GOLD RUSH DREAM Page 2

  “Rose? Come on up, Rose. We have to get out of here.”

  At mention of her name, she raised her face to him and he saw the tears streaking down her sooty cheeks. Her eyes looked as lost and forlorn as any he’d ever seen.

  “Aw, honey, it’s all right. Come on now, take my hand. Get up behind me. I’ll keep you safe. Really. Okay? I won’t let nobody hurt you.”

  She blinked and reached out her hand gingerly. He swung her up behind him and she automatically lifted her leg and straddled the horse. He sighed inside, feeling sorry for the orphaned girl, and feeling something else as her breasts pressed against his back, but he wasn’t going to think about that now.

  He just wasn’t.

  Miles and hours later, he had forgotten all about the girl behind him. She was like his horse, there and not there. He had kept his attention trained on the lay of the land and the sounds therein. He didn’t want to be surprised by the war party. Twice, spooked, he stopped, breathing shallowly, listening, but heard nothing other than the breath of the wind in the trees overhead. So alert he felt his heart beating hard, he went on, slowing through rocky ravines, moving faster along animal paths and at the edges of open land where thigh-high field grasses rose and fell in waves from errant breezes.

  He was headed south, trying to get out of the Apaches’ known territory. When night fell he felt safe enough to stop and let his horse and Dorry, the donkey, drink at a little clear branch that wandered off through trees. On the other side of the branch he found a flat grassy patch and only then remembered the girl.

  He turned a little in the saddle, his bottom aching and uncomfortable from the heat. He helped her down. She didn’t protest, but neither did she look him in the face. He was growing mighty worried about Rose. It was a bad thing she’d lived through, but she was alive and that meant everything. You didn’t come out to this country and expect it was going to be easy. If it got hard, you just got harder, that's what he thought. You couldn’t let the land beat you. In other words, if the beaver played out, you got busy trapping something else, didn’t you? No use crying in your coffee and drinking tears.

  He made short work of hobbling Dorry, tying his horse (who he hadn’t named yet, as he’d just bought him two months ago from a trader over in San Antonio), and setting up camp. He wished he had a tent now that the girl was here, but she’d just have to contend with the bare night and the falling dew.

  He got a fire going with a kettle of water on it to boil. He brought out a cotton sack of roasted coffee beans, the last of his store, and poured a double handful in a dishpan to grind down with the heel of his knife. Once the beans released their aroma and were as finely ground as he could get them, he dumped them into the boiling kettle. By the time he had done all these things, while Rose sat on a log she’d pulled up to the fire, dark had fallen and the night had settled in.

  Travis sank on his haunches, airing his sweaty behind that was only now drying, and watched the girl. “You got any people?” he asked. Meaning other than her parents, but he didn’t want to say that.

  For some moments he thought she wasn’t going to answer him, just as she hadn’t answered other questions he’d asked during the long day, but finally her head lifted and her chin came forward. She blinked slowly, bringing a hand up to rub at her cheek. A smooth white spot showed in the soot, the skin there as pale as the moon and as soft looking as the pelt of a white rabbit.

  “I’ve got an aunt and uncle in Galveston.”

  He widened his eyes in question. “Galveston? I ain’t never been there, blame if I have.”

  “It’s an island,” she said, now looking away from him to the fire. “My aunt lives there.”

  He thought she was repeating herself because she wasn’t quite right yet. She hadn’t yet snapped out of her shock.

  He tilted his hat back and looked up at the rising moon. It was a quarter moon and silver as a sword blade. Galveston. He could maybe take her to Galveston to that aunt of her’s, at least that was a way to get rid of her and be sure she was safe. It wasn’t in his nature to abandon children.

  Besides, he liked to gamble and he figured there would be some gambling going on in the saloons in Galveston, with real decks of cards and real money. He used to play poker with his father, before his father died of consumption when Travis was thirteen, but they’d made their cards out of brown wrapping paper and for money they used pebbles. Since then he’d played his share of hands with poker players all over Texas and he usually came out of it ahead. He liked to have a jingle in his pocket.

  “I could take you down to Galveston, I guess,” he offered.

  “How old are you anyway? Fourteen?”

  Her head came up at that. “I am not,” she said. “I am not fourteen, I’m seventeen.”

  He grinned at her spunk and thought maybe she’d get over this sad predicament and be able to go on. Anyone proud enough to correct her age had to have a future.

  “Seventeen.” He rubbed his chin and tried not to smile. “That’s about grown. By seventeen I was a seasoned trapper, making my own way.”

  “By seventeen I was all alone,” she said, as if to herself, her head down again so he couldn’t see her eyes.

  Damn, but it was a blame crazy thing to bring this girl out into wild East Texas just to make a farm. Blame if it wasn’t.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Broken Bear sat cross-legged in a prickly blind of tawny dry brush downwind and only yards from the camp. When the other braves raced away from the burning cabin, Broken Bear lagged behind, getting farther and farther from them. He had the strangest feeling. He had been the target the girl shot at from the cabin window—the one and only shot she’d taken with any aim at all. He’d seen her face, the red hair piled high on her head, and he’d even seen the blue eyes. Then she was aiming at him and he turned his horse, causing it to rear and whirl on its back legs, almost dropping them both to the hard packed ground. The girl missed, but surely not by much. When the shutters closed he didn’t see the girl again. The roof caught fire and the dried log walls took up flame. The white man was already dead in the paddock, nosed by his goats.

  Soon the two women inside the cabin would be dead too, or that’s what they thought so they left once it was done. Yet as they rode off with the farmer’s animals trailing behind the braves, Broken Bear thought he’d heard something. A keening. High and wild and human turned to animal. Wounded animal.

  He told the others to go ahead, he’d see them back at the camp. He circled through the woods and watched while the white trapper on the horse took the keening girl with the red hair and blue eyes with him.

  He followed, not close enough to be noticed, not far enough to be lost. He knew he should have either attacked the couple or returned to camp, but he wanted the girl who tried to steal his life. She had made his soul fly from his very body for a second. He had felt it—felt it lift up out of his chest area and hover just above his head while his horse reared and skittered to stay on its feet. He thought for a moment he was truly dead. On his horse, holding the reins, and dead.

  She had some kind of sacred power, the Red Hair, to scare him so thoroughly, to make his soul flee before her. He had never been scared before, not in any battle, but the near miss of her gunshot had reminded him of his mortality.

  He had not figured her out. She might be a shaman of her people. Filled with magic. She had reached out from the little cabin window and touched him with fear. She had also survived the raid and the fire, so surely she possessed powerful magic. He could not imagine how she had risen whole from the charred cabin remains.

  Oh he wanted her.

  Not to kill.

  He wanted her for himself, this mighty witch woman. Hadn’t some braves stolen white women and kept them? Granted, most stolen white women were made slaves, given to the old women and beaten when they didn’t work hard enough. But some few lived in a brave’s teepee, taken as a love squaw. That’s what Broken Bear wanted for the Red Hair. Teepee squaw. Lying beneath
him on a bear rug, hot as a fire, welcoming him. He’d see himself in her blue water eyes, see his own reflection of black hair and brown-gold face.

  Now he could hardly see the woman who mesmerized him. The light from the campfire threw dancing shadows that hid her from view. The man and girl were talking in low tones, too intimate for Broken Bear’s taste. He bet the white man wanted the girl for a teepee squaw too, but he wasn’t going to get her. He was not!

  The problem was the white man was one of those the tribes knew well. Travis, they called him, fierce white trapper, sure shot, quick. Quick to react and quick to kill. He had lived in the hills and forests since he was a boy and he was as good a tracker and trapper as any brave they had. No one crossed knives with Travis, thinking him charmed by the spirits and protected by them too. If he wasn’t a snake would have already poisoned him, a bear would have already mauled him to death, or the sickness that had come to kill the Indians would have already dropped him down in his deathbed.

  Broken Bear, who had gotten his name from having single-handedly forced a monstrous brown bear off a ledge so that it fell and broke its bank on rocks below, hated Travis. He hadn’t hated him at first, cared little about him one way or the other when the man trapped beaver. It wasn’t all his fault the beaver was scarce. There were just too many white men trapping them, that was all, so it couldn’t be Travis’s fault alone.

  No, Broken Bear began to hate the white trapper when he started taking bear. Bear was Broken Bear’s talisman. His namesake. His spirit watcher. For the white man to kill bear he should have had the Great Spirit’s permission and of course he did not because he was not Apache. The Great Spirit would never permit a white man to take the bear. The white man was an intruder. He brought the sickness, he raped the land by clearing it, and he killed all the things in the vicinity with his ravening hunger.

  Broken Bear’s face fell into a grimace as he thought about Travis and the girl and the real problem they presented. If it had been any other white man, Broken Bear would have already been on him, burying a hatchet in his skull. But he had to go careful with Travis. Careful and slow.

  The Red Hair turned her head, looking off into the underbrush exactly where Broken Bear hunched and he drew in his breath to hold it. Oh he wanted her. Young, with hair like flame and eyes like water. She was heir to two of the oldest, most sacred spirits—fire and water. That must be what gave her power.

  He had to have her.

  #

  Traveling double on Travis’ horse down through East Texas was a hard, hot trip. Some years March was like this, Travis thought. Spring occurring in February and March bringing what in any other climate would be called summer. Rose kept wiggling around, unused to riding astride a horse for so many hours. The sun beat down so hot that Travis felt like letting slip a curse, but bit his tongue for the girl’s sake. He didn’t want her to think he was one of those uncouth cowboys who didn’t know how to act around ladies.

  Around noontime he handed a strip of deer jerky to the girl behind him as they rode, and chewed a piece himself, savoring the flavor. He had purchased some chili peppers from a Comache woman up north to season his jerky and it sure created a surprise on the tongue when chewed. Rose soon begged for water, complaining how hot the jerky was, so he passed her the buckskin water bag. As for his own tastes, the jerky wasn’t hot at all, just spicy good.

  They had moved out of the piney woods and followed an old cow trail out onto the flattened plains of south Texas. The sky was so blue it was a pain to the eyes, not a cloud in sight. Sunshine spilled over them, draining them of sweat, and drying their tongues. Once Travis had to stop to refill the water bag from a clear running creek crossing the plains. It took a lot of water to cross south Texas, and two or three times as much to cross west Texas.

  Further west in this territory was a thirsty place---dry, dusty, baking under a relentless March sun.

  When they made camp, it was along a wide dirty brown river lined with cottonwoods. Travis killed a cottonmouth snake before he could water his animals. He saw it lurking at water’s edge, its body rippling the surface of the water. He reached out and grabbed it behind the head, took the tail in his other hand and abruptly swung the long snake around his head and then down toward the ground, snapping its head on hard dirt. He threw it over into a clump of trees. A bite from the cottonmouth to either his horse or donkey would have made them swell up and unable to travel.

  Back at camp he said, “Watch for water snakes. This is a swampy place and they like it here.”

  Rose asked if she could bathe, but he thought she shouldn’t. “Not yet, not here. It’s just too snaky. Wait till we get down to Galveston.”

  Shock transformed Rose’s face. “You want me to stay dirty all the way to Galveston and show up at my aunt’s house looking like…like this?” She spread her arms and swept them up and down the length of her dress. It was true she looked a sight. Her hair was bedraggled and tangled, her dress torn and sooty.

  “Tell you what, I’ll go haul up a pot of water from the river and you can heat it on the fire. Bathe from that. Would that do?”

  Rose frowned, but finally nodded her head. “If that’s all I’m allowed, it’s better than nothing.”

  She was a mite demanding, it seemed to him. She should have thanked him for the offer, but that hadn’t seemed to cross her mind.

  They done spoiled her, he thought to himself while he went for the water. Being an only child could do that. It made parents center in on a kid and treat it like something special. Travis had been the youngest of four brothers, all of whom had left home to head farther west before he was grown. His family never thought once of spoiling one of the boys over the others.

  Back at the camp, he saw she’d started the fire and settled a ring of rocks in it to hold the pot of water. He set it down in the flames and turned to look at her. She looked hungry as he felt. “I’ve got some more jerky and only a few dry red beans. I think I better go scare up some game for supper.”

  She licked her lips. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll bathe while you’re gone. And don’t sneak up on me, either. Not till I’m…I’m finished.”

  He knew she’d add some kind of admonition like that. He wasn’t a sneaky man, but if he wanted to pause in the shade of those trees over there just before he came back into camp…

  He grinned and slid his rifle from the leather holster on his horse. “I’m not going far,” he said. “This river looks like good hunting. Clean up quick.”

  In fact, he found a fat rabbit not more than three hundred feet down the river’s edge, so after bagging it, he dawdled on the way back to camp to give the girl time to be decent. He wasn’t really going to spy on her from the woods; he’d just been teasing his own mind.

  So it surprised him when he came through the copse of cottonwoods and saw her with her shirtwaist hanging down her skirt and the fine column of her naked back turned to him. He halted dead still and found he’d stopped breathing. He ought to turn around and wait. Or go back a ways, then come through the trees again making a lot of noise to warn her of his approach, but he just couldn’t take his eyes off her. He was held in suspense, hoping she’d turn. He wanted to see…

  She turned, unaware he stood in the shadows watching. Her breasts weren’t large or small, neither pendulous nor little knobs on her chest. They were perfectly rounded and snug against her ribcage, the nipples large and pink. Pink! It was a rare woman he’d seen naked who had pink nipples.

  Travis swallowed hard. He was getting all excited and that wouldn’t do. Now that he knew she was seventeen and old enough to have already been married, his sudden bouts of lust seemed more reasonable. He was a man, after all, and it was obvious she was a woman.

  He was afraid she’d notice his near presence and know he’d been spying. He whipped around and trudged off the way he’d come, carrying the dead rabbit by the hind legs in one hand, his rifle in the other. And in his thoughts all he could think about were pink nipples. Large pink nip
ples in the center of perfect breasts on a red-headed woman.

  #

  They came up on the ferry to Galveston, Texas around noon. He’d fed the girl more jerky and she’d just about drunk all his water again. The overhead sun beat down on her bare head and turned her hair to the color of fiery autumn leaves. She hugged him around the waist loosely as he trotted toward the crowd waiting for the ferry. There were wagons and mules, women and children standing about, and hunters with their trade-wares bundled on donkeys.

  “I’m not too fond of boats,” Travis muttered.

  “I don’t like them either,” she said.

  “I thought y’all must have come over from the Old Country, what with your accent. And you had to be on a boat to do that.”

  He thought she might be smiling at his back because he could hear it in her voice when she said, “I was really little so all I remember was being sick to my stomach the whole time. And I don’t have an accent.”

  “Yes, you do,” he said, thinking how much he liked that lilting Irish accent when it came from the throat of a pretty girl.

  On the ferry, crowded with both people, animals, and fowl of every description, Rose stayed close to his side. She kept pointing over the brown waters toward the island and exclaiming about how far she could see out across the Gulf. Travis was a little seasick from the motion of the ferry as it rolled through low waves so he said not much. He was afraid he was going to upchuck every little bit of jerky that was in his stomach. Now he knew how little Rose must have felt on the long trip over the ocean. Damn, but he didn’t like the sea.

  When they disembarked at the busy docks on the island, and Rose had told him what street her relatives lived on, Travis helped her back onto the horse behind him and, leading his donkey heaped with furs, he set off looking for their place. The streets were hard and rutted from rains, but that didn’t seem to slow the commerce. Boats lined the dock unloading every manner of thing—cloth, rice in hundred pound white bags, coffee beans, flour, sides of salted beef and hog, plank wood, and boxes of tools. Travis hadn’t been in a busy town like this in months. Galveston must be the port for all of South Texas, he decided. Surely the people here couldn’t use all the supplies he’d seen being unloaded on the docks.