The Passionate and the Proud (11 page)

“Come on, Em!” Randy was coaxing.

He had her pressed close up against the side of the Conestoga now, his body holding her gently there in dark shadow. She felt the evidence of excitement through his trousers, and she felt her body stir in response. A sweet warmth took hold of her then as she saw him bending toward her for the kiss. Why not? she thought, closing her eyes. His lips were gentle at first, and she responded, putting her arms around his shoulders, holding on to him, letting herself drift in easy pleasure. But the spark, so casually struck, flashed suddenly upon the tinder of mutual need. Emmalee felt his strong arms pull her even closer. A shudder ran down the length of his body and transmitted itself to her. He was kissing her hungrily now, and Em was beginning to lose her breath. This was getting far too serious. He might think that she
was
ready for the home and family he’d mentioned. The last thing she wanted was to lead him on, to hurt him…

With difficulty, both because of his strength and because she wouldn’t have minded continuing the kiss, Emmalee broke away.

“No, Randy—” she began.

“Please, Em…”

There was a sound of movement from inside the wagon, and then from the back of the Conestoga came that unmistakable voice, husky, amused, conspiratorial: “Go ahead and kiss him, Em, and get it over with. People in camp are trying to get to sleep.”

Garn! What was he doing in Ebenezer Creel’s wagon?

Randy edged away from her. He and Emmalee turned toward the back of the wagon. Garn had stepped down from the endgate and stood in the moonlight, grinning. He’d put on a clean white shirt, which gleamed in the pale light, and he’d found refreshments too. There was a mug in his hand.

Randy, embarrassed, went on the offensive.

“What were you doing in that wagon?” he demanded angrily. “And at this hour?”

“Mr. Creel’s a newfound friend of mine.” Garn’s voice was calm, rational. “He said I could stop by any time and share his blessings.” He lifted the cup slightly, in parody of a toast. “What are you doing out
at this hour,
my friend? Corrupting the morals of our fair youth?”

“It’s certainly nothing like that…” Emmalee said.

“I’m a little amazed that you’re still around,” Randy said, “after that humiliation.”

“Really?” asked Garn. “What humiliation was that?”

“Would you two stop this?” Emmalee pleaded, realizing that she was the reason for this unpleasant exchange. Two men and a woman. Bad combination.

“If you don’t know,” Randy was saying, “it’d be no use telling you.”

“As you wish.” Garn laughed. “Now, go away and see if you can get Emmalee to kiss you somewhere else. I want to have a drink in peace.”

“Let’s go, Randy,” Emmalee said. “It’s late and I have to get to my bedroll.”

“Ah! Sounds intriguing,” said Garn.

“Landar!” Randy warned. “Watch your tongue.”

“Forget it. Clay. Cool down. You’re one of these intrepid farmers, not a fighter. You even strike me as a decent man. Let’s shake hands and forget about this.”

“Backing down again, eh, Landar?”

“Randy!” cautioned Emmalee, who knew by Garn’s tone that, whatever his motives, he hadn’t truly truckled before Cassidy, and he certainly wasn’t doing so now.

Emmalee stepped between the men and took Randy’s arm. “Let’s go, Randy.”

“All right,” Randy agreed. “Don’t expect we’ll be seeing you around here much longer, will we?” he called over his shoulder to Garn as Emmalee led him away.

“Yes, you will, I’m afraid. I’ve got to protect this train against itself.”

“Well, don’t you worry about Emmalee! I’ll take care of her.”

Garn laughed again, low and throaty. He’d enjoyed the whole exchange. “But Emmalee’s told me that she’s totally capable of looking out for herself,” he said.

“Be quiet out there!” shouted somebody from one of the wagons. “People around here are trying to get some sleep.”

In spite of her fatigue, sleep came hard to Emmalee. The wagon was close and stuffy, and her bunkmates, three daughters of former Arkansas sharecropper Festus Bent, tossed and sighed and wheezed. They suffered from hay fever and from desperate dreams of men. Emmalee took her bedroll and laid it underneath the wagon. Soon she began to drift away, regretting but trying to forget the scene between Garn and Randy, remembering how her body had felt with Randy pressed close to her…

“Emmalee!”

A husky whisper. She awoke to a hand clasped over her mouth. Her first impulse was to scream, but then she saw Garn beside her, silhouetted against the moon.

“Can we talk?” he whispered.

The first time she’d heard his voice, Emmalee recalled, she’d wondered what it would sound like when he whispered. Now she knew. Velvety and insidious. She nodded, and he took his hand away. She was excited against her will, by his nearness and the night.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

“I had to come. I wanted to see you.”

Emmalee recalled that he’d been drinking, but he sounded perfectly lucid and sober to her.

“See me tomorrow,” she said.

“No, now. You gave your time, and more, to Randy Clay.”

He was leaning over her. By shifting his weight just a little, he could easily pin her to the blankets on which she slept.

“All right,” she said, “what do you want?”

“To make love to you.”

“What?” she cried aloud, trying to jerk upright. But he clasped his hand over her mouth again, shifted his weight, and pinned her down.

“You want it as much as I do,” he said.

Then he took his hand away and replaced it with his mouth. It was like a shock. His kiss came so suddenly, so surprisingly, that at first she could not resist. She tried to get her hands up to his chest to push him away, but he was close on top of her and his lips were beginning to have an effect, an entirely unwanted effect, on her whole being. A quiver of heat shot up and down her body. His kiss was not hard or magisterial, but rather tender, almost reverent, completely different from what she might have expected, given her knowledge of him.

The kiss charmed her, dazed her, stunned her. She sensed rather than felt his hands move beneath her nightdress, loosening the tie-string at her throat and slipping the garment down slowly across her shoulders and breasts. Cool night air touched her skin and might have brought her to her senses, rescued her from this great, slow fail into which she was so deliciously descending, but Garn’s shirt was open and when the skin of his chest met her nipples she jolted in response to the shock and he crushed her to himself. Her mind was dazzled by sensation. She fought to think clearly but could not. In fact, she could not think at all. Her whole body seemed to be on fire with a timeless flame that kept flashing brighter and brighter but yet did not consume, and she was spinning slowly in a ravished space between heaven and earth. This was truly passion, to which love was supposed to lead, real passion and not childish snuggling in a sleigh or the slow, almost brotherly kisses evoking hearth and home. There was a dangerous power present here. If Emmalee surrendered, she would be lost…

Sporadic waves of heat flashed in her body now, sourceless, questing, careening through her being from one place to another, random tracers in search of a target. In the first moments, she’d tried to escape his kiss, but now she could not. A hot hollow grew beneath her breasts and the very air became thin and rare, rivers of heat flowing down into her abdomen now, and down…

…kissing him back now, hard, as fiery tributaries became rivers of flowing heat moving toward confluence, then into a great channel of aching need, nightdress tom away, his hands gentle on her breasts, on her quivering thighs, sweet fingers searching to find…

“Stop
!” She moaned, gathered herself, straining, and tearing herself away from the sorcery by which he sought to bewitch her. Emmalee wrenched herself free of him and sat up, pulling nightdress and blankets around her shoulders and bare, tingling breasts. Above, inside the wagon, one of the Bent sisters murmured in her sleep. Across the camp, a dog barked. Emmalee heard two people panting and realized that they were Garn and herself. She slowed her breathing with an effort of the will.

“Why…did you stop?” He gasped.

Because I can’t allow something or someone to have such control over me, she thought. “Because I don’t want to,” she said.

“That’s a lie. You’ve never wanted anything as much.”

“Not with you.”

“Another lie. We’re alike. We’re out of the same mold. You need me.”

Emmalee was beginning to collect her wits.

“I don’t,” she said. “And you only want me. There’s a big difference.”

“How would you know?”

“I know.”

“When I first saw you on the pier,” he said, “I knew you were made for a man to want, but as I’ve learned more about you, your ambition, your independent spirit, I’ve come to realize that you’re exactly what I need.”

“I suppose I should be flattered—”

“You should,” he interrupted. It was the kind of remark so characteristic of him.

“But I’m not. Besides which, you might get me into a lot of trouble here on the train.”

They were whispering. No one seemed to hear them.

“Only if you tell someone,” he said, with a quiet laugh. He reached out and touched her cheek. She felt herself leaning instinctively into his hand, then moved away.

“Why are you giving me such a hard time?”

“Because I don’t trust you. I don’t respect you. We’re not alike at all. I’ve seen how you drink, gamble, show off instead of face problems…”

“You mean that business with Red Cassidy?” he asked, laughing quietly. “What would you have done?”

“I’d have—” Emmalee faltered.

“Shot him. Sure, I could have. But then I’d have been run out of camp, if not lynched on the spot, and you’d be defenseless.”

“Look, I don’t
need
your protection. That’s another kind of need you can spare me.”

“Oh, angel…”

“Don’t call me ‘angel.’”

One of the Bent sisters coughed and rolled over. “Shhh!” Emmalee said.

“You know what I think I’ll do,” Garn threatened. “I’ll raise a big ruckus, people will come running, and Torquist’s notions of morality will force him to throw us both out. Then you’ll have to stick with me.”

“I wouldn’t count on that.”

“Or maybe Randy Clay would come running to save your honor. What is it with him, anyway? Can’t he see that you’re not at all his type of woman?”

“Randy is an honorable and decent man,” Emmalee flared. “He’s certainly not like you.”

Garn drew away from her slightly. His voice was thoughtful and serious. “And what exactly
am
I like?”

“I believe that I’ve given you some indication of what I think about that, haven’t I? You’re reckless and opportunistic and irresponsible. I don’t think you’d see a difficult thing through to the end, and I’m sorry to say this but I really can’t visualize much of a future for you.”

“Well, well. That’s quite an indictment. Not too charitable of you either. I thought I explained all that to you back on the
Queen of Natchez.
When I find something worth caring about, then I might just reveal virtues more to your liking.”

He was deadly serious, speaking without jest. For the first time since she’d met him, Emmalee had the impression that she was close to touching the real Garn, unsuspected until now, who existed beneath that magisterial, swaggering, insouciant facade.

“Maybe I was a little uncharitable,” she admitted. “It’s just that the way you’ve acted, the manner in which you carry yourself, well, you don’t make it easy for a woman to let down her guard with you. And then there are the stories that you’re the son of an outlaw…”

“Sure. I know that one. And you’ve heard that my mother was a prostitute as well?”

Emmalee nodded.

“Untrue, both tales. I was born in Laramie, Wyoming. My father was framed and hanged as a cattle rustler. The good, Christian people of Laramie turned against my mother and me. I was just a kid at the time. The only people who would take us in were ‘ladies of the night,’ I suppose you would say. They raised me, since my mother died when I was five.”

“Is that true?” Emmalee asked, surprised at his story.

“I may be many things, but a liar is not one of them, Red Cassidy’s opinion to the contrary. So you see, with a few variations our pasts are not that different.”

“Well, I’m not a gambler,” Emmalee said. She recalled Myrtle’s story about having married a charming gambler and how it had changed her life for the worse. “I don’t gamble with
my
life.”

“You’ve got to take some risks. I really gamble money only for amusement. I’d never do it over something serious.”

“Such as?”

“I think we’re talking about it now.”

Slowly, the moon had been descending as they talked, and now a glowing rind of dawn had appeared in the eastern horizon.

“Oh, my God,” Emmalee exclaimed. “It’s almost sun-up and I haven’t gotten any sleep at all.”

In the wagon, one of the Bent sisters awakened, plodded to the rear of the Conestoga.

“Please leave.”

“Sure. But I’ll see you tonight.”

Somewhere on the other side of the campfire, they heard the rattle of a metal spoon inside a kettle. Each morning Myrtle Higgins rode her mule around the camp and awakened everybody with kettle and spoon.

“No! You can’t see me tonight!” Emmalee protested.

“Why not? Are you going to be kissing Randy Clay, or what?”

“Don’t be funny. You can’t see me at all.” She softened slightly. “Unless you do something to prove to me that you’re…”

“…a better man than you think I am? That won’t be hard. Just give me a couple of days.”

“What are you planning?” she asked, suddenly alarmed. What if he killed Red Cassidy as he’d allegedly slaughtered Brutus?

“Time will tell,” Garn said.

Three days later the wagon train was camped at the juncture of Ladder Creek and the Smoky Hill River in western Kansas.

Myrtle Higgins did not climb aboard Ned that morning; the banging clatter of spoon against metal was not heard. Pleased with the train’s progress and relieved to find no evidence of Indians, Horace Torquist had decreed a half-day of rest. Lambert Strep would spend the morning filling the barrels on his water wagon; horses, cattle, and oxen would be allowed to drink their fill before moving on. Colorado, once unimaginably distant, was now within striking range.

Emmalee rose before dawn and bathed long and luxuriously in the river. She had laundered ail her clothing on the previous evening, and now she put on her bright red-and-white gingham dress, brushed her hair until it gleamed like spun gold, and walked over to the Creels’ wagon. The train was drawn up in the tip of an arrowhead-shaped pocket formed by the convergence of river and creek. A high, grassy ridge rose southwest of the camp, tall grass green as jade in the shining dawn, and it occurred to Emmalee how cozy and protected this campsite was. Feeling clean and glorious, she wondered where the Pennington party was camping. Their great pillar of dust hadn’t been seen for several days. Poor Lottie, she thought, remembering Burt’s sassy daughter. What a pity she has to travel in all that dirt!

Drawing near the Creels’ wagon, Emmalee heard Bernice Creel moaning in pain. She ran the final yards to the Conestoga and clambered inside.

“Ohhhhh, Em.” Bernice groaned. “I’m so glad you’ve come. The pain is worse than ever this morning.”

Emmalee glanced about the dimly lighted wagon. Bernice was in her hammock, but Ebenezer’s was empty. And no wonder. She saw the old man lying on the floor next to his whiskey barrel, which was poorly concealed by an old horse blanket. As always, he was wearing his thick moneybelt. After a moment of panic, Emmalee judged that his bony ribcage was going in and out. He was alive.

“Honey, you’ve got to give me some of that white powder real quick. Hurry. I can’t stand the pain much longer. Lately Ebenezer’s been giving me some in the middle of the night, but he had him a little too much of his own medicine last night, poor man.”

Emmalee took the bag of opium powder from the bin in which it was stored and put a heaping spoonful into a mug of water.

“Hurry.” Mrs. Creel was panting like a woman in childbirth.

Emmalee held the mug to Mrs. Creel’s lips. The woman drank the elixir in gurgling desperation, then waited for its effect to take hold, grasping her swollen abdomen as she prayed. Finally, she felt the first rush of relief and relaxed a little.

“Ebenezer thinks I don’t know what this is,” she said, smiling thinly.

“Do you want some more?”

“No. We have to ration it. It’s opium. I know. He tells me it’s a kind of peppermint to settle my stomach. He’s a dear man.”

Emmalee covered the snoring Ebenezer with a shawl. “Shall I read to you?” she asked Bernice Creel.

“No. I want to talk to you. There’s a favor I’ve got to ask. Honey, I don’t want Ebenezer to know this, but I’m not going to make it to Olympia. I can’t hold out that long.”

“Oh, Mrs. Creel, don’t be silly. You’ll—”

“No. Save your breath. I can tell. And I want you to promise me this: that you’ll take care of Ebenezer after I’m gone. Oh, I don’t mean to wait on him hand and foot, you know, but just watch out for him. He could get hurt the way he carries on.”

She gestured at Ebenezer with a limp hand.

“He didn’t always used to drink this much, you know,” she said defensively. “It was all that trouble he had during the war, and after.”

“Did Ebenezer fight in the war?” Em asked. He looked much too old for it.

“He’s always had this problem about picking the wrong side, the wrong man,” Mrs. Creel went on. “And in the Civil War he thought Jeff Davis and the Rebs would win. We lived on the Union side of the Ohio and almost all of our neighbors was loyal to Honest Abe. Well, one day that Union general, Boris Spaeth, comes through town on his way to attack Jubal Early’s troops in Tennessee…”

Emmalee had read of the bloody exploits of “Mad Dog” Spaeth, most feared of the Union officers. “Go on,” she said.

“Well, Ebenezer got it into his head to be a spy. He tried to get news of Spaeth’s progress to Jubal Early. Naturally, he was caught. Eb’s been in jail till just two months ago. We were ruined, lost the farm and everything. We haven’t a cent to our names.”

Emmalee wondered how this could be true, since she’d seen very clearly that big hundred-dollar bill. She suspected that Ebenezer had a few secrets he wasn’t telling
anybody.

“It’s just lucky that Horace Torquist is the strong, generous man he is,” Mrs. Creel said. “He accepted us on his train, in spite of everything. And Ebenezer’s enjoying himself for the first time in years. He’s taken a shine to this handsome young scout. You know the one I mean?”

“I think so.”

“Eb says this young man is really going to go places.” Just like Jefferson Davis, Emmalee thought.

“And how
is
Mr. Landar these days?” she asked.

Emmalee hadn’t seen Garn since that night underneath the wagon. He had gone off promising to do something that would, in a manner of speaking, redeem himself in her eyes. And he hadn’t come back at all. She owed herself a kick in the posterior for thinking, even for a moment, that he’d bother. But she had to admit, too, that if anybody required such a display of personal worth from her, she would have a strong impulse to tell them off.

“Mr. Landar comes here at night?” she asked.

“Oh, yes. He and my husband have a snort or two. Then Mr. Landar goes off to do whatever he does.

“I think he gambles,” Mrs. Creel added. “He was telling Ebenezer they ought to roll craps. But, of course, Eb’s got no money.”

Probably not anymore, if he gambled with Garn, Emmalee reflected. The man was
completely
unprincipled, to try to bilk a self-deluded old failure like Creel, and whomever else among this party of innocent farmers he could gull.

“I’ll go over to the chuckwagon and get us all a little breakfast…” Emmalee was saying, when, from the ridge to the southwest, there came a long cry of woe and warning. It awakened the camp more effectively than Myrtle had ever done, and by the time Emmalee had pushed open the canvas flaps of the Conestoga and jumped down onto the ground, people were milling in wonder and alarm outside their wagons. They saw a horseman coming at breakneck speed down the ridge toward the camp, leading a riderless horse by the reins. Emmalee recognized Randy Clay. He was heading for Horace Torquist’s tent.

She ran toward the tent, as did dozens of people, and got there just as Randy was reining his mount in a cloud of dust. The second horse tossed its mane nervously. Torquist must have been awakened by Randy’s cry, because he stepped barefooted out of the tent, buckling his belt.

“Clay! What is it?” he asked. The wagonmaster was trying to be calm, but Emmalee noted a flicker of panic in his question.

Randy made no bones about trying to appear composed. He wasn’t. “J. C. Steele and I were out scouting today’s trail,” he said, speaking raggedly, “and we…and we…”

“Out with it. Clay, for God’s sake.”

“…J. C.’s dead. He took an arrow right between his eyes. One moment he was talking to me, next minute there’s an arrow in his head and he’s on the ground, dead. I don’t know where it came from.”

“You didn’t see any Indians?” demanded Lambert Strep, who had raced up in a nightshirt and hurriedly pulled on boots.

“Not a glimpse,” replied Randy. Emmalee saw that he was trembling.

“Arapaho,” said Garn Landar coolly, striding upon the scene. He was fully clothed: buckskin jacket, breeches, silver-banded hat. A rifle was slung over his shoulder. “Chief Fire-On-The-Moon. I told you.”

The crowd, which was growing by the moment as more and more people came to see what was happening, now quieted to a hush.

“But Randy didn’t actually
see
any Indians,” Torquist said hopefully. “The arrow could have come from some lone brave out hunting.”

“Really?” Garn smiled, his voice easy, eerie. “Take a look up at the ridge.”

The people, hitherto preoccupied with Randy’s news and Torquist’s reaction to it, turned and cried out in unison. All along the ridge, from sky to sky, were the Arapaho, hundreds and hundreds of them on horseback, brandishing lances and spears, quivers of arrows and long, curved bows. An army of painted savages poised above the encampment, conveying a sense of ominous, hideous power, but motionless and absolutely silent. Emmalee heard a collective gasp from the people around her, part of which was her own terrified exhalation.

“What are you going to do now?” Garn asked no one in particular.

“We can’t fight them,” mourned Strep. “We’re peaceable folk. We don’t even have that many guns.”

This was true. With few exceptions—rifles for rabbits, a couple of shotguns for pheasant—the Torquist party was unarmed. Torquist had seen no reason for it. “Our virtue is our armament,” he had said on many occasions, “and the Lord is our defense.”

“They don’t seem in any hurry to attack,” Torquist murmured in wonder. “Perhaps they’ll just move on.”

His voice had spirit in it, an effort of optimism meant to reassure his followers.

“They don’t have to do a thing,” Garn said, deflating Torquist’s fragile hope. “We’re trapped. The river and the creek are at our back and flanks. The ridge is in front of us. I couldn’t have picked a worse place to camp if you’d given me ten years to figure it out.”

His voice had the heat of whiplash and true anger in it now. Emmalee realized how ignorant she really was. Only a little earlier she had been thinking how cozy this spot seemed.

The other scouts now appeared—Cassidy, Ryder, and Mexx—fully clothed, grim, and jittery.

“Hey there, boys,” Garn drawled. “Steele’s dead, and you’ve got a little problem up there on the ridge. Which one of you dullards was bright enough to tell Horace to camp here?”

“This is no time for recriminations!” cried the wagonboss. “We have to decide what to do.”

But Cassidy, to his credit, took the responsibility for error. “I figured it’d be better to ford the river last night, so’s we wouldn’t have to start today all wet.”

“We might well start today all dead” was Garn’s only comment.

The people in the crowd were regarding him in a completely new light now, a wholly respectful light.

“We have to plan what to do,” said the wagonboss uneasily. Emmalee, who was close to him, saw pain in his expression, and realized the cost of the effort he was expending in trying to maintain a commanding air.

Suddenly the Indians on the ridge moved, just a slight shift of position. The center of their line parted and there appeared, riding up from behind the ridge, a figure of splendid but terrible wonder. On a pony white as snow, in a headdress of feathers three feet high, wearing bands of gold on his arms and legs, face and body painted vividly, sat a brave whose very bearing suggested ruthlessness, mayhem, and peerless contempt.

“There he is,” said Garn quietly, in a voice that did not try to conceal awe. “Fire-On-The-Moon.”

“Oh, my God!” breathed Torquist. He stopped, aware that he was displaying not only doubt, but fear.

Then, intruding absurdly upon the scene, one of the Bent daughters, Priscilla, came running up, hollering, “Hey, everybody, there are two dead dogs down by the river!”

She looked around, as if wondering why everyone was gathered here. Then she saw the Arapaho and froze in her tracks.

“I have an idea,” said Randy Clay. “During the war,” he explained, “when Mad Dog Spaeth was beseiged in Fort Cuyahoga, he made it appear as if his troops had more cannon than they did by sticking stovepipes out of portholes on the battlements.”

“I see what you’re getting at,” exclaimed Torquist.

“And the attackers thought he had more firepower than he actually did. They withdrew. Now, if these Indians were to think we had cannon—”

“But we don’t have cannon,” said Garn.

“We’ve got wagonwheels. And axles. We’ve got wagonpoles.”

“I get you,” exulted Lawrence Redding, blacksmith. “We’ll take wheels off the wagons, and cut wagonpoles to cannon-barrel length. We can grease them black, to look like the real thing. At this distance, them redskins’ll be fooled like nothing.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that,” Garn said. “When it comes to putting mental pressure on an enemy, they’re way ahead of us. Fire-On-The-Moon drove half a camp to suicide once just by circling around its wagons and, once every hour, shooting a flaming arrow down into their midst. He waits. Until we find out what he wants, the battle is all his.”

“Enough of that talk, Landar!” admonished Torquist. “Clay has a good idea and the only one I’ve heard so far. I think it’ll work.”

The people, just minutes ago so favorable to Garn, now shifted behind their leader. They wanted to believe that Randy’s ploy would save them.

“Women and children to the wagons,” Torquist commanded. “Men, begin removing wheels from the innermost circle of wagons.”

Emmalee walked up to Garn. She could not help but think of those wildly intimate moments beneath the wagon. Her body recalled the feel of his bare chest against her naked breasts and her mind remembered how difficult it had been to pull away from him.

“Hello, Emmalee,” he said to her now, as if that incident of ecstatic conflict had never occurred. “Better find a wagon and crawl inside.”

She realized that he probably knew more about the Arapaho than the other scouts, certainly more than anyone else on the train. She also understood, in a very direct way, that his knowledge might be their best defense.

“What’s going to happen now?” she asked.

“I’m going to protect you.” He smiled, but his expression showed real concern. “Just like I said.”

Emmalee was not about to make a wisecrack or debate the issue. Suddenly she was very glad that he was there, whatever his faults were.

“What does that chief want?” she asked.

“Frankly, other than live women and dead men, I don’t know what he wants.”