Shiloh

by Lori Benton

  “Neil wouldn’t have used this one to reach Lacey’s cabin,” Ian said, then added without conviction, “Maybe he found that last stretch along the ravine too treacherous in this rain, left the horse below . . . to come unhitched?”

  Mounted or afoot, Neil would have taken his medical supplies up to the old man’s cabin.

  “I will see. Wait here with the horses.” Before Ian could protest, Joseph was climbing nimbly up the ridge along the faint indentation that marked where deer had passed.

  Ian grabbed Seamus’s bridle before the horse could follow. He checked the gelding’s feet, finding the reason for that hitching stride lodged in the right forehoof. Seamus had picked up a stone. With his knife, Ian worked it free. “There ye go, old man.” He set hoof to earth and slid the knife back into its sheath, alongside his tomahawk.

  Minutes crept by. Rain fell noisily through leaves well gone toward scarlet and gold at that higher elevation. Thunder cracked. For the first time, lightning flashed, bluish, surprisingly bright in the brooding gray. His and Joseph’s mounts stood steady, but Seamus’s ears flattened.

  “Easy,” Ian soothed, as his own fears screamed. Gabriel . . . Catriona. Please, God Almighty, hurry. Hurry . . .

  At last he heard Joseph descending the ridge—sliding in soggy leaves, catching himself against trees, his caped form a glimpse through autumn foliage. When he was down onto the lower trail, breathing hard, he reached for Seamus’s reins as well as his own mount’s, hitching them together. “We must get the horses up there.”

  Ian balked. “Crane’s trail goes along this way.”

  “We will follow it—later.”

  Rain was fast obliterating it. “Why not now?”

  Joseph grabbed his arm, hard enough to command Ian’s full attention. “Because I have found my sister’s husband.”

  39

  The trap had caught Neil’s ankle, biting deep through boot leather and flesh. He lay on the ground, rain-soaked, white-faced—dead, or so Ian thought for a gutted moment.

  “He lives,” Joseph said.

  Before returning to Ian, he had tied Neil’s belt around his calf in a makeshift tourniquet, wrenched open the trap’s jaws and removed the foot, but hadn’t touched the mangled riding boot. Ian couldn’t bring himself to look twice at what the gaping leather revealed. Rather he looked at his neighbor’s face, still and sheened with rain.

  “We must get him onto his horse,” Joseph said, then eyed Seamus’s load. “No, mine. Tsigalili will know what to do?”

  Had Lily ever tended such a wound? Ian didn’t know. “She’d try. But we cannot leave off following Crane.”

  Neither could they abandon Neil.

  “We will not,” Joseph said. “I will take him to the women and come back to you.”

  Relief swelled, though a new fear pierced it. He had counted on Joseph if it came to a fight. Lightning flashed. Its tail of thunder boomed. Rain pelted down. Ian held the dun mare steady while Joseph gathered Neil MacGregor into his arms, hefting him onto the saddle, face against the horse’s mane. Neil roused with a cry as they eased his wounded leg over the horse’s rump.

  “We have ye,” Ian said as the man struggled to sit upright in the saddle, injured foot dangling, eyes dull with shock. “Joseph’s taking ye home. Lily’s there to aid ye. Just hang on.” To the horse. To life.

  The shock in Neil’s blue eyes gave way to bleak assessment. His gaze shifted to Joseph, steadying him from the other side while he slipped Neil’s sound foot into the stirrup. He blinked again at Ian, eyes dilating with dawning urgency. “Catriona . . . Gabriel. I saw them.”

  Ian grasped the hand that clutched weakly at the reins. “Where?”

  Neil motioned farther up the path, where, they now saw, it crossed the game trail they had been following below. “They passed . . . with Crane.”

  “Taking them to Lacey’s?”

  Neil nodded. “I never made it. Dinna ken whether Hector . . .”

  “I’ll see.” Dead or alive, innocent or in league with a devil—Ian would sort out Hector Lacey with the rest.

  Joseph swung onto Seamus and took his mare’s reins to lead. “What of Matthew?” he asked Neil. “Did he not see you?”

  Neil closed his eyes, grimacing. “Matthew? Where is he?”

  “I’ll find him too.” Ian gripped his neighbor’s hand, aware of his own shaking. He shared a look with Joseph.

  “I will return,” Willa’s brother said.

  Resolved to continue alone, Ian nodded. “Get him home. I’ll find them.”

  The rain had closed in, falling steadily. For a time they had all crammed into Willa MacGregor’s house, muddied around the edges and anxious for their missing ones and those gone to rescue them. Neil, too, out in that mess visiting the ailing. While Malcolm sat by the kitchen hearth reading his Bible, murmuring prayers, Naomi and Maggie fixed a dinner Seona knew she wouldn’t taste. Lem, Ally, and the boys finally went out to tend horses and check on Tuck, healing from his knife wound.

  Willa went to answer her baby’s cries, leaving Seona and Lily alone in Neil’s surgery. Lily had brought her simples box.

  “In case there’s need,” she had said as they gathered up things to keep themselves and Mandy occupied for however long they would be away from home. She was sorting through it now, though she had its contents memorized.

  Seona had held a teary Mandy, who hadn’t stopped asking for Gabriel until she dozed off, then put her down on Willa’s bed. With nothing now to do with her restless hands, her mouth took up the slack.

  “Mama, I cannot bear this waiting. I want Gabriel.” She wrapped her arms around that gaping emptiness below her ribs. “I need him.”

  Lily turned from her box, features pinched, her own need plain in her gaze. “Come here, girl-baby.”

  In her mama’s arms, Seona wept, fear choking her words. “I didn’t think it would be . . . like this.”

  Lily rubbed her back. “Ye didn’t think what would be?”

  “Being with Ian. Being free. Here. All of it. He promised, Mama.”

  Lily pulled away, holding her shoulders to better look at her. “What did he promise?”

  “To keep us safe. When he gave me this.” She wrung trembling hands, twisting the silver ring. I Am My Beloved’s.

  “Seona,” her mama said with a slow shake of her head. “Did ye think freedom from slavery meant freedom from every trouble?”

  “I don’t know. But I never would have come here if I’d thought it meant losing Gabriel.”

  “He’s not lost. Ian’s out there doing all he can to bring Gabriel home. Catriona too. So are Joseph and Matthew.”

  She knew that, and it ought to have reassured her, but this fear was beyond reason. “Even if we get him back—both of them—what’s next?”

  Lily didn’t answer that. Instead she asked, “Why d’ye think Ian made ye such an impossible promise?”

  Impossible. “I don’t know!”

  “I think ye do know.”

  Seona stared at the windowpanes streaked with rain. “Do I?”

  “Would Ian have made such a promise if he wasn’t desperate to see ye happy? To make up for all the hard things that happened to ye at Mountain Laurel?”

  Seona turned from the window, arms laced. “You’re saying it’s my fault he promised?”

  “No one’s at fault—save that Aram Crane causing grief. Just don’t hold Ian to a promise no man but one can keep. The one who’s also God.” Lily frowned as she said that last. “Have ye given up—?”

  From the front of the house a door banged open. Men’s voices spoke, a deep, urgent tangle, until one rose above the rest: “Tsigalili!”

  Her mama’s stare turned blank. “Joseph?”

  Seona’s heart nearly burst with hope, but Lily beat her to the surgery door. Filling the other end of the passage, coming at them fast, were Joseph and Ally, streaming rain, carrying between them an equally soaked Neil MacGregor.

  Willa came from somewhere in the h
ouse, baby in her arms. “Neil!”

  Joseph didn’t speak until they had Neil laid out on the surgery table, white as linen, dark hair plastered to his skull. He seemed uninjured . . . then Seona saw his foot. So did Willa. Ally backed out of the way as she rushed forward, handing a startled Josephine off to Seona. Lily was down at Neil’s boots, holding the gaping one open to better see the bloody mess within. Something—a belt—was cinched around the calf above it.

  Maggie came rushing from the kitchen. “I thought it was Catriona and Gabriel back. What’s happened?”

  Lily got the ruined boot off, rousing Neil to groan. From the doorway Maggie echoed the sound. Seona figured everyone crowded into the little surgery was thinking the same. Neil’s ankle looked like it had been chewed by a bear or . . .

  “A trap?” Seona blurted and would have covered her mouth had her hands been free of whimpering baby. She jiggled the child unthinkingly as Joseph gave them answer.

  “One of Crane’s.”

  Willa caressed her husband’s head. “How?”

  “We found him caught. Near the cabin of the man he was going to bring down from the hills. We think that is where your son is,” Joseph added, meeting Seona’s gaze. “And Ian’s sister, taken with him.”

  “Ian—did he come back with you?”

  “And Matthew?” Maggie asked from the doorway.

  “We have not found Matthew. Ian was heading up to Lacey’s cabin when I left. One of us had to bring him home,” Joseph said with a searching look at Lily, still examining the extent of Neil’s wound. “I will go back.”

  Seona bowed her head over Willa’s baby, restraining the scream wanting to come tearing out.

  “Seona . . .” Neil’s voice, but a thread, held them instantly riveted. “Crane had them bound . . . but whole.”

  “You saw them?” Seona stepped nearer.

  “Aye . . .”

  “But you . . . ,” Willa said, features nearly as pale as her husband’s. “How did this happen?”

  “On my way to Lacey,” Neil forced through teeth beginning to chatter. “Seamus . . . lame. I stopped to check . . . dismounted onto the trap.”

  He hadn’t reached Hector Lacey’s cabin. They hadn’t found Matthew. Ian was left to face that trap-setting, child-abducting, gold-hungry villain alone. Seona pressed back a sob as Willa laid a blanket over her husband’s upper body, leaving his legs exposed, then looked appealingly at Lily. “Is there anything you can do?”

  Her mama’s features were a mask of control as they all took in the ruin of Neil’s ankle. Seona saw bone amid the bleeding flesh. So did Maggie, who was nearly fainting against the doorpost. “Where’s Lem?” she asked weakly.

  “On the porch,” one of her brothers said in the passage behind her.

  “Take me to him. And, Lily . . .” Maggie looked at Seona’s mama, pleading. “I’ll be praying.”

  She left the surgery. Joseph started after her but paused before Seona, touching her shoulder briefly with a hand still rain-wet. But it was to Lily he looked. She was looking back in a way that startled Seona—the kind of speaking look she and Ian had sometimes shared.

  “You are certain?” Joseph asked.

  A nod from Seona’s mama drew joy across Joseph’s face, brighter than the lightning that briefly lit the surgery window. He was gone before the thunder rolled, and Lily took command. “I need one more pair of hands.”

  “You could have mine, if someone takes this baby,” Seona said, voice shaking as this new fear piled atop the others.

  Already deep into Neil’s medical supplies, Lily shook her head. “No, girl-baby. I need someone can give their all to this.”

  “Reckon that’s me.” Naomi had left the kitchen too and stood now in the surgery doorway, sturdy as an oak, holding a steaming kettle. “You’ll need this. Tell me what else to do.”

  Seona held Willa’s daughter close in trembling arms. “What do I do, Mama? I can’t do nothing.”

  Lily fixed her with a gaze that took her back to their broken conversation. “Pray, girl-baby. That’s what you need to be doing.”

  After Joseph rode down the mountain with Neil MacGregor, lost among the trees in a graying blur, Ian had led Ruaidh to where the game trail crossed the broader path. The rain had made a pudding of the trodden ground, but the need for tracking was past. He knew this climbing trail. There was no other shelter on that rain-swept mountainside save Lacey’s cabin, at its end, but while everything within him screamed to race forward, fear of triggering another trap and rendering himself helpless held him in check.

  Head bowed to the weather, he trudged on, leading his horse, rifle tucked beneath his cape. He left the leather ties of the lock cover loose. It was still in place over frizzen and pan, but the powder wouldn’t stay dry long in that downpour. If it was now.

  The path climbed steeply through hardwoods already in autumn array, the dark greens of pine and fir. Rock outcrops thrust through the earth, creating gaps in the forest shelter he crossed with care, watching for traps but also for Crane retracing his path. Having secured his prisoners, he would make for the farm. Unless he meant to wait out the storm.

  As he neared the creek that twisted out of the mountains through the ravine, Ian encountered runnels crossing the trail that hadn’t flowed in summer. All coursing downslope to spill into the creek, which he heard even before the trail steepened for its last climb along the ravine’s lip.

  At that point he hesitated. He and Joseph had led their horses along it back in summer. Not in such weather as this. He would go faster without Ruaidh.

  A stand of fir offered the only shelter. He hitched the roan among them as a faint flash lit the mountainside. Ruaidh flattened his ears. Ian counted seconds until thunder rumbled. A longer delay. Rain still fell with battering force, but he dared to hope the worst of the storm was passing as he left his dripping horse.

  The trail wound up, pocked with stones that broke from the saturated earth beneath his feet to go tumbling into empty air before striking the water below. Coming to a jut of rock where the view was unobstructed, he paused to look over the edge.

  The ravine’s face wasn’t sheer. It broke into levels where stunted trees had found purchase. Some thirty feet below, what had in summer been a clear, burbling creek edged by stony banks surged high and brown, filling the narrow ravine.

  The next stretch of trail hugged the forested slope. A mere six feet out, it fell away to frothing water. He was halfway across it when a crescent of earth at the trail’s outer edge sagged away, sheared off by its rain-soaked weight. Ian dropped his rifle as he fell to his knees, scrambling to keep from plunging over an edge two feet nearer than it had been. He clawed his way to the base of the slope, reaching back to snatch his rifle before it went tumbling.

  Heart banging, he sat in a patch of sodden ferns, staring at raw earth gaping as though a great mouth had torn away a bite. Then he took in the next few feet of trail he would have trodden had the earth not fallen away beneath him. A frisson of mingled alarm and relief shook through him.

  The snare was simple. A slender limb laid across the trail was its trigger. Ian traced its line to the base of the slope and found the rigging. Tied with scuppernong vine, it blended with the matted ferns and saplings growing thick on the steep slope—except where a pile of deadfall, held precariously in place by two upright posts, waited to come sweeping across the trail, and anyone on it, when those posts came free. All it would take to unleash the avalanche was a careless boot, or hoof, kicking aside that slender limb.

  He could spring the trap and leap to safety, was on his feet and seconds from doing so when he reconsidered. The weight of that deadfall crashing down might take out another chunk of trail, impeding Joseph’s approach. Instead he found a slender stick, drove it into the soft ground square in front of that triggering limb, then with chilled fingers untied his neckcloth and fastened that to the stick, spreading the ends out wide, the linen pale against the sodden earth.

  There coul
d be no missing that. He prayed it would do for a warning as he stepped carefully over the limb.

  Past the snare, the trail angled up through a stand of yellowed birches, then took a gradual bend away from the ravine, up into a narrow hollow. Ian proceeded with redoubled caution but discovered no further snares before the bottom edge of Hector Lacey’s corn patch came into view.

  The stalks still stood, brown and dripping, but Ian ducked low, not making straight for the cabin that squatted like a toad at the planting’s other end, at the base of a jumble of massive stones that formed a near-perfect arc. With the wooded crest of the mountain rising behind, draped in cloud, those stones rimmed the cabin like a fortress wall. An irregular one. Though Ian minded them vaguely from his previous visit, closer scrutiny showed the stones jutted in places where a man might climb. Or hide. Though slackening at last, the rain’s patter covered any sound there might have been from the cabin. Glimpses through the cornstalks revealed no movement.

  He wanted to rush the place, go barreling in, take down Crane, and rescue his son, his sister—old Lacey too, was he held captive. Again he checked the frantic impulse. What he needed was a better view. Higher ground.

  Ian crept along the field’s ragged edge and up into the trees, making for those rocks, moss-covered and tree-grown at their crowns. He was nearly among them when the clatter of falling stones froze him, hunkered in the shelter of a rotting stump.

  Cradling his muddy rifle across his knees, he eased the tomahawk from his belt, gripping its handle in a chilling clench. He had drawn back the weapon for a throw when a voice spoke, soft but alarmingly close.

  “Ian?”

  40

  Matthew MacGregor was soaked to the skin, having worn no cape against the rain when he took off from the schoolyard. Concealed within a stony crevice among the rocks behind the cabin, he and Ian hurled questions at each other, low and urgent.

  Were Gabriel and Catriona inside the cabin with Crane? The man’s horse was hitched in a lean-to behind the cabin, so they must be.