The Pride of Hannah Wade (13 page)

“Yes, sir.” The response betrayed no emotion.

Bettendorf seemed irritated by the noncommital reply. “I can imagine the agony Wade is going through, not knowing if she’s alive or dead—the thought of her in the hands of those . . . barely civilized savages. It’s hell, I’m sure.”

“I’m sure it is, sir.”

“We all know that her chances of being alive are slim,” Bettendorf insisted. “How many white women taken captive by Indians have ever been seen again? Damn few, I’ll wager—and then they’re usually not right in the head afterward. It’s a damned shame that Delvecchio or Sloane didn’t shoot her before they died. Now we can only pray to God that she knows a merciful death.” He paused, glowering at Cutter for his continued silence. “You’re a seasoned officer, Captain. Apaches don’t burden themselves with women captives unless they intend to rape them or sell them into
slavery. Children they will take into their tribe, but it’s an exception for a grown woman to be accepted.”

“You’re right, sir. If they keep her alive, she’ll be a slave.” And, like camp dogs, at the first hint of enemies in the vicinity of the
rancheria,
slaves were killed so that the location of the Apache wickiups would not be revealed by a dog’s bark or a slave’s betrayal of his master. In severe circumstances, Cutter knew, the Apache was known to kill fussing infants or toddlers, sacrificing one for the safety of many. Supposing she lived long enough to accompany them into their Mexico range, she’d be sold or bartered to some slaver for a rifle or a horse.

“She’s going to haunt him.” Bettendorf looked after the retreating figure of Stephen Wade. “That’s why it is better if he believes she’s dead. Then he can grieve over her passing and the pain will be clean. Eventually, the memory will dim.”

The colonel had it worked out too neatly for Cutter’s taste. That was the easy solution—to turn your back on what was unpleasant. To some, it was simpler than dealing with it.

“That may be, sir,” was the most he would admit. “Is there anything else you wished to ask me about?”

“No. I’ll expect your written report.” Bettendorf dismissed him, apparently realizing how long he’d kept Cutter standing there listening to his defensive explanations of why he wanted to shut the book on Hannah Wade.

Before he reached his quarters, Wade was intercepted by the owner/editor of the
Gazette
in nearby Silver City. A derby hat was perched atop Boler’s head and his checkered jacket was unbuttoned around his large middle, his chest spanned by the gold watch chain hooked to his vest. His sideburns were long, flowing into his heavily jowled cheeks, a style popularly called
Dundrearies. Shrewd and intelligent, Hy Boler had the look of a man who knew a good story was before him and intended to have it.

“Major Wade, I can’t tell you how badly I felt when I heard about your wife’s abduction by the Apaches.” He’d already run one story when the word had first spread to Silver City. Below the
Gazette’s
banner, the headlines had read, “Army Wife Carried Off by Savages” with the subheading, “Gallant Cavalry Officer Pursues Apaches to Rescue His Wife.” It was a sensational story, and the eastern trades had already picked it up. “What happened? Were you able to catch up with those murdering savages?”

“No. We lost the trail. The wind came up and wiped out their tracks,” Wade admitted tersely, in no mood for this questioning, yet aware that it was never wise for an ambitious officer to ignore the press.

“You didn’t find your wife, then?”

Grimly, Wade recognized this as a tactful way of asking whether she was dead. “No. The Apaches still have her.”

“You believe she’s alive?”

“Yes,” he said forcefully. “And I will not quit looking until I find her. Our scouts will be spreading the word to all the friendly Apaches that I’ll pay a ransom for her safe return. You can put in your newspaper, Mr. Boler, that I’m offering a reward for any information about her.”

“Will you be going out again to search for her?”

“Every time I leave this fort, sir, I will be looking for my wife. I will not be content until I have her back,” Stephen asserted. “Now, if you will excuse me?”

Upon entering the rooms he had shared with Hannah, Stephen immediately felt the force of her absence, the sense of something vital missing. An emptiness seemed to ring through the place. His steps slowed, then stopped altogether as he looked around. He
removed his dusty campaign hat absently and laid his gloves inside the crown, then set both on a side table.

Some invisible weight dragged at him, increasing the slant of his broad shoulders. Inside he was emptied, a hollow ache occupying the void. He looked at a framed sampler hanging on the wall, its finely stitched design all Hannah’s work, and thought of her soft, smooth hands, the gentle strength of their touch on his arm. So many memories came to him—the evenings they spent together when he read aloud the latest novel to come their way; the picnics she arranged, complete with wine and crystal, at some surprisingly idyllic site she’d found; the times they had raced their horses across the flats and she’d let him win.

How he adored her! She was more than an officer’s lady, more than his wife and companion; she was his island in a sea of sand, the one who made his life bearable. He needed her—her intelligence, her wit, and her love. She had believed in him, which had allowed him to believe in himself.

Stephen followed the narrow hall to the bedroom door and walked through it into the room where they’d spent so many nights together. The shock of seeing a woman standing in front of the wardrobe stopped him short. At first his glance couldn’t get past the gown she held, the brown one shot with gold threads that Hannah had worn to the party for Lieutenant Sloane and his bride. When he could drag his gaze from it, Stephen noticed the coffee-brown color of the woman’s skin and recognized the laundress, Cimmy Lou.

“I didn’t mean t’ startle you, Majuh.” Her voice was a throaty drawl, a match for those knowing eyes that watched him.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded, finding her presence disruptive.

“Miz Goodson asked me to come by an’ tidy up some.” She smoothed a hand over the shimmering
gown. “What d’you want me to do with Miz Wade’s things? Miz Goodson said maybe you want ’em packed away.”

Turning, Stephen unfastened the front of his army Jacket and crossed to the vanity table and mirror. The table was nothing more than packing crates disguised by material from an old blue satin gown of Hannah’s, pleated and flounced to skirt the wooden boxes. Stephen picked up the gilded hairbrush, part of a vanity set of comb, brush, and hand mirror. A strand of dark auburn hair was caught in its bristles. Memory played a cruel trick, flashing him the mental image of a scalp he’d seen once—freshly taken and bloody.

“She shore did have some pretty things,” Cimmy Lou declared.

“No!” Mindless of her comment, Stephen shouted at the image in his head, a roar of pain and anger. It vanished.

“Majuh?” A long-fingered brown hand touched his arm.

He jerked away from the contact. “I don’t want anything done. Leave everything as it is,” he ordered, and finally looked at the colored woman. “Put the gown back where you found it. I don’t want you touching anything of hers.”

“Yes, suh.”

“Hello? Hello-oo?” A female voice trilled the questioning call, the sound seeming to originate in the vicinity of the front parlor.

Frowning, Stephen left the bedroom to find out who else had gained entry into his living quarters. In the parlor doorway he paused and refastened his uniform jacket when he saw captain Goodson’s wife standing by the side table, his hat and gloves in her hands. Her amber hair was arranged atop her head in rolled curls, a single ringlet dangling from the back, and a small navy
blue hat that matched the trim on her serge suit in a lighter shade of blue crowned it all.

“Mrs. Goodson, forgive me.” He apologized for his disheveled appearance, belatedly noticing that he still held Hannah’s hairbrush in his hand. “I didn’t know who was here.”

“I knocked, but you must not have heard me.” Her hand made a small, graceful gesture toward the front door.

“I was . . . in the rear.” He glanced at the hairbrush, his hold tightening on it slightly.

Maude Goodson looked at it, too. A shimmer of tears glittered in her china-blue eyes when she lifted her glance to his face. “I knew you had returned and I—I wanted you to know how sorry I am about your wife.”

Her sincerity was unmistakable, but Stephen was conscious of her delicate phrasing, not actually stating whether Hannah was dead, missing, or captured. He knew that she and Hannah had been close, as close as any army wives could be, considering their peripatetic lifestyle.

“You are most thoughtful, Mrs. Goodson.”

“While you were gone, I had Cimmy Lou come by to clean.” She appeared hesitant. “I wasn’t certain what you wanted done with your wife’s things.”

“Nothing.” He was quietly emphatic about it. “Everything stays exactly as it is.”

Her expression grew tender. “Of course, Major,” She smiled in warm understanding and sympathy. “Would you care to accompany Captain Goodson and myself to chapel this evening?”

His hesitation was slight, “Thank you, yes.”

“We must remember, Major, that the Lord knows of our sufferings, and we must believe that Hannah is in his care.”

“Yes.” Stephen deferred to her faith, since she was
the daughter of an army chaplain. Hard facts were more his line. As far as he was concerned, his wife was in the hands of the Apaches. And if that thought didn’t tear a man’s guts out, he wasn’t much of a man.

Mrs. Goodson laid his campaign hat and leather gauntlets aside. “We will come by to pick you up later this evening, Major.”

“I shall be waiting.” He walked her to the door.

Bathed, freshly shaven, and dressed in a clean uniform, Cutter angled his body against a post supporting the
ramada
roof outside the bachelor quarters. Water-filled ollas hung nearby, an occasional cool stir of air reaching him. Mess call had sounded some time ago, bringing the soldiers to the hall. Retreat was over and stretching shadows covered more and more ground as the sun settled in the western sky. He smoked his cigar, the first one in four days that didn’t taste of desert alkali or salty sweat, and watched the flow of officers, especially those with wives, into the chapel. Wade was among them, in the company of the Goodsons and the Bettendorfs. Cutter made no move to follow them.

Not long afterward, he heard the muffled resonance of their voices lifted in praiseful singing. His cigar was smoked down to the butt, so he shoved away from the post and went down the steps to the walk. Strolling, Cutter made a slow circle of the fort’s grounds, the children playing and laughing along Suds Row drawing a rare smile from him.

When he reached the small cemetery that lay on the fort’s perimeter, he paused to search out the two freshly dug graves among the little mounds. They stood out sharply from the older ones. The elements here were quick to reclaim what belonged to them, the older mounds of disturbed sandy soil being slowly leveled by the desert wind until they blended with the rest of the
ground, leaving only faint outlines of the graves’ dimensions. Soon, even those would be gone.

As Cutter stood by the new graves, he remembered how distraught Mrs. Sloane had been when he’d stopped by her quarters before supper to pay his respects. She had not wanted comfort. Sloane would live in his wife’s memory forever. But a time would come when no one remembered the way he laughed or recalled the firm way he shook hands. Just as the desert absorbed his grave, time would absorb him, too. Nothing would be left.

“Death makes it easier to forget.” Cutter recalled the essence of Bettendorf’s words during their discussion of Hannah Wade.

With an obstinate set to his features, he dug a heel into the sandy ground and drew a small trench around the oblong shape of Sloane’s grave, more sharply defining its outline. The desert would require that much more time to weather it away. The inevitable was merely postponed. He left the cemetery, taking the long way to his rooms. The evening wind lifted around him, scented with the night’s coolness.

Dark was settling and he felt the loneliness of his evening walk. On the edges of his mind were memories, still sweet, and wounds, still aching. He’d heard it said that when a man finds a woman, he finds his ambition, too. In his case, it worked the opposite, he supposed.

All by choice. And the decision was still one he wouldn’t change even if he could go back and do it over. There was too much hate—the hate of a high-born southern aristocrat’s daughter for a blue-bellied Yankee officer of the occupying army. Eventually she had been able to forgive him that sin, but the idea that his command would be a company of colored soldiers had been more than her plantation-bred heart could
tolerate. She had issued an ultimatum—her or the army. In the end, it hadn’t been much of a contest.

The army hadn’t wholly satisfied him, but it fed his prime hungers: for the hard discipline and the thrill of action, of men riding, fighting, and sweating, and the wicked satisfaction that burns in a man when he’s in the middle of a good fight. But the army had disappointed him, too, with its politics and prejudice, its seniority system that put inferior men in superior ranks, and its bureaucratic corruption that put an ill-equipped, ill-supplied, and undermanned force in the field. Lately, he’d been giving a lot of thought to quitting the service. After twelve years in the cavalry, following the guidon had lost its glamour.

But if he left the army, where would he go? What would he do? The only knowledge that the army had given him that was worthwhile on the outside dealt with horses and the kind of remounts the army needed in large quantity. Cutter supposed that if he ever got his bellyful of the army, he might go into the horse business.