She watched him go and remembered the last time he took that trail with her in the saddle in front of him. When he was out of sight she walked slowly back to the house. Maybe those renegade horses had given her her chance.
Chapter 16
Nick was still friendly and talked some at supper, so when a cool breeze sprang up afterward and he went out to sit on the porch that ran across the front of the house, Callie joined him.
Suddenly, though, as she sat down in the old rocker handwoven from strips of bark that sat opposite his, she resented needing to explain anything to him at all. Any man ought to understand that a woman wouldn’t simply blurt out the news of her condition to a man. And any man ought to understand the powerful pull of a person’s body toward someone she loved.
Maybe that was it. Maybe Nick was judging her for not being married to Vance.
“Nickajack, do you think I’m a loose woman?”
He whipped his head around to look at her.
“What did you say?”
“You heard me. Are you thinking bad of me because I was with Vance without being married to him?”
“No!”
He looked genuinely shocked. “That’s nobody’s business but yours. What riled me was the silent lie of not telling me about your baby.” He shrugged. “Call yourself ‘Mrs.’ for the sake of a school, if you want to, but tell me the truth about what I need to know.”
“Have you told me all your secrets?”
His only answer was a long, straight, angry look, his eyes full of pale fire in the gathering dusk.
“Well, I’m glad you’re not judging me for Vance, anyway. I can’t bear to think what I’d do without this baby.”
Nickajack couldn’t stop looking at her. She had turned away to stare out across the yard with her determined chin lifted just a little to prove she was right.
“What you’d better be doing is thinking what you’ll do with this baby.” His voice came out hard as stone.
She whirled around to look at him.
“What do you mean? That I can’t stay here after he’s born? I told you I’d leave in the spring.”
“No,” he snapped. “I’m telling you that you can’t take care of a baby and hold school at the same time.”
“Oh, yes, I can.”
Her belligerent tone made him want to smile but he didn’t. He wanted her to know he meant what he said.
Suddenly the thought of her baby became real and he wanted to see it, wondered if it would have huge, green eyes like its mother. Her gaze held his, wouldn’t let go.
“What are you thinking?” she demanded.
“Reckon that baby will have a stubborn chin like its mama’s?”
She frowned at him, then smiled.
“Yes,” she said, “and lots of sand. This is a baby who made the Cherokee Strip Land Run.”
Her smile widened into that big, brilliant one that lit up her face and the whole world besides. The smile that could break the heart of the meanest man.
Any woman with a smile like that surely could be trusted. Any woman blunt enough to walk out on the porch and ask straight out if he considered her a loose woman surely was honest enough to be trusted.
Somehow it seemed comforting, the thought of having a baby around. And interesting. He had always loved being with his young cousins in the Nation.
He couldn’t let her go, once the winter was over. Yes, he’d told her he’d build her her own cabin on half his claim, but she couldn’t go there and have the baby alone!
But, oh, Lord, she certainly couldn’t stay here and have it with him. He’d not know how to help her; couldn’t bear to hold those two lives in his hands.
Terror trickled like icy water into his veins. He was losing his mind, because the gravity of this situation had just now hit him.
“Here, now,” he said, too roughly, “who’s going to help you when your time comes?”
She bristled.
“You don’t have to worry,” she said sharply. “I’ve told you more than once that I’d be gone as soon as winter’s over. Before my time comes. I’ll keep my word.”
She was so appealing, glaring at him with the high color rising just beneath her fine skin. He ached all over his body, he longed to reach out and pull her into his arms, but he would die before he let her see that.
Because she might not feel the same way about him. She must not, or she wouldn’t be constantly talking about leaving. She’d be hoping that their marriage might somehow turn out to be real—like he was, much as he hated to admit it.
She had cared for him, for his safety at least, when she found Fox’s letter. That was no sign that she loved him, though. And she’d never told him so.
Except with her body, all of one whole night.
But who could say? The way she’d so carefully kept her baby secret, despite how close he’d felt to her …
Look, Smith, she’s carrying another man’s baby. She loved that other man, she told you so, and she still loves him. So get a hold on your runaway feelings.
And, knowing Callie and her honor and her sense of obligation, she might’ve been merely pleasuring his body on their wedding night, doing it out of a feeling that she owed that to him for offering her a place to winter. She was bound to be scared—out here alone with no place of her own now and a baby to provide for, come spring.
If he had a grain of sense, he’d take her somewhere else right now and make her go back to civilization, where she’d have help with the baby—before he really fell in love …
But it was too late for that. Way too late.
“Callie,” he said, his throat tight with wanting her, every muscle in him tense with wishing he never had to let her go, “maybe you should think about a school in town.”
She stood up and brushed the dust from the back of her skirt, clearly too touchy tonight to consider a sensible suggestion. One from him, at any rate.
“Nickajack, I told you. You will not have to do one single thing concerning this baby. I’ll take care of it. There’s no need to start trying to run my life again, either—soon we’ll both be out of your hair.”
She sounded very adamant and very sure. Callie knew what she wanted; she always did.
He sat there like a bump on a log and let her walk away from him. She stopped at the door.
“I hate to put you out of your bed,” she said, “but I know you won’t hear to anything else.
Let me know if you change your mind.”
Then she went inside, huffy as could be.
It made him smile in spite of the mixed-up emotions roiling in his heart. Yes, she was bound to be scared about taking care of a baby, and yes, she had no claim anymore and she had worked all those days on her soddy only to hand it over to Baxter, but she still had her tough spirit—none of her trials had dampened her fire. If anybody could hold school and take care of a baby at the same time, Callie Sloane could.
Callie Smith. According to that preacher’s piece of paper, she was Callie Smith now.
He sat there, looking out across the wide yard sloping down to the dry creekbed, watching the mares move about in their pasture and the young horses in theirs as they all settled quieter and quieter beneath the night, falling dusky and sweet from the east while the sundown claimed the sky in the west. He could feel the faintest hint of coolness in the air. After all, it was October.
This might be one of those years when October passed hot and dry as one of the summer moons, and then November blew in cold and wet as sudden winter. It was a good thing Callie had given up her claim, much as he’d hated for her to do it for him. She and a baby couldn’t survive over there without a man to haul water and cut wood and make a shelter that would protect them when the blizzards blew.
Finally, the moon began to rise. He needed sleep. He needed to get away from the house and to his bed in the barn. He needed to stay away from Callie until he knew her true feelings about him.
That made him smile. He sounded like some prissy woman dem
anding to know if a man’s intentions were honorable.
He stood up, and the chair rocked back and gently thumped the wall. One of the colts raised his head and whinnied at the moon, which was full and bright and beautiful coming out to ride the sky.
But instead of walking through its mellow light toward his bed in the barn, as he intended, he turned to the door of the house. Callie had had plenty of time to wash up, go to bed, and get to sleep. He wouldn’t wake her.
Silently, he stepped inside the big room. Callie had made it look like a real home again, the way it had when his mother was alive. Callie was a whole lot like his mother, except for her blunt openness. His mother had kept her own counsel.
Something drew him to the table-desk, and he stood in front of it before he realized that what he wanted was to look at that marriage certificate again. He’d barely glanced at it when he and Callie had signed it.
He felt sheepish but he picked it up, anyway. Callie had thrown it and the registration papers for the claim there at some point—he’d noticed that in passing to get his clothes from his room.
He needed to put the papers into the tin box hidden in one log wall behind a weaving his Cherokee grandmother had made. But first he really wanted to look at the marriage paper. Somehow, he needed to look at its words and Callie’s handwriting, although it was all meaningless if she didn’t love him, too.
Her bedroom door was open for the breeze, so he left the lamp unlit and silently crossed the room to the light of the low fire. He sat on his haunches in front of it and stirred the coals until some small flames leapt up.
The registration paper slipped from his fingers and fell onto the floor.
Calladonia Sloane.
That was the only name on the front of it.
He picked it up, unfolded it, and read it rapidly, front and back.
Calladonia Sloane was the only name on it anywhere. The legal land description was the correct one for his claim.
A flash fire burst up the back of his neck and that whole half of his scalp began to burn.
He let out a roar so terrible that it nearly tore out his throat.
Callie leapt from the bed reaching for a weapon, for anything to fight with. What was it? It was in the house! She tried to yell for Nickajack, but was so wildly scared that not one sound would come out.
A panther? No, it wasn’t that scream. A bear? How could a bear get into this house without making a sound?
“Goddammit, Callie, get out here!”
Her toes grabbed the wood planks of the floor.
Nickajack?
Her heart raced at a gallop.
What in the world was he doing, terrifying her like this?
He filled the doorway, his face awful in the moonlight.
“What the hell did you think you were doing?”
His voice was anguished now but it was that same roar.
He waved pieces of paper in both hands.
She couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, could only stand there in her night shift and stare at him while she tried to hold her heart in her chest with both hands.
“So this is how you get a home for your baby,” he snarled. “You planned it all along, didn’t you? Were you and Baxter in league? Or did you see your chance and take it when you saw me sitting helpless in jail?”
Her mind was racing, doing its best to take that in, but she must’ve been asleep even though she thought she hadn’t. Not one word of this made the slightest bit of sense.
Gradually, though, her pounding blood began to slow. This was Nickajack and he wasn’t attacking her. Not physically, so the baby wasn’t in danger. She wasn’t in danger—except of dying of heart’s pain.
How could he talk this way to her?
Her tongue felt thick as cotton wool, her lips stiff as the paper he was brandishing in her face.
“What?”
She finally managed to get that one word out of her mouth.
“You’ve stolen my claim, that’s what! My land, my homeplace, where my mother’s bones are buried. If you think you can get away with this …”
Just as suddenly as he’d appeared in the door, he thrust past her and staggered to the bed. He dropped onto it as if someone had knocked his knees out from under him.
“You can get away with it, though, can’t you? And you know it. All you have to do is side with Baxter and shout to the world that I’m Cherokee.”
Finally, at last, her brain began to work again. So did her legs.
She ran to him in spite of the fact that his eyes were burning the skin off her face.
“That’s why I had to do it, don’t you see?”
The words came out in an anguished cry.
He stared at her, shaking his head, uncomprehending.
“Baxter was in the Land Office with me—he was talking about you being Indian, and the other people were speaking up about their white relatives that didn’t get any claims,” she said desperately. “There was going to be big trouble over it, but your bald-headed clerk saved the day.”
“By giving my claim to you?” Sarcasm dripped from the words.
“Yes. He pretended that your note on the permit was to sign your claim over to me and he passed it off that way. I couldn’t say anything in front of everyone, and I knew I could deed it over to you when all the excitement had passed.”
“But the excitement’s just beginning, isn’t it?” he said with that biting sarcasm meant to wither her.
Reckless, irresistible fury wiped out her fear.
“You do not trust me at all,” she said. “After all we’ve been through, after I signed away my homeplace, the only legacy I could have for my baby, to get you out of jail, you ungrateful, abominable wretch, you do not trust me at all!”
A flash of startlement showed in his eyes.
But he stood up and towered over her like an avenging angel.
“I don’t trust any woman,” he said, in a dead voice. “After Matilda, I should’ve known better than to put any faith in you.”
Callie stepped back so she could look him in the eye. The devastation she saw in his soul broke her heart.
She certainly hadn’t put it there. She had done him no wrong, if he would stop jumping to conclusions long enough to realize it.
“I don’t know Matilda, I have no connection to Matilda, and I resent being compared to Matilda,” she said firmly.
“Matilda betrayed me for her own ambitions,” he said with a furious look that said, As you did, too.
“I haven’t betrayed you, Nick.”
She waited patiently, but he appeared not to have heard her.
“Matilda told my enemies where I’d be so they could set up the ambush,” he said. “But you didn’t need to do that, since Baxter already knew I was locked up in jail.”
All her pity burned away in the fire of her anger.
“Stop comparing me to Matilda!”
“She taught me not to trust even the word ‘love’.”
“Coming from her,” she cried, before she could stop herself.
What was she doing? Getting ready to say he could trust her, Callie, if she said she loved him? She could never tell him that—he hated her now. He didn’t trust her any farther than he could throw this cabin they stood in.
And if he didn’t leave her this instant, she was going to throw herself at him and beat his chest with her fists until her bones broke. If he didn’t trust her, he didn’t love her.
Woe to her, she loved him anyway, in spite of all—and she could not bear to be near him another instant.
“All right,” she snapped. “Fine. You’ve learned your lessons about life. Leave me now so I can get dressed.”
Callie decided to wait until daylight to leave. She marveled that she could have that much control, because all she wanted was to run to her wagon and drive Joe and Judy away as fast as they could gallop. Nickajack didn’t love her. The thought sliced a wound across her heart that would never heal.
Not only did he not lo
ve her, he didn’t know her. He didn’t even want to know her.
After all their adventures, after she’d showed her loyalty by buying him out of jail, for heaven’s sake, he didn’t even know she was herself, Callie Sloane—no, Callie Smith, to her own everlasting regret—and not that Matilda from his past. That woman must have been an awful person and he was lumping them together, saying they were peas in a pod.
The hurt of his words hung in the air around her like a fog clinging to a river. She needed to get out from under it more than she needed her belongings in his house and barn—but she needed her baby even more, and the danger of wrecking the wagon in a ravine in the dark was too real. Never, in a million years, should she have started that trip to rescue Nick from Cap Williams in the jolting, scary dark.
“As things turned out, it wasn’t worth the risk, was it?” she muttered to the baby.
Never, since she’d boarded the train that carried her out of the mountains forever, had she felt so alone.
She dressed quickly, just to be able to get out of Nick’s bedroom, wrapped her things in her nightgown, and carried them out into the big room. He wouldn’t come back into the cabin until she was gone. He didn’t want to see her any more than she wanted to see him.
The cut across her heart widened a little. She had thought she had a friend for life. A husband in name only, maybe, but a friend. Now he was gone because he had no faith in her at all.
If she needed any proof of that, she had it. On his way out, he had thrown the marriage certificate and the claim registration to the floor.
As she crossed to the kitchen, they mocked her, those two stiff pieces of paper, their edges blowing gravely back and forth in the breeze from the open door like winged ghosts, shining white in the night gloom. They were ghosts—the ghosts of her dreams.
Trying not to think, she went to get her favorite iron skillet and the cloth sack of shucky beans. She would need every scrap of everything to eat until she could get a job in Arkansas City.
When she had looked around for everything that was hers, when she had tied it all into a bundle and set it beside the door, she went to Nick’s desk and lit the lamp. He could think what he wanted from now on, but he’d never be able to say she stole his place.
The Renegades: Nick Page 22
