Sword of Vengeance (19 page)

“By thunder, do they think me some journeyman who has never heard the war whoop of savages?” he blustered.

“Sir … uh … bad news?” Captain Bellamy inquired haltingly.

To the captain’s relief, Jackson did not reproach him. Instead, he leaned against the pole supporting the porch roof and crumbled the dispatch in his hand.

“Colonel Harrelson has informed me that I can expect one Lieutenant McQueen. Colonel Harrelson believes this upstart lieutenant can be of great help to me in making peace with that renegade white Choctaw Iron Hand O’Keefe. Make peace? I have gathered over a thousand men, furnished them with weapons and clothing paid for by myself. And yet, with such a superior force and my own considerable experience, I cannot hope to prevail without the aid of this … this … Lieutenant McQueen.”

Bellamy gulped his brandy. The liquor flowed like a rivulet of fire down his throat. Warmth spread to his limbs. He glanced longingly at the bottle and licked the last drop from his glass. No commission
yet.
He sighed to himself.

“Well, General, this McQueen fellow must be quite the hotspur,” Bellamy said.

Andrew Jackson glanced over his shoulder at his subordinate. “You are ever the optimist, Marcus.”

Any day now he was expecting another hundred men from over in the Cumberland country. They’d come hungry and ready to fight. They’ll get their
fill of sowbelly
and savages
before
I’m through, Jackson thought. He glanced at the dispatch crumpled in his fist. According to the date of this missive, Kit McQueen was overdue. The lieutenant should have arrived days ago. He swept the distant hills at a glance. General Andrew Jackson had a campaign to launch, and he wasn’t about to wait for some lieutenant.

“Hrumph,” Jackson grumbled. “Quite the hotspur, eh? Just where the hell is he?”

P
ADDLES RHYTHMICALLY DIPPED INTO
the muddy waters of the Alabama. The two dugouts shot forward, propelled by strong arms and backs and aided by the current of the river. Kit McQueen glanced over his shoulder at the woman seated at the stern of the craft that had carried them for the past three days toward a rendezvous with the mysterious riverboat, the
Alejandro
. Young Otter and Stalking Fox, in a dugout of their own, kept pace with Kit, keeping a few yards behind the lead boat.

Kit returned his attention to the river ahead. Raven used her paddle as a rudder and steered the boat around the obstacles she remembered, and where the river split occasionally to isolate a hillock of land and create an island of tangled greenery, she chose to cut across certain shallows, keeping in mind which shortcuts to take and which to avoid.

Kit trusted her judgment. After all, Raven had certainly been right about where Iron Hand had cached the dugouts and concealed them on a riverbank below the Coosa. It had taken almost a week to reach the boats. Rain had slowed their progress south of the hills, and twice they had almost blundered into Creek war parties.

Stalking Fox was of a volatile nature, and it had required a great deal of persuasion to keep him from attacking the Red Sticks, who outnumbered Kit’s party by never less than three to one. Kit lauded the warrior’s courage, but their mission was to locate the riverboat, not commit suicide in such a futile display of bravery. Young Otter understood and helped to keep his friend in line. There was a time for war and a time for vengeance, but this was a time for stealth.

River water splashed the back of Kit’s neck, and he looked around and noticed Raven trying to suppress a grin. He dug his paddle below the surface of the river and sent a wave of water exploding over the rear of the boat. Raven stifled a scream and ducked forward, laughing as the water missed her by inches. They were traveling close to the west bank of the river. The shadows of the trees stretched across the glassy surface, reaching to join with the opposite bank and cloak the waterway in darkness.

The afternoon hours had passed swiftly on this fourth day of river travel. Arm muscles were growing accustomed to the stretch and pull of paddling—and after all, the river itself was doing most of the work. Returning upstream was going to be another story, and Kit didn’t look forward to that.

Raven spotted a suitable inlet and steered the dugout toward a low, grassy bank where a natural barrier of fallen timber had collected enough silt to channel a fraction of the Alabama into a U-shaped cove fringed with a dense stand of cattails and, beyond them, a thicket of willow and oak to further conceal their campsite. The dugouts glided through the rushes. Kit leaped out of the boat as the bow slid up on the bank. Raven climbed over the stern and helped her partner haul the dugout halfway up the bank. Young Otter and Stalking Fox followed suit, though Stalking Fox slipped to his knees in the mud and muttered to himself.

Kit cradled his rifle in the crook of his arm and walked off from the river to enter the deepening shadows of the forest. His eyes ranged the timber, searching for any sign of intruders other than himself.

Blue jays darted among the trees and protested his presence. He sensed movement near his boots and glanced down in time to see a smoke-gray cotton-mouth slither beneath a rotting branch and burrow beneath the leaves and underbrush carpeting the forest floor. Kit shivered. The damn snake must have been five feet long. A lethal, venomous killer on the hunt. And Kit had missed stepping on the reptile by a stride.

A breeze stirred the branches and set the limbs of the oaks swaying. The treetops were burnished gold by the slanting rays of the late afternoon sun. It was a world of fragile beauty and sudden death.

“All depends on where you stand,” he said softly.

“And where do you stand?” Raven said, coming up the trail his footsteps had left in the soft earth.

The breeze tugged at her long black hair. She had braided one length and tied the end with a patch of tanned rabbit hide adorned with tiny amber shells. She carried a rifled musket and moved with an air of casual grace. She fixed the white man in her green-eyed stare.

“Stalking Fox does not trust you. He thinks your army will turn on us when you no longer need our help.”

“I understand a man like Stalking Fox. He does not trust because he loves his people.”

Raven scoffed—a brief, bitter laugh—and then continued what she had come to say. “Then you do not understand Stalking Fox at all. He does not trust because he has a great desire in his heart for me.”

“I don’t understand,” Kit said.

“And he sees me in your dugout,” Raven finished, and cocked her head, a wry, playful smile on her face.

“Oh, well, I suppose I could …” Kit was about to suggest he change dugouts and partner with Young Otter. But the words wouldn’t come. He enjoyed her company and wasn’t about to exchange it for some stocky Choctaw warrior, even one as good-natured as Young Otter. “I suppose that’s just too bad for Stalking Fox.” There, he said it.

By heaven, O’Keefe’s daughter left him tongue-tied!

Raven walked past Kit to stand in the shade of the oaks. Soon it would be the Leaf-Changing Moon, painting the forest foliage with brown and gold and vermilion. And after the season of harvest, the tree limbs would shed their colorful mantles (save for the pines) and stand stark before the wintry breath of the hard-faced sky. The wilderness frontier was all the home Raven had ever known. Her father had spoken to her of the villages to the north, and though she had cajoled him into the trip to Mobile, that port wasn’t really the same as visiting the places a man like Kit had seen.

“Tell me of the great villages,” Raven said to the man standing behind her. “Tell me of your Philadelphia and Washington and Boston.”

Kit smiled, and taking care to skirt the underbrush that might still conceal the snake, he drew close to the Choctaw woman. “Well, there’re lots of people—too many, if you ask me. And they have rules to go by, to tell them what to do and when to do it.”

“And there is music? And libraries? My father has told me of such things. And some people live in lodges tall as these hills.”

“Maybe not quite as tall,” Kit told her, gently amused. “Yes, I have walked the streets of the white man’s villages. But the music I have heard pales in comparison to the wind in the branches of the oaks. And I have learned as much from forest trails and meadows and the wild sea spray as I have from books.” He shook his head and thought,
Listen to me. I sound like some bloody cavalier.

Raven glanced aside. “Still … one day I shall see for myself.”

“I imagine you will,” Kit said. He kicked at the ground, examined the depression he’d left in the dirt, cleared his throat. “I’d be honored to show you those places, sometime.” He looked up and into her warm green gaze.

Silence reigned; it was a comfortable quiet that the two of them enjoyed. Raven found herself liking her companion more and more. Though Kit had not been raised among the Choctaws, the All-Father had most certainly touched him and given him the vision to see the truth of things. She heard his stomach growl. Moments later hers answered, and she laughed.

They reached the same conclusion and started back to the riverbank. Kit glimpsed movement off to the right and noticed Stalking Fox leaning on his rifle, keeping watch from a nearby thicket. The warrior, once discovered, stooped down and began to gather firewood.

Kit wasn’t fooled. The flesh crawled on the back of his neck as he turned his back on Stalking Fox. Kit had a gut feeling one of them wouldn’t be returning from this river run. Sweat trickled down his neck; the back of his blousy shirt was matted, soaked through. He was beginning to feel like a walking target. He checked his rifle. Yes, it was loaded and primed. Stalking Fox better take care. This was one target that intended to shoot back. In civilization, as in the woods, a man must step carefully and keep watch for the make in the grass.

M
OONLIGHT SHIMMERED ON THE
river’s surface, and the moon itself was a pale disc of silver overhead, afloat upon an obsidian sea. Stark, somber shadows rose up from the river to form the opposite bank. The rush of owl’s wings cut through the stillness. The inevitable night stalkers were prowling the forest. Somehow, man stood between, striding the frontier as both hunter and prey.

Kit studied the moon’s reflection, and then reached inside his shirt and lifted the medal until it caught the glare and shone in the palm of his hand. He heard footsteps—a twig cracked behind him. Kit tensed briefly, then relaxed as Raven approached with a gourd bowl filled with boiled meat and corn and the starchy stalks of the cattails she had harvested from the river’s edge. Behind her and several yards back, Young Otter and Stalking Fox squatted by the campfire wholly involved in their own meals, though Kit had the feeling Stalking Fox was keeping watch on him no matter how absorbed he seemed in his dinner.

Raven was looking at the British crown bearing the initials
G.W.
scratched upon the surface, the medal given to Daniel McQueen in another time and another war.

“A gift from my father,” Kit explained.

Raven nodded and studied the coin. “Your father is a warrior?”

“He is dead now,” Kit said. “Yes, he was a warrior. But he thought of himself as a blacksmith and a farmer … a man of peace who liked to build and to watch things grow.”

“It is good you keep his spirit with you,” O’Keefe’s daughter replied.

“Yes. I keep it with me—and him.”

He tucked the medal back inside his shirt and gratefully accepted the bowl of venison stew. The cattails tasted something like potato, and the plant’s green shoots were sweet as wild asparagus.

He looked out over the river. They were making good time, at least so it seemed. The breezes off the river were cooling, which eased the day’s labor, and though he watched the riverbank with a wary eye, Kit still had time to appreciate the beauty of these woods. He’d heard wild turkeys call from the depths of the forest.

Just that afternoon while rounding a bend, the dugouts had startled half a dozen whitetail deer as they drank at the water’s edge. The startled herd had fled from the river and vanished among the oaks and climbing bittersweet.

Kit marveled at the countryside. It was a good land, blessed with all manner of foods to sustain the varied wildlife, a land whose rich soil offered a bountiful harvest to those willing to clear the field and sow the seed. But the land’s richness was its own curse as well as its blessing. For a place worth having was worth fighting for. The dogs of war had come to the territory’s smoky, cloudswept hills and verdant valleys, to its lush, grassy meadows and sparkling creeks and rivers.

The fight for land was an ages-old conflict, one that Kit figured had been going on since Cain slew Abel. As for Kit’s part, he had to believe his cause was just. He intended to do whatever needed to be done to help peace return to this territory. And that meant convincing General Andrew Jackson and his army that the Choctaws weren’t their enemy. Visiting Jackson at his Tennessee encampment with a British agent in tow seemed the best way to sell the sharply opinionated general on the idea of just who his enemies really were.

“Your thoughts,” Raven said, “do they travel upriver or down?” Kit was a curious man, one moment outgoing, pensive the next.

“Maybe a little of both.”

“Be careful that they do not become lost in the night,” the woman cautioned.

“As long as you’re here,” Kit replied, “they’ll find their way back.” By God, he’d said it. He couldn’t believe his own courage.

Raven uttered a little embarrassed laugh. “I think perhaps you are like my father. Such words come easy. But is it bold talk or the truth?”

“Maybe you ought to wait around and find out.”

Raven did just that.

Young Otter helped himself to another bowl of stew, then returned to his place by the campfire. Stalking Fox had barely touched his food. He’d set his bowl aside and was honing the iron blade of his tomahawk on a sharpening stone. The blade made a rasping sound as the metal edge ground along the flattened surface of the palm-sized rock. Now and then, he lifted his eyes from his work to stare out at the darkness where Raven had gone to bring food to Kit. That she failed to immediately return left him seething.