Table of Contents

Cover

Excerpt

Title Page

About the Author

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Author Note

Copyright

“Am I disturbing you?”

When Wesley didn’t answer that, Sarah continued guilelessly, “But you’re finished, aren’t you? I mean, you’re dressed—” She ran her eyes over the muscled planes of his torso turned toward her. “That is, you’re more dressed than you usually are, and you’ve finished shaving. So I didn’t think I was disturbing you by wanting my turn to lie down.” Her smile was especially warm, even melting. “Did your rest restore you?”

The look he gave her suggested that he had been restored to health but not to serenity.

“Hungry?” she asked next. She relished this teasing, testing, pushing, prodding.

He opened his mouth, glanced beyond her to the flaps at the front of the wagon, then thought better of what he was going to say. His eyes narrowed, and she had the most scandalous sensation that he had just stripped her naked….

Sweet Sarah Ross
Julie Tetel

www.millsandboon.co.uk

JULIE TETEL

has always loved both history and romance, making it easy for her to love reading and writing historical romances. She is from a suburb of Chicago and currently lives in Durham, North Carolina. She has two sons, two careers, at least two points of view and one husband.

Chapter One

May 1836

On the Oregon Trail

Sarah knelt at a shady spot on the bank of the river and wondered what all the fuss was supposed to be about. In the two weeks since she’d left Independence, Missouri, the trip west had certainly not lived up to its arduous reputation. Instead it had been rather more like a pleasant outing. The only disagreeable aspect of the journey—besides the presence of her bratty little sisters, of course—was that horrible Mrs. Fletcher who had joined their wagon train at the last minute. Sarah was determined to put the old gossip in her place before they arrived in Oregon at the end of the summer.

Dipping her hands into the shallow water, she admitted to herself that difficulties might lie ahead. Nevertheless, nothing she had experienced thus far compared to the dire stories she had heard back in Independence. She was inclined to think that the tellers of those tales either intended to scare off the faint of heart or were faint-hearts themselves.

She splashed her face and allowed her sense of self-satisfaction to expand. She hadn’t wanted to come on this trip, but she was pleased to judge herself an excellent traveler even when the conditions were far beneath her. No, she hadn’t wanted to come, but when she had refused William’s insipid offer of marriage, her usually loving mother had been unaccountably angry with her and demanded that she accompany the family on the journey to join her brother and his wife, who had settled years ago in the Oregon Territory.

Even her normally reasonable father had refused to understand the logic of her arguments in favor of staying behind in Maryland, and had cut her off by saying, “This time, Sarah Ross, you’ll not wrap me around your little finger.” It had been too absurd of him to fail to see that at the mature age of almost twenty-two she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself. Not to mention that she had money of her own—never minding the fact that she wouldn’t have access to it for a few more years yet. And to have accused her of wheedling had been unjust!

Drinking from cupped hands, Sarah tasted the purity of the river, felt the chill against her teeth. She was caught short by the stray thought that here one could never feel tired or old. She rose to her feet and critically surveyed her surroundings. The broad green river braided before her and away on either side. Grassland sloped up behind her. An improbable indigo sky bowled above. A dry breeze rustled around her, mixing the scent of grass and sandy loam. The calm pulse of the prairie hummed in her ears.

When confronted with odd experiences, she often imagined how her father—her real father, the General—might have reacted, and she paused to consider what he would have thought of the rustic charms of this wilderness adventure. With a sniff she concluded that he would have agreed that she deserved the elegancies of life, not the rigors, and with some distaste she found a secluded clump of trees where she relieved herself. Afterward she adjusted her skirts and twitched her shawl into place. Then she secured the ties of the reticule hanging from her waist and fiddled coquettishly with the brim of her bonnet as if she were stepping out into a fashionable shopping street in Baltimore.

She was about to return to the wagon train circled beyond the slope behind her just out of sight, when the afternoon calm was shattered by piercing cries. Suddenly, she was distracted by glinting flashes of splashing water at the edge of the riverbed about twenty feet away from her. She had taken a half step out from the shelter of trees but quickly drew back in and behind the nearest tree trunk. A large, strange beast was lumbering in the water, balanced only on its hind legs, moving in her direction. Her heart jumped to her throat when the beast turned the bend in the river and began to head straight for the trees.

She would have made a run for it up the grassy slope, back to the safety of the wagon train, had it not been for the effect of a renewed volley of raucous whoops that assailed her ears. The terrifying sounds seemed to be coming precisely from the direction of the wagon train. The thought Wild Indians! stabbed through her brain and halted its normal functioning. The vision of the wild beast coming toward her paralyzed her legs. She stood frozen, staring wide-eyed at the beast, who was still upright, hardly swaying at all. Its hair was dark and curled chaotically around its head. Its eyes were a ferocious blue. It looked strong and remarkably surefooted for a—a—

For a human beast. Terror turned to shock, then dissolved into confusion, which meant at least her brain was working again, even if her feet weren’t. She blinked. Yes, it—no, he—was a human beast—a human being. It—he, it was definitely a he—was tall. The skin on his face and arms and broad shoulders was brown, as if accustomed to the sun. His skin was a bright burnt pink across his belly and down his—

At that moment she fully registered the fact that the man-beast was stark naked.

She shut her eyes and ducked her head behind the tree trunk. She strained to hear the sounds of the man-beast’s approach. Through the clamor filling the air behind her, she detected the splish-splash of feet leaving water. The soft clunk of rock tapping rock. A stick breaking hardly two feet away. Then…

The man-beast stopped running. He was so close to her that she could hear him panting and feel the radiating heat of his exertion. She caught the scent of a body pushed hard, but still strong and healthy. He splayed a palm against the tree next to the one behind which she was hidden, at such an angle that a sinewy forearm muscle appeared in high relief at her eye level. He leaned against the tree and hung his head so that the sunburned nape of his neck was visible to her.

She shrank back, wishing she was invisible. She could tell that the man-beast was winded. If she was going to get away, now was the time.

Her feet wouldn’t move.

Then she became aware of a sudden silence more frightening than the savage cries that had rent the air moments before. In retrospect she perceived that the war whoops had been answered with gunfire, but now the guns had nothing left to say. She felt more than saw that the man-beast cocked his head slightly and pricked his ears, as if he, too, perceived the meaning of the deafening silence. She held her breath and hoped she wouldn’t faint from the pounding in her chest and thunderous drumming in her ears. She clutched at the crossed ends of her shawl and hung on to them for dear life.

Her poor, overworked heart was subjected to yet another assault when the man-beast suddenly whirled. Before she could even squeak in fright, one of his hands came down to clamp her mouth while the other grasped her shoulder and wrenched her against his sweat-soaked body. She writhed but did not effect her release from his grip. Nose to nose with him, she was eyeing two blue pools swimming with madness or exhaustion.

His gaze came into focus. It roamed her face, circled her bonnet, returned to the hand held over her mouth. He bent toward her ear and croaked softly, “Don’t speak. Too dangerous.”

She could only stare at him.

To emphasize his point, he pressed the hand at her mouth. On the barest of breaths he demanded, “Promise.”

She nodded vigorously. He slowly withdrew his hand from her mouth but didn’t release the grip on her shoulder. He moved a half pace away and surveyed her top to toe. Fear and a proper upbringing prevented her from doing the same to him. His hand at her shoulder was squeezing hard enough to hurt her, but some ancient instinct warned her not to reveal any weakness.

The hand at her shoulder began to fall, dragging her shawl with it. He managed to say, “Let go.”

It dawned on her that the man-beast spoke a version of civilized English, and a ripple of relief coursed through her. This was followed by a veritable wave of relief when the significance of his request sank in. He wants my shawl to cover himself! It took a moment, however, for the command from her sluggish brain to reach the fingers wrapped so tightly around the shawl ends. Eventually her fingers uncramped, one by one, and she handed the large square cloth over to him. She felt better at the mere thought of the man-beast wearing some sort of clothing.

Upon accepting the cloth, the man-beast sat down on the ground, and the next thing she knew, he was tearing the delicate material in two. Her slight surge in good feeling turned swiftly to puzzlement, then yielded to indignation. Instead of covering that which no lady should see, he proceeded to bind his feet!

She didn’t know what to make of it. Nor could she observe him at length without causing herself great embarrassment So she turned her back to him and considered what to do next, now that he—the man-beast, her captor, whatever he might be—was preoccupied. She saw her opportunity to scramble up the slope and see what she could of the wagon train.

From behind her came quiet words that seemed to have rattled up and out a rusted pipe. “Don’t go…there…yet.”

She never took kindly to orders, and knew of no reason why she should obey one from a naked man-beast, but the tone of that statement was ominous enough to give her pause. She whispered back, “My father and mother are there.”

“Not time. Not yet.”

“My sisters, too.”

To that he said nothing, and his lack of response brought horrific visions to her mind’s eye. She stood immobile once again, this time from fear for her loved ones. Perhaps she still had reason to fear for herself, but her best assessment of her immediate circumstances said she didn’t. The man-beast hadn’t attempted to kill her for the shawl, and he obviously had no weapons concealed on his person. She knew that he was strong, but judging from the muffled grunts and groans coming from him as he worked on his feet, she guessed that his body was in great pain and that his strength was nearly spent.

At thoughts of the fate of her family, her vision blurred and her stomach churned. Go over the slope? Or stay here?

More words broke into her indecision. “If your family is…still there, you can do nothing…for them now,” he said. “If your family has…escaped, you are only…exposing yourself…to capture…by the Sioux. Might still be around. Probably are.”

The Sioux. She had a hazy recollection of hearing something about them in Independence. “The Sioux are hostile?”

His grunt confirmed the worst. He had apparently finished with his feet, but didn’t rise. Instead she heard him settle against the trunk of the tree behind her. She cast a curious, cautious glance over her shoulder and saw that he had positioned himself out of her line of sight. She could see only one corner of his shoulder and an arm bent at the elbow. The hand had disappeared and was no doubt resting against his invisible hip. She supposed she should be thankful for his delicacy, whether or not it had been intended.

He added with great weariness, as if to himself, “No sense killing yourself…unless you’ve a mind to die.”

She slid down the trunk and sat at the base of her tree. So. Here she was in a clump of trees in the middle of nowhere, not more than a foot away from a naked man-beast, and possibly surrounded by Sioux. Anger and outrage and helplessness overcame her. Seizing on the most immediate injustice, she began on a harsh whisper, “Why, sir, did you—”

The absurdity of calling him “sir” stopped her midsentence. She began again, this time very deliberately. “Why, sir, did you rip my shawl and bind your feet when the material could have been put to much better use?”

“My bloody feet,” he replied with labored breath, “are blazing…a trail.”

“For the Sioux to follow, you mean?”

“For prairie wolves, too. Can smell blood…and a festering wound…a mile away.”

Prairie wolves sounded worrisome, but she decided to take her worries one at a time. “If the Sioux are following you, why did they fall upon our peaceful wagon train?”

His reply came after a lengthy pause. “I’m guessing…they think…I found refuge…in your party.”

“It’s because of you, then, that our wagon train was attacked?”

“Pioneers travel…at their own risk.”

The callousness of that remark caused her to raise her voice above a whisper. “So if my family lies dead yonder, I’m not to blame you?” she snapped back.

“Some of your wagons…must have gotten away. The Sioux have not…been able to count me…among the dead.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re not looking…for me…here. Not yet Which means…they might be trailing…wagons that got away.”

It was a glimmer of hope for her family but not much more. “Why do they want you dead?”

“I was on their land. Took me prisoner. Got away. Were going to kill me any way…but now their desire…has doubled. Honor at stake.”

“How did you get away?”

“Old tribal dispute. Sioux warriors took off…like somebody set…breechclouts afire. Left me with the squaws.”

“That was lucky.”

The frail sound that came from his throat was a brittle ghost of a laugh. “Sioux squaws no bargain. Take to torturing with pleasure. Warriors rode off…with all the ponies in camp. I cut loose…started to run.”

“You ran? Just like that?”

He drew a deep breath, seemed to strangle on a dry cough. “The squaws came close to catching me…with my hands tied and all. My legs are longer. Knew what would happen…if they caught me.”

As intrigued as she was by the notion of Sioux squaw bloodlust, she didn’t think the sound of the war whoops she had heard had come from women, and she said as much.

“When warriors returned…they took after me, too. By that time…I had gotten my hands free…and was far enough off…to keep ahead of them.”

“You’ve been running all day?”

He didn’t answer for a long time. Then, as if from far off, came the answer, “All day…and day before. All night, too. I’ve covered…maybe fifty miles…barefoot.”

She reassessed the gravity of his physical condition and wondered if he’d survive the night.

“I’m mortal thirsty. The river tempts me…but I’ll not risk an arrow through my heart…after all I’ve done…to stay alive.”

“You didn’t drink when you, were running through the river?”

“Didn’t want to waste time…. Stuck my tongue out and caught what drops I could…splashing along.”

“But that’s nonsensical to run through water and come out of it dying of thirst!”

“I chose the water route…to lose my scent. Not to drink.”

“I suppose you’ve learned your lesson now,” she said primly, trying not to feel sorry for him, since he was the immediate cause of her misfortune.

“You could…fetch me water. It might be…worth the risk…to be rid…of your fool conversation…for a few minutes…or forever.”

She gasped at the insult and thought it mighty cheeky of a man-beast on his last legs who, now that she came to think of it, might just have to depend on her for survival—that is, if she was of a mind to help him survive, which, at the moment, she was not.

“And if you’re thinking…of leaving me…to my own devices…I’ll ask you…two questions.”

Since she was thinking just that, she swerved her head and found herself looking into a pair of blue eyes no longer glazed, but still rimed with red and shot with blood.

“Can you…kill and skin…a rabbit?”

“No, but—”

“And do you know…how to start a fire…with two sticks?”

“Well, I’ve never had occasion to try, but how hard could—”

“Then the scissors…in the bag…you’re wearing…just might save…the both of us.”

Surprised, she stared openmouthed at him until she recalled that when he had pressed her to him, he must have felt against his bare thigh the small metal shape in the reticule hanging from her waist. She flushed with embarrassment at the thought of that intimate contact, then turned back around. There was absolutely nothing to say to that, so she resolutely closed her mouth, until it occurred to her that his objective had been to shut her up. But when she opened her mouth again, no words came. So she sat there, speechless, her thoughts colliding so violently and her emotions roiling so precipitously that she was beginning to feel seasick.

The sun shifted. The shadows lengthened in the minuscule glade. The man-beast didn’t move from his seated position at the base of the tree. He might have dozed off. He might have died. Her first thought was that it would serve him right. Her second thought was that she would be without someone who knew how to make a fire and find food. She scooted over to him on all fours to see whether or not he was still breathing.

She peered into his face, which was streaked with dirt and sweat. His eyes were closed and lined with fatigue. His jaw was slack and stubbled with several days’ dark growth, as was his chin. His lips were so parched they were cracked and white in places. She couldn’t risk a glance down the length of his body to check out the feet wrapped in pieces of her shawl, but he was breathing. Definitely breathing.

He was also alert. She had hardly completed her inspection of his face when his hand shot out and grasped her forearm so hard that she yelped involuntarily.

“Don’t,” he said softly, without opening his eyes, “do that again.”

She wriggled her arm, and he let it go. She withdrew to her tree. “Don’t make sure you’re breathing?” she whispered in return. “Or don’t cry out?”

“Both.”

“I’m going to get you some water,” she said. Sioux or no Sioux, she was pretty sure that his body needed water desperately, and she saw the wisdom of keeping alive the means of her possible salvation. She began to rise.

“Not yet,” he said.

Thinking she had not heard him aright, she glanced over her shoulder and craned her neck to see that his eyes were open. He looked up at the sky, around their hiding place, over at the river. “Still too early,” he pronounced.

“But you’re dying of thirst,” she protested.

“I wasn’t kidding…about Sioux arrows.” He lolled his head on his shoulder and looked at her. His expression bordered on the grimly humorous. “I might need you…as much as you…need me.”

“It’s something that you admit it,” she replied, sitting back down.

He grunted. “Just…my luck.”

She was about to respond in kind when she recalled the fifty miles he had covered barefoot. With great restraint, she said, “I’m willing to allow that it is extreme dehydration that makes you disagreeable, so I’ll overlook that remark. About the Sioux, though, I judge it to be a few hours ago already that they came through here. They haven’t been down to the river, at least, not to this part of it, so it seems safe enough to venture out to get you some water and see the damage that has been done at the wagon train.”

“Might have gone…to higher ground…about a half mile away. They have eagle eyes.”

She wasn’t a complete dolt. “They certainly couldn’t shoot me at a range of a half mile.”

He regarded her balefully. “Don’t want them to discover…our hiding place.”

“Oh, I see,” she said. “I didn’t know you meant that the arrow through the heart would come sometime after the trip to the river.” At her most proper, she intoned, “You will let me know, sir, when it is time.”

“Until then, quiet. Just be…quiet.”

She was thirsty and irritable herself and mighty anxious about what lay beyond the grassy slope. But she held her tongue, although the effort nearly killed her. In truth, she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of speaking. He wouldn’t have to tell her twice to shut up, but then she remembered that he had, in so many words, told her twice to shut up.

Thereafter her brain was so busy picking the sore of her lacerated dignity—which another part of her brain knew full well was happily keeping her from contemplating worse thoughts—that she didn’t hear him the first time he said softly, “It’s time.” When he repeated it loud enough for her to register it, she looked around her to see that evening was stealing through their hiding place and veiling their surroundings in moving shadows.

It wasn’t until she was at the river’s edge that she wondered how she would transport water back to him. She looked around for some kind of hollowed-out vessel but no appropriate object caught her eye. She considered filling her bonnet but figured the water would drain out before she could make it back to him. So she settled on her ankle boots, figuring he was too thirsty to be picky. Sure enough, when she handed him two shoefuls of water, he accepted them gratefully and even seemed to acknowledge her resourcefulness with an approving nod.

It was less embarrassing being next to him in the gathering darkness, so she knelt beside him and noted that he didn’t gulp the water down. Rather he restrained himself to take it in measured sips. When he paused at some length, she asked, “Can I go over the slope now?”

He took another spare sip, shuddered with relief. He cleared his throat, then uttered his first full sentence. “It’s best to go before the moon and stars come out.” His voice was deeper and more resonant than she had expected. She moved away from him, and he said, “Crawl, don’t walk.” When she was at the edge of their hiding place, he added, “Watch out for rattlesnakes.”

She squeaked in horror and got down on her hands and knees to crawl through the cover of the grasses and the shifting twilight. The afternoon’s wait had been unbearable, but this last crawl up and over the slope was excruciating. She was hoping against hope that when she judged herself close enough to the scene and lifted her head above the grasses, she would find that—

All was well.

Her heart leapt with joy. The spot where her family’s wagon had been was empty. Meaning that they, and most of the others, had had time to flee. Her joy turned to sorrow as she recognized the one who had not been so lucky.

She had been traveling with her family in a train of ten wagons. Only one was left at the site, broken beyond repair, and the Widower Reynolds lay facedown on the ground next to the wagon, an arrow in his back. She went over to the dead man, bit her lip to stifle her sob, then did what she had to do.

She crawled back down the slope to the shelter of the trees. She made her way over to the man-beast, who had not moved from his seated position, and announced, “I’ve brought you some trousers.”

Chapter Two

Powell woke from fitful dreams of being chased by white-skinned women and red-skinned women around drawing rooms in Washington, D.C., and over the open prairie.

He cracked his eyes, his chest heaving from dream effort. His bone-dry eyes were soothed to perceive cool, blue moonlight after days of red-seared sunlight. He swallowed once over a painful knot in his throat, but he knew he had had water in the past few hours, and the pain in his throat this night was not as bad as it had been the night before. He figured he was ready for more water now without putting his battered body into shock. He needed a prolonged watering. Mmm. A thorough soaking would be nice.

In a hazy sort of way, he was sorry he wasn’t some kind of plant. He might choose to be a vine, and he imagined his legs, stretched out before him, turning into long tendrils. Then he would have only to wait for it to rain, and the backs of his legs could take root in the earth, and he could drink and drink and drink his fill without having to move an inch.

He breathed in. He breathed out. He came to the conclusion that he wasn’t a plant but an animal, and animals had to move around in order to find food and water. It was a pity. Especially since he had a fuzzy recollection that a source of water ran behind him quite a few yards away, and his feet were burning as if on fire and swollen to the size of huge squash. He couldn’t use his feet to get there, not a chance, but maybe he could slither over to the water. On that thought, he entertained feelings of deep envy for snakes who had no feet to plague them. Fish, too, who moved suspended in gallons and gallons of lovely water. And birds, who could get off their ridiculous unfleshly feet anytime they wanted—

Birds, fish, snakes, vines. He must be thirst-crazed to be having such thoughts, and the only way to restore his sanity was to get himself over to the water. He shifted from his seated position so that he could slide on his belly, and when he moved, he became aware of the lump of coarse material in his lap.

He fingered the lump and determined that it was some sort of clothing. Shirt. No. Trousers, maybe. Yes, trousers. He was reminded of something, and in order to discover what, he had a notion to look around the dark glade where he had taken refuge.

Moonlight dappled the dark and dotted a human form lying a few feet away from him. It was a woman, a white woman, to judge from the outlines of the clothing draped around her reclining body. Her head was pillowed on another piece of cloth—must be her bonnet—and long strands of golden hair turned silver in the moonlight had escaped whatever pins might have been holding them. As pretty as her hair was to contemplate, he was more interested in her skirts and underskirts. Not carnally but practically. He mentally cut up the superfluous yards of cotton she must be wearing and made snares and slingshots and bags and bandages.

He was so cheered by thoughts of all that good material that he began his slithery sliding toward the river. He thought of the woman and couldn’t for the life of him figure out what she was doing in the glade with him.

Then he remembered. She was the woman who had been wearing a shawl. Two things about her stood out in his mind. She was an idiot, and she was beautiful. A beautiful idiot. When he had first seen her, she had been bobbing around a tree, and if he hadn’t known better, he would have thought that she was trying to attract his attention rather than conceal herself. The tree she had chosen couldn’t have been much more than a foot wide, and with her skirts sprouting out on either side of the base, he wasn’t likely to miss her once he had come ashore. That is, if he hadn’t already spotted her when he had rounded the bend in the river.

The river. It was all coming back to him. He winced at the flood of memories of capture and escape, of the brutal bruising his body had endured during his two days of flight. He had come to the riverbank, fearing at first it was a mirage. He had been heading for the Platte River, knowing it was ahead of him as he ran, thinking it would save him if he could just get there before the Sioux got their hands on him again.

He held a pretty good map of the territory in his head, but his hobbling had prevented him from making an accurate estimate of the ground he had paced out on foot. He had had an even better map of the territory on paper, but that map was in the ashes of a sacrificial fire, and he didn’t want to think yet about what had happened to all his surveying equipment. Probably offered to the Teton Sioux god of Wandering Souls, for all he knew. Why hadn’t he had the good fortune to run across the Mandans or the Pawnees, instead of the Tetons? He wasn’t a fur trader or a bison hunter or even a settler. It was just his luck to have run into the Tetons on a bad day in a bad mood.

And it was just his luck to have run into a beautiful idiot who didn’t understand the first thing about life on the frontier. He might even have said as much to her. But she had a pair of scissors in her bag and was wearing yards and yards of useful cloth, and now he had dragged himself over the twigs and the rocks and the sand and was at river’s edge and didn’t have a thing to worry about anymore.

He put his face in the water and drank. It was cold and bracing and provided as exquisite a pleasure-pain as he had ever experienced. He drank some more and then some more. The more he drank the thirstier he became, and he doubted that he could ever drink enough to have enough excess to piss ever again.

When he needed air more than he needed water, he lifted his head, turned his entire body. He picked the absurd flower-printed bandages off his feet, rinsed them out. Then he flopped over so that he could immerse his blazing members in the cold. The sizzling sting of the water on the open sores of his soles nearly killed him, but almost as quickly numbed his wretched feet, so that the overall effect was mercifully, outrageously sensual. He lay on his back in the sand, his feet in the water, his eyes on the clouds drifting across the diamond dust in the night sky, and thought, It’s good to be alive.

With his return to life came the return of his ability to plan for the future. He knew where he was. He knew who he was with. He knew his resources. He knew what he would be up against come morning. His chances didn’t look good.

Still, it was good to be alive.

He yielded to the pleasure of bathing his feet in icecold water and of witnessing the magnificent spill of stars high above. His well-trained eyes picked out the constellations, and he reckoned the lateness of the hour by the hunter Orion walking stiff-legged across the sky. He tried to find the Little Dipper by climbing up its tail from the polestar but lost it in a sky too milky with moonlight.

He could think of ways to improve his lot in life, and the first would be to spirit away the woman with the shawl to the drawing rooms of Washington, D.C. He could picture her perfectly there, chattering all day long with every other woman he had ever known who was exactly like her. He had, alas, no magical powers to transport her from here to there, and the more he accepted her presence in his immediate circumstances, the happier he was that he had a pair of trousers to wear.

Lying naked on the riverbed, he made a mental note to put those trousers on before the first rays of dawn would illuminate him, once again, in all his masculine glory.

Sarah snuffled half-awake to a rumbling in her stomach and a crick in her neck. She squeezed her eyes shut tighter, but her room was flooded with disturbing daylight, suggesting that someone had forgotten to draw the curtains. And her bed was as hard as the earth. She groggily rehearsed the prettily worded complaint she would offer the hostess of the house party she must be attending.

Then she remembered that she was lying on the board she had for a bed in the wagon and regretted having turned down William’s offer of marriage. She sat bolt upright, put a hand to her neck and shook her head to alter the unpleasant illusion that she was seated directly on the ground in a clump of trees in the middle of nowhere and in the company of—

A man-beast who was sitting cross-legged with his back to her. He seemed to be tending something in front of him, but at the groan she emitted upon coming fully awake, he turned and looked at her. She was pleased that he was wearing the trousers she had retrieved for him, but the expression on his face did not encourage her to think that she would find him any more agreeable today than she had the day before.

Nevertheless, she greeted him properly. “Good morning, sir. I trust you are feeling better today than yesterday. May I ask if your feet are improved?”

A look of faint disbelief—or was it amusement?—crossed his features. “I’ll put it this way,” he answered her. “I’m no longer running the risk of fatal infection, but I’m not walking anywhere today. We’ll be staying put.”

The vision of a tedious day stretched before her. She sighed and felt the wreck of her coiffure, then patted the ground for precious pins that might have fallen while she slept. She picked up her bonnet, brushed it off, took out the stockings she had stuffed inside it. She folded these into the waistband of her skirts and rose to her feet, holding the bonnet by its ties so that it dangled from her hand.

“We’ve plenty to do,” he added, turning back around, “so don’t worry about remaining idle.”

This was not the first time he had accurately guessed her thoughts. “Do you fancy yourself something of a mind reader, sir?” she demanded, palming several hairpins.

He shook his head and occupied himself with whatever was in front of him. “No, but it’s plain you haven’t traveled much.” She was sorry that he had turned his back to her, for he missed her rather superior smile. “I’ll have you know that I’ve been to England and back.”

To that he made no response.

“Two years ago it was, and my chaperon was an elderly lady who needed more care than she gave. So I assure you that I have dealt with many demanding situations as a traveler abroad and proved myself equal to all occasions.”

“Ah. Now tell me. What language do they speak in England?”

Poor, ignorant man-beast! “They speak English, sir, and it is a version very similar to that which you and I speak.”

“The dwellings the English inhabit, what manner would they be? And what manner of conveyance do the English commonly use?”

“They live in houses, some of which are like palaces, and they often ride in carriages.”

“I see. Tell me something else. What language do the Sioux speak?”

“Indian, I suppose.”

“What manner of dwelling do they inhabit?”

“I have heard they live in rough tents called tepees.”

“And have you encountered any roads or carriageways in the past few days?”

She caught the man’s drift and was annoyed. “I gather it is your objective to emphasize the dissimilarities in my two traveling experiences,” she said evenly, “but I can tell you that crossing a vast ocean is a very demanding experience.”

“We’re not on the ocean now, we don’t enjoy the protection of a ship with a well-stocked hold, and we aren’t bound for familiar or friendly shores.”

Her response was frosty. “You have made your point, sir.”

This was hardly the ideal beginning to the day, which, she noted, had hardly dawned. She yawned, then stretched out the kinks in her back and neck. At that moment she caught a whiff of something malodorous. “What’s that I smell?”

“Breakfast.”

Approaching him, she looked over his shoulder and puzzled over the sight of a jumble of smoking rocks crisscrossed by sticks. “And what is for breakfast?”

“Tree frogs.”

She thought she detected a slightly gleeful note in his deep voice, like the kind a little boy might use when dangling a slimy worm before a little girl. Although her empty stomach recoiled when she perceived the outlines of the small, shriveled creatures skewered on sticks, she suppressed her revulsion in order to reply knowledgeably, “The French eat frogs. They are considered quite a delicacy.”

He took a stick and held up a wizened carcass. “Want one?”

She declined the French delicacy, citing customary lack of appetite first thing in the morning. She saw him take the frog off the stick and begin to eat it. Feeling nauseous, she looked away and announced her intention to go to the river. She added—with as much dignity as rumpled clothing and a ruined coiffure would allow—that she hoped she could be assured of her privacy.

To her back he said, “It’s all we have until lunch.”

She heard these words as a taunt and decided to defer the problem of finding suitable food in order to satisfy the most immediate of her bodily needs. She continued in the direction of the river. At the edge of the trees, a thought struck her. She paused and said, “You haven’t warned me about arrows in the heart and such, but I note that you’ve kept the fire low, which I suppose is to avoid giving the Sioux a sign that we’re here.”

“I’ve kept the fire low so as not to burn the frogs to a crisp, and I’m thinking the Sioux have no further interest in this area. But now that you mention possible dangers, keep your eye out for the prairie wolf stalking our campsite.”

Indians, rattlesnakes, prairie wolves. What next? “How kind of you to mention it,” she said with exaggerated civility, “for I had completely forgotten about the prairie wolves following your trail.”

“Wolf,” he corrected. “Just one. You’ll recognize him by his cropped ear. I think I saw him a couple of hours ago, but I can’t be sure. Not to worry, though. I’d say he weighs less than a hundred pounds, and wolves have always feared humans, so I’m guessing this one will keep his distance.”

“How reassuring,” she said, and resolutely left the shelter of the trees. As she made her way toward the river, she dared to wonder whether the man-beast had mentioned the wolf so that she wouldn’t run away from him and leave him to fend for himself. However, just in case he wasn’t the kind to stoop to scare tactics, she kept a nervous eye out for the wolf.

She saw nothing to disturb her at the river and performed her morning ablutions to the extent that the primitive conditions would allow. She dearly wished for a comb and a brush and a mirror, but made do with her fingers. She spent the whole of the time dressing her hair mentally arguing with that vexatious man-beast, who always seemed to be putting her in the wrong. She donned her bonnet, then knelt down by the river, cupped her hands and dipped them in the water. When she tasted the freshness on her tongue and the chill against her teeth, she was arrested by memories of the thoughts she had entertained the day before when drinking from the river at this very same spot.

She had judged the trip to be more like a pleasant outing? She had reckoned that difficulties might lie ahead?

Hah! She hadn’t guessed the half of it!

Then, an uneasy thought occurred to her. Was this the “Someday” that her mother had predicted for her? Had she, in some mysterious fashion, brought this present calamity upon herself?

Sarah recalled her mother’s reaction upon being informed that her daughter had turned down William’s offer of marriage. Her mother began gently enough. “Sarah, love, you’ve had everything your own way for too long, I’m afraid, and I don’t know what to tell you anymore except that you will simply have to stop leading these poor men on.”

“Now, Mother, I didn’t lead William on.”

Her mother’s normally serene expression had set into lines of disapproval. “You toyed with Mr. James’s affections as if he were a parlor poodle, and if you haven’t determined your effect on men by now—especially after all the ruckus you raised in England—”

“Gossip! Malicious gossip, all of it!”

“Then you are a far more insensitive young woman than I had ever imagined! And I don’t want to hear another word about ‘malicious gossip.’ A woman who looks like you and behaves like you can expect tongues to wag on occasion, and given your reputation, I can only wonder how poor Mr. James allowed himself to fall prey to your toils!”

Sarah had been unwise enough at this point to observe, somewhat flippantly, “William isn’t poor.”

“Indeed not!” her mother had instantly agreed. “Everyone knows he comes from one of the richest families in Baltimore, and he’s a fine-looking man, I might add. As much as I love you, I’m beginning to think that my love has been blind and that the gossips have been right. Could it be, young lady, that the only reason why you would crush such an eligible man beneath your heel is that you think far too highly of yourself?”

“But William dotes on me, Mother! I couldn’t bear a man who dotes on me all day long!”

“Since you don’t seem to be able to inspire in a man any other desire but to dote on you, you will be pleased to accompany us on the journey we must make to join Laurence and Cathy.”

Sarah had been aghast. “To the Oregon Territory? Me? You must be joking!”

But her mother hadn’t been joking, and nothing Sarah had said afterward had persuaded either her mother or her father from their unreasonable position. She had left that particular discussion angered by her mother’s gross mis-representation of her character.

And now, here she was, standing at the edge of a river in the middle of nowhere, recalling her mother’s final words. “Someday, Sarah Ross Harris,” her mother had said on a note of threat. “Someday, you will get what’s coming to you.”

For one hideous moment, Sarah was seized by the idea that she had been deliberately abandoned by her mother and father to the Sioux, the rattlesnakes, the prairie wolves and the man-beast. But then her reason reasserted itself. She hadn’t imagined the war whoops or the Widower Reynolds’s dead body, and her parents had had other opportunities before now to abandon her along the way. Besides which, they wouldn’t be capable of doing anything so despicably underhanded to her, would they. Would they?

She returned to the clump of trees, repeating to herself that she hadn’t wanted to come on this journey, no she hadn’t, which was proof enough in her mind that she wasn’t responsible for having brought any of her present misfortune upon herself. And the General? What would he have said about the events of the past day? Why, to be sure, he would have agreed that none of this was of her making, and he would have reminded her to be on her mettle.

Once within the shelter she noted that the man-beast had finished his breakfast, for the fire was banked, and he was sitting under his tree, his back against the trunk. The pieces of her shawl were wrapped around his feet, but they were no longer bloody. He looked as if he was about to say something to her, but since she was feeling hungry and out of sorts and unable to take one of his disagreeable comments just then, she said, “I’m going to return to the Widower Reynolds’s wagon and see what provisions may be there.”

“The Sioux would have already taken all of use and value.”

“They didn’t take his trousers.”

“They don’t tend to touch dead white men, and they’ve no need for white man’s clothing.”

“I’ve a mind to go to the wagon anyway.”

“Before you go, I want to—”

She held up a hand. “To warn me. I know. Rattlesnakes.”

He made no further comment. She left the glade, scrambled up the slope, where she discovered that the broken-down wagon had been picked clean, and returned to the shelter of the trees empty-handed. At least the man-beast didn’t annoy her with obvious remarks about having been right.

Instead, he asked, “How many petticoats are you wearing?”

She was so surprised by the question that she answered it. “Two.”

“Give me one.”

The ensuing discussion roused her indignation, which brought her out of her dejection and partially restored her spirits. It ended with the surrender of one of her petticoats, but she decided to make a virtue of necessity and offered up the white cotton as if it were a magnificent sacrifice. She soon discovered that its fate was even more ignominious than that of her shawl, for the half of it was reduced to long strips that she was told would serve as jackrabbit traps. The other half would be saved for the future.

She was put to work and obliged to carry out the man-beast’s instructions while he lounged against the tree trunk. She set up the rather ingenious traps, as directed, which were composed of sticks and strips of cloth and clover. She fetched the man-beast water in her shoes. She gathered the plants that he told her to gather. She flipped back the cuffs of her long-sleeved blouse and used the hem of her skirts to wipe the sweat from her brow. She found two stones he told her to find and kept them with her in case she might encounter the prairie wolf. She was not to use the stones as lancing objects. Rather, she was to chip away at one rock with the other. She was told that that was how Indians made arrowheads. She wasn’t expected to actually make an arrowhead, but the chipping sound made animals, like prairie wolves, wary, as wild animals are of anything strange.

The morning ran quickly into afternoon. The afternoon brought the capture of two jackrabbits. After that, the man-beast was busy with her scissors, skinning the rabbits and cooking them over a fire that gave almost no smoke. Then he set about fashioning the hide.

At one moment while the man-beast was involved in scraping out the rabbit skin, she was troubled enough to say, “I can’t understand why my family hasn’t returned to look for me. That is, if they escaped, which it seems they did. They should be worried about me, no?”

“They’re probably thankful you weren’t on hand during the attack yesterday afternoon. If they haven’t come back for you, it’s because they’re not able to come back for you.”

“Which makes me worried about them, then.”

“Of course.”

His response to her concern had been reasonable. No gushing sympathy. No unrealistic assurances of her family’s well-being, either. But he had offered her a kind of fellow understanding nonetheless, and she was inclined to judge the man-beast the better for it. She had too much to do, however, to dwell on her slightly improved opinion of her partner in misfortune.

In the course of her afternoon’s work, she didn’t encounter any wild animals, so she didn’t have occasion to chip away at her stones, although she was aware at odd times during the day of being watched. However, whenever she looked about her, she saw nothing. No Indians. No prairie wolves. She kept the rocks with her, and when she smoothed them in her palms, her jumping nerves steadied.

The afternoon was spent, and so were her energies. She went one last time to the river, removed her bonnet and splashed water on her face. Heedless of the fact that her hair was tumbling around her shoulders, hairpins askew, she returned to the glade and plopped down on the ground at the base of her tree. She was happy to empty her mind and stare into the lengthening evening shadows.

When the faintest twinklings could be seen in the sky through the leafy arches in the trees, the rude, inconsiderate man-beast tossed two rabbit skins into her lap and said, “It’s time to move on.”

Chapter Three

Powell rose to his full height, tested his weight first on one sole, then the other. His feet were still torn and sore, but the covering of wet rabbit hide made it easier to stand on them. He flexed his knees and felt the ache of muscles in his calves from the awkward way he had walked trying to spare his feet over the last few days. Still, his condition was no longer bad enough to warrant the risk of playing the role of sitting duck another day.

The trousers were a definite inconvenience. The Widower Reynolds had evidently been a much shorter man than he, for the pant legs reached only to his midcalf. The suspenders did not adjust and were, therefore, unusable. The trousers were too short in the crotch, too, but the waist was snug enough so that he didn’t have to waste one of the precious strips of petticoat cloth as a belt. If the beautiful idiot hadn’t been with him, he would have preferred to go naked. However, since she was with him, something about keeping to the conventions of dress seemed like a good idea.

He had already packed up the sack he had made from one half of her petticoat. It now held the suspenders, the torn shawl, the strips of cloth retrieved from the traps, and the beautiful idiot’s shoes. Her scissors he carried in one of his back pockets. He had already dismantled the rocks he had used for the two fires he had made, the one for the tree frogs, the other for the jackrabbits, which he had built a few feet away from the first. He had scattered twigs and leaves over the warm ground where the fires had been and had disposed of the jackrabbit remains. All day long he had been rescaling the map of the territory in his head to fit the proportions of crossing it on foot. He had charted their course.

He figured they were ready to go.

When he took his first tentative steps toward the riverside edge of the trees, he became aware that the beautiful idiot had not moved. He looked over his shoulder and repeated, “It’s time to move on.”

She remained seated and motionless at the base of the tree. The twilight silvered the golden hair that was swirling about her heart-shaped face and shoulders like a fallen halo. The soft half-light paled her rosy skin, giving it the texture of flower petals. Her big brown eyes were luminous with a feisty mix of emotions, and her pretty lips were set in a line oddly expressive of seduction and obstinance at once. She had crossed her arms under full breasts and crossed her legs at their shapely ankles. Her feet peeped out from under the flounces of her petticoat and overskirt. The moccasins lay untouched in her lap where he had tossed them.

“You cannot be serious,” she stated in that falsely pleasant voice that grated on his nerves.

It took him a moment to absorb the impact of that statement, then another moment to suppress the desire to strangle her. He shifted the sack on his back and demanded, “Are you always like this, or only when survival is at stake?”

“Always like what, sir?”

Why mince words? “Always idiotic.” He saw the flash in her eyes shift from seductive obstinance to outright anger. “We’ve done fine for the day here, but I’ve no desire to linger longer and make myself easy prey for either man or animal. And I’m assuming you see the advantage of traveling at night, so that I don’t have to spell it out for you.”

“No, you don’t have to spell it out for me, but I’d like to point out that I’m the one who’s been working all day while you’ve been sitting around.”

He gave her a very deliberate once-over. “You look like a healthy woman, and the amount of ‘work’ you did is nothing compared to the physical demands that will be put on both of us tonight—which is why I gave you half an hour to rest. We need to move, and the time is now.”

She didn’t budge.

It would take only one more idiotic word from her for him to leave her here to her own devices. Let her die, for all he cared. But then he thought of her scissors in his pocket, the valuable cloth in his hands and the fact that she had fetched him water more than once today, and he realized that it wouldn’t be fair to leave her. But when was life ever fair? Besides which, it was her choice, after all, to stay or come. You could lead a horse to water…and all that.

He turned to go.

“I need my shoes,” she said. “I don’t see them lying about, so I’m guessing that you have them in the half of my petticoat that you have slung over your shoulder.”

“Wear the moccasins I made you.”

“I want my shoes.”

“Moccasins don’t leave the same footprints as white man’s shoes, and I had to cut up the laces of your ankle boots to make four ties for our two pairs.” He saw her lift the rabbit skins and examine the ties. He saw her jaw drop. He cut off whatever idiotic thing was going to come out of her pretty mouth by saying swiftly, “They’ll fit you perfectly. I measured them against your shoes. Now, let’s go!”

He slipped through the trees and stepped out onto the riverbank, half hoping she wouldn’t follow him.

No such luck, but, then again, that was just his luck. He hadn’t gone ten paces before she was behind him, asking, “Where are we going?”

“To deliver you to your family.” He added, with feeling, “And without delay.”

“Oh! Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” When she caught up with him, she said, “You know, we might get along much better if you would explain yourself to me instead of making me out to be an…an idiot! And I could think of you less as a man-beast and in a more kindly manner if I had a name to call you.”

At that he stopped in his tracks and looked down at her. She was looking up at him, her beautiful eyes wide and almost beseeching, but not quite. Her practiced social smile held a hint of something else that he wasn’t willing to examine just yet. Instead, he pinned his thoughts on the incredible idea that she had called him a man-beast, and he almost laughed. Good God, she was an irritating woman, but she had a way of diverting his attention from the pain in his feet. He’d grant her that much.

“I asked you your name, sir,” she repeated.

“Powell.”

“Just Powell? Only that?”

“Wesley.”

“Well, which is the first name and which the last, sir? I’m afraid I cannot distinguish.”

“Wesley Powell,” he said slowly. “My name is Wesley Powell.”

“Very well, then, Mr. Powell.” She nodded her head graciously. “I am Miss Harris.”

He regarded her a moment longer, then grunted and began walking again. Really, she had expected no better from the man-beast, but she found that it humanized him to have a name, and such a perfectly ordinary one, although he had pronounced it with a kind of reluctance. Or did his tone hint of challenge?

No matter. Since their immediate goal was to find her family, she was content—if content was an appropriate word to describe her emotional state in a situation where her survival was not assured from one hour to the next—to walk along beside him. She hardly needed to be told that he didn’t like her any more than she liked him, and she didn’t need to be told twice, no, three times, that he preferred her silence to her conversation. However, since she saw no reason why she should behave according to his preferences rather than hers, she continued chattily, “So, Mr. Powell, can you tell me how we are going to achieve the very worthy goal of finding my family?”

“First, tell me whether, before embarking on this journey, you and your family established a meeting place in the event you should become separated.”

She had to consider that question at length. She did recall her father and mother discussing such a situation, but she hadn’t paid attention to what the outcome of the discussion had been. At the time, she had been thinking it would be a mercy to be separated from her bratty little sisters, but now, imagining that they had met some unspeakable fate—but, no, she turned her thoughts from dwelling on horrors and bent them toward remembering the names of the various stages of the journey that Morgan Harris had recited on more than one occasion. It seemed logical that her father would have decided that, if separated, the family would meet up at the next landmark.

She said, “Chimney Rock,” since that was the only landmark she could recall, and if she didn’t say something soon, Mr. Powell would think her an even bigger idiot than he already did—not that she cared.

“Chimney Rock?” he repeated under his breath.

Hoping that the landmark was ahead of them rather than one they had already passed, she repeated with confidence, “Yes, Chimney Rock. Is there something that troubles you in that, sir?”

“Nothing beyond the fact that it lies some two hundred miles and more to the west of here. Did you not identify more proximate meeting points? Windlass Hill, perhaps? Ash Hollow?”

“Ah, yes, Windlass Hill,” she said, picking the landmark that sounded the closest. “I had forgotten.”

“You don’t have the faintest idea of a meeting point, do you?” he snapped. “No, don’t answer that question! Tell me instead whether, in one of your two trips to the Widower Reynolds’s wagon, you bothered to notice the direction of the tracks of the wagons that had fled the scene?”

She interpreted this question as just another one of his gratuitous attempts to expose her ignorance. She composed herself before answering, “The character of the know-it-all is one of society’s least attractive types, in case you didn’t know it, Mr. Powell. Now, you might have asked me to notice the direction of the wagon tracks earlier in the day, if you had wanted the information, and you will not waste your breath asking me any more questions of this type if you know—and I make no secret of it—that I didn’t want to make this trip in the first place and would far, far rather be in Baltimore!”

He grumbled inarticulately, but she caught several syllables. Although her lady’s ears were offended, she guessed that he was cursing himself for having failed to ask her to investigate what seemed, to his mind at any rate, important clues left at the previous day’s wagon site. After a few more paces he turned away from the riverbank and made his way up the slope. She supposed she was to follow him, but his long legs scissored through the tall grasses at a faster clip than she could sustain, so she stopped not far from the top of the slope and hung back while he tramped around the wagon site, his head bent toward the earth. After a while, he stopped that activity and stood looking into the distance. He was facing toward the sun, which had set beyond the horizon but which was still streaking the open sky with broad strokes of pink and orange, while the earth below was bedding down in layers of gray shadows.

She refrained from calling out and asking him if she should come over to him or if he was going to return to her or what she should do. She was rewarded for her forbearance when, about ten minutes later, he returned to her side and said, rather grimly, that they would follow the river only for another mile or so. She also forbore to ask what they would do after that, thinking she’d find out soon enough, which she did. A mile, she had already learned, was not a considerable distance in this part of the world, even when one was on foot.

They traipsed along at the water’s edge, hidden from sight by the slight slope that rose on either side of the broad river. The air was getting chillier by the minute. She knew that although the temperature had dipped into the cool range the night before, it had not become uncomfortablycold. She was hungry, having only nibbled at a little jackrabbit all day, but she refrained from asking about food on the perfectly good grounds that if she brought up the subject, the perverse Mr. Powell was sure to concoct something disgusting to eat. She would wait until he got hungry, then eat what he ate.

At length he stopped abruptly. Looked down at her. In the light of the rising moon the planes of his face were sharp-etched, his expression somber. He nodded to the slope of the bank, which was steeper at this point than at their hiding place downriver. He climbed up high enough to be able to toss the sack over the edge, then moved back down and offered her a hand. She accepted his strong clasp gratefully, didn’t protest at the harsh squeeze he gave her or the rough tug that got her up and over the top of the slope.

Once again on her feet, she brushed her skirts off at her knees. He picked up the sack, shouldered it. They were looking out over the valley of the Platte, an enormous table of land that rolled away and merged with the whole of the darkened horizon. By day she knew the land was tufted with green and yellow grass. At night it looked to her more like the surface of the moon, cratered with every shade of gray, or a paradoxically dry ocean, whose dips and rises had been made solid.

When she noticed the direction of his gaze and followed it with her eyes, she saw two patches of white, not far off, crowded up against a slight rise in the landscape. The patches looked like the broken sails of two shipwrecked vessels. Her heart caught at the implications of that pathetic scene.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t look at her. Nor did he immediately move. It was as if he was allowing her to come to terms with the possibilities of the scene that lay ahead before actually confronting the reality of it.

After several long moments passed, he said quietly, “It’s as I thought. Back at the wagon site, I saw the two white dots in the distance and suspected something like this. Tell me when you’re ready to go over there.”

She summoned strength from the General, the father she had never known. She straightened her backbone, squared her shoulders. “I’m ready now.”

Together they crossed the open expanse. She feared. She hoped. As they approached the pitiful remains of two covered wagons, she experienced a kind of death herself. Resisted it with every particle of her being. But she didn’t resist looking upon the brute scene of the bodies of her former traveling companions, which littered the ground around the two disabled wagons. There were five, stretched this way and that. Some facedown, some faceup, caught in their scattered, equally ineffective paths of flight. Without blinking, she looked at each body in turn. Every moment that passed brought her new life and new hope.

She made the gruesome rounds twice, just to assure herself that hope and the moonlight weren’t playing tricks with her eyes.

She pronounced, “So far, so good.” Then she laughed at what she had said. “Of course, nothing good has happened to these poor folks, but at least none of them are from my family! It’s awful to say such a thing aloud, but I’m happy that if misfortune was to visit our wagon train, it has fallen on others.”

Powell didn’t reply. He had put his sack on the ground and climbed into one wagon wreck, then the other.

On a hope and a prayer she repeated, “So far, so good. At least as far as I know for now.”

He climbed back out of the wagon nearest her, jumped down on the ground. “Nothing,” he reported. “Not a pot or pan or sack of flour to be found.” He walked over to her. “Don’t feel bad about being happy your family isn’t among the slain, although it may feel odd to be so happy in the midst of this misery.”

She nodded and voiced her puzzlement about another matter. “Two others from this wagon are missing. You see, here are the Kelly brothers.” She gestured toward a trio of bodies. “They were traveling together and had left their aging parents behind in Ohio. Now, beyond the second wagon lie Mr. Clark and his grown son Jack, but Mrs. Clark and her daughter aren’t there. I’m wondering whether they might have escaped.”

“Possibly.”

“Which means they might be roaming the hills,” she said. “Perhaps we should look for them.”

“They might have been captured,” Powell replied. “Or they might be lying dead yonder, out of our sight.”

“Still, I’m wondering why it is only the men who have been killed outright, and none of the women.”

Powell walked around the large dispersed triangle that was formed by the Kelly brothers, studied the sprawled attitudes of the dead bodies. “Do you know whether all three were carrying firearms?”

“I would suppose they did. Every man on the wagon train had a rifle, sometimes two. Why, even Morgan—my father—had a rifle for shooting game.”

“Judging from the way these bodies lie, and adding the Widower Reynolds into the equation, I would say that those who were killed outright were the ones doing the shooting. From the placement of their arms and hands, it looks as if each one was holding a rifle that was subsequently taken.”

“You must have had a rifle when you were captured, no? Why didn’t they kill you outright?”

“My rifle was on my back,” he said, “and I wasn’t shooting at them. At the time I was sorry to be so defenseless, but perhaps not anymore.”

“They were going to kill you anyway,” she observed, “and I don’t like to think of Mrs. Clark and her daughter facing unspeakable torture. I doubt the two of them would be able to escape the way you did.”

“How old is the daughter?”

“About ten.”

He considered the matter. “The Teton Sioux might currently have a shortage of women. A ten-year-old girl who could be taught their ways and a woman perhaps still of child-bearing age might be prized rather than killed.”

At that Sarah’s mind boggled. The phrase “Fate worse than death” drifted into consciousness but just as quickly drifted out. Her thoughts easily embraced the idea of her sisters, if captured, remaining alive, and her mother, too, but stumbled against the notion that they would be condemned to live an Indian life. Condemned? Her thoughts bumped uncomfortably into the image of her father, Morgan, and her brother, Laurence—that is, her stepfather, Morgan, and her stepbrother, Laurence, child of Morgan’s first marriage to an Iroquois woman.

Laurence had lived with them since Sarah was a baby, but he had left the Maryland farm already thirteen years ago. Sarah had always been in awe of the remarkable Laurence Harris, who was fifteen years her senior, and she had always been angry at anyone who might have called him half-breed behind his back.

At the same time, she had always been…well, not ashamed of his Indian heritage and the life that Morgan had lived before he had married her mother, but maybe rather confused by it. Or alienated by their background, which had so little in common with hers, and conflicted with hers. Their background was a complication in her life, another strike against her, although few people had ever dared refer to her own background or the disadvantages it had brought her. She had sometimes felt like a stranger in her own country, in her own family. And she had been there first—before Morgan or Laurence or her bratty half sisters!

“You said that even your father had a rifle. What did you mean by that?”

Sarah’s tangled musings were cut short. “Only that he’s a peaceable man and wouldn’t shoot at another person.”

She waited for the retort, “Not even at an Indian?” But it didn’t come. Instead Powell said, “All right, then. One wagon remains back at the original site and one body. Two more are here, five bodies, minus two women. The other six wagons—”

“Seven,” she corrected. “We were ten in all.”

Powell paused, then said, “I must have miscounted the tracks. In any case, the other wagons dispersed more to the north than the west. What I don’t know is how many warriors descended on your wagon train and how many were spread out looking for me in other parts of the territory. Covered wagons move a lot slower than horses, so in order to get away, the men in those wagons must have killed some of their attackers. I can’t be sure of the number, of course, because those bodies would have been long since returned to their villages by their tribesmen to be given a proper burial.”

“We don’t know that all of the seven other wagons escaped in the end, do we?”

“No, but they made it at least two or three miles, which is a rough estimate of the distance I could reckon from the wagon site.”

“So which way do we go now?”

He pointed in the northwesterly direction they would travel for the night. “It will be slow going to put the complete puzzle together, but with luck we’ll have it solved in the next day or two.”

“Speaking of proper burials, do you think we should do something about—” She broke off and gestured vaguely about her.

He shook his head. “No good reason to advertise that anyone has been through this territory, which is what we’d be doing if we buried the bodies but didn’t dispose of the wagon wrecks.”

She saw the wisdom in that.

“And we don’t have any shovels.”

“True enough,” she agreed. “Then you might wish to choose a pair of trousers that fits you better.”

Powell nodded. When he began to walk around the bodies, sizing them up for the best fit, she looked away from the scene and out over the darkened infinity stretching before her, trying to keep fearsome thoughts at bay. She asked quietly, “Do you think we should take another pair of trousers, just in case?”

He didn’t immediately respond to that, which made her think he hadn’t heard her, but when he came up behind her several minutes later, he said, “I’d like to, but I don’t want to have to dispose of another body.”

She turned and saw that he was fully dressed. White shirt, torn and bloodied over the left breast. Trousers that fit. Leather suspenders. A pair of boots laced together and slung over his shoulder. She glanced around and saw the body that had been stripped down to long Johns, the arrow still sticking straight up from the heart.

“I see what you mean,” she said. “We can hardly leave him out in the open, can we?”

“I’m thinking of dragging him into the wagon. If any Sioux pass by here and bother to inspect the wagon, they might think he got caught sleeping. We’ll leave the other bodies the way they are. As much as their boot laces would be useful to us, I won’t risk taking them.”

Together they dragged the stripped-down body into the nearest wagon and dressed it in the ill-fitting trousers Powell had cast off along with the Widower Reynolds’s suspenders. When she was climbing out again, her eye was attracted by a flash of moonlight caught in some small object that was lodged under the wheel of the other wagon. When she bent down to inspect it, she was delighted to discover a new-fangled tiltedged razor.

She held up the miraculous object. “Look, Mr. Powell. I have found a tool perhaps even more useful than my scissors. Why, I’m sure you could put this to use as a fine weapon.”

Powell approached her and ran his hand over his chin and neck. “I think it’ll make a better razor than weapon, and I can certainly use that.”

Annoyed, once again, by the way he seemed to have put her in the wrong, she handed him the precious object, saying pleasantly, “How sorry I am, Mr. Powell, that I didn’t discover a comb and a brush beneath the wheel, since we are apparently not in dire need of weapons. It seems that I am not to be credited with any good ideas—not that I am expecting a thank-you!”

He had the grace to smile, and the harsh lines of his face were transformed into a surprisingly attractive arrangement. She dismissed this unexpected effect as a trick of the moonlight.

“Your excellent find of the razor, Miss Harris, will be useful in a variety of ways, and allow me to compliment you on your suggestion that I choose a better-fitting pair of trousers. It was, perhaps, your first good and useful idea,” he said with a slight bow, “but I am confident that it will not be your last.”

“It was my second,” she corrected. “Remember that I had the idea to bring you the first pair of trousers last night, although I suppose you’ll only say now that in taking the Widower Reynolds’s clothing, I have left evidence that white folk have come through the area.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything of the kind, Miss Harris,” he said. He picked up the petticoat sack, tied it around the boots hanging over his shoulder so that the ends of the cloth were balanced front and back, and struck out in the direction that he had earlier indicated they would take for the night.

Sarah had no choice but to follow him.

After what seemed to be several miles of walking, they came upon what Powell identified as the tracks from several of the fleeing wagons of the day before. They strained to find signs of wreckage or dead bodies but saw nothing. They were inclined to take it as a good sign.

They followed the tracks, although they had no assurance that the ruts had been made by her family’s wagon. The moon rose. They walked. The moon traversed the sky. They walked. And walked until she could feel every step through her soles to the muscles of her calves and thighs and back. To take her mind off her aches and hunger and thirst, she fixed her thoughts on an image of Morgan Harris confronting his Sioux attackers without raising his rifle to them. In her vision the Widower Reynolds fell to the ground. So did the Kelly brothers. Mr. Clark and Jack, too. But Morgan remained standing.

Chapter Four

When the night gave a hint of surrendering to a new day, Powell stopped at a small tree-filled hollow he had found tucked in the shadows of the barren plains. Sarah’s leaden spirits lightened at the sight of a spring lazing in the middle of the hollow and ringed by rocks glowing white in the moonlight. Her thirst was stronger than her exhaustion, so she slipped down the rocky slope to splash her face and drink her fill. When she returned to what would be their campsite, Powell had heaped several arm-fuls of leaves beneath a tree, spread the half petticoat out upon them and offered her a bed. Without waiting for her thanks, he began to fashion his own bed of leaves about ten feet away from her.

She lay down on her back, sure she would never move again. It was a merciful torture to be lying there with every muscle in her body throbbing and quivering. She was only vaguely aware when Powell left the campsite, but she was acutely aware when he returned, for he seemed to be moving about far too busily for a man who had just trudged God knew how many miles on wounded feet.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Gathering wood to build a fire.”

She felt a faint stirring of hope. “You have meat to cook?”

“I wish,” he said. “No, it’s rather that we have company.”

She groaned when she rose up on an elbow. “Company?” she echoed weakly.

“The prairie wolf. The one with the cropped ear.”

She groaned again when she sank back down onto her bed of leaves. “Let’s kill it and eat it.”

“That might not be so easy. Nor so wise.”

“I know it might not be easy, but why might it not be wise?”

He began to stack the wood to build his fire about five feet away from her. He paused at length before answering, “I don’t know. Just a feeling.”

Her only feeling at the moment was of bare-boned existence. Breathing in. Breathing out. Body stinging with pain top to toe. Stinging, too, with the will to live. She worked sluggishly through the implications of his statement. “So, if it wouldn’t be wise to kill it, you must think it’s useful to us somehow.”

“Wolves have been known to stalk a man or an animal for miles, so I’m not saying he’s not out for our blood. It’s just that…” He trailed off.

“Did you know it was following us all night?”

“No. I sensed at different times that we weren’t alone, but he’s a clever one and didn’t show himself. He could have easily made a move on us at almost any point, but he’s kept his distance. Even now it was only by chance that I happened to catch a glimpse of the silhouette of his ear in the fading moonlight before he ducked into the bushes on the ridge opposite the hollow.”

“What’s the fire for, then?”

“To keep him at bay.”

“Just in case he was thinking of us as dinner, as I was happy to consider him?”

“Let’s just say that he might be waiting until we’re in a worse way than we are now before going in for the kill. After all, he has to rustle his grub as easily as he can with the least risk to himself.”

“If he has to wait until we’re in worse shape than we are now,” she said wearily, “then he must be in a pretty bad way himself.”

Powell brought the fire to life. “Exactly what I was thinking, Miss Harris.”

That revived her a bit. She raised herself back up on one elbow and saw that he sat squatted, balanced on his heels, and was tending the fire with a stick. She said, “That’s my fourth good idea. The first and second were for the trousers, the third for the razor.”

He looked up and met her glance. “Keeping score?”

“With a hungry prairie wolf stalking us, Mr. Powell, I’d like you to think that I’m more useful alive than as wolf bait.” She smiled faintly. “Not that I want to give you any bad ideas.”

The flickering light from the flames licked the sharpedged planes of his face and blued the unkempt black curls that spun around his head. Something about the way his eyes narrowed as they rested on her suggested that he was enjoying a private joke. His expression riled her enough to shake off her tiredness.

“Although,” she said, rising laboriously to her feet, “it seems you already arrived at that idea on your own.”

She moved toward the fire, plopped down across from him so that she was looking at him through the flames. Her bonnet was still tied around her neck, but hanging down her back. She picked apart the knot in the ties and pulled the bonnet off. After folding it in her lap, she attempted to finger-groom the tangles of her hair, which felt as wild and untended to her as the surrounding landscape. Her scalp was beginning to itch. She had a vision of paradise, and it was a hot, scented bath and a luxurious shampoo.

“So how do you do it?” she asked, nodding toward the flames. “Make a fire, that is.”

His lips curved up in the barest suggestion of a smile. “So that you’ll know how to make one after you’ve thrown me to the wolf?”

The suggestion took her aback. “You think I’m capable of that?”

Noting her surprise, he replied, “Well now, it seems I’ve given you a bad idea. But it might have been one that would have come to you eventually, given the right set of circumstances.”

She wasn’t a bit tired now. She didn’t know which danger had alerted her senses more, the one stalking them outside the campsite or the one she felt hovering above the circle of the fire.

“You have experience with Sioux women,” she said, hugging her knees to her chin and arranging her skirts around her feet, “which gives you an idea how a white woman might behave outside the conventions.” She rested one cheek on a knee. “Does that mean you won’t tell me how to make a fire, so that I have to depend on you for food and warmth?”

He shook his head slightly as if to dismiss this absurd, yet not so absurd, discussion. Then he slipped his hand inside his trouser pocket and tossed something over to her. The sparkle of the small objects in the firelight brought her head up. She sat back reflexively so that she was cross-legged Indian-style, and two stones fell in the trough created by her skirts spread across her knees. She picked up the chunks and looked at him in question.

“Iron pyrites,” he explained. He withdrew several more pieces from his pocket and showed her how to strike them to achieve the desired result. “Starting fires from sticks is a tedious business, so I was happy to have found these rocks as we walked along the riverbed this past evening. Keep them. You never know when you’ll need them.”

While she untied the strings of the reticule at her waist in order to slip the rocks inside, she considered the unpleasant possibility that they might be separated. She was about to ask which one of them should carry her valuable scissors, but before she had a chance to pose the question, he tossed another object over to her. The next thing to land in her lap was one of the strips from her petticoat, bundled into a ball, which, she discovered upon opening it, contained a bunch of berries.

“Dinner,” he said.

She was catching on to his ways. “So that’s what you were doing all the time we were walking next to those bushes. I thought you had chosen the route to offer us protection from attack.”

“That was part of it.”

“You were harvesting the berries as we walked,” she said, recalling that she had glimpsed in his hand an occasional flash of metal in the moonlight. The razor’s tilted blade would not have been exposed enough for the task, so he must have used the scissors. “I hardly noticed what you were doing, just as I hardly noticed you gathering the bits of iron pyrite as we walked along the riverbed. You were able to bend down and pick them up without breaking stride.”

“Which is why I’m still alive.”

She decided that he had more useful ideas for her scissors than she did. Instead of asking for them back, she inquired, “What kind of berries are these?”

“The bitter kind,” he warned her. Then he opened the bundle he had prepared for himself and began eating.

She did the same. Having been forewarned of the taste helped cut the effect of the bitterness. “Not so bad,” she said, munching slowly, fighting the ravenous impulse to gobble, savoring every sour flavor.

“Tell me,” he said, “what else you have in your bag.”

She sighed. “Pins and needles and thread. A few coins. How I regret not having equipped myself more completely! When I think of all that I left behind in the wagon—”

“Better not to think of it.”

“Yes, well, the needle and thread can still be useful. I was thinking that I should repair the rent in your shirt so that it doesn’t look as if it was robbed from a dead man—in the event anyone should notice the tear and care about it. I could embroider something over it, you see, to disguise it.”

“You like to embroider?”

“Not at all! It drives me to distraction, but I can do a respectable bird or two, and I even have the right colors for an oriole.”

“An oriole?” She shrugged. “A Baltimore oriole. It’s the first embroidery pattern little girls learn where I’m from. After the alphabet, of course, and the usual flowers.”

“That’s right,” he said, his voice low and lazy, “you’d rather be in Baltimore. Do I assume that’s where you’re from?”

She heard his questions as conversational, a way to fill the spaces of time that were as empty as their stomachs. She hesitated over her usual impulse to pretty up her background, but the coziness of the campfire, which contrasted with the vast ocean of emptiness around them, prompted an honest response.

“From a farm just east of Baltimore,” she said. “It’s at North Point on the Chesapeake. I have many friends in Baltimore, though, and often go into town for one reason or another.”

“And now you’re on the road to Oregon,” he observed. “What did your family grow on the farm?”

“Years ago—well before I was born, that is—it was tobacco. When the Maryland farmers were undersold in that market by the Virginians and Carolinians, the profit seemed to be in the staples, corn and kale and the like. More recently…”

He finished her statement. “More recently there was no profit to be had in anything.”

She stared into the flames and watched a succession of miniature jewel gardens grow and die. It was pointless to deny the obvious. No one left a home when it was comfortable or a business when it was profitable. The original colonists hadn’t been landed gentry or moneyed merchants when they had left England, and their descendants weren’t fat cats leaving the East, either. The word depression had been circulating in The Baltimore Register with ever more frequency, along with installments from Samuel Parker’s guidebook to the Oregon Territory.

It had taken only a recent letter from Laurence’s wife, Cathy, reporting on the success of their apple tree farm out west, for Morgan and Barbara to decide that they had worked too hard for too long to have so little. Before Sarah knew it, the Harris family was packed up and ready to go. They were the first in their neighborhood to leave the old soil for greener pastures, but every farmer and shopkeeper in and around Baltimore had heard the enticing reports of the Oregon climate and the timber.

Sarah was of a mind to tell Mr. Powell that she had not been obliged to undertake this journey because she was poor. Oh, no! Mr. Powell should know that she had a very fine trust fund on which she could live in the style she deserved and which had been provided her by the widow of her father, the illustrious General Robert Ross of the British army.

Now, Mr. Powell didn’t need to know that she wouldn’t come into the money before she was twenty-five. Neither did he need to know that Mrs. Ross had threatened to close the account after those catty British “ladies” had tried to ruin Sarah’s reputation when she had visited Mrs. Ross two years before. And he certainly didn’t need to know that Morgan and Barbara had refused to borrow a penny against the future of that money and that their refusal hurt her in a peculiar sort of way. She knew, however, that to say any of this would leave her open to embarrassing questions.

She looked up and repeated, “No, there was no profit to be had in anything.”

If she thought she was going to avoid embarrassing questions, she was mistaken. Powell, who was thoughtfully chewing his berries, asked next, “You’re traveling with your sisters, no?”

“That’s right. I have two.”

“Older? Younger?”

“Both younger. Helen is sixteen and Martha is fourteen.”

“Which makes you—”

“One and twenty, Mr. Powell.”

“Hmm. I see.”

There was something in the way he said, “I see,” that made her think he saw nothing at all. She knew what he was thinking, and it was exactly what that hateful Mrs. Fletcher had said when she had met Sarah. Upon inquiring about Sarah’s age, Mrs. Fletcher had smiled sweetly and said, “Oh, I see, my dear. You must have suffered a disappointment in love. No? Well, why else would a woman of your age be accompanying her parents to begin a new life on the other side of the continent?”

Sarah could restrain her vanity no longer. “I’ll have you know, Mr. Powell,” she said, “that I turned down a very good—no, an excellent offer of marriage hardly more than a month ago, and so you needn’t think that I came on this trip because…because I was unable to situate myself or anything of that sort!”

Her vanity was hardly appeased when Powell asked, “Why didn’t you find a way to stay with one of the many friends you have in Baltimore, if you didn’t choose to be traveling now?”

Because none of her friends had turned out to be true friends. After Sarah had turned silly William down, she found that the doors to the houses of Olivia and Isabelle and Claire didn’t open so readily or so widely for her anymore. Never mind that they were as stuck-up as they were rich. And they had been jealous of her from the start. Oh, yes, jealous.

She said primly, “I don’t like to impose,” and had to swallow her pride to see the smirk of understanding cross her companion’s stubble-darkened face. It was difficult to determine which was the more unpleasant circumstance to bear at the moment: her exhaustion, her hunger, the memory of being so thoroughly snubbed, or the company of this impossible man.

“And you, Mr. Powell?” she asked, gathering together the tired remains of her dignity. “What brings you to these inhospitable parts?”

“The U.S. government. I’m a surveyor.”

The vision of a precise surveyor jarred against her continuing image of him as a man-beast. She was surprised into asking, “Your studies in surveying informed you of how to trap and skin a rabbit and how to build a fire from sticks and iron pyrite?”

He shook his head. “A year of being in the field has done that for me.”

“Nevertheless, I don’t suppose when you chose such a…a respectable profession that you ever imagined finding yourself captive to bloodthirsty Sioux squaws.”

“I’ll admit,” he said, “that I never imagined the surveyor would be regarded as the Indians’ worst enemy.”

“How so?”

“The hunters they dislike. The pioneers, too. But the man with the magical instruments who looks at their land—just looks!—and works for the Great White Father back in Washington…this man they hate. And, perhaps, rightly so.”

“Speaking of the Indians,” she said, looking nervously over her shoulder into the blackness, “I’m wondering whether this fire, as useful as it is for scaring away the hungry animals, might not alert any unfriendly humans to our presence.”

“Right again, Miss Harris, and I’m none too pleased about still finding myself in Sioux country. So before I set about making the fire, I gave a couple of owl hoots, since to the Sioux, the hoot of an owl is the sign of death.”

“That was you?” she replied, amazed. She had heard an owl a while back and, unlike a Sioux, had been comforted by the familiar sound of it. “You seem to have learned a lot of skills in a relatively short time.”

“Since boyhood I’ve been able to hoot well enough to get answers from owls.”

“Where are you from, Mr. Powell?”

“Everywhere, Miss Harris, and nowhere.”

Thereafter the conversation didn’t flourish, and she was inclined to think that they were protected as well as could be expected from their predators, whoever and whatever they might be.

After a while, Powell got up and left the campsite. Sarah felt a leap of panic at his departure and had to suppress a desire to ask him if she could accompany him. After all, he hadn’t followed her when she had had occasion to disappear once or twice behind a bush during the course of their long walk, nor had he said a word about it. Still, it was dead of night, the prairie wolf was stalking them, and this was Sioux country. She glanced at his bed of leaves and thought it was distressingly far away from her own bed. However, to suggest making his any closer to hers was unthinkable.

So she drew herself away from the fire and fairly crawled back to her bed. She lay down on her back, intending to turn on her side, but once down, she couldn’t move another muscle to turn over. She was captive to the leaves, imprisoned in a body that was not dead but not fully alive, either. With every sense stretched well beyond tiredness, she lay there with her eyes open, her gaze lost in the snarls of the wood and leaves above her head.

The shadows hidden in the branches mingled with the sneaking glow of the dying fire to create weird mind pictures of prairie wolves, of Sioux warriors with feathered arrows cocked in drawn bows. Of William down on one knee, taking her hand in his, begging her to be his wife. Of the flick of her wrist, that one, brief gesture containing both her surge of triumph and her loss of desire to ever see him again. Of English aristocrats paying her extravagant compliments in darkened corners and then pawing her breasts. Of hoot owls.

The next thing she saw were the sun’s rays breaking through the branches above where she lay. She sat straight up, draining the blood from her head. She was woozy from bad dreams and the realization that the sun was already well up in the sky. She ached everywhere in her body, but mostly in her heart, and when she looked around and saw that Mr. Powell’s bed of leaves was empty, her aching heart nearly failed her.

She wanted to call out for him, but didn’t dare. A moment later she was glad she had kept quiet, for she saw fresh sticks neatly laid for a new fire a few feet away from the previous night’s fire. At the base of Mr. Powell’s tree she spied a folded white shirt, a pair of moccasins, her laceless ankle boots, a laced pair of men’s boots, a few rolled-up strips of white cotton and the torn shawl, atop which glinted a small object she recognized as her scissors. Relief sloshed through her, and she was able to conclude that Mr. Powell was at the spring, most likely bathing.

Given that, she decided to wait for his return to the campsite before going to the spring herself in order to wash. The evidence of the newly laid kindling suggested that he might have found some meat to cook. She was so cheered by the possibility that she decided to make herself useful. She got to her feet and hobbled across the campsite to retrieve Mr. Powell’s shirt and her scissors. Then she hobbled back to her bed, sat back down, opened her reticule and began to mend the tear in the upper left front panel of Mr. Powell’s shirt.

She engrossed herself in her task and was, perhaps for the first time in her life, soothed by the activity of threading her needle, of setting tiny stitches, of snipping finished ends, of making inyisible knots. She saw the head of a delicate golden orange bird come to life beneath her fingers, sprout a wing, perch on the beginnings of a leafy branch. She let her thoughts roam where they willed. They fixed, pleasantly, on the happy reunion she would soon have with her mother and father and Martha and Helen.

Mr. Powell returned to the campsite. She didn’t look up at him, absorbed as she was in her handiwork. She heard the small sounds of him lighting the fire and the subsequent snaps and crackles of the flames. Presently the aroma of jackrabbit drifted over to her and brought a watering in her mouth.

“I’ve roasted meat on a stick for you,” Mr. Powell said to her at one point, “and placed it away from the fire on these rocks. You can have it when you’re hungry.”

“I’m hungry now,” she said, still not looking up.

“I don’t doubt it,” he said, “but you’re right not to hurry, since we can’t move out of here for quite a few hours yet.”

She was in her black threads now and began to place the beak. “Just like yesterday, then?”

He grunted his assent “The terrain in these parts doesn’t provide enough cover for us to travel during the day. I’ll do what I can to sniff out the trail of the wagons over the next few hours, but I’m limited in my movements because of that prairie wolf and my lack of a knife. Not to mention the Sioux.”

“I’ve got a bit of work left to do on your shirt,” she said, “and could probably spend the day embroidering, if I had enough thread.” She held his shirt away from her and regarded it critically. She turned the shirt toward him, then finally looked up. “You see—” she began, and got no further.

He was squatting down before the fire and balanced on his heels just as he had when she had last seen him, but there the resemblance between the Mr. Powell of last night and the Mr. Powell of this morning ended, and she wouldn’t have known him for the same man if she had not already heard his voice. When she looked up, he met her regard, and her overall impression of him now was that he was much younger than she had guessed, although she had not previously considered him old. She was frankly astounded to discover how thoroughly a shave could transform a man. His face wasn’t handsome—she wouldn’t go so far as to say that—but it was…compelling, in a masculine sort of way, all flat planes and clean angles.

His eyes were blue. She had noticed that right away, along with the fact that he was unusually sharp-sighted. But now that his blue, sharp-sighted eyes were focused on her in inquiry and no longer bloodshot, they had a quite distinctive effect. His hair was different, too. She wouldn’t call it precisely tamed, but he had evidently washed it, and it was still slicked back from his face and only just beginning to curl as it dried. Then there were his broad shoulders and his muscular chest, which tapered down to a washboard stomach. She had already discovered how strong he was, but she couldn’t quite understand why she hadn’t made a connection between that strength and the physique that matched it This lack of connection was all the more curious given the fact that when she had first laid eyes on him he had been naked.

At that she blushed and had the presence of mind to hold the shirt in her hands up in front of her face. She cleared her throat. “You see what I’ve been doing,” she tried again. “What do you think so far?”

He did not immediately respond. In fact, the silence was prolonged enough to give her time to recover her complexion and to peek around the side of the shirt.

He was staring open mouthed in amazement, but his expression was not that of pleasant surprise, nor did he seem particularly impressed with her unexpected skill with a needle.

“I asked you what you think, Mr. Powell.”

He closed his mouth, then opened it to say, “It’s a bird.”

“An oriole, yes. I told you so last night.”

“I didn’t think you were serious about putting it on the shirt.”

Any trace of embarrassment vanished. This was the Mr. Powell she knew. “It’s a rather fine start I’ve made, if I do say so myself,” she said sweetly, and fixed him with a well-practiced gaze that blended mild puzzlement with entreaty. “Do I take it that you have some objection to the improvement that I’m making?”

Chapter Five

He might have predicted that the beautiful idiot would end up doing something idiotic while he was gone from the campsite. She was an irritating woman, no doubt about it. A tricky one, too, and he didn’t want even to begin to respond to the look in her big brown eyes, no sir, or imagine how many men had fallen victim to it. And although he was able to recognize the not-so-subtle manipulative intention of that look, its effect on him was in no way lessened. It reminded him that a year in the field was a long time—

He shook his head to clear it. “I object to wearing a shirt with a bird that belongs on a sewing sampler.”

“I think you should know, sir, that this pattern represents a skill level well beyond that of the sampler. It is found on parlor pillows in the best houses and on napkins, linen napkins.”

“Especially a bird that’s surrounded by all those curlicues.”

“Those are to become mimosa flowers,” she informed him. “I have hardly had time to finish the entire pattern, so perhaps it’s premature of you to judge it at this stage. The pink of the flowers will nicely complement the golden orange of the bird’s body, while the brown of the branch balances out the white and black of its head and wing feathers.”

“Does it have to be so big?”

“Well, this is about the size of the design as it figures on parlor pillows.”

“Ah, but I suppose that on napkins, it would be—” He broke off.

There it was again, that look. “You were saying, sir?” That voice, too. Sweet enough to melt a foolish man. “Something about napkins?”

This was a ridiculous conversation, and he wasn’t going to pursue it. He needed a shirt, and it looked as if he was going to have one with an orange bird, surrounded by pink flowers, poised to chirp its silent song across several square inches of his upper left breast. He exhaled gustily, slipped the suspenders hanging down at his sides over his shoulders and rose to his tender bare feet.

“Let me know when the shirt’s ready,” he said. “You can eat whenever you want.”

He retrieved his moccasins and was at the edge of the campsite when she stopped him with the words, precisely enunciated, “Do you mind telling me where you are going, sir?”

Yes, I do mind. “Is there a specific reason why you need to know, ma’am?”

“Since I wish to bathe at the spring, I would like to be assured that we do not get in each other’s way.”

He should have guessed. “I’m going to check out possible wagon tracks and trails. Since I can’t move out in the open for any considerable length of time, I’ll be gone several hours at least, but won’t be able to cover much more than a mile or so.”

“And if the prairie wolf comes, should I chip stones again?”

He nodded. “Keep the fire going, too, or start another one for practice. Remember never to make two fires in one place. That will make it easier to cover our tracks before we move on out of here later today.”

As he was leaving the campsite in a direction away from the spring, he heard her say, “If you’re worried about not quite striking the right fashion note with a beautiful oriole on your shirt, I might remind you that your present outfit is far more stylish than the one you were wearing when I first saw you.”

He crunched his way through the trees, grumbling to himself. This was hardly the best start to a day that was sure to be as grueling as the one before. He was in better shape, though, much better shape. After the beautiful idiot had fallen asleep the night before, he had boiled some water and put some snakeweed in it. Then he had soaked his feet in the concoction and slept with his soles wrapped in sage leaves. This morning, although his feet were far from healed, they were no longer stabbing him with pain. Since he wouldn’t be doing much walking today, mostly waiting, he figured his feet would be even better by the time of the evening’s trek.

As a man from everywhere and nowhere, he liked to plot people and places in precise positions on the various mental maps he held in his head, and he knew just where to put Miss No-First-Name Harris with her postures and her pretenses and her embroidery scissors. He knew her type. Hell, he had been given birth by her type. The lack of physical resemblance between Miss No-Name and his mother wasn’t going to mislead him, and he’d have to remember his mother’s jet black hair and sapphire eyes every time he looked at Miss No-Name’s golden curls and twist-a-man-around-her-little-finger brown eyes. He indulged fellow feelings for the poor fool who had extended her the supposedly excellent offer of marriage she claimed to have turned down—and even dared to wonder if she had received such an offer. But why had a farm girl from the Chesapeake taken a trip to England with a chaperon?

He didn’t know, and he wasn’t going to spend the day thinking about her, especially not thinking of her bathing in the spring. Better to think of where he was and what he was doing, and that was surveying the one hundredth meridian. Better to find a place to hide in the occasional sprigs of vegetation where he could calculate the slant of the sun and plan his moves to coincide with the slow shifts of shadows. Better to wonder why white men wore black trousers, the kind that didn’t blend into any daytime landscape.

Now that his senses were returning, he was interested to find out what happened to his telescope and his chain and his level, not to mention what might have happened in the meantime to the rest of his team of three other surveyors. However, he wouldn’t be able to retrieve his instruments in the Sioux camp or restore himself to his team until he had returned the beautiful idiot to her family.

Full circle. Begin by thinking about a woman. End by thinking about a woman. Maybe it had something to do with having been stripped naked, made to face certain death, and then being reborn. But how long was he—were they—destined to survive with almost no resources in the middle of hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness? Make that several millions of acres. He didn’t know exactly how many, and it was the job of the surveying team to establish that number. The odds against him accomplishing his part of the mission now were high, and here he was a good hundred miles east of where he had last seen his team, with no equipment, no horse, and in the company of an irritating woman who seemed to think that their life-or-death circumstances made a good occasion to embroider.

He eventually found a miniature scarp in the seemingly smooth grassland in which he could nestle himself. Lying horizontally, he shared this patch of earth with creeping critters and stared at the sky, which was three hundred and sixty degrees of clouds, packaged like a drawing-room gift assortment of mare’s tails and cumulus and cirrus, with an occasional dark storm cloud resting on a silvery gray pedestal of rain afar off to the west. He brought his gaze down to the horizon and chose a fixed point in the middle distance upon which to base his estimates of the wide spaces yawning around him. He took his time and arrived at what he knew would be a remarkably accurate estimate of fifteen miles to the slight rise of land on the western horizon.

This neat trick of spatial approximations was one he had taught himself as a distraction during the regular beatings he brought upon himself at the military academy. Over time, he discovered that he was good not only at the small-scale calibrations he had performed in the confines of the Correctional Chamber but also at the mapping of larger spaces, where plane geometry no longer applied and the curvature of the earth came into play. When he had surpassed his cartography teachers in precision, the beatings stopped, and he was sent to the War Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C.

He calculated and waited, moved and calculated, waited some more and moved again. He spied what might have been fresh wagon tracks, but didn’t risk following them. Instead he simply calculated their direction and figured in the possible ground that had been covered in the past forty-eight hours. The possibility danced around the edges of his busy brain that Miss No-Name’s family had backtracked to find her. However, it seemed more logical, since she was the one who had been spared from attack, that her parents would do their best to arrive at the next meeting point and wait for her there.

That is, if they were still alive. And if they weren’t, he was stuck with her.

He had seen what there was to see, so he headed back to the campsite. This took enough time to imagine a variety of scenarios for how she had spent her day, which included her being foolishly preyed upon by the prairie wolf and bathing in the spring. The image of her bathing in the spring seized hold of his imagination but was instantly replaced, upon his return to the camp, by the combination of her with the prairie wolf.

He came upon the campsite from the direction he had left it, and the first thing he saw was Miss Harris standing in the center of the little clearing with her back to him. Her spine was rigid, and she was looking straight ahead of her. She was wearing her bonnet, and her clothes looked fresh but slightly rumpled in a way that suggested that she had washed them and dried them in the sun on rocks. Across from her and facing him was the prairie wolf, who had ventured right up to the edge of the opposite side of the campsite. He was a scruffy, pitiful excuse for a wolf, but he was more than a match for a human. His ears were cocked, his right foreleg was raised, and he had a wary look in his eye, as if he was waiting for his best moment to pounce. Or was he, incredibly, about to retreat?

In that first half second Powell realized that the beautiful, blessed idiot was trying to stare the damned prairie wolf down. In the next half second, he realized that she was winning the war of nerves.

The scene unfroze. Powell moved forward. The prairie wolf turned tail and ran. She whirled at the sound of his footfall behind her and clutched her heart.

“Oh, it’s you!” she exclaimed under her breath. “You scared me!”

“I scared you?”

“Sneaking up on me like that. I didn’t hear you.”

“A wise man doesn’t announce his arrival anywhere in these parts,” he replied, “but as for being scared, I would have thought our mangy friend did that for you.”

She let her hand fall to her side. “He was playing a game of hide-and-seek with me on the edges of the trees there for a good long while. I picked up my rocks, and I would have thrown them at him if I had had to.” She gestured to the rocks at her feet. “I decided not to go on the offensive, recalling what you said about your feeling, so I dropped them and figured that my best strategy was to stand my ground here in the center.”

“Why did you figure that?”

“To let him know that I knew he was there and that I wasn’t moving. I’ve been standing here immobile for an age and am heartily sick of it.”

He controlled himself to say levelly, “Since his teeth are much bigger than yours, that was a risky strategy to pursue.”

“What would you have had me do instead?”

“Climb into the safety of a tree, to name but one idea.”

Her brown eyes flashed with magnificent scorn. “I will not be treed by such a mangy creature, as you so aptly described him! I had no assurance that you would return to deliver me from the branches, and so I made my decision to die standing up. You will grant me that measure of dignity, surely, even in these thoroughly undignified circumstances.” With a lofty gesture toward his bed of leaves, she informed him summarily, “I have finished the embroidery on your shirt. I am quite pleased with the result.”

He wasn’t going to argue with her astonishing success in staring down that peculiar prairie wolf, who was either unusually cowardly or remarkably wise. He himself remembered that discretion was the better part of valor and concluded that he didn’t want to mess with her while she was in this mood any more than did, perhaps, the wolf. Nor did he think it wise to comment on the brilliantly hued bird that now adorned his shirt, so he put that piece of clothing on in silence.

At the moment he decided it was time to find some food and moved away from his tree, he was jumped on from behind. Writhing vigorously, he put his attackers to the test before his mouth was gagged and his arms were wrenched and tied behind his back. In his twisting and turning, he was able to see that Miss Harris had been set upon by three men, Indians by their dress and hair, and that she was being bound and gagged, as well. Their eyes met briefly. Hers flashed with surprise and terror. Raging against his helplessness, he redoubled his efforts, but he did not effect his release, since he had determined that not three but rather four men were holding him.

He strained to catch words or phrases from the language the Indians were speaking to one another. They hadn’t said enough for him to know whether the Teton Sioux had finally caught up with him, and he hadn’t had a close enough look at the warriors following him three days before to know whether they were the same ones now. All he could think was that either he had been careless and had led them straight to the camp or the prairie wolf had somehow alerted them to this human hiding place.

However the Indians had tracked them down, he and Miss Harris were in for it now. He was being pushed and pulled around the spring, and made to stumble up the rocks and over a ridge to where the Indians had left their horses. He wished he could see how it was going for her, but she was being kept out of his sight range. The Indians mounted their horses. One end of a rope was tied around his waist, the other end around one of the horses, which meant that he was going to be forced to trot along on the ground beside the rider. He imagined that Miss Harris was subjected to this same unhappy means of travel.

The party took off, seven men on horses plus a man and a woman on foot. Powell regretted that he wasn’t wearing the boots he had retrieved from the dead man. He regretted that she wasn’t wearing her ankle boots, even without the laces. He regretted that he hadn’t at the very least had the foresight to make them two new pairs of moccasins.

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