Enchanted Heart (20 page)

“Marty,” she said weakly, which brought her twin to her side. “Send Seraphina ahead with the others.”

“No, Mama!” Seraphina pleaded, her eyes welling up with tears again.

“Yes, my angel, you must,” Greta insisted, her eyes pleading with Marty to agree with her. “It is not safe here for you.”

Caid joined them and agreed with Greta. Remembering his own mother’s motive for sending him away so that he would not see her suffer, he knew that Greta’s request was for the best. Marty looked to him for support and when he nodded, she nudged Sera toward him.

He tucked the little girl beneath his arm and said, “It would be better if Sera Dear went on with me.”

Marty smiled at his answer, hugging herself to keep from hugging him in front of her niece and her sister.

“I’ll take good care of her,” he promised both of them while hugging Sera Dear.

Greta said with a grave expression on her face, “She can live with Elsa—until I get there.”

Seraphina finally shrugged and said, “I’ll go, Mama. But I’ll pray every night that you will find me.”

Tears fell from Greta’s eyes as her mouth quivered just before she said, “Don’t worry about me. I’ll find you.”

With that, Seraphina leaned over to kiss her mother and then took Marty’s outstretched hand while the men lifted Greta onto the pad of blankets on the far side of the cave. Daniel stayed with Greta and Seraphina while Caid took Marty to the entrance of the cave to speak privately with her.

Daniel knelt next to Greta and tucked the blankets around her while her daughter watched. Seraphina eased to her knees and took her mother’s hand. She hiccupped a whimper but swallowed it away, saying, “I love you, Mama.”

Greta stared at her daughter for some time before she smiled and replied with a trembling voice, “I love you too, Sera Dear.”

Daniel wanted so much to say those words to Greta that he had to clamp his mouth shut. He knew that she only wanted to be a friend but he could not stop his heart from bursting each time she looked at him. And she looked at him then, her light blue eyes filled with worry when she said, “Daniel will take care of me and Aunt Marty. And Mr. McAllister and Cousin Elsa will take good care of you.”

“I know, Mama,” Seraphina replied with a smile of reassurance. “I’ll be brave. I promise not to cry.”

“Oh, my angel,” Greta said with a squeeze of her tiny hand. “You are such a big girl. But you can cry. Crying doesn’t mean that you are weak or that you cannot cope with the problem that faces you.”

Daniel noticed that she had moved her eyes toward him when she’d uttered the last statement. He knew in his heart that she understood his feelings for her and that she was keenly aware that he was truly remorseful for his responsibility in the accident that had injured her. And he knew that she could tell that he was on the verge of tears despite his manly mindset. To show her that she had gotten her point across to him, he smiled.

Then he cleared his throat and began, “If I could change…”

“You cannot change what has happened,” Greta interrupted him. Then she continued with wisdom in her voice, “Not everything is in our control. What we can change and control is the way in which we handle it. We can either wallow in self-pity or we can move on and learn from it.”

“I don’t feel sorry for myself,” Seraphina interjected, shaking her head.

“I know, Sera Dear,” Greta replied with a motherly smile.

“You should rest,” Daniel told the woman whose eyes became heavy with fatigue.

She nodded and allowed sleep to overcome her even though she desperately wanted to spend as much time with her daughter as possible. In a few moments, her body completely relaxed and her breathing became heavy as sleep gave her refuge against the pain.

For a long time, Daniel and Seraphina watched her slumber, each of them drifting in their own thoughts. Neither of them felt the need to speak but knelt silently above Greta as if in prayer.

***

“I don’t like this,” Caid repeated for the umpteenth time, his lips pressed in a thin line. He squinted at the sunlight outside the cave entrance and continued, “I don’t like leaving you here unprotected.”

“We have Daniel and the rifles,” she argued as if her words would change his mind about their welfare.

“One man and two rifles will not defend you against renegade Comanche braves or their friends the Comancheros,” Caid said with disgust. “They would just as soon gut you and leave you to the buzzards as to take you hostage. Those are the ones who you don’t want to cross paths with.”

“I thought there was a treaty between the Comanche and the Germans,” Marty asked with a questioning stare.

“There is,” he said. “There was. But some of those in the new generation don’t believe that their forefathers made the right decision and they are bound and determined to take their lands back.”

He refrained from mentioning the various varieties of Apache Indians that inhabited that part of Texas. Warning her about them would not keep them from coming and it would not make her leave her sister and go with him to safety. All he could do was hope that young Daniel was man enough to protect Marty and Greta if the need arose. But the pup whose mother seemed to want to suckle him until her dying day was the only unmarried man with them so Daniel was their only option.

“We haven’t seen any renegades so far,” she argued with a shrug.

“And you never will, until it’s too late. Until you are skinned and scalped,” he said angrily.

“What choice do we have?” she asked while she turned to look inside the cave at her sister’s still form.

“None, I guess,” he conceded with a sigh. He took her shoulders into his hands and kissed her soundly on the lips and said, “It’s getting late. I should get the wagons moving.”

For a long, heartbreaking moment, he stared into her eyes, trying desperately to convey his worry for her safety without frightening her. Then, he reiterated the words that he had told her while he was still on top of the world and before their world came crashing down on them, “I love you, Marty.”

And, taking a deep, soul-searching breath, he paused before repeating the words that he had pledged to her that night when he had rescued her from the river, he promised, “I’ll come back for you.”

“I know you will,” she said with a warm smile. “And I love you, too.”

He pulled her into his body and kissed her as if this was their last moment together. Then he stared into her face, memorizing every nuance of it, hoping that the memory of her features would sustain his aching heart. He cupped her cheek in his large hand while he bent to kiss her once again. Then he pulled the ribbon from her hair and tucked it into his shirt pocket for safe-keeping and to remember her by while he was away. His smile silently reminded her that he would come back for her even if it killed him. Then his face turned serious enough to make her understand how dangerous it was for two women and one young man, still wet behind the ears, to stay there in the mountains.

“Keep the rifles close,” he said firmly. Then he said, “And no fires. You don’t want to alert them and tell them your whereabouts.”

Marty nodded and Caid repeated these words to Daniel, who nodded and seemed to raise his body to his full height in an effort to convince this man that he would defend these women with his own life if the need arose.

Then, Caid reached for Seraphina’s tiny hand, saying, “Let’s go, Sera Dear!”

When she took it, he lifted her upon his shoulders and winked at Marty before he turned to leave the cave. Keeping his eyes on the treacherous path that they had taken in order to climb to the cave so as not to fall and hurt the child, he finally looked up at Marty when he paused on a flat slab of granite. He waved to her and his actions were mimicked by Sera Dear, who smiled and then held tightly to his head when he turned to continue downward.

Marty watched them retreat to the bottom of the mountain and then she turned to tend to Greta again. With no light, she could barely see the wounds that she knew needed re-bandaging, but she set about doing it just the same.

Daniel stood above her and she could hear him sobbing behind her. Suddenly angry at him for pretending to be brave and the moment he is left to the task of protecting them, he broke down. She froze in her actions, trying to contain her ire at him. But when she turned to see him fully enveloped in a fit of sorrow and not fear, she could not keep herself from hugging the young man who stood two feet above her head.

She wiped her hands on her skirt and watched the boy who was barely seventeen as he shifted his feet in the dirt and stared at his boots. His sandy brown hair was wet with sweat from the march up the mountain and his cheeks were marked with trails of tears through the dirt that had collected there. His broad, manly shoulders were slumped and sullen as he thrust his hands into his pants’ pockets and pulled in a great sigh of sadness.

Daniel’s voice cracked when he let his breath out and stammered, “I’m sorry. It was my fault. I thought I heard her say ‘I love you’. I turned to see if she had said it and I didn’t see the boulder until the wagon wheel was almost on top of it. I’m sorry.”

Remembering that she had stood on the dome of the Enchanted Rock and had shouted those very words and that it might have been her voice that Daniel had heard, Marty touched his arm and assured him, “It was not your fault.”

He pulled away from her, putting his back to her, remorse clearly overtaking him as he kicked the dirt and said, “I should have been paying attention.”

“Daniel,” she said sternly as she walked up behind him and placed a hand on his arm. “We are all in the hands of God. If something bad happens, we have no control over it. Even if you had been watching at that moment, there would have been another time for her to be hurt. And it is God’s decision as to whether she lives through this or not. Nothing you or I could do for her will change that.”

He nodded, remembering that same sentiment coming from Greta’s lips, but he could not find the words to reply. Instead, he walked to Greta’s side and fell onto his knees next to her. He took her hand into his and held it as if that simple gesture would heal the woman that he so deeply loved, but whom he knew did not feel the same way about him. This time, he did pray. He promised God, or whoever would listen to his breaking heart, that he would give his own life if Greta’s could be spared.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Marty left them to walk outside for some fresh air. There, she watched the wagon train round a bend and disappear from her view. In her heart, she knew that Caid loved her just as much, if not more than Daniel loved her sister. It would be the love for Caid that would carry her through while she took care of Greta and waited for him to come back to her, to marry her and to grow old with her, as he had promised on the Enchanted Rock. Then, full of the faith that he would return, she turned to go back inside and finish redressing her sister’s wounds.

The night was long and sleepless for both Marty and Daniel, who fretted every time Greta cried out in her painful fits. And morning did not bring any respite for the two who took turns sitting with her and holding her hand. But, as the day droned onward, they feared that she was not going to live through the night.

Her body writhed in a growing fever and her leg continued to bleed, despite their efforts to stop the continual seepage. They tried binding it tighter and tighter until her toes turned purple. They sprinkled the wound with Caid’s white powder. But none of this lessened the pain or stopped the bleeding. Greta tossed and screamed in agony, begging them to let her die, just let her die!

Marty cried desperately as she wet a cloth from the canteen and put it to Greta’s scorched skin on her forehead. She was afraid that her sister was dying and she couldn’t do anything to stop it. Fleeting pictures of Papa’s feverish face flew into Marty’s mind and she closed her eyes against them as if that would make them, along with her dread, disappear. Fear, grief and finally anger filled her breaking heart while she watched Greta slowly lose consciousness again.

She glanced at Daniel, who stared helplessly at his booted feet, his hands thrust deep into his pants’ pockets. Then, as she turned her head back to her sister, she thought she saw a shadow of a man in the cave entrance.

Elated that it could be Caid, she whirled around, but Daniel had already jumped to attention, for he had seen that the man standing in the entrance was not Caid, instead it was a Comanche warrior.

Paralyzing fear gripped Marty, freezing her like a statue hovering over her sister’s body. Thoughts of renegade Comanche Indians and their counterparts, the Comancheros whom Caid had described as treacherous, assaulted her with the all-encompassing panic that kept her feet planted in the dirt while Daniel clumsily came to her rescue.

Young Daniel fumbled for the rifle and tripped over his own boots, but managed to catch the gun before it hit the ground. He quickly cocked it and raised it to his shoulder to fire a bullet into the invading Indian, his voice deep with emotion as he growled in anger at the intruder. But in his haste, Daniel stumbled once again, losing his grip on the rifle as it fell to the ground and exploded. The bullet sailed passed the Indian and ricocheted off the limestone walls, barely missing Greta when it finally stopped in the thick mound of dirt at Marty’s feet. A surprised, almost incredulous look crossed Daniel’s face before he regained control of the gun and cocked it once more, aiming with grave intent to kill.