Sword of Vengeance (28 page)

Bill Tibbs jumped in surprise, then stared through the acrid discharge and saw Runs Above stumble, clutch his back, and pitch face forward in the trampled earth.

Wolf Jacket loosed a savage war cry and charged into battle. He leaped the crumpled form of the man he had murdered and without so much as a side-glance raced toward the sound of battle.

Tibbs hesitated, uncertain of his role. There should have been guards posted by the dugouts and outlying sentries stationed in the forest. Red Stick braves brushed past him, drawn to the din of shrieking men and thundering guns. Somewhere in all that furious bloodletting, Kit McQueen waited. As sure as morning followed night, Kit waited for him. Tibbs smiled and drew the scimitar from its gold-inlaid scabbard. He stared at his elongated reflection in the length of razor-sharp steel.

“Take me to him,” he said aloud, and joined the Creeks as they prepared to retake the eastern end of the village.

On the ceremonial pole in the heart of the encampment, the scarlet tanager whose sunrise song had awakened the dawn left its perch and rode the morning breeze up and over the lodges and the newly tilled and planted fields. It swooped and soared above the stockade walls left virtually undefended in the wake of the Choctaw attack. The tanager flew on toward the woods and glided down toward the branches of a white oak, then altered its glide and rose once more into the sky, frightened off by the column of soldiers emerging from concealment.

General Andrew Jackson had arrived.

The horn of Iron Hand O’Keefe blared once again. It pierced the tumult and summoned the Choctaws and Cherokees to fall back, which they did in good order, swiftly and almost in unison. They broke off the fighting and retreated through the smoldering ruins of the Creek encampment. Dead men, mostly Creek but some Choctaw, littered the ground.

As O’Keefe’s people headed for the dugouts, many a former captive followed them. Choctaw women and children gathered rifles, powder, and shot from the slain and joined in the retreat to the tip of the peninsula and the riverbank of the Tallapoosa, whose muddy waters effectively prevented any escape. They were cornered.

Kit had trouble keeping up with the wild-eyed Choctaws as they fled through thickening clouds of ashen smoke. His leg, though healed, was not as limber as it used to be. Kit’s buckskin shirt was ripped and blood oozed from his slashed shoulder. A red welt streaked his powder-burned cheek. Lead slugs whirred past, searching for him. Gray smoke from the burning village drifted over the peninsula, obscuring the combatants who had blindly stumbled into the stinging mist.

A Cherokee warrior staggered. Kit caught him by the arm, then saw the man was already dead, the back of his skull blown away. The riverbank at last materialized up ahead. The Choctaws scrambled into positions behind the dugouts and prepared to make their final stand. Kit redoubled his efforts and, with his lungs burning, managed to vault the makeshift barricade.

As he reached the tenuous safety of the dugouts, half a dozen rifle balls flattened against the side of the nearest boat and showered him with splinters.

The first wave of Creeks followed close on the heels of the Choctaws. The Red Sticks, in their fury, never slowed but descended on the dugouts in a wild assault through the billowing smoke. The Choctaws loosed a ragged volley that broke the attack as quickly as it had begun and further obscured the riverbank.

Kit fired into the acrid mist, then dropped below the dugout and reloaded. By the time he swung his rifle over the edge of the barricade for another shot, the Creeks had already retreated into the smoke to regroup and lick their wounds. At least fifty of their number were sprawled upon the ground, dead or dying.

Kit crawled the fifteen feet to the river’s edge and dunked his head beneath the cooling waters. He was not alone. The rest of the Choctaws hurried to slake their thirst before the next onslaught. Kit raised up. Water matted his red hair and beard and dripped from his face. O’Keefe loaded his pistols a few yards farther up the bank and Kit scrambled across to the Irishman. O’Keefe gripped a pistol between his knees and poured a charge of powder down the barrel, then rammed home a patch and shot. Kit noticed the Irishman’s iron hook was caked with blood. Someone had died a nasty death.

“They’ll come at us full force this time,” the Irishman grumbled.

“I imagine so,” Kit replied.

He looked east to where the morning sun struggled to be seen through the billowing wood and powder smoke shrouding Horseshoe Bend. Kit then glanced down at his torn shirt where the medal of Daniel McQueen dangled against his chest. He placed his hand over the British coin that George Washington had initialed and presented to his father thirty-six years ago. In those early days of the Revolution, things must have looked pretty hopeless… same as now.

“Well there’s one good thing,” O’Keefe said.

“What?” Kit asked.

“We won’t have time to get scared,” the Irishman said, and squatted behind the barricade. The dugout was hard-pressed to provide cover for a man his size.

Kit shouldered his Kentucky rifle and knelt alongside O’Keefe. All along the riverbank Choctaw warriors began to taunt the Creeks, who no doubt were massing to attack. Kit’s chest swelled with pride. He had never been among more gallant men.

The Red Sticks advanced through the haze, a dim, ghostly army on the move. Kit, O’Keefe, and the rest of the Choctaws prepared to meet them with another volley.

Suddenly, on the verge of the attack, a thunderous exchange of rifle fire sounded at the opposite end of the village. The Creeks halted, uncertain whether or not to continue their advance. Behind them, the rifle fire increased in intensity, and now could be heard the cries of the dying and the war whoops of the Blue Ridge boys and enraged Tennessee mountain men wild as any savage to be found on the peninsula.

“By God, it’s him!” O’Keefe was jubilant. He stood and raised his horn to his lips and sounded a blast. “C’mon, you bloodthirsty bastards. You’ve a choice now. Old Hickory or Choctaw steel!” O’Keefe danced a jig and laughed aloud. The Choctaw warriors grinned at his display.

Kit reached up, caught O’Keefe by the arm, and pulled him back behind the barricade.

“The white chief Jackson has taken the village. The Red Sticks are trapped,” Young Otter exclaimed. The stocky warrior had worked his way along the riverbank until he had reached them with this news.

“Yes, trapped,” Kit said. “With only one way out,” Kit replied. “Through us.”

At the first report that Jackson’s troops had stormed the stockade and were loosed in the village, Wolf Jacket knew he was finished. Now his sole concern was to live to fight another day. Standing before his assembled warriors, he sent most of them back into the drifting smoke, back into the encampment in a vain attempt to rout the soldiers.

The war chief held in reserve the warriors of the Bear Clan and those of the Turtle Clan. With these men he would storm the dugouts, cut his way through the Choctaw, and make good his escape. He spied Bill Tibbs standing close at hand. From the expression on Tibbs’s face it was plain that the gunrunner had guessed the purpose of the war chief’s strategy.

Tibbs rubbed his watering eyes. He’d lost his stomach for the fight. He peered at the dugouts through the haze. Kit might be there, yes, but Tibbs had a bad feeling about charging into those Choctaw rifles.

“Give me the long knife,” Wolf Jacket said, his dark eyes fixed on the scimitar.

“Go to the devil,” Tibbs replied.

Wolf Jacket nodded to the Red Sticks standing to either side of Tibbs. They jabbed their rifles into his sides and cocked their weapons.

“I will not ask again,” Wolf Jacket said.

Bill Tibbs’s long, lean frame tensed. His left hand closed into a fist. The paleness of his flesh was positively cadaverous and stretched taut over his bony brow and prominent cheekbones.

A pitched battle was raging in the village, coming closer, ever closer. He was wasting time. Tibbs, his expression as if etched in stone, tossed the Eye of Alexander on the ground before Wolf Jacket. The Creek retrieved the weapon. As he grasped the hilt, energy surged through his limbs. The warrior’s lips curled back in a feral snarl. He spun, lunged with the scimitar, and buried the blade in Bill Tibbs’s vitals.

Tibbs gasped and clawed his belly, astonished, feeling the violation of the blade. “No. …” he moaned, and sank to his knees as the blade slid out, drenched with his blood. He collapsed upon the smoke-shrouded ground.

“Now I have the power!” Wolf Jacket raised the crimson blade, gleaming hilt, and ruby eye for the Red Sticks to see. Then, with an ear-splitting shriek, he charged the barricade, the Bear Clan and Turtle Clan at his side, following Wolf Jacket and the spirit weapon he held.

Kit McQueen heard the inhuman-sounding cry and sighted his rifle on the shifting clouds of smoke. The oncoming Creeks again materialized out of the ashen fog within a few yards of the dugouts. Creek and Choctaw rifles belched flame. Men dropped on both sides, fell clutching their shattered limbs and spurting wounds. Men stumbled and cried and begged for water and died. And that was only the beginning. Creek warriors leaped the barricade and closed with the defenders, who rose to meet them. Choctaw tomahawk and Cherokee knife and Creek rifled musket continued the butchery. The fighting was hand to hand: stab, club, kick, or gouge. Pistols fired at close range also took their toll.

Kit, his rifle empty, tossed the weapon and drew his pistols, the “Quakers.” A Creek warrior climbed atop the dugout and leveled a pistol of his own. Kit shot him dead and fired with the second pistol. The heavy-caliber slug knocked a second warrior to the ground. A pistol roared to his right and Kit saw O’Keefe drop one warrior with his flintlock. The Irishman disemboweled another victim with his hook.

“McQueen!” O’Keefe bellowed a warning. Too late. A blurred figure in a red coat leaped over the dugouts and barreled into Kit. The two men rolled down the riverbank. Kit caught a glimpse of curved steel; then the thin razor-sharp blade cracked, slicing into Kit’s side. He groaned, staggered, kicked free, and finally faced his assailant through a haze of gunsmoke.

He recognized Wolf Jacket. And the Red Stick remembered this white man who had stolen away Iron Hand’s daughter and humiliated the war chief of the Creek nation.

Wolf Jacket feinted with the scimitar, whose shattered blade still posed a threat, a foot of jagged steel sprouting from its jeweled hilt. Had it been an actual thrust, Kit would have died then and there, for he was dumbstruck and rooted in place at the shock of seeing the weapon Wolf Jacket held, the Eye of Alexander.

The war chief howled in triumph, darted forward, and slashed at Kit’s throat, assuming the sword’s magic would continue to hold his intended victim spellbound. Wolf Jacket was wrong.

Kit ducked beneath the thrust, caught the war chief’s wrist, and wrenched the man off balance, flinging him into the shallows. Kit dove after the Red Stick and, using his weight and leverage, turned the sword against Wolf Jacket. Kit shoved down through the muddy water and plunged the shattered length of steel hilt-deep in the warrior’s heart.

Wolf Jacket screamed and choked as water poured into his mouth and muffled his agonized cry. Bubbles rippled the surface. The warrior’s legs thrashed the water but he could free himself neither from the weight of the man atop him nor from the cruel bite of the blade that took his life.

The legs settled in the water. The bubbles stopped. The struggle ended. Kit straightened, stood, and pulled the broken-bladed weapon free, leaving a bloody trail on the river’s silt-churned surface. Kit gradually became aware of the silence, broken only by a scattering of gunshots. He looked up and saw that the battle at the dugouts had ended. The surviving Creeks had lost their stomach for the fight and had surrendered to O’Keefe’s people.

Gripping the Eye of Alexander, Kit stumbled as if in a dream walk out of the river and through the Choctaws, who stood aside to let him pass. O’Keefe spoke to him, but the Irishman’s voice seemed far away. He said something about the scimitar being worth a fortune.

Up ahead, a war-weary line of soldiers straggled from the village. Kit recognized Captain Bellamy, alive and clutching a broken left arm. And there was General Jackson astride a fine chestnut stallion. Gritty black powder smoke lapped at the stallion’s belly. Old Hickory waited, the general no doubt expecting Lieutenant McQueen to make his report.

But the general could wait.

Kit picked his way among the dead warriors. The half-glimpsed corpses of three tribes lay twisted and still beneath the hellish mist, the residue of war.

Then Kit McQueen heard the voice, and he knew what had drawn him from the river. He saw the arm reach up from among the dead and extend a hand above the shifting charcoal-colored shroud.

“Mine,” said a voice that might have belonged to Bill Tibbs but sounded as if it called from the land of the dead. “Miiiinnnnnne …” The man who had been his friend beckoned.

The Eye of Alexander gleamed and glittered, and Kit saw his own reflection in the jewel. It was worth a fortune, that sword—no, more than a fortune. The Eye of Alexander was power. And all Kit had to do was keep the sword. Keep it. Keep it for his very own.

Keep it.

Kit shuddered and gingerly reversed the shortened blade and fitted the jeweled hilt into the outstretched fingers of what had once been Bill Tibbs. And Kit thought he heard a kind of sigh. A death rattle? Or the horrid, sibilant sound of a man’s soul being sucked out and imprisoned in a blood-red stone? The hand sank out of sight. Kit McQueen turned, and parting the black mist, he kept walking until he reached the sunlight.

T
HE MEDAL IS A
series of novels that chronicles the exploits of the McQueens, a family whose devotion to the dream of what America can be involves them in our nation’s most turbulent decades. Passing along their own unique “medal of honor” from one generation to the next, the McQueens embody the proud spirit of the country they serve.