They would survive without him. Skylar would not.
Leaving the camp without being detected had been simple. Throughout the journey, braves had been stealing away with their entire families under the cover of darkness. The soldiers had noticed the absence of some and sent details out to look for them, to no avail. However, many of the absences were as yet undiscovered. Sun Hawk knew he would not be one of those, but it didn’t matter. By morning he would be a renegade.
The wooded hillsides made it easy for him to circle around the camp to a place above the wagon where Skylar was chained. Like all the Apaches, he had studied the routine of the soldiers during the past week, so he knew that they stationed guards at intervals around the camp and that those guards changed twice during the night. All afternoon one guard had stood over Skylar at the wagon.
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Biding his time, Sun Hawk crouched near one of the outer guards.
Sometimes the man sat on a rock and dozed, and at other times he meandered around while he smoked a fire stick of tobacco. Presently another guard came to replace him, and Sun Hawk knew it was almost time. He waited until the newness of the soldier’s job had worn off and he had relaxed; then Sun Hawk slipped silently away and began working his way toward the wagon.
When there were trees and boulders for cover, he used them. When there was only open ground, he crawled, never moving quickly, but never stopping unless a noise reached his ears. Some soldiers had made their camp between the hillside and the wagon, but they were not an obstacle. Their snores told him they were sound asleep, and he crawled among them, making no more noise than the gentle breeze wafting over the sand.
He reached the back of the wagon and smiled with satisfaction. The tiny red glow of a fire stick made the guard easy to find. Crouching low, knife in hand, Sun Hawk crept around the wagon until he was behind the guard, and then he sprang. With one hand he covered the man’s mouth, and before the guard could utter a single strangled sound, drove his knife between the soldier’s ribs.
After dragging him beneath the wagon, Sun Hawk quickly searched the soldier’s pockets until he found the key to Skylar’s shackles. Then he removed the soldier’s revolver and cartridge belt. He secured them around his own waist and crawled out from under the wagon. He could barely make out Skylar’s form, but the angle of her head as she leaned against the wheel convinced him she was asleep. Knowing no way to prevent her from being startled, he clamped his hand over her mouth.
Skylar came awake instantly and began struggling, her eyes wide with fear as she strained to see her captor’s face.
“Be silent,” Sun Hawk whispered with his mouth next to her ear, and she stopped struggling at once. He removed his hand from her mouth and unlocked her shackles. The rusty hinges creaked, and he paused, listening, but the only sounds he heard were the uninterrupted snores in the distance.
It was incomprehensible to Skylar that Sun Hawk was really here. Her mind was still drugged with sleep, and she wondered if she was still dreaming.
He had no reason to take such a terrible risk for her. “You must not do this,”
she whispered. “The guard—”
“Dead,” Sun Hawk told her as he moved past her to grab the soldier’s rifle, which was leaning against the wagon. He turned back to her and pressed his mouth to her ear again. “Do as I do and make no sound.” He yanked her toward the opposite end of the wagon, then let her go as he fell onto his stomach.
Questions soared through Skylar’s mind. Why was he doing this? Did he realize the terrible consequences of his act? Where would they go? What would they do? How would they survive when the soldiers came after them?
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But of course she couldn’t ask the questions, and she couldn’t refuse to go with him. If she stayed, she would die anyway. Beyond that, Sun Hawk had killed a man to save her life. If they were discovered, there would be no long day of questioning for him as there had been for Skylar. The soldiers would fall on them like a pack of wolves until nothing was left but their bullet-riddled corpses. The die had been cast, and Skylar could only follow the man who was risking death for her.
Mimicking his position, she crawled slowly beside him, painfully aware of every rustle of her skirt and the scrape of every pebble that was dislodged by her body. When they came to the sleeping soldiers, she knew it was all over.
She could never pass among them without waking them, but Sun Hawk slipped ahead of her and they crawled between the soldiers in single file like a long-bodied snake.
No one stirred.
They reached a crop of boulders well away from the soldiers and paused.
“We will go to the trees,” he whispered into her ear. “When you are there, walk lightly or we will not get past the guards.”
Skylar couldn’t see the trees, much less the guards, but she trusted Sun Hawk. If he said they were there, they were. But she had much less faith in her ability to navigate as silently as he could. The crack of one broken twig could kill them both, but they crept forward until they reached the trees and the ground began to slant upward. And then, after what seemed like a life-time, Sun Hawk stood up, took Skylar’s hand, and began to run.
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12
Over her mother’s protests, Rayna left for Malaventura and barely arrived in time to catch the evening train to Albuquerque. The eastbound from Los Angeles arrived shortly before midnight, and a few hours later she was in a room at the Palace Hotel once again. She felt no sense of nostalgia at her return, but she did manage to catch a brief nap before going to the Military Headquarters office early the next morning.
Fueled and ready for a fight with Whitlock, Rayna quickly had the wind knocked out of her sails when she arrived and discovered that the general was no longer stationed at Fort Marcy. He had been transferred to the Department of the Platte, and in his place sat a colonel with less rank, less authority, and much less personality than his predecessor. Colonel Duncan McLeash was a pleasant, round-faced, placid man who listened patiently to Rayna’s tale of woe, clucking his tongue and nodding in commiseration.
Unfortunately there wasn’t a blessed thing he could do to help her but nod and cluck. His greatest contribution to the conversation was to inform her that General Crook was indeed in Arizona and that he was making his headquarters at Fort Apache, at least temporarily.
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This wasn’t news to Rayna. Several weeks after she left Santa Fe, Meade Ashford had written a letter to her father passing along that information.
It was the first and only time she’d heard from the major despite the two letters she’d sent to him. She certainly hadn’t expected him to fall on his knees in gratitude for her effort, but she hadn’t anticipated being ignored, either.
The insult was just one in a growing list of grievances she had been trying to catalog against him. He was a pretentious, irascible, weak-kneed milksop. And that was only the beginning of her inventory. At the bottom of it was a small notation that somehow outshone the rest: The thought of the way he’d kissed her made her own knees weak.
Since Rayna detested weakness, particularly in herself, it wasn’t something that counted in Meade’s favor. That was why she found it incomprehensible that after her meeting with Colonel McLeash the first thing she did was head for the post hospital.