Lori Benton (20 page)

After cleaning Seamus’s hoof, MacNab shaped a fitting shoe. While the smith did his work in the yard, filling the air with the acrid smell of burning hoof, Neil ducked inside the smithy. At the drinking bucket kept inside the wide-open doors, he dipped a gourd to quench the thirst worked up on the walk into the settlement. He still had the gourd to his lips when the smith’s hammer stilled and Neil heard him say, “Och, aye. A moment, then, and I’ll see t’ the Colonel’s mares.”

Neil hadn’t heard any new arrivals over the hammering and had no
time to react before a figure stepped within, headed for the bucket Neil was drinking from. With his eyes already accustomed to the dim interior, Neil caught the blaze of red hair as the new arrival doffed his hat and scratched behind an ear, recognizing Aram Crane, Colonel Waring’s groom. The man caught sight of him next instant. He drew up short, as if he meant to duck back out without so much as an acknowledgment, then seemed to change his mind.

“MacGregor, isn’t it?” Crane tossed a glance at the yard and asked in some surprise, “That roan MacNab’s shoeing, is it yours?”

“That he is.”

“Where did you come by him?”

Neil explained how he’d lost the horse but kept the particulars of its finding vague. He raised the gourd, still dripping in his grasp. “Water?”

Crane hesitated, then came forward and took the dipper. He downed a swallow and hung the gourd on the bucket. “That’s a turn of luck, it showing up again.”

“I’m inclined to think it the hand of Providence.”

Crane’s mouth twisted. “Anyway, looks to be in fair condition. Guess you’ll be moving on now?”

Moving on. The very thing Neil had pondered with every step into town, though with less enthusiasm than he’d have thought would be the case. The shame of returning to Philadelphia in defeat was no longer an issue, thanks be to the Almighty and Joseph Tames-His-Horse. But that first flush of joy had abated; with the return of his horse and supplies, other decisions loomed.

Moving on.
Soon
, he thought.
But not quite yet
. Giving his wrist another week of rest wouldn’t come amiss. ’Twas throbbing with a vengeance after tending to the girl. Thought of saddling a horse each day, shifting gear to and fro, was enough to make him wince.

And then there was Willa. Now she had the children to tend as well as her fields, while the issue of her parents’ loyalties still hung over her uncertain
future. The likelihood of her carrying out the brave promise spoken to Elias Waring seemed slim, while she was tied by strings of necessity to hearth and field. Was there some way he could help her, before moving on?

But what of his own duties, his own promises? He couldn’t deny the call of pen and brush and plant press, of solitude and wilderness, but he felt a twinge of guilt to think of leaving now.

“Aye,” he said. “I suppose I must do. Soon enough.”

It struck him as odd that Waring’s groom should look relieved at his words.

“What is it exactly you’re doing out here, wandering about?”

“I’m sent by the American Philosophical Society to catalog—to create a field guide of sorts—the mountain flora north of the Mohawk River. I’d lost most of my equipment for the work along with the horse. But that’s all restored now.”

“The boy, Lem, he’s told me the tale of you falling from that boundary stone half a dozen times. I suppose by now you’re wishing it’d been just about anyone else come along to drag you home like a load of deer meat.” Crane finished with a significant look at Neil’s hairline, or where it would be if his hat wasn’t covering it.

Neil had revealed his scar at their first meeting at the mill, in an effort to show Crane he wasn’t the only one to have suffered during that raid, and that such blanketing hatred he seemed to hold for the entire race of red men was unwarranted. Perhaps it had been a misguided action on his part. Was the man now attempting to sympathize with him by insinuating he, too, must hold Willa in low regard?

“What happened to me at Cherry Valley had naught to do with Willa Obenchain. ’Twas years ago, and she wasna there.”

“No,” Crane said. “But maybe some of her red brothers were. Anyway, she’s drawn you into her troubles, hasn’t she?”

“No more than I’ve drawn her into mine.” Neil raised his right hand,
wrapped again after seeing to the girl. “And whatever this interruption has cost me, what the British did at Cherry Valley cost a hundred times dearer.”

Crane’s whole posture changed, like a dog bristling at a threat.

“The British? The Eighth would’ve kept to the fort and left the settlement alone. It was Brant’s savages did the butchering. They wouldn’t be controlled.” The man’s face seethed. Spittle flecked his lips as he added, “There was nothing the regular soldiers could do once the brutes got a taste of blood and burning.”

Taken aback by such vehemence, Neil stared at Crane several moments before the meaning of the words sank in. “How is it ye ken so much about the British regulars and what they could or couldna do? ’Twas all a swirl of smoke and flame and chaos, as far as I could tell.”

The hard line of Crane’s lips parted, but only to gape in silence. The hammering in the smithy yard had fallen silent too. Neil looked toward Seamus, to find the sunlight of the yard blocked by the hulking figure that stepped into the smithy and took Aram Crane by the arm.

“MacNab’s ready to tend our horses,” Richard Waring said, low voiced. “I need you in the yard.”

Crane jerked, as if Waring’s grasp had broken a different sort of grip, and went out into the sunlight, leaving Waring facing Neil. Before stare or silence could resolve itself into anything concrete, the man nodded briefly and stepped into the yard, vanishing from sight beyond Seamus, where the Colonel’s horses waited.

The spade had gone missing. It was not on the porch, where Willa had left it last evening. It was not by the new horse shed or corral, or anywhere in the yard or field. With the morning wearing on, she pushed her way back inside the cabin, decidedly vexed. It didn’t help her mood to find Neil MacGregor seated at the table, the girl perched beside him peering round-eyed at his drawings spread across the boards—or that the boy still sulked in the corner as he’d done for the past two days. Even the collie was taking its ease, sprawled before the hearth where the fire had dwindled to embers.

Gripping the door’s edge, she kept a precarious hold on her temper. “Which of you took away the spade, and where did you put it?”

Neil looked up. “Was it not right outside the door yesterev’n?”

“It is not there now.” Furtive movement in the corner drew her narrowed gaze. “Two will find it faster. Owl, if you wish to stay here while your sister’s leg heals, you will make yourself useful.”

Without moving off the pallet, the boy muttered, “I don’t know where it is.”

“You’ll speak to Willa with respect, Owl. Get up and do as she asked.” Neil MacGregor stared the boy down until Owl heaved himself to his feet and started toward her.

Neil spoke again as she turned to go. “I’ll be along to help as well. I meant to try my hand at drawing again today, but that can wait till dark.”

“You should not be drawing or working in the field. Your wrist was made worse when …” Willa glanced at the girl, who quickly lowered her eyes.

“I think we’re back on course with the healing.” Neil turned to the
child with an easy affection that made Willa’s chest constrict. “What say ye, lass? With my legs and your hands, can we put in the work of one able-bodied farmer?”

At Pine Bird’s shy nod, Willa’s ribs squeezed tighter. She clenched the door. “No one will work if I cannot find—”

A
thunk
reverberated through the door with the force of a slamming fist. The impact shuddered up Willa’s arm, choking off her words. The collie sprang up with a startled
woof
.

Yanking Owl out of the way, Willa shoved the door closed, shutting them within.

Neil shot to his feet. “What was that noise?”

Heart thundering, Willa snatched up her musket. “Stay back,” she said to Owl. “Neil, move the girl to the hearth.”

She waited until none of them could be seen from the doorway, then pulled the door open a crack. The metal hinges creaked, but there was no other sound. Soft air trickled in, smelling innocently of morning damp.

Neil was frowning, the girl pressed to his side. “Willa, what—?”

“This.” Clutching the musket, she swung the door wide to reveal the feathered shaft of an arrow embedded in the wood, at exactly the height of her throat.

While the arrow’s intent was clear to Willa, Neil had been less certain. Shaken as they stood on the spot at the woods’ edge where they surmised the shooter had stood, he’d said, “Ye dinna think it was meant to …?”

“Kill me?” Had the arrow been so intended, the deed could have been accomplished a dozen times while she ran hither and yon in search of the missing spade. She clutched the arrow she’d wrenched from the door. “It is a warning. From Richard.”

Neil had glanced around the underbrush, striped with sunlight, belying
the dark intent it had so recently concealed. “Or someone delivering it for him.”

He’d spoken the words under his breath, but Willa caught them, and the furrowing of his brow. “What is it you are thinking? Tell me.”

His blue eyes focused on her. “ ’Tis a thing that happened at the smithy, when I took Seamus for shoeing. Richard was there.”

Alarm flushed hot down her spine. “Did you tell him about the children or Joseph? Is that why this has happened?”

“No,” he said. “I ken better than to do so. Anyway, I barely saw Richard. ’Twas Aram Crane I spoke to. I mentioned Cherry Valley again, and he said some things about it that made me think he wasna there. Not on the side of the settlement, I mean. ’Tis been a niggle at the back of my mind since, but I think, maybe, he was part of the British regiment attacking the fort.”

Willa did her best to hide her startlement, to keep the suspicion that dawned from showing on her face. She might be wrong. There was no knowing. Not until Joseph came in from hunting and she could ask him whether he had another reason for being in Shiloh, besides her. Had he tracked his deserter there too? And was that deserter Aram Crane?

“It may mean nothing to the present situation,” Neil was saying. “And ’tis no surprise if the man doesna want it spread about that he was once a British soldier—if he was so.”

“Do you think,” Willa ventured, unable to hold back such a burning curiosity, “he could be a deserter?”

That surprised Neil. “I hadna thought it, but I suppose ’tis possible. What makes you ask it?”

Willa shrugged the subject away. “No reason. It is the children that worry me. We must keep them close. Always within sight.”

“Surely Richard wouldna harm the bairns?”

“I don’t know.” Richard wasn’t the only man in Shiloh with cause to
hate the Mohawks—nearly every man did, whether they would ever act on it or not—but she couldn’t shake the suspicion that he was behind that arrow in some way. Despite his words of repentance, his professed desire to help her, her return to Shiloh had rattled him, stirring up memories she thought he would rather have kept buried.

“What I know is that this”—her grip on the arrow tightened—“cannot keep me from my work.”

“How d’ye mean to work with no spade?”

She’d already started toward the cabin and did not look back. “If I do not have a metal blade, then I will dig the ground with sticks!”

In the end she found a tool more serviceable than a stick—a sharpened length of deer antler—but decided, once her temper cooled, that breaking more field ground could wait. She was on her hands and knees now, digging among a patch of burdock upstream along the bank of Black Kettle Creek. She’d lined her carrying basket with the coarse heart-shaped leaves, then added young roots to use for salves and wound washes. Two of the plants she’d harvested intact, roots packed in earth, meaning to start an herb garden.

Their musky scent, the feel of earth and growing things, the creek’s burbling at her back, all combined to sooth her ruffled nerves. But her thoughts were still taken up with the arrow, the missing spade, and another theft discovered soon after. The magnifying glass had disappeared from Neil’s satchel, left on the porch while they probed the woods for the place the arrow had been shot.

Fresh in her mind were thoughts of Aram Crane, and British deserters, and of Neil MacGregor unknowingly—if her guess was a right one—threatening the place that man had made for himself as Elias Waring’s groom. And if so, then maybe Neil MacGregor was the target. Not the children. Not her.

That was one possibility. But there was another thing. She couldn’t
shake from her mind that the spade and the glass had gone missing after the children arrived. Was it coincidence, or might that unhappy boy be responsible? Not for the arrow, of course. But what of the rest? Owl
had
stolen Joseph’s mare.

As she worked the sharpened antler tine around another plant, careful not to scar its roots, Willa remembered Joseph’s tale of the would-be theft, told after Neil left with his horse and the children napped inside the cabin.