Ride the Panther (11 page)

“And now, here I am, eh?” Lorelei asked, her eyes twinkling.

Raven nodded. She emptied the last of the feed over the chickens and stepped outside the coop and leaned in close to the girl from Fort Smith. “And here you are.” A strained silence passed between them. When it ended, Raven and Lorelei understood one another. Raven picked up a basket she had brought from the kitchen and handed it to Lorelei. The medicine woman had just the chore for this most recent of Pacer’s “wounded” guests.

“Why don’t you gather the eggs?” Raven suggested pleasantly.

Lorelei nodded and smiled cordially and accepted the task. “My pleasure.”

Neither woman was fooled.

Pacer’s shirt hung from one of the fence posts near the garden. Gathering snap beans was hot work, but Pacer relished the simplicity of the task. The garden offered peace and freedom from the doubts that had begun to plague his waking hours. He realized his return could only be a temporary visit. Raven’s valley was merely a calm port in the storm of conflict dividing the country. The war had already proved costly. His beliefs were diametrically opposed to those held by his father and brother. What would they think when they saw the posters calling for the apprehension of the Choctaw Kid? The raid on Lawrence had caused the Confederacy to scorn his service. And in abandoning Quantrill he had no doubt earned the enmity of his friends and comrades at arms. It was too much for him to think through. So he quit and concentrated on twisting the pale green pods off their stems. The vines grew thick about each wooden pole. Pacer lost track of time.

He had filled the first bucket and started on a second when he heard Hecuba sound her warning from over by the barn. He set the bucket aside and walked down between the rows of snap beans and waited at the edge of the garden. Pacer wished he could see the north trail leading from the headwaters of Buffalo Creek to the house. He thought about crossing over to the barn, where he’d be able to have a full view of the upper reaches of the valley. The damn hill blocking his vision was a perfect windbreak but made a blind spot from his current vantage point. Raven and Lorelei were inside. Smoke curled from the chimney and the aroma of baking cornbread drifted on the air. Raven was safe, Lorelei too. Pacer shoved open the makeshift gate and trotted up from the garden and across the path to the “necessary.” The chicks hurried to the henhouse as he passed the coop. He slowed his pace as he neared the corner of the house. About a hundred feet from Pacer, the barn cast its shadow across the side yard. From within the barn, a cow issued a deep, doleful moo as if reminding its human owners that it had not been milked this morning. The horses in the corral off to the side of the barn circled the trampled earth and nervously tossed their manes. They, too, were aware of someone riding onto the homestead. But it was Hecuba who sounded the most frantic alert. Spreading her gray-tipped wings, she paced in front of the smokehouse alongside the barn. The goose extended her neck and issued a raucous challenge. She put on such a show that Sawyer Truett was completely absorbed in watching Hecuba, fearing she might charge his already skittish mount or the pack horse he was leading. Sawyer had dropped the carcass of a white-tailed deer across the back of the plodding brown mare behind him. He’d also loaded a second bloody hide and packets of venison, hastily smoked to keep the meat from spoiling until he reached Tullock Roberts’ plantation.

Sawyer sensed movement to his right, and as Hecuba ceased her alarm he turned to find Pacer watching him. Sweat rolled across McQueen’s bronze torso, down his arms, and dripped from the knuckles of his right hand, which dangled loose by the worn wooden gun butt jutting from the holster at his side.

Sawyer Truett looked much the same as he had in Lawrence. He wore the loose-fitting gray blouse and black trousers of a guerrilla. However, he wasn’t bristling with guns like before. He sported a single Colt Dragoon thrust in his waistband and cradled a long-barreled Kentucky rifle in the crook of his arm. The “Kentuck” was his hunting gun. Its blued-steel barrel encased in a walnut stock was as long as most men were tall and fired a .52 caliber bullet. The dead carcasses bore mute testimony to the hunter’s marksmanship. Both animals had been killed with headshots.

“I figured that fresh trail belonged to you,” Sawyer said. He scratched his black goatee and started to shift the rifle in his arms. For the moment it was aimed toward the barn. “The tracks of two horses had me wondering, though.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Pacer warned.

Sawyer froze in midmotion and managed a look of wounded innocence. “You’re a might touchy, Pacer Wolf.” The horseman held up his right hand so that Pacer could see the livid white scrawl of scar tissue across Sawyer’s knuckles, the legacy of McQueen’s knife. “But maybe you have the right to be.” Sawyer doffed his floppy-brimmed hat and wiped the perspiration from his forehead on the sleeve of his guerrilla shirt. “Any man who turns again’ his own ought to keep on guard. ’Cause he’s chosen a lonely road to walk.”

“What do you want here, Sawyer?”

“I was reared on this land same as you. Reckon I can come callin’ on Raven if I’ve a mind.” He glanced up as the back door opened and Pacer’s grandmother descended the few steps to the ground. Lorelei appeared but remained on the top landing, framed in the doorway. One cheek was smudged with cornmeal. A morning breeze ruffled the hem of her gingham dress and revealed the pretty turn of her ankles.

“Good morning, Sawyer, you’re just in time for cornbread and molasses.”

“That’s a tempting offer, Miss Raven, but I’m due back at Honey Ridge before any of this meat spoils. I might could butcher it out right here…” Sawyer’s voice trailed off as he noticed Lorelei at the back door. He lowered his voice so only Pacer could hear. “Looks like you took a real interesting way home after you turned tail and run out on us in Lawrence.” He stood in his stirrups and swept his hat across his chest and half bowed. “Good morning, miss. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“You can call me Lorelei,” she said, laughing at his attempt at gallantry.

“I most certainly will. Every chance I get,” Sawyer replied. He flashed her a smile, then returned his attention to Raven. “I figured with no one to hunt for you, half of this buck ought to come in handy.”

“We won’t be needing it. I’m here now,” Pacer interjected before Raven could accept the gift. “I can see to her smokehouse.”

Raven looked puzzled. These two had been close as brothers once. They had ridden off as friends. She began to wonder if Sawyer had left something out of his heroic account of the attack on Lawrence. All he had told her was that he had lost sight of Pacer Wolf during the raid and that Pacer had never returned to Quantrill’s troop. He had attributed the jagged scar on his hand to a Union cavalry officer’s saber-wielding charge. The two men continued to stare at one another.

“Maybe you better keep on. That meat won’t spoil if you ride straight on to the plantation,” Pacer firmly suggested.

Sawyer Truett shrugged and settled his hat on his head and touched the brim in farewell to the ladies. Then he turned toward McQueen.

“I’m glad you’re back, Pacer. I was worried about you.” He glanced down at his rifle and blew a trace of dust from the sights. “We’ll get together later and talk over old times.” He touched his heels to his horse and trotted off at a brisk pace, leading the pack horse as he went. The white-tailed deer draped over the mare stared at Pacer with eyes as black as death, its head jostling from side to side as if in sad denial of its own fate and foretelling the same for the Choctaw Kid.

“M
Y SPOTTED DOG’S GOT
no spots,” Cap Featherstone’s voice rang out across the rolling landscape as his wagon climbed the last slow rise between him and the town of Chahta Creek nestled in the shadow of the Kiamichi Mountains. The creek that gave the town its name was a narrow ribbon of sweet spring water that skirted the mountains and flowed southeastward to merge with the Kimishi River a couple of miles east of town. The community’s founders, including Jesse’s grandparents, had chosen a townsite with access to the bubbling creek yet protected on the north and northeast by a maze of steep gorges and tall stands of old-growth timber and the time-eroded ridges of the Kiamichis.

“He used to have, he had lots,” Cap continued, in a booming baritone.

“He walked under a ladder

when my pa loosed his bladder

and bleached him as white as

my socks.”

Jesse, astride a rose gray gelding glanced aside at his companion. Kansas City lay two weeks behind them. It was early September, a time of Indian summer. Cap Featherstone had made an interesting travel companion. He had a yarn for every watering hole, a tall tale or two for every campfire. And when he wasn’t lying about his exploits or filling the air with his salty recollections of all the women he’d bedded—from hot-blooded señoritas in Santa Fe and Taos to a Paiute princess he had stolen from the Navajos and later sold to a fur trapper bound for the Wind River range—he was serenading the wilderness with ballads and jigs and tunes whose origins were better left unguessed.

Jesse glanced aside at the heavy-set bearded huckster now a proper saloonkeeper, at least according to Cap’s description. He intended to make the Medicine Wagon Saloon the talk of the Indian Territory so that when the war ended and commerce returned to the Texas Road (with herds of cattle and Texas vaqueros passing through on their way north) the lure of Cap Featherstone’s gambling parlor, saloon, and palace of pleasure would be impossible to resist.

Cap finished his song and winked at Jesse. “Yessir, my young captain, folks said I never would amount to much more than hawking snake oil in two-bit towns. Wait till you see the Medicine Wagon. I’ve fixed her up proper. Brought me in some gals from as far away as San Antone. A man can’t play Abbot’s game forever. A man needs something to call his own.”

Jesse listened, but he kept his thoughts to himself. The captain had exchanged his uniform for tan duckins pants, a blue pillowticking striped cotton shirt, and a dark brown broadcloth vest and a wide brimmed hat. A gun belt and Colt Dragoon rode high on his hips. A second “hideout” gun, a .22 caliber Smith & Wesson had been tucked away in his right boot. A Spencer .52 caliber carbine gave Jesse added assurance that he was prepared for whatever trouble came his way. And he was indeed beginning to fear the worst after passing the cold charred remains of Hack Warner’s station house an hour’s ride behind them.

“I fear I may be too late. The countryside appears to be in open conflict, if Warner’s station is any indication.” Jesse walked the gray abreast of the wagon as it reached the top of the grade and came to a halt in a cloud of billowing dust that drifted over the two men. “Major Abbot wants me to stop a war, but I might just wind up fighting it.”

“These are perilous times, younker. I am well rid of the responsibility of worrying about anyone else’s hide but my own.” Cap considered how that last remark sounded and attempted to clarify his position. “Of course, if you need any help, you just call on old Cap. Ain’t no telling what a judicious man might pick up in the way of gossip. Talk flows as fast as rotgut in a place like the Medicine Wagon. The son of Ben McQueen can always count on me to back his play.” Cap uncorked a jug he kept below the wagon seat and tilted it to his lips to drink a toast to Jesse’s success. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and smacked his lips. A trickle of corn liquor had dribbled into his belly where it bulged across his belt and buried the buckle in rolls of fat. “Your pa and I go way back. We’re like blood kin. I’d be a sorry bastard if I let anything happen to his eldest boy.” He pointed the mouth of the jug toward the town, visible in the distance.

“Here’s to dreams,” he said, and drank another toast. Cap offered the jug to Jesse, who declined. Ben McQueen had called the situation here a powder keg. Well, if that was the case, the Knights of the Golden Circle had already lit the fuse. Jesse Redbow McQueen wondered how much time he had before the entire situation blew up in his face.

Carmichael Ross scrutinized the map of Chahta Creek that overlooked her desk in the reception area of her newspaper office. The
Chahta Creek Courier
had been born beneath the spreading branches of an enormous live oak down by the creek bank. Once a week since that first of May in 1850, Carmichael Ross had supplied a newspaper to the families in town and the surrounding area. Carmichael’s parents had been New England-born teachers whose missionary zeal had brought them into the territory more than twenty years ago. Carmichael sighed and looked at the portrait of her father, Jacob Ross, captured in oils, frozen in the full bloom of his youth.

It was Jacob who had dreamed of starting a paper and spent a modest inheritance on the printing press and type set his daughter now used with distinction and courage. She wielded the power of the printed page with force and cleverness, doing battle with the common enemies of mankind: intolerance, gullibility, ignorance, and petty fears.

Carmichael reached up and patted her father’s image on the canvas. After her father’s death a few years ago, Carmichael assumed the responsibility of publishing the
Courier,
refusing to return home to New Haven with her widowed mother.

Carmichael returned her attention to the map of town and the surrounding area. Main Street ran from northwest to southeast, a broad avenue where a wagon could make a wide turn if need be. Main was flanked by Choctaw Street on the west side and Cherokee on the east. A series of orderly, well-laid-out streets intersected Main and its two companion thoroughfares. First Street was the closest to the Kimishi River on the southernmost edge of town. The other streets were numbered consecutively up to Sixth, which was a meandering dirt track that skirted the forested slope of Turtle Mountain, a towering mound of upthrust limestone seamed with gulleys and sporting an apron of thick foliage along its lower half.

Carmichael studied the artist’s rendering and decided that her skills were simply not up to the task of carving a wooden negative of the map. She had wanted to make a wood print of the township surrounded by a veritable army of hooded riders with a banner beneath the sketch that read “Knights of the Golden Circle tighten their grip on the loyal patriots of Chahta Creek.” Unwilling to lose the banner, she changed the subject and instead set about depicting a man in a frock coat struggling to free himself from the vicelike grip of another man cloaked in robes and a hood. She smiled as she worked, enjoying a moment of self-congratulation. The drawing would be the centerpiece of a page decrying the nightly forays of the hooded raiders. Another column noted the arrival of Daniel Pacer Wolf McQueen back in the area. He had yet to come to town, but that didn’t stop Carmichael from preparing a scathing list of the Choctaw Kid’s shameful escapades in Missouri and Kansas culminating in his association with William Quantrill and the looting and burning of Lawrence. Raven McQueen was her friend, but the editor’s affection for the half-breed medicine woman of Buffalo Creek would not stop her from speaking her mind. She knew Raven would be furious. She was fiercely protective of her grandchildren whether she agreed with their actions or not.