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  “What’s the hubbub?” Huntley asked his friend. “She pull a knife on you?”

  He was halfway joking at first. Whit’s deep copper face seemed to have drained of color, so it was obviously something of an alarming medical nature. He grabbed the doctor by the shoulders. “What’s wrong?”

  Whit was having trouble speaking. “She…she…” He looked distantly at the floor, his mouth agape.

  “All right. I’ll just have a look for myself, then. I’ve seen loads of naked Digger women in my time.”

  What could possibly upset a physician who had probably been witness to all manner of scrofula, elephantiasis, and gangrene in his time? Striding into the bathroom, Huntley saw the squaw Bel cowering against the wall, holding her verminous deerskin skirt in front of her groin. Well, Whit had been correct. She was quite appealing when cleaned up. Her rounded, uplifted breasts were of artistic proportions, and the sight of her edible, soft nipples actually made his mouth water, thinking of licking them.

  But of course she cowered against the wall. He’d shot her. She’d shot at him, twice. There was no hope that she’d ever be anything other than afraid, or at the very best, disgusted at his presence. So he called, “Whit. Tell me what’s got you in such an uproar.”

  Whit went to the maiden’s side and tugged at her deerskin. She did not want to give it up. Huntley could see that by the panicked look in her eyes. Whit merely turned her by the shoulders so Huntley could view her well-proportioned, flared ass. There were even two dimples pressed into the sides of the blazingly white behind.

  Wait. Huntley tried to formulate the words for what he was feeling. Wait a minute. White ass?

  He gaped in Whit’s direction. “White ass?”

  Whit nodded tersely. “Exactly. White ass.”

  The two men stared at each other for several long moments. Looked at Bel’s white ass. Then looked at each other. Then back to the ass.

  At length, Huntley looked to Bel’s face. She seemed terrified, overflowing with trepidation that they had discovered her secret. She cringed against the wall as though she wished to pop through the other side to run. But what was the secret? In English, Huntley questioned her bluntly. “What’s your name?”

  She whispered, “Bel.”

  “Don’t give me that shit. And you obviously understand English, or you wouldn’t have understood that question. What’s your name?”

  “Bel!” she proclaimed with more intensity.

  Whit stepped in, placing a calm hand on her bare shoulder. “Belle, is that what you mean? B-e-l-l-e?”

  She nodded, her eyes wide, drawing the deerskin up to cover her breasts. “B-e-l-l-e,” she agreed.

  Exhaling mightily, Whit and Huntley looked at each other with defeated eyes. They had just captured an American woman. Most likely an American woman of very base mentality, for who else would be living in the mountains with a tribe of savage Diggers?

  Then, even more surprisingly, she looked right at Huntley and said timidly, “I know who you are. You’re Huntley Ashbury, King of the Tulareños.”

  Huntley became a bit puffed with pride, mostly that Dr. Whitney should be hearing that he was considered king of anything. The Tulareños had been his first tribe after mustering out of Frémont’s Battalion, down in the San Joaquin Valley. “Yes, that’s me. Now maybe you can assist us in learning…Who are you, and how did you come to be living with Diggers in the Sierra?”

  The girl reached out a slender, muscular arm. “May I first have the shirt from Lupe?”

  * * * *

  Belle didn’t feel like a handful of a harridan, or whatever else Ashbury had termed her.

  The past couple of days had been traumatic and humiliating. Of course she wished she was with her tribe, but the ones who weren’t wiped out were on the run, probably back to the Ahwahnee Valley, where they could meet up with Chief Tenaya of the Yosemite tribe, known to Americans as “The Grizzlies.” They were perfectly content to be known as the Grizzlies, “the lawless.” That put fear into white men’s hearts and would keep them out of the valley.

  “So tell me,” said the doctor, by far the more pleasant of the two men. “How did you come to be living with Indians?”

  Belle sat on a soft velvet couch wearing a red flannel shirt that tickled her arms with fleecy comfort. She wasn’t accustomed to wearing a shirt. Nor was she accustomed to the myriad of sights that assaulted her eyeballs in this room. Two walls were lined with books, and she struggled to read the titles. Her eyes throbbed with the strain of looking at so many colorful bright objects, rendered especially painful as filtered sun poured in through tall windows on one entire wall.

  She was also not accustomed to telling this story to a white man. The doctor, although he looked part Indian, was enough of a white man that she still regarded him as the enemy. “My party was coming from back east, and we were ambushed. My husband and daughter were killed, but the Indians must have thought I was already dead, for they left me. The few of us who were left struggled into the mountains—”

  “When was this?” the King of the Tulareños interrupted.

  “A year ago, last winter.”

  “Yes,” confirmed Ashbury to his friend. “Last winter was harsher than usual.”

  “Yes,” Belle agreed. “So they say. Or, so I now know. We tried to build little huts to protect us from the snow, but…the rest of us died. I was very nearly dead when the band of King Joseph took me away to their encampment.”

  “Which is why you trust them,” the doctor suggested gently.

  Belle smiled, glad that he seemed to understand. “Yes, exactly. I had no idea where the nearest white settlement was, and after awhile, there didn’t seem to be any reason to try and find one. What would I do in a white settlement with no husband or child?”

  Why was Ashbury laughing so incredulously? Did he mean that she could easily find work as a whore? Belle protested, “Back east, I was very cultured! I graduated from a Female Academy and played wonderful piano!”

  The doctor said soothingly, “I am sure that you did. Major Ashbury is just laughing because the sight of a…” He looked to Major Ashbury for assistance. “A fair, unattached white woman is a rare sight around these parts. There are plenty of things for you to do.”

  “Hell,” said Major Ashbury, with a hint of a smile. “We’ll be fending off all the would-be suitors.”

  Belle managed a smile in the direction of the King of the Tulareños. Maybe he had a heart after all. He was quite a striking man. All the stories were true. One of the tallest men she’d ever seen, his beauty brought to her mind those childhood stories of King Arthur and his knights. Yes, he was like a courageous valiant knight, that was it. A man whose daily trials had created a brutal, ruthless, and probably cruel armor. But all of these books lining the walls seemed to say that he had a thoughtful, intelligent side that hopefully tempered his cold-blooded nature. And he had failed to kill her when he had a very good chance to.

  He’d also, admirably, refrained from raping her.

  Belle had been tormenting herself ever since that incident. She had fought for her life, but the man was simply much stronger than her. She’d had to relent and allow herself to be taken captive. But on the long, dull ride to this place called Agua Fria, a perhaps even more frightening reality had seeped into her consciousness. His apparent brutality had perhaps not been as brutal as it might have been. There had been another element to his domination of her. The way he’d pinioned her between his powerful thighs while reaching for the leather thong to bind her wrists. The hard ridge of his stiff, yearning penis pressed against her tailbone had brought out a wide array of longings that Belle had imagined long repressed.

  Back East, she’d been told it was womb hysteria, the same thing, apparently, the doctor had just mentioned in the bathroom. Her husband Ned had always been appalled at her lust for things of a sexual nature. In her mania, she had gotten pregnant before they were even married. Since then, she had tried to tamp it down, or at least
pretend it wasn’t happening, and was partially successful with large applications of laudanum. Living with Indians had helped, too, since she viewed them more as children of nature or some poetic nonsense. But the moment the virile mountain man had pinned her, immobilizing her securely to the snow with his penis so stiff she imagined she could feel the bulging head against her ass, these sexual feelings had been flooding back. Maybe it was just the nature of the blood that filled her pelvis, as one doctor had suggested. Her blood was merely hotter than most other women’s. But the cold towels the doctor had told her to place on her womb had never succeeded in calming her down.

  She now looked at both men as desirable satyrs. The Indian doctor, too, was exceedingly handsome with his well-trimmed moustache and muscular, capable arms. Belle had been quick to note the sluggish erection tenting his pants when he’d stood up in the bathroom. She was proud to know that it came from gazing at her nude body. That was one of the things she adored about living with Indians—one could run about nearly nude, although there, no one seemed to think it was a prurient thing. As Belle, apparently, still persisted in thinking. So now she thought about laudanum.

  “May I have some whiskey?” she inquired. “Now that you don’t think I’m a Digger. White women are allowed whiskey in the Far West, are they not?”

  Both men leaped to their feet to fulfill her request. She grinned at the sight of them grappling over the whiskey bottle, both their fists around the neck of it. Apparently the one whose hand clapped atop the bottle’s mouth was the winner, and the doctor was allowed to pour her a tumbler of the stuff.

  “As for what you’ll do,” said Major Ashbury, “I don’t advise trying to run and return to that tribe. Or any other tribe, for that matter. There’s a war coming, and the Indians will doubtless come out on the losing side, as I’ve been attempting to explain to people for months now.”

  The doctor asked, “Did you have a husband in the tribe?”

  Belle shook her head. “No. Luckily they didn’t harass me in that manner. I was seen as more of a…an in-between sort of person, does that make sense? Not a man, and not a woman.”

  “Sexless?” the doctor suggested.

  “Yes! Thank you, that’s a very good word for it.” She felt herself blush then. “Some words I’m having a hard time recalling, even though it’s only been a year since I’ve spoken English. Sexless. I was seen as a strange…”

  Once again the doctor helped her out. “Anomaly?”

  “Yes.” It felt good to use such a fancy English word again. “I was allowed to learn to hunt, but I also wove baskets. I skinned animals but also cooked. The women, really, do most of the work. The men just eat, grumble, and sleep. A few times, I wore the full head of a doe to camouflage myself while hunting.”

  Major Ashbury’s smile was genuine. “I’ve done that, too. The heads are surprisingly heavy.”

  “Yes!” Belle agreed heatedly. Then she remembered. Turning to the doctor, she asked, “What is this I overheard about becoming your maid?”

  If the doctor wasn’t such a beautiful coppery shade, Belle might have seen him blush too. “Why, I…”

  Already she was regaining her old confidence. “Because if that’s what you want, that sounds agreeable to me.” Major Ashbury appeared amused, as though she were a sideshow spectacle, a two-headed skeleton in a museum under glass. “But apparently there’s some confusion as to where the doctor actually lives.”

  Major Ashbury’s face went blank, and the doctor—she’d heard the major call him “Whit”—looked embarrassed. So she continued, in the old brash and passionate way she was infamous for. “I would like to be your housekeeper, but I don’t think a hospital tent is the appropriate place for a white woman, do you? Major. If Dr. Whit here is to be your physician, and the battalion physician as well, wouldn’t it be more appropriate for you to house him—and me—here in this grand place?” She looked around at the lofty walls full of books. “You appear to have enough rooms, unless someone else lives here I haven’t yet met.”

  It was all coming back to Belle, how men used to be appalled at that bold aspect of her. So she stood, now feeling more naked than ever wearing only the red shirt and the deerskin skirt, and went to pour herself more whiskey. She felt their eyes boring into her ass, but it pleased her. She had always suspected she could utilize this womb hysteria to some sort of advantage. Perhaps all men were not horrified by it, as her husband Ned had been.

  At length the major cleared his throat and said, “Why, yes, I don’t see why not. Lupe has her own house, a husband, and children nearby. She doesn’t sleep here.” Ashbury stood, and Belle turned to admire his long athletic arms dangling at his thighs. She must be a terrible minx. A couple of days ago he had shot her in the arm, and now here she was, admiring his brawn! “I’ll show you to a couple of rooms downstairs here. It was thoughtless of me not to offer it before.” His ardent look when he glanced at the doctor was unmistakable. Belle wondered what their “misunderstanding” had consisted of.

  Clutching her whiskey glass, Belle started following Ashbury out of the study, but the doctor stayed her. “I can see where you might dislike him,” he said confidentially. “But he’s just an army man, acting as a soldier. At first, he thought you were a man.”

  “How could anyone make that mistake?”

  The doctor looked abashed. “Well. It’s very evident to us, now. But it might help you to understand Huntley a bit better if you know that his wife and child were taken away from him while crossing the plains too, in ’45, I believe. Illness, not Indians. But nevertheless, he knows the pain of losing everyone you love. I think that’s why he acts so tough, so gruff.”

  Belle nodded. That did help her understand the major. “And what is this treatment laid out by Hippocrates that you wished to experiment with on me?”

  Whit’s jaw hung agape. She must learn to control her mouth—or perhaps not drink whiskey!

  “Something about womb hysteria…?” Belle prompted.

  Regaining his professional demeanor, he said smoothly, “Well, yes! I’ve been practicing a form of medical massage on the large population of women who have hysteria of the womb, and have achieved a great success—”

  “Where is everyone?” the major bellowed from the other side of the house.

  Belle and Whit giggled at each other. Taking deep breaths, they strode through the foyer to view their new bedrooms.

  Chapter Seven

  Huntley couldn’t sleep.

  Far too many images and thoughts swirled around his addled brain. First, the intensity of the skirmish at what they were now calling Battle Mountain, after having been so many years away from war. Then, the disturbing confusion when he discovered his captive was a Yankee.

  Now, Huntley paced and drank whiskey in his study, the tails of his dressing gown billowing behind him, pleasantly exposing his nude body to the frigid winter air. He hadn’t bothered stoking the fireplace. It was about two o’clock in the morning. In several hours Colonel Barbour would arrive with the Indian Commissioners detailed to this spot. There would be the usual haranguing, writing eloquent letters to the “Children of the Great White Fathers in Washington” giving details of the battle and troubles leading up to it. Already Huntley had sent some former mission Indians—those that hadn’t taken part in any raids but had acquired all of the vices and none of the virtues of their white teachers—out to the tribes to get them to relent, and already two chiefs had arrived to make peace, the warlike Grizzlies notably absent.

  One Digger chief had told Huntley, “The Indians in the Deep Grassy Valley on the Merced River do not wish peace and will not make treaties. They think you can’t find their hiding places and that they can’t be driven out.”

  “I’ll smoke out those Grizzlies from their holes!” Huntley seethed now. But the truth of the matter was, he’d been spending more time thinking about the delightful Belle than about any crusty old Indians, surrendering or not.

  Leaning his backside against the ed
ge of his desk, Huntley squeezed his eyes shut and thought, She’s a white woman. She’s an American. He still hadn’t been able to fully accept this truth. After years of fucking squaws, he had an American woman living under his roof again. He had not tried to sleep in a bed this close to a white woman since…well, since his wife. It was unnerving. And it was natural that his thoughts would turn to fucking.

  Hadn’t he just been thinking he surely needed to brush up on the ways of humping American women? Hadn’t he just the other day been pondering on giving up his Indian squaws? Surely there was no future there, and he was becoming of an age where this nomadic existence must come to an end. His wife had always been apparently pleased with his fucking skills, but then, Yankee women didn’t express much of an opinion on such matters. It would be nice to find out, once and for all, a knowledgeable American woman’s opinion on his prowess. Belle, having been married before, might have such an opinion.

  Oh, God’s holy trousers, what am I thinking? Huntley returned to his pacing after sloshing more whiskey into his tumbler. He had just shot the poor woman in the arm. How was he to know she’d be an intelligent, even assertive beauty? Whit had said something about taking her to swim in the creek tomorrow. Now they knew she was white, wouldn’t they have to avert their eyes? How to prevent her nude body from being viewed by the hundreds of dilapidated, sordid miners who would surely race as one unit to the creek once they heard she was there—naked, long limbs stroking through the water, rivulets rushing down between those firm, uplifted breasts…

  Oh, God’s…Furious with himself, Whit stumbled to the velvet couch and flung himself down face-first. He was drunk, he knew. Or was the term “pleasantly mellow”? First, he’d been forced to witness that physician pumping his monstrous cock. He’d been properly shamed the next day when he’d caught himself imagining slurping up the puddle of semen from between those tight, dark nipples. It had probably just been randiness for an American woman, that was it.

  But he couldn’t just grab Belle by the hips and do her like a barnyard animal. She was a graduate of some Female Academy, after all. Huntley’s mind drifted to thoughts of grabbing Belle and doing her like a barnyard animal when he heard the study door squeak open and soft feet padding over to him. He propped his chin on a fist, somehow imagining it was Belle coming to do some housekeeperly things, such as allow him to bend her over and take her in the Italian fashion. No, wait, a housekeeper might come to refresh his whiskey bottle, or something like that.