The Renegades: Nick (3 page)

“I’m not asking to be treated different from a man, in spite of what I said earlier,” Callie snapped back. “Go ahead and shoot.”

They stared at each other, the ridiculous words hanging in the air between them. Neither could resist a smile as hard as they tried.

“But not until I get a gun that works,” she added quickly.

His smile vanished.

“A woman who won’t give up,” he said. “That makes what I’ve done even worse. If it hadn’t been for my meddling, you’d be on your way out of the Strip right now.”

“No, I’d be searching for a claim on foot or trying to ride my hateful horse to find one. I’d camp out here for days if I had to, waiting for somebody to give up and go back home.”

“Let me buy you out, and you can get a place in town.”

“No! I can’t live in town. It’d kill my spirit.”

“You can’t survive alone out here. Go home, now, before you blister your hands and break your back trying to farm this ground.”

“I can never go back to the Cumberlands,” she said, her throat tightening with unshed tears.

He hesitated for a moment, waiting for her to say why. Somehow, somewhere in the back of her mind, that made her want to smile again, in spite of all. She would never have guessed he’d be interested enough to be curious.

“Well, I can’t take care of you,” he said finally, irritation flooding his voice. “I won’t. I hate it that I tied you to this land.”

“You didn’t,” she said, pulling herself up to her full five foot, three inches. “I would’ve staked a claim come hell or high water. It was Vance’s … my … husband’s … and my dream. We planned it from the minute we read about the Run in the newspapers.”

He held her gaze although she tried to look away, and he saw her tears for Vance.

“Well, you’ve reached that goal in his memory,” he said. “Now let me buy you out, Mrs….”

“Sloane.”

“Let me buy you out, Mrs. Sloane,” he said again, in a soft voice so full of pity that she couldn’t believe this was the same man who’d ordered her off his claim. “I’ll pay enough for you to get a nice place with a well.”

If there was anything she hated, it was being pitied.

“I’ll soon have a well right there on my claim,” she said, in a tone so bitterly fierce that
it surprised her and him, too, from the look of him. “Until then, I can haul water however far it takes. If I have to do it a dipperful at a time.”

The sharp gray eyes never left hers, the hard, handsome face never changed, yet something shifted behind it.

“I have a spring that never goes dry,” he said. “You can haul it from there if you don’t tell anyone.”

Her meager breakfast of water and half a biscuit roiled in her stomach.

“No, thank you,” she said. “I don’t hold with secret obligations.”

He said nothing, only shrugged. She could not understand him at all. One minute he was not going to take care of her, and the next he was offering her water from his spring. One minute he was angry, the next gentle.

“Besides, who would I tell?” she said, throwing a sarcastic glance to the left and to the right.

“Pilgrims like Baxter,” he snapped. “And the pumpkin-rollers who did get claims and are hunting the closest water source at this very minute. Half of ‘em will try to camp on a creek or at a spring until they get their shelters built.”

“But it’s heartless to deny people water when you have it!”

The more she thought about it, the more shocked she was.

“Why, you’re worse than those vultures on the border, going up and down the line selling water for a dollar a glass!”

He gave a bitter chuckle.

“I’m worse than anybody you ever met, Mountain Girl.”

He looked at her hard.

“Hold your tongue about the spring on my place,” he said, “whether you come there for water or not.”

He turned and threw himself onto his horse’s bare back in a fast, fluid motion that reminded her of a panther pouncing.

“I’m not having anybody come onto my place,” he said. “Except you, if you should decide to accept my offer.”

“I feel very strange about withholding information that could keep someone from dying.”

“Getting shot for trespassing could
cause
them to die.”

“Well, that sounds familiar,” she said wearily. “Next thing you know, we’ll have a real mountain feud out here on the prairie.”

“No,” he said, “no feuds, just facts. This can be a dry country, and anybody stupid enough to think he can tear up this ground and farm it might as well learn that right now.”

He sounded just like Papa in one of his rages against the Harlans.

“And you’re the one mean enough to teach ‘em,” she gibed.

“Damn straight I am,” he shot back, “and don’t you forget it.”

He was mean as a snake, but, she realized suddenly, her days of being afraid of meanness were long gone. He needed to know he couldn’t bully her. They would be neighbors, after all, and neighbors did have to do things together sometimes, whether they wanted to or not.

She gave him a narrowed look.

“I’m no more afraid of you than a bear is of a squirrel.”

That made him laugh for real. Then he sobered.

“If there’s another weapon in that wagon, go get it,” he said. “I’m leaving you now.”

“Well, thank the good Lord. I was commencing to fear I’d never see the back of you.”

That bit of sassiness made him grin.

“You might thank me, instead,” he said.

“For what?”

“For seeing your flag flying over a claim, any claim. And for running Baxter off.”

Wasn’t that just like a man? He was sorry he’d got her a claim, but now he wanted thanks for it.

“I refuse to be obligated,” she said. “I know! I’ll repay you in pumpkins when I gather my first crop.”

He clearly didn’t think that was funny.

“You’ll be obligated, all right, when the blue northers blow and you only have to haul your water half a mile instead of five.”

Oh? And wasn’t
that
like a man, too, assuming she had said yes when she hadn’t.

“Seems to me you’re so proud of your gallantry that you’ll be likely to bring the water to me.”

He looked her over, up and down, with a little smile tugging at the corners of his mouth again.

“I don’t care to see anybody that often, not even a body as good-looking as yours.”

She was glad that hot look didn’t make her blush. At least, not so he could see it beneath her hat.

“Fine,” she said. “Don’t come back. You’ve already claimed my land; next thing I know, you’ll be trying to claim my wagon, too.”

“But not your team,” he said. “Never that team.”

That made them both laugh. Their eyes held for a long heartbeat.

Then he smooched to his horse, surged past her, and was gone.

Callie was still smiling as she turned and walked slowly down the slope toward her wagon. The dizziness had left her, and she didn’t feel sick at her stomach anymore, either.
That little bit of verbal jousting had been fun—it had made her feel almost connected to someone again, after all these days and nights of loneliness just past.

Even in the border camp, when she’d met Dora and her family, she had still felt like such an outsider, so cast out. Which she was. It was hard to believe that she would never see or be a part of her own big family again.

But how could she feel connected to that man who called himself Smith?

She reached the wagon and climbed inside to get a drink of water and a towel to wipe her face—for all the good that would do. Sweat and dust would attack her again as soon as she went back out to work on the wheel. But at least there weren’t as many ashes from the government’s burning flying around here, as there had been on the border.

Her arms and legs trembled, and she sat down on the trunk that Granny had sent with her all the way from home. She longed, suddenly, to open it up and take out the photograph of Vance, but she couldn’t afford the time. It would be dark in a few hours and she had to fix that wheel and drive onto her own place before then.

She had to find a spot to park the wagon that would be halfway defensible if Baxter did come back.

Worry swept through her; it sucked the strength right out of her muscles and sinews. The pistol she’d bought from that cheating, swindling, lying reprobate in the border camp might never work again. She had no other weapon except a butcher knife.

She wasn’t afraid of meanness, true—but that was if she saw it coming, had a chance to face it down. A sneak attack in the dark was different.

Callie slowed her breathing and listened. The only sounds besides the wind were the squeals of Joe and Judy, who had never stopped kicking and biting at each other the whole time they’d stood there, she guessed. The next chore was to unhitch and hobble them and let them graze, while she tried to get the wheel off the wagon and the rim back onto it. Even driving no farther than her claim could break the wheel, and then she’d be in truly desperate straits.

Her stubborn mind left the necessary planning and jumped back to Baxter.

The crowbar might make a decent weapon, but as her brother Josh used to say, “If somebody’s close enough to hit with a stick, he’s close enough to take it away from you.” The same was true of her knife.

Baxter alone could cause her no end of grief, and much more, if he brought his brothers. He had not seemed to be a principled man.

Terrifying scenes came boiling up out of her imagination, possibilities that stopped her breath. She had to protect her baby at all costs!

Hot as it was inside the canvas-roofed wagon, she kept on sitting there, limp with dread of what she might meet outside. Thin cloth and rickety wood though it was, it seemed as secure as a fortress compared to the endless mountainless desert where there was no cover.

It took more strength than any movement she had ever made in all her eighteen years, but she forced her body up and onto her feet. She had not, as God was her witness, traveled a thousand miles without friend or kin beside her, then stuck to her purpose through the hell that was the border camp and the chaos that was the Run, to sit still in a wagon and bake.

Or to let winter find her there without shelter and freeze her. She had a baby to provide for and a home to build.

Pushing her box of books and some of her other heaviest possessions toward the back of the wagon bed, she prepared to unload them to lighten the wagon for removing the wheel. She didn’t know exactly how, but she could do it. She must.

She would not be dependent on or beholden to anyone. The home she would build here, no matter how humble, would belong to her and the baby, and no one else would have any say
in it. No one would have the power to throw her and the baby out of this home.

The first thought that hit her, though, as soon as she stepped out into the open, scared her more than Baxter’s threats.

She wished for Smith; she wished with all her heart that he would come back. Not to protect her, not to fix the wheel—but to keep her company, here in this wide, lonesome land.

T
he young Widow Sloane was finding out that homesteading wasn’t easy.

Nick sat his horse and watched her struggle to loosen the hub and get the wheel off the wagon; keep the crowbar propped under the box—as if it would hold the weight when the wheel came off, if it ever did; keep the sweat out of her eyes; and try to stay behind the petticoat she had rigged up for shade all at the same time. Good. Maybe after she got her wagon rolling again, she’d drive it right on out of the Strip.

But she’d said she could never go back to the Cumberlands. Now, how could that possibly be? You’d think she’d killed somebody.
He’d been wondering all day why she couldn’t go home, studying on it with a sharp curiosity that wasn’t really in his nature. Generally he gave no thought to another person’s business, but when she’d said that, he’d wanted to ask her why so bad he could taste it.

But that was why people came West—to lose the past—and nobody had a right to ask any questions.

He pulled down his hat, squinted his eyes against the glare, and followed every move she made. It was a big job for someone so little—a small-boned woman who stood barely over five feet and wouldn’t weigh a hundred pounds soaking wet. But she wasn’t backing down from it any, attacking that hub with all the vinegar she’d poured into trying to jump his claim.

She was a woman of deep feelings, all right, and from a feuding family, so she might have killed somebody back in the mountains. That would’ve been no reason to run, though, if such was their custom.

Mrs. Sloane had clearly been hard at it ever since he left her. Those snuffy animals of hers were hobbled and grazing, and it looked like half the wagon’s contents were unloaded. Great. Now she was
camped
on his claim.

Maybe she couldn’t go back to the Cumberlands because it hurt too much when her husband
died. Maybe the pain when she even thought about returning was so stabbing keen that it felt as if it would kill her. Maybe it was the same as his own hurt when he thought about ever going back to the Cherokee Nation.

Well, one thing about it: she was the opposite of Matilda Copeland in actions and looks, too, so she wouldn’t always be reminding him of the sly, inscrutable dark-haired beauty.

He brushed the gray gelding’s sides with the dull rowels of his spurs and started down the slope. What did he mean, “always”? This little woman wouldn’t last until winter, no matter how much grit she showed.

But this had been hers and Vance’s dream, she’d said, to homestead in the Cherokee Strip. There had been unmistakable love in her voice when she’d said his name.

What kind of man had Vance Sloane been?

The gray he rode had settled down a lot in the last few days. He’d learned to trust Nickajack, which left him free to use his smooth, natural way of going. Mrs. Sloane didn’t hear him coming, didn’t know when he stopped behind her. She was making so much noise flailing away with some rusty tool that she wouldn’t have heard a shotgun blast.

“Mrs. Sloane.”

She stood up and whirled around in an instant, the tool ready in her upraised right hand, her green eyes fierce. A woman warrior.

Her hat was hung on the side of the wagon, and her pinned-up hair looked like a red-gold crown. A crown that was melting in the sun—wisps of gleaming hair fell all around her face.

Lord, she was in a bad spot out here! Any high-line rider could’ve come up behind her just as he had done.

“I told you to keep a lookout,” he said.

“I told
you
not to come back.”

They stared into each other’s faces and he couldn’t slow his heart’s sudden, fast beating. He’d scared the life out of her and he was sorry—that was the reason.

“You’d be in a fine fix if I hadn’t.”

“I can do this! I can take care of myself! Go away.”

“I’m at home,” he said. “This is my claim, if you recall.”

“And I’ll be on my own place, too, in a little while, if you’ll stop interrupting my work.”

He glanced from her to the wagon and back again to her face.

“Maybe. But you’ll be on your place on foot and with no more of your supplies than you can carry, if you don’t have some help.”

He stepped off his horse.

“Isn’t there a custom in the Cherokee Strip of waiting to be asked before a visitor dismounts?”

“I just told you—I’m not a visitor.” He strode to the wagon.

That took her back a little, but she covered it quickly.

“Well, uninvited visitor or lord of the land, go on and leave me to it. I don’t intend to be obligated to you.”

He dropped to his haunches in front of the wheel, looked it over carefully, and whistled for the horse to come to him, bringing tools in the saddlebags.

“Too late,” he said, throwing the words over his shoulder. “You’re already in my debt, Mrs. Sloane, remember?”

“For my dry-land claim,” she said hotly.

“Sell it to me, if that’s how you feel,” he said, “and go find one with water.”

“Don’t start that again.”

He stood up and started taking what he needed from the bags. “Then stop complaining about not coming out of the Run empty-handed.”

“I’m not!”

“Sounds like whining to me.”

He left the gelding ground-tied and went to the pitiful little bunch of belongings she’d managed to wrestle out of the wagon, chose a cask of about the right height, and carried it over to prop up the wagon’s box.

“Look,” she said, wearily wiping the sweat from her face with her sleeve, “maybe I’m not strong enough to do what you’re doing. But I
want you to know that I’ll pay you, and I won’t take no for an answer.”

“Fine,” he said. “Bring me those pumpkins you promised.”

“No! I mean now. Money. I have a small amount left …”

He frowned at her. “You’re more worried about obligations than anybody I ever saw.”

“Owing someone a debt gives that person power over me. I won’t have that, ever again.”

Her tone held a dozen feelings all mixed together, with only one of them clear: experience. She had suffered from someone’s power over her, that much was sure.

Nickajack stole a sharp look at her, wondering.
Was
that love he’d heard in her voice when she’d said Vance’s name? Could her husband have been heavy-handed and overbearing with her?

“I don’t want power over you,” he said. “Don’t get all wire-edged over that.”

“You said you weren’t going to take care of me.”

Frustration at that truth prickled along his nerves as he dropped down and began pulling off the wheel.

“I’m not,” he said. “I’m just trying to get you off my land.”

“And out of the country,” she said. “You want to fix my wheel thinking that then I’ll be
so grateful or so beholden that I’ll do what you say.”

Damn. The woman would raise the temper in a sleeping baby.

“There’s as much chance of that as sunshine in a snowstorm,” she huffed.

She had an endless supply of grit, that was for sure.

“Well, if it’s to assuage your guilt about taking the best claim, forget it. It won’t work.”

That made him so mad he shot to his feet, whirled to look at her, and grabbed her by the arms, all in the same motion.

“What I feel guilty about is getting you any claim at all,” he said through clenched teeth. “You need to try to prove up a claim like a pig needs a hat.”

Her face paled with anger until the faint dusting of freckles stood out across her nose. He caught the light scent of flowers and powder beneath the dust and sweat.

“I can prove it up.” Her teeth were clenched, too. “And I’m not accepting help today or any other day. I will
not
be beholden to you, Mr. Smith, so you can climb right back up on your big, black high-horse—”

She tore loose from his grasp to turn and look at his mount.

“You’ve changed horses.”

“Yep.”

“This horse was nowhere in sight the first
time I saw you,” she said. “Nor the saddle.”

He didn’t answer.

“Mr. Smith,” she said, in a voice filled with surprising authority, “where was this horse during the Run?”

He laughed. He couldn’t help it. “You sound like my teacher at the Dwight Mission Schoolhouse when I was seven years old.”

He sat on his haunches again and went back to work on the wheel.

“That’s because I am a teacher.”

He cocked his head and shot a glance at her. She’d pulled herself up to her full height and set her fists on her hips, looking for all the world like she was ready to challenge the big eighth-grade boys in the back of the one-room schoolhouse. Her dress was sweated through at the neck and down nearly to the waist in a vee-shape between her high, beautiful breasts. The big boys would be forgetting what they were in trouble about, right about now.

Desire knifed through him, even stronger than the anger had been. What was happening to him? He was losing his grip. No other human being had so much as
nearly
touched any of his emotions for many moons now. Yet he was letting the Widow Sloane jerk him from one end of the row to the other. This had to stop.

“Hm,” he said, pulling the wheel off into his hands, “a teacher. Where’s your school?”

“It’ll be built next spring, or we’ll hold it in my house. I can make it through the winter without a salary.”

That last didn’t sound quite as sure as the first.

“Maybe not after you pay me back for fixing your wheel.”

She startled a little at that, but covered it nicely.

“Don’t try to change the subject on me,” she said. “Where’d you have that horse and saddle stashed?”

Then it really hit her.

“And those tools!”

She went to his horse and lifted one of the saddle bags.

“You’ve got ten pounds of hardware in here and ten more there on the ground,” she said. “Don’t even try to tell me you made the Run with all that slowing you down. You’re a Sooner, aren’t you?”

He stood up and went to get the wheel rim. “Do you think I’d admit to that? And if I did, what would you do? Challenge my claim at the Land Office?”

She narrowed her big green eyes and stared at him from between thick rows of curling auburn lashes that hid her thoughts as well as a mask would’ve. It was her eyes that always betrayed her deep feelings. That face, with its turned-up nose and lush, strong mouth, could
belong to a champion poker player, that was certain sure.

“That’d be right ungrateful of me, now, wouldn’t it?” she said. “That’s probably your reason for being such a Helpful Henry. I just now realized it.”

“Hey, little lady,” he said, leaning the rim and wheel against the side of the wagon, “you’re the one always trying not to be obligated. I haven’t asked for any payment.”

She gave him an even harder look.

“Don’t be calling me ‘little lady’. My name is Callie. Or … Mrs. Sloane, if you prefer.”

“Callie.”

“Yes. Short for Calladonia.”

“I’m Nick.”

“Well,” she said sarcastically, “Nick’s not quite so run-of-the-mill. I was expecting Tom or Joe or Bill or Jim, Mr. Smith.”

“The Smith’s real.”

“Well, then, what am I going to owe you when you get my wheel fixed, Mr. Nick Smith?”

A kiss. One kiss from those lush red lips …

He slapped that thought away.

“You can pay me back tonight,” he said.

Her eyes opened wide. She must’ve mind-read his first, unspoken answer.

“Tonight?”

“We need to watch each other’s backs tonight, here on the border between our land.
There’ll be plenty of claim-jumpers prowling around.”

“All night?”

He nodded. “I doubt they’ll have any rules about what time they can backshoot a man … uh, a person.”

“But that certainly wouldn’t be proper,” she said. “I’m a … I have no husband. You’re … unmarried, I assume.”

“That’s right. But hard times make strange bedfellows, I’ve always heard.”

There it was again—that flicker of shocked surprise in her big, green eyes.

“I hardly think we’ll be
bedfellows
”

She was using her teacher voice again, prim and proper.

He couldn’t resist teasing her a little.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, “we’re liable to doze off along about mornin’, after such a hard day as we’ve had.”

“I
do
know. We will not.”

Nickajack chuckled and gavé a little shrug.

“We’ll see.”

Her fists went back to her hips, then she took a step toward him.

“Now, Mr. Smith, I intend to be the schoolteacher for this part of the country, and I can’t have it said that …”

He held up a hand to hush her.

“Don’t come unwound on me, Callie. Nobody knows us tonight. Nobody’ll know
where well sleep or whether we will. Nobody cares. Besides, there’ll be plenty of neighbors camped on their common borders tonight.”

He took a step toward her and looked her straight in the eye.

“If you aim to prove up a claim like a man, then there’s times you have to forget you’re a woman,” he said. “You’re a homesteader now.”

As always, she didn’t miss the implication.

“So you’ve given up on trying to buy me out? You realize that I’m going to hold down this claim no matter what may happen?”

Such gratitude, such a … vindication, appeared in her eyes that he couldn’t help but bask in it. For some reason, his opinion meant something to her. A whole new warmth moved through him.

He couldn’t summon the strength to contradict her.

“Baxter and his kind’ll multiply in the dark, since nobody’s claim is registered yet,” he said.

She put one hand to her throat.

“I hate to admit it, but Baxter did throw a fright into me,” she said. “He … well, he’s too wild-eyed. He may not be quite right in the head.”

“Could be. He didn’t scare much.” He felt his lips curve in a grin. “But then, neither did you.”

She grinned back and it was a wonderful sight, with her wide, luscious mouth. Her smile was bright as sun on a signal mirror.

“And I’m not sure if I’m right in the head, agreeing to turn my back on you in the dark.”

Her voice held a teasing tone that drew him like a warm fire in winter. He teased her back.