NO OTHER MAN
CHAPTER 1
Late summer, 1875
God was punishing her. It had to be that simple.
And that was awful.
As the stagecoach came to a jerking halt, Skylar wondered briefly if she deserved the kind of death that now threatened her. No. No one deserved the fate it seemed she was doomed to discover. Please, God, no one. And what she had done was surely not so very bad, not so horrible, not so…
Oh, God!
She had seen them coming. Seen the war-painted Braves on their speeding painted ponies, screeching out their hair-raising battle cries. She had prayed that the stagecoach might somehow outdistance them, but she had wondered even then if God would pay heed to her fevered cries after the deception she had so desperately carried out.
It seemed not.
The doors to the coach were suddenly wrenched open. Fear ran like an icy river throughout her limbs, clutching her heartand lungs. Suddenly sunlight poured in, somewhat blinding her, yet what she saw was enough to turn her fear into terror.
A massive shadow filling the doorway. Blocking out the sun. Huge, forbidding, terrifying…
It was Sioux country. She’d known there were Indians in the West. She’d known the United States Army was heavily in residence near here, battling the heathens on behalf of the settlers, more and more of whom had flowed into the Badlands area when gold had been discovered here. She’d heard tales about the savages. The eastern newspapers had been filled with reports of them, all of them, the Comanche, the Cheyenne, the Pawnee, the Crow, the Assiniboine…
The Sioux.
Indeed, she’d heard something about them. About the way they’d been moving steadily westward themselves, battling other tribes who vied for the same hunting grounds. They were what the soldiers called true “blanket and pony” Indians, hunting the buffalo on horseback, painting themselves garishly for warfare, finding the greatest honor in feats of daring in battle. She’d also heard there were good Indians—those who accepted the White ways and stayed on the reservations set aside for them. Then there were the “hostiles,” those who refused to accept the boundaries of white treaties. Those who now raided white settlements and murdered whites whenever they could.
Those who attacked stagecoaches.
Oh, God, she had known that horrible things happened.
And she’d come here anyway.
She hadn’t been able to allow herself to think about the Indian situation. She hadn’t been able to allow herself to be afraid. Oh, God, she had been clutching at life, all right, grasping perhaps, and what she had done had been wrong.
She had taken just pains to escape the East, traveled a long, circuitous two-week route when the train might have taken herhalf the time. She had done everything to avoid danger in the east, and now, oh, God, she had been wrong, but surely, not so wrong as to deserve this.
She blinked furiously, trying to clear her vision. The dark, massive form in the doorway to the coach remained.
Impossibly tall, impossibly muscled and bronzed. His face was painted, half in red, half in black. Straight black hair fell past his shoulders. Buckskin leggings covered his thighs while beaded boots of a-like skin clung tightly to the heavy muscles of his calves. His chest, in all its muscled bronze glory, was bare except for designs painted in the same red and black shades that adorned his face. One look at him was enough to instill the very fear of God and the devil in her heart. She was well aware the Indians could be as merciless with women and children as they were with the soldiers.
Did they, perhaps, have a right to be so brutal? Hadn’t she heard talk as well that the soldiers were terrible when they attacked Indian camps? Everyone had heard stories about the famous young brevet general, Custer, who had done such glorious deeds for the North during the War Between the States. In 1868, he’d attacked a Cheyenne camp on the Washita River. It was another “great victory” for the whites—articles from massacred settlers had been found in the camp—but there were those who had written about the number of Indian women and children who had been slaughtered during the attack.
But she hadn’t slaughtered anyone!
Yet now, here, was this man, blocking the sun, threatening to make the earth flow crimson with her blood.
Split seconds passed as terror filled her.
But the hysterical scream she expected did not tear from her throat. Somehow, she swallowed it. If she was going to die anyway, she was going to do so fighting.
She’d heard enough about the Indians to know they’d enjoy her death even more if she begged for mercy while they granted not a whit of it.
Even as the brave at the door reached in to drag her out, she remembered the hatpin holding her mourning bonnet in place upon her head. She wrenched it out with a speed she found astonishing herself, grasped it firmly, and slammed it straight at the warrior’s eye. Something deep, guttural, and furious spewed from his lips as he caught her hand with a half second to spare in which to preserve his eyesight. She cried out with pain as his grasp seemed about to break the fragile bones of her hand. His hold eased, but barely. Kicking and screaming, she found herself being dragged from the coach. Her wild gyrations sent both of them flying to the dry, dusty ground. She saw the knife sheathed at his hip and lunged for it, drawing it free and aiming it at his throat before he once more managed to salvage himself from her deadly intent, this time capturing her wrist and rolling to pin her beneath him. She cried out again in fury and fear as he slammed her wrist against the earth, causing her to give up her hold on the weapon. He straddled her then, catching both her wrists in his merciless grip, his thighs tight around her hips. She continued to struggle, swearing, praying that the swearing would help her. “Bastard, wretched pagan, savage, hideous demon from the fires of hell, get off of me!” Yet if he got off of her, what then? Three of his comrades watched just a few yards away from them, seated upon their painted ponies silently observing her desperate struggles. If she freed herself from this brave, the four of them would hunt her down, run her into the ground, rape her, take her scalp, and leave her carcass for the crows…
“Cowards!” she hissed, trying to spit, trying to claw, whimpering, screaming, twisting. As she fought against the weight and muscle pinning her to the ground, she realized that the buckskin leggings provided little covering for the savage atopher. They twisted with each of her wild, bucking movements, creating a wave of dread and horrific fascination within her as she noticed the man wore a scanty breechclout along with the leggings, and nothing more. “Cowards!” she cried again, twisting anew. “Attacking a lone woman! Slaying that poor old driver!”Had they slain the man?she wondered. They must have done so, for he was nowhere to be seen. He was not leaping to her defense. She had to be grateful that she couldn’t see the driver’s mutilated, dead body upon the ground. She started to cry out again, her fury all that kept her from pure hysteria.
“You are nothing but hideous beasts! I swear it! You will all die, you bastards. The cavalry will come. You’ll die slowly, I promise, I…”
