Jack Iron (9 page)

Kit tried the door. The latch turned under pressure and the door gave way. Kit eased it open and slipped into the room, pausing to allow himself to become accustomed to the room’s dark interior. After a few moments he felt confident to move away from the doors.

The bedroom was comfortably appointed with padded chairs and japanned end tables to either side of the bed. And the bed… an ornate piece of furniture that looked as heavy as a trireme. The frame was of solid mahogany, with tapered posts at each corner that supported a ruffed canopy of amber-colored cotton panels trimmed with embroidered roses and daffodils and magnolia blossoms.

Kit glimpsed a huddled form wrapped in blankets and sheet and burrowed in a nest beneath the quilt that Olivia LeBeouf had herself sewn from a box of cloth scraps she stored beneath her bed and guarded as a miser would his gold. Quilting was another of the widow’s passions.

Kit stole quietly to the bedside and then, leaning down, reached around the sleeping form to take Raven in his arms. Behind him a shape detached itself from the dark side of a chiffonnier and darted toward the unwary intruder. And as Kit discovered he had embraced nothing more than a pillow and a rolled-up blanket, the point of a knife dug into his side.

“I saw you in the garden,” Raven whispered in his ear.

“I never made a sound.”

“No matter. I knew you would be coming. I saw it in a dream.”

Kit sighed. Raven and her dreams were an inexplicable phenomenon. Her mother, the woman Iron Hand had taken to wife, had been a revered medicine woman among the Choctaw. Great powers had been attributed to her. She had been a seer and healer among the tribe, who had held her in great esteem and mourned her untimely death. Despite the mix of bloodlines that flowed through Raven’s veins, it was said, she had inherited the gifts of her mother. Kit was a firm realist, but from time to time, Raven’s skills and knowledge left him completely baffled. There was a part of her world he would never understand or be one with which made his longing for her even more poignant. Whatever part of her life she could give him was enough for Kit McQueen.

“You ruined my dress,” Raven said. “And you embarrassed me in front of Olivia’s guests.” She increased the pressure on the knife. The man winced but did not move. “What do you think your punishment ought to be?”

“A good flogging might be in order,” Kit suggested.

“Too public.”

“You could press home on the knife and carve out my liver.”

“Not painful enough.”

“Ah… you want to cause me pain.”

“Right you are, dear lad. Now you’ve said it.”

“Well, then, tell me to leave and never return. Tell me you will never forgive me for being a jealous fool.” Kit turned and sat on the bed. Raven wore a flannel robe and her long black tresses flowed down across her shoulders and fell to her waist. She smelled of lilac and rosewater. Kit ached to take her in his arms and lose himself in the wild abandonment of their lovemaking.

“I thought of that. Only one thing stopped me,” said Raven.

“What?”

“I couldn’t bear the pain.” She sighed. “I suppose I should be grateful you were finally paying attention even if you nearly drowned me in the process.”

“Then I am forgiven?”

Raven pushed him back onto the bed and straddled his lower limbs with her tawny thighs. “I’ll let you know.” She bowed forward and a cascade of her soft black hair spilled over him. “Come morning.” She kissed him and lost herself to the fire in his flesh and the magic in her heart.

“W
HERE THE DEVIL IS
he?” Iron Hand O’Keefe growled, looking over his shoulder and checking their back trail. Kit turned in the saddle and checked the surrounding woods for some sign of the eight-year-old rascal whose mission in life had something to do with being a thorn in O’Keefe’s side. Neither McQueen nor Raven could spy any movement among the oak trees. It was a cold sunny day, and the forest was a patchwork of slanting shadows that could have provided concealment for an entire war party, much less a tan and sandy will-o’-the-wisp named Johnny Fuller.

O’Keefe scowled and rubbed the back of his neck. “Curse it, even when he ain’t with me, he’s with me.

“Grumble all you want, but the lad’s adulation pleases you no end.” Raven grinned and winked at Kit, who rode at her side ahead of her disgruntled father.

“Adulation… why, girl, it’s a plague. The scamp pops up when I least expect it. Every time I turn around or strike out on my own, there he comes, sure as the sunrise. Never seen a pup move so quietlike. I swear he’s got Choctaw blood in his veins, or worse, Creek. Now, them redsticks can sneak up on a man and slit his throat while he’s clearing to spit. But we took their measure at Horse Shoe Bend.”

O’Keefe chuckled, and straightened his great girth in the saddle. He glanced up at the cloudless sky that looked blue as ice and thought to himself how good it was to be alive. His gaze settled on the couple riding a few yards ahead of him on the way to the Choctaw encampment north of New Orleans. His heart swelled with affection. Look at them, Star Basket, he said to himself, carrying on an internal dialogue with the medicine woman he had taken to wife and who had borne him a special daughter. Raven had filled his days with joy and given him a reason to go on living after the untimely death of his Choctaw bride. She’s as pretty as a morning star and got your courage. Aye, and I’m thinking there’s more here than I can see. She has the gift. These dreams and such. The way she seems to be able to see the spirit in things like some I seen in the old country, them who were blessed by the little people and given a second sight. O’Keefe shook his head in wonderment at the turns of his life, and he felt a twinge as Kit leaned to the right and spoke in a hushed tone and Raven laughed clear and sweet. He was losing his daughter to the lieutenant. Kiss the Blarney stone, what was he saying? He had
already
lost her to McQueen, and it was time to face that fact once and for all. She was gone, and there was no returning to the way things used to be. Times had changed. The daughter of yesterday had become a woman in love today. By God, it left him in awe, the way his life had unfolded from the emerald hills of County Kerry to the American wilderness with its savage beauty and dangerous days. A man was always on the edge here. But he wouldn’t have it any other way. O’Keefe never felt more alive than when he walked the wild places.

He knew Kit felt the same way. Perhaps that was the reason he had taken a liking to McQueen, sensing a kinship in the lieutenant whose Yankee upbringing had not quelled his fierce thirst for adventure. God bless his Highland blood, he’d make a good husband for Raven and she a good wife to him. Ah, there it was again, a tug at his heartstring for the child who had blossomed into a woman. A father’s sense of loss indeed, but a father’s pride.

The back of his neck began to itch and he began to scratch it with his good right hand while gripping the rein in his teeth. Then, out of a naturally cautious nature, he craned his head around and discovered who he had been looking for since leaving the crescent city almost an hour ago. Johnny Fuller sat astride a mule in the middle of the wheel-rutted road about a hundred yards behind O’Keefe, his daughter, and her lover.

“There’s the young scalawag. I knew he’d followed us.” O’Keefe reined in his mount. Kit and Raven followed her father’s example.

“He certainly wasn’t born with any ‘quit’ in him,” Kit noted. He crossed his hands on the rounded pommel of his Spanish saddle and glanced at Raven. She had forsaken her finery for a cream-colored smock of brushed buckskin and leggings of the same. Butter soft moccasins encased her feet. The “Belle of the Ball” had been replaced by a dark-haired Choctaw maiden with flashing green eyes. As much as he was enamored of the former, this was the Raven he loved.

In his mind’s eye he relived the first moment he had glimpsed her. About a year and a half ago, the first of September, she had been surrounded by Creek warriors anxious to capture the daughter of Iron Hand. Armed with nothing more than her own bare hands, she had defied her enemies who circled her like a pack of wolves and held them at bay. It had been clear Raven wasn’t about to be taken prisoner. The Creeks would have to kill her. And that was just what they had been about to do when Kit interfered and saved her life. A few moments later and she had saved his, shoving him out of the path of a lead slug fired at his back by one of her attackers. In a single afternoon they had managed to save each other’s lives.

Memories gave way to the present, and Kit watched as Johnny Fuller rode toward them for a few moments, then halted his mount and watched for O’Keefe’s reaction.

A cloth cap with a crumpled leather brim covered the boy’s unkempt hair. He wore a loose-fitting cotton shirt and an oversized coat that hung below his knees. His woolen pants were coarsely woven but in good shape. The widow LeBeouf had patched the knees on his trousers herself.

“I ought to cut me a switch and drive him off,” O’Keefe muttered.

“Oh, Father, let him come along. He’s been wanting to see the camp,” Raven said.

“We ain’t riding into no picnic, Daughter. Nate sent word that Strikes With Club is stirring the waters again and riling up the young blades. He’s as much trouble as Spring lightning, mark my words.”

“The lightning comes with the nourishing rains. If we are to have the one, then we must endure the other.” She had grown up with Strikes With Club and knew that although he was a firebrand, he only had the good of the Choctaw people at heart.

“Since when did you start sounding so all-fired wise?”

“Since you started to listen,” she replied. “I think the boy’s place is with us.”

“If you drive him off, then you’ll wear out your neck watching our back trail and you’ll be chewing horseshoes wondering where the lad has gone and seeing him in every shadow and behind every bush,” said Kit.

He sat easy in the saddle. He wore a blue service coat and buckskin breeches tucked into his boots and carried the Quakers loaded and primed and caught in the belt at his waist. A rifled musket hung by a sling across his back. The bone-handle grip of a broad-bladed Arkansas toothpick jutted from a buckskin sheath at the small of his back. He could snake a hand around and have it in his grip in the blink of an eye.

“That’s straight talk,” O’Keefe sighed. He made a soft clucking sound and ran his tongue over his teeth as he considered his choices, and then with a shrug he waved the eight-year-old to come on. Johnny Fuller grinned and, removing his cap, slapped the mule across the rump. The animal broke into a trot and bellowed indignantly at the treatment he had so far endured. The last place the stable-bound animal wanted to be was outside in the wintry air where the sunlight held nothing but the illusion of warmth.

“You can tag along. But you stay close and do what I tell you or I’ll let the Turtle Clan string your hair to their war belts.”

“You won’t regret this,” Johnny excitedly said as he drew abreast of the burly Irishman known along the length and breadth of the Mississippi as Iron Hand, war chief of the Choctaw Nation. “My eyes are sharp and keen. Ain’t nothing I miss. A man your age needs someone to watch out for him.”

“A man my age!” O’Keefe snapped. He noticed Kit and Raven quickly looked away. “Well, see if you can keep up with Methuselah.” O’Keefe reared his mount and charged down the trail, forcing Kit and Raven to leap their horses out of harm’s way as he barreled past.

Johnny Fuller walked his mule up to the lieutenant and O’Keefe’s daughter. “Did I do something wrong?”

Kit chuckled and guided his mare back onto the north road. “No, younker. It’s just that some men fly to the truth, and others… well… they see it coming and run like hell.”

Nathan Russell did not consider himself any less of a Choctaw than the volatile young men ringing the council fire. But Strikes With Club had given them other ideas. He strutted before the warriors and circled the blazing pyre of logs and pressed home his point that the white soldiers were playing them all for fools. The Choctaw were not equal in the eyes of General Jackson, and once the British were driven off, then the one called Old Hickory would forget the red men who had allied themselves with him and spilled their blood on the common battlefield. What made things even worse was the fact that Nathan Russell, who had once been called Blue Feather, now used a Christian name and spoke of the white man’s God as the one spirit.

Nathan had heard these arguments before and did not doubt he would again. But Strikes With Club was getting under his skin. He allowed the younger man his moment before the elders, as was the way of the Choctaw, for each man had the right to make himself heard. And besides, Nate was buying time, permitting the members of the Snake Clan to gather in support of one of their own. Nate had also sent word to Iron Hand about the unrest in the Choctaw camp. Strikes With Club was attempting to add verbal tinder to an already-volatile situation.

The Choctaws had chosen their campsite well. Iron Hand had found a relatively solid patch of ground north of New Orleans. The glade was ringed by oak and shagbark hickory. Further out, the ground became spongy and eventually marshlike and virtually impassable for most men, although the Choctaw had long since adapted to the conditions and often traversed the bayous on logs cut and hidden in the underbrush for just such purposes. The woods were silent and still near the camp although a flock of geese had chosen nearby Muggat’s Bayou for their winter haven. Several of the birds had been trapped by the men in the camp and roasted over a dozen smaller cookfires where the hundred and thirty-eight warriors took their meals and awaited orders from the general whose sincerity many of them had begun to doubt.

“You wear the soldier coat,” said Strikes With Club. “You follow their orders rather than the council of your elders. It is true you are no longer Blue Feather. The soldiers have given you a new name, one you share with all the Snake Clan. Now you are called White Man Runs Him.”

“Enough!” Nate Russell said, rising up and walking across the clearing to stand before the younger man. Though the same height, Nate was much more solid. He was a farmer and his physique reflected the kind of life he had lived, toiling in the fields, planting crops, and uprooting tree stumps to clear more land. He had built a large blockhouse in the Choctaw village several miles upriver of New Orleans where his wife and children yet lived, awaiting his return. “It is true I have chosen to work the earth and plant the same crops as the white man. My cotton is the equal of any I have seen on the plantations around here. And I have taken a white man’s name. But I am still Blue Feather as I am also Nathan Russell.” Nathan studied the faces of the men surrounding him. The entire camp was present. He could see the restlessness and suspicion in the countenances of the young braves and the sympathetic glances of those warriors who, like him, had changed their names and striven to live in a fashion that was wholly incompatible with the old ways. He noticed the arrival of Iron Hand and Kit McQueen, but did not call attention to them. He wanted to make his own point without the aid of the Irish chieftain.