The Pride of Hannah Wade (10 page)

“The ground’s purty churned up here,” Amos said. “It looks like she put up a struggle.”

“Damn them!” The words were an ominous rumble that came from deep within Stephen Wade.

“I seed Mrs. Wade at the fort a time or two. I always thought she was a fine lady,” Amos offered as a kind of final comment before he turned to leave Major Wade.

Cutter took a swift step after him and pulled him to the side, muttering under his breath so that Wade wouldn’t hear, “What did you mean by that? Is she still alive? Did she leave here with them?”

“Yeah, she’s alive.” The scout wiped at the sweat trickling down his temples, and his crazy, marble eye directed its gleam at Cutter. “And we both know she’d be better off dead about now. Hell, Captain, between here and Texas, you been fightin’ these ‘paches for a few years. You seen what they done to white women.” Cutter knew. He had buried some of them. Unconsciously, he wrapped the piece of ribbon more tightly rebbon his fingers. He hoped to God he wouldn’t have to bury her, too.

“Get your scouts out. We’ll be on the move in another ten minutes.” He dismissed Amos. As the buckskin-clad figure moved away, Cutter glanced back at Wade.

The piece of cloth was clenched in his fist and held tight at his side. He was staring at the patch of desert, the gravel all scuffled, and Cutter saw the wetness in the other officer’s eyes. A rage of anguish contorted his features, making his long jaw stand out.

A man was entitled to his private feelings, so Cutter walked away, a bitter gall sticking in his own throat at the whole sorry situation.

Fire burned all the way through her, until Hannah felt seared to the bone. The sun had beaten down on her naked skin for hours, the tender white skin that she
had always protected with such care from too much exposure to the elements. She had only to look at her thighs and arms to see the redness and understand the searing pain.

Her body ached from riding, every muscle screaming its soreness; the insides of her knees were practically raw from gripping the horse, and her legs felt as if they were being pulled apart.

Her lips were cracked from the dryness and the heat. She’d had nothing to eat or drink since morning. She was on the verge of collapsing, yet some spark of life kept her going, kept her swaying to the horse’s stride, kept pushing her to continue.

Everything was a kind of haze, a shimmering agony of fire, thirst, and pain. Her face throbbed where Lutero had struck her, her lip was swollen, and her head ached. Dust and sweat had mixed to crease her skin with muddy rivulets.

They walked their mounts along a gully soft with sand, a single line of horses traveling nose to tail. The thick, fine sand muffled the thud of plodding hooves, a dully rhythmic sound punctuated by the odd snort of a pony clearing its nostrils of dust. The sound enveloped Hannah, coming from beneath her, behind her, and in front of her.

It was several beats before she realized it was also coming from another direction, and she roused herself from the stupor that claimed her to puzzle out the difference. The horses in front were angling out of the gully where a natural ford sloped the sides. Instead of following them, Lutero was riding straight ahead, the blood bay gelding in tow. The riders behind them turned after the others.

Confused and unable to think clearly, Hannah swung her dull gaze to her Apache captor and watched him lift a hand in farewell to his comrades. When he noticed
her bewilderment, his mouth curved in a smile that seemed malicious.

“Scatter across desert,” he said in Spanish.

It took her a minute to unravel that cryptic message and to recall his earlier likening of the Apache to gains of sand. The band was breaking up, scattering across the desert to disappear one by one. In. the half of her mind that was functioning, the part not dulled by physical suffering, Hannah realized that any cavalry patrol following their trail would be unlikely to notice their tracks in this soft sand, splitting away from the main bunch.

She cried out, but it was only a low moan. Her body hurt too much.

T
HE SHOCK OF WATER AGAINST HER PAMCHED LIPS AND
thick tongue lifted Hannah out of her stupor and awakened her pain-drugged senses. The smell of the tepid water, the sound of it trickling from a container made from animal intestines, and the wetness of it reduced her to a primitive drive. The rough hand that had twisted into her hair no longer needed to hold her head back. She clutched at the water bag, tipping it higher to increase the flow. More came than her dry throat could swallow and it slopped over the side of her mouth, its warm wetness cooler than her sunburned, dehydrated skin.

When the flow was cut off and the water bag withdrawn, Hannah greedily reached for it, her thirst not nearly quenched. “No, please.” The croaked protest was no louder than a whisper and it lacked strength.

No response came as Lutero walked, away from her kneeling form. Her outstretched arms fell limply to her
sides, and a sudden gut-wrenching pain convulsed her stomach. The precious liquid she had so greedily consumed was disgorged in a violent upheaval. The desert sand instantly sucked up the watery vomit, leaving only a damp, dark circle to mark where it had been. Hannah wiped at the slimy spittle on her lips while her shoulders lifted with dry, hacking sobs.

She sagged into a sitting position, propped up by one hand, her legs curved to one side. The reviving influence of the water, however briefly enjoyed, had broken the stupor that had kept her from feeling the agony of her blistering flesh and screaming muscles. Salty sweat ran onto her cut lip, making it sting afresh. Prostrated by heat and exhaustion, Hannah felt incapable of further movement. With eyes that blurred and didn’t hold focus, she looked around.

They were in the midst of some sort of ruins. Behind her were the crumbling remains of an adobe wall, weathered and old. The area was ringed by trees and encroaching brush. Beyond lay a high range of mountains, the Mogollons. She noticed some broken shards of pottery nearby. But none of this was capable of rousing her interest. She was alive; that was all that counted.

The sun was nearly behind a distant ridge whose spiny top flamed with a yellow glow. Lutero was picketing the horses near a tumbling wall where tufts of desert grass provided forage for them. The bay gelding wasn’t interested in the nourishment; it stood with its head hanging and its legs braced apart. They were stopping for the night, and a fragment of relief quivered through her.

Wanting to avoid causing herself more pain, she tried to stretch out carefully on the ground, but the sharpness of the gravelly sand against her raw and tender flesh was excruciating. She collapsed onto it, the single convulsion of pain preferable to a multitude of little
ones that clawed at her nerves. She went limp, throbbing all over and much too exhausted to care about the rough bed the desert floor made. She shut her eyes.

The blessed oblivion of sleep was brutally disrupted by a pain stabbing through her ribs. The force of it-rolled her over, and sand scraped the raw flesh of her back. When she opened her eyes, Lutero was standing over her, his high-moccasined legs spread slightly.

Dusk lavendered the sky, cerise clouds lying low on the horizon. At first Hannah thought he wanted her to rise so that they could be on the move again. Weakly she moved her head from side to side, a mute, negative answer to his command, while sandy grit entangled itself in the wild mass of her hair.

Her half-closed eyes caught a glimpse of motion. She tried to focus on it. The breechcloth that hung past his knees in front was being unwrapped and drawn away to reveal more of the brown-skinned body. Almost against her will, Hannah’s gaze focused on the turgid male erection. All that had been shapes in the shadows with her husband, brief glimpses and sensations of size, was now blatantly there for her to see.

Inwardly she recoiled, trying to shrink from him. With his foot he forced her sore legs apart. More of her raw, sun-seared skin rubbed across the sand and the contact drew sharp gasps of pain from Hannah. When she felt him move between her legs, she raised her hands, trying to ward him off, but her sun-battered and ride-abused body was too weak.

He pressed the weight of his sweat-slick and grimy body brutally onto her, indifferent to the rough scrape of his skin against her sore flesh, and the smell of him saturated the air she breathed. She made puny, ineffective attempts to escape him, her hands pushing futilely at his deep, stoutly muscled chest, and she twisted, trying to arch away from the jabbing prod, writhing at the pain any movement on this gravel bed caused.

“No. No.” Hannah repeated the word over and over, crying silently, too weakened and physically beaten by the elements to offer any other resistance.

His callused hands grasped her hips and held them in position while he entered her dryly, ramming into her without a care for her discomfort. Her mouth opened on a cry that never came out, shut off somewhere by a desire to deny the driving animal thrust that rocked her body and ground her seared flesh into the dirt.

In this whirling moment of pain and violation, a sense of unreality took hold. None of this was happening to her. She shrank from it mentally, blocking it out and crawling into a corner of her mind to hide until it was all over.

The pounding increased in tempo, Lutero’s bestial gruntings rumbling into her hearing. None of it stopped until he’d spent his seed inside her. Almost immediately he withdrew his still-hardened shaft from her and stood without ceremony. Hannah kept her eyes shut, revulsed by the mere thought of the hanging genitals.

But Lutero was uninterested in her now that he had taken his satisfaction. The tough rawhide soles of his moccasins made a small crunching sound as he stepped over her sprawled legs and walked away, picking up his breechcloth to wind it around his hips again.

Slowly, hurting, Hannah drew her legs up and curled into a tight fetal ball. She ached from the rough usage, the wetness of his sperm making the insides of her legs sticky. She felt dirty and unclean, a defilement that had nothing to do with the honest grime and sweat coating her naked body. She recoiled from the mental image of the broad-faced Apache mounting her like a rutting animal.

“Stephen,” she said in a broken sob. “Stephen, where are you?” Her shoulders shook. Then she saw Lutero walking straight toward her. “Oh, God, no.” She didn’t know what he intended—to rape her again
or to kill her—but a spark remained that made her want to live. He crouched down on one knee and caught up both her wrists. “What are you going to do?” Hannah demanded hoarsely in Spanish.

But the Apache wasn’t inclined to answer her as his inscrutable black eyes gave her brief glances. Using a piece of rawhide, he tightly bound her wrists together, so tightly that her pulsing blood was just barely able to continue to flow. All the horrifying tales she’d heard about the innovative ways Apaches used to prolong death came rushing back to her with frightening clarity. Half certain that he intended to stake her out atop a mound of vicious biting fire ants, Hannah watched him tie the free end of the strap to the solid trunk of a mesquite not far from her head. He tied her ankles as well and secured their rawhide thong to a thick branch that he pushed deep into the ground. She could roll from side to side, but the rest of her movement was restricted.

With a grunt of satisfaction, Lutero again left her, his footfalls making no sound. Even if she’d had the strength to try, she couldn’t have freed herself from the leather bonds. In her condition, it was best simply to breathe and try not to think of past events—or the future.

The campfire was a deep-glowing light in the swallowing blackness. Overhead the stars glistened sharply, and the mountain desert held its mysteries from them. The breeze lifted, carrying the smell of the cavalry horses and their excrement to the soldiers beyond the fringes of the firelight.

The camp was segregated into three parts—four, if the picketed horses and mules were counted. The largest section was occupied by the Negro troopers, the dark blue of their dusty uniforms and the dark shades of their faces blending with the midnight blackness. Off
by themselves, away from the campfire, the Apache scouts had bedded down. And the last area belonged to the officers.

After a tasteless meal of beans and hardtack, the officers grouped around Major Stephen Wade. His anger was controlled but palpable as he viewed the circle of men, slicing a pointed look at the one-eyed scout who stood slouching on his right.

“The size of the raiding party has shrunk during the course of the day, gentlemen.” Stephen faced them, his shoulders stiffly squared. “Mr. Hill estimates that we may now be trailing as few as five Apaches,”

“They been travelin’ single file, each pony messin’ up the tracks of the one in front of it, which makes it hard for a tracker to gauge how many’s in the party.” Amos Hill had a cheek full of chewing tobacco, which made a small bulge in his whiskered face. “An’ all them extra ponies just makes it tougher. We’re purty damned sure we’re four horses shy, plus some of the extra stock— and maybe more.”