Page 69 of My Heart Will Find You

After what seemed like an eternity, he came back up on the pony and the bull went down. Etta breathed again, her heart in her throat.

When she looked back, all the women were watching her.

Etta reacted in an age-old way. She grinned in pride and patted her heart. Her gesture said, “He’s mine!”

The women laughed. They fully understood. They went back to preparing food for the tribe.

It was a while later when she heard Max’s voice. He was shouting at her. She stood up, her hand to her aching lower back, and smiled at him. He looked really, really good. She made a gesture to indicate herself. She couldn’t imagine how bad she looked. She was covered in blood and tallow and hair.

“Go! Go!” Max was yelling and riding toward her.

“Not yet,” she shouted back, but a buffalo walked in front of him, and he turned to avoid running into it. She went back to work. Who cared about rescuing Wyatt Earp when feeding people was involved? She couldn’t leave yet.

In the next second, she was picked up. Not nicely, not painlessly, but by her hair and her shoulder, and she was slammed across the spine of a horse. She got a mouthful of dirty horsehair.

The animal didn’t slow down for minutes, then she was pushed off and landed hard on her backside in dirt that had been churned up by thousands of buffalo.

She assumed it was Max. “What the hell are you doing?” she said, then looked up at the man towering above her on a horse. The face was so very familiar! “Lester,” she whispered.

Sometimes you met strangers and felt you knew them. This was the case. He also recognized her. Not as Henrietta Wilmont from the future, but as a spiritual connection. Kindred souls. He looked great! Resplendent. He had on buckskin, beads, feathers, and best of all, face paint.

His face had been divided diagonally, half of it painted a very dark brown.

They were staring at each other in silent recognition when Max rode up, dirt and manure flying. “You were almost killed!” he yelled as he jumped down before the pony stopped. “I told you to move but you didn’t obey. Youneverobey.”

Etta looked around him and up at Lester. She knew his sense of humor. He’d say that a man yelling at a woman out of fear was true love. She stepped away from Max, removed the Celtic symbol from around her neck, and handed it up to Lester.

He took it, then removed a beaded necklace, and handed it down to her.

She smiled at him, he nodded, then he rode away. He looked downright majestic.

“What the hell was that?” Max demanded. He sounded jealous.

“Spiritual bonding? I have to finish this.”

“You are the only woman still working. We have to go. The others are nearly here.”

She knew he meant the Cheyenne and the hunters. She tried to orient herself. With no GPS it wasn’t easy to figure out directions, but she thought she was facing north. “Who are they?”

Max looked in that direction. There were more painted men on horseback. “Pawnee.” His voice was quiet and deadly. “We will be caught in a war. And we are the enemy of all of them.” In the next minute, they were bareback on the pony. It was smaller and leaner than Max’s well-fed horses.

“Stay down,” he said as he led them to the side, as out of sight as he could manage.

It took a while but he got them back to their horses, still tied at the top of the hill, munching away, and quite peacefully happy.

13

After being bareback on a skinny pony, sitting atop Daisy and a saddle felt like being on a lounge recliner. Why had she ever complained about it?

As they rode through the warm Kansas night, Etta finally relaxed. Her weary muscles quit aching, her head fell forward, and she went to asleep. She woke once to see that Max was leading her horse. She smiled. He always took care of her.

The next time she woke, he was pulling her off the horse. She snuggled in his arms. He was bare chested. Lovely! She closed her eyes.

“No, you don’t,” he said. “You have to have a bath. You smell so bad I think wolves are following us.”

“I just want to sleep.”

“So do they with their bellies full of careless people. Get undressed.”

---