now she had learned there seemed to be a particular smell to each man.
Perhaps it was nothing more than the cinnamon oil he worked into his long black curls. So dandified. She thought about that long hair of his falling to his shoulders, what with Usher almost totally bald on top of his head.
But when she smelled that musk of his mingled with the cinnamon scent to his hair, and saw the look Usher got to his eye, she knew he had come to take her. It had been such a long time since last she had resisted. Gritta couldn’t remember when she had tried to fight off the huge man. Slow she had been to learn that her struggles only drove Usher all the more mad with desire.
So she had given up resisting, retreating inside herself instead. Even there, far and away from everything painful, she still hated herself for conspiring with Usher to abuse her—a married woman vowed to give her years and love to her husband only. Tortured with guilt, unable to find any other direction to turn to for salvation, Gritta sank lower and lower into despair, never sure from moment to moment if she should go on living. What was the purpose in living when hope was gone?
God knows she had tried to end the pain for herself: snatching up a knife Usher had carelessly left lying about, dragging it across her wrists until the man wrenched it from her grasp. The next time it was a pair of scissors the Negro had forgotten in the tent after trimming the colonel’s hair. But as those first days rolled into weeks and the weeks stretched into months, Usher had eventually learned enough not to provide her with anything that could remotely be used to take her own life.
He even left his brace of ivory-handled pistols with George when he came through the tent flaps with that evil in his eye.
One of these days, she promised herself, when he’s lifting me into the ambulance, perhaps helping me down from it as his men begin to make camp for the night—I’ll grab for one of those pistols and shoot Usher … no, I’ll turn the gun on myself.
Then he can stand there watching me bleed to death, seeing the smile on my face as my life drains away at last. Long, long last.
“Till death do us part,” she whispered the words again within the rattle and clunk of the squeaky, swaying ambulance.
What life there is left in me. The way Usher has drained me of everything already. The boys …
And for a moment Gritta went cold, more lost than ever.
… what—oh, God—what were their names?
She strained for their faces, yanking at her memory like fingernails scratching at damask curtains.
“Little Zeke,” she finally said with a faint smile as she remembered.
Surprising herself that she had.
• • •
But the man was not like so many who knew little of travel in country so open as this. He clung to the bluffs and rock outcrops. He rode hugging the timber when possible. And at last night’s camp the white man had cooked his meal in a pit, eaten, and remounted. Then he rode another of the white man’s two, perhaps three, miles before the rider dismounted in a copse of trees and made his cheerless camp among the willow and alder, hidden from any roving eye.
That is, hidden from any but the eyes of Two Sleep.
From the man’s still-warm fire, the Shoshone warrior knew the white man had eaten antelope. From the bones left, the way they had been stripped clean and gnawed. Two Sleep guessed it might be the last meat the white man had along.
“He will be hungry before the day is out,” said the aging warrior as he had climbed from his blankets in the gray light of early dawn that next morning. There came more and more tight complaints along his muscles with the waning of every moon. They felt much like the knots he would crimp in a new buffalo-hair lariat or green rawhide to make hobbles for his war pony.
“There isn’t much game from here for the next day’s ride.”
And for that moment Two Sleep sensed some sorrow for the lone rider. But instead of going down the slope to share his dried meat with the white man, the Shoshone had instead quickly lashed his blanket over his saddle pad and made ready to leave—but only when the other one left his cold camp among the willow below.
“He sleeps long,” the Shoshone had murmured to himself at dawn.
To the east the red sun came up beneath purple rain clouds, to be swallowed in the time it took the sun to travel from one lodgepole to the next. Far to the west above the uplifted land, the worrisome clouds were already unloading their long streamers of rain upon the parched, high land.
Small wonder the white man had decided to sleep late. There was little sunlight to awaken him, and all that he had to look forward to was a day of rain. The late days of summer in this country could be like that, Two Sleep had mused as he watched some stirrings of movement in the camp below, the plains grown hot as the bottom of a cast-iron skillet, the air cooling in the high, snow-covered places rising all around this land. Clouds created above those high places were ultimately sent scrambling over the hot valleys to spill open their rain-swollen bellies accompanied by noise and torment.
It had come and gone—that storm battering the distant rider for more than two hours along the westward trail before he gave up and sought some shelter among the cottonwoods beside the narrow river. At those first drops Two Sleep had slid from the back of his pony and stripped himself naked—everything but his moccasins—then rolled his dry clothing up within the blanket covered by a small piece of oiled hide.
Soon he grew used to the cold of the rain, the hammer of the cold drops pelting his unprotected body. Soon it began to feel good, cleansing.
He wondered if the lone white man knew about bathing. So many didn’t. Two Sleep thought on all the white men he had known, most of them encountered along the Holy Road that took the whites to the western sun, or those men met at Big Throat’s fort near the Shaded River. It was the one called the Green by the white men. Among them Big Throat was known as Bridger. He was called Big Throat among most of the tribes because of the swollen flesh of the goiter at the old scout’s neck.
It had not been all that long since Two Sleep had heard rumor that Big Throat had abandoned the mountain West, had gone to Fort Laramie and beyond, even beyond the string of forts along the Platte River Road. East, it was said, to a home Bridger had not visited for many, many winters.
“I call you Two Sleep,” Jim Bridger had said many winters before to the young Shoshone warrior distantly related to the mountain fur trapper through marriage. Big Throat was the husband to Two Sleep’s cousin, cementing a bond with the Snake Indians many, many summers back in time, when both Bridger and Two Sleep had been younger and full of the rising sap of youth.
“Why you give me this new name?” the Shoshone had asked as he passed the pipe on around the circle of warriors come to visit Bridger where the white man had erected his log fort.
Bridger had smiled, his eyes merry. “Because I have never known you to sleep, my friend. On our hunts, when I go to sleep, you are still awake. When I wake up, you are already awake. So I think when you finally go to sleep, you will sleep for two men, eh?”
The old men had liked Big Throat’s reasoning, giving their approval to the name. So it was sanctioned, this new name: Two Sleep.
From that wedding day Chief Washakie had added his blessing not only to Bridger’s marriage, but to Two Sleep’s new name as well. The two men became even closer friends. Hunting together, making war on the enemies of the Shoshone together, loving their women and the Snake people and this land the tribe fiercely called its own.
“I will fight alongside you, Big Throat,” Two Sleep had told the trapper when word came that white men were riding out of the south against Brid-ger.
The old trapper had gathered a double handful of his old friends, all men who had spent years among the mountain snows and valley streams with Brid-ger, men who moved a little slower these days but still aimed true and shot center. Those few punished the other white men come cocky and bold on their big American horses, giving the attackers a solid drubbing, these old warrior friends of Brid-ger’s did. It was these that Two Sleep came to know as friends when the Shoshone warrior came to live among the whites, instead of living among his own.
