CHAPTER 16
Anna dropped down, down, down along the slanting falls. She fell until she didn’t think there was any way she could make it to the surface of the river from here.
She dropped until her fingers touched seaweed and mud. It was a dark, soundless world devoid of light. She was in a black prism. Fear was no longer a part of her. She’d tumbled beyond fear into a mindset focused entirely on survival, the blackness of watery death pressing against every inch of her.
She’d thought that over the past couple of days she’d lost her will to survive. Tobin’s lip-smacking blow had finalized the notion for her. When Henrietta had led her up the stairs at Cheyenne Bend, she hadn’t cared if she were being led to the smoking gates of hell. She’d just wanted the ordeal over.
Now her instincts took over and she swung her feet down beneath her, kicked off the muddy bottom, and swam hard for the surface, swinging her arms broadly and kicking her legs while her lungs felt as though they would burst. When her head finally broke the river’s moving surface, she sucked a deep draught of the night air and fought to keep her head above water. At the bottom of the falls, the river had picked up speed and it shuttled her quickly downstream through darkness that made her feel as though she were drifting through space. Only by the stream’s current could she tell which way was upstream and which way downstream. She had no visual reference points; otherwise, the entire world around her was as dark as the bottom of a deep well.
Fighting to keep her head above the surface quickly exhausted her. Several times the current pulled her under, and weakness almost made her give in to the stream’s demands. Each time, however, she belted out, “No!” through gritted teeth and shoved her head up into open air again.
The current twisted and turned her, took her from one side of the river to the other. Until the river’s will began to relent. Gradually at first but then there was hardly any current at all.
The banks had dropped away on both sides of the river, she could see now in the first wash of pearlescent dawn light emanating from the far eastern prairie. She swam toward the shore on her left and was surprised and delighted in a vague, exhausted way to feel sand under her feet. She got her feet beneath her and stumbled toward the shore, so exhausted that her temples throbbed, and her heart felt as though it were being squeezed by some sadist’s iron fist.
Shore lay just ahead, beyond a short cutbank. A sun-bleached log lay on it, beside a fire ring in which a small pile of long-cold ashes and some burned airtight tins resided. She was five feet from the cutbank, walking in water only an inch or so deep, when her knees buckled and she dropped, out like a blown lamp even before she hit the ground.
She slept the sleep of the half-dead. Dreamless. Soundless. Touchless. Emotionless.
No desires or anxieties. No cares, no worries.
Complete as the still blackness at the heart of the universe.
Something hard and cold and round pressed against her forehead, hard.
Even before she opened her eyes, she knew what it was.
She gazed up the long barrel of Saguaro Machado’s ivory gripped .45. His hideous mask of a scarred, one-eyed face beneath the narrow brim of his ridiculous, black stovepipe hat gazed down the barrel at her, his one dung-brown eye blazing. His jaws were set in hard lines, ensconced in tangled beard, dark-brown beard.
The sun was full up, and the birds were singing. The sky above Machado was a faultless lake blue.
Annabelle smiled up at him. “My, you have a big gun, Senor Machado. You know what they say about men with big guns. Compensation for small . . . brains.”
She reached up and placed both hands around the barrel. “Go ahead. Shoot me. I want you to.” She hardened her voice, rage and exasperation creeping back into her repertoire of emotions. “Go ahead, tough man. You said you were going to do it. So do it, you limp-wristed, cowardly son of a back-alley bitch!”
Machado’s mouth screwed up into a grimace and he pressed the barrel of his .45 harder against Anna’s forehead. Anna gritted her teeth against the pain but kept her smile in place, albeit stiffly, as she kept her hands wrapped around the. 45’s seven-and-a-half-inch barrel. “Do it!” she screamed.
Somewhere behind the outlaw leader, a horse whinnied.
Abruptly, Machado pulled the gun away. He holstered the pistol then bent down and pulled Anna up by her left hand. It was then that Anna saw the five other members of the man’s gang sitting their horses in a semi-circle behind their fearless leader. Machado pulled Anna up and over his left shoulder. He carried her over to the mount they’d appropriated for her by shooting an innocent cow puncher off his horse. The look of shock and horror she’d seen in the drover’s eyes—he’d been alone, stopped at a creek to let his horse draw water—when he’d seen Machado calmly pull his big gun and ratchet back the hammer.
Machado had killed the man as easily as he would have shot any game animal he might had come upon, helpless.
Now he brusquely slung Annabelle up onto the saddle. He held out his hand, and a length of rope was promptly placed in it by one of the other riders. Silently, morosely, without saying anything to anyone and not looking at Anna, he tied Anna’s wrists to her saddle horn. When he had them secure, he took the reins himself, mounted his own horse, and pulled out, glancing at his men behind him and merely saying, “Let’s go!”
Then they were off at hard gallops, continuing east and north upon the nearly featureless land. It was as though the outlaw leader was following some trail in his head alone. Rarely since they’d left Lusk had the gang followed a bone fide trail. Here and there they would pick up a corner of a freight or stagecoach trail and follow it for a mile or two but inevitably Machado would swing off said trail and head cross country once more.
It was as though he’d ridden this way often, and he probably had. He likely knew the shortest route and the one that would be hardest for others to follow.
Everything about the man. . . about the men he rode with . . . was diabolical.
Anna didn’t even want to think about how many women and girls had endured the same indignity she was enduring. She’d gotten off relatively easily so far. She hadn’t been ravaged. Tobin was the first who’d directly assaulted her. She’d just been tortured with fear and by riding tied too long, being underfed and watered, and made to do most of the chores when it came time to camp. At the point of several pistols aimed at her from blanket folds.
She couldn’t help wondering why he hadn’t shot her when she’d been unconscious by the Cheyenne. He’d wanted to do it. Anna had seen it in his lone, cold, snake-flat eye. Yet he hadn’t. Surely, even a redhead couldn’t be worth that much money. She wondered vaguely if her being married to the notorious rebel freedom fighter, Hunter Buchanon, had upped her value.
Most folks in the territory had either heard of Hunter’s exploits during the war or they’d heard of the now-legendary feud that had broken out when Hunter had first asked for Anna’s hand in marriage and her father, Graham Ludlow, had refused. Most newspapers had reported on that infamous war, and even a few pulp writers had ridden out to the Box Bar B for additional information. Of course, Annabelle and Hunter had driven them off the place, but they’d still penned their stories. They’d just made up most of the details.
Also, Anna might be seen as a trophy. An invitingly dangerous one, at that, to a sporting man. After all, she was married to a man who, if still alive, would hunt for her. That danger aspect might up her value.
Which meant one thing and one thing only: Many men were sick puppies, indeed.
They stopped for the night in the early dusk, setting up camp and tending the horses in a cottonwood copse along another, narrow, muddy stream. The red-brown patch of upturned earth that was the vast Dakota badlands lay ahead to the north and east. Annabelle had never seen that wild country before, but she’d read about it in books and magazines—mostly archaeological reports of excavations of dinosaur and ancient Indian burial sites and old settlements situated in the heart of that colorful, picturesque, and unforgiving land.
She didn’t have time to scrutinize that storied patch of wind-and -water-eroded castle-like earth, for the sun was fast going down and she was prodded to build a fire and to cook these savages another supper of fatback and beans. Anna merely walked over to a tree near the stone ring one of the men had arranged, and sat down. She drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.
She was miserable, still a little damp from her swim in the river. Wrung out. Wind- and sunburned. Where her clothes had dried, they were stiff.
She herself was as hollow as an old tree stump.
She would work for these men no more.
“What’re you doin’?” Machado asked her.
“Go to hell.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
He stopped for her, set his feet a little more than shoulder width apart and thrust an arm and angry finger at her, narrowing his lone, shallow, stupid eye. “You will cook as I tell you to do it!”
Annabelle smiled at him in delighted defiance. “Go to hell, you half-breed whore.”
The other men stopped what they were doing—tending the horses and hauling tack into the camp—to stare in shock from Machado to the pretty redhead who’d defied him again. Not only defied him but desecrated his honor.
He grunted furiously and strode up to Anna. He whipped his right hand back behind his left shoulder and started to swing it forward and down, toward her face, but stopped himself. Anger burned in that lone eye. He stared down at Anna in silent rage for nearly a minute before he whipped around and barked at one of his men: “Tie her!”
That was the end of the discussion.
She would not work for them tonight. All Machado would do about it was tie her to the tree. She was shocked. Even a little frightened. Sometimes the withholding of punishment was more menacing than the punishment itself. Likely, a powerful rage was burning in Machado. Annabelle knew he didn’t one bit care for how she’d spoken to him in front of his men.
Her only punishment seemed to be the withholding of food. When the men had eaten, they drew straws and then the two losers gathered up all the pans, dishes, and silverware, hauled them down to the stream, and began cleaning, conversing in hushed tones, which Anna could hear, though not make out the words themselves, beneath the cool night breeze.
Two men were sent out on guard duty. The others passed a bottle for a while, conversing in desultory tones, then, around eleven or maybe closer to midnight, they rolled up in their soogans and went to sleep. Anna slept then, as well, wrists tied before her, chin dipping toward her chest. She was sound asleep despite the uncomfortable position when a dirty hand closed over her mouth, jerking her head up harshly.
Here it comes, was in the back of her mind. Here it comes at long last.
A face slid up close to hers from behind the tree. It was not Machado. It was one of his men—a man the others called Big Nick. He wasn’t tall but he was wide, and he wore only buckskins and had a big, sheathed Bowie knife on each hip.
He had a long, narrow, craggy face, close-set eyes, and long, grizzled silver hair that never laid flat but that just sort of fanned out around his head beneath his cream, leather-banded hat adorned with a feather from a red-tail hawk. He’d been eyeing Anna covertly for days. She’d often spied him staring at her, maybe from one side or the other, and when she returned his gaze, he held hers and his thin lips quirked a dubious smile that betrayed the workings of his devious mind.
Now he held up one of his big knives in front of her face, threateningly.
He pressed two fingers to his lips and then, as if to show her what would happen if she didn’t stay quiet, he made a slashing motion with his knife across her throat, the razor-edged, upturned tip grazing it sightly.
Then, keeping his hand over her mouth, he began to cut the ropes securing her to the tree.