Daughter of the Sword

by Jeanne Williams

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  Daughter of the Sword

  Jeanne Williams

  For My Mother

  I do not forget

  i

  Keeping her head back, left foot slightly forward, Deborah Whitlaw tried to parry her twin brother’s blade, but he took her knife on his buffalo-hide-armored forearm and feinted beneath it, drawing her Bowie while he lightly traced a crescent that would have ripped her from side to side in the soft vulnerability beneath the ribs, except for the tough hide buckler she wore.

  “If I were a Border Ruffian, you’d be dead!” Thos’s eyes, usually soft russet, like Deborah’s, glowed with a fire-edge of excitement.

  Johnny Chaudoin, their teacher, lately a buffalo hunter, though first and always a skilled blacksmith who’d learned his trade from James Black, the maker of Bowie’s fabled knife, shook his massive head. “Don’t seem right for a lady to learn such tricks,” he rumbled.

  Deborah flung back her unruly mane of chestnut hair. “Better I know than not be able to protect myself or the people I’m with,” she countered. “Since Thos and I are doing the same work, I need to know the same things.”

  “You shouldn’t be into this in the first place,” Johnny growled. “Your mother—well, she’s a saint, but how she can keep you away from dances and still let you risk your neck with the railroad is more than I can figger. And you’re only seventeen.”

  The Whitlaws and Johnny were conductors on the underground railroad that spirited slaves, mostly from the neighboring state of Missouri, to freedom in the north. Johnny’s smithy was a “station,” as well as a busy center for shoeing horses, making and repairing tools, harnesses, and wheels.

  Much of this rough work was done by Maccabee, a giant Masai. Johnny alone made knives, though, and only for favored persons. He never quite admitted it, but his work was of such superior quality that it seemed certain that Black, his teacher, had given to him alone the secret of the blade that had been cremated with Bowie at the Alamo. When asked if Black had rediscovered the secret of Damascus steel, Johnny merely shrugged his huge shoulders and said he didn’t know as to that, but Black had possessed that skill or something just as good.

  While Johnny exhorted and excoriated his pupils in French, his grandfather’s language, Spanish learned from trading with Comancheros, and the Sioux of his wife’s people—never, in Deborah’s hearing, had he cursed in English, though he said “Tatanka espy!” often enough for her to begin to suspect what it meant, since she knew Tatanka was the word for buffalo bull—Maccabee had been hammering out a wedge while Laddie pumped the bellows. Laddie was a warm-skinned, black-eyed youngster of eleven, orphaned younger brother of Sara Field, the Shawnee girl who cooked and kept house for the bachelor stronghold.

  She appeared now in the doorway of the log building, which was really three log cabins connected by covered dog-trots. She and her brother lived in one, the large two-room center cabin was for cooking, company, and Johnny, and Maccabee had the flanking structure.

  Because of the unusual amount of room, travelers frequently stayed at the smithy, but word had spread among the roughest of rivermen, hunters, and hell-bent Missourians that the comely Indian girl was not to be addressed in any but the most respectful tones. Johnny had sheared off the hand of one man drunk enough to try to handle her.

  Sara didn’t like knives and she usually timed dinner to interrupt a Bowie lesson. Maccabee signed with his hammer that he’d be along as soon as he finished his present piece of work and Johnny shooed the twins for the cabins.

  “Don’t ever let your mother know that I’m a-teaching you,” he commanded. “I’d rather run the gauntlet than have her look at me stern.”

  “You may keep her from losing us,” Thos reminded. “It’s feather-headed to think we can smuggle runaways without being able to defend them.” But as he looked at Sara, the fire in his gaze softened, and as soon as he’d washed up at the bench and basin outside the door, he spoke to her softly.

  “Reckon we could have a ride after dinner?”

  “I’m baking. The bread has to go in the oven after it rises.”

  “When will that be?” Thos sounded anxious.

  He and Deborah had to be home in time to do evening chores. Father and Mother spent most days at the print shop in Lawrence and often didn’t return till twilight, so the chores were left to the twins. Thos also helped put together and deliver The Clarion of Liberty after its more or less regular weekly publication.

  In spite of his ability to sell advertisements and the special printing jobs that kept the press busy when The Clarion wasn’t being set up, the family relied heavily on the garden Deborah tended, wild grapes, sandhill plums, blackberries, and nuts, eggs from their dozen hens, and milk, butter, and cottage cheese from their cow, Venus, so named by Father because of her generous endowments, the twins suspected, though he said it was because of her melting eyes and long lashes.

  Thos brought in jackrabbits, wild turkeys, ducks, and innumerable prairie chickens, providing all their meat except the occasional side of bacon that paid for ads or a printing job, or the buffalo and antelope meat Johnny dropped off every autumn, pretending he had more than he could eat or sell. Deborah couldn’t bear to eat what had been a graceful, fleet deer or antelope and was glad that Thos had never killed them.

  The frontier was rough. They all did things that would have shocked them when they lived in New Hampshire, not just when conducting runaways, but in the way they lived.

  Still, the mud-dabbed log cabin Johnny had helped them build last year was sheer luxury after a soddy, though perhaps the soddy, with its three-foot-thick walls, had been the best place to pass the terrible winter of 1856.

  There were no soddies, though, at Johnny’s. Stable, smokehouse, and well-house were of shakes, cured before use so as not to shrink much. The root cellar had been the dugout where Johnny lived his first winter in the region, but now it housed only potatoes, onions, and apples, which would keep nearly all winter in the cool, dry darkness.

  Sara’s garden, too, was much better than the one Deborah had planted, watered, and weeded with so much hopeful care.

  In spite of Deborah’s admiration for Mr. Fenimore Cooper’s Mohicans and a predisposition, inherited from her parents, to find the red man an unspoiled child of nature, she found it humbling to be excelled in “civilized” skills by the Shawnee girl.

  Sara could sew finer stitches, too, and was much better at knitting. Deborah sighed, then laughed and shrugged. She’d better become a good Bowie handler! It was her only chance to do something better than Sara.

  But she really didn’t mind. Sara was really her only friend of the same age. The young ladies of Lawrence bored Deborah, who preferred to spend the little free time she had walking out on the prairie or visiting Sara and Johnny. Of course she’d love to have a horse, but Mother and Father needed Belshazzar to pull the wagon. That left Nebuchadnezzar, who, for all the splendor of his name, was happiest grazing. Father said he took after the Babylonian king’s phase when he was being punished by being turned into a beast and eating grass. However that was, he was indignant at being caught up and always eyed the twins with disgusted reproach when Deborah got up behind Thos.

  “Go on with your ride,” Johnny said now. “Reckon I can put the bread in the oven.”

  “It’s my work,” Sara protested, but her eyes lit.

  Straight, black shining hair was clasped at the back of her head with a beaded ornament, and fine dark brows arched gently above slightly tilted eyes. Her skin was warm bronze and the primly high-necked and long-sleeved calico dre
ss could not conceal the grace of her slimly curving form. She said now, smiling, “You mustn’t spoil me, Johnny. How can you keep your mind on forge and oven at the same time?”

  “Tatanka wakan!” growled Johnny. “Holy buffalo bull! If I burn that precious bread or let it run over, I’ll make a new batch!”

  “But Johnny,” teased Sara demurely, “who’d clean up the floor? The last time you made biscuits—”

  “Good, wasn’t they?”

  “Yes, what got in the pan.”

  Laddie grinned. “My sister say ‘Cesli tatanka!’ many times, Shotgun, while she scrubbed the floor and table and cupboards and shelves.”

  Scowling abashed, for a moment, Johnny quickly recovered. “Your sis, young sprout, better not talk like that!”

  “You say it,” Laddie pointed out.

  Johnny glared. “I ain’t no young sweet lady.” His outrage faded. “Cesli tatanka!” he breathed, stricken. “What all those old heifers said was true! I’m not fitten to have charge of you, Sara, now you’re growing up!”

  “Johnny! You—you’re the most ‘fittin’’ person I know!” Sara hugged him, drew back to stroke his grizzled face. “What would have happened to us if you hadn’t taken us in? I’d rather have you than any blood parent!”

  “No other father!” Laddie said decisively.

  “You need a woman, Wastewin. Someone like—well, Mrs. Whitlaw, to teach you gentle speaking and what’s proper!” Wastewin was Johnny’s pet Sioux word for Sara. It meant “nice, good woman.”

  Sara’s eyes flashed. Turning with dignity, she led the way to the scrubbed plank table with a bowl of wild flowers in the center. “I am grown up, Johnny. Isn’t your food good? Your home clean? How have I failed you?”

  “Now, doggone, don’t you go twistin’ what I meant into knots!” roared Johnny. “It’s not my comfort I’m thinkin’ on, though it appears I’ve let it put me to sleep when I ought to’ve been paying attention! Mrs. Whitlaw’s offered to have you and—”

  “Mrs. Whitlaw’s a fine lady, but I belong here!” Sara’s mouth trembled. “Unless you don’t want me anymore!”

  Taking his place at one end of the table, Johnny flushed red to the roots of his shaggy, white-streaked black hair. If he shaved off that beard and sideburns, would he look so old? What had gotten into him and Sara? It wasn’t like either of them to flare up over nothing.

  “You go riding.” Johnny’s tone allowed no argument. “You work too hard, too long.” His voice softened, but Deborah, alerted to something unusual, detected pain beneath his words. “Play a little, Wastewin, play and be young. Don’t get in a hurry to plumb grow up. All that comes soon enough.”

  Sara twinkled at him and the strangeness was gone. “Then I will go riding, and, thank you, sir! Take a nice helping of that sheep sorrel; it’s good for you. And you, too, Laddie.”

  Both groaned but did as commanded. Deborah herself enjoyed the tart wild greens, especially after winter’s dearth of fresh vegetables and fruit, but there was no excuse for the pickiest eater to go hungry from Sara’s table, though Johnny liked to grumble that the blue “delft” stoneware dented the edge of the hunting knife he would use at meals. He preferred wooden trenchers.

  Marble-sized new potatoes and tender peas in cream sauce filled the biggest crock. There was hominy flavored with salt pork, stewed prairie chicken, juicily golden pies made from dried apples and peaches, but, most delicious of all, there were biscuits! Of fine wheat flour!

  Such flour was used in the Whitlaw household only when a subscriber or advertiser paid with it. The staple for most Kansans was cornmeal.

  Cornbread, corn dodgers, pumpkin cornmeal loaf, corn muffins, Indian pudding, griddle cakes, corn gruel—there was no end to the ways resourceful (or desperate) cooks found to use the unbolted meal ground at the mill after a family spent an evening shelling a washtub or barrel full of corn.

  Cornmeal mush and hasty pudding, parched corn with milk, hominy, green corn, white pot made with eggs, molasses, and milk—Deborah stopped the all too familiar litany and had another crusty biscuit, closing her eyes to savor it as it fairly melted in her mouth.

  Maccabee seemed always silent at meals, perhaps because he didn’t fully trust any white besides Johnny, who’d bought him after his master, despairing of ever making him a profitable servant, had beaten him nearly to death.

  Incredulous that anyone would buy “dog meat,” the owner was glad to make anything off what he’d considered a total loss. But Johnny knew cures from his dead Sioux wife and had found lodging for himself and Maccabee with a kindly farm family till he nursed the great black man back to health.

  Suspicious at first, hating all whites, Maccabee couldn’t accept Johnny’s good faith till the old hunter finally convinced him that he was free to go north, even to find his way back to Africa and the dung-plastered conical huts of his people.

  Maccabee refused to go since his owner’s lash marks would be forever on him as a sign of his bondage. He learned the smithy work, and when Johnny moved to Kansas Territory, longing to get closer to his old life on the plains, Maccabee came along. It was at his urging that the smithy became a stop on the way to freedom.

  Now, his awesome presence loomed even more because of his reserve, but no one, satisfying their first hunger, spoke much.

  As Deborah savored the succulent peas and potatoes, she reflected that blacksmithing paid better than journalism. Some customers, journeying west, even paid in cash for the shoeing of their horses or oxen, mended wagons or wheels or harness, though barter was the rule.

  The scrupulously exact account book which Sara kept, since Johnny couldn’t write and had no interest in such things, showed that he’d been paid in boots, steel, pans, old iron, cord wood, hogs, cloth, flour, corn, quilts, preserves, and game. One entry showed he’d made a new axle for the Whitlaw buggy in return for a subscription to The Clarion and some advertising.

  These were concessions to Josiah Whitlaw’s pride. Johnny couldn’t read and he didn’t need to advertise. He had more work than he and Maccabee could handle, especially during the summer months, when travelers and freighters bound southwest or for California and Oregon followed the Santa Fe trail south of the Kaw. Those going to the West Coast would cross the Kaw and follow the Big Blue River till they turned west along the Platte, but near Lawrence all westbound wayfarers followed the rutted tracks along the Kaw, which had probably first been buffalo and Indian trails hundreds of years before Coronado came searching for golden Quivira or French trappers and traders met the Comanche, or Zebulon Pike and John Frémont came exploring.

  Forty-niners bound for California, troops dispatched to defend the frontier, Mormons seeking a new homeland, and since William Becknell’s successful trip from Missouri to Santa Fe in 1821, thousands of wagons of goods for the Santa Fe trade. The headquarters of the freighting business of Russell, Majors, and Waddell was located near Fort Leavenworth. Father had recently run an article praising the firm’s policy of fining teamsters who misused animals or swore, whereupon Johnny had muttered that out of the six thousand teamsters the freighters hired, he’d bet the best ones cussed.

  Thos was reaching for at least his eighth biscuit. Deborah kicked him under the table. He winced and looked martyred till Sara offered him a quarter of the apple pie.

  Real coffee was another luxury of Johnny’s. With honey and thick cream, it completed the feast. Deborah suspected that though Sara always set a good table, she made an extra effort when Thos was expected.

  Deborah volunteered to do the dishes so that Thos and Sara could be off. Maccabee and Johnny went out to drowse and smoke their pipes under the giant cottonwood that shaded the main cabin. Laddie filled the water buckets and the woodbox near the stove before he grinned at Deborah and settled down with the last piece of pie. He was faithful about work, but when he wasn’t needed, he disappeared in the trees along the river.

  The four loaves of bread rising beneath the clean dish towel on a shelf by the sunny w
indow gave out a good yeasty smell. Peeking, Deborah was sure they had doubled. She poked up the fire, added a chunk of wood, and was putting the bread in the oven when Johnny came in with that silent, light tread of his.

  “So!” He threw back his head and for a moment Deborah thought he was angry. She was glad when he chuckled. “You don’t trust me, either, Miss Deborah?”

  “I was just finishing up,” she said, a bit flustered. “And the bread looked ready.”

  “And didn’t I come in right spang on time?” he asked with great satisfaction. “You be sure and tell Sara so!”

  “I’ll do that, Johnny.” Deborah slipped off Sara’s apron and hung it on a peg. “Thanks for the Bowie lesson and dinner. I wish there was something we could do for you.”

  Johnny made a rude blowing sound through his moustache. “Holy buffalo! You talk like that and you’ll rile me into botching that plowshare I have to make! Having you folks for neighbors is the best luck I could have.”

  “But it’s you who’s always helping us! You’ve got everything!”

  There was a strange flicker in Johnny’s dark eyes beneath the grizzled brows. “Think so?” he asked wryly before he grinned and shrugged. “Man can never have enough real friends. I rest a lot easier knowing that if anything happened to me, you Whitlaws would help Sara and Laddie. Maccabee would do his best, but the pro-slavers would try to get him if I was out of their way and Sara and the place were up for grabs.”

  “We’d look after Sara and Laddie, of course, but nothing’s going to happen to you, Johnny!”

  He said grimly, “Now, that’s a thing no one can say, sure not in these bad days, Miss Deborah.”

  She looked at him in surprise. “But, Johnny, the worst must be over, surely? When we first came here, Border Ruffians were crossing from Missouri to steal elections, and pro-slavers burned Lawrence, and John Brown …”

  She broke off, chilling at the memory. Two of the five pro-slavery slain, cut down by two-edged swords without a chance to defend themselves, had been little more than boys, killed along with their father.