The Renegades: Nick (6 page)

If he did, the fact that he’d just handed her enough information to cause him to lose his home would never again cross his mind. He wouldn’t be able to think of anything but her.

Such a storm of feelings rose in him, he couldn’t have sorted them out if there’d been a gun at his head. He put down his fork and stood up.

“I need to see to my horse,” he said, and left her.

He walked out past his horse and then hers and her mule, all the way to the edge of the arroyo that the creek deepened with every flash flood. His heart kept on pounding hard and fast, rolling in his chest like ominous thunder.

Looking out across his beloved prairie made it worse. Campfire lights glowed everywhere, sparkling with a taunting cheerfulness that tore him up. Why, he could even hear voices and faint faraway music on the night breeze!

Last night he’d been the only human being for miles as the grass waved in the wind and the wild animals settled into their dens.

This
night, people were everywhere, their plows in hand. Soon the face of Mother Earth would blow away.

Fences would be next. Lots of fences—more, many more than the cattlemen who’d leased the land had ever built. There’d be enough fences to pile the wild horses up against them when the snow and sleet flew, enough to prevent them from drifting to shelter in the hollows of the land.

He had known this and he had fought it and he had hated it for so long that the bitterness ran wild in his blood. Nickajack waited for the old rage to rise in him.

Instead came a despair that spread deeper into his bones with every breath he took. How could the sun have set as always? Why hadn’t it blazed down and burned the earth to a crisp? How could the wind die down into a breeze tonight instead of growing into a curling, twisting tornado that would clean the ignorant farmers off this land and blow them back to wherever they had come from?

But the most mysterious question of all was how could one of those ignorant farmers, on this sorry, devil-spawned day of the Run, reach out and touch him in the heart?

They carried his saddle blanket and her quilt, both of his handguns and his long gun, and a canteen of water up to a rolling rise.
Nick got them situated at the feet of the few scraggly trees so they wouldn’t be silhouetted against the horizon in the moonlight.

“We can see your flag and your marker from here,” he said, keeping his voice quiet so it wouldn’t carry out into the night. “Imagine a circle around us, take that half of it, and watch for movement against the sky.”

They settled in, carefully sitting far enough apart that they weren’t touching. Callie looked east and north, he west and south. He handed over the extra gun.

“Here’s a handgun you can use,” he said, “but I’m hesitating to let you have it.”

“Why? I told you I can shoot.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he drawled. “I know you’ll at least try, and
this
gun works.”

They chuckled very quietly, like conspirators up to no good.

“Proper or not, I’m glad you stayed here tonight,” she blurted, as if she, too, felt the camaraderie. “I’ve never spent a night alone in my life, and out here in this huge, open place with claim jumpers prowling around it wouldn’t be a good time to start.”

It sounded so preposterous, he laughed.

“You what?”

“Never spent a night alone. On the train, there were other people in the car. At Arkansas City, Dora took me in and let me camp with her family until I bought my own outfit.
Besides, there were thousands of people camped all up and down the line.”

“But before that. In Kentucky.”

“Some of my kin was always with me. I shared a room with my Aunt Janey and my littlest brothers.”

“Where’d your husband sleep? With your big brothers?”

She hesitated. He thought he’d offended her with such a direct reference to the marriage bed.

“Oh, well, of course, after I married …”

Her soft voice trailed off for a moment.

“… Vance never did leave me, never was gone at night. Until he … passed on.”

Then, hastily, as if to change the subject, she said, “I don’t think we have to worry about getting through the winter, Nick. If this land can be this hot after the sun’s gone down, it’s too hot to ever be cold.”

He chuckled.

“Tell me that again come January. It’ll be just as cold then as it is hot now.”

“Surely not!”

“Surely so. And that same week in January it can turn warm enough to spawn a cyclone.”

“What a place! Does it feel so huge to you that it seems you’re no bigger than an ant?”

“No. I feel part of it.”

“What feels natural to me are the mountains, wrapping their arms around me. They
make me feel safe and this makes me feel … exposed, I guess. Like a chicken about to be caught by a hawk.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

If you can survive it

“Back home, nobody leaves the mountains without some of their kin going with them. I guess everybody feels the same way I do.”

“Sounds like mountain people don’t trust outsiders.”

“Flatlanders,” she said. “We don’t. And especially not the government.”

“Then you’ve come to the right place,” he said. “I have a lot of trouble with that myself. Any kind of government, tribal or …”

The Shifter’s soft whinny called to him through the dark.

Nickajack sensed Callie freezing in place.

“Baxter?” she whispered.

“Maybe.”

But they waited and listened for a long time and heard nothing else. Finally Callie let out her breath in a long sigh.

“Don’t be scared,” Nick teased her, in a whisper. “Fear’s your worst enemy.”

“I’m not scared!” she whispered back.

“In a pig’s eye!”

“Pigs! Why do I always make you think of pigs? If you keep this up, I’m going to start a pig farm right here on the line between your claim and mine.”

“Go ahead. The wind’s usually out of the south or southwest, so all the smell will blow to your place instead of mine.”

That made her laugh. Her laugh made him go warm in the pit of his belly.

They waited a long time more without a single word and without moving, but they heard nothing else except some faraway singing.

“The horses are settled,” he said, at last. “Nobody’s sneaking around.”

“I’m going to get the school,” she said fiercely, right out of the blue. “I won’t let anyone else have it. And nobody, sneaking or not, is going to get this claim, either.”

His jaw clenched.
Damn
the minute he’d jammed her stake into this ground. And damn the fact she had such a one-track mind.

“I thought you planned to raise pigs,” he said, keeping his voice light.

She made an unladylike noise of derision.

“Only if you drive me to it.”

There was something so trusting, so companionable, in her voice that he felt like the most treacherous snake in the world. He shouldn’t even be here, shouldn’t have been pretending that the connection between them was real and that they’d be riding back and forth sharing supper all winter.

“No,” she said, “I’ve been thinking that Mr. Peck might want to teach the school in this district. It’s plain he’s an educated man, and
he has all those sons to do his farm work.”

She sounded so disconsolate that he searched for a way to cheer her. Usually he never bothered to think what another person was feeling, much less try to help. What was it about her?

“He didn’t strike me as the kind to want to fool with a bunch of young ones, though,” he said.

She thought about that.

“I believe you’re right,” she said, more hopefully.

It scared him, the way she believed him and the way he tried to glean what she wanted, what she meant, what she was thinking inside. He had to stop it.

“Maybe you’ll get the school, even if he wants it,” he said. “After all, they’d have to pay more to a man.”

“Well, thank you so much, Nick, for cheering me up.”

He had to laugh, she went from worried to hopeful to tartly sarcastic so fast.

“Just trying to help.”

“Well, don’t try anymore.”

“Then don’t cry anymore.”

That silliness brought a low chuckle from her, and then she was silent. Suddenly she spoke, her tone so low and calm it made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

“If I ever let myself cry, my tears would wash away the world.”

The words struck him like an arrow in the heart. They held the bald, honest truth and not the slightest shred of self-pity.

“You’re too young for that,” he snapped.

Had she loved her husband, that Vance fellow, so much?

“Young has nothing to do with it,” she said.

They both fell quiet then, as if speech had no more power.

He felt the same way, he realized, but he hadn’t known it until she said it. Not that he had actually cried since his mother’s death nor ever expected to, but that was exactly the way he felt.

She was in the Strip tonight because sorrow had chased her there. He was in the Strip tonight not only because it was his home, but because he was running from the past as hard as Callie Sloane or any other homesteader. If he weren’t, he’d still be back in the Nation, meddling in other people’s affairs and mixing his life up with theirs.

Getting young men into situations that guaranteed they would never grow old.

And now, God help him, he’d done the same thing to this gallant girl who would be on her way out of the Strip right now if he hadn’t idiotically staked her a claim.

She seemed to have moved nearer, although
he didn’t turn to look. And she still smelled of flowers, somehow. That ought to be impossible, clean dress or not, for even with the sun down and the night breeze up, the heat remained fierce.

The silence kept on growing more comfortable. It stretched out between them and pulled them together until it made as mysterious a bond between them as words had done. After a long while, Callie gave a feathery sigh and he felt her small shoulders lean against his back.

The night came on, laying more darkness across the sky and pulling more stars out to glitter, as if nothing had changed in the whole universe. The new fires gleamed everywhere he looked. He waited for his legs to move, his arms to reach for Callie Sloane and lay her down so she could truly rest, perhaps carry her into the wagon—except in there, out of the breeze, the air would be stifling. He had to do something so he could move away from her.

And he would. After a while.

C
allie opened her eyes. She started to wake, but the sweet smell of woodsmoke pulled her down into the dream again. The aroma floated in the heavy summer air, and wandered along the creek to find her and her little brothers picking blackberries up in Tall Pine Cove. They were having a good time because nobody was mad at her, the boys weren’t crying and calling her a traitor through their tears, and her fingers were flying to gather the ripest sweet berries. It was during the good days, before any of them knew about her and Vance.

Then she drifted into believing that the smoky aroma came from the cookstove in the
kitchen, the day after she’d told Papa about the baby. Not one of her kin was speaking to her except Granny and Mama. Today she had to leave the mountains and the Sloane Valley forever. She was banished, and only Granny and Mama were trying to help her—with their eyes red and tear-swollen and their sadness cutting them in two, right down to the bone. She felt the same way, like she couldn’t hold her body together to walk out of there.

Helpless, she sank deep into her bed and listened to Mama’s cast-iron skillet clattering against the stove lid and the rolling pin thumping on the worktable, ready to roll the biscuit dough for the last breakfast Callie would ever eat with her family. She ought to get up and help, but instead, she snuggled her head into the crook of her arm and tried to get back into the berrypicking dream with her brothers.

“Callie, I’m leaving now.”

A man’s voice, not Mama’s. It woke her immediately.

Nick Smith’s voice.

A frightening feeling washed through her. Even dreaming about Kentucky, she hadn’t thought the man speaking was Vance. Or Papa. How had she known so fast that it was Nick?

He was leaving now.

She sat up, pulling the rough blanket up
over her breasts with both hands. It smelled of horse sweat and dirt and it was way too hot, but she huddled under it anyway. He must have covered her sometime in the night.

A stronger smell, the smell of coffee, began drifting into her nostrils beneath the sweetness of the smoke. Her stomach roiled. Ever since she’d started this baby, coffee in the morning made her sicker than anything.

“I have to saddle up,” Nick said abruptly, striding toward her.

Oh, Lord, he had to go away—fast! If she threw up in front of him, he might guess the reason and haul her off to town, slung over his saddle. If he was worried about riding by her place someday and finding her body frozen or starved, he’d certainly refuse to live next door to her
and
a baby!

She held her breath against the coffee smell and pulled down her skirts, which had bunched up around her thighs beneath the blanket. Then she held it up to him.

“Thanks for the use of it,” she said thickly, wanting to get to her feet but not daring to move.

He just stood there, all easy and loose, with his saddle slung over his shoulder, holding it with one hand as if it were a feather. He stared down at her as if judging her, somehow.

“It got right cool before sunup,” he said, sounding angry, as if she had demanded an
explanation of why he’d covered her.

“Thank you,” she said again, then didn’t dare say another word.

He grabbed the blanket, then turned and strode quickly toward his black horse, which was patiently waiting. He stopped and turned back.

“I made coffee. I’ll bring back your wheel when it’s done. After that, you’ll have to take care of yourself.”

She waved him on, afraid to open her mouth to speak.

He went to the horse again, but took what seemed to be an age to saddle and mount. Finally he turned to ride away. The horse took a couple of strides, then stopped.

“Make a show of possession,” he called, “and forget the socializing.”

“I
know
!”

She did all right with that one, so she gulped in another breath.

“And I’ll never say the word ‘water,’ and I’ll throw my body across the entrance to your canyon if anyone comes near it.”

He threw her an exasperated look, as if she were being completely unreasonable, and rode off without a word of good-bye. Yes, after meddling freely in her affairs to his heart’s content, Nick Smith rode away and left her.

Thank goodness.

As soon as he had disappeared into the
mouth of the tree-lined draw, Callie leapt to her feet and ran in the other direction, over a small rise and down it, where she emptied the meager contents of her stomach into the sand. Shakily, she walked back to the wagon, bathed her face in the tepid water in the barrel, and managed to take the coffeepot off the fire.

She walked away from it while it cooled and lost its scent, and went to sit on the tailgate of her three-wheeled wagon. Well, she would see him again, because he’d bring back her fourth wheel.

Shocked at that thought, she pushed it away. She had come out here alone and she could take care of herself. She could get used to being lonely, too. The wheel was the only reason she cared whether she ever saw Nick Smith again or not.

Callie scooted back to lean against the corner of the wagon bed, pulled up her knees, wrapped her arms around them, and stared out at her new home. A show of possession. Today, she supposed it’d have to be a few furrows plowed, because she had no idea how to build a sod house. Sod, for heaven’s sake! Whoever heard of building a house out of dirt?

And Nick thought her plow too dull. Well, for his information, there was a file in that box of old tools that came with the wagon.

He certainly hadn’t been very companionable
this morning. No doubt he was mad at himself, for fear she would think he had taken her to raise, no matter what she’d said last night.

She knew how men’s minds worked. From raising seven brothers she knew it was much the same as little boys’ minds worked. That knowledge might come in handy for more than teaching school.

Immediately, shame washed through her. She didn’t need to know anything about men, because she was never getting involved with another one. Vance was her true love and he always would be, for there was only one for everybody in the world. She would make their dream become real for the sake of their little one, and she could do it by herself.

Callie got up and got busy, going to the tool box for the file, then jumping down to the ground to sharpen the plow. She didn’t dare even consider eating breakfast, so she might as well get on with her day’s work. Simply surviving out here would take all her strength and common sense, so she needed to keep her wits about her and start finding out how to make a shelter for her babe.

Plus, at the border camp, everyone had talked about rushing to register at the Land Office as soon as they could after staking the claim and finding its legal description. She glanced at her wagon with its missing wheel,
hoping Nick would return with it today. This was her only transportation.

Riding away with the wheel and the rim held out from the horse as if they weighed no more than the saddle he’d carried this morning, he had looked like a legendary hero out of a book, a man powerful enough to do anything. Just remembering how his muscles had knotted and flowed under his thin, sweat-soaked shirt and how broad his shoulders had looked above his slim waist and hips, sitting so easily in the saddle, made her go all tight inside all over again.

She gave the plowshare a hard, swift swipe with the rasp. That was the last time, the very last time, she would allow herself to think about Nick today. She must put her mind to sharpening this plow, making enough furrows that anyone could see this claim belonged to someone, and finding the legal description marker so she could write that down.

As always, she had a folded leaf of paper or two in her reticule. If she finished plowing before Nick … before her wheel came back, she would walk around her claim for a while with paper and pencil and a canteen of water looking for that information.

She dropped the rasp. After she’d watered Joe and Judy! Good heavens, how could she have forgotten to take care of her animals?

“I forgot you even existed,” she told them,
leading them one at a time in their hobbles to the bucket she’d filled from her barrel. “Doesn’t that seem impossible, as awful as you are?”

Once they’d drunk their fill and gone back to grazing, she rushed back to work on the plow. At the rate this was taking, the sun would be saying high noon before she had a single inch of ground plowed.

Nick surely was against plowing. So then, how did he expect to make a living on his claim? How had he been doing it all this time? Had he lived there steadily since he was a boy?

No, because he’d mentioned cowboying and eating with other men. Surely that hadn’t happened on his claim he liked to keep so private.

Settlers hadn’t been allowed to live in the Strip before yesterday; only cattlemen had leased it for grazing. So how had Nick’s family made a home here?

She let the rasp go still and turned to look toward the mouth of his draw as if he would be there waiting to answer her question. The faint sound of hoofbeats immediately turned her head in the opposite direction. She listened. Someone was coming. From the south.

Quietly, as if whoever was about to ride up to her wagon was already within hearing distance, she laid down her tools and climbed back into the wagon. Sure enough, the extra
handgun that Nick had brought her was there, carefully placed on top of the flour barrel, where she’d see it. He had not left her defenseless.

She took the gun, checked the load, and slipped it into her pocket before she returned to the tailgate and jumped to the ground. Hiding at the side of the wagon, she listened again. Maybe the rider was coming from the east.

No, whoever it was seemed to be coming from the south—but sound didn’t travel out here the same as in the mountains. She cocked her head to listen harder.

Yes. From the south. So it surely wasn’t Nick. Yet it could be, if he’d left his claim by some other way.

Her heart stopped. What about Baxter? Could he be coming back with his brothers in tow? With Nick gone, and her alone?

With a hard, fast lurch, her heart beat again.

Maybe something was wrong at the Pecks’ place. But it was hard to believe that with all those men there, they would be coming to her for help.

This definitely was trouble, though. Whoever it was was riding in such a tearing hurry that her heart began to beat in triple time. That kind of speed on a hot day like this—on any day—could only mean an alarm.

She stepped out from behind the wagon,
shielded her eyes with her hand, and squinted into the distance. A cloud of dust formed as she watched. She couldn’t yet tell what made it, so she turned back to see where Joe and Judy were. This galloping visitor might inspire them to try to take off in spite of their hobbles.

They were remarkably calm, grazing away as if they would never be influenced by what another horse or mule might do. Since they were very near the wagon, she turned her attention back to the dust cloud, which was now much bigger.

Once again, she walked around to the far side of the wagon to wait. She curled her hand around the butt of the gun in her pocket. This could prove to be an enemy.

The thought chilled her in spite of the heat, which was already unbearable this early in the morning. If only Nick hadn’t been in such a hurry to leave!

She brought up short. Hadn’t she told him she could take care of herself? She could. And unless this was Baxter on a wild tear to shoot her as he passed by at a gallop, it wasn’t an enemy. Enemies sneaked up on people. Enemies ambushed each other. Why, this person’s horse wouldn’t have enough wind left to carry him in an escape.

The common-sense lecture made her feel much better, and she looked around the corner of the wagon. A horse and rider materialized
out of the fog of dirt, but it took a minute more before she could make out much about them. They wore such a layer of dust that she couldn’t see it was a boy on a bright sorrel horse until they slid to a stop a few feet from her.

The lad slumped in his saddle, gasping for breath, as she ran to him. He was no more than ten, about the same size as her brother Adam. In the midst of her panic, a blade of homesickness stabbed her in the heart. Adam had been more upset than any of her kin, except Papa, that she had consorted with a Harlan.

She turned loose of the gun in her pocket and reached up with both hands.

“Get down,” she said, “rest your horse.”

She looked at the horse standing splay-legged and trembling, lather dripping from its muzzle.

The boy shook his head.

“Fire!” he croaked.

He cleared his throat and spat.

“Prairie fire!”

Goosebumps broke out on Callie’s arms. She looked behind the boy, then glanced over her shoulder at her wagon. If it burned, she’d lose everything she owned and her hope of survival. How could she have felt helpless only minutes ago, with all that at her disposal? At least with it, she had a fighting chance.

“Where?”

She scrambled up onto the tailgate to get water for the boy. When she went back and held it up to him she noticed that her hands were shaking.

“South of our claim,” he said, “Pecks. I’m a Peck.”

He took the water and gulped it all.

“Some neighbors come told us,” he said. “Them and my pa don’t know what to do. Pa says there was a man here named Smith who seems to know the country.”

“He’s gone back to his own claim.”

“Pa give me orders to find him,” the boy said, handing the cup back to her, then pulling on the reins. “Tell me where.”

Callie’s blood rushed to her head. She couldn’t send him to Nick, who had left her to guard the entrance to his lair. And she couldn’t let him ride that horse to death.

“Get down,” she said. “Stay with my wagon. I’ll go get Mr. Smith.”

“No, I will. Pa thinks we’ve got time to do something if the wind don’t pick up too much. He wants that man Smith to help us know where to set a backfire and judge the distance and all.”

“Get down.”

Eighteen years of ordering younger brothers around had given her an authority not to be challenged. The boy half-fell off his mount.