Wilderness Double Edition 23, page 14
“No!” Palantine bleated, and dropping his pistols, he clutched at his ruptured intestines and the other organs spilling from the cavity. “This can’t be happening!” They were his last words.
Zach swung around. Nine or ten other people were in the dining room, most too stunned to move. He did not see Athena and wondered if she had made it through a door at the other end. Then a heavy blow jolted the back of his head and he sprawled forward, his whole body going numb. But he could turn his head, and there she was—the woman he yearned to strangle with his bare hands. She had been against the other wall. In her hand was a long brass candleholder she had taken from a nearby table. There was blood on it. His blood.
“This isn’t how I wanted it to be,” Athena Borke said as she stooped and picked up Palantine’s unfired pistol. “I wanted you to grovel. I wanted to hear you beg for your life.”
“Never!” Zach found his voice. The numbness was fading, but not rapidly enough.
“Never is a long time, boy,” Athena said. “And time is one thing you’re out of.” She pointed the pistol and thumbed back the hammer using both thumbs. “Maybe it’s just as well. You might have been run over by a carriage or hit by lightning or something before I got around to disposing of you, and I wouldn’t want to deprive myself of the pleasure.”
Zach sensed she was about to shoot, and he fumed at the injustice of it all. Then a small, soft voice from the doorway seemed to fill the dining room.
“Athena,” Evelyn said. She pointed both flintlocks. They were already cocked and her fingers were on the triggers.
Athena Borke glanced sharply around, then slowly shifted, her own pistol still trained on Zach. “Well, well. The child bares her claws. Put those down before you hurt yourself.”
Silence had descended, both in the parlor and the dining room. Everyone was riveted to the girl in the pretty dress and the woman in black.
“I want to thank you,” Evelyn said.
“Thank me?” Athena repeated, clearly puzzled. “Why in the world would you want to do that?”
“You have taught me that I am not who I thought I was.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Are you stalling in the hope your brother will shoot me before I shoot him?”
“My brother is to stay out of this. You hear me, Stalking Coyote?”
“Yes,” Zach answered. “I hear you, Blue Flower.” He made it to his knees and leveled the shotgun at the others.
“Blue Flower?” Athena sneered.
“My Shoshone name,” Evelyn said. “I have a white name and an Indian name, but I have never used the Indian name much.”
“Who cares? Drop those guns or your brother is the next to die.” Athena aimed her pistol.
“I won’t let you harm him.”
“Oh really?” Athena took a quick step just as a guard burst inside and snapped off a hasty shot at Zach; her step took her into the path of the bullet. The impact staggered her. She gaped in disbelief at the hole below her bosom and exclaimed, “No! Not like this! I won’t let it be like this!” Pain hit her and she doubled over. Shrieking like a bobcat, she tottered a few steps, then raised her head and snarled, “I should have killed you long ago, you stinking little half-breed!” She raised her pistol, but her hand was shaking so badly, she couldn’t hold it steady.
“Yes, I am half-and-half,” Evelyn said. “I’ve tried to pretend I wasn’t. I thought my father’s people were better than my mother’s people. I thought your world was the world in which I wanted to live. But I see now I was wrong. Both worlds have their good and their bad.” She paused. “You are part of the bad.”
“Who are you to judge me?” Athena spat. “You’re nothing but a squaw’s droppings.” She sought to straighten but couldn’t. A sheen of sweat caked her as she pressed her other hand to the bullet hole and hissed, “You’re not fit to lick my shoes! Die, damn you!” But as she struggled to hold the pistol level, her legs buckled. She was dead before she sprawled onto the floor.
Eighteen
Evelyn did not feel a thing. Not any emotion at all. She stared at the blood oozing from Athena Borke and she did not feel happy or regretful or sad. “How peculiar,” she said to herself, then started when a hand gripped her shoulder.
“We have to light a shuck, sis,” Zach said. He was covering the guard, who had thrown his hands in the air.
A beefy man with large sideburns hooked his thick fingers into claws and lumbered toward them. “Filthy murderers! You’re not going anywhere! Athena Borke and Edmund Palantine were friends of mine.”
Another man stopped him, saying, “Have you lost your senses, Ricard? They’ll do to you as they did to them.”
Zach had begun to turn but stopped. “What did you say his name was?”
The beefy specimen with the sideburns answered for himself. “My name is Ricard, Emile Luc Ricard.”
“This is for a girl named Charlotte,” Zach said, and fired the shotgun into Ricard’s face. Ricard’s head exploded like a pumpkin, spraying hair and pieces of flesh and bone over everyone within a fifteen-foot radius. Stray buckshot struck a few of the others, but only Ricard’s body fell near Athena’s, his head gone except for a flap of sideburn and half of one ear.
A woman lost her supper.
“Sweet Jesus!” a man exclaimed.
From somewhere at the front of the mansion came harsh yells. More guards, Zach figured, and propelled Evelyn toward the rear wall. She was still staring at Athena Borke and did not seem to be aware of what was going on around her. “Snap out of it!” he said, shaking her. “We’re not out of the woods yet!”
Evelyn tore her gaze from the woman who had held her captive for so long and roused herself with a toss of her head. “Sorry. I’m all right. What do you need me to do, big brother?”
They came to a window. Zach unfastened the latch and opened it as high as it would go, then literally shoved Evelyn through. In a heartbeat he was beside her in the night and taking her hand as they raced toward the stable.
“Thank you,” Evelyn said.
Zach responded, “Save it for later, if we live.” They still had a small army of guards to elude.
The stable doors were closed. Zach cast the shotgun aside and opened the right-hand door. Every stall contained a horse. Fine horses, the best money could breed. Bridles were in a tack room in the corner. He grabbed one for him and one for her. “We’ll have to ride bareback.” It would take too long to throw on blankets and saddles.
“So?” Evelyn said. Her parents had put her on a horse almost as soon as she learned to walk, and for years she rode her pony bareback. Opening the second stall, she slipped the bridle on a buttermilk. It stomped a hoof. Gripping its mane, she swung herself up and beamed. “Ready when you are.”
Zach kneed his mount to the door. “Don’t lose me in the dark. If you take a bullet or your horse is hit, give a holler.”
“You must think I’m awfully stupid,” Evelyn teased.
“No, I think you’re the best sister anyone ever had, and I care for you with all my heart.”
Evelyn’s ears burned and a lump formed in her throat. He rarely complimented her, and she could count on one hand the times he had expressed affection. Usually, all they ever did was bicker.
“Here we go,” Zach said, and pushed the door wide open. Dark figures were at several of the rear windows and a rifle cracked as he reined around the corner and trotted toward the wall. Glancing over a shoulder, he ensured Evelyn was keeping up. She grinned at him. At that moment, he loved her more than he ever had.
“There’s the back gate!”
Zach had already seen it. It was closed, but that was quickly rectified, and side by side they circled to Lafayette Road and headed toward New Orleans. For the first mile Zach held to a gallop, but after that he slowed to save their mounts for when their speed would be really needed.
Evelyn breathed deep of the night air and did something she had not done in more days than she could remember: She laughed. “I’m so happy, I could cry.”
“Makes two of us,” Zach said, “and Ma and Pa will show you all their teeth when we get back.”
“I’ve missed them so much.” Evelyn did not let herself dwell on it or she would break into tears. “What now? Do we go into the city or around it?”
Zach was mulling the same question. He would like to buy supplies and visit a gunsmith and maybe send a note to Alain de Fortier, thanking Alain for his help. But the police were still on the lookout for him, and thanks to Edmund Palantine, so was half of New Orleans. “I think it best we go around.”
“And you know better than me.”
“That’s a first,” Zach said, and they grinned.
Evelyn’s elation lasted another mile. Then the drum of hoof beats signaled they were being pursued.
“Took them long enough,” Zach remarked, and guided her into the forest bordering the north side of the rutted road. They did not have long to wait before over a dozen guards and guests, armed and as grim as death, pounded past. Not until the riders were out of sight did Zach knee his mount from concealment.
“They’re not very bright,” Evelyn said. “They should have brought torches so they could track us.”
“I doubt that bunch could track a herd of buffalo across a mudflat,” Zach scoffed. When it came to wood lore, most whites, particularly city dwellers, were helpless babes. Not that all Indians were master trackers. Some were good, some weren’t. It was the individual, not the lineage, that counted.
Half a mile from the outskirts of New Orleans, Zach again left the road and made off cross country. There were a lot of other towns and a few cities between Louisiana and the frontier where he could stop for provisions and visit a gun shop. In the meantime, they would live off the land.
“I don’t mind,” Evelyn said when he explained. Once, she would have. Once, she would have insisted on staying at a hotel so she could pamper herself with hot food she did not have to cook and a hot bath to relax her before she turned in.
“Sorry it took me so long to find you,” Zach remarked.
“Don’t be silly. I’m amazed you did it at all,” Evelyn said. “I suppose we should be grateful to Athena Borke.”
“Were you hit over the noggin when I wasn’t looking?” Zach wasn’t sure he had heard her correctly.
Evelyn snickered and shook her head. “No, I meant we should thank her for the favor she did you.”
“I’ve lost your trail, little sister.”
“Didn’t you know? She never stopped bragging to me how she rigged your trial by bribing half the jurors so they would find you innocent of murdering her brothers. She thought the gallows were too good for you. She wanted to kill you herself.”
Zach had to marvel at the woman’s craftiness. “She should have been born a rattlesnake.”
“I wish she had never been born at all,” Evelyn said. She recalled the terrible auction, recalled its purpose, and shuddered.
“Forget her,” Zach advised. “You’re safe now, and you’ll stay safe if I have anything to say about it.”
Evelyn did not say anything. There was a time when she thought the world was a bright and shiny place as safe as a hug from her mother, when she took it for granted that nothing really bad would happen to her. Now she had learned better. Now she knew what her father had been trying to help her understand all the years she was growing up. He held the view that there were two kinds of people in the world, those who saw it as it was and those who saw it as they would like it to be. She had not realized he was talking about her. About the fluffy and nice pretend world she had made up. Because life was not all fluffy and nice. Life could be hard and life could be cruel.
She should have seen it sooner. But it was not wholly her fault. Her parents had sheltered her from hardship as much as they were able, and while there had been a few incidents where her life had been in peril, her day-to-day life was as peaceful and loving as anyone had a right to pray for.
Looking back through the mists of time, Evelyn saw their cabin as an oasis in a desert of burning hate, hot lead, and cold blades. The real world, the world her father tried to warn her about, would slit her throat or gut her and hang her out like a skinned raccoon if she did not always keep in mind that it could happen anywhere, at any time.
“What are you thinking about?” Zach asked. Normally she would be talking his head off.
“Growing up,” Evelyn said.
“It’s not much fun,” Zach admitted.
Through the night they rode, and camped at daybreak in a glade near a creek. Zach cut whangs from his buckskins to fashion crude but serviceable hobbles for their mounts. Then they curled up under the spreading limbs of an oak. He tried to sleep, but he would wake up every hour or so with his heart hammering and then have trouble dozing off again. About one in the afternoon, he sat up for the fourth or fifth time. Careful not to awaken Evelyn, he slunk off into the brush.
They needed to eat to keep their strength up. Zach spotted a doe, but he did not shoot when it bounded off. A shot could be heard from a long way off, and posses were bound to be scouring the countryside. He was thinking he would try to bean a rabbit with a rock, which he had done before, but an obligingly plump gray squirrel came down out of a tree to chatter at him from a low limb, and he beaned that instead.
Returning to the oak, Zach gathered a handful of dry kindling, took his fire steel and flint from his possibles bag, and soon had a small fire crackling. The few tendrils of smoke it produced were dispersed by the boughs above. He butchered the squirrel and rigged a spit for the chunks of dripping meat.
Soon Evelyn stirred and opened her eyes and sniffed. “Something smells delicious.” She rose on an elbow and licked her lips. “What did you get for you to eat?”
“Me?” Zach said, and chuckled. “Oh. I get it. Next time I’ll club a cow and carry it back over my shoulders.”
“Would you do that for me?” Evelyn sat up and leaned against the oak. “I can’t believe we’re really here. I keep thinking I’ll wake up and find myself back in that bedroom.”
“We’re really here.” Zach turned the spit to roast the meat evenly.
Evelyn had another worry she brought up. “Will they send the army after us like they did after you killed the Borke brothers?”
“I don’t see why they would. This isn’t a military matter.” Zach tried to sound convincing, but secretly he suspected their bloodletting would haunt them later. Whites were more tolerant of whites killing whites than they were of half-breeds or Indians killing whites. “Don’t fret your little head over it.”
“My noodle is as big as yours,” Evelyn bantered, tickled that they were as they had always been.
Zach speared a piece of squirrel with the tip of his Bowie and gave her the knife. “Try not to stab your tongue by mistake.”
Evelyn ate ravenously. She was hungrier than she had been in weeks. Juice dribbled down her chin, and she swiped at it with a sleeve and chuckled.
“What now?”
“I’m me again.”
Zach bit into his piece and happened to gaze at the horses. Both had their heads high and their ears pricked and were staring intently to the east. Jumping up, he stomped on the fire to smother the flames.
Evelyn did not ask why. She helped him, and did not complain when he practically threw her onto the buttermilk. As quietly as Comanches, they slipped away.
From the crest of a wooded rise a quarter of a mile away they could see the glade, and the riders in it. “I count eleven,” Zach said. The chase had begun in earnest.
For the rest of the day and on into the night, they put their mounts to a test of endurance. At midnight, Zach stopped. He persuaded Evelyn to sleep by promising he would soon turn in, but he did no such thing. He stayed up all night watching their back trail. Before dawn, he shook Evelyn and they were under way again.
By noon their animals were flagging and Zach’s eyelids were leaden, but he permitted only a brief rest. He had not seen any sign of the posse, but that did not mean they weren’t back there.
Along about two, they came to a swamp. Evelyn wanted to go around. Her encounter with the alligator was vivid in her mind and she would rather not encounter another.
“I think we should push on through,” Zach disagreed. He realized the risk was great, but so was the potential benefit. He deemed it unlikely the posse would follow them in.
“Whatever you say, big brother.”
“I could get used to this,” Zach said.
For four hours they slogged through rank vegetation crawling with snakes and fetid pools swarming with insects. They were exhausted and dirty and bone sore when they came to dry ground, but Zach still did not stop. Again it was pushing midnight when he drew rein.
Evelyn was so exhausted, she was asleep the instant her cheek touched the ground. She did not wake up once during the night, and at daybreak she was refreshed and eager to head out.
Two more days passed. Two days where they did not come across another living soul. Two days where there was no hint of pursuit.
“We’ve given them the slip,” Zach announced. “In a couple of weeks we'll be in St. Louis, and from there it’s on to the Rockies, and home.”
“Home,” Evelyn said. Back to the mountains she once despised. To the cabin in their valley high in the mountain, and a way of life she had been ready to forsake for the glitter and deceit of civilization. “I can hardly wait.”
WILDERNESS 46
UNTAMED COUNTRY
One
There were eight of them, riding in single file. They did not spot the lurker in the trees.
Nate King was in the lead, astride a dust-caked bay. A big man with night-black hair and piercing green eyes, he had once been a free trapper. That was back in the days when beaver pelts fetched prime prices, before silk hats came along and knocked the stuffing out of the beaver market. Now he called himself a mountaineer. He and his family lived where few whites dared, in the untamed country more commonly known as the Rocky Mountains.
