Sword of Vengeance (9 page)

“Morales!” he roared, and his challenge rang above the din of battle. It was at that moment the rifles in the woods behind him fell silent. “Morales!”

Sergeant Morales hesitated at the sound of his name. He recognized the voice and the challenge in its tone. He smiled then, and instead of lifting himself astride his horse, he took the pistols from his saddle holsters and faced the clearing yet again.

“Let there be an end to this, Pablo,” Father Ramon pleaded from off to his right.

“Sí. There will be an end … the end of this troublesome
Inglés
whelp,” the sergeant assured. He wiped a forearm across his perspiring features and winced as pain coursed through his wounded shoulder. “Even with a clipped wing I can still handle the likes of Señor McQueen,” Morales added. He tucked one pistol inside his tunic. The other he calmly raised, sighted on Kit, and fired … and missed as Kit dodged.

Kit heard the slug whine past but never lost stride in his race with death. The Spaniard’s smooth-bore pistols weren’t very accurate at a distance, but at close range the next shot could cut Kit in half.

Fifteen yards became ten as Kit drew near, his every muscle working with fluid, feline grace. Morales drew the second pistol from his tunic, cocked and leveled his weapon. Kit threw the pistol he had taken from Galvez in an overhanded toss that sent the weapon spinning toward the sergeant. Morales held his fire and crouched to avoid the missile. He momentarily lost his footing as he stepped back into a shallow depression in the earth.

Kit tensed and leaped the remaining few feet as the sergeant recovered and tried to center his aim on his airborne attacker. Kit landed like a battering ram with a vicious, stiff-legged kick to Morales’s chest. The sergeant’s pistol discharged into the air in a tongue of flame and billowing black smoke. Morales, for all his mass, was knocked off his feet by the impact, and he landed hard, arms open and legs akimbo as he sputtered and gasped for breath.

Kit leaped onto the man’s upper torso. The sergeant huffed and groaned in agony as his attacker pinned him to the ground. Morales’s eyes bulged in his head, and he knew his death was at hand.

Kit reached over and tore the still smoking pistol from the sergeant’s grasp. He gripped it by the barrel and raised the gun like a hammer, its iron-embossed stock now a lethal bludgeon. Kit glared at the sergeant. His hand trembled; then he slammed the pistol down with enough force to bury the weapon several inches into the soft earth a hair’s breadth from Morales’s skull.

Mud spattered the sergeant’s face as blood drained from his features. It took Morales several seconds to realize he was still alive.

“By the grace of God and that good man yonder”—Kit nodded toward the cabin and Father Ramon—“I’ll not kill you.” Kit stood and hauled the disheveled sergeant to his feet. Morales made no reply; his brush with death had left him momentarily humbled.

Kit glanced aside at Father Ramon. “Take your sergeant home. Hurry. Leave while you can.”

“God bless you, my son,” the Franciscan said. He mounted up, as did Morales.

“I don’t understand you,
Inglés
,” the sergeant said. “Now I am in your debt. Pablo Morales always pays his debts!” The sergeant shook his head in confusion, pointed his horse toward the trees, and rode away.

“May the Lord speed you homeward, my young friend,” the priest said. He made the sign of the cross in blessing over Kit.

“Be well, Padre.” Kit slapped the rump of the padre’s horse and sent Father Ramon Saucedo galloping off toward the forest behind the cabin.

Kit inhaled the aroma of the venison steaks the Spaniards had left sizzling over a pair of cook fires. Escaping execution had worked up an appetite. He squatted down and began to eat, waiting for his mysterious benefactors to join him.

They weren’t long in coming.

“W
E ARE THE ARMY
of the Free Republic of Florida,” said Iron Hand O’Keefe as he gnawed the chunk of meat he’d skewered on the hook that served for his left hand. He swallowed, then leaned back and roared with laughter. The “army” consisted of two dour-looking Choctaw warriors and O’Keefe, a giant Irishman who was dressed much like his red-skinned companions.

The long-haired warriors had followed O’Keefe across the clearing from the woods where they had fired on the Spanish dragoons. Thanks to the eighteen rifles now strapped to the back of a nasty-tempered mule, three men and a bugle had been able to create the illusion of a much larger force. O’Keefe had kept his men under cover until the last of the Spaniards was long gone. Then he and his two companions had packed the rifles and warily approached the campsite, drawn by the irresistible aroma of hot food. Like the Choctaw warriors, Iron Hand O’Keefe was garbed in buckskins and carried a tomahawk. His lantern-jawed face was painted for war. His silver hair hung past his shoulders. By their deference to him it was obvious the warriors considered the Irishman their leader.

“I be Patrick O’Keefe, but my people call me Iron Hand.”

“Your people?” Kit asked, looking up from his cup of coffee.

“The Choctaw,” O’Keefe explained. “Took me in many a year ago when I wandered into their village, sick and lost and damn near crazy with fever. Nursed me to health. Hell, I had no place to go. I was just an ignorant Irishman who’d jumped ship in Charleston. I come inland so’s the damn British press gangs would never find me again. I stayed on and learned the ways of the Choctaw and made ’em my ways.” O’Keefe plopped a morsel from his hook into his mouth. “Gun carriage crushed my hand aboard ship. Damn thing never healed. When it started to rot, the ship’s doctor—butcher, I calls him—sawed it off. That’s something else I owe the British for. Smithy in Charleston made me a hook. First class work he did, eh?” He held out the iron hook for Kit’s inspection. “Injuns are a superstitious lot. The hook sort of set me apart as something special. So I wasn’t among ’em for long when these lads made me a chief. Of course, the Choctaws ain’t nobody’s fool. Their chiefs have a habit of getting killed off, by Creek Red Sticks, mostly. But I reckon these here rifles will even things up.”

The Irishman turned and said something to his companions, and the warriors nodded and walked off to load up the dead Spaniards onto a couple of horses.

“We’d better plant these poor lads before they ripen,” O’Keefe said. “Young Otter and Stalking Fox will tend to them.”

“I’ll help.” Kit stood and walked toward the grave of Alsino Escovar. The padre had left a shovel by the mounded earth.

“My braves could drop them in the bayou yonder,” O’Keefe suggested.

“They died doing what they felt was right,” Kit said.

“Killing you?”

“I’ll see them buried proper. I’m not asking you to help,” Kit snapped back.

O’Keefe chuckled. “You’re a stubborn one. Do things your own way, even if it means charging into battle with naught but an unloaded gun. By heaven, you remind me of me.”

They buried the dead men in a row alongside Escovar. Young Otter and Stalking Fox seemed anxious to be done with the job. Not that it was a pleasant task by Kit’s standards, but still he wondered if the warriors expected the men to return to life to give battle. O’Keefe cleared up the mystery.

This was Creek country—Red Sticks, as the Irishman called them. He went on to explain how the Red Sticks and Choctaws were mortal enemies. It was this animosity that led the Choctaws to act as guides for a volunteer militia sent to invade Florida, part of the territory claimed by the Creek tribes. The militia had been reassured that U.S. troops would quickly follow once an insurrection had begun in the Spanish colony.

Unfortunately, the troops never came. Perhaps the Washington politicians had gotten cold feet concerning the invasion, what with the possibility of another war with Britain. No doubt more cautious heads had prevailed. Whatever the reason, O’Keefe, his Choctaws, and the volunteers from Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas were left on their own. Without reinforcements, they soon found themselves outnumbered. Decimated by death and disease, the militia fell apart into smaller groups of desperate men, struggling to escape not only the Spaniards but the vengeful Creeks as well.

O’Keefe and his scouts had made the best of a bad situation. Salvaging the rifles and gunpowder their companions had abandoned, the Choctaws were heading back to the hills of Alabama. The extra rifles would help their people prevail against the Creeks, who outnumbered them almost two to one.

Kit found himself liking the Irishman. Despite his silver hair, Iron Hand O’Keefe was only in his early forties, but he’d spent almost half his life among the Choctaws. He was a bit of a braggart, and no doubt the man was not above a little larceny if the cause was right. But he had saved Kit’s life. And from the way O’Keefe and the Choctaws had fought, Kit doubted he’d find any better company to ride the trail with, especially if they ran into trouble.

Of his own background, Kit spoke little. He recounted how he’d been shipwrecked and captured by the Spanish, who obviously had been looking for the likes of Iron Hand O’Keefe and the other remnants of the military expedition. Kit made no mention of the treasure or Bill Tibbs’s betrayal. It was a private matter, to be locked away deep in his heart until another day.

A swarm of glossy bronze ibises cleared the tree-tops and momentarily blotted out the stark blue sky. The beat of their wings was like some great rushing wind, and their lofty cries rang out over the forests and marshlands like the voice of nature itself. Theirs was a song older than the dreams of man.

It was time to leave, Kit thought as he shoved a brace of pistols in his belt and took up a rifle from O’Keefe’s supply of firearms.

Stalking Fox, the younger of the two Choctaws, watched the birds with a mixture of awe and dread evident in his coppery features. He was roughly the same height as Kit but leaner limbed. He carried none of the extra muscle the white man had developed after a year at sea.

Though he had been part owner of the
Trenton
and could have enjoyed an easy berth, Kit McQueen had often worked right alongside the crew until he had mastered the art of seamanship, for such had been his father’s teaching: that a McQueen took nothing for granted and earned his way in the world. Going to sea had provided Kit an opportunity to learn something new, and he had made the most of the opportunity.

The treasure he had stolen from the Corsican bandit, al-Jezzar, was lost to him; a friend’s betrayal had given him cause to hate—yet that too was in the past. At hand in the here and now, he had a pair of sturdy horses, pistols, a rifle, and a tomahawk O’Keefe had presented to him along with the sound advice that a tomahawk made a sight better weapon than an unloaded gun. Kit had the clothes on his back, a full belly, and the promise of a tomorrow. What more could a man ask for in this world?

He glanced at Iron Hand O’Keefe, who was re-checking the rifles and ammunition they had loaded on the pack mule. The Irishman draped his bugle over the tied-down rifles.

Young Otter rode up on Kit’s left. He also had been watching the ibises as they winged their way north. Young Otter was a husky, long-armed young man who after an initial suspicion seemed to accept Kit. The warrior had never seen a man with red hair and kept wondering if perhaps Kit had somehow managed to set his head afire. He gestured toward the birds and spoke in his native tongue.

Kit looked to Iron Hand O’Keefe for help.

“He’s telling you them birds we seen are the spirits of our enemies. They go before us,” the strapping Irishman explained. “Kind of like a procession, you might say. The enemies we make … and the friends, too, we’re bound to meet ’em farther down the trail.” He scratched his belly with his hook hand. His buckskin shirt was worn smooth in spots, and it bore the stains from a month of meals.

O’Keefe was no nosegay, to be sure—but then again, Kit thought, they weren’t standing around at a church social, either.

“Choctaws have their own peculiar way of seeing things,” O’Keefe continued. “They figure it’s all like a man standing at midcreek. No matter which way he moves, it sets up ripples that touch each bank, the one he’s left and the one he’s going to.”

O’Keefe noticed the Choctaw had already mounted. They had the right idea. It was time to quit this place of death.

Kit shaded his eyes and looked up as the last of the ibises vanished beyond the treetops. The spirits of his enemies, the ghostly memories of his friends. What lay ahead for him now? Home? Retribution? Time was supposed to heal all wounds. But not this cold hatred that clawed at his heart and caused him to shudder even as it filled him with deadly resolve. No, this wound could only be cauterized with vengeance.

Kit leaped astride his mare and walked the animal a few paces out into the clearing, away from O’Keefe and the Choctaws, and faced north. When at last he spoke, it was in a soft yet ominous voice, words of warning for his betrayer.

“Look over your shoulder, Bill Tibbs. I’m here. You son of a bitch, I’m still here!”

A
LMOST TWO YEARS LATER,
Kit McQueen again had reason to think of Iron Hand O’Keefe and his Choctaw allies and their escape from Spanish Florida. It was the Fourth of July and the good people of Springtown, Pennsylvania, had chosen to have a celebration despite how badly the nation was faring in its war with the British. Kit had traveled to the Springtown Fair with his mother Kate, his sister Hannah Louise, and Hannah’s two daughters. Thirteen-year-old Penelope loosely held Kit’s right hand while eight-year-old Esther Rose kept a tight grip on his left.

The girls took after Grandmother Kate with their yellowgold hair and skin the color of freshly poured cream. Penelope, who gently pulled free of his grasp, was the independent one and obviously more interested in a fourteen-year-old boy who was standing alongside his father in the limner’s tent. Esther Rose, however, was riveted to the paintings surrounding her as the limner, with a decided flair for the dramatic, uncovered yet another of his battle scenes, this one a horde of Choctaw braves swarming over a keelboat stranded on a bar in the Mississippi. The boatmen were putting up a valiant fight but were hopelessly outnumbered and doomed. Several had already fallen to knife and tomahawk.