THREE

‘What do you know about her!’ Darby Pierce asked. He seemed more embarrassed than upset.

‘Nothing,’ Calvin Manassas answered, watching the broad Easterner’s eyes. ‘Except that I saw her once and wondered what a young woman is doing locked up in a wagon.’

Darby appeared confused. The Easterner in his buckskin coat and ironed white shirt looked rumpled and discomfited. He moved his lips but he did not answer. Finally he said quietly, ‘Forget you saw her. It has nothing to do with our business.’

In the morning the wagon train with its escort followed Calvin out of the encampment toward the high, broken trail toward Lee Trent’s parcel. The wagons proceeded in a ragged column along a winding upward trail. Manassas guided them forward, although once shown the head of the trail the hunting party could have found Trent’s cabin on their own.

There were uneasy feelings in Calvin’s heart still. Not that he was doing anything criminal or immoral, but that he had made a wrong decision based on his own needs. He was not, that is to say, particularly proud of bringing this collection of men of dubious character into Lee Trent’s wilderness sanctorum.

The pines massed large and dark, rubbing against each other’s boughs as the caravan trailed higher. The scent of the evergreens was almost overpowering. The sky became only a strip of brilliant blue above the trail. The men who rode with Manassas were silent for the most part. The baron with his sweeping mustache, flanked by his two helmeted guards, the insolent dark man and Darby Pierce in buckskins and a crimson shirt appearing subdued himself. Behind them trailed the wagons, clanking, squeaking, flanked by various outriders – taxidermist, dogsbodies and kitchen help on stumpy, heavy-coated horses, and behind them a half-dozen men whose function was not clear but whom Manassas took to be other fighting men.

These last were a rough assortment without uniforms, probably collected here and there across the frontier to further insure the baron’s safety in the wilds. Judging only by their dress they seemed to be Americans, but the hunters had been long in the West and maybe they had simply adapted to local custom.

At last the party broke from the woods and before them was a wide, long-grass valley and a silver rill with Lee Trent’s three-room log cabin in the distance, set back against the face of a rising bluff.

‘From what this man had said, I expected a great manor,’ the baron said to the younger, dark man. Manassas glanced at them, his expression wooden.

‘This land, though,’ the baron said with a sweeping gesture. ‘All his? Even to the mountains.’

‘That’s right,’ Calvin answered.

‘Then he must be a very good friend of the Cheyenne indeed.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Calvin said using the term of address not out of respect or obeisance, but from habit. His father had taught Calvin that it costs nothing to call a man ‘sir.’ ‘He is a brother and a son to Great Elk, the chief of the Green River Cheyenne.’

‘So—’ Baron Stromberg said thoughtfully, tugging at his huge mustache. ‘How did this come about?’

‘That’s not for me to say, sir. I don’t know the half of it. Lee,’ he shrugged, ‘he don’t like to talk about it a lot.’

‘I see.’

‘Pierce,’ Cal said to the American. ‘I might not have done as good a job as I should of explaining to Trent how many people there were in this hunting party. At any rate, I think maybe just you and the baron and … whoever this fellow is, should ride up to the house with me. You can look around and see there’s plenty of grass for the animals, plenty of water for your needs. Your people ought to hold back here in the meadows while we settle the finer points with Trent.’

‘I understand,’ Darby Pierce said. ‘Baron?’

‘Yes, yes, I understand,’ Stromberg said. The man was in a subdued state of excitement, and it gave Calvin pause to consider. Why was this worldwide hunter so wrought up over a chance to bag one more animal to display in the halls of his baronial mansion? There was something.…

‘Do we go now?’ the dark-haired man wanted to know. His irritation continued to chafe Calvin’s sensibilities. No matter – he would soon be shucked of all of them and then he could make his way downriver to Rock Springs for his winter stores. When he came back, they would be gone, winter would be arriving and things would be back to normal once more.

‘We’d better,’ Manassas said, squinting toward the cabin. ‘I can see Lee standing on his porch now, probably wondering what’s keeping us.’

In a file the four men started toward Lee Trent’s home. Jack broke away from them and ran toward Trent, barking twice to announce himself. When they swung down from their horses, Lee Trent was crouched, petting the eager dog’s head. Lee looked them over in silence, then rose.

‘You may as well come inside, gentlemen,’ the frontiersman said.

Manassas said, ‘I’ll just wait out here, Lee. I’ve got nothing to do with the rest of your business.’

Darby Pierce considered for a moment. ‘Neither do I. I’ll wait out here with Manassas.’

The baron impatiently strode into the house, paying little attention to the cabin or its occupant. These were only stepping stones to his objective. The young dark-haired man followed, managing to swagger in riding boots. Manassas sat down on the porch, wiped his salt and pepper hair back and replaced his hat. Darby seated himself beside Calvin and the two studied the wide valley and the far snowcapped mountains in companionable silence.

‘Who is that whelp, anyway?’ Manassas asked, nodding toward the closed door of the cabin.

‘The duke?’

‘If that’s what he is,’ Calvin shrugged.

‘His name is Duke Severin Caulfield von Hefflen.’

‘Is that what you call him?’ Manassas asked with a tight smile. Darby smiled in return.

‘I don’t call him anything – you see how he is.’

‘How’d he come to be here? Important man, is he?’

‘In his own mind. His family once held a duchy in Bavaria. It’s long since gone as a legal state, but he’s entitled to call himself “duke”.’

Calvin shrugged and slowly filled his pipe. He knew nothing about European duchies and only a little about the geography in those foreign lands. Darby still hadn’t answered his question.

‘So – what brings him out here on the expedition?’

‘You haven’t figured it? Well, as you saw there is a young woman, a very beautiful young lady travelling with the hunting party. Her name is Lucinda – she’s the baron’s daughter.’

‘Oh?’ Manassas said, things beginning to clarify themselves in his mind. He puffed lazily at his pipe and scratched the dog’s ears. ‘And Duke – whatcha may call him—’

‘Is engaged to Lucinda. He’s trying desperately to recover his station in life, you see, Calvin. We’ve passed into a time different from those of his ancestors. Now it’s money and not land that counts among the aristocracy. He will never recover his duchy, and he knows it, but—’

‘By marrying the baron’s daughter, he might well gain a lot of money.’

Darby nodded. Manassas was unlettered, but he had a quick grasp of matters. Broodingly the young American studied the distant camp where several cook fires had been started. After all, he had to admit, wasn’t he doing the same thing as the duke? Hoping to pry gold from the baron’s fingers. He considered that unhappily for a moment and then decided that his was a more noble motive. Besides, he and his father’s shipping line were offering a service for their share of the baron’s vast wealth, a service that should be mutually advantageous.

Calvin interrupted his thoughts. ‘So … the woman? Why is she a prisoner in the camp, Darby? Are they afraid that she might try to run away? Afraid that harm might come to her out in the wilderness? Try to leave the duke before they can be married?’

‘No,’ the man from Baltimore answered without glancing at Manassas. ‘I thought you might have guessed, that you somehow knew … Lucinda Stromberg is quite mad.’

Inside the cabin Lee Trent watched the eyes of the two men as they reached an understanding. Ulysses could be taken; Lee would guide them to the herd himself. If the baron was actually willing to pay $500 for the trophy, then under the circumstances he and Calvin had discussed, it was – sadly – time to let the old stag travel on to another life. That is where the Cheyenne believed the elk went. It was customary to apologize to the animals before they were hunted down, to assure them that there was a bright trail in the sky for them to follow to a better land.

Lee Trent, who had been much among the Indians, was not convinced of that, but he hoped that there was a wisdom among the Cheyenne he had not yet grasped fully.

‘When can we proceed?’ was the duke’s stiff question. Lee’s eyes revealed nothing, but he found himself not liking the young nobleman already. That had been Calvin’s first impression, but Lee didn’t let other people’s opinions color his own. Hearing that someone is no good leads to carrying that prejudice into a meeting. But now he saw what Manassas had meant.

Lee spoke to the baron who had not shifted position since entering the cabin except to occasionally toy with his huge mustache. ‘We can scout the herd in the morning. There shouldn’t be more than a few of us. We don’t want to spook the elk. If you have field-glasses you’ll be able to study Ulysses at range and assure yourself that he is indeed trophy size.’

‘I don’t doubt your word,’ the baron insisted. ‘When may I have my shot at him?’

Lee hesitated and then shrugged, ‘Bring your chosen weapon tomorrow. It may be the elk will shy; it may be Ulysses will offer us a clean shot.’

Even as he spoke Lee Trent felt traitorous toward the big wapiti. He sighed inwardly. Such thoughts did nothing to help. The bargain had been made, logically and monetarily. He would deliver up the great creature. The stack of fifty-dollar gold pieces on the table gleamed dully in the lantern light, but Lee Trent seemed not to notice them. He rose and indicated silently that he was finished with the discussion and the two Europeans went out.

Troubled by the turn of events which he himself had allowed to eventuate, Lee Trent rose after a few minutes and went out himself, leaving the stack of coins where they rested. Really, they meant little to him. Although as Manassas had pointed out, gold does have its uses, especially if hard times befell him.

Calvin was still seated on the porch, his pipe bowl showing a small red coal, a lazy stream of smoke rising into the late afternoon sky.

‘Well, Lee,’ the old man said, patting a place on the porch beside him, ‘what do you think?’

Lee sat with his hands clasped, looking toward the camp the hunters had set up on his meadow.

‘You know what I think, Calvin.’

‘I guess I do,’ Manassas said, glancing at the younger man. ‘It seemed like the thing to do at the time. There’s so many things that seem that way,’ he added with a wry smile. ‘Nope – I don’t know. You would likely have shot old Ulysses yourself if you saw him having trouble this winter.’

‘Likely,’ Lee agreed. ‘It doesn’t make a man feel any better.’

‘No,’ Manassas agreed. ‘These people,’ he said, waving his pipe toward the encampment. ‘What do they even know about life out here? You know, Lee, I doubt a one of them could survive a winter in Wyoming. Without their fancy weapons and supplies. I think, Lee, that we’re coming to a time when people won’t even know how to clothe themselves or feed themselves, build a shelter, if someone else doesn’t provide the labor.’ It was a deep thought for Manassas, and he shook his head at the implacable progression of time.

The sun had tilted over toward the western hills; the Rocky Mountains, their high reaches lost in eternal ice, grew dark and withdrew into the solemnity of coming night. Lee Tent rose from the porch and dusted off his britches.

‘Pardon me, Calvin, if you will,’ he said, ‘I feel the need to be by myself for a while.’

Calvin nodded, and watched as the strong young man walked slowly away, entering the fringes of the forest where all was shadow and the only sounds the sad song of the night birds.

Lee Trent walked on, following a path he had known by heart for years. It was there that he had first found Four Dove, the lovely Cheyenne girl only half his age who had been wounded by encroaching Shoshone Indians.

The baron had asked earlier how a friend of the Cheyenne could name his horse ‘Shoshone.’ And, studying the nobleman with his expressionless brown eyes, Lee had told him a part of the story. Not all of it; he had told no man all of it.

‘The horse’s name is in memory of the skirmish. Great Elk gave him to me and so it was named for the six Shoshones who lay dead in this forest.’

The baron had said nothing. Duke von Hefflen’s face carried the mocking expression of a man whose exploits had been exaggerated, so believed no one else’s. It had not mattered to Lee Trent what they thought. A question had been asked and answered; let them believe what they liked. Lee did not walk through his life to impress others.

Now and then he thought of Four Dove. Of the long trek when he had carried her with her legs torn and her body bruised, through the snow the six miles to the Cheyenne camp. That was when he had won his ‘parcel’ from Great Elk although he had never asked for a reward.

How old would the girl be by now? My God! She would be a young woman, nineteen or twenty, probably married to a strong young buck with three or four chubby little children crawling around her lodge … or so he hoped. So he liked to envision her life.

He had not been back to the Cheyenne camp for five years. Shoshone – the horse must be nearly nine years old now! Lee shook his head. The years were sliding away. Each day seemed so long at times, but the years flowed as rapidly as the Green River careening through the gorge.

Lee’s thoughts, focused on the past were jolted suddenly into the urgency of the present as a young woman in black silk burst from the forest depths and threw herself into his arms.

‘Help me,’ she said. ‘Oh, please help me escape from them!’

The night was settling softly, the sky a rich purple. Lee was not a hundred yards from where he had found Four Dove and rescued her from an attacking party of Shoshones. There was a moment when the sudden appearance of the dark-haired, slight woman caused him to wonder if he had re-entered a dream. But she drew her face away from his shoulder and he saw her blue eyes, the pale flesh and the moment of déjà vu vanished.

‘Who …?’ He put her at arm’s length and examined her. Who indeed, was this woman?

‘They wouldn’t have told you,’ the woman said shaking her head violently. ‘I am Lucinda. Did you hear me! I have escaped and you must help me find freedom.’

‘Lady—’

‘Please,’ Lucinda begged, her eyes meeting his, falling away and returning. ‘I am a prisoner. I know that this is your estate – I have heard them talking – I know you are the lord of the manor. I pray, give me protection.’

Lee stood stunned by this outpouring of myth and fabrication. Unprepared, he tried to explain. ‘I’m lord of nothing, miss. I have no estate. I am a man of the wild country, that is all.’

‘All the better!’ the girl with the deep blue eyes said excitedly. ‘Then you know all the better how to protect me from … them,’ she said, gesturing toward the distant camp.

‘No. I don’t know how to do that, nor why I should.’

‘Sir!’

‘If you’ll calm down a little so that we can talk, maybe I can help you in some way,’ Lee tried to explain, ‘but I can’t barge into affairs that I know nothing about. Please,’ he said to the girl with the violently rising and falling breath, ‘tell me something I can understand, and we’ll see if we can’t find some solution to matters.’

‘Is there a place …?’ Lucinda asked, looking around.

‘I have a small cabin not far from here. I lived in it before I built the big house,’ Lee said, smiling at the term. The ‘big house’ had three rooms and a wooden roof. The cabin had one room and a pine bough ceiling and had been abandoned after the first needful winter he had occupied the Cheyenne land. ‘Come along,’ he said to the woman who shivered beneath her dress and clung tightly to him.

You see, he would have told Manassas, had he been there, this is what a man gets for allowing strangers on his parcel.

They wove their way through the dense pines and blue spruce toward the disused cabin on the rocky ledge. Interlaced as they were, someone might have taken them for lovers; the truth was that Lee could not get Lucinda to release her grip on him, and she was staggering as she walked beside him in her town shoes, tripping over roots and loose rocks so that he felt a need to support her. Lee liked none of it, although he had to admit if there were anyone there to admit it to, that the warmth of her body beneath her black silk dress was pleasing against him.

She tripped again and then began to stagger. She had to pause and lean her back against a pine tree, hands behind her. Overhead the sky was growing rapidly dark and the stars began to blink on one by one. Through the deep forest Lee could no longer even see the camp-fires.

‘I need to know—’ he began, and the girl buried her face in her hands and began weeping so that her shoulders shook.

‘I can’t tell you all,’ she said tearfully. ‘They have me prisoner. It is because I won’t marry Severin – Duke von Hefflen. There is an important financial transaction between him and my father.’ She lowered her head in shame, ‘And I … I am a part of the price.’

‘We’d better get you inside,’ Lee said. He was shivering with the cold himself, having come out wearing only a shirt. The night would grow no warmer; he guessed the thermometer, had they one, would stand near thirty degrees. The young woman in her silk dress was certainly cold.

He urged her toward the tiny cabin, assisting her by supporting an arm. Then, in the near darkness as she collapsed Lee scooped her up and carried her in his arms, placing her on the rickety bed which had been his own once and now showed signs of age. A leather strap had broken and one leg was angled like that of a spavined horse. No matter – she would be better off here than out in the forest. He wasn’t sure he could have made his way back to camp carrying her; and he did not know what punishment might await her there.

The old grizzly bearskin still rested in the chest near the door. It had a stale scent to it, but it would keep her very warm. Lee himself stood looking down at her placid, beautiful features and shook his head with uncertainty. He had needed no further complications with these people and their mysterious ways. Yet now he had brought her here; he would let her rest for the night and maybe tomorrow her story would be clearer and he could decide on a proper course of action.

He, of course, had not been made privy to the conversation between Manassas and Darby Pierce. No one had told him that the girl was considered to be a madwoman.

Lee took an Indian blanket which hung on the wall and wrapped it around him as he sat in the cabin’s only chair, his boots propped up on the low table. It was cold and uncomfortable, but then he had passed many nights in the mountains with fewer comforts.

Outside an owl screeched and a distant coyote barked excitedly. The night passed in cold progression and Lee Trent fell gradually into a restless sleep.

He had seen the girl running as swiftly as a fawn in flight. As slender and as graceful, her huge dark eyes filled with terror, her mouth set determinedly. She wove through the tall pines, flitting from shadow to shadow. She passed near enough for him to hail her, but she did not pause in her headlong rush. She was Cheyenne – that was clear from her dress – and very young, on the verge of budding into womanhood, but still a frightened child. He thought that she might have encountered a mountain lion or an irritable grizzly; then not fifty feet behind her he saw the attackers.

The Shoshones were afoot and Lee reined in the stocky gray horse he rode in those years, lifting his Henry repeater as a warning.

In the passion of their frenzied pursuit, the Shoshones did not even slow at the unexpected appearance of the tall white man. The man second from the lead dropped to one knee and fired his rifle wildly at Lee. It was a near miss and Lee Trent had answered with a shot from his Henry repeater which slammed the Indian back to land roughly against the ground, his heart stopped. Then a howl went up from the attacking Shoshones and as one they wheeled toward Lee.

An arrow caught the thick-shouldered gray horse in the chest and it leaped forward, shook its head crazily and collapsed. Lee just managed to kick free of the stirrups before the animal rolled, kicked at the air and died. Lee leapt forward to use the horse’s body as a breastwork. From behind the heated body of the horse he fired into the chest of an onrushing Shoshone and the man folded up in mid-stride to fall to the earth.

To his left Lee heard another attacker howl and saw that this warrior was still pursuing the fleeing woman fifty yards down the slope of the wooded hillside. From a seated position Lee carefully trained his sights on the man, led him with the front bead of the Henry and fired. The Shoshone brave halted in his tracks, looked in confusion to the right and left and then collapsed.

Lee turned his eyes back toward his attackers in time to see another warrior leap the horse like a hurdling athlete, lance held high, ready to strike. Lee could see the man’s painted face, his determined eyes clearly as he pulled the trigger of his repeater and shot the man in mid-vault. The Shoshone fell, so near that his feathered lance brushed Lee Trent’s arm as he somersaulted to his death.

The Indian had pinned Lee’s legs to the ground and he slithered free as yet another young buck burst from the pine forest, his scream angry and determined. Lee, still on his back, levered another round into the chamber of the Henry and fired wildly. He heard rather than saw the Shoshone fall and he lay back, breathing deeply.

Wriggling from under the weight of the dead Indian he turned over and began crawling away from the bloody scene.

The Shoshone’s moccasin came down on the barrel of his rifle and Lee looked up to see the grim, violent face of yet another warrior. Lee rolled to one side and tried to scramble to his feet, but the Indian, wielding a steel tomahawk rushed upon him and the two men went down in a cloud of dust among the strewn pine needles.

Lee clamped his left hand around the Shoshone’s wrist before he could drive his axe down into his skull. Flailing wildly with his own left hand, the Indian tried to batter Lee’s head into the ground. Lee was the larger man and he managed to roll on top of the raider, pinning his shoulders with his knees.

‘Give it up. There has been enough death,’ Lee said using the smattering of the Shoshone tongue he knew, but the man would not quit.

‘It is done!’ Lee said in English, but it had no effect on the violently writhing young Shoshone.

The near report of a rifle shocked Lee’s eardrums. Smoke wreathed their small war site. The Indian’s mouth gaped and blood flowed from it. The man tried to frame a few words, could not, and lay back dead.

Lee looked up to see the girl, no more than thirteen or fourteen, holding his own rifle, a wisp of smoke curling from its muzzle still. She was panting with the rapidity of a small hunted animal. Her face was streaked with scratches from her rush through the forest. Her legs were both bloody; her white elkskin shirt had been torn open. Her eyes were as dark as obsidian, her hair, tangled with briers was as black as midnight in winter. She collapsed to the ground and Lee carried her home to the tiny cabin in the woods. She had said, ‘My name is Four Dove and you are my man,’ and then passed out in his arms as he placed her on the small bed he had made and covered her with the warm hide of a rogue grizzly bear he had killed only the week before.

Lee awoke.

There was a woman in his bed. Who? He stretched and waited for the recollection to come back, for dream and reality to sort themselves out.

Slowly, through the dense fog of heavy sleep, he realized that he had had the long dream again. The dream of Four Dove.

Now he rose, stiff with the cold. He stood over the foreign woman, watching the twitch of long eyelashes, the tight gripping of her hands as she slept. Then he walked to the doorway and stepped outside for a long while, watching the dream of a thousand stars.