GOLD RUSH DREAM

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  Gold Rush Dream

  by

  Billie Sue Mosiman

  Copyright 2010 Billie Sue Mosiman

  Originally published under the pseudonym Naomi Stahl by Five Star Press.

  This book is available in print under Naomi Stahl at most online retailers.

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  BILLIE SUE MOSIMAN has other e-books available including BANISHED, WIDOW, BAD TRIP SOUTH, LEGIONS OF THE DARK, RISE OF THE LEGEND, HUNTER OF THE DEAD, UNIDENTIFIED, WIREMAN, SCROLLS OF THE DEAD, HORROR TALES, HORROR TALES 2, LIFE NEAR THE BONE, ANGELIQUE, and FROM A HIGH WINDOW.

  CHAPTER ONE

  March in the East Texas piney woods was hot as a nail head pounded by a ten-pound sledgehammer. It was barely spring, but the sun didn’t know it. It was going to be a scorcher summer.

  Rose Donahue, at seventeen years old, didn’t feel the heat as much as her mother, who now stood over the wooden table in the center of the cabin, sweat pouring from her as she worked bread dough for supper. Rose rarely sweated, though she worked hard. She felt the heat like a warm hand lying on the back of her neck where her up-swept red Irish hair kept slipping from pins. She couldn’t stop thinking about going down to the creek for a dip. She’d let down her long hair and wash it, luxuriating in the cool water as it dripped deliciously down her back in the sun.

  She’d broach the subject of the swim with her mother after the chores were done. The creek bottom lay at the slope of the hill from their two-room cabin and was shaded by burly pines and a tangle of creepers. Even her mother didn’t know what kind of vines they were, but they were tough and thick, draping from one tree to another, like green lace. East Texas was so much wilderness, nothing like the horribly crowded city in New York where they’d landed from Ireland. And this land was theirs, homesteaded and belonging to them forever. It was a dream come true for her father, who had never owned even a speck of dirt farm in his homeland. He had worked in a coal mine, his lungs blackening year by year until the famine came and forced so many of them to flee their homeland.

  Outside the open windows, with the morning sun just beginning to beat down hard, she could hear her father’s voice yelling, “Haw!” at their mule, Gad. Gad was stubborn, Father said, the old cuss didn’t really like to work pulling the plow. Didn’t like to do anything but rub his fat behind on the corral boards.

  Rose was smiling at the recollection of her father’s words when she heard the scream.

  The dress she had been wringing out in the black iron wash pot on the floor dropped from her hands and she looked in fear at her mother.

  “Raid, it’s a raid. Indians!” There was a wild look in her mother’s eyes, wild and horrified. After a moment’s hesitation, her mother sprinted for the corner of the room where the shotgun was propped. Flour flew from her like a drift of snow.

  Rose stood from the washtub, hands dripping suds from homemade lye soap. She ran for the open door, whether to close it or to rush out to see about her father she didn’t know. Before she reached the door, she was jerked from behind. Her arms flew out and she let out a cry of desperation.

  “No, Rose! Close the door, your father has a gun with him. Close the shutters, quick, quick!”

  Now they could hear the quiet morning split with war cries and knew for certain a party of war braves gathered outside the cabin. Several other settlers had been slaughtered in the past months, but until now the Donahues hadn’t seen one Indian around their place. They had begun to believe their land was a magical island in the center of the piney woods, hidden from invaders.

  Not now. It was no island, nor was it magically protected. Rose helped her mother bar the door and slam close the wooden shutters. But what about her father, she wondered in panic? He’d be out there alone now.

  Rose was handed a handgun, a long barreled revolver her father had traded for in New York. She’d shot it, practicing by shooting at a small square of red cloth nailed to a tree at the edge of the clearing around the house. Yet now, with the gun in her hand and war yells beginning to surround the small cabin, and her father’s fate unknown, Rose lost rational thought. She stood near one of the two windows, her mother at the other, shotgun poked through a crack. She stood immobile, the revolver hanging at her side. What was she supposed to do? Was she really going to have to point the gun at another human being? Oh God...

  “Rose! Aim and shoot. If you can’t hit a man, hit his horse.”

  Rose snapped out of her fugue and cracked the shutter, raising the gun in her hand. She felt the shutter snap back against her knuckle, struck by an arrow with flame coming from the flint arrowhead. She slapped at the flame, knocking the arrow loose from the wood, and then she got her first look at the raiding party. There had to be six of them, horses rearing and pawing the ground. The man in front of the party, long black hair braided and hanging over one shoulder, saw her and raised his bow to aim an arrow.

  Rose saw he wore a necklace of bear claws around his neck and his face was painted with streaks of red clay. She screamed at him, unable to resist her sudden rage, then ducked and shot off the revolver at the same time.

  Peeking over the sill, she saw she’d missed. Her father would have been disappointed in her. She had to do better than that! She had to stop this madness.

  The bear claw brave had swung his horse in time and avoided certain death.

  Now Rose could smell smoke and knew the roof must be on fire. She shot out the window wildly, the six-shooting, cartridge-fed revolver burning hot in her hand. She pressed her back to the wall, reloading, when she saw her mother coming toward her, overcome with fright. She trembled from head to toe. Her face was pale, splotched with red on the cheeks.

  “Get in the potato hole, the onion cellar,” she screamed, dragging her daughter from the window.

  Rose dropped the gun, tried to scramble for it, and found herself nearly hauled off her feet. “No, Mama, no, they’ll get in here, the house is on fire. No, Mama, no…”

  Rose’s mother kicked aside a chair and lifted the trap door in the floor. She pushed Rose down the earthen steps. “Rose, you stay down there, I don’t care what you hear up here. You understand? You stay. You don’t come out.”

  Bending, huddling, knees to chin in the small dugout where they stored winter potatoes and onions, Rose looked up at her mother and let the tears roll down her cheeks. The cabin was filled with smoke and her mother looked like a mad woman lost in a gray, foggy dream. “Mama…” Rose heard her own plaintive voice, small as a kitten, as the trap door came down hard and darkness fell with a finality that was like death.

  #

  Travis Caldwell saw the smoke in the distance and dropped his bear trap. There had been so many raids on the homesteaders this past year. He had not been close enough to help any of them, but he heard about the deaths and mutilations from other trappers when they passed through his territory.

  Now he knew what the smoke was, a cabin on fire, or the whole forest for all he knew, and there would be people dying there.

  Rushing to recover his trap, Travis mounted his horse and hung the massive trap from the horn on his saddle. He was just a half mile from his camp where he could leave the trap and drop the one bear hide he had lying across the back of his horse. If he hurried, he might be able to save someone at the fire. It looked to be no more than five miles away, on a wooded ridge south of w
here he hunted. Why these immigrants came into Texas and thought they could battle the elements, the land, the heat, and the Indians to make a home was beyond Travis. Not more than a third of them would survive.

  He, on the other hand, was a native of the area and kept on the move. Staying in one place was asking for attack. The Indians were angry, and they were deadly warriors. The homesteaders just had no idea what they were doing trying to brave the vast emptiness and danger of the Texas woods.

  Minutes later, pushing his horse across a shallow creek, hurrying it full out across an open field where he felt vulnerable, Travis pulled up sharp at his camp, dropped the trap on the ground, startling his supply donkey tied to a nearby tree. Hauling hard, he got the still-blood-wet bear hide off his horse, and turned in his mount on the horse to race for the ridge.

  #

  Travis sat on his horse in a stand of red oak and pines near the clearing where the homestead had been built. Ahead of him he could see the damage. Smoke still rose from the charred house remains. A clay brick fireplace chimney, blackened with soot, was canted at a particular angle, threatening to collapse. Beyond the burned cabin, he could see a corral where a bloody man lay on his belly, unmoving. His head was as red as a sunset. He’d been scalped, Travis knew. And he was dead, there was no doubt about it.

  All around the body were tracks. The war party had taken the stock, however many there had been. Probably a couple of milk cows, a goat or two, a horse. These homesteaders didn’t have much and it had taken everything they owned, begged, borrowed, and stole to get started on their own.

  For what, Travis wondered, shaking his head, feeling sadness creep into his mind like a panther. For a few acres they had to hack out of old pine growth so thick you couldn’t fell one without it falling into the stand. For isolation and danger and a mere pitiful living off the land. He shook his head. He would never understand it.

  That’s why he was a trapper, he reflected. And it had been good, so good, back when the beaver was as thick in the rocky bottom creeks as bees on a hive. Now the beaver was about all trapped out and Travis had taken to hunting bear and fox, a much more dangerous proposition—at least the bear was. Hadn’t he been mauled? Hadn’t he been lucky to get out of that fight alive?

  But trapping was still better than farming, that was a sure thing. He didn’t even like sleeping indoors, he was so used to the moon and stars over his head, and the call of the owl in his ears as he slept. Truth was, he wasn’t all that sociable and didn’t really like towns and people much. It seemed to him all they wanted to do in town was get drunk and find willing women to keep them warm at night. Their ambitions were no more understandable to him than that of the immigrant farmers.

  Just as Travis was about to turn his horse and head back to his own camp, he saw a movement from the corner of his eye. It was in the ashes, right in the middle of the burned square of timbers from the cabin.

  He thought he must be seeing things, for nothing could be moving in that horrible mess, and if it was, it was a charred black thing he did not want to see anyway. He backed up his horse on instinct, horror crawling up his back.

  Then he saw her. A girl, just a girl, soot-covered, hands to her face. She had come up from a square hole and now he saw the trap door that fell back as she rose up. She must have been hidden in the ground, saved from the fire and the raiders. She skittered forward, stopped and looked around, eyes wide. She never looked farther than the blackened spot where her home had stood, having no idea he sat on his horse in the tree shadow. Then suddenly she high-stepped over the hot coals and blackened timbers all the way to the edge and onto the dry dirt of what had once been the back yard.

  And he heard her. Keening, like a calf caught in barbed wire. Keening high and thin, the sound so eerie that Travis kicked his horse in the flanks to fly toward her. He had to stop that sound, stop it or go crazy, it was so awful, so awful, so…lost.

  He pulled his horse up short, dust kicking up around him to mingle with the columns of smoke. He leaped down, touching his horse under the jaw, an order for it to stay put.

  He hurried to the girl, who now was free of the burned debris of the cabin. She didn’t see him. He suspected she didn’t see anything. She stared ahead of her, hands hanging limply at her sides. Her face was so black with soot that he wasn’t sure she was a white girl. Except that her eyes were blue. Glistening with tears and blue as summer sky, blue as a robin’s egg he’d found as a kid down in South Texas.

  “Miss? Let me help you. Can you hear me, Miss?”

  She didn’t answer him, indeed did not seem to even hear him. He was invisible to her. He smelled something terrible, greasy, fried, sickening. The scent had a heavy thickness that made him want to gag. He knew if he scanned the burned cabin thoroughly, he’d find the body that was burned and filling the air with that terrible smell.

  He needed to get this girl away from here. He didn’t know where to take her. The nearest homestead was at least fifty miles distant. So he’d take her to his camp, feed her, clean her up. And see if she would talk to him about this loss. He couldn’t just leave her here this way.

  “Come on. Come with me, Miss. I’ll take you out of here.”

  “Rose,” she said softly, her gaze never moving toward him.

  “Is that your name?” He waited. “Miss, is your name Rose?”

  He guessed she wasn’t going to talk to him again. Rose was it. Rose was all she was going to say. Blue Rose came to his mind, but that was only because of her unusual eye color because he certainly had never heard of or seen a blue rose. There just couldn’t be such a thing.

  “All right, Rose, come on, climb up on my horse. I’ll take you out of here.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  She had said her name. She knew that. Rose. So he wouldn’t call her “Miss” again. Mainly she wanted him to shut up. She kept hearing her mother calling and she didn’t know where to find her. She remembered nothing but the darkness, smelling of dank earth and the acrid, eye-burning scent of onion. She remembered smoke slipping into her hiding place, making her cough and cover her nose and mouth with her skirt. Then there was a crackling sound, like sticks breaking, and they were right in her ears, right next to her brain, filling her with dread.

  When she emerged like from a cocoon, she didn’t understand what she saw. The cabin was gone. Mama was gone. The bread dough rising on the polished old planks of the table, gone. All of it, her whole life, vanished.

  That didn’t make any sense at all. She must have wandered off and gotten lost. Father told her that would happen, joking about her dreaming as she grew up. “Always dreaming when you should be paying attention,” he would say. “Watch where you step, Rose, before you trip.

  “Lift your head, girl, before you run into the wall.”

  His admonitions used to tire her, but she wished now he was nearby to tell her what to do. “Tell me to pay attention,” she mumbled, wishing to hear his voice answer her.

  She lifted her head and saw she sat on a horse behind a man in the saddle. He had the reins in one hand, and held both her hands clasped around his middle with his other hand. His belly was hard as a washboard and the hand holding her own was rough. She could smell this man through his homespun beige shirt. He didn’t smell unpleasant. Men didn’t smell bad to her, not her father after a day plowing, and not this man, who smelled a little like wood smoke and green saplings and the musk of wild animals.

  She stared at the back of his neck that was very brown below his shaggy dark hair and black felt hat. She turned her head to look around, wondering if he was taking her to her parents, and was surprised to see the woods crowding in. Shadows hunkered on the ground and darkness waited in the thick brush. She shivered, hugging even closer to the man in front of her.

  She remembered something else, something…ugly. An Indian---from what tribe she did not know. He had a bare chest, smooth and brown as a nut. A necklace made of bear claws and teeth hung threaded through a leather thong swung on his neck. War
paint decorated his face and tall feathers adorned his long black hair. He was going to…

  Going to kill her.

  She winced, pushing the memory way back, way way back, so far back in her mind that it didn’t even need a shut door to keep it safe.

  #

  Travis reached his camp and knew he had to break it and move on. He was too close to where the raiding party had burned down the homesteader’s cabin. They could even be here now, lurking in the bramble of bushes, waiting to take his scalp.

  He called halt to his horse and, reaching back, slid the girl off to the ground. She didn’t even bother to look at him. She was in a bad way, all right, and what was he going to do with her?

  He slid out of the saddle himself and began gathering his things. On the pack mule he tied bear hides, fox pelts, and a canvas bag holding his small supply of coffee, salt pork, and pots. He’d have to clean and tan his most recent prize bear hide when he got far away from here. It was imperative they put miles between them and the camp before dark.

  As he hurried, packing, he sneaked glances at the girl. She hadn’t moved an inch from where he’d lowered her to the ground. Shadow had settled on her downcast face and shoulders. She was still as dirty as a street urchin out of Abilene, but he saw now that her figure was comely. Her breasts swelled the front of her deep gray, pinstriped dress, and her bare arms, though covered with dirt and soot, were plump and rounded. He guessed her to be fourteen or fifteen years old, and a pretty thing.

  Not that he had the blamed time for thinking such idiotic thoughts, he counseled himself. He had to get them out of this place, and fast. He kicked dirt over his fire pit to disguise it, grabbed pine needles in bunches and placed them over the droppings of his pack donkey. These precautions wouldn’t trick a good scout, but it would pass beneath notice if an entire Indian party happened by. He got Dorry untied, led the donkey over to his horse, and remounted. He reached down for the girl’s hand, but she was just standing there, looking at the ground.