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Afterward, Thunder Horse would lead what was left of his Fox band on to the reservation.
The white chief had met personally with Thunder Horse’s father in Washington, to discuss peace between them. A final agreement had been made that Thunder Horse’s people would join other Sioux bands on the reservation. But on the way home from Washington, his father had become desperately ill.
When the white chief learned of his father’s illness, he had sympathized with Thunder Horse’s dilemma and had given his permission for some of Thunder Horse’s people to remain at the village, while others had gone on to the reservation. Everyone would come together again after his father’s interment in the burial cave.
When Thunder Horse saw Jessie reach the outskirts of Tombstone, his thoughts returned to her again.
He dismounted, tied his horse in a clump of scrubby bushes, and made his way stealthily to the shadows of an outbuilding at the edge of town. He had decided he would not return to his village until he saw who met her . . . whom she had come to Tombstone to be with.
He hoped that she hadn’t come to live in prostitution as so many of the women in town did.
He watched her stop at the stagecoach station. He kept watching as several men came out and began talking to her.
The longer he watched her, the more he was taken by her loveliness, and by her courage!
Chapter Two
Jessie tried to remain calm as several men ran up to her as soon as she drew the team of horses to a halt in front of the stagecoach station.
The men all seemed to talk at once, making Jessie’s head spin as she looked from one to the other.
“What happened?”
“Where’s Tom, the driver?”
“Why are you driving the stagecoach?”
“Where is your luggage?”
“Please . . . please . . . !” she cried, waving a hand in the air toward them. “Please stop all these questions. Just . . . justgivemea chance to get off this horrid stagecoach and then . . . then . . . I’ll tell you everything.”
One of the men stepped forward and raised a hand to help her, which she readily accepted.
Once she was on solid ground, with her beaded purse, which she had rescued from inside the stagecoach, gripped in her hand, she inhaled a nervous breath. Before she spoke, she looked past them in the direction where she had last seen Chief Thunder Horse. There was no sign of him.
“Well? Where’s Tom?” one of the men said, bringing Jessie out of her thoughts to the morbid task at hand, for she had the terrible chore of telling these men that Tom had died at the hands of outlaws.
“I’m so sorry,” Jessie said, her voice catching as she looked slowly from man to man. “Tom is dead. We were ambushed—”
“Dead?” they all seemed to say at once.
“Yes,” Jessie said solemnly. “The masked men seemed to come out of nowhere. They killed Tom, stopped the stagecoach, and—”
“How did you live through it?” a man shouted.
“I truly don’t know,” Jessie said, visibly shuddering. “Once they had the stagecoach stopped, all they seemed interested in was my trunk. They took it down, but when they opened it and saw that it held no valuables, they cursed, then . . .”
She stopped before telling the truth of what had happened next, for to tell them that the outlaws had fired their guns into the air and spooked the horses would be to tell them Thunder Horse’s role in rescuing her.
She knew it was not best to tell them that, although what he had done was valorous. He had saved her life.
Still, she knew that Thunder Horse would not want to be mentioned. He would not want these men to know that a powerful chief was so close to their town.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” one of the men said, staring incredulously at Jessie. “A mere woman managed to get out of that fracas alive, and then drove a team of horses on into Tombstone.”
Several others commented favorably about what she had done, while others quietly studied her, as though they suspected that she had left an important ingredient out of this tale.
“And so they just rode away without another thought of you?” one of the men said, raising an eyebrow.
