Daughter of the Sword (7 page)

“Thank you, Mrs. Whitlaw,” said Dane, bowing. “One's national anthem always sounds sweetest when in another country. But it grows late. We mustn't infringe longer on your hospitality.”

“Just one last song.” Josiah rested his hand on his wife's shoulder. “Letty, will you play Mr. Whittier's “Hymn of the Kansas Emigrant?”

Deborah's clear voice rose above her father's and Thos's in this rousing song that had thrilled her since she'd first heard it back in the east.

“We'll seek the rolling prairie,

 In regions yet unseen …”

They were into the second stanza when a clamor of barking arose, reaching a frenzy as hoofbeats pounded up to the door.

“Come out, Whitlaw!” a hoarse voice yelled into the shocked silence. “Show yourself, you damned abolitionist, or we'll burn you out!”

Mother caught his arm. “Don't Josiah! They may shoot you down!”

“Do you have weapons?” asked Dane beneath his breath.

“Just an old shotgun,” whispered Thos.

“Load it,” ordered Dane.

Josiah called to the men outside, his voice steady, though his lips seemed bloodless.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

“Never you mind who I am, you blue-bellied Free-Soiler! I want my nigger wench!”

Leticia rose swiftly and went to the door, though her husband tried to stop her. “She's not here, and this is most discourteous of you, brawling up to our home, threatening us! Would you like your own families treated so?”

“By God, ma'am, we don't war on women if they act like women!” growled the leader. “It's your man we want to see!”

“I'll go,” Josiah said, but Dane caught his arm.

The intruders sat in their saddles beyond the light from the house, surrounded by the barking hounds. It was impossible to see them, but from the squeak of saddles and shifting hooves, there seemed to be at least four or five.

Rolf muttered, “Keep them talking! I'll climb out a back window and get my rifle from the saddle scabbard. Dane, you'll be ready here?”

“You mustn't risk yourselves,” Josiah began, but Dane grinned at his brother.

“I'll be ready.”

Josiah put Leticia out of the doorway. “You see me, stranger. Will you step into the light so you can be seen?”

“I'll step into your house is what I'll do, 'cause I think you've got my Judith hid away.”

“Look for yourself,” said Josiah.

There was the groan of a saddle. “Sit tight, boys, but cut loose with your guns if you see anything funny. We can do for this Yankee like we did for that Free-Soil scum yesterday at Marais des Cygnes.”

“Marais des Cygnes?” echoed Josiah, as a tall, raw-boned man with scraggly black hair and beard strode across the patch of light and loomed in the doorway. Dane had stepped into the bedroom with the shotgun. “What've you done?”

“You'll want to print it in your filthy paper, won't you?” The gangling man smelled of whisky. The leather thong around his neck usually meant an Arkansas toothpick hung on the other end. He had a pistol at either side and another knife sheathed at his belt. Thrusting his face close to Father's, he shifted his cud of tobacco and laughed.

“Ain't you the lucky one, gettin' it straight from the horse's mouth?”

“What?”

The stranger was enjoying his game. He cocked his head and gave Deborah a randy look before he grinned at the elder Whitlaws. “You've heard tell of Cap'n Charles Hambleton? Fine gent from Georgia, settled in southeast Kansas and got run out by you damned Free-Soilers.”

“I heard Captain Hambleton was charged with horse-stealing,” Josiah said grimly.

“You must hear plenty of lies to fill your rag so full of 'em! But those Free-Soilers who drove the Cap'n out of his place ain't laughin' much now!”

“What have you done, man?”

“I just kind of lucked into it,” the black-haired intruder said modestly. “Me an' my friends here were chasin' that damned Judith when we met up with the Cap'n and a few dozen other spunky Missouri lads. When they said what they were doin', we just naturally had to throw in.”

Josiah's voice slashed like a blade. “What did you do?”

“Why, the Cap'n had a list of the worst Free-Soil rascals. We rounded up eleven, then herded 'em into a gulch that runs into the Marais des Cygnes River. When the Cap'n gave the order, we shot the bastards down.”

“You killed eleven unarmed men?”

“Six look like dyin', and five dead,” preened the killer. He chuckled at the Whitlaws' horror, adding truculently, “Ain't it exactly five unarmed men your goddamned abolitionist John Brown cutlassed to death at Pottawatomie Creek two years ago?”

“If you read my paper, you'd know what I thought about that!”

The Missourian spat on the floor. “Don't signify what you think, Yankee! Just keep out of my way whilst I look for that high-yaller!”

A glance convinced him no one could hide in this room. He ducked to enter the bedroom, then gave an astounded grunt as a shotgun poked into his belly.

“Have your look,” Dane commanded. “I've killed too many men to want another on my soul, even as sorry a one as you. I want you to see for yourself the girl's not here. Then if you
do
come back, I promise that I'll kill you.”

The Missourian's jaw dropped. “Who in hell are
you
—some new breed of Yankee? Cain't hardly make out a word you say!”

“Try,” Dane said, shifting the barrel slowly around to his captive's back. “Go ahead! Look under the bed and in the chest and behind the curtain. Then you can search the lean-to, the stables, and, if you like, the chicken coop!”

“My boys'll cut you down in your tracks the minute we step outside!”

“Will they?” Dane laughed harshly. “Too bad for you, then, since a shot from them means I blast you wide open.”

The night rider seemed to understand
that.
Jumpily glancing over his shoulder at Dane, he bent for a perfunctory glance under the bed. Deborah held the lamp so he could see, then pulled aside the curtain so he could tell there was nothing there but her bed and nothing beneath it.

Dane, receiving a nod of consent from Leticia, lifted the chest lid to reveal tight-packed bedding and clothes.

“Satisfied?” he demanded.

The scraggly man nodded. “Cap'n Hambleton was sure the gal would be brought here if'n she was helped by some gang of nigger-stealers. But maybe she slipped off on her own. She got sweet on my best buck.” A leer showed stained, broken teeth. “It was interferin' with her duties, so I sold him off. She took on worse'n a white woman, and a lady, at that! Took a butcher knife to me when I was tryin' to comfort her. I reckoned a whippin' would settle her down. Wouldn't have thought she could move for a couple of days, but she sneaked off that night.” He shifted his cud. “Looks like you don't have her, Whitlaw. Me an' the boys'll mosey along.”

Dane said to Josiah Whitlaw, “Shouldn't we turn these men in to the law? By this one's own boast, he's done murder.”

Leticia laid her hand on Josiah's arm. “You can't let him go; he'll track down that poor woman!”

“What
can
we do?” Josiah said, tormented. “If we turn them over to the militia, they'll be lynched—provided we could capture them to start with! But if they go to trial, with a pro-slave judge sworn to uphold the slave code foisted on us by the Bogus Legislature, they'll be acquitted.”

Dane spoke slowly. “You're saying there's no justice in this Territory? No legal way that this man will be tried and punished?”

Josiah shook his head. Deborah knew he was thinking of the dead and wounded at Marais des Cygnes, felt with him a great wave of grief, outrage, the need for vengeance, yet the shrinking from becoming judge and executioner. Deborah knew her father was struggling, praying for guidance.

Should he loose this man who killed wantonly, beat women, hunted them as he would animals?

“I'll see to him,” Dane said abruptly.

Deborah's breath flowed out in relief.

The man would die. But the deed wouldn't be on Father's head, or his to do. Dane was a soldier; he'd killed before, killed men who were doubtless infinitely better than this wretch. She couldn't have killed him herself unless he were attacking, but thinking of a fugitive colored girl, thinking of eleven men taken from their families and murdered, as Father might have been tonight if the Englishmen hadn't been here, Deborah felt no pity for the Missourian.

“Jed!” came a shout from outside. “What's takin' you so long? If'n you found your gal, you ought to pass her around!”

“Say you'll be out in a minute,” Dane grated.

The man obeyed in a hoarse croak. His burned-coal eyes darted wildly from Josiah to the women and Thos. But Leticia was already confronting Dane.

“You mustn't do it,” she said, “for your own sake more than his.”

“What then, madam?” Dane's eyes were as cold as a winter storm sky.

Something passed between the determined man and the fragile older woman, something of spirit and will, love and courage. “Leave him to God, son.”

“God?” cried Thos. “How can you talk of God and this … this …”

“Enough, Thomas!” Josiah laid a hand on his son's shoulder. It was the first time Deborah could remember hearing her brother called by his proper name within the family. Still, Josiah seemed released from some vision of inevitable apocalyptic terror as he turned to Dane. “My wife is right, Mr. Hunter. Since we can't bring him to man's justice, we must leave him to the judge of us all.”

Dane's gaze flicked to Deborah, as if he were trying to read her thoughts. Then, facing the elder Whitlaws, he gave a brief nod. “It's yours to decide. But Rolf and I will escort these men far enough to discourage them from coming back here.” He added to the trembling Missourian, “Remember what I promised earlier: if you come back, you die.”

“I'm not comin' back!” The man's craggy Adam's apple bobbed up and down. “The law can hunt my nigger like it's supposed to do; I don't aim to get shot by some funny talkin' furriner!”

Reprieved, he was looking jauntier. Deborah thought she read his mind. “You can't follow this gang, Mr. Hunter!” she protested. “You're outnumbered. They'll start an uproar in the dark and kill you.”

“Not if we have their guns and knives.”

He smiled at her without mockery for the first time. An amused tenderness in his eyes and voice that startled Deborah reached into her heart with a thrill of joyful recognition so powerful that it hurt. She knew this man! She knew him in her depths, as if they had been two halves of Plato's sundered being and couldn't be content till reunited.

It was a magical high moment, everything else in suspension, till Dane turned to Thos. “Will you collect their weapons in some kind of sack? We'll deposit them in some deep, muddy stream. These gentlemen will go home with their fangs properly pulled.”

“You cain't take our guns!” Jed's Adam's apple seemed about to disappear down his scrawny throat. “After this morning's business, those Free-Soilers'll be riled up like a den of rattlers! If we meet up with them, we'll be helpless as babes!”

“Like the men you killed,” said Dane brusquely. And to Thos, he asked, “Are you ready?”

Thos nodded, having found the sack in which cornmeal was brought home from the mill. Mother looked at it with regret, but evidently she decided it couldn't go to better use, as Thos took Jed's knives and pistols and dropped them into it.

“My brother's in the stable with a rifle,” Dane told Jed. “So we'll walk out in companionable fashion, you a little in front so this persuasive shotgun won't show, and if your friends regard your life, they'll hand over their arms.”

Jed cast him a scared, venomous look but didn't argue. At a prod of the shotgun, he started to go outside. “Keep away from the door and windows,” Dane warned the Whitlaws. “Somebody may get off a shot.”

Obeying, Deborah stood with her parents to one side of the door, nerves screaming as the men's footsteps faded into the mingled sounds of restless horses and riders.

“Good evening, gentlemen!” Dane's voice was deep and pleasant. “Don't do anything sudden or Jed will have a large hole through his vitals. You won't be hurt if you do as you're told. Put your hands over your heads and keep them there. Rolf, why don't you step out so our guests will know you've a rifle to their backs—a Sharps breech-loader, gentlemen, with which I'm sure you're familiar!”

“One of Beecher's Bibles, compliments of that infernal New England Emigrant Aid Society!” growled one raider.

“Not at all,” said Rolf. “I bought this pride and joy with my own money. Picked off a brace of rabbits today at up to five hundred yards.”

There were metallic clinkings and muffled curses as the weapons were collected. Deborah began to breathe. It was working! In a moment the Missourians would be on their way.

A shot exploded. Oaths, the sound of plunging horses, two shots blasting almost at once, screams, a cry of agony. Both Whitlaw women started out, but Josiah caught them back, pushing them to the floor.

“Thos—he isn't armed!” Deborah cried.

“He can use something from the bag,” Father said grimly. “Stay here! I'll go through the back window.”

Casting about for a weapon, he seized the poker and vanished through the bedroom. More shots came from outside, anguished groaning, before the staccato hoofbeats of a galloping horse echoed back, dimming as they reached open prairie.

Lying on the rough planks, mother and daughter stared at each other, then sprang up as Josiah leaned in the door. “Bring the lamp! Young Mr. Hunter's hurt. One of the ruffians got away, but Thos had his guns.”