Sweet Sarah Ross. Julie Tetel

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СКАЧАТЬ not a chance, but maybe he could slither over to the water. On that thought, he entertained feelings of deep envy for snakes who had no feet to plague them. Fish, too, who moved suspended in gallons and gallons of lovely water. And birds, who could get off their ridiculous unfleshly feet anytime they wanted—

      Birds, fish, snakes, vines. He must be thirst-crazed to be having such thoughts, and the only way to restore his sanity was to get himself over to the water. He shifted from his seated position so that he could slide on his belly, and when he moved, he became aware of the lump of coarse material in his lap.

      He fingered the lump and determined that it was some sort of clothing. Shirt. No. Trousers, maybe. Yes, trousers. He was reminded of something, and in order to discover what, he had a notion to look around the dark glade where he had taken refuge.

      Moonlight dappled the dark and dotted a human form lying a few feet away from him. It was a woman, a white woman, to judge from the outlines of the clothing draped around her reclining body. Her head was pillowed on another piece of cloth—must be her bonnet—and long strands of golden hair turned silver in the moonlight had escaped whatever pins might have been holding them. As pretty as her hair was to contemplate, he was more interested in her skirts and underskirts. Not carnally but practically. He mentally cut up the superfluous yards of cotton she must be wearing and made snares and slingshots and bags and bandages.

      He was so cheered by thoughts of all that good material that he began his slithery sliding toward the river. He thought of the woman and couldn’t for the life of him figure out what she was doing in the glade with him.

      Then he remembered. She was the woman who had been wearing a shawl. Two things about her stood out in his mind. She was an idiot, and she was beautiful. A beautiful idiot. When he had first seen her, she had been bobbing around a tree, and if he hadn’t known better, he would have thought that she was trying to attract his attention rather than conceal herself. The tree she had chosen couldn’t have been much more than a foot wide, and with her skirts sprouting out on either side of the base, he wasn’t likely to miss her once he had come ashore. That is, if he hadn’t already spotted her when he had rounded the bend in the river.

      The river. It was all coming back to him. He winced at the flood of memories of capture and escape, of the brutal bruising his body had endured during his two days of flight. He had come to the riverbank, fearing at first it was a mirage. He had been heading for the Platte River, knowing it was ahead of him as he ran, thinking it would save him if he could just get there before the Sioux got their hands on him again.

      He held a pretty good map of the territory in his head, but his hobbling had prevented him from making an accurate estimate of the ground he had paced out on foot. He had had an even better map of the territory on paper, but that map was in the ashes of a sacrificial fire, and he didn’t want to think yet about what had happened to all his surveying equipment. Probably offered to the Teton Sioux god of Wandering Souls, for all he knew. Why hadn’t he had the good fortune to run across the Mandans or the Pawnees, instead of the Tetons? He wasn’t a fur trader or a bison hunter or even a settler. It was just his luck to have run into the Tetons on a bad day in a bad mood.

      And it was just his luck to have run into a beautiful idiot who didn’t understand the first thing about life on the frontier. He might even have said as much to her. But she had a pair of scissors in her bag and was wearing yards and yards of useful cloth, and now he had dragged himself over the twigs and the rocks and the sand and was at river’s edge and didn’t have a thing to worry about anymore.

      He put his face in the water and drank. It was cold and bracing and provided as exquisite a pleasure-pain as he had ever experienced. He drank some more and then some more. The more he drank the thirstier he became, and he doubted that he could ever drink enough to have enough excess to piss ever again.

      When he needed air more than he needed water, he lifted his head, turned his entire body. He picked the absurd flower-printed bandages off his feet, rinsed them out. Then he flopped over so that he could immerse his blazing members in the cold. The sizzling sting of the water on the open sores of his soles nearly killed him, but almost as quickly numbed his wretched feet, so that the overall effect was mercifully, outrageously sensual. He lay on his back in the sand, his feet in the water, his eyes on the clouds drifting across the diamond dust in the night sky, and thought, It’s good to be alive.

      With his return to life came the return of his ability to plan for the future. He knew where he was. He knew who he was with. He knew his resources. He knew what he would be up against come morning. His chances didn’t look good.

      Still, it was good to be alive.

      He yielded to the pleasure of bathing his feet in icecold water and of witnessing the magnificent spill of stars high above. His well-trained eyes picked out the constellations, and he reckoned the lateness of the hour by the hunter Orion walking stiff-legged across the sky. He tried to find the Little Dipper by climbing up its tail from the polestar but lost it in a sky too milky with moonlight.

      He could think of ways to improve his lot in life, and the first would be to spirit away the woman with the shawl to the drawing rooms of Washington, D.C. He could picture her perfectly there, chattering all day long with every other woman he had ever known who was exactly like her. He had, alas, no magical powers to transport her from here to there, and the more he accepted her presence in his immediate circumstances, the happier he was that he had a pair of trousers to wear.

      Lying naked on the riverbed, he made a mental note to put those trousers on before the first rays of dawn would illuminate him, once again, in all his masculine glory.

      

      Sarah snuffled half-awake to a rumbling in her stomach and a crick in her neck. She squeezed her eyes shut tighter, but her room was flooded with disturbing daylight, suggesting that someone had forgotten to draw the curtains. And her bed was as hard as the earth. She groggily rehearsed the prettily worded complaint she would offer the hostess of the house party she must be attending.

      Then she remembered that she was lying on the board she had for a bed in the wagon and regretted having turned down William’s offer of marriage. She sat bolt upright, put a hand to her neck and shook her head to alter the unpleasant illusion that she was seated directly on the ground in a clump of trees in the middle of nowhere and in the company of—

      A man-beast who was sitting cross-legged with his back to her. He seemed to be tending something in front of him, but at the groan she emitted upon coming fully awake, he turned and looked at her. She was pleased that he was wearing the trousers she had retrieved for him, but the expression on his face did not encourage her to think that she would find him any more agreeable today than she had the day before.

      Nevertheless, she greeted him properly. “Good morning, sir. I trust you are feeling better today than yesterday. May I ask if your feet are improved?”

      A look of faint disbelief—or was it amusement?—crossed his features. “I’ll put it this way,” he answered her. “I’m no longer running the risk of fatal infection, but I’m not walking anywhere today. We’ll be staying put.”

      The vision of a tedious day stretched before her. She sighed and felt the wreck of her coiffure, then patted the ground for precious pins that might have fallen while she slept. She picked up her bonnet, brushed it off, took out the stockings she had stuffed inside it. She folded these into the waistband of her skirts and rose to her feet, holding the bonnet by its ties so that it dangled from her hand.

      “We’ve plenty to do,” he added, turning back around, “so don’t worry about remaining idle.”

      This was not the first time he had accurately guessed СКАЧАТЬ