Firebrand's Woman

by Vanessa Royall

  “Woman’s a fine looker, Ginral. Says she comes from Georgia, originally.”

  “What was their story? About the raid against them?”

  These were things Jackson had to know, as commandant of the Tennessee Militia. If you rode off on a mission of retaliation possessed of half-baked facts, you might stir up more trouble than you bargained for. There was always enough trouble to go around as it was.

  “Not too exciting. They had ’em a wagon train, coming in toward my town…”

  Jackson was beginning to note the man’s constant proprietary references.

  “…an’ they were attacked by a bunch of braves from old Four Bears’ village. Ambush. Everybody but them two were wiped out.”

  Harris grunted on, telling how bad the attack had been, mentioning again, with a sly leer, how good-looking that Georgia girl was who’d come over the mountains with Jason Randolph. But Jackson was thinking back twenty years to a savage moment at dawn, on the banks of the river by the white falls of Roaring Gorge. In a sense he had been living on borrowed time ever since that day.

  “What do you hear of old Four Bears?” Jackson demanded.

  “He’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “Yup, he croaked, all right.”

  Andrew Jackson felt an odd tug somewhere down in his heart. The man who had spared his life all those years ago no longer breathed the living air. He felt as if he’d lost a strange kind of friend, or brother. No, that was ridiculous. Four Bears was—had been—like all the rest of them. A murderous savage.

  “Where’d you learn this?” he asked Harris.

  “Randolph told me.”

  “Well, then I guess he must have had time to take a little break during that ambush and sit down and palaver with one of the braves. How’d he know?”

  A dull gleam showed far back in Harris’s eyes. “He an’ the wench tell me they got captured and taken to the village. Heard about Four Bears while they was there. They managed to get away. That grizzled old featherhead is dead, all right.”

  “Got them a new chief yet?”

  Harris took a drink, leaned way back, and sort of grinned.

  “That’s why I come to see you, sir. Now’s the time to go back in those mountains and wipe ’em out. Man, woman, and child. Now’s the time. Every last godforsaken one of the miserable throat-slitting bastards.”

  “Sounds like you mean it,” Jackson commented, watching the man closely.

  “Their new chief is a buck called Firebrand, ’cause that’s what he does when he comes to a white settlement. Puts the torch to it. Every time. Near lost half our settlement last time him and his shit-smelling red devils came around.”

  Jackson saw that Harris did not quite meet his eyes while rendering this enraged dissertation. Might mean nothing at all—some found it pretty hard to look direct into the hard hawk eyes of Old Hickory. Might also mean the man was lying, or not telling every last little inch of the truth.

  “When did this Firebrand get to be the new chief?”

  “Randolph said only a day or so ago. Let’s see, took him an’ the girl a day an’ a half to come through the pass—would have been, let’s see…”

  “An’ when was the raid that hit the wagon train?”

  “Would have been…” Harris calculated, “four, five days ago.”

  “So,” Jackson observed, “the raid was between Four Bears’ demise an’ the choosing of the new chief.”

  “So what?” Harris said.

  “It’s important. Might have been unauthorized. Just some jumpy braves going out on their own. Not that that’s in any way excusable, but I just want to know the facts.”

  He felt his intuition throb and take over. Something was not quite right about this whole business.

  “Nothing might have happened, did it, to stir up them braves? Any provocation you can think of?”

  “No, sir, none at all!” declared Rupert Harris, staring Jackson straight in the eye—just a little too straight and a little too long.

  Jackson sipped his drink, and wondered.

  “So I just come up to suggest now’s the time to wipe the bastards out, good and all.”

  “Well, Mr. Harris, I will certainly take that under advisement with my commanders, an’ one of these times I’ll ride on down to Harrisville and pay a call.”

  “That’d be great, Ginral,” Harris oozed, although Jackson could see he was disappointed not to have won a decision for immediate battle with the Chickasaw. But no rank frontiersman debated military strategy with Old Hickory, nosiree, or leastways not directly to his face while swilling his liquor on the verandah of the Hermitage. Harris was crude, but he wasn’t dumb. There’s always another day, and more’n one way to skin a cat.

  Talk turned to the national picture, and Harris allowed that Jackson would pretty soon be moving to Washington.

  “Maybe. Maybe. An’ I’ll tell you one thing. When we westerners finally do grab the big prize—an’ we will—I’m going to throw the biggest, wildest, damn end-and-out funnest party Washington, D.C., has ever seen.”

  “I’ll be there, Ginral. An’ you can count on that!”

  “I’m sure I can. I’m sure I can,” responded Jackson, watching Harris polish off another mint julep. The man looked equipped to do everything to excess.

  Rupert Harris spent the night in the Hermitage, sated with a huge dinner of roast beef, baked potatoes, corn bread and molasses, wild squash, and raspberries and cream. For entertainment there was the flogging of Floyd, which Harris enjoyed mightily, until the fainthearted darkie passed out on the eighteenth stroke, leaving eighty-two undelivered.

  “Oh, hell,” said Jackson, addressing Rufus, who stood there disconsolately, holding the bloody whip. He seemed embarrassed by Floyd’s lack of endurance. “Cut off his ear an’ lock him up again. Put him to cutting firewood in the morning. Tell him I’ll expect a full cord by nightfall, or he’ll get the rest of the lashes.”

  Walking back to the house, Harris observed: “Kind of gentle on the nigger, weren’t you?”

  “He’s better off working than dead.”

  Harris thought that over. “Right there, Ginral. Right you are.” Then, as an afterthought, “Too damn bad we can’t make slaves of the red devils.”

  “They’re not the type.”

  “I’m trying it out, though. Got me an Indian kid back home in my village. He’s showin’ some promise as a house boy. When properly encouraged, that is. It’s an experiment of mine, sort of.”

  “I see,” said Jackson, who studied Harris out of the corner of his eye. A tough, brutal man, this one. He could be a big help here in the West, or he could bring disaster. You never could tell.

  “Darling,” Rachel said after Harris had ridden off the next morning, “I hate to say it but I didn’t care for that man.”

  “I know what you mean,” Jackson said. “But the man’s determined to own a big chunk of Tennessee, and it’ll be mighty dangerous for anybody who gets in his way.”

  Chapter V

  Delia and Jason had stumbled down out of the mountains and entered Harrisville, hungry and in tatters. As they approached the town, Delia’s fear grew by the moment. Rupert Harris, she knew, was a barbarian who abducted helpless children. And how often had she heard tales of the great threat posed to the Chickasaw by the very existence of Harrisville? Then, on a crude trail leading through the forest toward the village, she had seen nailed to a tree a poster offering money for the capture of “the murderous Indian, Firebrand, dead or alive.” At the bottom was the name Rupert Harris.

  “I am afraid,” she admitted.

  “Do not worry. Do not think about it,” Jason had replied. “I’ll take care of you.”

  She had not known what to expect of the village. She had not been out of her mountain home since Four Bears had carried her into it, so many years before. So when she glimpsed it for the first time, Delia was amazed. This was a war camp, a base of terror and bloodshed? This was Harrisville, the cause of
so much worry and grief upon the part of the preoccupied Chickasaw braves?

  “Why, it looks so quiet and peaceful!” she exclaimed, almost relieved.

  “It is that,” Jason smiled. “But remember, just as was true in your village, many things go on beneath the surface, and a wise person listens and waits.”

  His remark, meant to soothe her, served only to increase her distress. Was she •wise enough to know these subterranean things? Among her own people she had failed miserably and been cast out. If she failed here, or betrayed her origins, would they kill her?

  On the trek through the mountains toward Harrisville, she had told Jason Randolph of her origins, and of the battle of Talking Rock. Indeed, as refugees will do, they had shared aspects of their lives with each other. But she had not told him that it was Andrew Jackson who had killed her parents. That he must not know, because Jason Randolph admired the general, and because—someday, somewhere—Gyva meant to kill the man. Jackson would pay with his life for the lives he had taken.

  “When we meet the villagers,” Jason was telling her, “they will want to know about us. I would advise you to stick as close to the facts of your life as you can. You are a native of Talking Rock, Georgia. Your parents were killed in a raid. Now you have come here to make a new life. All those things are true, and they will have a true sound when you tell them.”

  “But…but what about…?”

  “Do not hesitate. Tell me.”

  “But what about my eyes, my hair?”

  “They are beautiful. What about them?”

  “But surely they shall give me away, and brand me Indian before the white people.”

  “I think not. It was, perhaps, your fair complexion that caused you difficulties with the petty and the envious among your tribe. But here it will be your fine skin that marks you as a white woman. And a lovely white woman at that.”

  He looked at her in that way he had. She glanced away. It was not difficult at all to know when a man was falling in love with you. It did not matter to which race he belonged.

  And so they walked into the village. What strange dwellings were there! Some were made of wood, but where did trees grow that were flat and long? And the houses made of stone had every stone the same, rectangles stacked one upon the other, up to a roofing of steeply slanting wooden slabs! How were these mysteries accomplished? Where were such trees, such stones found? Then a long, terrible shrieking pierced the air, and she pressed against Jason in fear.

  “What is it?” he asked, seeing her alarm.

  “Someone is dying!”

  He actually laughed. “I do not think so,” he said.

  Fighting panic, she looked about the village. She could not see a soul.

  Again, that long-drawn-out horrible sound.

  “They are all dying!” she maintained, thinking of some disaster that had perhaps come upon this village. She was not especially sorry about the thought.

  But Jason just laughed again. “They are probably down by the river. What you hear is the work of a sawmill.”

  She repeated the word, wonderingly.

  “Let us go. It is as good a time as any. They will be very busy, and they will not stop their work long for us.”

  He led her through the village, which consisted of a long, dusty street, on either side of which were about ten or twelve of the strange wood and stone structures, none of them very large, but of many shapes, with lean-to additions on some of them, and on one an odd protrusion that Jason called a porch: These buildings were of great interest to Delia, but none astounded her as much as a spare wooden frame with horses living in it! She exclaimed about this bizarre thing in such incredulous tones that Jason laughed, explaining that it was called a stable, to keep horses, which were valuable, out of the weather, sheltered and fed so that they would be fit for riding or work in the fields. Delia accepted this, yet it seemed strange to her, as if the white jackals in some way worshiped animals, to house them as they did themselves.

  Then she caught Jason studying her.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “You know very little of our ways?”

  “I have been in the village of my people since I was a tiny child.”

  He frowned, worried. She knew why. All of the simple, daily things in the life of white men were unknown to her. How could she hope to pretend to be a refined white lady when the most ordinary things were intricate mysteries to her?

  “We will do one thing at a time,” he said, reassuring her. “I shall speak for you as often as I can.”

  The trail down to the river was not difficult to find, being well marked by horses, wagon treads, and the deep gouges of logs that had been dragged to the mill.

  Once more the terrible shriek arose. Jason and Delia came out of the trees along the river bank and into a clearing. Now she saw how the terrible noise was made! A great wheel, tall as five men, was turned by the flow of the river. By so doing, it turned also an axle attached to it, at the other end of which was a thin, silvery, jagged-tipped wheel, into which men—and women, too—were pushing a great log. The jagged tips of the spinning silver wheel ripped apart the logs into flat planes of wood such as Delia had seen on the houses in the village, and at the same time evoked from the wood that unearthly rending shriek. When the log had been pushed all the way through the ripping wheel—a saw, Jason called it—the direction was reversed, and another flat plane of wood was torn away from the log, until the log itself ceased to be. In a pit not fat from the sawmill, Delia saw blocklike wooden forms being stuffed full of mud and straw by more women and children. “Bricks,” said Jason, pronouncing it distinctly so that she would remember. “Bricks,” she repeated, and recognized them as the odd stones forming some of the houses.

  Say what one would about these white jackals, they did indeed perform some interesting skills!

  Then the two of them were seen by the people. A last length of lumber fell from the shrinking log. The axle was disengaged from the saw and silence descended for a moment, followed by a burst of babbling as everyone—men, women, children—rushed up to greet the newcomers.

  The one who spoke first was a gigantic man with a great red beard. Delia subdued the trembling that momentarily threatened to dominate her. It was the man who had kidnapped Bright Badger!

  “Hey, strangers,” he said, in a suspicious but not altogether unfriendly voice, squinting at them against the sun. “What can we do for yuh?” He was the biggest man Delia had ever seen, not just in height but in bulk, too. None of it was fat, either. His shoulders measured at least two axe handles in width, and a massive torso tapered to a hard, rippling gut. To think that Torch had grappled with this man! But Delia looked him straight in the eye and did not flinch-not even when his eyes bored into her own, then dropped to follow the curves of her body. His eyes were bright with intelligence, she noted; but they also glittered with cunning, and arrogance, and appetite.

  “What’s your handle, man?” he asked, turning toward Jason.

  Jason gave his name and began to explain what had happened.

  “Randolph! Sure. Been expectin’ yuh. Where’s your party? Up there in town? We can use the new men, clear a lot more land—”

  “No, wait,” Jason said. And then he told of the raid, how he and Delia were the only survivors.

  Everyone quieted.

  “Damn!” muttered some of the men.

  “Those foul redskins,” Rupert Harris cursed. “We’ll settle with them for good one of these days.” He eyed Delia watchfully, and there was no doubt he desired her beauty, whether or not he suspected her of Indian blood. “Your wife?” he asked Jason pointedly.

  For an instant she wished that he would say yes-it seemed to afford added protection. But he had read the situation well and, as promised, devised a solution to increase her safety. “No, the daughter of a friend,” he said. “I promised to look after her when he was killed in the raid.”

  Even Rupert Harris seemed to accept this, at least for the moment, th
ough he gave Delia another long glance, as if he might have seen her before, as if the sight of her reminded him of something or someone.

  “Well,” he grunted, “you’re safe, an’ the important thing is you’re here. Got to clear a lot more land around here, before we’ll have plantations big enough to support a crop of slaves to clear more of it for us.”

  Slaves, thought Delia, remembering the white man’s penchant for putting human beings into servitude.

  “But don’t worry. Plenty of land out there for us all. Someday Harrisville will be the biggest, richest center of life in all Tennessee!”

  His people nodded and exclaimed in agreement. Clearly Rupert Harris had the strength and vigor to encourage their dreams.

  But the land, Delia reflected, belongs to my people!

  Harris went on to explain that for the time being, due to the constant Indian threat, everyone lived in the village. There were as yet no individual farms. Men and women went out to clear and plant land during the day, but in the evening returned to the safety of numbers. “A couple of days a week,” he added, “we do community work—like lumbering, here, or grinding flour—because that takes a lot of help. We got several more logs to split now ‘fore nightfall, but then we’ll break off an’ get you and the lady”—his eyes once again searched Delia—“situated and on track for the future.”

  “Let me give you a hand here with those logs,” offered Jason—a shrewd suggestion, honestly advanced, which immediately won for him the esteem of the people.

  “I can work, too,” Delia said.

  “Come now,” Harris demurred. “You’ve had a hell of a trek through the woods. There’s no need.”

  “No, we belong here now,” Jason insisted. “Just a drink of coffee or something and—” He stripped off his jacket and shirt, preparing to go to work.

  The citizens of Harrisville let out a gasp of horror. They saw the great wound where the strip of flesh had been ripped from his abdomen.