A horrific scream reverberated through the night air. The unexpected cry halted an entire troop of bone-weary cavalry soldiers in their tracks.

Lieutenant Winslow Brighton reined his chestnut Morgan tight.

“Shhhh, Blaze,” he whispered as he reached forward and cupped his fingers over the horse’s nostrils for silence. The animal stood alert, awaiting its master’s next command.

“What the hell was that, sir?” the man on his right whispered.

“I don’t know, Sergeant Major. Whatever it was, it can’t be good.”

Lieutenant Brighton looked ahead across the moonlit landscape in the direction where the unnerving sound had emanated. The hair on the back of his neck still prickled from the eerie call. The tortured scream was unnerving beyond anything he had ever heard.

He attempted to pinpoint the source of the cry. The moonlight displayed unrealistic shadows across the low, rolling desert hills of northern Nevada territory. Scrub juniper and sagebrush took on low images of danger. A tumbleweed brushed by, in an abrupt gust of wind from the rear, bumping Blaze’s fetlock and causing the animal to sidestep nervously.

“Easy, Blaze.” Damned Washoe Zephyr. Never knew when a gust would blow.

The pungent, fresh-ground-pepper smell of the sagebrush, after a brief summer shower, tingled the nostrils of man and beast. God, he hated this job of scouring out pockets of renegade Paiutes! He never knew when a rampaging Indian might leap from the underbrush to ambush them.

Isn’t it enough that the entire population of an incoming wagon train was slaughtered earlier in the day? What were the savages up to now?

Seeing no evidence of the enemy nearby, the lieutenant looked at the stars searching for clouds that might block the moon. The stars are the one redeeming quality of this country. On those rare occasions when he had leisure time to study them, he felt as if they were so close he could nearly touch them. Tonight, they served only as a guide. In the middle of the desert, under a full moon, with those bright stars giving him his bearings, Winslow Brighton braced his legs against his horse’s sides. His tall, slim body stiffened in the stirrups, hoisting himself higher off his saddle, he strained to see farther in the pale light. He held his breath, listening for any noise, watching for any movement.

The clumps of irregular sagebrush could easily hide an unfriendly Indian. The distorted shadows the moonlight cast from the brush didn’t help matters.

Did savages surround the entire detachment? Maybe the scream was a diversion.

Lieutenant Winslow Brighton was not a conventional officer. He would not send a man on a dangerous mission that he would not attempt himself. He knew it was regulation to stay and command the troop. And, although he had attended Officers Training School and understood the rules well, he preferred to take his own risks and leave someone else behind in temporary command.

He settled back into his saddle, leaned sideways and whispered to the sergeant major next to him, “Ride back, quietly, and tell the men to stay here. I’ll take Jackson and scout up ahead.”

Jackson was a large, muscular man who had proven himself to be unbeatable in previous battles. Lieutenant Brighton knew he could depend on him to think on his feet and, although he made a big target, he was agile and wily. Just the type of man he wanted at his side in a pinch.

“You man the troops and wait until one of us returns. If we’re not back by sunup, send someone for reinforcements.”

“Maybe it was a big cat, sir,” the sergeant major said. “Heard tell they scream like a woman in pain.”

“Yeah,” the handsome, dark-haired, blue-eyed lieutenant answered with a catch in his voice. They could only hope it was a wild animal. Too vividly he remembered the silent wagon train they had inspected a half-day’s ride back in the Forty Mile Desert.

“Chances are better it was someone that the Indians took with them from that wagon train we inspected.”

The sergeant major turned to pass his superior’s orders along. The lieutenant watched him hesitate at each group of two men in the line behind them. While he waited, he studied his reasons for being in what he was beginning to believe was godforsaken country.

He had joined the California militia when he was a very young man. Stationed near his hometown along the Mexican border, he had been able to return to finer things at home occasionally. But he was bored. When the opportunity arose for him to transfer to the silver country, the Washoe area, the adventure was too much for him to resist.

He knew a good many of the other men who joined up were nothing more than Indian hating zealots. When he was appointed his own command, he handpicked his men closest to him, rejecting the inhumane, and retaining the good ones. Anyone who didn’t measure up soon slid through the cracks to another unit, or those that survived and disobeyed orders deserted or were court marshaled. Either way, he would not tolerate inhumanity toward the natives. He did his job, but he did it with honor.

His regiment was charged with protecting the Pony Express, the Overland Stage and the travelers along the Overland Trail from renegade Indians—Indians irate at the intrusion of the white settlers on their homeland. Many natives watched and went hungry as the pinion trees that bore nuts for their winter supplies were destroyed to provide timbering in the white man’s holes in the ground—the mines of Virginia City, Gold Hill and Silver City.

Tired of starving, and having their women attacked by miners, warring young men struck back, creating their own justice. They hoped beyond hope to drive the settlers from their land.

In a way, Winslow Brighton couldn’t blame them. He’d be hard-pressed to understand someone taking over his home and family, too. The lieutenant turned to see the sergeant major approaching with Jackson following behind. He set his jaw in determination.

“Remember, Sergeant Major, I said sunup.”

“Yes, sir.”

Not only was the responsibility his to save the immigrants and settlers, his unit was also involved in building Fort Churchill for the settlers’ future protection. No matter how hard they fought, the Paiutes have already lost the battle. They were far outnumbered by the settlers and cavalry. Should they somehow succeed in their attempts to destroy a farm, a way station, or a wagon train now and then, there were many more people moving behind the others. As the settlers’ population grew, the cavalry would swell its ranks from other units in California, or one of the territories, until the Indians were obliterated, or at least beaten down to a manageable size. Whether he survived to see it or not, Lieutenant Brighton knew, in his heart, the white man would eventually control this rough country. Why they wanted it was beyond him. Except for the riches under Mount Davidson, it seemed good for nothing to him.

The lieutenant moved his horse into position to join the approaching rider. Side by side, Winslow Brighton—Win, as his two older brothers had called him—and the sturdily built Tom Jackson headed their horses through the sagebrush in the direction of the scream.

Although it seemed they had come a long way, they had ridden only a short distance when a horse nickered ahead of them. Win heard the animal’s mane flap in the air as it shook its head. The horse whinnied at the sound of their approach.

The two men studied the brush and rolling hills, at last seeing the shape of the animal in the moonlight.

“Maybe it’s been abandoned, sir,” Jackson whispered.

“Or it’s a trap,” Win whispered back. “If we ride over to see what’s going on, we’re liable to be in a nest of savages.”

They sat their mounts and studied the situation.

Slowly, the horse moved toward them, then it stopped and began nibbling low grasses.

Win pulled his pistol and cocked it.

Tom Jackson squinted, trying to get a better look in the dim light.

“No rider, sir. No saddle—or bridle.”

“Could be there’s an Indian hanging off the other side,” Win said. He knew he couldn’t be too cautious. If we let our guard down we could end up dead.

“Do you s’pose this is where the scream came from?” Jackson asked, still keeping his anxious voice low.

“Maybe. We’ll have to check it out. Watch your back as we ride in.”

As they cautiously approached the horse, a figure slowly showed itself from behind a juniper tree.

“Thank God, you’re cavalry,” a coarse whisper greeted them out of the night. “I’m Claude Stewart—wagon train scout.”

“Lieutenant Brighton and Private Jackson, here,” Win said keeping his voice low in case the enemy might be near. “You from the wagon train we found a few miles back?”

“Yeah,” the man said, his voice tinged with sadness. He was near enough now for the two cavalrymen to make out his form next to the horse as he rubbed its nose. “I was out checking the distance to Asa Kenyon’s place at the river. When I returned, well, if you saw the train, you know there wasn’t much left.”

Win nodded again. “I left a detail to bury your people.”

“They weren’t all dead when I got back. I found Mr. O’Connell breathin’ his last. He managed to tell me they were attacked by a small band of Indians led by a fella that looked different than the others.”

Stewart remembered the dying man clutching the front of his shirt and reached toward his chest with his own hand as if he still felt the pressure of O’Connell’s bloody fingers gripping the thick cotton fabric.

“With his dying breath he told me they took his daughter, Laura,” Stewart said, remembering the old man’s words.

“‘Find her,’ O’Connell begged me. ‘Find her before those savages—’ O’Connell’s words stopped and I pried his fingers from my shirt,” Stewart continued, remembering the gruesome site of the wagon train and O’Connell’s head dropping back, eyes staring into the distance from which he had come. “I laid his body there on the desert floor with the rest of ’em. Didn’t have time to bury anybody—not if I had any hope of finding the girl—leastwise, findin’ her alive.”

“Too bad, too,” Stewart continued. “She was a pretty thing. Brightest red hair I ever did see. Didn’t weigh much more than a small sack of potatoes. Had a temper, that one. It’d be my guess, if them heathens haven’t killed her already, they’ll have a fight on their hands.”

“We heard a scream. That’s why we’re out here,” Win told the scout.

“Yeah, I heard it, too. Maybe they ain’t killed her...yet. By the description O’Connell gave of the one Indian, I’d bet he’s that renegade Apache the Paiutes call Angry Bear. Understand he was banished from his own tribe and’s carvin’ a place for himself out here.”

“He took a Paiute woman for his wife. Shortly after she birthed a baby boy, a couple o’ drunk miners caught her off by herself at the river and took off with the two of them. Angry Bear’s been stirring some of the young Paiutes up ever since.”

“Anyways, I picked up their trail from the wagon train and been tracking them. My horse stepped in a gopher hole and went lame on me. I dropped his gear off him. Figured I’d go on afoot, if need be.” The man was standing next to Blaze now, looking up at Win.

“Hop up behind Jackson. We can’t go very fast anyway. If what we’ve got is a hostage situation, an extra gun could come in handy,” Win said.

Claude Stewart reached up and grasped Jackson’s arm above his offered hand. Arms interlocked, Jackson kicked a foot from the stirrup so Stewart could insert his boot toe and boost himself up.

When Stewart was seated behind the saddle on the edge of the blanket, he shook his head and studied his horse briefly.

“Sure hate to leave a good animal like that wandering around loose. The Paiutes will pick him up, sure. They’ll either get him healed up or eat him.”

* * * *

She had not meant to scream.

She had determined, after seeing her mother killed and her father wounded, that nothing these savages did would elicit an emotion from her. She wondered about her aunt and uncle in Virginia City who would get the word that the family had been massacred.

Thank God Jimmy stayed behind at Salt Lake to help with the next wagon train.

She gritted her teeth and closed her eyes, praying silently as the warrior’s knife burned against her hairline. Already he had knocked the tightly knotted bun of her hair loose and twisted his fingers in the long, fine strands of loose curls. When he yanked her head back, she felt her neck would break. It had been a reflex to open her mouth and let the horrendous shriek escape.

Oh God! Oh God, don’t let me feel the pain. Let him kill me first. Let him stab me or shoot me—use any method of death that is quick!

She smelled the metallic stench of death—of blood on unwashed bodies fresh from the kill. The campfire illuminated the bare-chested warriors around her. Flames flickered light across encircling, reed-constructed hovels.

The camp was hidden among the low rolling hills near a small pool of water that was surrounded by a huge valley created by the evaporation of an ancient lake. No one would find her here, she was sure. And, if they did, by then she would surely be dead.

She twisted in the Indian’s grasp and kicked out at his bare legs, trying to make him fall and loosen the grip he held on her. She heard the rattle of heavy beads, which served as a belt to hold his breechcloth in place and hung on loose leather thongs from his waist. They issued a warning akin to a rattlesnake.

He was the one that had ripped her away from her father’s side as she bent over him to check his wound. Surely, without her help, he was dead now, along with her mother. If that were her fate, also, she would not die easily, she vowed, and gritted her teeth against the pain.

“Yi. Yi. Yi. Yi.” A shrill screech preceded the sound of pounding hooves of a running horse.

Laura lurched in her tormentor’s grip to look in surprise as another Indian rode pell-mell into camp. He leaped from his horse before it stopped and roughly clutched the first Indian’s hand to stay the knife.

“Angry Bear, release her!” The newcomer demanded in words she didn’t understand.

Angry Bear yanked his other hand to untangle his fingers from Laura O’Connell’s fire-red hair, plucking thin strands, caught in his bloody knuckles, from her head as he prepared to struggle with his opponent.

Her knees weak, Laura dropped to the ground and doubled up from a sharp pain in her stomach as she wretched and nearly fainted. Fight it. She struggled to stay alert and quell the queasy feeling threatening to engulf her. Sweat broke out on her forehead and she felt an icy chill run down her spine.

She and her attacker had been near the campfire during their battle over her scalp, and she felt the heat add to her agony where she lay. A stick of wood popped and splattered sparks across her blue-and-white-checkered gingham dress.

She was too weak to move, too exhausted to care what happened to her clothes. Her mind swam back and forth, in and out of darkness as a noise roared in her ears, fluctuating like a steam vessel about to pop its safety valve.

Abruptly, more words she didn’t understand spewed forth as the Indian that had stopped her assailant spit emphasized syllables in the other’s face.

“She’s not the one that took your wife and baby! Do not take revenge by hanging her scalp outside your lodge as your badge of honor. It is bad medicine and will only bring you shame and sorrow.”

Slowly, Angry Bear dropped his knife to his side.

The voice went on.

“We have better things to do with her,” the second Indian said as a way of persuasion.

While the two Indians discussed her plight, Laura steadied her shaking body, gathered her courage and tried to inch her way on her hands and knees toward the darkness of the camp’s perimeter. Nearby, just outside the lighted area, one member of the raiding party secured the horses in the shadows. Still others assisted injured warriors to their shelters where the women anxiously assessed their wounds.

If I could just edge away from the firelight, away from the confusion, perhaps I could escape. She crept ever so quietly toward the outer circle of the camp, avoiding the busiest section near the ponies.

The Indian that had stopped Angry Bear’s knife turned slightly in her direction. She hoped his gaze was not close enough to notice her gradual retreat.

Suddenly, he was on top of her, stomping the full skirt of her dress, as he shouted words she didn’t understand. Then, she felt his large hands repeatedly slapping her gingham-covered body.

She heard a single unfamiliar word as he shouted and pointed to her dress.

She looked toward the hem of her dress where the smoldering coals burst into flames. The smell of scorched cotton fabric reached her nostrils as the heat from the flames licked toward her body. Quickly, the Indian rolled her across the ground, using the fine granite dirt to extinguish the flames.

Why is he helping me? Why didn’t he just let me burn to death? Then the realization that she had just escaped a horrendous, painful injury, if not death itself, jarred her further.

When he was certain the fire was out, the Indian tied her wrists together with rawhide cord, leaving the strands loose enough to allow some comfort. He effortlessly sank a spear into the ground nearby and tied the other end of the leather strap to it. He gave her a warning look and spoke words she didn’t comprehend. But she understood the look in his eyes commanding her to stay put.

He turned to finish his conversation with Angry Bear.

“When I returned here to our main camp and found only the frail elders, the women and the children, I was angry that you took the young men and left the people unprotected.

“You knew I would not ride with you, today because I do not believe any good will come from this bloodshed. I felt I would be too late to stop the killing, but I had to try. By the time I caught up with you, the white people were already dead.” He remembered the scene before him as he crested the hill in search of his easily led brothers, who had gone to share the taste of Angry Bear’s revenge.

Brave Eagle had tracked Angry Bear and the small band of renegades along the well-defined trail they left. He reached a low divide in the hills and stared south. The trail he studied was centered between the distant mountains a few miles from the place the white men called Ragtown Station. It was the spot where the wagon trains first found fresh water at the Carson River after their difficult trip through the great desert. There, just short of the wagon train’s salvation, his brothers had struck so quickly, the travelers hadn’t even had time to circle the wagons.

Brave Eagle remembered sitting alone on his horse on the windy ridge looking down on the devastation in the desert before him. The only sounds he heard were the forlorn whine of the wind whipping a mournful refrain across the canvas-covered bows on the wagons, and the bellowing of still-harnessed animals smelling water on the breeze and crying to be set free from their traces to quench their thirst. He saw no movement except feathers—goose feathers from a slashed mattress—swirling like snowflakes across the desert floor. As he had surveyed the sight below him, he doubted he could have stopped the raiding party from attacking, even if he had reached them in time.

He sensed, too, like the flow of blood his brothers created, they could not stop the stream of settlers encroaching upon their land.

“It is done! Now, stay out of this, Brave Eagle.” Angry Bear nodded toward the girl. “I have claimed her. I will do as I wish with her.”

Laura realized they were discussing her fate by the quick glances they darted in her direction. She concentrated her attention on her abductor, comparing the strength of the two men. If they fought, who would win? If this challenging Indian persists, will I be set free? She only dared to hope.

Then firelight glinted off a small gold chain Angry Bear had removed from the waist of his breechcloth where he had kept it tucked safely away. Laura recognized the gold cross hanging from the clenched fist he shoved in the other Indian’s face.

“She means no more to me than this white man’s trinket,” Angry Bear shouted. “She is one of them whether or not she had anything to do with my loss. She is yet of their tribe—the white man.” He spat into the fire with disgust.

Hatred like Laura had never known before surged within her. He had her mother’s cross! She would know it anywhere. Now, the chain was broken where he had yanked it from her mother’s neck. He had been the one who killed her mother.

She pushed herself up from the ground, determined to kill him in return, with her bare hands and teeth if necessary, but the tether held fast and she fell back against the hard-packed earth with a thud.

* * * *

While the Indians argued, Winslow Brighton, Claude Stewart and Tom Jackson watched anxiously from the dark shadows of the tulle weeds and brush rimming the encampment. Win motioned to the other two men to stay hidden while he puzzled over a plan of attack. They were there with very little ammunition to protect them, let alone take on a band of renegades, fresh from the kill, with excitement still pumping rampant through their veins.

He counted the Indians.

Eight.

There were eight Indians in all, including the wounded. There were five able-bodied men and three with various degrees of injury. He sensed the two that stood arguing next to the now glowing embers of the campfire were the most apt to give them the toughest fight. Win acknowledged they were outnumbered nearly three to one. How are we going to get one girl away from eight renegade warriors?

The numbers just didn’t add up.