Now that his senses were returning, he was interested to find out what happened to his telescope and his chain and his level, not to mention what might have happened in the meantime to the rest of his team of three other surveyors. However, he wouldn’t be able to retrieve his instruments in the Sioux camp or restore himself to his team until he had returned the beautiful idiot to her family.
Full circle. Begin by thinking about a woman. End by thinking about a woman. Maybe it had something to do with having been stripped naked, made to face certain death, and then being reborn. But how long was he—were they—destined to survive with almost no resources in the middle of hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness? Make that several millions of acres. He didn’t know exactly how many, and it was the job of the surveying team to establish that number. The odds against him accomplishing his part of the mission now were high, and here he was a good hundred miles east of where he had last seen his team, with no equipment, no horse, and in the company of an irritating woman who seemed to think that their life-or-death circumstances made a good occasion to embroider.
He eventually found a miniature scarp in the seemingly smooth grassland in which he could nestle himself. Lying horizontally, he shared this patch of earth with creeping critters and stared at the sky, which was three hundred and sixty degrees of clouds, packaged like a drawing-room gift assortment of mare’s tails and cumulus and cirrus, with an occasional dark storm cloud resting on a silvery gray pedestal of rain afar off to the west. He brought his gaze down to the horizon and chose a fixed point in the middle distance upon which to base his estimates of the wide spaces yawning around him. He took his time and arrived at what he knew would be a remarkably accurate estimate of fifteen miles to the slight rise of land on the western horizon.
This neat trick of spatial approximations was one he had taught himself as a distraction during the regular beatings he brought upon himself at the military academy. Over time, he discovered that he was good not only at the small-scale calibrations he had performed in the confines of the Correctional Chamber but also at the mapping of larger spaces, where plane geometry no longer applied and the curvature of the earth came into play. When he had surpassed his cartography teachers in precision, the beatings stopped, and he was sent to the War Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C.
He calculated and waited, moved and calculated, waited some more and moved again. He spied what might have been fresh wagon tracks, but didn’t risk following them. Instead he simply calculated their direction and figured in the possible ground that had been covered in the past forty-eight hours. The possibility danced around the edges of his busy brain that Miss No-Name’s family had backtracked to find her. However, it seemed more logical, since she was the one who had been spared from attack, that her parents would do their best to arrive at the next meeting point and wait for her there.
That is, if they were still alive. And if they weren’t, he was stuck with her.
He had seen what there was to see, so he headed back to the campsite. This took enough time to imagine a variety of scenarios for how she had spent her day, which included her being foolishly preyed upon by the prairie wolf and bathing in the spring. The image of her bathing in the spring seized hold of his imagination but was instantly replaced, upon his return to the camp, by the combination of her with the prairie wolf.
He came upon the campsite from the direction he had left it, and the first thing he saw was Miss Harris standing in the center of the little clearing with her back to him. Her spine was rigid, and she was looking straight ahead of her. She was wearing her bonnet, and her clothes looked fresh but slightly rumpled in a way that suggested that she had washed them and dried them in the sun on rocks. Across from her and facing him was the prairie wolf, who had ventured right up to the edge of the opposite side of the campsite. He was a scruffy, pitiful excuse for a wolf, but he was more than a match for a human. His ears were cocked, his right foreleg was raised, and he had a wary look in his eye, as if he was waiting for his best moment to pounce. Or was he, incredibly, about to retreat?
In that first half second Powell realized that the beautiful, blessed idiot was trying to stare the damned prairie wolf down. In the next half second, he realized that she was winning the war of nerves.
The scene unfroze. Powell moved forward. The prairie wolf turned tail and ran. She whirled at the sound of his footfall behind her and clutched her heart.
“Oh, it’s you!” she exclaimed under her breath. “You scared me!”
“I scared you?”
“Sneaking up on me like that. I didn’t hear you.”
“A wise man doesn’t announce his arrival anywhere in these parts,” he replied, “but as for being scared, I would have thought our mangy friend did that for you.”
She let her hand fall to her side. “He was playing a game of hide-and-seek with me on the edges of the trees there for a good long while. I picked up my rocks, and I would have thrown them at him if I had had to.” She gestured to the rocks at her feet. “I decided not to go on the offensive, recalling what you said about your feeling, so I dropped them and figured that my best strategy was to stand my ground here in the center.”
“Why did you figure that?”
“To let him know that I knew he was there and that I wasn’t moving. I’ve been standing here immobile for an age and am heartily sick of it.”
He controlled himself to say levelly, “Since his teeth are much bigger than yours, that was a risky strategy to pursue.”
“What would you have had me do instead?”
“Climb into the safety of a tree, to name but one idea.”
Her brown eyes flashed with magnificent scorn. “I will not be treed by such a mangy creature, as you so aptly described him! I had no assurance that you would return to deliver me from the branches, and so I made my decision to die standing up. You will grant me that measure of dignity, surely, even in these thoroughly undignified circumstances.” With a lofty gesture toward his bed of leaves, she informed him summarily, “I have finished the embroidery on your shirt. I am quite pleased with the result.”
He wasn’t going to argue with her astonishing success in staring down that peculiar prairie wolf, who was either unusually cowardly or remarkably wise. He himself remembered that discretion was the better part of valor and concluded that he didn’t want to mess with her while she was in this mood any more than did, perhaps, the wolf. Nor did he think it wise to comment on the brilliantly hued bird that now adorned his shirt, so he put that piece of clothing on in silence.
At the moment he decided it was time to find some food and moved away from his tree, he was jumped on from behind. Writhing vigorously, he put his attackers to the test before his mouth was gagged and his arms were wrenched and tied behind his back. In his twisting and turning, he was able to see that Miss Harris had been set upon by three men, Indians by their dress and hair, and that she was being bound and gagged, as well. Their eyes met briefly. Hers flashed with surprise and terror. Raging against his helplessness, he redoubled his efforts, but he did not effect his release, since he had determined that not three but rather four men were holding him.
He strained to catch words or phrases from the language the Indians were speaking to one another. They hadn’t said enough for him to know whether the Teton Sioux had finally caught up with him, and he hadn’t had a close enough look at the warriors following him three days before to know whether they were the same ones now. All he could think was that either he had been careless and had led them straight to the camp or the prairie wolf had somehow alerted them to this human hiding place.
However the Indians had tracked them down, he and Miss Harris were in