Sword of Vengeance (16 page)

“You have tried me, mixed-blood,” Wolf Jacket said. “But the chase is ended. And I have won.” He warily approached. “First I will take you; then I will bring your head to my village, to hang about the walls of our council house.”

He unslung his powder horn and shot pouch, the better to free his limbs for action. The tomahawk was all the weapon he needed now. Let her struggle. Ah, yes, he wanted her to struggle. It made the inevitable all the sweeter.

Raven flexed her fingers and tried to shake some feeling back into her hand and arm. Her black hair was plastered to her skull and neck and shoulders. Droplets of rainwater mixed with sweat stung her eyes.

She made a feint as if trying to bolt past him on the left side, then altered her course and tried for the right, but the footing proved too treacherous and her strained muscles weren’t up to the feat. She slipped and fell to one knee before the Red Stick chief, and like a cat she rose with bared claws, her hands ready to tear into Wolf Jacket with the last of her strength.

He retreated a step and reconsidered his intentions, deciding the woman had become more trouble than she was worth. He raised the tomahawk and prepared to strike. A rifle barked from back up the wall of the ravine and the tomahawk exploded in half as a lead slug shattered the wooden shaft. The iron blade plopped into the racing brown waters of the creek.

Wolf Jacket spun around and reached for his rifled musket, then remembered it was empty. He had needlessly shot the rock from Raven’s hand. He glared up at his assailant. The Red Stick’s look of surprise mirrored Raven’s own startled expression. She had been seconds from death. Now, one accurately placed slug from a Pennsylvania rifle had won her a reprieve.

On the slope overlooking the creek bank, fifty feet from the edge of the floodwaters, Kit McQueen steadied his dun mare and returned his smoking rifle to its beaded buckskin scabbard. He had heard the gunfire on his way to Hope Station and tracked the shots to Turkey Creek. He’d spied the Choctaw woman and watched in admiration as she attempted to face down the Red Stick warrior.

Kit had reacted on instinct and didn’t regret his actions one bit, though he had undoubtedly made a mortal enemy of the Creek.

Wolf Jacket started toward his rifled musket, figuring to reach the weapon and load it before the white man could ready his own gun.

“I wouldn’t,” Kit said. His eyes were shadows beneath his broad-brimmed hat. But Kit’s voice was strong and filled with warning.

Wolf Jacket stopped and peered around at the man on horseback. To his dismay he noted the flintlock pistol Kit held. Where had the white man come from? Was he one of the spirits of the dead? But the pistol he held was real enough. And the man had already proved himself Wolf Jacket’s equal with a gun.

The warrior’s mind raced through his options. There weren’t all that many. He could try a bluff, stall for time until Little Badger arrived. Or he could run like a bear with a swarm of bees at his tail.

“White-skinned fool,” Wolf Jacket called out in Kit’s own tongue. “Know that I’m Wolf Jacket, chief of the Red Sticks, the people of war. Run while you can. Flee to the safety of the northlands, where your people are many. Leave the land of the Creeks, or you will die.”

“I’m called Kit McQueen. And you, sir, have wasted your chance,” Kit replied laconically. He gestured toward the Indian’s discharged weapon. “Bold words won’t buy you another. Call me a fool, eh? Why, I’ve eaten boiled mush with more brains than you show.” Kit cocked the “Quaker” he had pulled from his belt. So much for options. Wolf Jacket spun on his heels, dove into the raging waters of Turkey Creek, and was instantly borne away on the onrushing brown current.

Raven watched, open-mouthed, as Wolf Jacket was swept out of sight around the bend, beyond a hillock covered with hickory and oak. He was gone, the danger momentarily past. But Raven had the feeling she’d not seen the last of the Red Stick. He was a dark and dangerous man, larger than life; his deeds were spoken of in the camps of his enemies. Such a man was born to die in battle. She did not think even the raging waters could kill him.

Kit dismounted and led the dun mare down the incline to the mud-slick creek bank. When Raven turned to face him, her comely features took his breath away. All the other women he had known, from the ballrooms of Philadelphia to the harem halls of Araby, paled before this mixed-blood lass.

Raven brushed a strand of her lustrous black hair away from the corner of her mouth. Her startling green eyes had a luminescence all their own, sparkling like twin emeralds, filled with daring and mirroring a wild, free spirit.

Kit puffed out his muscular chest, threw back his shoulders, and swaggered up to the young Choctaw woman, who continued to study him, her features filled with curiosity. Kit knew he was probably behaving like an idiot. But by heaven, she left him feeling utterly inadequate. He was forced to rely on pretense.

“Well, then, my darlin’,” he began in English. “Yours is the prettiest life I’ve saved all day.” He slapped the barrel of his pistol against the palm of his left hand. “What say you?” he asked with a wink. He wasn’t prepared for what came next.

One moment Raven was hesitant, suspicious, edging back toward the floodwaters that had blocked her escape. Suddenly her wary expression was transformed into a look of alarm, and she dove forward into Kit and knocked him off his feet, slamming him back into the muddy bank. She landed on top of him, knocking the breath from his lungs.

A gunshot sounded barely a second later, and a lead slug whined through the space where he had been standing.

“Hey!” he gasped, and worked his arm free as she rolled aside. It took him a moment to realize what had happened then he twisted around to face his attacker. Little Badger stood about twenty feet away. The warrior had just worked his way through a stand of dense timber and undergrowth now threatened by high water as the creek was a good six feet out of its banks. The warrior had seen Wolf Jacket’s desperate attempt at escape and was determined to avenge the possible death of his chief. But his first shot had missed, thanks to the cursed half-breed woman. It was a race with death to chance another. His fury gave him the foolish courage to try. The young warrior pulled the plug from his powder horn with his teeth and poured a charge of gunpowder down the shortened barrel of his rifled musket.

Kit rose up on one knee and raised his pistol, sighting the heavy octagonal barrel on the Red Stick’s chest.

“Drop your gun,” Kit said in English, and then repeated the command in broken Choctaw, which the young warrior understood.

Little Badger did not even bother to patch the rifle ball as he rammed it home. Speed was more important now.

“Drop it, I say,” Kit repeated. Trying to catch his breath made his gun hand waver. He sucked in, held the air, slowly released it.

The Creek warrior never slowed or wavered. He tapped a trace of black powder in the pan, cocked the weapon, and Kit shot him. The “Quaker” boomed like a hand cannon, and the impact of the slug sent the Red Stick flying backward, smashing him against the trunk of a hickory and dropping him as broken as a cast-off puppet. He fired his rifle on the way down, blasting a hole in the rain-soaked sod. The gunshot echoed, following the distant, dying reverberation of the pistol shot. The warrior made a horrible noise, that of a man struggling for air, for life. He shoved himself off the ground. Blood dripped from his mangled chest and mingled with the mud beneath, forming a puddle the color of burned gravy. Then Little Badger’s strong arms failed him, and he settled back to earth and lay still.

Kit scrambled to his feet and quickly reloaded his flintlock pistol. Cockiness had come near to costing him his life. He studied the creek bank, both sides going and coming, and then gingerly approached the dead warrior. He knelt and pried loose the man’s grip from the rifled musket. He hefted the weapon and studied the buttplate. It was only a moment before he realized he was holding a British-made firearm.

“And I’ll just bet the other one is exactly the same,” Kit muttered, and, putting the first weapon down, turned to examine the weapon Wolf Jacket had dropped.

Raven picked up Little Badger’s rifled musket, steadied the weapon in her hands, and aimed it directly at Kit’s midriff. Kit froze. The Red Stick’s weapon he held was useless, and his own brace of pistols were tucked in his belt.

The Choctaw woman cautiously advanced on the white man until her rifled musket almost touched his chest. Then she raised the weapon and placed the muzzle to Kit’s forehead.

“I was hoping the Choctaw were still a people of honor,” Kit spoke in the woman’s own tongue.

Lifting the gun’s barrel, Raven tilted back Kit’s hat, revealing his thickly curled, shaggy red mane. Her green eyes widened with renewed interest.

“You do … uh … speak the language of your people?” Kit asked, struggling with the dialect.

Raven stepped back and appraised the man standing before her. The she stunned him as she finally spoke.

“Well and again, my darlin’,” she said. For all her Indian attire, the lilting tone of an Irish-bred lass rolled off her tongue. “And yours is the prettiest life I’ve saved all day!”

W
OLF JACKET SHOULD HAVE
died there in the raging current: crushed by an uprooted hickory tree, smashed to lifeless ruin against shale outcroppings, or skewered on a mass of bristling roots that thrust out of the riverbank like dragon’s teeth—he should have died.

A couple hundred yards down from where he had leaped into the creek, the sodden warrior struggled out of the churning brown waters. He had caught hold of a low-hanging oak branch and hauled himself hand over fist from the flooding creek. Once clear of the water he had managed to swing over to the bank, drop to safety, and then dig into the mud to keep himself from sliding back into the creek.

Bruised and battered, he crawled up the rain-slick bank. He vomited up the silty contents of his stomach, and when the spasms had ended, the Creek forced his arms and legs to dig into the soft earth and propel him farther from the water’s edge, crawl a yard, slide back a foot, scramble forward another few feet, alive because he had willed it, alive because the spirit of the water had tossed him back, alive because he had already mingled his blood with the waters of these ancient hills, bursting with foliage in the brief, sweet days before autumn.

A fine mist began to fall, then the low, heavy clouds loosed their burden as they drifted up and over the rolling foothills and steeper ridges of the Smoky Mountains. Wolf Jacket rolled over on his back and allowed the droplets to wash his torso. With outstretched arms he lay still, as if asleep or dead. But he was neither. The warrior was merely allowing the steady downpour to soothe and massage his weary limbs and get the blood circulating again.

At last he stood, climbed the few remaining feet, and lost himself in the forest. There was nothing to mark his passing save a furrow in the green earth and a trace of war paint. His features might be washed clean, but his heart was still filled with rage. He could do nothing but vent his anger on the uncaring timber and the lowering sky. When that was spent, Wolf Jacket started south to rejoin the war party he had abandoned to pursue the half-breed daughter of Iron Hand O’Keefe. Failure did not sit easy with him. But he was alive. And he would make a sacred offering to the Above Ones that one day he would again cross paths with the white man who called himself Kit McQueen.

T
HE ALABAMA SKY MELTED
down around the blackened remnants of Hope Station. The stockade walls lay in ruins, although here and there a single charred wood post thrust upward from the rubble. The blockhouse had caved in on itself about the base of a stone chimney, set square in the center of destruction like a headstone for this place of death.

As for the dead, the ravens and scavenging red wolves had had their day, feasting on the burned and butchered inhabitants. Beneath the droning rain, bones and blood and soot and mud mingled, formed pools and rivulets to catch more of the sky’s steady tears. If the dead defied identification in their present state, not so their killers. Kit spied a tomahawk whose shaft bore the Turtle Clan markings of the Choctaw. He noticed another buried deep in the remains of a post. A flintlock rifle also lay nearby. The Turtle Clan markings were burned into the weapon’s walnut stock. Yes, the perpetrators of this tragedy had been careless in what they had left behind—careless, or cunning as a fox.

“I feared this,” Raven said solemnly, drawing up alongside Kit. “One of the Creeks guarding me wore a tall, black hat with a blue feather in the crown. I recognized it. I had seen Jonas Talbot wear it many times. But I hoped the Red Sticks had taken it from his homestead and that the station was safe.”

Kit and Raven stood just inside the stockade, where the gate would have been. Perhaps the Red Sticks had tricked their way inside the stockade. Or maybe they had stormed the walls and overpowered the defenders by sheer weight of numbers. The reasons didn’t matter now—not to the dead, nor to the watchers in the rain.

The dun was eager to be away from this grim and silent place. The overpowering stench of death had alerted the animal and made the mare skittish as a colt.

Kit shared the dun’s sentiments. He hadn’t the time or strength to dig all the graves that were necessary. And there was no one but the girl to hear a parting prayer. Kit spoke the words in his mind and sent the souls of the deceased on their way.

The woman at his side began to chant softly in a melodious voice:

“
We are gone.

We have become people of shadows.

The Grandfather Above has built a fire

in his lodge. We are gone.

And enter into the warmth.
”

Kit reappraised the woman, marveling at how quickly she shed her father’s culture and became as a full-blood Choctaw. It was an appealing combination, one that left him unsettled yet awakened his interest. He swung around and faced her. Then, without speaking, they both turned as one and quit the burned-out remains of Hope Station.