Daughter of the Sword

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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 dress 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—”