Sword of Vengeance (17 page)

“We need to get out of this rain,” Kit muttered, slogging back toward the forest.

“I know a place,” Raven said, and gestured toward an area of the forest where the timber thinned and an outcropping of shale formed a shallow cave that would provide a serviceable shelter from the elements.

Kit was in a hurry. He remounted his horse and offered a hand to Raven, who hesitated, then shrugged and allowed Kit to haul her up behind him. The heat of her body passed through her water-soaked garment and warmed his back. Kit, trying to keep his mind on the business of survival, pointed the dun toward the thinning trees but kept the mare to a walk.

He might be drenched to the bone, but he wasn’t crazy. After the grisly discovery he had made, the touch of Raven’s hand, her warmth, the flutter of her breath on the back of his neck offered some small balance to the horror.

They rode away then from Hope Station and did not look back.

Rain singing to the ground, a lovely sound, drop by drop in the dark. Who can tell them apart? Who can capture the wind or ride the thunder or hold the last days of summer in his hands and steal time or reel in the past like a ship hoisting its anchor and preparing to sail? Some things are unattainable.

Rainstorms brought out Kit’s pensive nature. It had been a day filled with discovery and death. Kit leaned on his flintlock rifle and stood near the lip of the overhang ledge beneath which he and Raven O’Keefe had built a fire to dry themselves out and capture a little warmth. The ledge was large enough to accommodate the man and woman at one end and still provide shelter from the elements for the dun mare ground-tethered a few yards away.

Kit stared out into the dark. Hope Station was hidden in the blackness of the forest, and it was just as well. Let the earth accept its dead, let them nurture the soil, and in the spring let wildflowers grow where ashes have been.

He turned back and found Raven watching him. There had been little time for talk—what with gathering enough dry wood for a fire and scouting the surrounding countryside for any of Wolf Jacket’s friends. He held out his hands to the blaze.

Raven spooned boiled meat into a wooden bowl for Kit and helped herself to an equal portion.

No dainty eater here, Kit noted with amusement, comparing the Choctaw woman to the ladies in Philadelphia he had known. Raven ate with gusto, relishing each bite. Her wooden spoon clattered on the sides of the bowl as she scooped the broth into her mouth. Her appetite was going to make some serious inroads into his supply of jerked venison.

If they didn’t find Iron Hand O’Keefe in a couple of days, Kit would have to restock his saddlebags with fresh game. Still, it pleased him to watch her. She seemed so open and honest and free of any pretense. Most women would have been numb from undergoing such an ordeal as had almost claimed her life.

They passed the meal in silence. Raven finished first, looked longingly at the remaining few morsels of meat in Kit’s cook pot, and when the man nodded his go-ahead she helped herself to seconds and quickly finished the last of the food. Only with her hunger appeased did she become self-conscious of how quickly she had devoured her meal.

“My father has always said that hunger is the best seasoning,” Raven told the man sitting alongside her. “Never has deer meat tasted better.” She dabbed sheepishly at her mouth with the sleeve of her buckskin shirtdress. She settled back against the shale wall, which radiated the warmth of the campfire.

Talons of gray smoke curled over the rock shelf to dissipate in the singing downpour.

“It was raining like this the morning Wolf Jacket raided our village,” Raven said, her smile fading as her thoughts drifted to the past. “My father and most of the men had gone to the village of the Cherokees to decide what to do about the white soldiers preparing to make war on us. The Creeks to the south. Colonel Jackson’s Volunteers to the north. Wolf Jacket planned his raid well. Though a few escaped, many were captured. The old ones were killed outright.” She lowered her gaze to the flames, and her eyes smoldered with green fire. “Wolf Jacket has had his day. But we will have ours.”

“Of that I have no doubt,” Kit said. He set aside his empty bowl, filled two blue tin enamel cups with strong black tea, and handed one cup to the Choctaw. “Here, Fire-seeker.”

Raven glanced up, surprised by Kit’s knowledge.

“So you know why the Raven’s wings are black?” the woman asked.

“In the early days the Father Above hid fire in the heart of a hollow sycamore,” Kit said. “Raven discovered the hiding place and crawled down into the tree. She retrieved the fire and brought it back for the world to have. But her beautiful plumage was burned black by the flames.”

“Poor Raven.” A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth.

“Not so,” Kit countered. “Raven showed she had courage. And goodness. Her dark wings mark the beauty within and without. And men still sing of her deeds and tell her story about their sacred campfires.”

Raven lowered her head and looked out past the veil of her long hair. Her voice was silken soft as she spoke. “And what of Kit McQueen? Is there one to sing of his deeds?”

“Maybe,” Kit replied gently, his thoughts drifting back to a little girl and how she stood in the center of the road and watched her uncle ride out of her life. She had bravely managed not to shed one tear, but had raised her hand to wave good-bye.

Good-bye. I will never forget you. I will always love you, Uncle Kit. Good-bye.

He wiped a hand across his face and blinked the memories from his mind’s eye, returning his thoughts to the present, where there was beauty and danger enough for this man’s life. “But the song is long ago and far away.”

He yawned and stretched his legs toward the comfortable blaze Raven had built. Then he snuggled down in his blanket. Raven shivered in her damp clothes and slid over toward Kit. Commandeering the left side of his bedroll, she reclined beside the white man.

Kit studied her a moment, appraising her actions. She had moved, not out of passion but practicality. He understood and pulled the other blanket up to Raven’s shoulders and lay back, listening to the pattering chorus of the rain and the quiet, steady rhythm of her gentle breath. They were both sweet music to his ears.

Kit closed his eyes and let the downpour lull him into a deep sleep that lasted well into morning.

He took no notice when the rain ceased.

He was oblivious to the sunrise.

He never heard the heavily armed, war-painted men as they circled the shale overhang to cut off escape and then cautiously closed in for the kill.

“T
HE ONLY REASON I
don’t shoot you outright,” Iron Hand O’Keefe said as he cocked his big .56-caliber rifle, “is ’cause maybe I’ve misread what looks to have happened here!” He centered the weapon on Kit’s spine. Kit’s eyes popped open. He was turned toward Raven and had his right arm draped across the woman where she lay against him. Sunlight glimmered off the rock walls.

It took him a moment to recognize the voice. Presuming on the mercy of an old friendship, Kit slowly rolled over and sat up to face the war chief of the Choctaws.

“You’d finish what the Spaniards tried to do back in Florida?” Kit asked.

Iron Hand O’Keefe brightened and retreated a step. “Well, kiss the Blarney Stone, if it ain’t Kit McQueen!” O’Keefe grinned and started to lower his rifle, then snapped it up again. “See here. What be you doin’ with my daughter?”

Then he softened as Raven got up and came to him. A look of relief washed over his features as he hugged her.

“Oh, father, can’t you see we were both hiding from the Red Sticks?” Raven said. “This white eyes needed protection, so I kept him with me.”

O’Keefe looked anxious for a fight. The Irishman and his war-painted followers wanted their people back. And they wanted revenge.

“A hunting party of Cherokees brought us word that the Creeks had crossed the Tallapoosa and were raiding north. I figured they’d hit our village.” O’Keefe turned and looked off in the direction of Hope Station hidden beyond the wooden hillside. “We tried to cut them off.” O’Keefe kicked at a rock and sent the stone rolling downslope. “We failed.”

Using his forearm, the Irishman brushed his shaggy, silver hair back from his face, taking care not to gouge his face with his iron hook. He tapped the hook against the horn dangling from the braided hair rope he wore around his throat. “I’ll not sound my horn again until I see Wolf Jacket dead before me on the ground.”

Kit searched the red-skinned faces of the warriors surrounding him. They wore their hair long, unbraided, and unadorned like their buckskin shirts and leggings. Their faces were streaked with the white and red markings of war. Kit noticed that the men were haphazardly armed. Some carried Pennsylvania rifles, long-barreled trade guns that had no doubt seen action during the American Revolution. A few of the warriors carried muskets, also left over from the glory days of the Continental Army. The rest brandished bows and knives and tomahawks. There wasn’t a British-made weapon in the bunch.

These were hard and implacable fighters, who once wronged would not rest until they had exacted vengeance for the misdeeds of their enemies. Kit had no trouble reading the determination in the eyes of such men. Hatred was an emotion he knew only too well.

“We are to gather at Willow Creek by the night of the first full moon. Then my Choctaws will hold council and decide what course of action to take.” Iron Hand related his decision to the men around him, who responded enthusiastically to their war chief. Kit managed to understand just enough of the Irishman’s instructions to know that O’Keefe had told his followers Kit was a friend and was to be trusted … up to a point.

Another five heavily armed warriors emerged from the woods behind the shale outcropping. The man in the lead stopped short in surprise. He was a stocky, round-faced individual, who after recognizing the white man hurried forward to join O’Keefe and his daughter and stand proudly before Kit.

“Young Otter!” Kit said.

“Kit McQueen! So the white man’s world could not hold you,” Young Otter replied. “Have you also come to make war on us, as the white soldiers to the north prepare to do?”

Young Otter’s question hung poised in the air, unanswered. O’Keefe noted Kit’s lack of response. Kit turned to the Irishman.

“We must talk, Iron Hand, and before the first full moon.”

O’Keefe said, “Tonight, then, when we make camp. You can have your say. We’ll hold our own council, eh, lad?”

“The sooner the better.”

O’Keefe motioned for the men to follow him and then looked at his daughter. “I’ll have a couple of men escort you to the village of the Cherokees.”

“I will not go,” Raven stated flatly.

“What’s this?” the Irishman glowered. But his daughter refused to be cowed. O’Keefe glanced sheepishly at the Choctaws around him, many of whom were old friends and bemused by his daughter’s obstinacy. Raven’s stubborn ways were often the talk of the village; but then, so was her courage. Iron Hand O’Keefe took the young woman aside. “Now, see here—”

“I am as good a shot as any man.” Raven patted the rifled musket she held. “And I shall have my own revenge against the Creeks. The spirits of those I saw murdered demand this of me.”

O’Keefe shook his head and snatched at his beard with his hook hand. He sighed, a sign of grudging acquiescence. “If your dear mother were alive—”

“Star Basket would tell me to follow the path of my destiny,” Raven concluded.

Ah then she had him. Images of the charred remains of the Choctaw village flooded the Irishman’s thoughts. The sight of such ruin, the ground littered with the bodies of the aged ones and the young warriors who had been killed defending their home ground, the blackened wreckage of the longhouses, Raven’s capture, all had left him sickened and filled with dread.

But she was alive and unharmed and with him. What father wouldn’t want his daughter safe from the dangers that lay ahead? Yet her words were weighted with a truth he might once have been able to deny as a lad of County Kerry—but he was a Choctaw now. He was Iron Hand. And only a fool ignored the spirits of those who had gone above.

“Come,” he said to her, and started off toward the forested hills that crinkled the southern horizon.

Kit caught up the reins of his dun mare and walked up beside O’Keefe’s daughter as she fell into step behind her father.

F
IREFLIES WHIRLED AND DARTED
like a spiral of exploding stars that burned bright and winked out, only to be reborn elsewhere in the deepening shadows of the forest. Raven leaned against the trunk of a white oak and watched a red-bellied woodpecker tap-tap-tap out a cadence in his unceasing search for food. Elsewhere among the branches, a trio of gray squirrels quarreled over rights to a cluster of acorns. Eventually the threesome began a series of feints, cluttering insults, and guarded attacks that soon became a madcap chase among the spreading branches of the oak and carried over to a shagbark hickory. The combatants disturbed a nesting of scarlet tanagers that swarmed into the air with a wild
chip-chiree, chip-chiree
that lingered on the breeze long after the birds themselves were lost from sight.

O’Keefe’s daughter glanced over her shoulder at the campsite he had chosen to spend the night. It had been a tiring day.

O’Keefe had led his men on an irregular course that criss-crossed the hills and cut across ever-winding valley and hollow. By late afternoon, they had met up with another party of Choctaw warriors whom Iron Hand had sent off to the west. These new arrivals brought eight children, Choctaw boys and girls from eight to twelve years of age who had eluded capture.

There had been much celebration as some of the children were reunited with their fathers. Though a great and terrible challenge lay ahead, at least these children were safe. In the morning the boys and girls would be sent with an escort back to the Cherokee village. Once again Iron Hand had hinted at the notion of sending his daughter along with the children. Raven had walked out of camp, refusing to hear of such a thing.