, before she knew what he was capable of. He had loved her and held her close to his heart until she was too old to hold.

Then he had taught her the wonders of riding horses and everything else that he would have taught a son.

She had not allowed herself to be insulted, or hurt, to know that in his heart he resented the fact that she was not a son and could never enter the military with him.

But no father could have been prouder of a daughter than he had been of her. He had always thought her fragile because of her petiteness, but although
she was not all that strong, she had been strong enough to fend for herself when the need arose.

Several times she had been caught away from the fort in a rain storm. She knew that her father had been frightened for her on those occasions. He knew, much better than she, the dangers that lurked away from the safety of the fort.

Of course she knew all about Indians and what some were guilty of doing to whites.

But she hadn’t allowed that knowledge to make her a prisoner of her own home, for if she had, she would have felt only half alive.

“And now I am a true prisoner,” she whispered to herself, again looking at the food.

She had never been so hungry in her life, yet . . . yet . . . each movement of her wrists brought renewed pain and fresh blood as the irons scraped against her already raw flesh.

Again she thought of her father. She knew that if he were alive, he would be sending the military out everywhere to look for her.

She could even now envision him sitting in his study, staring into the fire, as he waited for her to return.

The thought of the study brought more than her father to her mind. She shivered as she again recalled the head in the jar, and where Two Eagles had found it.

In her father’s study!

Now she understood why he had never allowed her to enter it. He was hiding something ugly beyond
belief. How could any man do such a thing to another human being?

Her thoughts were interrupted when she heard footsteps outside drawing near the tepee. They were not the footsteps of a woman, so she knew not to expect Hawk Woman.

Her heart pounded at the thought of who had come for a morning visit. A moment later, Two Eagles nudged the entrance flap aside and came to stand over her.

As before, he wore only a breechclout, moccasins, and a headband holding his long, thick, black hair back from his magnificently sculpted face. The scar beneath his lip was certainly no hindrance to his handsomeness.

But today there was something about his attire that was different. He wore a huge knife sheathed at the right side of his waist.

It looked deadly.

He also carried a lovely white, fringed dress across one arm, and held a pair of moccasins in his left hand. A thin, long piece of hardened leather was in his right.

She knew immediately what that strip of leather was: the hardened remains of a leather strop.

She grimaced at the memory of a time long ago when one of her friends, Sam, a twelve-year-old boy, had been punished by his father for bloodying the nose of a playmate. His punishment had been a whipping with his father’s leather strop.

She would never forget Sam’s yelps of pain as his father brought the strop down across his back at
least a dozen times. Nor would she forget that afterward, his father had taken Sam by an ear and forced him to apologize to the other boy, even though as far as she was concerned, that boy had earned the bloody nose because he had yanked so hard on Candy’s pigtails. The pain in her head had lasted for a full day.

So . . . why had Two Eagles brought a razor strop into this tepee? Was it a way to frighten her even more?

Did he use the strop to punish anyone who disobeyed him?

She closed her mind to the possibility that he would use the horrid thing on her; surely he could not do such a thing to someone as innocent as she.

Her insides tight, and scarcely breathing, Candy watched as Two Eagles laid everything down.