Robson, Lucia St. Clair Read online

He sat high above little John. The child never flinched, but glared at him through his mother’s wide blue eyes. Cynthia froze, crumpling a handful of her mother’s skirt and waiting for the Indian to skewer John on the delicate point of the fourteen-foot lance he held carelessly. Suddenly John drew back, cocked his arm, and hurled the rock hidden in his shirt. The hours spent driving crows from the fields had sharpened the six-year-old’s aim and strengthened his arm. The rock thunked on the Comanche’s cheek, leaving a dark welt.

  The Indian swooped, and Cynthia screamed as all of them fell back. Leaning off his horse until only the loop braided into its mane held him, he reached toward John and tapped the boy’s shoulder.

  “A-he, I claim him!” Like a chorus of coyotes, the warriors laughed at the coup. The white cub was a worthy foe.

  Motioning with his lance, the thin, hawk-faced man ordered Lucy to lift John onto his horse. When she paused, there was a tensing of the circle. It drew in a little tighter and the men shifted their weapons. Lucy grabbed John under the armpits and hoisted him up behind the lean rider. The little mustang cantered off toward the fort with John bouncing on his broad rump. Clinging to the rawhide surcingle, he looked back at his mother, his face wrinkling as he fought tears.

  A tall, lithe warrior wheeled his coal black pony in a tight circle to face Lucy and the children. The black rings around his eyes gave his face a startled, Satanic leer that couldn’t hide the handsome set of his features. His full, sensuous mouth was grim as he pointed first to Cynthia and then to the back of his pony. One raven feather hung from his scalplock, and otter fur was wrapped around his long, thick braids. When he reached out to pull the child up onto his horse, she saw the wide leather band that protected his wrist from the bowstring. Though he was hardly more than sixteen years old, his grip was painfully strong. He lifted her as easily as a doll.

  As she settled behind him, she smelled smoke and tallow and leather. She tried not to touch his bare body glistening with sweat and oil, but when he quirted his horse, she lurched and grabbed him around the waist. Together they raced after his companion. The circle of Indians, bored now that the small white warrior was gone, scattered for the shelter of the stockade before the white men discovered them in the open. Lucy and her two younger children were abandoned to the two remaining men, who would kill or enslave them as whim dictated.

  From the thickets along the river bottom nearby, David Faulkenberry watched the surrounded Parker family and swore under his breath.

  “Damn them. Damn them to hell.” Whether he meant the Indians or the Baptists of Parker’s Fort he couldn’t say himself. Prime raiding weather and the gate left wide open, like as not. He had warned them so often, but they wouldn’t listen. They had all the answers in that Bible of theirs. “The Lord will provide and the Lord will decide.” Old Elder John’s favorite maxim. And look what the Lord has provided this day, John Parker.

  The big fanner rested his battered Hall carbine on one strong forearm. Sweat ran down the channels in his tanned cheeks. He had prayed and sworn as Lucy and her children ran toward him. There had been no way to help her alone in the open. Now she was trapped, so close and so impossibly far.

  He steeled himself for what he would have to do. He could only get off one shot, so it would have to count. It would be for Lucy. When the Indians tried to rape her, he would charge them and shoot her. There could be no error in his aim. He hoped they killed him quickly after he’d done it, but the chances were they’d kill him very slowly indeed.

  David Faulkenberry was a veteran of a dozen battles. He had been at San Jacinto when Santa Anna lost Texas just four weeks earlier, but for the first time in his forty years of trouble he felt not simple fear, but terror. He was terrified of what he would have to see and do. He tensed into a sprinter’s position as the thin raider and his tall companion took the older children back to the fort. If only his son Evan or Abram Anglin were here to draw fire, he might stand a chance of rushing them. Swearing at Parker was just a way of cursing his own stupidity in coming to the river alone.

  When Lucy was left with only two warriors, David reacted almost reflexively. He charged silently from the bushes, devouring the distance with his long, powerful legs. One of the Indians had pulled Lucy and Orlena up onto his horse. The other one reached for little Silas. They looked up, startled by the white man who had appeared like a ghost from the tall grass and waving flowers on the hill. They stared at the steady, lacquered barrel of the carbine aimed at the chest of the one holding Lucy.

  “Now, sir,” David said levelly, advancing on them. “You just put the little lady back on the ground or I’ll blast you into a puddle of paint.”

  His meaning was clear. Lucy slid down, then reached up and took Orlena. The raiders backed their ponies, reined them hard around, and galloped for the safety of numbers. David let them go. A shot might bring the rest back. Indians didn’t like to leave a dead or wounded comrade. They were like rattlesnakes that way.

  “David, they killed Silas. They scalped him. My God, you should have seen him.” Lucy swayed, struggling to keep calm.

  “Miz Parker, we have to get to cover. It’s just a little farther.”

  “No. They’ve taken John and Cynthia. I have to go back. Don’t you know what they’ll do to Cynthia?”

  “We can do nothing, Miz Parker. And if we don’t get out of sight, little Silas and Orlena will be dead or worse.”

  Lucy wasn’t listening. In shock, she had already turned and started up the hill, still absently carrying Orlena, who clung to her neck. David gently stopped her, his big hand on her shoulder. He picked up Silas in one arm, put the other around Lucy, and guided her toward the trees near the river. On hands and knees he pushed them ahead of him into the tangle of wild plum bushes and grape vines. He forced them to crawl, until they could no longer hear the noise of fighting over the rush of the Navasota River. Thorny twigs tore at their clothes as they burrowed through, hauling themselves along on their elbows and knees.

  David rolled to clear a small space with his tough body and pulled the children down next to him. He laid a calloused finger to their lips. Exhausted, they didn’t need to be told to keep quiet. They lay with their faces pressed to the humus, breathing its thick, musty odor. Lucy stretched out next to her children. With his carbine in his left hand David threw his heavy, corded right arm across all three of them and settled down to wait. He knew he should try to reach the other men pinned down in the grove of trees below the fort to the north, but for now he would stay here.

  Reaching up with his big, scarred hand, he pulled a leaf out of Lucy Parker’s tangled, honey-colored hair and pondered his next move.

  CHAPTER 2

  With his large, luminous eyes in a heavy fringe of lashes and his cherubic face under the smeared yellow paint, Potsana Quoip, Buffalo Piss, looked like a child playing at war. But he carried a fresh, bloody scalp on his lance. It was the first foray of the season for the Penateka Comanche and his first raid as a war chief. He wasn’t ready to end it yet. The few of his men who had guns stood watch on the roofs of the cabins that jutted like lichens from the stockade wall. Those who weren’t busy elsewhere sat on their ponies and listened as the raid leaders of the three tribes discussed strategy. Every man there was his own commanding officer, and decisions took time.

  The settlers, frustrated by the carefully cleared land around the walls, were sniping from the trees and deadfalls of the grove below the fort. The snap of their gunfire sounded like com popping in a skillet. The Indians were pinned down. Attacking the entrenched white men across the open space would be suicidal. Still, Buffalo Piss refused to give up.

  “Are we turkeys,” he snarled, “to roost here helpless?” “These white eyes don’t know how to fight. We can kill them all instead of amusing ourselves with their women.”

  Ooetah, Big Bow, waited a beat to give his words more weight. His features seemed chiseled from walnut and polished to a luster. His deep-set eyes reflected the wisdom and generosity that ma
de men follow him willingly on raids. His braids were long, and wrapped in deerskin. He was solidly built and as graceful on the ground as on horseback. He carried few tokens of his coups, yet everyone knew he had more of them than any man in the party. At twenty-three he was the youngest member of the Kaitsenko, the Society of Ten, the Kiowa’s highest honor.

  “It is time to go,” he said. “We have scalps and horses and captives and goods to take to our women. They will be happy and dance for us and warm our beds. There is no need to make them cry when we don’t return. I say we should scatter, pick up the extra horses at the Nav-vo-sata and meet at the ford of Three Rivers. We can divide the goods there and go our separate ways. The day grows old. We can do no more here.”

  While the raid leaders talked, a few men finished with the women, who were mercifully unconscious. Others packed the stolen loot onto the settlers’ horses. Some still ransacked the cabins. Patient ponies stood outside the open doors as the muddled sounds of breaking china and furniture drifted out. Feathers from a torn blue comforter floated dreamily down around the bodies sprawled in the wet, slimy mud.

  Sitting tall and loose on his black pony, To-oh-kar-no, Night, with Cynthia still clinging to his back, Wanderer studied the littered yard. Quinna, Eagle, reined in beside him, John perched behind him. He grinned at his friend and looked around.

  “Nocona, Wanderer, my brother, I wish these white people would come west so we could raid them all the time. They have such wonderful things, and they’re soft like newborn pups. I may spend more time here in the east.”

  Wanderer grunted, but his thoughts were on the small, round mirror he held in his hand. It was backed and bound by a silver frame of intricately intertwined flowers and vines. He rubbed the raised design and ran his finger over the cool, smooth surface of the glass itself. He stared at his reflection, the large black eyes and the planes of his face shown as truly as if he were another person looking at himself. It gave him the curiously detached feeling of not being in his own body. The one who made this had medicine, powerful medicine.

  He wrapped the mirror in a piece of torn calico and put it into the fringed bag slung on his surcingle. Something about this raid was nibbling at the corner of his mind like a mouse hidden in the winter’s pemmican supply. Something unseen, yet disastrous. He considered the new breechloader slung over Big Bow’s shoulder, replacing the old musket the Kiowa had given away already.

  No. Quinna, Brother Eagle, was wrong. White people weren’t soft. A soft person didn’t make weapons like that new rifle. Always they had new and better weapons. The white eyes were like the river, never still, always changing. The people who made these things were not soft or stupid. Untaught in a land that was new to them, but not stupid. And what would they be when they learned to survive here? What would the pups grow into? What new kind of animal was moving toward the land of Nermenuh, the People? Who would be the victim and who the prey?

  Aside from the Kiowa, Big Bow, Wanderer was perhaps the only one in the party to ask such questions. Suddenly he felt restless and alone. He wanted to return to the wild, desolate Staked Plains where his people, the Quohadi Comanche, lived. All these trees and bushes made him feel uneasy, penned in. They screened the view and gave the enemy too many places to hide. The wind moaned through the leaves like dead souls denied paradise.

  While the two men were absorbed in their thoughts, John leaned over to whisper to Cynthia, who sat almost knee to knee with him. Eagle casually elbowed him in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him. The child gulped for air, gagged, and turned red, then purple. Cynthia feared he would die before he finally caught his breath. He didn’t try to speak again. His sister sat with her face buried in the crook of her arm, her head pressed against Wanderer’s back. But even in the darkness she could see the picture of her father hanging from the gate.

  The raid leaders had reached a decision. It was time to go before the desperate white men found a way to attack them.

  “Huh! Oti, Hunting A Wife, Paroni, Skinny And Ugly, leave that woman. Throw her away,” Buffalo Piss called to his men. One of them was spread-eagled and humping atop the motionless form under him. With his head buried in his victim’s large breast and his birdlike legs stretched along her heavy white thighs, Skinny And Ugly looked like a suckling child. Digging his bony fingers into her soft, doughy shoulders he worked on, oblivious to the horses’ hooves passing nearby and the debris scattered around him. While he held Skinny And Ugly’s piebald, Hunting A Wife tore a calico skirt into strips to hang from his own pony’s war bridle.

  “Do you want to be left here like a dog stuck in a bitch?” snarled Buffalo Piss from across the yard. He didn’t like having his decisions voted down. All his men had best steer clear of him for a while.

  With one last thrust of his pointed, naked buttocks and a grunt of pleasure Skinny And Ugly pulled himself up and tucked himself back into his breechclout. He straightened his leggings and brushed the mud from them. Then he took his patient little piebald’s reins from Hunting A Wife and checked the knot holding the battered copper kettle to the broad leather band of his surcingle. Around the yard raiders were vaulting to the backs of their war ponies and moving toward the gate to hear their instructions. There was a clatter and clank of pots, pans, and tools tied to the settlers’ horses.

  The warriors lined up in splendor. The yard was crowded with them. Strips of gingham and calico, linen and wool waved with the scalps and deer tails on bridles and shields. Sleeves had been ripped from coats to make vests. Sunbonnets bobbed in and out, their ties fluttering in the fitful breeze. Granny’s gray shawl was wrapped around a naked waist. A red union suit hung limply from a lance, the legs stirring now and then as though something still lived in them.

  Wanderer and Eagle jumped down from their horses and lashed each child’s ankles together with ropes passed under the horses’ bellies. Tied tightly in place they might survive the flight ahead. Then the men remounted and walked their skittish ponies to the rear of the war party swarming at the gate. Wanderer knew there was no need to be in front. Night, his friend, his brother, his favorite pony, could outrun them all. He and Night would both be glad to leave this place.

  Scattered through the grove of pecan trees were the men who had been in the fields when the first faint sounds of death floated over the hills. Their tanned faces and hands and faded, dust-drenched homespuns blended into the cool, thick leaf mold of the grove’s floor. Sun dapple and shadows camouflaged them even more. Iridescent blowflies, gleaming in shafts of light, buzzed around the body of a small skunk, the remains of an owl’s midnight meal. The carrion smell burned the men’s noses.

  L.D. Nixon, his wispy, blond hair sweat-plastered to his round, pink head, cried softly. Sweat and tears blurred the spectacles that perched on his small nose. His pale blue eyes were red-rimmed and raw. Stretched next to him behind the huge fallen tree trunk was Luther Plummer. His narrow shoulders shook as he swore with an imagination no one would have expected in him. He fired mechanically at anything that moved above the spiked walls or outside the gate, though the Indians were beyond his range. He continued blaspheming under his breath as he reloaded, ramming the lead balls viciously down the muzzle of his old Common.

  Whatever James Parker’s thoughts were, he kept them to himself as usual. His hooded dark blue eyes never left the fort above them, sweeping the blank wall from front to rear and back again as he searched for some sign of his family. Seth and Ashbel Bates and George White held quiet council, rifles cradled, backs hunkered against a massive gray limestone boulder. White’s deep voice rose and fell, counterpoint to the whine of the flies’ song.

  “Elder John, Silas, Ben, Samuel, and young Robert Frost are up there. Dead if they’re lucky. I saw someone running down the hill toward the river. Indians ran ‘em down, though. Looked like they brought ‘em around back the other side of the walls. I don’t know if anyone made it to the bottomlands or not. Where’s Old Man Lunn and the Faulkenberrys and Anglin? Do you think they
could hear the noise all the way to your cabins?”

  “I reckon so,” said Seth. “It ain’t much farther than the fields, and the wind’s right.”

  “David went down to the river to fish, first light. He’s probably holed up there. If anyone makes it to the river he can help them. He’s got his carbine with him,” Ashbel said.

  “The others were working on Anglin’s well. They must have circled around to the river. Looks like we’re the only ones anywhere near firing distance,” said Seth Bates.

  “How many Injuns do you suppose there are?” White asked.

  “A passel, seventy-five or a hundred at least. The Caddos are from around here, but the Kiowas and Comanches are a long way from home. There ain’t that many Injuns in this whole territory,” Seth answered.

  “Is your wife and young-uns up there, George?” asked Ashbel.

  White nodded and continued to study the fort from around the edge of the rock. “They’re all in there. All of them.” His self-control almost cracked.

  “George, James, we’ve got to do something,” Plummer called.

  “What do you suggest, Luther?” James Parker answered, but his eyes never relaxed their vigil.

  “What about the opening in the back?”

  “We planned well when we built that fort. We left no cover standing around it,” said Parker patiently. “You know we’d be porcupines before we could get around to the back. The grass isn’t as trampled there, though. If the other men are at the river, maybe they could crawl up the hill to the back door. And then what? These guns are no match for arrows at close range.”

  There was a piercing howl from the fort. The white men jumped. A mass of riders exploded from the gate and fanned out across the hill, flowing down and outward like water bursting a dam. As it spread out, the pack turned and fled in a wide circle around the grove and north, paralleling the Navasota River.

  “Don’t shoot,” White shouted. “Some of them are riding double. They must have taken captives.”