Swift Horse

But Alan didn’t reply. His eyes were locked in a death’s stare, a tear having run from the corner of one of them.

“You did steal my woman away, and now someone else has her,” Swift Horse said tightly.

His gaze looked slowly around the room, his throat somewhat constricting when he saw the ropes that had fallen from the chair. He could only guess that was where the cowkeeper had placed Marsha upon their arrival here. He had tied her to the chair, and then someone else came and released her and was now taking her . . . where?

“He said one eye, and then . . . Marsha,” Swift Horse said, so wishing that he knew how to interpret that.

Did he mean that a one-eyed man was there? Or did he mean that the man who was there was . . . One Eye?

He sighed heavily as he respectfully closed Alan’s eyes although this man had done him and his woman so wrong. But Swift Horse was a religious man, who understood what it meant to respect the dead—even the death of someone he loathed.

He reached for a blanket and placed it over Alan Burton, then hurried from the room and ran outside.

He mounted his horse and rode out into the open. He studied the track activity all around the house, then followed what he found until he came to a tall stand of grass that reached out far and wide in all directions.

The one who had taken Marsha knew that it would be difficult to follow them in such tall and weaving grass. Swift Horse had to think like the one he was tracking and choose a direction, hoping that he would eventually be led to his woman.

Hopefully she would still be alive!

He snapped his reins hard, sank his heels into the flanks of his steed, and took off at a hard gallop.

Chapter 24

Those hours, that with gentle work did frame

The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell. . . .

—William Shakespeare

One Eye looked down at Marsha where he held her on his lap on his horse. He could see pleading in her eyes and he could hear her trying to say something behind the gag.

For now he ignored her. He just smiled and continued onward, too full of himself and what he had achieved tonight not to feel proud and smug.

He was on his way to his hideout, and would then decide exactly what he would do with Marsha. It just didn’t seem enough for him to kill her outright. There needed to be more than that for him to feel that he had made her pay for having interfered in his life—a double life that combined the excitement of being a chief with the notoriety of being a renegade.

Yes, soon he would think up a way to make this lady pay, and in the worst way possible. But until then, he had to get her out of the area, so that none of Swift Horse’s warriors could find her—that would come later!

He smiled darkly at knowing that he had taken the lady away from Swift Horse—to whom everything came so easily. Swift Horse had always been the one everyone looked up to over One Eye.

Even One Eye’s own clan admired Swift Horse more than they should when they had their own leader. It was just that Swift Horse had always had more of a noble bearing about him than One Eye.

He gazed at Marsha, who was still making all sorts of noises behind her gag, her eyes pleaded with him in the moonlight.

“All right, what is it?” he said, yanking the gag from around her mouth, yet holding tightly to it, for he planned to keep her gagged until they were safely at his well-concealed hideout, which no one yet had been able to find even though many soldiers had scanned the land for him and his gang.

“I’m so thirsty,” Marsha said. “Please give me a drink of water.”

Needing a drink as well, and a moment or two to stretch from having been in the saddle for so long, One Eye didn’t hesitate doing as she requested. He rode onward as he watched for the shine of water beneath the moonlight, knowing that he was near Silver Creek, where he had stopped ofttimes to refresh himself.

“Please, One Eye, I am so parched,” Marsha pleaded, thinking that he was ignoring her.

She kept glancing at the gag that he was still holding, expecting him to stop and place it back on her at any moment. She hoped that he would leave it off long enough for her to be able to cry out with alarm if they came anywhe

re near a settler’s home, or if by chance someone came along on a horse.

Yet she reminded herself what time of night it was. It was surely the midnight hour now, for it seemed an eternity since she had been sitting peacefully beside the fire, crocheting. Now she doubted she had many more hours to live.

Oh, if only Swift Horse would have listened to her when she had told him that One Eye was the villain! Even her brother had scoffed at the idea. She hoped it wouldn’t be too late when they discovered that she was right.