The Pride of Hannah Wade (2 page)

When Cochise made peace, he had spoken only for himself and promised to urge the rest of his group to agree to the terms. No treaty was made with the other Chiricahua bands, leaving them free to raid and war as they were wont to do, as evidenced by the frequent sorties they made against the miners in the Silver City area.

Hannah had heard the frustration caused by the too-democratic system discussed too many times. He army didn’t know how to deal with it. But it wasn’t that knowledge that brought her attention to the captain now. He’d spoken with certainty rather than suspicion in naming the band. More than once her husband, Stephen, had complained about the difficulty of telling one Indian from another, yet the captain was claiming to distinguish one Apache band from a host of others.

“How do you know this, Captain?” she challenged. He absently rolled the cigar along his lips, taking his time in answering. The action showed the angles and hollows of his jaw and cheek. Of all the officers at Fort Bayard, Captain Jake Cutter alone remained clean-shaven, growing neither whiskers nor mustache. It set him apart from the other men, as did many things about him.

“See that dumpy, mean-looking one on the glass-eyed roan?” He spoke around his cigar, his lips barely moving while he clamped the butt between his teeth. “He fits the description of Juh, a leader of the
Nde-nda-i
group.” He pronounced the Apache’s name as
Hwū.

In her earlier perusal of the small band, Hannah had glossed over the fat one. This time her glance paused on him. Whether or not her impression was colored by Captain Cutter’s words, she sensed a malevolence
behind those devil-black eyes, a base cruelty that brought a shiver to her skin and prompted her to look away.

“What is he doing here?” She sought to dispel the sensation and rushed the question, giving it a tone of demand.

“Shopping, the same as you, Mrs. Wade.” The dry reminder came with the hard gleam of a smile. “Although I expect they’re wanting to trade for something other than odd pieces of pottery and baskets to pretty their wickiups.”

His comment obviously revealed his skepticism about the importance of this trip. They’d come to purchase some inexpensive Mexican goods that would be utilitarian as well as decorative for Mrs. Sloane’s quarters on Officers’ Row. Without some attempt to brighten it, army housing could be as drab and barren as the desolate land surrounding it.

“Spoken like a jealous bachelor who has no woman to create a cheery corner where he can slip away from the army’s hard existence,” Hannah retorted, completely sure of her role and purpose in her husband’s life, which was to provide beauty and grace and to alleviate loneliness.

“I knew I was missing something.” His jesting comment mocked her sentiment, but not unkindly.

A flurry of movement distracted Hannah, checking her reply as the Apaches who’d been in the store came out. They moved swiftly, not appearing to hurry yet gliding across the ground. They swung onto the blanket-covered saddletrees strapped on their horses’ backs and each gathered up the single braided rawhide strand looped around the horse’s lower jaw that served as both bridle and rein. The shifting hooves dug up the dust layers, the horses snorting to clear their nostrils.

The first Apache, the bare-chested brave with the scarred cheek, faced his tan and white pony toward the
store. The look he threw at Captain Cutter was a killing one, but the border Spanish he called out was intended for the trader inside the adobe building.

“He said he would be back when the ‘yellow legs’ and his ‘buffalo soldiers’ had gone,” Hannah translated. “Yellow legs” referred to the yellow stripe down the legs of a cavalry officer’s trousers, while “buffalo soldier” was the Indians’ descriptive term for the Negro troopers whose kinky hair reminded them of the shaggy mane of a buffalo.

“I heard.” But he couldn’t guess the reason for a return visit—perhaps to complete a trade for illegal goods or to settle a score over some slight, or merely to talk big.

In a scurry of ponies, the Apaches swept out of the clearing and melted almost instantly into the desert scrub that grew thickly along the dry wash. Cutter watched until there was no more trace of them, then brought his attention back to the party of women.

A shaft of sunlight pierced the dried brush roofing the crude shelter and awakened fiery lights in the red-brown hair of Mrs. Wade. They caught his eye, causing his glance to linger on her. Slim and round-bodied, she had ivory-fair skin and heavily fringed brown eyes. Her smoothly refined features held a contented look, as of strong passions running a serene course. His attention centered briefly on the soft crease of her lips, a hint of will and pride at the corners. When her glance swung to him, it was full and direct.

“You speak Spanish.” Cutter remembered the instant translation she’d made of the Apache’s words only minutes ago.

“When we were stationed in Brownsville, I had a Mexican woman for a maid. And you, Captain, where did you learn?” The heat was already building, even in the shade beneath the
ramada.
She lifted a lace handkerchief
to her face and delicately pressed it around her mouth to absorb the fine sheen of dampness.

“I guess I picked it up during all those years on the Texas border, too.” Cutter observed her action, so indicative of breeding and refinement. The lavender fragrance drifted across the heated air to him, stirring up memories and an old bitterness. Those were behind him—and better left there.

So instead he considered the way the army could isolate a man. Even though he and Major Wade had served in the same regiment for the last four years, this was the first time they’d been assigned to the same post. Therefore he’d only recently become acquainted with the major’s wife. At some of those Texas outposts, months would go by without Cutter ever seeing a white woman. Few officers permitted their wives to join them, not necessarily because they were bothered by the hardships of the post or the threat of hostiles, but because they were concerned about their women living in close proximity to all the enlisted colored soldiers. Exceptions were the forts near centers of civilization, like Brownsville.

The entire officer corps of the Ninth Cavalry Regiment was white. The Negro soldiers they commanded never advanced beyond the noncommissioned ranks. And few officers were happy about serving in a colored regiment, but Cutter had been with the Ninth since its inception after the War Between the States. Besides, he’d always had trouble fitting the mold.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, he’d enlisted in the Union army at the age of eighteen. He was a natural leader, and all his promotions had come in the field, catapulting him up through the ranks and earning him an officer’s commission without the benefit of a West Point education, something the War Between the States had done with many a soldier.

But that need didn’t exist after the war was won, and the army found itself with a surfeit of officers. Like many other officers, Mrs. Wade’s husband among them, Cutter had been demoted at the close of the war. But unlike Major Wade with his West Point ring, he didn’t insist on the observance of military courtesy that dictated his being addressed by his former rank. While the others scratched and clawed to regain their previous status, Cutter found no great difference between the major he’d been and the captain he now was. Having seen the army from both sides—officer and enlisted man—he was satisfied with the uniform and the job.

He was an officer, but he didn’t fit in with them; Jake Cutter was a soldier, but he didn’t belong in the ranks. At thirty-two, he was an outsider to both, and the years in between had calloused him with a hard self-sufficiency. So when he looked at the proud major’s wife, she represented a class and lifestyle he didn’t seek—the formal soirees and teas, the petty post intrigues and politics, and all their accompanying emptiness and greedy ambitions.

“Tell me, Captain Cutter”—the scented lace was lowered and smoothed by her slender white hands— “how did you know those Apaches intended us no harm when they rode in? You didn’t even put a hand to your pistol.”

Her observation produced a brief flicker of admiration in him. “A collection of things, but most notably their clothes,” he answered, smiling as he held the cigar in his hand. “Only one of them was stripped to ... his native gear; the rest were fully dressed. Nah-tay, the Apache scout at the fort, told me it’s bad to wear clothes when fighting. If you’re shot, a piece of material can get inside the wound and cause an infection. Don’t ever underestimate the natural intelligence of an Apache, Mrs. Wade.” He shifted to survey the clearing with its scatter of adobe huts. “Perhaps you should join
the other ladies and finish your shopping. It might he best if we don’t linger here too long.”

A small question flared in the brown wells of her eyes, but she was too well-trained a military wife to ask it. Army discipline dictated that one accept orders without questioning the reasons for them.

“Of course, Captain.” The long folds of her skirt made a swishing sound as she turned to rejoin her companions.

His gaze lingered on the gentle slope of her shoulders and the fashionably nipped-in waist of the black-and-green-striped dress top. A beautiful woman. Then his thoughts moved on to more pressing matters as he left the shade of the brush arbor and crossed to the army ambulance.

The driver, a tall, leanly muscled black sergeant named John T. Hooker, stood by the four hitch of long-eared mules. Sergeants were the officers’ communication links to their troops; all orders were funneled through them. John T. Hooker was A Company’s top sergeant. He’d served under Cutter during those long border years in Texas and had earned the chevrons on his sleeve through skill, courage, and intelligence. Unlike most of the black troops, where literacy was a problem, Hooker could read and write. He was officer material, but Cutter knew no black trooper would rise above a noncommissioned rank in this white man’s army.

“Came outta nowhere, didn’t they?” Hooker studied the brush.

“They usually do—if you’re going to see them at all,” Cutter replied.

“Think they’ll be waitin’ for us?” Hooker wondered. The two accompanying troopers stayed by the military ambulance where their horses were tied, standing at ease now that the threat was gone, yet remaining watchful and alert.

“They stopped here for one of two reasons— ammunition or supplies.” A mule stamped its foot at a fly, its brace chains rattling. “Let’s hope it was ammunition. They’ll be less likely to waste what they’ve got left on us.” A humorless smile lifted the corners of his mouth.

“That was a raidin’ party on their way to Mexico, and I’d bet my stripes on it,” the sergeant declared, perspiration from the desert heat giving a sheen to his brown-black skin and accenting his strong cheekbones and jaw.

“I don’t think you’d lose.” With an idle slap on the curried-slick neck of a mule, Cutter turned to bring the women into his view. They were still outside poking through the odds and ends stacked under the
ramada,
nicknamed the “squaw cooler” by some whites, in search of some house trinket.

The owner of the store emerged from the adobe building, a potbellied white man with a bushy mustache and long, flowing sideburns, slovenly dressed in baggy pants secured by dark suspenders over the faded red of his long johns. He was one of the early settlers of the area, drawn by the stories of Apache gold and then held by the money, to be made selling supplies to miners, soldiers, and Apaches. Long ago he’d married a squaw from one of the Mimbres bands so he could have a foot in both camps, the white man’s and the red. But he was never fully accepted in either; whites looked askance at a squaw man, and the Apache never forgot the white man’s greed.

“’Lo, Captain.” The locals called him “Apache Jack” Reynolds. As he approached Cutter, he showed a measure of discomfort, a nervous tic twitching the skin along the corner of his upper lip. “Sorry about that little incident. Hope it didn’t scare the ladies much. They were just some of my wi—Little Dove’s relatives come to visit.” He checked the impulse to identify the
heavy, plodding Apache woman as his wife, craving the respectability of his own kind and deprived of it by their prejudices against his copper-skinned wife, no longer the maiden he’d once desired. “They’re comin’ back, like most of their kind, they get nervous when the army’s around.” He laughed, weakly trying to make a joke out of it while explaining the parting comment in case Cutter understood Spanish.

“Relatives.” Cutter somehow doubted that. “I thought I recognized Juh. Who was the one that called to you?”

Beads of sweat broke out across the trader’s forehead. He couldn’t be sure whether the question was a trap and Cutter already knew the warrior’s identity. He mopped his brow with a soiled bandanna and tried to hide his unease.

“Lutero.” It was a tight, forced smile he offered with the name; then, in defense, he added, “You know how tangled these Apache relations get sometimes. I mean, even Cochise was related to Mangas Coloradas and that war shaman Geronimo.”

Lutero. Cutter matched the name to the scar-cheeked image in his mind and filed it away. Such pieces of information were maybe important and maybe not. But it might be worth remembering that he had seen an Apache, believed to be Juh, in the area with a handful of warriors, among them a brave called Lutero. Maybe a raiding party? Blood always ran fast in the spring. It had been bold of them to show themselves to Cutter and the escorting troopers. There was no doubt in his mind that their little group had been thorougly scouted before Juh and his band had ridden in.

“Is there anything I can do for you, Captain?” The inquiry had an edge to it; the questioning had put Apache Jack on the defensive and turned him slightly belligerent.

A mule snorted, ridding its nostrils of accumulated dust. “We’d like to water the team if you can spare it,” Cutter replied.

“The well’s there to the side. Ya can draw what ya need.” The white trader gestured in the general direction of the desert well.

“Sergeant,” Cutter, knowing Hooker had overheard the conversation, left the business of watering the mules to him.