For the Love of Suzanne (21 page)

“Again?” she asked in a trembling
voice and grasped his arm. “Cody, no. We have to stay
together.”

He could hear the fear in her voice and see it in
her eyes. “I’ll be back for you. I promise.”

“When? Where will you go?”

He took her hand, seeing her eyes filling with
tears. “Honey, you have to get well so I can take you back to
where I found you. It’s a long, hard trip and you have to be in
good health to make it. I’ll be back in two weeks to check on
you. Try to understand,” he told her softly, caressing her slim
fingers. “I’ll be around. I’m not going to leave
you.”

“Take me with you,” she whispered.
“Please. I can ride my own horse. I can keep up,” she
begged.

He watched tears slip down her tanned cheeks and
colossal guilt swept through him. He wanted to be with her and stay
with her, but if he didn’t leave, either he or Boris would end
up getting shot. He really hated to leave Marda a widow after all
she’d done for them.

“That isn’t the problem, sweetheart.
Not at all,” he said barely above a whisper. “You’re
sick and you need to get well. It’s cold and snowing outside
and you need to stay warm. I can’t provide you shelter like
this,” he said sweeping his arm toward the room. “It
would be caves and shelters I build out of tree boughs. It’s
too cold for you, honey,” he told her consolingly, but could
see he wasn’t reaching her.

He held her face in his hands and kissed her
softly for a long moment. “I’ll be back,” he
promised. “I will never leave you, Suzanne. You have touched me
like no woman has before. I will be back.”

“Let me go with you,” she pleaded,
gazing into his dark eyes. “I’ll do everything you tell
me.”

“Sh-h,” he whispered and drew her
against him. “No, honey. You need to stay here where it’s
warm and there’s plenty of food. It’ll be okay. I’ll
be back in two weeks.”

“No,” she whispered in his ear and
kissed his neck. “Take me with you.”

“The weather is just too bad right now. Stay
here, honey. I won’t worry so much if I know you’re
safe.”

She drew away and looked at him. “Is it sex?
I’ll have sex with you if that’s what you want.”

“As much as that appeals to me, it isn’t
like that. It has nothing to do with it. I just want you to be warm,
safe, and get well so we can get you back to where you need to be,”
he reasoned and kissed her again.

He got off the bed and dug into the front pocket
of his jeans and pulled out his rosary. He straightened the dark
wooden beads on it and handed it to her, the silver crucifix swinging
as she took it.

She wept quietly as she looked at it. “You
need this.”

“Keep it. It’s from me to you,”
he told her softly and dropped a kiss to the top of her head.

Before she could say anything more, he was gone.
She struggled out of bed to stop him, but by the time she got to the
front door, he was out of sight. “Cody,” she whimpered,
holding his rosary in her hand. “Cody, please don’t go,”
she wept and tried to follow him until Marda caught her around the
waist and led her back inside.

“He said he will come back and he will. I
don’t think he can leave you for long,” she said, patting
her belly with a little smile. “Think of your child, Suzanne.
Staying here is better for him than being out there in the cold and
snow.”

She knew Marda was right and she knew Cody was
right, but it didn’t ease her pain as she watched him leave on
his big black horse.

Her heart broke. She had been left again by the
only man she ever truly loved.

Cody wandered around the woods, living off the
small game he hunted and taking refuge in a shelter he’d made
from pine and spruce boughs. It was still cold, but the storm had
broken the day he’d left the Claybornes and the wind had died
down substantially.

He missed Suzanne. He thought of her constantly
and his heart ached. He would wait the two weeks he’d promised,
but knew she wouldn’t be ready to travel then. It would be just
a visit, but it would be worth it just to see her again.

On his eighth day in the wilderness, he decided he
would go to the nearby town to see if he could find out anything
about the raid at the fort that had been close to his village or the
village itself. He needed to know if it was safe for him to get
Suzanne out of the Claybornes and make their way back to the scene of
her accident. He knew the other warriors had been in pursuit and
hoped they would have given up by now. They were far away from the
village but his people knew how to take care of themselves in the
mountains. They did it during the hot summer months, but stayed away
in the winter because of the intense cold, lack of food, and
uncertainty of snowstorms.

He wasn’t sure exactly where the town was
located, but five days later, he found it. He would be late in
getting back to Suzanne, but figured this was pretty important. On
his way out of the mountains, he’d gone by the Clayborne’s
and had seen Boris outside chopping wood but no sign of Suzanne. He
hoped she was okay and went on his way without being noticed.

~~~

Cody had changed into a trapper, trading his blue
jeans for buckskins and his duster for a bearskin coat that he’d
found in Boris’s barn, and pulled his hat down so it partially
hid his face. He’d tied his hair back with a leather strip and
tucked it under his hat, hoping the only thing that might raise
suspicion would be the color of his skin, but so far, it hadn’t
been an issue. He was riding down the street, passing others who were
walking or riding and nobody seemed to notice him. It was good.

He’d never been here before so he took a
little ride through the center of town, looking at all the
establishments, spotting a hotel where he hoped to get a room and a
bath, a livery where he would get Titan taken care of, a restaurant
and a saloon, a dress shop and a general mercantile. He was hoping to
get everything he wanted, but knew it was all contingent on whether
they dealt with Indians.

He tethered Titan to the hitching post in front of
the saloon and saw three other Indian men sitting outside on the
boardwalk, passing a bottle of whiskey between them, speaking quietly
and laughing. He thought it was sad that they had lost so much in the
last few years…land, animals for food, their way of life, and
their pride. They’d had it all and now they had nothing. They’d
lost their self-respect and their dignity and sat outside a saloon
waiting for handouts.

It wasn’t just the way with these Indians
but all Indians, including his own Chiricahua. It made him feel
guilty to think he’d been instrumental in their adversities,
but he’d been lied to by the government just like they had and
had acted in good faith. That eased his conscience a little, but it
still bothered him.

He didn’t acknowledge them as he went inside
the warm, well-lit room where the piano music was loud and lively and
people laughed, danced, and drank. There were soldiers in the room as
well as a few other trappers and hunters while the saloon girls were
busy serving drinks and keeping lonely men company with their gleeful
laughs and unladylike behavior.

He made his way to the bar and stood beside a
stinky, passed out old man who had his head and arms on the bar,
snoring loudly. He looked at his heavily bearded face and could tell
from his buckskins and coat made of buffalo hide that he was a
trapper and hoped he was giving off the same façade.

“Can I buy you a drink, handsome?”

He looked at the voluptuous blond woman who was
scantily dressed in a flashy green silk dress, black lace gloves and
stockings, and high heeled black shoes. A matching green feather
stuck out of her hair and she wore a green ribbon around her neck.
She had pretty blue eyes and a very pretty face even if she did wear
too much paint, but he wasn’t interested in what she was
selling. But she might know something. “How about if I buy you
one instead?” he suggested with a smile.

She smiled in return. “Thank you. That would
be mighty nice of you, sir.”

He paid for a bottle of whiskey and got two
glasses and led her to an empty table that needed to be cleared. He
shoved the empty glasses off to the side and set the other two down.

“What’s your name?” she asked in
a soft purr, watching him open the bottle with his teeth.

He’d never cared for the masquerade saloon
girls put on when they were trying to get business. He found them to
be phony both inside and out. He had taken more than a few up on
their offers, but the results were always the same. He always felt
cold and empty and like he’d had sex with a wild woman. It was
okay, but now that he’d met Suzanne and knew he was in love, he
wanted his next time to be with her.

“John,” he replied as he filled the
glasses. “What’s yours?”

“Joanie,” she said with a smile and
offered him her hand. “Glad to meet you, John.”

Instead of kissing it like she wanted him to, he
shook it as he would shake any other stranger’s hand. “Glad
to meet you, Joanie.”

She dropped her hand with a little pout, but
quickly got over it. “Are you out trapping?” she asked
conversationally.

He nodded. “Have you been here long?”

“About a year. Have you been trapping long?”
she asked as she sipped the drink.

“Awhile now, yes. Have you heard of anything
happening down south?” he asked casually.

“Nothing in the lines of trapping.”

He refilled her empty glass. “No Indian
uprisings?”

She smiled. “Do you want to be a soldier?”
she asked with a laugh.

He shook his head. “No. Just thinking about
heading down that way. I just don’t want to get caught in any
wars or anything.”

She thought for a moment. “Well, I did hear
a little something about an uprising down there that wiped out every
man at the fort, but that was a few months back.”

That long? He’d lost all track of time.
“Hmm. Who was the man in charge?”

“Well, I did hear some soldiers talking
about a Major Richards, but I can’t be sure he was the man in
charge. I do know he was there, though. Murdered, too, in a most
awful way. Those Indians can be a mean bunch,” she said with
obvious distaste. If her voice didn’t reveal her contempt for
them, the wrinkle of her nose did.

He nodded, knowing it was true. “Yes but
they aren’t all that way,” he said quietly.

“I suppose not,” she conceded with a
smile and leaned toward him with her chin resting in her hand. “Why
all the interest?”

“Like I said, I’m thinking of heading
down that way. Did the army catch the renegades who did it?”

She nodded enthusiastically. “They sure did.
Burned their village to the ground and killed everyone in it.”

He thought of his good friend Lone Wolf who’d
been very loyal to Chief Tall Deer, but only because he was the
chief. He’d never taken part in any of the chief’s
sadistic rituals with women and had never been mean with his own
wife. He’d been born into the village where Cody had found
himself as a child. Lone Wolf had taken a big chance on
befriending him and Cody had never turned his back on him. They’d
stayed together through white man’s school and had learned to
hunt, trap, and track together. Even after Lone Wolf had married and
become a father, they’d remained close. Now that he was gone,
Cody had nothing left. He didn’t have a job anymore, his people
were massacred and soon Suzanne would be gone from his life, too. He
was alone.

He pushed the dismal thoughts out of his mind and
tried to focus on Joanie and what she was telling him.

“Served the heathens right, you know. I
mean, how dare they go into a fort at night and castrate those poor
men and hang them up so they bleed to death,” she said with
disgust.

He wanted to tell her that wasn’t true, but
didn’t want to raise any suspicion. He wanted to be in and out
of here in a day and didn’t want to get wrapped up with the
law. “Is that what they did?” he asked curiously as he
raised the glass to his lips but didn’t drink.

“That’s what I heard,” she said
simply and tossed the drink down her throat. “Awful damn people
those Indians are.”

He took a sip of the whiskey, really hating the
taste of it and set it back down without agreeing or disagreeing. He
yawned, covering his mouth politely with his hand. “Excuse
me.”

She smiled. “So polite,” she said in
wonder. “You sure do talk smart for a trapper,” she
observed.

He smiled with a little embarrassment. “My
mother taught me well. I need to go get a room. I haven’t seen
a bed or a bath in weeks.”

“The hotel is right across the street,”
she pointed toward the door. “It isn’t fancy, but it’s
clean and heated.”

He knew he looked Indian and wondered why she was
being so nice or maybe she didn’t see it. Even with his hair
tucked under his hat, he still had the look and she seemed oblivious
to it. She’d probably had too much whiskey.

He handed her some money as he rose to his feet.
“Thank you, Joanie.”

She took it with a smile. “I sure wouldn’t
mind joining you,” she said suggestively.

He gave her an easy smile and a flirtatious wink.
“Another time.”

She had enough grace to blush and hollered after
him, “I’m going to hold you to that.”

He laughed a little and gave her a wave and headed
out the door.

He got his bath and a bed and the information he’d
needed, and would leave in the morning. He hoped Suzanne would
understand his reason for being late. If it had been any other woman,
he wouldn’t have cared what she thought, but Suzanne was
different. So very different.

He laid in the clean bed with her on his mind. He
wasn’t sure how he would react to her leaving him. She had
touched his life like no other person ever had, but even if he did
love her, he had to let her go. She was another man’s wife and
she carried her husband’s child. The man had to be worried sick
about her.