The Renegades: Nick (15 page)

“Your witness is mistaken.”

“Description fits you to a T. Big black stud horse, fine-tooled saddle.”

“Does this look like a black horse to you?”

His accuser gave a short laugh.

“Same saddle.”

“I haven’t been to Santa Fe
since
last week.”

“Yore name Nick Smith?”

“Yes. Who’s your witness?”

“Man name of Baxter.”

“He’s a lying son-of-a-bitch,” Nick said. “He’s wanted this claim since the Run.”

“We’re taking you in,” Cap Williams ordered.

Guns drawn, the men surrounded him.

“No!” Callie screamed. “Listen to me!”

She ran, crashing through the dry leaves and twigs, darting in and out through the brush, fighting it away from her face with both hands. Nearly breathless, she burst out of it closer to the band of vigilantes that had taken Nick, but they were already riding away.

“I’ve been with him all day,” she yelled. “He hasn’t been to Santa Fe.”

“Yeah, sure,” Cap Williams called, barely
turning in his saddle to take note of her. “Next time, get you a man who won’t drop the money in the road.”

All of them guffawed at that.

They urged the horses toward the mouth of the draw, moving so fast Callie soon couldn’t see them in the dusk—not even Nickajack’s pale shirt above the yellow mare.

Callie drove up to the small limestone building marked
jail
shortly before noon the next day, parked the wagon, and wrapped the lines around the brake handle. She’d never imagined, when she saw the little place last week, that she’d be rushing to get to it today with her heart in her throat.

She climbed down over the wheel and stood for a moment, brushing the dust from her person. If she looked as nice and as respectable as possible, Williams would take her as seriously as possible. Surely he would, despite the way he had treated her the day before.

Also, she wanted to look nice for Nickajack—to help give him hope.

It would show him, too, that she was capable and self-sufficient and not falling apart without him. That would keep him from worrying about her.

She practiced smiling a time or two, wishing she had a mirror so she could tell whether she was succeeding. But never, since they brought
her the news of Vance’s death, had she felt less like smiling. Ever since she’d risen from Nick’s bed before first light, she’d had that shivery, scared feeling all the way into her bones that she used to get whenever Mama woke her in the middle of the night for the start of a journey or to harvest the oats ahead of a rain.

But this time there was no excitement or anticipation underneath the uncertainty, no deep security of kinfolk surrounding her. Only fear like she’d never known.

It wasn’t worry for herself, though, that had kept her awake all night. It was worry for Nick. She was going to get him out of this jail if it was the last thing she ever did.

She crossed the short distance to the door, which stood open as a concession to the heat of the day, and stepped into the one small room. Nick sat behind a row of rough iron bars that reached from the wood floor to the low ceiling, his long legs stretched out before him on the narrow bed, his hands clasped behind his head, looking as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

His eyes told a different story, though—she caught a glimpse of mute despair before he saw her. His eyelids half-closed and his lips curved in the ghost of his rare smile.

The look made her heart ache and her blood run hotter.

“You don’t appear surprised to see me.”

“I knew you’d come,” he said, in a low voice that touched her, deep inside. “After all, ain’t you the buggy boss of that whole country out there around Chikaskia Creek?”

He got up and walked to the row of bars that divided the small room in half.

“No-o-o,” she said, moving to meet him as helplessly as a moth to a flame. “I drive a wagon.”

That made him actually smile, although barely.

“Wagon boss is another name for it.”

“Well, I’m not any kind of boss at all or you wouldn’t be … in there.”

She, who was so blunt by nature, couldn’t bring herself to say “in that cell” or “behind bars.” It physically made her heart hurt in her chest to see him helplessly trapped, when he should be astride his big, black horse riding freely across the vast prairie.

“I’m furious Williams wouldn’t listen to me when I told him you hadn’t been to town yesterday.”

“He thinks you’re my wife, so you’d lie for me.”

His gaze held hers.

“I would lie for you,” she said, “but he won’t even believe me when I’m telling the truth.”

“Like the truth that you were with me all day yesterday?”

That made her smile.

“Yes. For all the good it did.”

“Exactly,” he said, his voice suddenly sharp with worry. “I told you to stay hidden.”

His gaze lingered on hers.

“I couldn’t,” she said, lifting both hands to wrap them around the bars, wishing she was strong enough to rip them out of their sockets. “Where’s the High Sheriff?”

“Across the street to get my breakfast. Said he can keep an eye on the door from there.”

“As if you could break these bars. Or go through those thick stone walls.”

She glanced around, aching to get the feel of those words off her tongue and the sound of them out of her head. He followed her gaze. Despair for him filled her, for he hated to be inside, much less locked in. It was already hot as sin in there.

“Another irony of the selling of the Strip,” he said dryly. “This is an old line cabin of the Circle N, the outfit that leased this graze. I used it some when I rode for them.”

Callie tried to imagine that.

“But it surely didn’t already have
bars
across it?”

He gave a bitter chuckle.

“Nope. But Cap Williams gets things done, even if the town is only three weeks old. He’s a lawman on fire to lock up the bad men, so he’s gotta have a cage to put ‘em in.”

He sobered and looked at her straight.

“He’s a good politician, too, is our Cap. You better be gone before he comes back. Running out of the trees to defend me last night and now, hanging around the jail talking friendly with the big
bandido
, might be enough to keep you out of your school.”

“I’m here to talk to
him
. To tell him that we’ve been together for the last week, and that I know where you’ve been and that you couldn’t have robbed the bank.”

That brought a glint of amusement before he gave her a stern, warning look.

“Then you
really
won’t get a school. Surely you don’t think he’d believe I’ve been living alone in the barn for a week.”

His sleepy-looking lids lowered, and his eyes told her he wished he hadn’t been. For a minute, that look held her and she wished the same. The feel of his arms around her aboard the yellow filly flowed through her. When he got out and came home … if he still looked at her that way …

“You might as well be whistling “Dixie,” anyhow, Callie. The man’s happy as a hyena about catching himself a bank robber. He won’t take anybody’s word to let me go.”

“Then I’ll find somebody to contradict Baxter! You know he can’t be the only one who saw the robber, right here in town!”

“You go register your land description, is
what you do,” he said fiercely. “Of all days for me to be locked up! I could kill the claim-jumping …”

“I brought your permit,” she said, opening her reticule to take out the folded paper and pen and ink she’d wrapped together. “I thought if you’d sign it, they might let me register for you, too.”

A bleak hope flashed in his eyes.

“Give it here.”

As he took it, he gave her a slow grin.

“Going through my papers again, hmm?”

She felt herself blush a little.

“How’d you get a permit, anyhow?” she asked, to change the subject while she held the ink for him to dip the pen. “A bribe?”

“A visit to a registration booth,” he said, with a chuckle, “and then a ride back home, keeping to the draws and off the ridges. I saw several other Sooners on the way.”

He motioned for her to turn and let him prop the paper against her back. One of his big hands held it flat, feeling like a brand to her skin. She wanted it to stay there forever. What if he could never touch her again? What if she could never touch him again?

“If they won’t let you do this, don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll try again when all this is over.”

Her heart dropped again.

“How will you ever get out?” she whispered.

“I may have to break out,” he said. “If I hit the owl-hoot trail, stay at my place and take care of my horses.”

“I will.”

After she said that, her voice was gone.

“Try to go to the bald-headed clerk that took my bribe,” Nick said, and touched her shoulder so she’d turn to face him again.

She did, fighting tears with all her might.

His light gray eyes blazed at her from his dark face.

“Callie …”

He put his hands on the bars then, too, over hers, and the heat they held shot through her whole body. It was a thrill and a comfort, both. It gave her strength and took the very starch from her bones at the same time.

She waited, holding her breath.

“… Be careful.”

It wasn’t what he had first meant to say, and she knew it. But another moment and she’d be sobbing like a child, trying to separate the bars to get to him, never mind letting him out.

“Go,” he said.

Slowly, he removed his hands from hers and let them fall to his sides.

She tore her gaze from his, turned, and ran for her wagon.

It was only after she’d driven all the way through town, past loud saloons and rearing horses and a fight or two, and had left her
team and wagon at the livery stable, that she could even think about anything but Nick. The registration. Today was the day he’d paid good money to get, and she couldn’t let that go to waste. The line was already more than a dozen people long, even with the method of assigning days. She must get this done, and then she’d try to find someone else who’d seen the robber running from the bank.

“Hey, there, home-steadin’ widder-woman!”

The shout stopped her in her tracks because her body recognized Baxter’s voice before her mind did. She turned to see him crossing the street, waving at her, hurrying to get to her before a line of freight wagons reached him.

Her fear of him didn’t even have a chance of overcoming her anger. He’d lied about Nick and tried to ruin him, he accosted her every time she came to town, he—

But wait. He was just the man she needed to see.

She pretended to ignore him and walked on to take her place in line at the Land Office, which had become the most significant spot in her life. Well, today would be the last time because she—and Nick, she was determined to believe—would be registered and she wouldn’t have to come here for another five years, when she’d proved up her claim and earned final title to it.

This slow-moving line at the Land Office would be dear to her heart forever, if she could gain Nick’s freedom here. If she could challenge Baxter and then bribe him to change his story, this ugly Land Office shack would even be beautiful.

“Well, well,” Baxter called, gaining her side of the street, “my reckoning was you’d be coming to town to see about yore man.”

“No,” Callie said sweetly, turning on her heel to face him, “I came to town to see you, Mr. Baxter. And you certainly cannot be called ‘my man,’ “

She held herself to her full height and waited for him to come to her. Frowning, he did so, his eyes glinting bright as they bored into hers.

“Then you found me, little lady.”

“You know you lied about who robbed the bank,” she said. “Mr. Smith wasn’t in town yesterday.”

“Wal, now, I’ll grant you that if anybody’s liable to know where that Injun’s at, you’re the one,” he said, “but I can’t deny what I seen with my own eyes.”

“But you
can
deny that the robber was Mr. Smith if you think it over and realize that you were mistaken.”

He shrugged.

“Tall man, well built,” he said flatly. “Black hat, big black stud horse.”

Every word he spoke in that self-righteous tone and every satisfied look he gave her fanned the flames of her fury, but she refused to let him see that

“That could describe a lot of people.”

“Th’ Injun’s nothing special, true,” he said derisively, “but that black horse is a humdinger. Couldn’t miss that good-lookin’ sucker in a coal mine at midnight.”

Suddenly it struck her. He hadn’t had Nick thrown in jail and then hailed her on the street to taunt her for revenge. He wanted something.

Callie’s heart soared. In the middle of the night, she had realized that he probably could be bribed. Of course he could! He had all those children to support, didn’t he?

This
was the reason he had falsely accused Nick. He’d seen Nick’s fine horse twice, he’d seen his nice saddle last week in town, and he’d decided he was tired of riding a mule. The Baxters had nothing as a result of the Run, and he believed Nick had staked two claims …

Panic trailed cold fingers down the length of her spine. No. Surely not. Surely something smaller would do.

B
axter must have very little money. Surely he would take something much smaller than a claim.

“Perhaps I could offer you some compensation for your time to think again about what you saw yesterday,” she said softly, grateful that her voice held steady. “It’s such a gross injustice that Mr. Smith is sitting in jail when he is innocent and the real robber outlaw is running free.”

He stroked his beard with a slow gesture that seemed somehow both insolent and menacing.

“If that’s true, it’s a shame,” he said. “And it might be that I have possibly misspoke
about him. In what way do you think to compensate me?”

She did a quick calculation in her head.

“You understand that I’m limited to my own resources only,” she said. “If Mr. Smith knew about this conversation, he would be out for your blood rather than your good will.”

A little threat couldn’t hurt; maybe it would even help keep the price down.

“Maybe so,” he said, “but I ain’t worried about losing my hair.”

So. Here was a second threat. Nick would never be able to register his claim if the government found out he was a member of the Cherokee Nation.

“What are you offering, lady?”

His voice had gone cold as stone.

“Twenty-five dollars,” she said. “It’s all I have.”

That wasn’t quite true, but it was close enough. Without that amount, she’d be on Nick’s charity for food this winter.

He laughed. He threw back his shaggy head and laughed long and loud. Then his laughter stopped.

“Your claim,” he said.

Even though she had expected those words, Callie cringed.

“I have to have a place to live,” she said. “We must come to some other agreement.”

He watched her silently with his shrewd,
malevolent gaze. When she had held her breath forever, he spoke.

“No deal.”

“Thirty dollars.”

“Your claim.”

In the middle of the night, she had worked out a whole list of possible bribes. She’d have to bring out her best offer because she could not, would not, give up her land.

“Mr. Baxter, I will be teaching the Chikaskia Valley School when it opens,” she said, amazed that she could speak so calmly. “And for the first few years at least, the parents will have to pay a subscription. The first time we met, you mentioned that you have several children and so does your brother. I could give a reduced rate to your and your brothers’ children.”

If he bargained with her and asked for free subscriptions, she would give them. Surely that and thirty dollars would persuade him to withdraw his false accusation.

Instead, Baxter roared out an oath. “All them children may go to school or they may not, but they are gonna work a farm for me,” he said tightly. “They’ve got to pay for their raising somehow.”

“They can do more for you if I teach them to read and cipher …”

“Your
claim
,” he roared. “That’s the end of it.”

And it was. Her heart sank and she wanted desperately to try again, but she knew that he would take nothing less.

She had to give him her claim.

Suddenly the sky felt huge above her and the land stretching beneath it even more vast, while, small and pitiably weak, she stood in Baxter’s trap giving in to his highway robbery. The town seemed to close around her, close enough to choke her.

No one could help her, and she couldn’t help herself.

Never, not even when she’d left the mountains, knowing that she wouldn’t see her family again as long as she lived, had she felt so helpless.

It ain’t jist a feelin’, girl, it’s the hard-down truth. Ain’t nothin’ you kin do
.

It was Granny’s voice speaking in her ear: all-seeing, all-knowing Granny, who never failed to get to the heart of any matter. Once again, Granny was right.

Fury at the injustice of it came surging into her soul, mixed with fear. A terrible fear of what might happen to her and her baby.

A terrible shaking came over her inside and she fought not to let it show on the outside.

They would have no place to live! She’d have no place to be when the baby came!

Oh, and all her whole week of hot, miserable drudgery cutting and stacking sod
bricks—all her four, hard won half-walls that were going to be her home—would go to Baxter! He would come with all his kin and live on her land.

And with this one tiny baby who was now her only kin, where would she go?

Granny would tell her to take it one day at a time and trust to the Lord to provide. And both Granny and the Lord would stand behind her in doing anything to get Nick out of jail. After all he’d done for her, she’d never sleep well again if she left him there in order to keep her land.

“Baxter, you listen to me,” she said, clenching her teeth so that her chin wouldn’t tremble, “you had better not mention the word
Indian
or make any reference to it ever again.”

“I wouldn’t think of it,” he purred, with an evil grin that she longed to slap right off his face.

But there, too, she was helpless. If only she were a man! Then she’d …

Callie forced herself to turn her back on the despicable Baxter and to turn her thoughts, too. No sense working herself up into a froth over him; this was the way it was and it couldn’t be helped.

She must calm down and think this through.

While they stood in line waiting to get into the Land Office door, she wracked her brain for something, anything, she could do so as
not to feel so helpless. That feeling was dragging her down toward real despair and she had to fight it. She also had to deal with this horrid fear that Baxter still would make trouble about Nick’s being Cherokee once they stood in front of the clerk. That way, he might end up with her claim and Nick’s, too.

As a few more claimants left the small building, some more crowded in, and she and Baxter moved a few steps forward. She turned to him.

“When it’s our turn, if you breathe a word about Indians or Cherokees or even hint at it, I’ll not sign my claim over to you, understand?” she said. “I’m registering Nick’s claim for him first. Then when that’s done, and if you’ve made no trouble, I’ll sign mine over to you.
Only
then.”

“If you refuse to sign it over, your big red-skinned buck will still be sitting in jail. He might even hang. Have you thought of that?”

“It won’t matter,” she said, willing the calm authority to hold firm in her voice. “If he loses his claim, he’d rather be in jail or dead.”

He scowled.

“Think about it,” she said. “Call him an Indian in there, make him lose his land, and I won’t sign mine over to you. The only way you’ll ever get it is through the law, and that would cost you a fortune.”

Baxter thought about it.

“All
right
,” he growled. “Let’s just get this done.”

Callie still felt shaky, but at least she had some bit of leverage, which comforted her a little.

When she saw a man going up and down the line handing out sheets of newspaper, a faint hope rose in her heart. Ned Adams, the publisher of Santa Fe’s new newspaper,
The Prairie Fire
, was giving away sample sheets of that day’s edition. While Baxter stood breathing down her neck like some greedy, malevolent monster, Callie asked Mr. Adams if he had investigated the story he had printed about the bank robbery. He assured her that he had done so very thoroughly, and that no one, not even those coming and going from the busy restaurant tent next to the bank yesterday, had claimed to have seen the robber’s escape.

The bank’s tent was jammed onto a small lot that people frequently cut across to avoid the traffic in the street, so all the robber needed to do was let the bandanna used as his mask fall from his face to his neck, and he would’ve looked like anyone else hurrying about his noontime business, carrying a bag of possessions in hand.

The clerk, too, had described him as black-hatted, tall, and well-built. He had ducked into
the bank from beneath one canvas wall and had departed the same way.

Callie’s heart sank as Adams tipped his hat and moved on, calling out his headline about the bank robber. He had only one or two takers in the line; most people were too wrapped up in trying to get registered to want to read.

Almost everyone there had his life hanging by a thread, with no money in the bank, and had more interest in his own survival than the bank’s.

And now she was one of the ones hanging by a thread, as if she hadn’t been before. She would have to move into this teeming town with its ugly Hell’s Acre and try to find a job she could hold until the baby began to show. Or stay at Nick’s place.

Quickly, she closed her mind to all the visions that came to mind. The brave, reckless part of her wanted that more than she wanted air to breathe—which scared her half to death.

She couldn’t even think now. All she could do was feel, and all she could feel was a bone-wrenching regret that her baby would have no homeplace after all, no land to roam and to call his own and pass on to his children, no big space to run and play, no creeks to splash in or rocks to climb. That was how it would be if she moved to town.

The sun was high now and heating up the prairie with a vengeance, and from time to
time her stomach roiled. Once or twice she thought she might even faint. She closed her mind to everything but Nick sitting behind bars. In only a few minutes she’d be able to see the terrible despair disappear from his eyes.

Suddenly, she just couldn’t stand there any longer. She turned to Baxter.

“We could walk quickly up to the jail before our turn comes, and you could tell Sheriff Williams that you’ve made a mistake with the identification …”

“Yore nowhere near wily enough to fool this old possum,” he said coldly. “Don’t even try. Sign the claim to me first, and
then
I’ll get your lover out of jail.”

She looked at him, letting the cold blade of her fury shine sharp in her eyes.

“If you know what’s good for your health, you will do exactly that,” she said. “If you try to walk away from me after my claim is in your name, I will see to it that you die. I don’t care if you have a
hundred
children to feed.”

Her heartfelt words astonished her as much as they did him—for the first time ever she saw his narrow eyes widen in surprise.

“I’m a man of my word,” he said, with a gruff defensiveness that was almost laughable.

She kept looking him straight in the eye.

“Yes,” she said sarcastically, “except when you’re a witness to a robbery.”

“I am,” he said, taking a step forward as the line moved again. “Didn’t I tell you the first time I ever seen you that I’d have my name on that there piece of land you was claimin’? And ain’t that what we’re gittin’ done right now?”

The truth of that made her sick to her stomach but she marched on, climbing the steps of the Land Office with the triumphant Baxter right beside her. The blisters tingled in the palms of her hands. She had worked like a man, day after day, to build a shelter for her baby, only to give it to him. There wasn’t a blessed thing she could do.

“And my word has held up in another way, too: when I said you and that Injun is a pair,” he said, with a disgusting smugness. “You wouldn’t be doin’ this for him if you wasn’t his woman.”

The phrase sent a waterfall of fear cascading through her. Any woman who became Nick’s woman would be placing her heart in reckless jeopardy. Nick Smith didn’t want any lasting companionship or sharing of his life.

“His name is Smith,” she snapped. “And you’d better not refer to him as ‘the Injun’ again, if you don’t want to be branded a liar right there in this Land Office, because then I’ll have nothing to lose. Be quiet and you can walk out of here in ten minutes’ time with a claim of your own.”

They arrived at the door and stepped inside the shack. Baxter stepped right in behind her, breathing down her neck, but at least he was silent, thank God. The air inside the building was sweltering and too thick to breathe. There were four clerks and at least one customer in front of each one.

Callie squared her shoulders and held her thoughts to the moment, to this one instant and then to the next, so that she wouldn’t make any mistakes. The rest of Nick’s whole life, maybe even his life itself, depended on her doing this right.

Then it was her turn and, as luck would have it, the bald government clerk beckoned to her. She pulled out and unfolded Nick’s registration permit.

“I’m registering this claim,” she said. “And then I have another to sign off on a sale to this man behind me, Mr. Baxter.”

“Very well,” the clerk said, and took the paper from her. “Your full legal name?”

“Mrs. Calladonia Sloane.”

The clerk wrote that down, then looked at Nick’s permit.

“There’s a note on the back,” Callie murmured.

He turned it over and read what Nick had written.

“Hmmn, Nick Smith,” he said heartily. “I remember Mr. Smith.”

“Maybe that’s because his skin’s a little bit
redder
than usual,” said a man’s voice.

Callie’s blood froze in her veins. She stiffened, then whirled to look for the speaker as she realized it wasn’t Baxter.

It was a man she didn’t recognize who was in line across from her at the next clerk’s table. When their eyes met, he spoke directly to her.

“I seen you last week with a man they said was named Nick-a-jack Smith who nearly got hit by a flying board,” he said flatly. “I’d say they was right calling him a Cherokee.”

Silence fell in the little room.

The interfering busybody held her gaze and said vehemently, “From the looks of him, I’d say he is.”

Several people had turned to look at her, and a burly man just inside the door spoke out loudly. “You mean you’re in here registering a claim for a Indian? I thought th’ U. S. Government paid the Indians good money to get this land away from them so godfearing white men could farm it.”

Callie’s heart stopped. What could she do? How could she offer this clerk another bribe, right here in front of everyone? How had Nick done it? Oh, Lord, what could she do?

“Damn straight that’s what she’s doing,” the man at the next table said. “I seen her with him. Redskin blanket’s what I’m talkin’ about—I seen ‘im with my own eyes and I’ve
seen a passel of Indians in my time.”