“Suffice to say you and Joe have something in common. You have both stumbled onto information that I would far rather did not meet the clear light of day.”
“You gonna knock him in the head with that little stick of you’rn?”
“Would it matter greatly to you if I did?”
Abe turned his head and spat a stream of tobacco juice. “I don’t have no truck with no In’juns,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’m just here to make sure you don’t renege on our bargain.”
Navarre gritted his teeth, but said nothing. He would find some way to rid himself of Abe McFarland, though he had to admit, the prospect of sending him off with Reagan Dawes was tempting indeed. There was something about the chit that he just didn’t like.
First things, first. He would see to Whiskey Joe, then worry about how to deal with Abe McFarland.
Tying off his horse’s reins, Navarre left the cover of the wood and started toward the shack. Lamplight spilled from the windows, pooling on the weed-choked dooryard, and a thin wisp of smoke curled from the chimney.
Navarre’s approach was stealthy. Years in the wilderness had taught him to tread carefully, noiselessly, walking toe first, as an Indian walked, lessons the bumbling ape crashing along behind him had apparently neglected to learn.
Navarre thrust a hand down to indicate that Abe should tread more carefully.
Abe snapped a stick, which cracked like a gunshot in the silence.
Navarre turned slightly, placing a finger to his lips, and Abe passed gas noisily.
His temper flaring, Navarre spun on his partner, and collided with a solid wall of flesh. Navarre’s fingers itched to ply the silver-headed walking stick, and only the suspicion that Abe could snap him like a twig kept him from it. “Make yourself useful!” he grated out through clenched teeth. “Go around the back.”
Abe just stared at him for a long moment, as if he could not quite comprehend what Navarre was suggesting. His stare was vacant, and had Navarre not been so angry, he might have been frightened. In that instant he felt a tiny twinge of pity for the object of Abe’s affections. Reagan Dawes was not a suitable choice for Jackson, yet neither did she deserve Abe McFarland. “Don’t think you can leave,” Abe said at last. “I’ll be watchin’.”
With that, he ambled off, making more noise than a bear in a thick stand of woods. Navarre sighed and, turning, made for the shack.
Once he was certain that Abe was in place, Navarre tried the door, which was barred from within. He rattled the latch, calling out in his most persuasive voice, “Joe? It is I, Navarre Broussard, Jackson’s uncle. I wonder if I might have a word with you?”
A shuffling sound came from within, furtive and quick... and then a heavy, waiting silence. “Joe? Come, come. Open the door, will you? Surely you know there is nothing to fear.”
Nothing, not a breath, not a whisper of sound was heard by way of reply. Curiously, the door was unbarred, allowing him to simply walk in.
A tallow lamp burned on a small rough-hewn table, casting its smelly light on the dingy little room and its meager contents. A few rusted traps hung on a square-headed nail by the hearth, along with a bearskin coat awaiting the chill of the coming winter. On the mantel was a strange collection of keepsakes: a tortoiseshell rattle, the skin of a black snake, and a handful of smooth, round stones.
Whiskey Joe was nowhere to be seen.
Navarre searched the room, tearing the furs from the pallet in the comer, ripping open the straw tick, scattering its contents.
No ring. No Joe. And Abe McFarland had come to loom in the doorway, like some great, hulking bird of prey, waiting and watching for him to falter, for the chance to pick his bones.
“Damn him! Damn him!” Navarre shouted, sweeping the keepsakes from the mantel, scattering the stones, crushing the tortoiseshell rattle underfoot. “It is not here! It is not here!”
“You sure you know where Lil Sister is?” Abe said doggedly.
“Imbecile!” Navarre shouted. “Get out!”
Hoof beats pounded along the south road. Navarre waited for the traveler to pass by, and cursed when the animal slowed just outside. “The light, the light! Douse the light! We cannot risk being found here, the two of us together! Mother of God, what else can go wrong this night?”
As he blew out the lamp’s flame, Abe shifted his bulk to the left side of the doorway; Navarre pressed himself against the wall on the right. Footsteps crossed the portico. The intruder paused, possibly surveying the door, which hung askew, barely supported by its last remaining hinge. Then he stepped cautiously inside, and Abe loomed up behind him.
Jackson sensed that something wasn’t right the moment he set foot on the portico of Whiskey Joe’s cabin. He had seen the lights from the road, lights that someone extinguished as he approached, and unless he was mistaken, that someone was not Whiskey Joe. Against his better judgment, he stepped into the darkened room. The taint of smoke and tallow hung heavily in the air, along with something else, something sweet and noxious and familiar at once.
Bear fat... and the rank sweat of someone who hadn’t bathed in weeks.
A frisson of alarm surged through Jackson. At the same time, he clawed for his pistols, and was roughly seized from behind and hauled off his feet.
It was like being caught in the jaws of an enormous vise. His assailant had him around the ribs, and was slowly squeezing the breath from his body. With his arms pinned at his sides, Jackson’s struggles were ineffectual. He tried to break the man’s hold, felt the blood gather in his face and throat until he thought his head would explode, heard the drone of a million bees swirling as oblivion rushed up to claim him, and he went limp in Abe McFarland’s arms.
Abe released his hold, flexing his arms as his victim slumped to the floor. “You want to hit him with your fancy little stick, Navarre, or should I pop his ribs for him?”
“There is no need for that,” Navarre replied, as he bent over the shadowed form. The unfortunate fellow had fallen half in, half out of the doorway. It was too dark to ascertain the man’s identity. Yet, by pressing a finger to his throat, he readily determined that his heart was still beating. “We’ll leave him to his fate. I congratulate you on a job well done. Perhaps you can be useful to my cause, after all. Now, be a good fellow and go fetch the horses.”
As Abe ambled off, Navarre could not resist a parting word of advice for the crumpled figure. “How fortunate for you that I find no fun in pointless murder. Out of the sheer goodness of my heart, I spare your wretched life,” he said, “and leave you with this: there are some things, like this part of town, for instance, that are far better left alone.”
At that same instant, a little distance to the north, a lone traveler trotted along on the back of a jet black mare. The moon, hidden by a cloudy sky, shed precious little light over the countryside south of town. The shadows loomed ominous and black as pitch on both sides of the lightless track, and it took every ounce of fortitude Reagan possessed not to turn the mare around and fly back to the welcoming warmth and relative safety of Belle Riviere.
As a child she had hated and feared the darkness. Aware of her irrational fear, playing upon it in ruthless brotherly fashion, the twins had locked her in the root cellar late one moonless evening. Trapped in the dank blackness, the earthy smell redolent of the grave filling her lungs, she’d been forced to listen to the evening closing in all around her. The stirrings of the nocturnal forest creatures in the underbrush had raised the gooseflesh on her arms and prickled the fine hairs at her nape. Two hours had passed from the time Reagan was missed to the time Luther forced a confession from the miscreants who’d imprisoned her... without a doubt the longest hours of her life. In due course, her mother had come with lantern to rescue her. Yet she’d never quite forgotten how alone and how frightened she’d felt trapped there in the darkness.
Much like she did now.
Her escape had been successful. She’d made a clean break, and would be safely on the eastern shore of the
Mississippi and hell-bent for Kentucky before Jackson ever realized she was gone. If she traveled hard, she would reach the Ohio River within a day or two and be home in a week, maybe two, depending upon the weather and the condition of the roads.
The countryside between Saint Louis and Bloodroot still remained largely unsettled, and decent accommodations would be hard to find. She would be spending countless hours waiting out the darkness, listening to the night sounds, feeling frightened and alone... and this time no one would be coming to rescue her.
The mare pricked her ears and whickered low, dragging Reagan from her musings. Much to her surprise another animal, startlingly close at hand, whickered back. A crashing of the underbrush sent Josephine hurtling into the tall grass in the opposite direction. Left alone to her fate, Reagan clawed for the pistol in her pocket, and as she leveled it, a great, dark beast of a horse, his flanks slick with sweat and his reins hanging slack, stepped into the road.
Euripides.
Reagan’s thundering heart sank as she hauled on the reins, bringing her mount to a stop. She’d been found out, her plan to escape him thwarted, and any moment now he would step from the shadows, a triumphant look on his handsome face.
Yet as Reagan nervously sat her mount, nothing happened. There was no Jackson, no one to stop her progress down the darkened road except for the quivering stallion and the niggling insistence deep in the pit of her belly that something wasn’t right.
“Damn it all, Jackson, show yourself this instant!” Reagan cried to the night-shrouded countryside, thinking that her choice of unladylike language would goad him into appearing as nothing else could. “This ain’t no time for games!”
The words shot out over the water, resounding off the tree-lined shore, flinging their way back to smite her hard... and then, a highly charged silence.
His reckless bent had landed him smack in the midst of some sort of trouble. She knew it as well as she knew her own name. She just wasn’t sure what to do about it.
Glancing around, Reagan scanned the roadside ahead and behind. Yet she could detect no lifeless form lying in the ditch, a fact that eased her mind not a single whit. She tried to think what to do, tried to decide if she should search or return to town and seek some help, and that was when she heard it: a low murmur, a man’s voice, with the same deep resonance, the same inflection as Jackson’s, coming from the south. In the near distance, she spied a small black square, the roof of which was outlined against the lighter sky.
Reagan’s heart warred against her head in that moment. He certainly sounded hale enough, capable of tending to his business without her assistance. She should leave, she knew. There was still a chance—despite his presence—that she could skirt Euripides and slip by unchallenged. Her heart, however, was more reluctant, more foolish than its counterpart, and argued staunchly that to ascertain that all was truly well was the only decent, Christian thing to do. “A fleeting glimpse, no more,” she promised the mare. “And from a distance.”
Gathering her courage, she dismounted and, taking Euripides’ reins, tied both mounts to a cottonwood well away from the roadside. Then she circled around, approaching the building from the rear.
It was a dwelling of the meanest sort, with wide cracks visible between the clapboard siding, and a stone chimney that was leaning and askew against the sky. Only a thread of smoke rose from the chimney. There was no light at all within. Reagan pressed her eye to an unchinked crack and, seeing only blackness, continued on, stealthily making her way to the comer of the structure, where a large rhododendron blocked the view of the sagging portico.
Carefully parting the branches, she peered through the crack provided, and softly gasped.
It had not been Jackson’s voice she had heard, but his uncle’s. He’d been bending over the lifeless body at his feet, but at her soft intake of breath he straightened, peering directly at her. For one brief second their eyes met, and a shock went through Reagan at the cold ruthlessness in his gaze. Then a hand clamped over her mouth, and she was dragged slowly back... back into the safety of the shadows, and away.
Chapter Fifteen
Impulse told Reagan to scream, yet the strange notion that Navarre Broussard posed a greater threat than whoever it was that held a hand clamped over her mouth kept her from it. In the next instant she turned her head and stared into the bleary eyes of an ancient Indian. Putting a finger to his lips, he moved aside a wide plank at the corner of the cabin, indicating that she enter the gaping black hole.
Reagan hesitated, yet in the end, Navarre’s smooth voice issuing from the side of the cabin, and coming closer, proved the deciding factor. “You may as well show yourself. I know that you are here.”
It was incentive enough for Reagan, who scurried through the opening. A heartbeat later the plank swung noiselessly into place. “Come, come, boy,” Navarre called to the night at large. “I assure you there is no need to be frightened. Boy? Boy! Filthy gutter trash! It would not be wise to test my patience!” He was standing just beyond the loose plank, so close that Reagan could have swung the board aside and touched him, and the fury and frustration in his voice were unmistakable.
“Boy!” he shouted, his voice echoing through the night, so loud, so fierce, that it rode over and above the soft, unintelligible curse that issued from just inside the cabin doorway.
Careful not to make a sound, Reagan crept toward the long, dark shape lying in the doorway. It couldn’t be, she thought in stunned disbelief, it simply could not be.
But it was. Jackson.
He lay sprawled half-in, half-out of the doorway, too large to drag very far unassisted, not conscious enough to know that a very real threat lurked just outside.
Her heart in her throat, Reagan braced herself against his shoulder, levering hard. “Roll, damn you!” she whispered harshly.
“Kaintuck,” he said groggily, “cher, is that you? The bed is cold. I miss your warmth. Come, lie with me again.”
“Ssshhh! Onto your side, quickly! The villain who laid you low is just outside. I must close and bar the door, and you’re in the way.” She pushed and tugged at him while he lapsed in and out of consciousness, and finally succeeded in moving him just enough to close the door.
As she slipped the bar into place, someone struck the door hard from the outside, a sturdy blow that caused the panel to shudder and creak. “Insolent whelp! Do you think that weathered piece of kindling can hold me at bay for long? I’ll kick it in, by God, and drag you out by the ears!”
Crouched beside an unconscious Jackson, Reagan trained the pistol in the general direction of the feeble portal, and thumbed the lock into the firing position.
Then came the tread of a heavy foot on the portico, and a voice that chilled Reagan’s marrow sounded just outside. “What game is this you play, Navarre?”
“No game,” Navarre replied. “We’ve been compromised. I found a boy watching from the bushes, and when I called to him, he barricaded himself and that damnable interloper in the Indian’s cabin.”
Reagan knew a moment of absolute terror. That rumbling voice was one she still heard in her nightmares, and she would have recognized it anywhere.
Abe McFarland and Navarre Broussard.
It was a match made in the blackest pit of hell, and it made no earthly sense. Laboring under a crippling fear, her breath coming fast and shallow, and her heart beating so violently she feared it would leap from her chest, it took every ounce of determination she could summon just to concentrate on what was being said. “It would not take but half a kick to break it in,” Abe told Navarre.
“Did you not hear that click?” Navarre demanded. Then he chuckled darkly. “No, I don’t suppose you did. Like a bull moose in the throes of rut, you were too intent upon the tugging of your heartstrings to notice anything. Go on, then, and kick it in, while I stand aside and watch the outcome. And when the lad cowering behind it drills you with a pistol ball, I’ll dump what’s left of you in the Mississippi.”
T
he groaning protest of the floorboards told Reagan that Abe had left the portico. But in a moment he was back. “Are you mad?” Navarre said. “This is no time for a bellyful of whiskey!”
“This here ain’t for drinkin’,” Abe replied with his typical calm. “It’s for smokin’.”
With a deepening sense of dread, Reagan listened to the soft splash of liquid dousing dry wood, followed by the unmistakable click of metal against stone.
Oh, God. He was firing the cabin. Unable to cajole or intimidate her into coming out, he was attempting to smoke her out.
A strange glow illuminated the cracks on both sides of the building, while threads of acrid wood smoke seeped slowly through the cracks in the cabin wall.
A cold panic congealing in her belly, Reagan spun toward the loose board in the rear wall, where the bright yellow of sprouting flame shone clearly through the cracks.
Abe had set fire to three sides of the building. The door, outside of which he and Navarre waited, was the only exit remaining, and she would rather die than to walk through it, knowing what awaited her on the other side.
From outside, Navarre’s voice came. “You have made your choice, but there is no need to die with it.”
Smoke poured through the unchinked cracks, rolling in noxious waves over the rough plank floor, stinging Reagan’s eyes, nose, and throat, making each breath sheer torment.
Beside her, Jackson stirred once more, groaning low in his throat. He coughed, then groaned, raising a hand to his head. “Merciful God, what is that smell?”
“Smoke,” Reagan said with a gasp. “Abe McFarland’s fired the cabin. We’ve got to get out of here, right now. Can you move?”
“Don’t be silly,” he said. “Of course I can move.” He made to sit up, and promptly passed out again.
Grasping his shoulders, Reagan shook him hard, tears coursing down her cheeks in a scalding stream. “Wake up, damn it! This ain’t no time to take a nap!”
Bride of the Shining Mountains (The St. Claire Men) Page 24
