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“Get on with you,” the man shouted, motioning with his shotgun toward them. “I’ve had my bellyful of Injuns lately. You’re all nothing but thieving renegades. I only recently lost almost every head of longhorns that I owned. I know that one tribe or another took them.”
“We are not responsible,” White Wolf said. He gestured toward his wife. “My wife. She needs rest. Surely you can offer shelter in your barn. My wife is hungry. Perhaps you can spare a biscuit or two.”
“You deaf or somethin’?” the man said, taking a step closer, his dog at his heels. “Get outta here. Go and beg somewheres else.”
White Wolf inhaled deeply to keep from saying things that came swiftly to his mind. He knew that Fort Duncan couldn’t be that faraway. The fort sat on the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass.
“Come, Violet Eyes,” White Wolf said, wheeling his horse around. “We don’t have far to go until I am sure we will be offered refuge.”
Dawnmarie hung her head, nodded, and followed him away from the threat of the shotgun and barking dog.
“I . . . am . . . so weary,” Dawnmarie whispered. She trembled. She felt so weak, so dispirited.
Back at the campsite, where the carnival people stood in stunned silence around the fire, Kaylene’s black panther strained at his leash.
The large, muscular beast had watched Kaylene being taken away. He sensed the danger that she was in.
Midnight strained one last time and he broke his leash and sprang from the campsite into the purple haze of morning.
Chapter 5
Open the door of thy heart.
—BAYARD TAYLOR
Kaylene was stunned by what had happened to her father. Although she, for the most part, never understood him, and hated that dark side of him that she had seen too often, sometimes even taking a whip to those workers who did not work at the speed he demanded of them, she did not hate him, the person.
He was her father.
He had never harmed her in any way, except with mind games; games of control.
Disillusioned over this Kickapoo Indian chief, the man she had felt such sensual stirrings for, Kaylene was torn now with what to do with those feelings. When she had not known that he was a heartless, cruel man, it had been easy to envision herself with him—that he might be the man to take her away from the drudgery of carnival life. Even if she had to live in a tepee or wigwam, she would have finally had roots.
Now she doubted she would live long enough to ever have a solid footing anywhere and be anyone’s wife. Because of her father’s greed, so deeply entrenched in his soul that he had to put children into what would be considered slavery, her life might soon be over.
She closed her eyes and tried to will herself into that wonderful land of sleep, where nothing could harm her—where sweet dreams usually erased the ugliness of her life.
But sleep would not come. The steady rhythmic beat of the horse’s hooves, multiplied by the sounds of those other horses following them, kept her awake.
She glanced down at Fire Thunder’s arm that held her in an ironlike grip around her waist. He had not let up on his possessive hold. In the chill wind of night, she could feel the warmth of his breath stirring her hair as he would sometimes lean lower, perhaps fighting off the urge to sleep himself.
Bone tired, she turned a sour glance his way over her shoulder. “When will we stop?” she asked, her voice drawn. “We left the Rio Grande behind us a long time ago. How far into Mexico is your village? That is where you are taking me, isn’t it?”
Fire Thunder gazed into her defiant green eyes, wishing that he could have found a different way to bring them together than this. Now, since he had been forced to make her father pay for what he had done to Little Sparrow, he doubted she would ever feel anything for him but loathing....
Not unless he could somehow prove to her just how evil her father was, and that he deserved to die.
It was hard for Fire Thunder to understand why that had to be proved to this woman. It already had been. And he knew that she had not approved of what her father had done, for she had befriended his sister. Little Sparrow had even grown fond of her in the short time they had been thrown together.
“We will camp at the foot of my mountain,” Fire Thunder said gently, trying to make her trust him by being gentle and caring with her. “If you or my sister were not with us, my warriors and I would travel onward up the mountain. But I can see that you are weary. And not only from being tired from the journey. You are having to accept many things tonight that surely tear at your heart.”
“And you call that fair?” Kaylene argued. “I am not responsible for anything. Why punish me?”
“You are my guarantee that the carnival people will not come after us, causing much blood to spill on the ground tonight,” Fire Thunder said.
He rode onward, working his way into the dark shadows of his mountain. “Do you not recall? I warned them not to follow. I told them that if they did, your blood would be the first to be spilled.”
Kaylene paled and swallowed hard. “Would you truly do that . . . ?” she asked, her voice breaking. “Would you kill me in cold blood, knowing that I am innocent of any wrongdoing?”
