The Renegades: Nick

by Dellin, Genell

  The knowledge held her where she stood. She’d been a foolish dreamer to think the treed claim with water was meant for her and her child. It actually did belong to the ruthless man on the black horse.

  His voice came from right behind her.

  “You’ve had me in sight since you drove your stake, so you know that mine was already there.”

  He was at her shoulder, on foot now, leading the horse—they had come up behind her as silently as ghosts. She had let her feelings consume her watchfulness, and in this terrible desert, that way lay disaster for her and her baby. She had to be more careful!

  She whirled on him.

  “All right! I can see. I admit it!”

  The words came out in a banshee scream and she clapped her hands over her mouth. Her blood was roaring in her head, the sickness rising again in her belly to steal what little was left of her strength. She set her mind against it, but it came anyway.

  Never, ever could she let him see it; never would she tell him she was expecting a baby. That would make her completely vulnerable and he’d try to take the second claim, too.

  Suddenly she couldn’t even think anymore. The rest of the heat drained out of her face, her mouth went stiff with grief.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, really looking at her now. “I had no call to interfere in your life and get that last claim for you. Proving up a homestead is too much of a job for a woman alone.”

  “A hysterical woman, you mean?”

  “Any woman,” he said, almost gently. “I never should’ve done that.”

  “Why did you, then, if you knew you could prove this claim was already rightfully yours?”

  “You were holding a gun on me,” he snapped. “Remember? What was I supposed to do—shoot a woman?”

  Now he was as hard and angry as ever.

  “That’s a good enough reason right there that a lone woman ought not be out here,” he said.

  “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 th
ink 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.

  Chapter 3

  The 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, n
atural 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?”