uncomfortable for them all.
At last the senior outrider, a sergeant, cleared his throat and spat in the alkali dust. “Load him in the damned wagon. When we get to the fort, we can dump him off at the Injun hospital.” He glared irritably at two of the men. “You! Move!”
“Watch his head.” Miranda hovered anxiously as the two soldiers lifted the unconscious Navajo and carried him toward the buckboard. His length sagged between them, one limp hand dragging in the dust. They hefted him high and rolled him onto the bed like the carcass of a freshly killed buck.
Miranda stifled a little cry as his body struck the planks. She paused to snatch up her discarded cloak from the ground. Then, without waiting for assistance, she scrambled up beside him and gathered his battered head into her lap. “Go,” she said to the driver. “Hurry.”
The wagon jounced over the rutted road as the mules broke into a trot. Miranda covered Ahkeah’s chilled body with the cloak and cradled his head to lessen the jarring. Tending injured men was nothing new to her. Her maternal uncle, Dr. Andrew Cavanaugh, who’d taken her in when her mother died, had spent the Civil War stationed at a Boston military hospital. With so many wounded to tend, he’d had little choice except to press his young niece into service. There was little in the way of grief and misery that Miranda had not seen. Perhaps that was why, when the war ended and she was able to resume her schooling, she had chosen to train not as a nurse, but as a teacher.
“Just think of it!” she had exclaimed to her disappointed uncle. “If we can teach children kindness and tolerance before they’re grown, perhaps there’ll be no more need for war!”
Miranda’s own words came back to haunt her now as she nestled the fallen Navajo’s head between her knees. His head wound had stopped bleeding, but his eyes were closed and his breathing was ragged. His pulse fluttered like the wings of a dying bird beneath her fingertips.
She remembered the sight of him, standing in the twilight beside his horse. His gaze had pierced her like a blade, touching deep, secret places that had lain undisturbed for all the twenty-two years of her life. Even now that he lay helpless in her lap, the power of his presence left her shaken. No one had ever looked at her with such pure hatred—a hatred that had chilled Miranda to her bones. What chance did her own beliefs stand against such deeply bred hostility? Why hadn’t she stayed in the East, where little more was expected of her than to be sweet, pleasant, ladylike and studious?
One of the outriders had caught Ahkeah’s horse and tied it to the back of the buckboard. When the clouds swept clear of the moon, Miranda could see the barred shadow of its rib cage below the tattered saddle blanket. When they reached the fort she would order the poor creature stabled and fed, she resolved. An animal, at least, would not be too proud to accept a bit of human kindness.
Ahkeah’s head rolled in her lap. He moaned softly, but his eyes did not open. Miranda gazed down at his moon-chiseled features—the jutting ledges of his cheekbones, the fine, straight nose, the long jawbones that met in a prominent, stubborn chin. His eyes lay in deep pools of shadow within the sockets of his skull. There was nothing to his face but skin and bone, and little more to his rangy body. All the same this Navajo was a riveting figure of a man—a wild hawk, lying broken and wounded in her arms, exuding a savagery that burned behind the lids of his closed eyes, searing her senses.
His limbs twitched like a dreaming animal’s as he moaned again, struggling in the depths of his darkness. Miranda’s fingers brushed back a tendril of night-black hair from his forehead. His skin was like polished jade, the hair stiff with alkali dust.
She thought of Phillip, his blue eyes, his fine, pale hair and his gentle ways. Dear heaven, what she wouldn’t give to be with him now, away from this bleak desert and this frightening man.
“It’s all right,” she whispered, remembering that seemingly unconscious people had been known to hear what was said to them. “You’ve got a head injury—perhaps a serious one. We’re taking you to the hospital at the fort. You’ll be looked after properly there.”
Had she felt his body jerk? The slight, convulsive shudder passed like a ripple beneath the woolen cloak and was gone.
“Ahkeah?” Could he really have heard her speak? Bending closer, Miranda gazed at him intently, but he did not move. Only his ragged, shallow breathing and the elusive flutter of his pulse told her he was alive.
Why did you hit him so hard? she wanted to scream at the soldier who’d crashed the rifle butt into Ahkeah’s dark head. Was it hatred, fear or simple stupidity? Miranda kept her silence, knowing that it was too late for outrage—and knowing, too, that this man could not be lost to his people. Whatever it took, whatever influence she could wield, she would see that he got the best possible care.
“Beggin’ your pardon, miss.” The driver’s twangy voice broke into her thoughts. “If there’s any chance that Injun can hear you, you’d best not say nothin’ ’bout the hospital.”
“What do you mean?” Miranda glanced at him sharply.
“Navajos got some odd beliefs. They don’t like to go where a body’s died, somethin’ about ghosts. Hell, I’ve seen ’em burn a place to the ground ’cause a body’s died there—and the whole family just standin’ round with no place to live. Sometimes, if they know ahead, they’ll haul the poor soul’s bed outside so’s he won’t have to die in the house.”
“And that’s why they don’t like the hospital? Because people die there?”
The corporal laughed, a raw, humorless sound. “We hafta drag ’em there at gunpoint. Ain’t no use tryin’ to do nothin’ for ’em, miss. Navajos ain’t got no more gratitude than they got sense!”
“I see.” Miranda sank back into her own silence. The stars had come out, diamond pinpoints spilling across a black velvet sky. So far away. So cold.
The road was straighter and more level here, as if it had been recently graded. Bare cottonwoods, their skeletal branches clawing skyward, lined the road on both sides. This, Miranda realized, would be the final approach to Fort Sumner.
Straining her eyes into the darkness ahead, she could make out glimmers of light, lower and brighter than the icy stars. Soon she and her weary escorts would be safe within the boundaries of the fort. Soon she would be greeting the tough, taciturn near stranger who was her father.
Major William Howell, known as Iron Bill to his troops, had already made it clear that he could not leave his post to travel East for Miranda’s June wedding. Dear Uncle Andrew would be the one to walk her down the aisle and give her to Phillip in marriage. All the same, Bill Howell was her father. Even though she had seen him less than half a dozen times in the fifteen years since her mother’s death, Miranda felt a need to close the tenuous circle that bound them together. With Phillip planning to take over the London office of the family shipping business, who could say whether she and her father would ever meet again?
The man in her lap stirred and moaned. His moon-silvered eyelids twitched as if he were dreaming, but his eyes remained closed in the shadowed pits of their sockets. Miranda studied the proud, sharp planes of his sleeping face. The proud Navajo was pure trouble, she knew. By all rules of common sense, she should let the soldiers deliver him to the Indian hospital. He was certainly in no condition to protest or even to be frightened.
In any case, Ahkeah and his people were none of her concern. She had come to Fort Sumner to see her father, not to aid the downtrodden. Two weeks from today she would be leaving by this very road. She would be going back to her own familiar world, to finish out her
