Ride the Panther (8 page)

“So you aim to steal my wife,” Shapter exclaimed.

Wife? So that was the reason the big man was so all-fired determined. A jealous husband was as unpredictable as a twister and to be avoided at all possible costs.

Pacer kept the man covered and managed to lead the pinto out of the stall. He reached out and took his bedroll and gunbelt from Lorelei and draped them over his saddle. Then with the gun he waved Shapter out of the way and headed for the open door and freedom.

“What about me?” Lorelei said. “You can’t just leave me here.” The alarm in her voice was real. She followed after Pacer and inadvertently came within arm’s reach of Shapter, who caught her by the wrist and hurled her backward against a wall hung with bridles and blankets and carriage harnesses.

“He ain’t got no use for you. But I do. You shamed me, girl. You won’t be likely to run off again,” Shapter said. He turned his back on McQueen as if dismissing him out of hand. Shapter had an abiding respect for the Colt .36 Pacer kept trained on him. Lorelei had no such protection and became the obvious focus of his rage.

“Don’t ever let the sunset catch you in this town again,” Shapter added as a menacing afterthought. Pacer eased himself through the doorway and out of the stable. The rain had eased somewhat, but the ground was crisscrossed with tiny creeks and rivulets. Each wheel rut was a flash flood in miniature. A cooling breeze rippled the watery curtain, behind which the streets of Fort Smith appeared to dissolve and reform in ever-shifting patterns. Pacer sensed magic in the phenomenon. He paused alongside the Kentucky mare that Frank Shapter had abandoned to the elements after catching sight of Lorelei and the Choctaw Kid within. Pacer stood against the wall in the deepening night and realized he could not bring himself to leave. And this time it had nothing to do with the likes of Frank Shapter. No one told Pacer Wolf McQueen to tuck his tail and run. A smart man would ride, a sensible man would leave and never look back. The girl was the worst kind of trouble, and Shapter was a bully in his own backyard with family and friends to come to his aid if need be. Pacer stood with his back to the stable wall running through every argument in a desperate attempt to convince himself to leave. It was a brave but hopeless gesture. He looped the reins in his hand over the doorlatch and then stepped around and entered the stable once again.

Shapter stood with his back to Pacer. Droplets of water sprayed from the man’s black coat as he backhanded Lorelei to the hard-packed floor. She cursed her assailant, her voice thick with pain. It took all her willpower to hold back the tears.

“You’re my wife. The parson hitched us legal. Better you learn to accept it.”

“I don’t care what you paid my pa,” she said. “You ain’t ever gonna have any rights over me. You can’t make me stay.” Her auburn hair spilled forward to partly conceal her hate-filled features. “I’ll leave even if I have to crawl.”

“You’ll crawl, all right. Get yourself back in the hay. I aim to take me a poke right now.”

Pacer stood inside the door and searched for the ax handle. He found it lying near a barrel of nails. He hefted the club in his strong right hand, and advanced down the aisle where Frank Shapter stood over the fallen young woman he had bought for the price of a pair of hogs. With Shapter blocking the aisle, Lorelei couldn’t see past to the Choctaw Kid as he approached. She wouldn’t have warned her tormentor anyway.

Pacer walked up behind Shapter, who heard a straw snap too late and started to turn. Pacer swung the ax handle and caught the bully behind the thighs. Shapter howled as his legs buckled, and he dropped to his knees. He dug in his coat pocket for a short-barreled Colt he kept tucked away. Pacer ended that threat with a blow to the big man’s belly.

“Gawd damn!” Shapter gasped, and leaned forward on both hands. “You son of a bitch.” Pacer was prepared to deliver another blow. But Shapter’s movements became clumsy. Slowly he flattened facedown on the stable floor and lay still.

Lorelei looked up in surprise. She scrambled to her feet and Pacer noticed a horseshoe that she had concealed in the loose dirt and straw by her side. It was obvious she would not have yielded to Shapter without a fight.

“I knew you’d come back,” Lorelei said. She wiped a trickle of blood from her bruised and swollen lip. Her eyes held a gleam of triumph. She retrieved her carpetbag.

Pacer knelt by the fallen man just to make sure Shapter was still breathing. He was relieved to see the man’s chest rise and fall.

“I’ll stay here in case Frank comes to. You fetch the town marshal and we’ll clap our friend in irons. I never met a constable yet who’d tolerate seeing a woman beaten.” Pacer prodded the unconscious lout with the toe of his boot. “Reckon he’ll lock our friend up and throw away the key.”

“I don’t think so,” Lorelei said. She rolled Shapter over on his back. The man groaned but remained unconscious. Lorelei folded back the flap of his sodden frock coat to reveal the tin star of Fort Smith’s town marshal pinned to Shapter’s vest.

Pacer closed his eyes and shook his head. “Oh no,” he sighed. After borrowing a pair of bridles from the tack wall, he set to work securing Shapter’s ankles and wrists with the long black leather reins. Shapter’s own neckerchief made an appropriate gag. Pacer dragged the big man to the rear of the stable and deposited him in the dimmest corner available.

Pacer hurried down the aisle with Lorelei coming along a few paces behind. Through the open doorway he noticed the rain had lessened to a fragile mist that seemed to hang suspended in the evening air. Pacer emerged from the barn and slogged across the muddy ground to the pinto that had pulled free from the latch but thankfully had remained nearby. The Kentucky mare was also close at hand. The mare recognized Lorelei as she held a hand beneath the animal’s nostrils, allowing the mare to catch her scent. Pacer swung into the saddle and fixed the young woman in his impassive stare.

“I don’t have a place to go. Not in Arkansas. There’s Shapters all through the Ozarks,” she said.

Pacer tried to stop himself, but the words spilled out as if they had a life of their own. “You can come along with me for a spell.”

Lorelei grinned. Was this also something she had known all along? She leaped astride Frank Shapter’s prized Kentucky mare. From a distance came a rumble of thunder, one final warning. This was only a lull. The storms were far from over.

R
AVEN O’KEEFE MCQUEEN HEARD
the wind call her name. She looked up from the kitchen table where she had been preparing a mixture of dried bull berries and wild turnips to be brewed into a medicine for Libby Whitfield. Gip Whitfield, Libby’s husband, continued to pace the cozy confines of the sitting room. He had heard nothing but the sound of his own breath and the floorboards creaking beneath his feet. Since old Doctor Linus Dick had his stroke, Chahta Creek was without a physician. But Raven McQueen had learned her lessons well. Her mother had been a Choctaw medicine woman who taught her to look to nature’s own bounty for healing.

Raven shoved clear of the table and headed for the front room. She moved quickly and gracefully despite her sixty-seven years. Her long black hair was streaked with gray, but her eyes were flashing and clear. And the lines that crinkled at the corners of her eyes and mouth were but the telltale tracks of wisdom.

She handed Gip a medicine bag filled with the mixture of roots, leaves, and berries she had prepared. The farmer pacing the front room gratefully accepted her preparations.

“You make Libby a full pot of this tea and make certain she drinks every drop,” Raven told the worried man.

Whitfield nodded his thanks. He was average in height, boyish-faced with freckled cheeks and straight brown hair. A year ago, Gip had ridden into Indian Territory attached to the 3rd Texas Cavalry. After contracting measles, he had been left behind when Colonel E. B. Greer rode east to join Nathan Bedford Forrest and his hell-for-leather Confederate cavalry in Alabama. Gip had never planned to be a deserter, but after being nursed back to health by Libby Culver, a sweet-tempered Choctaw widow, Gip had found reason after reason to prolong his stay on his benefactor’s farm. The war had grown less important to him as his affection for Libby continued to grow. They had been married only two months ago, and although there had been a certain amount of scandal attributed to their relationship at first, once the wedding vows were exchanged, all sins, real or imagined, were forgiven by most of the surrounding community.

“You reckon this will break her fever?” Gip asked, searching for a little reassurance.

“I wouldn’t be sending you off with it,” Raven replied, “if I didn’t think it would help.” The brogue she inherited from her Irish father had a habit of creeping into her speech whenever she tried to make a point.

“Well, I ain’t doubting you, Mrs. McQueen,” Gip added, thrusting the buckskin bag in his coat pocket. “You been real good to us. Even before me and Libby got hitched. You treated us like…well…”

“Like the good people you both are,” Raven said. She patted the farmer’s arm and walked him to the front door. He had a good five-mile ride to the Culver farm. It would be night by the time he reached home.

“I pray you come to no harm for helpin’ me. There be some who don’t have much use for a deserter or anyone who lends me a hand.” Gip lowered his voice. “Call themselves Knights of the Golden Circle. Long riders, I call them. Hooded highwaymen with no allegiance except to mischief. No better than Quantrill’s bunch, murderin’ and attackin’ innocent folks—uh, I’m sorry. I spoke out of turn.” Gip suddenly recalled that Raven’s grandson, Pacer Wolf McQueen, was reputed to have taken part in the raid on Lawrence. Gip reddened and cleared his throat and turned around to retrieve his hat from a peg by the door. It was a comfortable room; indeed, the entire farmhouse was furnished with hand-hewn chairs and tables, and each bedroom contained a wrought-iron bed whose frame had been fashioned in Kit McQueen’s own forge back in ’51.

“Tell Libby I will be out to visit her as soon as I can,” said Raven. Gip Whitfield nodded, and vanished through the door. He hurried out from under the porch and swung up astride the charger he had brought up from Texas. The animal had grudgingly adapted to its new role as a plow horse. With a wave of his hand, Gip sped away, leaving Raven on the porch, a solitary figure framed by lantern-lit windows in a whitewashed wood-frame ranch house.

Kit and Raven McQueen had built their ranch house and laid claim to over a thousand acres twenty miles from town, nestled against the foothills of the Kiamichi Mountains and along the west bank of Buffalo Creek. The house faced south to catch the warm summer breezes. Raven often took her breakfast out on the porch to watch the birds circle and dip above the buffalo grass carpeting the rolling meadow while clouds, like airy ships, sailed in tranquil and stately grace across an ocean of limitless sky.

But the porch did not hold her now. When the wind called, only the hill behind the house, to the north, would do. Raven darted back inside the front room, caught up a shawl draped over a wing-backed rocking chair near the hearth, and proceeded through the house and the winter kitchen and left by the back door, which swung awkwardly on a broken hinge and banged shut in her wake. She trudged across the yard, scattering hens in her wake. She paused in her journey to chase the chickens back into the coop, then continued up the trail that cut a straight path to the top of the limestone hill behind the house.

By the time Raven reached the summit of the hill, the sun was dipping below the horizon and night crept across the wooded ridges and engulfed the valley that stretched like a deep gash northwest into the heart of the Kiamichi wilderness. This was an ancient landscape.

Eons ago, the earth upthrust a mountainous chain of peaks and corrugated cliffs. Rains fell, cooling the tortured crust. Seas formed, teemed with life, evaporated into swamps, then vanished over millions of years and left behind the Kiamichi Mountains as a legacy to the timeless act of creation and re-creation. The elder spirits who walked this wilderness whispered ageless songs of life and death.

The wind called her name yet again. Raven stood upon the hilltop, her silvery black hair streaming behind her, her arms outstretched as she waited and watched. The branches of a white oak halfway up the slope rustled and stirred, the clattering against one another like chattering teeth. Night deepened. The last rosy glow to the west faded to grayish blue then black. Raven broke from her trancelike state and gathered together a small mound of dry brittle branches and, using crumbled chunks of bark for tinder, struck a match. After a few tries she had a small flame she could nourish into a hearty blaze, her spirit fire. Embers like desperate souls erupted into the night sky and winked out, leaving only a brief memory of pulsing light imprinted on the eye to mark their passing. Raven’s coarse cotton dress pressed against her legs as she turned toward the direction of the gusting breezes. Her shawl and linen blouse and the proximity of the spirit fire ensured her warmth. When she shivered, it was because of the unknown, the anticipation, the waiting. Time had no meaning now, it held no importance, there was only the wind and the leaping flames, her prayer song rising on the smoke, and the vastness of the night shrouded mountains.

Nothing lives long

except the sky and the

mountains and the mystery

that lies between.

“It’s getting dark,” Lorelei complained. “I’m tired. We ought to make camp.” She looked wistfully at the redbud-lined banks of Buffalo Creek and even in the dim light located several suitable campsites. They were a good five-days ride from Fort Smith, well out of danger from the likes of Frank Shapter and his kin, and still Pacer would not relax. He seemed a driven man, and that puzzled Lorelei. The very first night on the trail she had opened her blankets and offered herself to her new-found companion only to have Pacer gently refuse her charms. She could tell he was attracted to her. More than once over the past week she had caught him watching her. At those times Pacer would quickly focus his attention elsewhere, a ploy that amused the flirtatious and wily young woman. She was accustomed to men wanting her. Desire was a weapon she had often used to her advantage.