Do Not Forsake Me

by Rosanne Bittner

  “We’ve already had a meeting about it, and Katie and her mother are taking charge. Everyone has their assignment. Young people are coming over to sweep up broken glass, and women are making curtains. Some of the men in town are going to replace the windows. They might not all be done by the time Randy gets back or you get back, but it will get done.”

  Jake reached for a cigarette on the night table and lit it. “Katie’s a good girl, and brave. She’s good for Lloyd.”

  “Yes, she is.” The preacher just stood there a moment. “Do you want to pray with me, Jake?”

  Jake drew on the cigarette, shaking his head.

  The preacher sighed. “Don’t tell me you don’t pray, Jake. You wear a crucifix. You pray, all right. You just won’t admit it. Can’t let your guard down, can you?”

  “Not right now. I don’t dare let the hurt get to me. Feelings get in the way of what I have to do. Feelings can come later.”

  “Then God be with you, Jake…and with Lloyd…and most certainly with Evie and Little Jake. They’re waiting for you, Jake, so go and get them.”

  Jake met his eyes, a little surprised at the remark.

  “I think you have God’s permission to do what you have to do, Jake. Just remember what I told you about what happens after you get Evie back. And remember that you are always welcome at church. You are worthy in God’s eyes, and now you have a promise to keep. Randy is coming home, alive and well. Remember that. God is working in your favor. He will be with you when you ride out after Evie.”

  Jake nodded. “I hope you’re right.”

  “I am right. God bless you, Jake Harkner.”

  Zilke left. “God be with Evie and my grandson,” Jake muttered. “And he’d better help me do this right.”

  Thirty-three

  No one talked. They just rode at a steady pace, fast enough to try to reach Dune Hollow in three days instead of four, slow enough to keep from killing their horses. Jake, Lloyd, Brian, Jeff, and four men from town—feed-store owner Ruben Tate, whose children were all grown; farmer Fenton Wales, whose wife had died and who had no children; hardware-store owner Harry Wilkes, who had one nearly grown daughter; and gunsmith Red St. James, who did have family but was adept with handgun and rifle. Ruben, Fenton, and Harry knew rifles well enough to hunt with them, but this time they would hunt men. Brian carried a repeating rifle loaned to him by Lloyd. Jake had deputized all of them.

  Jake and his son are side-by-side, and right now it’s hard to tell them apart—not just in looks and ability, but also in their demeanor. Never has Lloyd more fully taken on the outlaw side of his father. If it weren’t for his long hair, it would be even harder to tell them apart. Jeff made notes in his head and wondered if he would live to tell his story. There are eight of us, but we figure up to fifteen men are with Marty Bryant. That’s two men each, if a person wanted to conveniently divide us up that way, but there will be nothing convenient about this, and I suspect that between Jake and Lloyd, few will be left for the rest of us to worry about.

  But even that wasn’t much of a comfort.

  They took roads, sometimes took shortcuts, waded through creeks, wove through heavy woods, climbed hills, wound through brush. Jake knew the country, and he was taking the shortest route to Dune Hollow. Every man along was afraid to talk to him—even afraid to talk to Lloyd, who adored Evie as his sister as much as Jake adored her as his daughter. Jeff had no doubt part of Lloyd’s devotion was because he’d never forgiven himself for abandoning his mother and Evie both when Jake went to prison. He felt as though he’d failed Evie then. He would not fail her now.

  They stopped at noon again the second day, rested their horses, quietly ate biscuits, and drank coffee heated over a small fire.

  “All of you listen up,” Jake said then, surprising them that he spoke at all. “All of you know what those men have likely done to my daughter. If any one of you ever talks like she should be ashamed, you’d better hope I don’t know about it. She’s the sweetest, purest woman who ever walked, so you will treat her as such, no matter what has happened. Plain and simple. Evie is a lady, through and through.”

  After a moment of silence Red spoke up. “Ain’t a man here who doesn’t respect Evie, Jake.”

  “If we thought any different, we wouldn’t have volunteered for this,” Ruben offered. “Anyone who knows Evie thinks of her as the kindest woman in Guthrie. She teaches Sunday school, knows her Bible, helps people in need, and she’s helped nurse a lot of us when we were bedded down sick or wounded at Brian’s place. We’ll find her, and she’ll be just as sweet and good when we get her back home.”

  Jake smoked quietly, taking a few seconds to answer. “I like the fact that you said we,” Jake told Ruben. “You men are risking your lives here, and that says a lot for how you feel about my daughter. I’m grateful, and I know Lloyd and Brian are too. And if Lloyd and I do this right, we’ll be the ones taking the brunt of this thing and hopefully keep any of the rest of you from getting hurt. We’ll head out again soon. I know it’s a bitch riding this hard, but time is important. My plan is to ride around where they’re camped. They expect us to ride straight at them from the west, but that’s all open country, and they figure they’ll have a good view and we’ll have little protection.”

  Jake knelt down and pulled an unburned stick from the fire, drawing in the dirt. “Here’s Dune Hollow. If we ride hard the rest of today, we can reach it late tonight. It’s called that because it sits in kind of a dip. From our direction, it doesn’t drop down that much.” He drew around the other side of the X he’d made. “But over here on the east edge is a pretty high ridge. We’ll go around to that so we can come up that ridge and be on top of them. They won’t expect that, because they know my temper, which means they figure I’ll come riding in hell-bent for blood, without thinking this out. I’m betting they figure I’ll charge right into that hollow from the west, not wanting to lose any time. That would leave me wide open for their guns, and they’ll figure once I’m in the hollow, I’ll be trapped because of that ridge to the east. Besides that, I’m banking on them thinking that it’s going to take me longer than this to find them, so they won’t be as alert as they would be a couple more days from now. They probably figure the man they left behind is dead. They don’t know he told me exactly where they were holed up. Our last bit of luck is that Marty Bryant doesn’t have the brains of a hummingbird.” The others laughed lightly.

  “That’s for damn sure,” Red put in.

  Jake made some squiggles along the line he’d drawn to indicate the ridge. “If we get around here and come up this ridge come morning, the sun will be at our backs as it rises…and it will be in their faces. We’ll have a big advantage. It’s hard to shoot uphill at a man, but it’s damn easy to be at the top of that hill shooting down at them. We’ll hit them the minute the sun breaks over that ridge. A rising sun can practically blind a man. It will be really hard for them to see us at all, so if we’re lucky, we can bring down half of them before they even know what’s going on. Then Lloyd and I can move in and blow the rest of them away. We’ll use those fucking sonsofbitches for target practice. Any man who touches my daughter or my little grandson is going to find out he made the biggest mistake of his life.” Jake rose from the fire then. “Ten minutes and we leave again.” He walked off alone.

  The rest of them sat there, looking at each other.

  “The man has spoken,” Fenton Wales said.

  “This is gonna be a whole lot more satisfying than killing a deer,” Ruben Tate offered. “A deer, I respect. These men shouldn’t be allowed to exist.”

  “I can’t think of a better man to be risking our lives with than Jake Harkner,” Harry Wilkes said quietly. “And you, Lloyd,” he added, nodding toward Lloyd. “Lord knows you’re as dependable with those guns as your pa is.”

  Lloyd sighed and tossed his cigarette into the fire. “Maybe, but he’s the best, H
arry. And when he’s this upset, you can bet he’ll use those guns till they melt in his hands. I’m just praying I don’t watch my pa get shot to pieces tomorrow. If that’s what it takes to get to Evie and Little Jake out of there, he’ll do it.”

  Brian sighed deeply and rubbed the back of his neck, hanging his head in obvious agony.

  “Brian, your wife is the nicest woman I ever met,” Red spoke up. “We’ll get her out of there, or some of us will die tryin’ to. That’s a promise.”

  Every man there knew the hell Brian Stewart had to be in right now. He stared at the fire, obviously struggling with his emotions. “I’m grateful,” he managed to answer, his voice gruff from grief.

  Everyone quieted again until Jake returned and poured his remaining coffee on the fire, then kicked dirt on it. “Let’s ride,” he told them.

  No arguments. They all mounted up and rode again…and rode, and rode…once in a while slowing down to ease up on the horses, twice getting off their mounts and walking with them for a while, stopping to let them drink, but never actually stopping altogether for more than five minutes.

  Every man here, including me, knows the danger we are heading into, Jeff mentally noted, but two things keep us going—a deep respect for Evie Harkner Stewart and her husband, and the knowledge that we are led by a man who knows exactly what he is doing.

  Even as a writer, Jeff couldn’t imagine what must be going through Jake Harkner’s mind. What a joyful time they could be having, waiting for Randy to get home, knowing she was well, if not for this ugly thing with Evie. The future of Jake’s entire family lay with what would happen when they reached Dune Hollow, yet now he seemed so much calmer. Jeff wondered if it was something the preacher had told him.

  They rode until it was almost too dark to see. Jake pulled up then and trotted his horse in a circle around the rest of them, talking quietly. “We’re around the back side of Dune Hollow right now. I took the longer way around, so if they have scouts watching, they didn’t see us. We’ll move deeper into the woods to the left and make camp there. No fire. If they have scouts up on that ridge, they’ll see it. Sorry, boys, but just biscuits and water tonight. Pour some water into your hats for the horses, and each man keep his horse right beside him to keep it from any alarm that might make it whinny. And no smoking. The lit end of a cigarette can show up for a mile or more. Everybody get out your bedrolls and stay in a tight circle. I need to talk to all of you again, and I don’t want to have to yell.”

  They all did as they were told. Once their eyes adjusted to the light of the half-moon, they could actually see each other well enough to know who was who. Everyone ate quietly and took care of personal business farther out in the trees. The woods came alive with the sound of crickets and an occasional owl.

  “If we’re close, why can’t we hear anything?” Jeff asked Lloyd softly. It was the first time he’d spoken to the young man since leaving Guthrie.

  “They’re on the other side of the ridge. A ground barrier like that completely cuts off all sounds from the other side of it. Didn’t you ever hear that’s why men close by never heard what was happening to Custer when he and his men were massacred?”

  “No.”

  “In Montana there are huge, almost mountainous ridges that create sound barriers. The way I heard it, army scouts at one time were right on the other side from where up to ten thousand Indians were camped, and they never knew it.”

  Jeff nodded. “I never heard that.” Both men sat quietly for a moment. “You okay, Lloyd?”

  “No. I’m dynamite, remember? But Pa, he’s nitroglycerin. That thing he did to Dooley back there in Guthrie—I don’t think I could have done that, but it didn’t bother me to watch Pa do it. There’s the difference between us.”

  “Jake seems calmer,” Jeff mentioned.

  “I know. I think it’s partly from learning my mother is all right. He takes so much strength from her, and he knows she’d be telling him not to go off half-cocked here. She’d tell him to stay calm and use his head. She’d remind him that he doesn’t think straight when he’s raging mad. I expect he feels her with him. That’s all it takes for him to settle down.”

  Jake joined them, gathering everyone close. “Tomorrow we’ll make our way up this ridge—leave the horses here. I am hoping two things will give us an edge. Because I was gone when those men raided Guthrie, they have no idea when I got back, so they don’t know for sure when I’ll come looking for them. So I highly doubt they expect me to reach them so soon. And they don’t know I’ve already had a little chat with the man Katie shot back in Guthrie and I know exactly where they are. They think they have a lot of time to have their enjoyment with my daughter and drink and take it easy and talk about all the ways they intend to torture me before they kill me. But before we go in there shooting, I’ll need to weigh the options. I can’t do that till we get up on that ridge tomorrow and get a look at the layout down there, so I don’t want any man here to just start shooting without my orders. I’ll tell you when to shoot and who to shoot so there are no wasted bullets. And it could be Lloyd and I have to go into that camp with guns blazing, so you men pick your targets and make sure one of us doesn’t end up with a bullet in our own back by accident. You’re all good with those rifles, so aim at a man and imagine he’s just a deer or a bear. He’s not a man. Understand? You can’t let doubt or feelings get in the way. If you have qualms about it, leave now. I’ll understand.”

  Ruben Tate spoke up. “That woman down there is loved by a lot of people, Jake. She’s not just your daughter—she’s Lloyd’s sister and Brian’s wife. And we all have no use for any man who’d abuse a woman or a little kid. There’s not a man here who’ll hesitate to put a bullet in any one of those men.”

  “All right then, get some rest.” Jake stepped closer to Brian. “Come with me, Brian. Leave your rifle here.”

  His head still bandaged, Brian got up and followed his father-in-law farther into the woods. Jake sat down on a log and told Brian to sit down beside him. Both just sat there quietly for a moment, resting their elbows on their knees, listening to the crickets.

  “Brian, you know about that time I went looking for Randy back before I married her, when she went alone to find her brother in Nevada…and how I found her at that trading post…so sick and weak she could barely move. Those men…” He sighed. “They didn’t actually…do the worst…but they took liberties. They defiled and humiliated her. I took care of them my own way, and I got her out of there…and I nursed her back to health. And I saw her only as the beautiful woman I was falling in love with, and nothing those men did made any difference. I felt like she was mine, before I even touched her that way. And she was someone to be treasured and loved.”

  Jake sighed thoughtfully before continuing.

  “And that’s what Evie is to you…yours…to be treasured and loved. As her husband, you’re the only one who can erase all the ugliness of this. The preacher told me something this morning that I’d never considered before.” He paused, listening to an owl. “He said that evil can’t touch Evie. He said evil could use her to get to me, but it couldn’t touch her, and I believe that. She’s carrying your baby—your baby—if she hasn’t lost it. Even if she’s lost it, you’re the one who planted that baby in her belly, out of pure, innocent love, which is the only kind Evie knows. So there isn’t a man down in that hollow who has really touched her at all, and only you can make her understand that. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  Brian nodded, fighting the tears that wanted to come. “She was only eighteen when I met her. I’m the only man she’s ever been with, the only one who owns her heart and soul, just as she owns mine. This changes none of that, and I’ll damn well help her see that.” He choked in a sob. “What hurts the most is that I failed to protect her.” He rubbed at tear-filled eyes. “A man is supposed to be the protector. I mean—look what Katie did. I should have done something like that.�
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  “You were taken by surprise. And I’m the one who failed to protect her, Brian. I took it for granted you would all be safe if you stayed in town. And you have protected her, your whole married life. You’ve sheltered her from everything mean and ugly out there, loved her with gentleness and respect. You’ve given her a good life. She’s never known a raised voice or a physical threat, and you have the kind of job that lets you be with her almost constantly. That’s the kind of husband she needed. She wouldn’t have been strong enough to be married to some gruff, gun-toting lawman or hunter or blacksmith, or some man who likes to drink in taverns. Hell, you don’t even smoke.” He put an arm around Brian’s shoulders.

  “You’re more of a man than I am in a lot of ways, Brian. You care about people and you save lives. I take lives.” He took a deep breath, fighting another urge to vomit over the thought of men abusing Evie. “If you’d ever hurt Evie, I probably would have thrashed you within an inch of your life and kicked you out. But never once have I seen Evie upset or unhappy. She’s always…smiling…and I can see the love in her eyes. I thank you for that.”

  Brian breathed deeply for self-control. “Hell, I can’t take a whole lot of credit, because she’s so easy to love. I take hope in the fact that she’s her father’s daughter, which means she has a silent, inner strength that I don’t think even you are aware of, Jake. I’ve seen it, mostly when you were still in prison and she was as stubborn as Randy about refusing to be told she couldn’t visit you or that I couldn’t give you a doctor’s attention when you were dying in there. She has helped me with surgeries, and she can handle blood and guts just fine for someone so soft and innocent in other ways. Don’t underestimate her strength, Jake. And Little Jake—God knows how stubborn he can be. He’s probably making all those men nervous, babbling about how ‘Gampa’ will come and hurt them with his guns.”