Freedom was traded for convenience. Comfort became the be-all and end-all of existence. In exchange for full bellies and warm clothes and soft beds, people were willing to give up the most priceless treasure in all existence.
Felicity thought that inexpressibly sad.
Suddenly a comment by Nate King brought Felicity’s musing to an end.
“To be a little safer, you two should cut all the grass around your cabin for forty or fifty feet. And keep it cropped. At night cover the windows with a blanket so no one can shoot you from out in the dark.”
The two men shook. “We’ll do as you suggest,” Simon said. “Don’t lose that long hair of yours to those heathens.”
The statement gave Nate pause. His friend was basically a good man at heart, but afflicted with a sentiment common among whites—namely, that the majority of Indians were sinful pagans and thus inferior. Knowing Winona had changed Simon’s thinking some, but not enough. “They probably think we’re the heathens, friend,” he bantered as he stepped into the stirrups.
Simon chortled. “But we know better, don’t we?”
Nate pursed his lips. “Most things that people do are judged right or wrong depending on the time and the place and the folks doing the judging.” Touching his hat to Felicity, he slapped his heels against the bay. It was only about ten a.m. With hard riding he could reach the Kendall place by midnight. Hard, hard riding. He regretted having to push the bay, but lives were at stake.
As he traveled, Nate was alert for sign. He saw plenty of evidence of game, but no horse tracks other than those Scott Kendall had made riding north. Paralleling them, Nate discovered that Kendall hadn’t stuck to the beaten path. Scott had made a beeline cross-country, riding as recklessly as he had on the ridge. It was amazing a mishap hadn’t happened long before then.
With so much ground to cover, Nate had a lot of time to think. He tried not to dwell on his family, home all alone, but he couldn’t help it. They were his life, his reason for drawing breath. Should anything happen to them, he would be devastated; he wouldn’t care to go on living. He tossed his head to clear it of horrid images of Winona being assaulted. He couldn’t stand to even consider the possibility. She was as much a part of him as his internal organs—and infinitely more important.
Funny thing about marriage. Wedlock took two independent people and molded them into one whole. It drew them out of their shells, made them reach out for the other, helped them learn whole new facets to being alive.
Take Winona and him. When they first met he had cared for her in a different way than he did now. Oh, he had loved her, but the love had a different texture than his mature love did—sort of like the difference between coarse burlap and fine silk.
When couples were young, much of their love had to do with how attracted they were to each other physically. Sexually. As they grew older, they became more attracted to the other’s personality, to what it was that made that person who they were. Nate’s affection for Winona had deepened to the point where he thought of her and him as two halves of the same coin. They were joined at the soul, as it were.
And Nate wouldn’t have it any other way. There was a lot about life he didn’t understand. Much that puzzled him. But one fact he knew beyond a shadow of uncertainty. Loving another person was the greatest experience anyone could have. Which was why he was so happy for his son.
Louisa genuinely cared for Zach. They were young, but Nate had known Shoshones and others who married even younger. If they would nurture their affection like a farmer nurtured seeds, the bliss they’d share would be beyond belief.
These ramblings, and others, occupied the big trapper for the rest of the day and long into the night. He left the Wards’ valley behind and climbed a series of rolling hills into the range that bordered the Kendalls’. From seven miles above sea level he gazed out over the benighted landscape, out over an inky canopy broken by rocky islands.
Sunset had brought the predators from their dens. Bears and painters, wolves and coyotes, bobcats and others roamed in search of prey. Roars, howls, yips, and screeches punctuated the night, along with the screams of creatures that were slain. The bestial chorus might scare greenhorns, but to Nate it was music as sweet as any ever composed by Europe’s masters. Countless nights he had drifted asleep serenaded by the feral song.
Nate had to be extra careful, though, and he rode with the Hawken at the ready. Wolves and coyotes posed no threat, but mountain lions and grizzlies were as common as fleas on an old hound dog, and had worse bites. Once, something heavy crashed through brush on his left. Nate brought up the rifle, but whatever it was meandered elsewhere. Another time a painter screeched, so close at hand that the bay nickered and shied.
Even though Nate was accustomed to riding at night, every now and then the murky darkness and the eerie rustling and stirrings got to him, fanning his imagination so that he thought he saw menacing hulks where there were none and heard sinister snarls when it was only the wind.
Nate consoled himself with the thought that even the Shoshones, who had dwelled in the mountains, since time out of mind, were prone to making groundless fears out of whole cloth. How else to account for some of the bizarre tales they told? Of red-headed giants that could rip a man’s head from his body? Of enormous snakes that lived deep in the bowels of the earth? Of water monsters that upended canoes and ate those who fell out? Most fascinating of all were stories told by the elders of the tribes, accounts of mysterious “little people” who lived deep in the mountains. As savage as sidewinders, the little men attacked every human they caught in their domain, slaying them with tiny arrows shot from tiny bows.
Nate branded the outrageous accounts as ridiculous. But it bothered him that some of the most respected oldsters in the Shoshone nation, men and women he’d met and who seemed as sane as he was, firmly believed the little people existed. A warrior called Two Knives had offered to take him to where the little people could be found, but one thing or another had kept Nate from taking Two Knives up on the kind offer. Maybe one day soon Nate would. He’d take Zach along, perhaps Lou, too, and use it as an excuse to become better acquainted with her. What harm could it do? There wasn’t any danger. The little people were a figment of Shoshone imagination, concocted long ago around campfires by ancestors afraid to leave the safety of the firelight for the ominous gloom beyond.
Along toward midnight Nate descended to a spine above the valley the Kendalls called home. Their cabin was situated in a stand of aspens in the middle, beside a spring. Scott had picked wisely. His family had ample water and forage, the trees sheltering them from summer sun and wintry winds.
Nate drew rein to listen. A deathly silence blanketed the valley, unnaturally so since all around the wilderness was alive with sounds and furtive movement. No lantern light shone amid the trees, which was to be expected since the Kendalls normally turned in early, by ten at the very latest.
At a walk, Nate continued. The dull clomp of the bay’s hooves seemed louder than they actually were. He had the feeling unseen eyes were upon him but shrugged it off. His nerves were acting up, was all.
High grass swayed in the stiff breeze, like waves on the ocean. Nate held the Hawken at chest height, his spine rigid, fully alert. When a long, sinuous shape parted the blades on his right, he swung around and fixed a hasty bead. But the snaked recoiled and glided elsewhere.
The aspens’ leaves shimmered like so many bees’ wings, glistening palely in the starlight. Nate was sorry the moon wasn’t out. The extra light would help. He stopped again to probe the stand, distinguishing the black outline of the cabin deep in among the slender boles.
Nothing stirred, not even in the horse pen that flanked the rear of the structure. And as Nate recalled, Scott Kendall had a mule that brayed at the slightest of alien sounds.
At close quarters pistols were better than a rifle. Slinging the Hawken, Nate palmed a flintlock, thumbing back the hammer on the .55-caliber smoothbore. A nudge of his knees sent the bay forw
ard. It shared his wariness and advanced slowly, ears erect, nostrils flaring.
The cabin might as well have been a mausoleum for all the signs of life. Nate reined up twenty feet out, slid quietly down, and cat-footed to the corral. As he’d suspected, all the animals were gone. Four horses and the mule.
His back to the wall, Nate edged toward the front corner. A dry leaf crunched underfoot and he froze, awaiting an outcry or a shot. When neither materialized, he moved on. A peek showed no one was in front. Nate sidled to the window. A burlap cover was drawn over it, preventing him from peering within. Ducking, he slid past, unfurled, and sidestepped to the jamb.
The door was open. Not a crack, as it would be to let in fresh air, but standing wide enough for him to enter. It verified the Kendalls weren’t home. Lisa would never be so careless.
Nate scanned the interior. Immediately, to forestall being shot, he jerked back. Once again no shots rang out. Sucking in a deep breath, Nate drew his other pistol, then sprang inside, to the right of the doorway. He had a jumbled impression of objects being where they shouldn’t, of a table that was supposed to be on the left now in the middle of the room, and of a chest of drawers that had been moved.
Waiting a full minute to confirm he was alone before he moved, Nate straightened and walked to the west window. As he recollected, the Kendalls kept a lantern on a peg close by. It wasn’t there.
Nate gingerly felt his way to the fireplace. The wood had long since gone cold. Fishing his fire steel and flint from his possibles bag, he lit a small fire that soon blazed high. After adding more logs from the bin, he rose and turned.
His first impression had been all wrong. The furniture hadn’t been moved around. It had been thrown every which way. The place was a shambles, everything overturned or upended, torn clothes and broken articles lying willy-nilly. Silverware relatives had sent clear from Massachusetts, tools Scott had used in constructing the cabin, a small crib for Vail Marie’s doll, everything and anything had been scattered or shattered or both.
Nate was heartbroken. He had hoped against hope that this wasn’t what he would find. He’d prayed the woman and the girl were all right, that when he got there they would greet him as they always did, that there was some other reason for Scott’s mad ride other than the marauding war party. Now those hopes were smashed to bits.
Nate moved to the tiny crib. Someone had stomped it to pieces and ripped off the bright cloth Lisa had trimmed it with. Scouring the room for clues to the fate of mother and daughter, Nate noticed the bedroom door ajar. Scott had insisted on a separate room for the adults so they would have some privacy. Vail Marie slept in a recessed nook just past the fireplace.
Fearing what lay beyond, Nate leveled a pistol and crept toward it. A skittering sound brought him up short. A shadow appeared, low down to the floor, and he trained the flintlock on it. He was a hair’s width from squeezing the trigger when the source of the shadow shuffled into the light, its small black nose and whiskers twitching.
“What the dickens are you doing in here?” Nate demanded.
The raccoon chittered as if irate at the intrusion, then as nonchalantly as could be waltzed out into the night.
Chuckling, Nate pushed open the bedroom door. His mirth was short-lived. A whirlwind had struck, ripping and shredding and smashing every item. Knives had reduced the bedding to ribbons. An artist’s rendering of Lisa’s parents had been hacked apart. Elk antlers Scott had hung above the headboard had been torn off.
The only encouraging sign was that so far Nate had not seen any trace of blood. He backed out, and stiffened.
The bay had whinnied.
Nate ran to the front door, seeking the cause. Crashing tree limbs, crackling brush, and a wild cry spun him to the left just as a huge form erupted from the vegetation almost on top of him. Before he could snap off a shot, a man sprang from a horse straight at him.
Six
Nate King’s reflexes had been honed to the sharpness of a sword’s edge by his years in the wilderness. Life in the wild was like a whetstone, sharpening instincts, toning muscles, steeling sinews. The demands of day-to-day living required that those who wanted to survive must adapt. Those who didn’t never lived long.
Nate had come to think of it as “survival of the quickest.” It wasn’t how strong a person or an animal was that mattered, or how intelligent, or how high they could fly or how far they could bound in a single leap. In life-and-death situations, at moments when life was in peril, what counted most was how quick they were.
Once, several greenhorns visited the King cabin. During the course of a friendly jawing session the subject of staying alive came up. Nate mentioned his belief that quickness was essential, and they had pressed him with questions. A lanky fellow from Ohio wanted to know the difference between being quick and being fast. Nate responded that quickness had more to do with speed, while being fast merely meant that a person was fleet of foot.
The pilgrim still hadn’t understood. So Nate produced a coin and put it in the palm of his hand. He’d told the man to snatch it from him, which the man tried doing several times and couldn’t. “You’re not very quick,” Nate tactfully commented.
“What a silly test. No one could do that. I’d like to see you try.” The greenhorn had asked for the coin and held it in his own palm. “Any time you’re ready,” he’d said with a smirk.
The coin was in Nate’s hand before the man finished speaking. The three men had been greatly impressed, but to Nate it was a child’s game, a parlor trick. Out in the wild a man had to be that quick, and quicker.
As the figure on the horse flew at him, Nate demonstrated how superbly quick he really was. He leaped backward, into the cabin, before the figure could reach him. The Hawken was level and cocked, his trigger finger curled around the trigger, when the unkempt, wild-eyed rider burst in after him.
Nate had the man dead to rights and could have blown a hole in him the size of a melon. But he didn’t fire. Instead he gawked in amazement, blurting out, “Scott? Is that really you?”
Scott Kendall was disheveled, his torn buckskin shirt hanging out, his ripped pants still caked with dirt and grime from his tumble into the talus. The nasty gash on his head wasn’t bleeding, but fresh small cuts on his face and neck were. His eyes were saucers, dilated and darting back and forth, his mouth twitching uncontrollably. In his brawny hands was his rifle, which he swung from side to side as if seeking enemies to slay. “Where are they?” he roared. “Lisa! Vail Marie!”
“Scott—” Nate said, letting the Hawken’s muzzle dip. The other mountain man seemed not to hear. Brushing past Nate as if he weren’t there, Scott ran about the room like a soul possessed, throwing furniture, looking into cabinets and cupboards, all the while raving, “Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?” Suddenly he ran into the. bedroom. There was more crashing and wailing, then he emerged, more haggard than ever. Legs wobbly, he stumbled as if drunk and mewed like a lost kitten, “They’re gone! Oh God, they’re still gone!”
“Scott?” Nate said again.
Kendall blinked, the wildness fading from his gaze. “Nate? Is that you? What are you doing—” Scott pressed a hand to his brow. “Oh. Now I remember.”
Picking up an overturned chair, Nate placed it beside his friend. “Here. Take a seat. I’ll fetch you some water from the spring.”
“No. I don’t need any. I’m fine. Truly fine.” Scott eased down, his appearance belying the claim. His features were chalky white, and he poured sweat. His forearms trembled so badly, he had to grip his legs to steady them. Tears filled his eyes as he surveyed the wreckage. “I was hoping they’d returned. That somehow they’d gotten away and made it here on their own. We have to go after them! Now! Before it’s too late.”
“First things first,” Nate responded, taking Kendall’s rifle and leaning it against the wall. “How did you recover so soon? And why in the world did Winona let you come after me?”
Scott averted his face. “She didn’t, ex
actly.” He licked his lips. “A couple of hours after you’d left, I came to. Winona told me you were on your way here. I begged her to let me go after you, but she wouldn’t. She claimed I was too weak.”
“You should have listened to her.”
“Easy for you to say. We both know what you would’ve done if it was your wife and child.” Scott looked up, and Nate saw a tear trickling down his cheek. “I bided my time until Winona and Zach and everyone had turned in. Then I grabbed my clothes and my possibles and snuck out. My sorrel was plumb worn to a frazzle, so I borrowed that buckskin of yours, the one you usually use as a pack animal.” He grew sheepish. “Hope you won’t hold it against me. It’s not as if I meant to steal it.”
“You should have stayed in bed,” Nate reiterated. What had been done couldn’t be undone. Now the question was: What to do next? “How are you feeling? God’s honest truth, mind you.”
Scott ran a hand through his tousled hair. “A mite puny, I’m ashamed to admit. Tired. Hungry enough to eat a whole buffalo. And there’s a blacksmith in my noggin, pounding on an anvil.” A lopsided grin curled his mouth. “Other than that, this coon is fit as a fiddle. We can head out right this minute.”
“Like hell.” Nate had already come to a decision. “We’ll rest up here until first light. You’re to get some sleep. If you don’t, we’re not going anywhere.”
“But—” Scott began, and realized it would be useless to argue. “I suppose a few hours’ sleep can’t hurt. But we light out at dawn, and we don’t slack off until my wife and daughter are in my arms again.”
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