Beneath a Dakota Cross Read online

  Brazos brushed the snow off his shoulders. “I reckon she’ll huddle near that carriage, wherever it is.”

  “What’s over by those boulders?” Robert pointed across a horizon of rolling prairie, dead grass, sage, snow, and mud.

  Brazos stood in his stirrups and scanned the horizon. “In this storm, a person can’t tell between sky and ground … just a blanket of white …”

  “Over there! I think it’s a buckboard or a surrey!” Robert broke into a gallop.

  Brazos pursued. Lord, how come I didn’t see that? Maybe I need some new spectacles. Maybe I need the eyes of some twenty-two-year-old kid to locate things for me.

  As he advanced, he could not observe anyone around the old, wet buckboard with three wooden bench seats and a tattered top of oilcloth and snow. Robert reached the wagon first and slid down from the saddle.

  “Dacee June!” Brazos shouted. He circled his horse through the brush next to the rig. “You find any sign, Robert?”

  “There’s nothing in the wagon. Nothing at all!”

  “Dacee June!” Brazos called again.

  Robert mounted his horse and looped around behind him. “Dad, we don’t know for sure that Dacee June was in this rig. It could have been anyone. We don’t …”

  “I know … I’ve been arguin’ with myself about it. I want to believe she’s back in Fort Pierre … or Bismarck … in some warm hotel room. But I wanted to believe she was sitting here at this wagon, waitin’ for us … but she’s not. She could be anywhere. She could be injured. She could be lost. She could be …” Brazos couldn’t make himself conclude the sentence.

  “Do you see any tracks leadin’ away from the wagon?” Robert asked. “This snow is coverin’ up everythin’. Whoever was in this wagon could have headed in any direction. There’s no way of knowin’.”

  Brazos studied the backboard. “If Dacee June was here, I know which way she went.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The wagon is pointed east. This wagon was headed back to Fort Pierre when it was stopped and the horses stolen. Dacee June has been with me enough to know that she should follow the way the wagon’s pointed. Like the time you, Sam, and those Devore girls broke an axle out west of the Leon River and Dacee June and I had to come find you. We just kept goin’ straight to where the wagon was pointin’.”

  “That only works until you lose sight of the wagon …” Robert pointed to a ridge straight ahead of them a couple hundred yards. “After that she could wander in any direction.”

  Snowflakes were the size of two-bit pieces by the time they reached the ridge. A fresh, white quilt covered the ground, erasing all tracks. Both halted and gaped into the storm.

  “Now where?” Robert inquired.

  Brazos stood in the stirrups, whisking the snow off his jeans. He tried to study the eastern horizon. He removed his spectacles, folded them, and jammed them into the leather case. “Don’t need those in this storm.” He kneaded the bridge of his nose and squinted as the snowflakes blasted his face. His heart throbbed through his temples.

  Lord, at some point Robert and me will have to think about gettin’ out of this storm and savin’ our own lives. At least, savin’ Robert’s life. I am so tired, Sarah Ruth. If I find our girl dead in the snow, I’ll just lay down next to her and die. He tried to summon enough energy to talk. “Draw us a straight line in the snow from here, back to the wagon … maybe we can project it on up ahead.”

  Lord, I know that it ain’t right to only be concerned if it’s my Dacee June. Whoever was in that wagon is some other father’s son or daughter. I’d like to help them, no matter who it is. But I can’t rescue what I can’t find, and I can’t track what I can’t see.

  With Robert digging a line with his boot heel, Brazos squinted both eyes almost closed and traced the direction of the line into the snowy horizon. “Is that some rocks up there?” he called out. He began to feel a surge of heat in his bones.

  “What?” Robert replied, remounting his sorrel horse. “Where? I don’t see anything.”

  “Follow the horizon about thirty degrees south of that line you made. See them up there?”

  “There’s nothin’ there.”

  “Sure there is … look again. If Dacee spied out those rocks, she’d head for them to get out of this storm.”

  “Daddy, I don’t see anything. I think you’re just being wishful. You don’t even have on your spectacles.”

  “I don’t need them for that,” Brazos insisted.

  “Our best bet is ridin’ this straight line.” Robert offered. “It will at least get us towards Fort Pierre. If we veer off to the south again, we’ll hit the Bad River … or Indians … or both.”

  “I’m sorry your sight is playin’ out on you, Son, but we’re going this way.” Brazos booted his heels into Coco and trotted off into the storm.

  The shout, “Daddy!” faded behind him.

  Visibility was not much more than twenty feet.

  And everything that was visible was white.

  Robert rode alongside Brazos, and after a romp into the storm that featured horses slipping and stumbling, he reached over, seized Coco’s chin strap, and yanked both horses to a halt.

  Brazos slid forward in the saddle and clutched the horn with his left hand.

  “What did you do that for?” Brazos shouted.

  “We’re goin’ the wrong way!” Robert hollered.

  “Turn loose of my horse!”

  “Daddy, come on. You’re gettin’ snow blind!”

  The once heavy snowflakes ceased as if on cue.

  “I know what I’m doin’, son.”

  “And I know what I’m doin’. We’ve got to get you back to Fort Pierre before you freeze to death. We’re going too far south, and you know it,” Robert argued.

  Brazos extended the barrel of his carbine and cuffed Robert’s hand away from the bridle. “I’m goin’ after my baby girl.”

  Robert stretched over with a gauntlet-covered hand and jostled his father’s shoulder. “Your mind’s playin’ tricks on you. Come on, I’m takin’ you to town!”

  A Chinook wind wafted from the south, slowly lifting the clouds off the horizon.

  “I’m not goin’ back without my Dacee June!” Brazos thundered, and he slapped Robert’s hand off his shoulder.

  “Dad, we don’t know where she is! Come on, let’s go warm up and then figure this out!”

  “Not unless you plan to whip me and hog-tie me to the saddle.”

  “If that’s what it takes to save your life, I’ll do it!”

  Robert’s eyes flared. For a brief second Brazos thought he was looking straight at Sarah Ruth. Then he gazed off to the east. Have I been starin’ at a mirage? Is he right? Is this storm whippin’ me and I’m seein’ things? Freezing … exhausted … losing hope. What’s happening to me? Has it gotten so bad my children have to take care of me?

  “My word, you were right!” Robert suddenly shouted.

  Brazos peered straight over Coco’s ears. “I was? Those rocks … do you see them, too?”

  “There’s no way you could have seen those from back there,” Robert protested. “The snow on top of them makes them almost invisible from here, even with the storm subsiding.” He jolted his horse’s flanks and loped towards the outcrop of brush and rock on the top of a rise about a half-mile away.

  Brazos trailed him, and by the time they reached the bottom of the incline, he observed a sliver of blue sky behind the heavy, gray clouds. Just like that, the storm is liftin’? Maybe the storm was all in my mind.

  Robert slowed to push his horse through the thick, leafless brush that surrounded the jagged, snow-covered rocks. Robert’s horse faltered, regained its foot, then lunged through the branches.

  At that moment a limb the size of a hitching post came swinging out from behind the rock, catching a startled Robert Fortune in the stomach. He plunged off the horse, but managed to seize the branch and hold on, wrenching the assailant to the snow.

  B
razos, his carbine at his shoulder, surveyed the two people rolling in the snow. A woman? Who is she? The lady’s cape hood plummeted off her head, exposing coal-black hair that was halfway unfastened and draped across her face. Robert straddled her, pinning her arms to the snow.

  “Who are you?” he shouted.

  “Who are you?” she yelled back, her round, smooth face, blushed red from the raw storm, or embarrassment, or both.

  “I’m Sergeant Robert Fortune …”

  “Robert!” a young girl’s voice wailed from somewhere behind the rocks.

  One time, several years earlier, Brazos and Sarah Ruth had driven to Dallas with Milt and Barbara Ferrar and listened to a visiting orchestra from New York City perform select works of Beethoven and Bach. Until this very moment, he always figured those were the most beautiful sounds he would ever hear in his life.

  But a young girl’s scream in the Dakota storm far exceeded the melodies of the orchestra. In the background he was sure he could hear choirs of angels.

  Brazos vaulted from his horse and plummeted through the thicket of brush. “Dacee June!” he yelled.

  “Daddy!” the voice cried.

  By the rocks, the hood of her cape buttoned under her chin, thick, wool gloves wrapped around a short-barreled shotgun, red-cheeked, blue-lipped, and eyes dancing, posed the most beautiful girl he had ever seen in his life.

  “Dacee June!” The carbine tumbled into the snow.

  Dacee June discarded her shotgun and sprinted towards him. She was over a foot off the ground when they met. Her enthusiastic arms knocked his hat off and encompassed his neck with a breath-stopping clutch.

  Their tears mingled as he held her freezing cheek against his.

  “Your face and lips are cold,” she informed him.

  “But my heart is very warm,” he said.

  “I just knew I’d find you,” she sobbed. “I knew I could. No one thought I could, but I found you, didn’t I? I came to Dakota and found my daddy!”

  “You found me, darlin’ …”

  “Actually,” a woman’s voice skimmed through the cold air from the midst of the outcropping, “both Thelma and I were quite confident we would locate you.”

  Two caped and blanketed women strolled closer. “Yes, we didn’t really start to lose hope until this morning when the hostiles pilfered our horses. I tried to convince the others to burn the wagon for a signal fire, but Louise felt that would attract the wrong element.”

  “The March sisters?” Brazos gulped. “What … why … how … ?”

  “Would you please let me up!” the dark-haired woman shouted as Robert rolled off her and struggled to his feet.

  “Hi, Robert!” Dacee June called out, but didn’t liberate her father’s neck.

  “Li’l sis, I’m surely glad to see you.” He reached back to offer the woman on the ground a hand. She refused, struggled to her feet, then slipped and fell. This time she held out her hand as Robert assisted her.

  “I can’t believe you sisters are out here in the middle of a Dakota storm!” Brazos muttered.

  “It’s been quite an adventure!” Louise Driver declared.

  “Especially the past forty-eight hours!” Thelma Speaker said as she sauntered straight up to young Fortune. “Hello, Robert, it’s so nice you could meet us with your father. I’m sorry we can’t offer you a cup of chocolate and a cookie.”

  “Mrs. Speaker,” he said as he tipped his hat, “Mrs. Driver, nice to see … I mean, I’m amazed to see you. I trust all of you are well,” Robert stammered.

  The young lady with the long, wavy black hair whisked snow off her cape and dress.

  “I don’t believe I know the young woman who tackled Robert,” Brazos inquired.

  “Tackled him? I tackled him?” the lady huffed. “I thumped him from his saddle. He’s the one who shamelessly threw me to the ground and rolled over on me like I was some dance hall darling. I’ve never been so …”

  “Actually,” Louise announced, “after what we’ve been through in the last two days it’s amazing we didn’t shoot you two on sight.”

  “Let me introduce you,” Thelma moved over next to the woman, using the same tone and expression as if she were at a ballroom in Austin. “Mr. Brazos Fortune, and his youngest son, Robert … I’d like for you to meet Miss Jamie Sue Milan from Des Moines, Iowa. She has been our companion the past two days and is a delightful and talented young woman.”

  “Yes,” Louise concurred. “She reminds me so much of my daughter, Julie.”

  “The Jamie Sue?” Brazos choked. “You are the famous Jamie Sue?”

  A slight smile burst across the woman’s smooth face for the first time. “Yes, how have you heard of me?”

  “There’s notices posted all over the Black Hills about you lookin’ for your brother.”

  The woman’s brown eyes sparkled. “Do you know Vincent?”

  “Actually … Miss … I don’t know him … but, I, eh, well,” Brazos stammered. “A friend of mine had some dealin’s with your brother.”

  “Really! Oh, that’s wonderful! Is he in good health?”

  “I understand he’s in better shape than … eh, than he looked at first glance. Anyway, this friend of mine is in Fort Pierre and will tell you all about your brother,” Brazos mumbled.

  “Oh, this is so wonderful! I have an estate settlement I must discuss with my brother. He’s never been interested in money, but I, at least, need his advice,” she gushed.

  “Well, a fella like your brother … just might, you know, change over the years,” Brazos mumbled. “Could be that money means more to him nowadays.”

  Dacee June slackened her grip on his neck as he let her feet slip down to the ground. “Daddy, I’m cold.”

  He retrieved his hat and shoved it on his head. “I think there’s enough brush around here for a fire. We’ll get one going, then Robert and I will ride back for the wagon. I reckon these two saddle ponies can do a little drivin’, if need be.”

  “You aren’t leaving me,” Dacee June insisted. “I’m going wherever you go.”

  Robert fetched the guns, then secured the horses to some brush. “Dad, you guard the ladies and I’ll go get the buckboard.”

  “You’ll need help. These two ponies won’t be too anxious to be rigged.”

  “I’ll go with him,” Jamie Sue offered, still shaking snow out of her hair. “I’ve been around horses and jackasses all my life. Both the four-legged and two-legged varieties.”

  “I would rather do it on my own,” Robert insisted.

  Miss Milan tried to repin her hair. “You think I can’t hitch a team?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Robert shook snow off some dead branches. “I think you should stay with the women and warm up by the …”

  Jamie Sue marched straight at him, like a bulldog on the attack. “I’m perfectly capable of takin’ care of myself without your advice.”

  “Since you two seem to rile each other,” Brazos began, “maybe you should …”

  “Rile each other? Rile would be considered a positive term compared to what I feel at the moment!” she huffed. “And I’m going to go help bring that wagon—that’s settled. May I borrow your shotgun, Dacee June?”

  “Oh, yes! My daddy will protect me now.” She handed the weapon to Miss Milan. “Are you scared the Indians will return?”

  “No,” Jamie Sue said. “I want protection for the next time the sergeant decides he wants to throw me to the ground and wrestle.”

  “Me? This is absurd. I am not taking her.” Robert stomped off to look for more firewood.

  “You might need help,” Brazos called out. “Take her with you, but promise you won’t shoot each other.”

  “I’ll make no such promise,” she raged.

  “Well, you better both warm up … on the outside … before you ride off,” Brazos lectured. “We’ll all need to dry off a little before we make a run for Fort Pierre. Where’s your satchel, li’l sis? You didn’t run away from home withou
t some belongin’s, did you?”

  “I didn’t run away from home.” When she looked up at him her nose was turned up even more than usual. “My home is with you, Daddy.”

  The fire was hot, explosive, and smoky. But no one complained. The March sisters sipped on hot water from a common shared cup, while Brazos drank boiled coffee and filtered the grounds with his teeth. Robert and Jamie Sue rode off on the two horses, squabbling over the merits of McClellan saddles. Above them, the storm clouds loitered but were now spaced by cold, blue sky.

  Dacee June perched beside him, hanging on his arm, and mauling a piece of tough jerky. Brazos’s carbine was propped up against his right leg. The March sisters sat on their duffles on the far side of the campfire.

  “I want to hear this whole story, Dacee June,” he insisted.

  “You mean, how I got clear up here to Dakota?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It all started when I got the letter that you weren’t coming home for Christmas. That’s when it dawned on me that you could never come ‘home,’ because we don’t have a home anymore.”

  “I meant that I wouldn’t be coming to your Aunt Barbara’s.”

  “Yes, but that’s not our home. Anyway, I cried myself to sleep for a couple nights and then that sheriff showed up looking for you.”

  “What sheriff?”

  “The Tarrant County sheriff,” Dacee June said.

  “What did he want?”

  “To apprehend you for resisting arrest in Fort Worth.”

  “That’s preposterous.”

  “That’s when I realized that my only home is with you, and you couldn’t come back to Texas, so I should go to you, and since you thought I was all content at Aunt Barbara’s you would never, ever ask me to come live with you. So I just up and decided on my own.” Dacee June sucked in a big, deep breath.

  Brazos glanced across at the two middle-aged ladies. “And just where do the March sisters come into this picture?”

  “I assure you, Brazos, we had nothing to do with her decision to leave Texas,” Louise informed him.

  “Heavens no!” Thelma added. “We were in Kansas City at the time, on our way home from visiting our children, and we knew nothing about this. But when we saw Dacee June at the railroad station there …”