The Renegades: Nick (9 page)

Finally he narrowed his eyes and gave her the barest nod, an incisive gesture that somehow affirmed her words more emphatically than a shouted agreement would have done. Then he went back to work.

Now that they were no longer riding, the heat was worse. Every square inch of Callie’s skin itched, and the smells of burned grass and charred earth filled her nostrils with every breath.

“Soon I’ll be begging you for directions to your waterfall,” she said, imitating him to unsaddle her own mount. “You’d better be telling me the truth, because right now a cool bath would be heaven on earth.”

She pushed her bedraggled hair off her face and pulled her saddle off the mare, then started to carry it into the barn. Nick took it from her and carried one in each hand, as easily as if they weighed nothing at all. After he put them on their racks, he went back outside,
stripped the bridles off, and slapped the horses on their rumps, sending them thundering away.

“They can stay in the pond the rest of the day if they want,” he called to Callie over his shoulder. “They’ve earned it.”

“So have we—I mean the rest of the day in the waterfall,” she said, “but I’ll go to the pond with the horses if I have to.”

He laughed.

“Go with ‘em now, if you don’t trust me.”

“Now, Nick, you know I trust you,” she said lightly, “even if you are a flatlander.”

“Only because you have no choice,” he said wryly.

He came back into the homey barn to put up the rest of the tack. Callie watched him hang it neatly in place, then looked all around at the old building while she breathed in its rich aromas of horse, leather, hay, and manure. A person could live in here and be perfectly happy—it was more orderly than lots of people’s houses.

“Oh, Nick, I’m so thankful this barn isn’t a pile of ashes right now. You didn’t want to, but you saved a lot of people’s stakes today.”

“Thanks to you.”

“Well, yes, I did get you to the fire. I’m known for my persuasive powers,” she said lightly, “for talking folks into doing things they don’t want to do—like learning multiplication
tables and practicing penmanship …”

“That’s not what I mean.”

He stiffened where he stood and turned to look at her, his gray eyes blazing like stars in his dark face.

“I froze,” he said simply. “If it hadn’t been for you, everything and everybody on the Chikaskia could be ashes by now.”

It cost him a lot to say that, she could see. But at the same time, she could tell that he couldn’t keep from saying it, that he needed to talk about it with her.

“How did you know?” he said. “And how’d you know what to say to jar me out of it?”

“It was the look in your eyes,” she said slowly. “I could tell that whatever you were seeing off in the far distance was too much for one person to face.”

“But how did you know that?”

She lifted her hands, palms up, and shrugged helplessly.

“I just did.”

He searched her face, her eyes, as if she might be hiding a better answer there. She told him silently that she knew no more.

Finally she spoke. “What were you seeing, Nick?”

At first she thought he wasn’t going to answer, but then he made a little gesture to say that she should come with him, and turned to leave the barn.

They started walking toward his cabin.

“When I was called Goingsnake,” he said, in a voice so profoundly sad that it instantly took over her heart, “I rode all over the Nation trying to rouse feelings against the sale of the Strip. A bunch of boys began to ride with me. Two of them were killed—for no other reason than because they were doing what I told them.”

The air went out of her in a quick, short rush.

“And you were afraid somebody would be killed in the fire? Doing what you told them to do?”

He gave a brusque nod.

“What I was seeing was those two fine, young bodies sprawled on the grass, bleeding.”

Slowly, they walked on in silence.

“We rode into that ambush because of a woman.”

His tone was studiedly neutral, but he gave her a slanting glance.

Callie caught and held it.

“You were thinking that you were at the fire because of me.”

“I guess. I guess I was thinking that it was all about to happen again.”

“Then how in the world did you ever …”

“I didn’t,” he said. “You did it. Whatever it was.”

“Did she persuade you to go there? Into the ambush? That other woman, whoever she was?”

“Matilda,” he snapped, his tone full of bitterness. “Matilda, who was considered the most beautiful woman in the Nation. She told my enemies what route I would take to the meeting of the Board of Governors.”

They walked into the front yard of the cabin, its sunburned grass covered with withered leaves, fallen early because of the drought. Callie could hardly hear them crackling beneath her feet because her ears were filled with his voice, which was pure tortured regret.

He was seeing it all again, she could tell by the faraway look in his eyes—no, he was
living
it all again, and it was unspeakable. She couldn’t bear to feel the pure pain emanating from him. It made her hurt for him and it stirred her own soul-searching sorrow.

She grabbed at the first topic that might distract him, even a little bit.

“What enemies did you have who were so dangerous?”

“Many. The Board of Governors wanted the money from the sale of the Strip for the People; some of the powerful tribal leaders believed it was the only way to keep the Nation itself from being opened to settlement; and some people thought I had no right to meddle
in political decisions since I’d lived in the Strip nearly all my life.”

“But that gave you more of a right!”

He shrugged. “That’s what I thought.”

He walked across the side yard and past the back of the cabin. Callie stayed beside him to a cut in the canyon’s side where a spring came gurgling out, up above Nick’s head. It ran down to the pond in a fairly strong stream.

“So this is the reason the pond isn’t as dry as the creekbed and all the rest of the land,” she said.

“Yes, but it’s slowing down,” he said. “Another moon with no rain and it’ll be gone, too.”

Nick picked up a piece of wood standing against the trunk of one of the cottonwood trees that grew along the water’s edge. He stood on tiptoe and wedged the board into a slot dug in the earth beneath the spring, so that the water fell with more force after coming over its curved surface.

“If you’d rather go to the pond with the horses, you can,” he said, with a fleeting ghost of his grin. “But this water’s cooler.”

Callie stepped beneath the water and closed her eyes as it washed over her like a cool, liquid blessing.

“I’ll go to the house and get you some dry clothes—”

“No!”

“Callie,” he said patiently, “I don’t intend to get bold with you or take advantage of you in any way—”

Her cheeks flamed hot despite the cool water pouring over them. Looking up into his face, tilting her head out of the water so she could hold her eyes open, she said, “I know that. I know you, Nick.”

His gaze burned into hers for a long minute, his face inscrutable.

“My real name is Nickajack,” he said. “I want you to know that, too.”

“Nickajack. I’ve never heard it before.”

It felt good on her tongue.

“It’s a common Cherokee name.”

He had trusted her with his real name. It made her want to tell him her secrets in return.

“Nickajack,” she said quickly, “I’ll not need dry clothes. These need to be washed as much as I do, and they’ll dry on me in a heartbeat.”

I need my clothes on for my armor—for something to protect me, to stand between us in this closeness with you
.

She needed to be far away from him, for her own good. She needed to flee back into her loneliness, much as she hated it, or she’d be wanting to be with him all the time.

Instead, she reached out and pulled him into the falling water. It was only to distract him from his memories, yet she had to force her hand to fall away from his arm.

“Let the cool water wash the worry out of you, Nick. There’s nothing you can do now, so it’s better not to think about the past.”

Politely, he ignored that foolish remark. There wasn’t much room for them both to be beneath the water, but she stood apart. If she touched him again, she’d throw herself into the comfort of his embrace. As it was, she was letting water run into her eyes so she could look at him.

“My name,” he said. “Don’t let anyone else hear it. Some white man would challenge my claim.”

She nodded, then turned her back to him, afraid she couldn’t keep fighting the urge to reach for him again. Guilt ran in her, just as it did in him. In the impossible advice she’d just given him she’d been talking to herself, too, hoping her own guilt would flow away in the spring’s stream.

“I know exactly how you feel,” she said, loud enough to be heard over the sound of the water.

“Don’t tell me that,” he said sharply. “How could you?”

She whirled to face him, wanting him to know she wasn’t speaking lightly. His eyes pierced her to the core, then he tilted his head back and let the water stream through his hair and over his set, hard face turned up to the sky.

Now he was gone far away from her—and she couldn’t stand that any more than she could his closeness.

“I was the cause of Vance’s death,” she said. “He wouldn’t have died if I had agreed to run away with him penniless.”

The muscles in his jaw relaxed a little bit.

“Because I thought we should have money to buy our homesteading outfit, Vance was working all the time at every job he could find,” she said. “On a logging job, he slipped in the mud and a tree fell on him and killed him. I might as well have pushed him—it never would’ve happened if he’d been rested and not in such a hurry.”

Nick looked down at her, water pouring off his chiseled cheekbones, his aristocratic nose, his square, strong jaw. His wet shirt clung to his skin and showed every muscle along his shoulders, across his broad, hard chest.

God help her, she wanted to throw her arms around his neck and glue herself just as tightly to him as that cloth. She wanted to kiss him again so much that her lips actually hurt. She must be a horrible person. How could she feel that way at the very same time she was mourning Vance?

And her the cause of his death!

“So that’s why I can never love any other man,” she said, looking up into Nick’s gray eyes.

She dragged in a deep, full breath of air that smelled sweet and good and clean from the water passing through it.

He had told her his real name—which she immediately knew he told to very few people.

His kiss had shifted the very heart inside her breast, as Vance’s never had done.

And now he was looking at her as if he and she were soulmates. His heavy-lidded gaze drifted to her mouth.

This had to stop.

“I gave up my whole family for Vance, and my leafy, green mountain home,” she said impatiently. “The reason I’m going through all this misery out here is to fulfill my and Vance’s dream. He’s the only man I can ever love.”

His look didn’t change.

“Now I know exactly how
you
feel,” he said, and lifted his face to the sky again. “I’ll never trust another woman after Matilda.”

She couldn’t feel anything but desire and the fear of it. He wanted to kiss her, too, that much was plain.

This was misery, standing so close to Nick and not touching him. Looking into his eyes and wanting to kiss him so bad that her lips ached.

One thing for sure, though—the misery would be worse if she kissed him again, because
another kiss would just make her want more, much more.

She turned her back to him and stepped out of the water.

Too late. Too late
.

The words sounded over and over again in her head.

What she and Nickajack had already shared was more intimate than anything physical ever could be. This talk, and his name, and that moment when, frozen in the face of the fire, he couldn’t speak.

How had she known that and known what to do to bring him out of it? Already, there were far too many deep feelings flowing between them to suit her.

She and Nick had better stay far, far apart.

C
allie drove into the raw, new town—called Santa Fe, like the old one in New Mexico, but named for the nearby railroad—with a great sigh of satisfaction. Alone, with nobody’s help, she had hitched up her team and driven them straight from her claim to town, following the directions she’d asked from the Pecks yesterday.

It had been a godsend when they’d stopped by on their way home from registering their own claim, even if one part of her had been bitterly disappointed that they weren’t Nick. She must, absolutely must, quit thinking about him. Any man who could go to the extreme of sneaking into her camp like a thief while she
was away cutting sod did not want to see or talk to her.

And whose fault was that? Her own. She’d caused Nick to behave that way, because she’d insisted on coming home as soon as she got out of the shower and had barely talked to him at all on the way. He’d led Judy so she wouldn’t run away again and made sure everything was all right at her camp before he left her there.

Nick didn’t see or talk to her when he brought back her wheel and repaired her wagon, because he thought she didn’t want to see or talk to him. That was for the best—and she was glad he’d decided to accede to her wishes.

It still made the bottom drop out of her heart, though, to remember coming back to the wagon to find it sitting on four wheels. Had she offended him so much that he’d never speak to her again?

She sighed again, in resignation this time, and made herself look around her. The Pecks would be her friends, and she might make more friends here today. And when the baby came it would be her constant companion. She had come out here to be independent and prove up a claim and she would do exactly that.

Santa Fe seemed like a metropolis after nearly a week alone on the prairie, and she’d
started looking for the Land Office. She hoped that horrible Baxter hadn’t somehow laid claim to her land—if only she hadn’t taken so long at making a show of possession before she came to town!

She sat up straight, pulled on the lines to show her recalcitrant team that she was still there, and started searching the new buildings for signs. No Land Office yet, but there was a tent with a cross on it for a church, several tents with lawyers’ shingles, most advertising skill in land disputes (which she might need, according to what Baxter did), a mercantile in a tent, and, farther down toward the east end of the street, the frame of a two-story building rising into the air.

There were lemonade joints, restaurants, cafes, dance halls, blacksmiths, and a livery stable in a wonderful spot beneath a big cottonwood, one of the few trees in sight. All were tents or rickety structures thrown together with an assortment of boards and canvas, except for one small building made of limestone which looked to have been there for awhile. It bore a crudely lettered sign, obviously new:
jail.

That surprised her. Somebody here must be mightily concerned about law and order.

There was also a horrifying number of saloons and what must be brothels, all crowded together. This must be what the Pecks had
called Hell’s Half Acre. Probably the jail was already a necessity.

The other surprising thing was that Joe and Judy had begun walking docilely through the mixture of buggies, freight wagons, horses, and people hurrying along the main street of Santa Fe. It was a great relief to the sod-cutting blisters on her palms not to have to pull on the lines so much.

Then she saw what had to be the Land Office up ahead at the far end of the street: a small, rough shack with a long line of people snaking along for what seemed a mile. Callie stood up from the seat and, sure enough, saw a sign tacked above the little porch that proclaimed in large, crooked letters “
land office
.” Her heart sank. There were so many claimants waiting to register that she’d never get back to her place tonight.

But suddenly, that wasn’t the main reason her stomach tied itself into a knot. Was Nick standing in that line? Or had he already been here on another day?

She dropped back down onto the seat with a thud of disgust. Why did she keep on thinking about him, day and night?

Well, at least she had stopped thinking about his kiss.

Almost.

She had nearly forgotten how he’d kissed her with such a wild sweetness, how they’d
shared that awful fear and the danger of fighting the flames, how they’d looked into each other’s eyes and told each other secrets neither would say to anyone else. By the next time she drove into town, she would have completely forgotten all that.

Nickajack Smith meant nothing to her, and he shouldn’t. She had come all this way to homestead in Vance’s memory, and that was exactly what she would do.

Yet she ran a sharp eye over the line of claimants as she passed them, even looking over her shoulder as her wagon rolled in front of the soon-to-be two-story building. Nick wasn’t there. No matter how big the crowd, he would’ve caught her eye in a heartbeat. Every part of her listened to the little voice of truth inside her that said that.

So she made her head turn and her eyes fix on the frame of the big two-story building going up only a few yards past the land office. Carpenters swarmed all over it like bees in a hollow tree, their hammering and sawing and shouting floating out to join all the noises in the street. It would seem really strange to come in to a brand-new town for supplies, a town that would make Pine Forks, Kentucky, seem two hundred years old.

She drove on past the construction with its sweet smell of new wood and its atmosphere of competence to turn the team under the
neatly lettered hanging sign that proclaimed LIVERY STABLE AND WAGON YARD. This Would be a safe place for her to sleep in the wagon, if it turned out that she must stay the night.

She made the arrangements to leave her team and wagon there all day and overnight, if necessary, took the small jar of water she’d stowed under the seat and put it into her reticule, removed her certificate permitting her to be in the Run so it wouldn’t accidentally get wet, and hurried to the Land Office to stand at the end of the line. She had bread and ham in her pockets, so she would stay until she registered, if it took all day and into the night.

Dora was the one she needed to be looking for, not Nick. She examined the line again. Dora had promised to come help with the birthing, and Dora was the one who was her friend.

Yet her gaze stopped on the back of every tall man. None had shoulders wide enough.

A small group of people stood talking directly in front of her, gathered in a loose knot while they waited in line. Two couples, one a man and woman about the age of the Pecks, old enough to have grown children, and a man and woman about Callie’s own age, were listening to a single man of about thirty who was holding forth in a lecture about the best methods of raising corn. The younger couple exchanged an amused glance as he drew a
quick breath and rushed on to the next point of his spiel, then their eyes held and the look turned tender and hot.

It filled her with a throbbing ache.

For Vance. She missed him, still, more than words could say. She wanted Vance. It was Vance to whom she’d given her heart.

Staring off across the dusty street, Callie tried to see his face but it refused to come to her. Tears stung her eyes. Surely she couldn’t forget him—she had to remember, so she could describe him to the baby!

“Well, well, if it ain’t the little missus who ain’t a missus after all!”

Cold fear shot through her as the familiar voice brought her whirling around on one heel.
Baxter
. With a sneer on his face that would be enough to rouse her fighting spirit even without the taunting remark.

Fear grew alongside her anger. He had walked up behind her with her totally unaware.

“My marital status is none of your business,” she said.

The garrulous man fell silent and the two couples listening to him also turned toward Callie and the brewing confrontation.

“Here to try to register my claim, are ye?” Baxter said. “Well, I aim to counterfile.”

“Get in line,” Callie said. “And get yourself a lawyer.”

Then she turned her back on him.

A man strode around the corner of the frame of the two-story building next to the Land Office. For an instant, she thought she’d imagined him.

Nickajack
.

A huge relief filled her, much to her chagrin. She would not depend on anyone, especially not Nick, since she could easily fall into the snare of wanting to do so all the time.

She ought to turn her back on him, too, and not watch him.

But he moved like the mountain lion she’d seen up close that time on Old Baldy, as if he ruled every inch of the earth he set foot on and every mile of it he could see. He was coming toward her with the balls of his feet barely brushing the ground and his long, beautiful thigh muscles flexing against the worn cloth of his Levi Strauss pants.

And he had seen her already. There was not the slightest indication in his face or manner, but she knew it was true from something shimmering in the air between them.

Foolish as that was. She’d probably hurt his feelings so much that he wouldn’t look at her, either.

Then something above him caught her eye, and she looked up to glimpse a thick board beginning to fall from the second story directly above his head.

“Nickajack!” she shrieked, cupping her hands at her mouth to try to make the sound carry over the noises of the carpenters and the street. “Look out!
Nickajack!
”

She started running toward him, as if she could reach him in time.

He whirled on his heel to look behind him instead of up, but he did take another step and it carried him out of danger. The board struck earth at his feet in an explosion of dust.

Callie kept running—somehow she couldn’t stop until she reached him. The other end of the board landed in the soft dust and he looked down at it, then up.

Callie raced up to him, grabbed his huge arm and held onto it, even though she couldn’t reach all the way around the hard muscles. Her body contracted deep inside.

“Sorry, partner,” a man’s voice called down. “It just slipped out of my hand. Glad it didn’t hit you.”

He was young and worried, peering down at them through the scaffolding, his hat pushed back on his sweaty hair to see them better, his blue eyes as sincere as his tone had been. Nickajack dismissed him with a nod and turned to Callie, who was still holding onto his arm.

She forced her fingers to uncurl; her arms to drop to her sides.

“I … I was scared you—”

“Hey, Nick-a-jack!” Baxter shouted. “I was wonderin’ where you was when I seen yore woman standin’ in line all by her lonesome.”

Nickajack threw Callie a glance she couldn’t read, then strode toward Baxter, escorting her swiftly with one huge hand at the small of her back.

“Shut up about me and the lady, Baxter.”

“I got jist as much right to speak my mind as you.”

“Do it someplace else.”

“You and whose army gonna make me?” Baxter said. “And don’t try t’ tell me one more damn time that you two ain’t together.”

A clutching fear took hold of Callie’s stomach. They would never be rid of this obnoxious man, and now he was making a scene in front of a hundred people.

“Watch your mouth,” Nickajack snapped. “There are ladies present.”

Some of the other men murmured agreement. Baxter wasn’t daunted in the least.

“Listen to you,” he drawled insolently, loudly, looking around him in hopes of drawing a crowd. “Protect the little redhead’s dainty little ears, protect her claim, stand there with yore arm around her and then tell me again you ain’t …”

Nick’s face turned so fierce that Baxter did bite his tongue and hush.

Then a sneering smile spread over his mouth.

“Oh …
Nick-a-jack
!”

He spoke far more loudly than necessary, in a voice as full of taunt as a schoolboy’s.

“Only other man I ever knowed with that name was a red-skinned Cherokee back in the Nations.”

Some of the noises of the land office crowd lessened, Callie realized, and a few people walking by stopped to listen.

Nickajack glared at Baxter, watching his gun hand, but he kept it still and away from the handgun he wore in the waist of his pants. Nickajack’s was in a holster at his hip.

Baxter took a belligerent step toward him.

“Let me tell you something, Blanket,” he said. “You ought to’ve got you one of them Indian allotments, ‘cause you ain’t gonna get one meant for a white man. I aim to counterfile agin’ you and your
woman
both.”

“Go ahead.”

The implied threat in Nick’s level tone of voice made Baxter hesitate with his mouth open to speak. Then he recovered.

“
She
,” he said, flicking his eyes at Callie, “ought not have no second claim of her own, and you ought have none at all. The U. S. Government paid you Cherokees good money for this land, and it’s white settlers they bought it for.”

Nick stared at him, his right hand hovering over the gun he wore. Callie’s breath caught and wouldn’t come out of her throat.

“I’ll see about this whenever it’s my turn to register,” Baxter bellowed, but he held his gun hand hard against his belly, clearly afraid to draw against Nickajack. “I’ll get a lawyer if I have to.”

“Go ahead and hire one,” Callie said. “I intend to. I’m not about to give you my claim without a fight.”

Baxter glared at her.

“You didn’t stake that claim, Missy. He did,” he said, jerking his thumb toward Nickajack. “And he already had one staked that he has no right to. My quarrel is with him.”

“Not if you’re talking about my land. This man is not my husband and my claim belongs only to me.”

“There’s no connection between us,” Nickajack said, and a weird feeling shot through Callie, as if he’d betrayed her. “Leave her alone. If you want to counterfile, do it against me.”

“I will,” Baxter said nastily. “And my brother will counterfile against her.”

Nickajack stared at him until Baxter turned and walked away.