Sword of Vengeance (7 page)

A man dead, Morales thought with disgust, and two wounded. The sergeant dispatched his remaining men to ring the Yankees’ position and then settled down to a waiting game. At least Morales could be certain the Yankees weren’t going anywhere while he tried to figure out some new tactic. An hour had come and gone, and he hadn’t hit on a solution except to wait for the long, hot hours to dull the senses of the
Inglés
defenders before trying another assault. Unfortunately, his dragoons were suffering as much as the men behind the barricade, maybe even more so for their lack of sleep.

“Sergeant Morales,” Vargas spoke up. “You think these Yankee bastards have much gold? The boy might have been lying.” The young dragoon raised up, snapped off a shot at the barricade, and as quickly crouched down and reloaded.

“The boy knows me. He knows what would happen to him and his mother and sister if he told such a lie.” Morales crawled to his knees and peered above the grass at the cypress logs. He had glimpsed Father Ramon with the Yankees and began to wonder if he might be able to use the priest to his advantage.

“
Inglés!
Hey you,
Inglés
, I am Sergeant Pablo Morales. I have you trapped. Yes? You agree? Well, at least you don’t disagree.” Morales stroked his chin, scratched at the stubbled growth. His mind was awash with plans that he discarded as quickly as he formed them. “You throw the gold over the logs where I can see it. Then I let you leave, eh? You go north to your home. I, Pablo Morales, give you your lives. Surely your lives are more precious than the treasure you carry.”

Morales wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. His lips felt waxy. It was always the same when he lied.

Safe within the walls of Escovar’s fort, Kit listened to the sergeant and wanted to believe him. But an instinct for self-preservation caused him to doubt Morales’s word. He looked toward the distant line of trees, hoping to spy Tibbs bringing the horses at a gallop through the pines. Kit realized with a sinking heart that he’d have to stall for more time. He hefted his shot bag and powder horn. Ammunition and gunpowder were dangerously low. He couldn’t beat off another attack if the dragoons made a concerted effort.

“You hear me, Yankees?” Morales called out. “Both of you discuss this among yourselves. You see I’m right. It’s the only way you have of staying alive.”

“At least the sergeant thinks he’s trapped us both,” Kit remarked. That meant Tibbs got away. He glanced at the priest, who had become increasingly distraught as the siege lingered on and he had seen three of his own countrymen shot down.

“I guess you wish about now you had left Bill and me to the sand crabs,” Kit said.

The priest shrugged. “Yes … and no. Yes, when I see men fight and kill one another and I blame myself. No, when I realize what I did was right, what the Gospel tells us to do, to treat all men as brothers.”

“Yankees?”

“We’re talking it over!” Kit shouted back. He studied the priest. “What about the Creek village and Father Ramon’s mission?” he called back to the sergeant.

“What happens to them will happen whether I kill you
Inglés
or not.”

Father Ramon lowered his head and thought of the people of the mission. He had taught them the ways of peace. And now he had betrayed them to the sergeant’s vengeance. Heaven only knew what cruelties Morales had in mind. Father Ramon’s converts might all be taken away in chains for harboring the men from the north. Somehow, the padre thought, I must save them. But
how?
Grief tore at his heart, and he was filled with confusion and remorse and an overpowering feeling of dread that there was no just way out of this predicament. Tragedy was at hand, and he stood helpless in its path. Unless—

Lead slugs thudded into the logs, showering Kit and the priest with splinters. The two men waited out the fusillade. Kit loaded his pistols. The priest armed himself with prayer.

Kit shifted position and crawled along the cypress barricade until he reached a juncture between the logs. Here he peered through intersecting roots and waited, noticing the telltale rustle of the tall grass as some of Morales’s men attempted to close in on the redoubt.

One well-placed shot might startle the soldiers and send them scurrying back. It had worked before. It ought to again.

He placed the barrel of his gun on the juncture between root and trunk. The log provided an excellent gun mount. He sighted along the barrel at the closest depression in the grass and slowly squeezed the trigger. The gun leaped in his fist and spewed a tongue of flame. A geyser of dirt erupted just inches from the grassy depression, and a man in a mud-spattered uniform leaped to his feet and scampered back the way he had come, along with three of his companions who assumed they too had been discovered.

“That’s done ’em,” Kit said, satisfied.

“I’m sorry,” Father Ramon said from across the redoubt.

“No need to be, Padre. I just read him from the Book. I didn’t plant him with it,” Kit said, turning. His moment of hard-won optimism faded at the sight of the priest, pistol in hand.

“Father, no.”

“I have to help my people. I am sorry. But you see, Morales will punish them all for my actions. They’ll be sold into slavery, down to the last child. I cannot allow it. Maybe this will buy his mercy. I have to try.”

“You aren’t going to kill me.”

Kit had another gun in his belt and slowly began to reach for it. And yet what good was it? Could he shoot the priest?
If only Tibbs would return
, he thought.
Damn. What had happened to the man?

While Kit pondered his fate and that of his friend, the priest continued to explain himself.

“No. I will not take a life. But touch your other gun and you will leave here a cripple,” the padre said as he aimed the pistol at Kit’s right knee. Kit sighed and did as the desperate priest ordered.

“The Yankee is my prisoner!” the priest shouted. He stood and revealed himself to the surrounding soldiers. “May God forgive me,” he added beneath his breath, taking no comfort in his betrayal.

Kit simply stared at the priest. Words failed him. His world had come crashing in on him, burying him in the rubble of his dreams. Scarcely a minute later Kit was surrounded by muskets, all of them loaded, primed, and leveled at him. Then a shadow fell across Kit as Sergeant Morales stood atop one of the logs, his florid features aglow with victory.

“Well done, priest,” he told the Franciscan magnanimously. Then the sweet rush of triumph melted away as the realization sank in that Kit was alone. The other
Inglés
had slipped away. And from the look of the empty clearing, the missing Yankee had taken the treasure with him. Morales leaped down and swaggered over to his prisoner.

“I am but a poor man, at your service,” Kit said, meeting the sergeant in the center of the redoubt. He stood toe to toe with the heavyset Spaniard. Morales’s answer was a hairy hand that seemed to come out of nowhere and caught Kit along the jaw, dropping him to his knees. But he wasn’t about to play victim to the likes of the sergeant. Kit dove forward and with his head butted the big man below the belt. Morales gasped and doubled over.

“Kill him,” Morales choked out through clenched teeth.

“No!” Father Ramon rushed forward and placed himself in the line of fire. He held out his hands to further impede the remaining soldiers before they could open fire. “No! I forbid this murder in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”

The soldiers hesitated, uncertain what to do. Sergeant Morales groaned and struggled to his feet, one hand covering his bruised crotch. He sucked in and exhaled massive amounts of air. His eyes locked with Kit’s. Something the sergeant saw made him look away.

“Very well, priest,” the sergeant managed to gasp. “The
Inglés
goes with us. I shall find the other Yankee and execute them both on the spot. Then the treasure shall be ours. And that will make me happy, priest. So do not vex me. Or I will forget the good you have done.” Morales glared at Kit. But the sergeant kept his distance. Then he shifted his gaze once more to the priest. “Tell me all you know, Padre. What has become of the other Yankee and the gold?”

Father Ramon lowered his head. He was unable to drive the destruction of the Christian Indian settlement from his mind. The fate of every man, woman, and child hung in the balance. The priest had no choice. He told the sergeant of Alsino Escovar and the horses and pointed out the deer trail leading through the woods.

Morales brightened. “Bring horses, my men. Bind the Yankee. Hurry! There is still time. We can still be men of wealth.” Four soldiers remained to guard their prisoner while the rest left to gather in the horses.

Father Ramon moved closer to Kit.

“Forgive me, Christopher,” the priest said, imploring.

Kit shrugged. “Forget it, Padre.” His mouth was a grim slash across his emotionless features. In the young man’s eyes, something cold and deadly had been born. It lurked deep in the wellspring of his once carefree soul. “You only did what you had to do,” Kit added, without a trace of warmth. “Like my friend, Bill Tibbs.”

A
LSINO ESCOVAR WAS A
small, wiry little man with skin the color of a rotting peach and a face as wrinkled and hard-looking as the pit. He was garbed in native furs and wore alligator hide moccasins. A medicine bag hung from a braided leather band that circled his throat. He was missing several teeth, and those still protruding from his gums did so by the grace of God. Escovar had one other distinguishing feature: His throat had been slit from ear to ear. It was a ghastly wound left by a razor-sharp blade—no doubt the scimitar, for Tibbs did not have a knife. The dead man lay in a patch of darkened earth where the blood had been absorbed into the soil.

Kit McQueen peered down into the man’s face. A look of surprise had become the poor man’s death mask. He was sprawled about twenty feet from his cabin near the gate of a crudely thrown-together corral. He’d made a fence out of pine saplings and hadn’t even bothered to trim the branches from the trunks. The gate itself was simply three smaller trees lashed together and then fastened to a post set in the earth. Like the corral, Escovar’s ramshackle cabin looked as if he had spent as little time as possible on its construction. The walls were haphazardly chinked and fit poorly together at the corners, and one side leaned noticeably outward. Racks of animal hides cluttered the clearing and made evident what Alsino Escovar had held important in his life. Pelts of river otter, mink, and gray fox hung alongside drying alligator hides and the tawny carcass of a recently killed panther.

The dead man’s cook fire was still smoldering; a chunk of roasted turtle meat had been gnawed on, then tossed aside for the ants to find. It appeared as if the trapper had been walking toward the corral when death came, taking him by surprise. He had probably settled on a price for his horses and thought there was nothing to fear. Maybe Bill Tibbs had offered Escovar the Eye of Alexander, worth a thousand times the price of a nag. Perhaps he had stood spellbound as Tibbs showed him the glittering blade and jeweled hilt. Escovar must have delighted in the bargain, not knowing he had dealt with the devil. With a quick flip of the wrist Tibbs could have slashed the trapper’s throat …

“There were three horses here,” Corporal Galvez called out as he knelt in the corral and studied the ground. “Or maybe two, it is hard to tell,” he added with a shrug.

The other dragoons fanned out across the clearing. A few of them stumbled as they walked, their steps leaden and movements awkward from lack of sleep.

Sergeant Morales was the exception. He prowled the campsite like a wolf on the hunt. His tunic was unbuttoned now and his hat discarded for a strip of cloth tied around his head to keep the sweat out of his eyes. He looked more a pirate than a man in command of these soldiers. He carried a pistol in each hand, and as he walked his angry gaze swept the surrounding forest for some indication that Tibbs was still nearby.

Eventually Morales wound up alongside Kit, who remained under the constant guard of the two men he had wounded. They had left the third casualty to rot where he lay. Sergeant Morales drew up in front of Kit and took a moment to study his prisoner.

“What kind of fool gives gold to a friend and expects him not to run off, eh? Your friend has left you to the mercy of Pablo Morales. But I do not feel merciful. That is a weakness best left to the padre.” He jabbed a thumb in the direction of Father Ramon, who was kneeling by the lifeless body of Alsino Escovar.

The priest paused a moment to look up at the sound of his name. It was plain that Father Ramon blamed Kit as well as himself for what had happened.

Sergeant Morales shifted his position and blocked the priest’s view. The sergeant had just begun to regale Kit for his stupidity when one of his men called out that he had found a set of tracks. Morales indicated to Kit’s guards to bring their prisoner along.

The set of tracks led out of the clearing and away from the meadow where Kit had waited, besieged and buying time for his friend. The tracks circled for a moment as if the rider had some difficulty with one of the horses (or perhaps Tibbs had been struggling with his conscience) and then cut sharply out of the clearing and on to the underbrush before heading north.

Up until seeing the tracks, Kit had been hoping for some kind of miracle that might reveal an ulterior motive for Tibbs’s actions. Kit had tried to believe Tibbs was hiding in the woods waiting for a chance to help his friend escape. But the tracks pointing north dashed such hopes and left Kit with the undeniable realization he’d been betrayed.

The treasure of al-Jezzar had seduced Bill Tibbs. Kit thought of the scimitar. It seemed the Eye of Alexander cursed and corrupted whoever looked into its blood-red, jeweled orb. Alexander’s luck, indeed. Kit glowered and cursed the day he had first spied the glittering blade hanging from a wall in the treasure rooms at Derna. Kit remembered how he had fallen under the scimitar’s spell and watched in awe as the large, round ruby, the Eye itself, seemed to pulse with life. He had attributed the phenomenon to the flickering torchlight, but now he was not so certain. After the shipwreck, the loss of most of their booty, the death of the
Trenton
’s crew, and now this, betrayed by his friend, Kit began to realize that the relic did indeed possess some kind of sinister power that twisted and destroyed all who came in contact with it.