Page 14 of Sure as Shooting

Chapter Six

“Huntley!”

“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. Hunt 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. 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—”