Savage Beloved

But she knew how improbable that was.

The only men she would meet would be more soldiers, and she certainly didn’t want to marry her “father.”

No, she would never allow that to happen. Like her mother, Candy hated military life.

She had never understood why the U.S. government sent soldiers to fight the people who had owned this land long before the white man. The Wichita, one of the tribes that lived in this area, had always

sought peaceful solutions with white people.

If it were up to Candy, these peace-loving Indians would still have all of the land that whites were now occupying.

When she saw Indians, she didn’t see savages. She saw a people who were standing up for their rights . . . their land . . . their freedom.

She wondered if the Indians in Arizona would be out for blood like the Sioux, who also lived in this area. Or would the Indians in Arizona be more like the Wichita, who always worked things out with white people in a peaceful manner?

Yet how would the Wichita behave when they knew how cruelly Short Robe had been treated during his incarceration in Fort Hope? When he was returned to them, one look at him would tell the tale of how his time at Fort Hope had been spent.

Oh, Lord, what would their reaction be?

Thinking of the possibility of their attacking the fort before Candy and her father left made her hope that their few remaining days in Kansas would go by quickly.

She gazed at herself again in the mirror and ran her fingers through her long, golden hair. She was tiny in build, so petite her father often referred to her as his “fragile porcelain doll.”

Her oval face was of a porcelain color, with a touch of pink at her cheeks, and with a nose slightly tilted at the end.

Her eyes were azure blue, shadowed by long lashes.

Today she wore a high-necked, beautiful delicate pale blue silk dress that fell in deep ruffles around her tiny ankles. Her waist was so small her father could fit his hands around it, his fingertips touching.

“And, Lord, my name,” she whispered to herself, hating the name Candy.

But her mother had insisted on it. She had said that the first moment she looked at her tiny newborn daughter she thought her as sweet as candy. Besides, her mother’s best friend, a woman she’d known before she had met Candy’s father and married him, was called Candy.

Candy had discovered only a few years ago that her mother had been a “dance hall queen,” and her friend Candy had been the same.

“But my father, as he put it, ‘saved’ my mother from sin by taking her away from such an ungodly place,” she whispered to herself.

But he could never change everything about her as he had hoped to do. From the moment her mother had married the esteemed Colonel Earl Creighton, she began to long for her former life as a dancer, and for her friend Candy—who, the young Candy had heard not long ago, had been run down by a team of horses on the streets of Laredo.

Candy prayed that her mother wouldn’t meet the same sort of end, now that she had fled the life of a military wife.

Sighing, Candy went to a window and gazed out. She saw her pet wolf asleep not far away on the parade grounds.

She would never forget the day her father had brought the tiny abandoned animal home for her to raise. Candy had named the wolf Shadow, and now felt as close to her grown wolf as she would have any brother or sister.

She looked into the distance, beyond the fort where there were no protective walls. She gazed at the rolling hills, where she heard wolves howling even now in broad daylight.

The sound emerged from the forest, eerily low at first, and then grew.

It sounded as if the forest were teeming with wolves, but Candy knew that these howls were coming from a small pack that she had become familiar with.

She looked at Shadow to see if she had been awakened by the wolves. Candy sighed with relief when she saw that her pet was still sound asleep.

She looked again into the distance, glad that the wolves were no longer howling and had surely gone on their way.

She was sorely afraid of those wolves, even though she had one as a pet herself. But her main fear was not so much for herself as it was for Shadow.

Candy had seen this pack of wolves more than once, led by an animal with snow-white fur. It had looked like a ghost with its white fur and mystical pearly blue eyes.