Merline Lovelace (24 page)

“We’d best collect our gear from Durham House and the horses from the tavern yard,” he said, rolling his shoulders to adjust to this odd sensation of freedom.

“And then?” Louise asked, not moving. Sunlight glinted on the shining coronet of her hair and dusted
her cheeks with a coppery hue. She stood straight and proud, a slight figure in a lavender day gown, but no man could walk past without turning for a second look.

Daniel’s strange, rootless feeling faded. He’d shed a lifetime of burdens, had lost a wife of ten years and the company of his military brothers, but he’d found something more precious than he’d ever dared dream of.

“I’m thinking we might take ship like you talked about in New Orleans,” he said slowly. “Go to France to look up your father or your husband’s people. Or we might go down to Texas. ‘Tejas,’ as the Mexicans call it. I hear their government is offering land to settlers. I could stake a claim and get us a cabin built before winter sets in, so you could start building a nest for the baby.”

She tilted her head, considering the matter. “Does this Texas you speak of have green mountains?”

“It’s got a few hills.”

“Does it have great rivers filled with beaver and otter and fish?”

“Well, there’s the Rio Grande and the Red, which I hear is muddy and flat.”

“Does it have high ridges peaked with snow and prairies that stretch as far as an eagle can fly?”

“Not prairies, exactly. More like dusty plains.”

“Then, me, I do not wish to go to this Texas. I think we should return to Osage Country.”

“You said you weren’t happy there, that you
didn’t feel welcome. Why go back where you’re not wanted?”

“I’m not welcome in my uncle’s lodge,” she corrected. “Nor among the Quapaw. But neither do I wish to sail to France and live among strangers.”

Lifting her hands, she cupped his cheeks. “Like you, I have no family to go to, no home to return to. We are both between worlds now, so we must make our own. You are my husband, my mate. Where you go, I go. Where we roll out our blankets and put our heads down is home.”

The streets around them were filled with people and noisy with the rattle of wagons and the
clip-clop
of carriage horses, yet Daniel could hear the mountains and prairies and rippling rivers calling to him. He was no farmer, had never felt the urge to stumble along behind a mule and carve up the land with a plow. He’d been trained as a marksman, had been taught to use a compass and circumferentor, could navigate uncharted rivers—skills Louise apparently appreciated as much or more than Daniel himself.

“Change comes to the land where the rivers run and the eagles fly,” she said, a troubled look in her eyes. “It is in the wind here, in the talk of presidents and generals. The Pawnee and Osage and Wichita will feel these changes, be caught up in them. Perhaps— Perhaps it is meant for us to go back, to be part of whatever happens. Perhaps that’s why you trek down the Arkansaw and I travel to New Orleans and Richmond. We each learn different ways and now we must take that knowledge back to share with
others. If settlers move into Osage Country and try to claim the land, or the Cherokee and Choctaw come, perhaps we can somehow keep the rivers from running red with blood.”

Daniel suspected it would take more than good intentions and knowledge of each other’s ways to stop the inexorable tide of westward movement and the violent clashes that would result. But he, like Louise, was ready to be part of whatever came.

“All right,” he agreed with a smile that went deep into his heart. “We’ll go back to the land where the rivers run and the eagles fly.”

October, 1808
Along a bend of the Arkansaw River

T
hey stood on the high ridge where Daniel had buried Henri Chartier. Animals had scattered some of the stones covering his grave, but enough remained to mark the spot.

Louise stood at the small mound for some moments, murmuring the prayers for Henri that she’d not had a chance to sing two years ago. Daniel moved to the edge of the escarpment to give her privacy and propped a boot on a rocky outcropping. Above him, hawks circled in a sky so blue it hurt to look at it. Below, forests of pine and oak, flaming red and orange and gold, spilled down to the Arkansaw.

They’d climbed the ridge not solely for Louise to say her farewells to Henri. Daniel wanted to scout out the strange carvings in stone that Chartier had
told him about, the marks supposedly left by Vikings. He intended to fix their location with the circumferentor and include them in the survey he’d been hired to perform for the United States government in anticipation of establishing a fort and moving troops into the region.

At this point, he didn’t know if the troops were intended for defense against the Spanish or for peacekeeping. The issue of the Indian Removal Act had yet to be decided. One of the chiefs, John Ross of the Cherokees, had threatened to challenge the proposed act in the highest court in the land. If the challenge reached John Marshall’s court, Louise was sure that would be the end of it.

In the meantime, Daniel and his wife had carved a place for themselves in the wilderness. The monies Henri had left her—which Bernard Thibodeaux had refused to surrender for use by a traitorous general and his son—had gone into a sound-timbered house and a trading post. The trading post was prospering, and Louise had plans for a school to teach not only their bright-eyed, inquisitive son, but any Osage, Wichita, Caddo, French or American children who cared to attend.

The house, the baby and the business kept them both busy and happy, but it was the charter from the government to survey the land that gave them the chance to roam. They’d traveled south as far as the wide, muddy Red River. North to the plains of the Kansaw and Pawnee, where the buffalo herds were so thick they formed a vast, brown sea. West until
the hills flattened and the sky rolled on forever. But this— This place of majesty and savage beauty would forever remain branded on Daniel’s soul.

As would the woman he’d found here.

Her prayers finished, she came to stand beside him. They didn’t touch. They didn’t need to. They were one with each other and with the land they’d made their home.

D
aniel and Louise are complete figments of my imagination, but many of the other characters in this book were very real.

Lieutenant James Biddle Wilkinson did lead an expedition down the Arkansaw during the winter of 1806/07—the first official U.S. exploration of the land that would eventually become Oklahoma. The lieutenant never quite recovered his health after the arduous journey. He was appointed a captain in 1808 and asked to lead another expedition, but declined, pleading “a lingering nervous disorder.” He died at Dauphin Island, Alabama, in 1813.

His father, Major General James Wilkinson, had to be one of the greatest scoundrels in U.S. history. He escaped being convicted of treason, as did Burr, but was eventually court-martialed by order of President Madison for his role in the conspiracy. Amazingly, he was acquitted. After leading a disastrous campaign against the British during the War of 1812, the general was again tried and acquitted, but his
army career had
finally
ended. He spent his last years in Mexico, where he died in 1825 from the effects of smoking opium. Not until almost a century later did researchers going through archives seized in Havana during the Spanish-American War find documents indicating Wilkinson had sold information for decades to the Spanish government as Secret Agent #13.

You might also be interested to know that Washington Irving, author of
Rip Van Winkle
and
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,
made good on his wish to visit the American West. He spent several years rambling and wrote wildly popular books set in the West, including
A Tour on the Prairies
(1835) and
The Adventures of Captain Bonneville
(1837).

By then, the wilderness Irving traveled through had officially become known as Indian Territory. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 despite vigorous objection from many parties. While some Native Americans began a voluntary relocation to new homes, others resisted and took their case to the courts.

Watch for the next book in this series,
The Untamed
, coming from MIRA Books in 2004. The story opens some years after the passage of the act, when the land that eventually became Oklahoma was still a vast wilderness, and a scheming adventuress from England adds a new chapter to an ancient legend.