A Place Called Home

by Elizabeth Grayson

  They couldn't stay crouched here in the high grass. Even tucked up in the shadow of the trees, Livi knew they were vulnerable. There were others to think about, too. Tad and Eustace had to be found and warned of the danger. All of them need to barricade themselves inside the cabin to have any kind of chance of surviving.

  Livi motioned Cissy to silence and took her hand. In a crouch, they stole toward the cabin. They moved slowly, clumsily, knowing one footfall or one flash of movement could betray them to the Indians.

  They crept to the notch at the end of the fence where there was a modicum of safety. The cabin stood on the far side of the creek, across what seemed like acres of open ground.

  Around them, the trees creaked in the wind. The sky loomed dark and threatening. Perhaps the Indians would leave if it began to rain. Perhaps, she thought, if they stayed where they were for just a little while...

  Then Tad appeared at the cabin door. "Ma!" he yelled. "Ma! Where are you, Ma? There are Indians!"

  Livi knew they couldn't wait a moment longer.

  Grabbing Cissy's wrist, she broke for the house. Her gait was lumbering, and the little girl managed to keep up. As they ran, a whoop erupted from the far side of the field. A brave lit out after them. In the doorway, Tad swung his rifle to his shoulder and drew a bead.

  Livi felt the report of the rifle break over her. She didn't look to see if Tad's aim was true. She didn't slow when the Indians' rifles barked in answer. She didn't falter when the water in the creek spattered as they crossed the bridge.

  Livi charged the last twenty yards in a hail of gunfire. Dirt erupted around them. As she rushed her daughter up the steps, a ball slammed into the cabin right above her head. Once they were inside, Tad banged the door closed behind her and jammed the bolt in place.

  Panting, Livi sagged onto one of the puncheon benches. Her heart was slamming against her ribs. She couldn't seem to suck air enough into her lungs. The baby kicked hard, as if he were none too happy with her recent activities, either.

  Then abruptly Livi laughed—breathless with relief. For the moment, her family was safe. For the moment, they were here together.

  Then slowly she raised her head. "Where's Eustace?"

  Tad looked up from reloading his rifle. "I never found him. He didn't come back from their cabin."

  Mindful of what Cissy had heard and seen, Livi nodded. "I found Violet out in the cornfield."

  Tad's face shaded grimmer. He pulled the plug from one of the loopholes in the front wall of the cabin and peeked outside. "Looks like they're gathering on the far side of the creek."

  Livi hauled herself to her feet to check the loopholes around back. Directly in her line of sight, one of the pigs sprawled in a pool of blood. There were chicken feathers everywhere, and she couldn't help wondering how the rest of the animals had fared.

  Abruptly Tad fired the second rifle, sending a spiral of acrid smoke twisting toward the rafters. Livi went to peer out the loophole beside him.

  "What the hell are they doing out there?" he whispered.

  There were not quite a dozen braves gathered at the far end of the bridge. They clearly intended to make some kind of assault.

  Livi tried to think how the two of them could fend off a whole band of Indians. They had a pistol and two rifles, a keg of powder, and plenty of shot. They had a fresh bucket of water and some food Anne Logan had packed up for them.

  They had a chance. If the Indians didn't stay too long, if they didn't attack from all sides at once, if they didn't decide to burn the cabin.

  If someone came to their rescue. Which seemed about as likely as pole beans sprouting roses.

  The room went dimmer as the clouds thickened overhead. The air clung close and oppressive. Thunder rumbled off to the west.

  "Will the Indians go home if it rains?" Cissy asked, rolling tear-wet eyes toward the roof.

  "We can hope for that, Sugar," Livi said. "Now, come give me some help with this."

  Cissy wiped her face on the hem of her skirt and went to where her mother was sitting.

  "See these leather patches?" She handed her a bundle of small, roughly cut squares. "I'd like you to lay them all out in rows here on the table." She both needed something to keep her daughter occupied and allow them to reload quickly. "Then I want you to put a ball on every one. Can you do that?"

  Cissy nodded and set to work. Livi bent to refill their powder horns while Tad kept watch.

  It had grown so dark in the cabin they could barely see. Still, they prepared and waited.

  "Ma?" Tad's voice was shaking when he called to her a few minutes later. "Ma, I think they're up to something."

  When Livi put her eye to the loophole, the light outside was gray and thin. Clouds shivered bright and dark. The air crackled with the threat of the coming storm. Thought she was running with sweat, Livi shivered with the threat of the coming attack.

  On the far side of the bridge, the Indians had begun to congregate around three braves who were hunched over something on the ground.

  "Can you see, Ma?"

  "Not nearly well enough."

  Livi fought to hold herself together and prayed she was wrong about what the Indians were doing. Shreds of diaphanous white began to dance upward, turning gossamer as they rose and dispersed in the whipping wind. Terror all but stopped Livi's heart as she saw firelight flicker across the Indians' faces.

  "Oh, Tad!" She turned to her son and saw he knew what was about to happen. "They mean to burn us out!"

  * * *

  Reid smelled smoke in the gusting wind, tasted it acrid and raw deep in his throat. He'd come upon burned-out homesteads more times than he wanted to remember and knew what it meant. He'd just never known the families' names.

  Fear for Livi and the children grabbed him—so hard he could barely breathe—with a force that jolted him to his fingertips. Reid forged ahead, needing to see what had befallen the people he'd vowed to protect.

  Thunder rumbled overhead as he and the other men who had ridden from Logan's Station crested the rise. Spears of fire whipped skyward from the blaze at the far side of the bridge. Flames shot along the perimeter of the nearest cornfield. Through swirls of smoke, Reid could see Indians with torches ablaze fanning out to touch off the other fields.

  His gaze swung to the cabin on the rise. A fire arrow flared beneath the roof's deep overhang, sending tendrils of yellow dancing along the eaves. Another had found purchase in the breezeway, so flickers of orange crackled up the walls. A third arrow sparked and fluttered to the left of the steps.

  There was no sign of Livi and the children.

  From behind him he heard men from the station curse and tasted their oaths in his own mouth. Sour and metallic. Bitter and ineffectual.

  The need to spill the raiders' blood suffused him. "Ready?" Reid asked and raised his rifle. Howling with rage, he led the charge down the rise and into the hollow. He thundered past the yellow blur of the first blazing cornfield, past the bonfire that flashed orange in the semi-dark.

  He fired as he rode; an Indian went down. He jerked his horse around. Swinging his rifle like a club, he battered another aside. He slammed a third with a backhanded jab.

  A brave vaulted up onto the back of his horse and grabbed Campbell from behind. He felt the man's hands tighten on his arms, felt the drag of the Indian's weight and struggled to reach his saddle pistol. His hand closed around the stock and Reid turned, jamming the barrel against the warrior's chest. He fired, and the brave's hands and body dropped away.

  Around Campbell, other men from the station fought hand to hand. One chased down a man with a torch. Another wrestled an archer to the earth. Dark figures writhed and merged in the firelight. Guns boomed. The air filled with shouts of fury, sounds of fury and death.

  Reid turned to look toward the cabin. Fire had clawed its way toward the peak of the roof. Flames were leaping high, blocking the cabin door.

  He jumped from his horse and raced up the rise. Reid didn't delude himse
lf. He couldn't put out the fire on his own. He couldn't salvage anything inside. The cabin he and David had built was lost. The homestead and the dream were gone forever. But none of that mattered.

  Reid didn't know where Livi and the children were. He wasn't sure if they were dead or alive. All he knew was that he had to find them.

  As he approached the cabin, an Indian intercepted him, with a torch in his hand.

  "Ravens Flight." The man addressed him in Shawnee. "I told them this cabin was yours. I told them it was your woman and children we'd trapped inside."

  Reid couldn't help glancing to where the roof of the cabin had begun to blaze.

  "They are burning inside, Ravens Flight," the Indian taunted. "Can you hear them screaming?"

  Reid threw himself at the Indian.

  The brave swung the blazing torch. As it whooshed past his face and chest, Campbell stumbled back. The brightness all but blinded him.

  When the Indian swung torch again, Reid reached past the flames. Somewhere in the darkness beyond he grabbed the Indian's forearm. The torch swung wildly between them. Flames seared Reid's cheek, and he could smell the acrid bite of his singed hair. Still gripping the Indian's arm, he rammed his shoulder into the man's chest and their two bodies crashed together.

  Thunder detonated and lightning tore across the sky as they tumbled to the earth, embers from the torch bursting around them. Sparks flared high, biting into Campbell's forearm, singeing his shirt at the shoulder.

  He gripped the other man's wrist and slammed his arm into the earth. The torch wavered, shuddered and rolled away. Deprived of his weapon, the Indian drove his elbow up hard against Reid's ribs. As Campbell fought for breath, the Indian squirmed away.

  Both men scrambled to their feet with knives in their hands. They circled slowly, shoulders hunched and arms extended. Each probed the other's weakness, seeking a way past the other's defense. Panting, they hovered, tingling anticipating the moment of contact.

  At last the warrior lunged, testing his advantage. He forced Reid back and Campbell gave ground. The Indian stepped closer, pressing hard. His knife snagged the flesh at Campbell's shoulder and sliced across his chest. Blood rose hot in the open wound.

  Reid jerked his blade upward as he twisted away. When the Indian pressed his advantage, Campbell turned and drove his shoulder beneath the Shawnee's guard. Putting everything he had into the thrust, he buried his knife in the Indian's belly. The brave crashed backward, grabbing Campbell's shirtfront as he fell, dragging Reid down onto his knees.

  The man gripped harder as life seeped from those cold, dark eyes.

  "Your family is dead," he whispered with his last breath. "When you find them in the ashes, Ravens Flight, there will be nothing left but their bones."

  Sure the words were true, Reid raised his head and bellowed a cry that quivered with both victory and defeat. It echoed fury and anguish, unbearable grief.

  As if he'd called it down on all their heads, the clouds ripped open. From high above the rain poured out as if a dam had broken, battering Reid, the dead Indian, and the bloody earth.

  A blaze of purple light screamed across the sky. In the pulsing afterimage, Reid saw what this little valley might have become—the homestead David longed for, the place of peace and friendship Reid had always hoped to find. In his head he saw David and Livi with their arms entwined, imagined Tad and Cissy as they might have been if they had lived to have lives and families of their own. He howled again for all he'd lost.

  The fierce drumming of the rain against him finally purged the savagery, diluted the miasma of carnage and death. He retrieved and sheathed his knife, then stumbled to his feet. He dashed the water from his eyes and turned to where the remains of the cabin should have stood.

  Instead the building was scarred but intact. The breezeway steamed as the rain washed in. The roof on Livi's end of the house was smoldering, and the door was dark with smoke.

  Then as he watched, that door slowly opened. A woman came out onto the steps and stood with her face turned to the sky.

  Relief jarred through him. Livi! Oh, God, Livi!

  He rushed the rest of the way up the rise, needing to grab her and hold her to be sure she was real. They came together at the bottom of the steps. He closed his hands around her shoulders, seeking out the solidity, the warmth, the life in her. He slid his palms down the length of her back.

  "Livi," he whispered.

  They stood with the rain running in rivulets down their faces, through their hair.

  "How did you know to come?" she asked, her voice raw from breathing smoke.

  "When you weren't at the station, I knew," he answered. "I knew I had to get here as soon as I could."

  He pulled her closer, smoothed back her hair. "Tad and Cissy? Are they safe?"

  "They're under the house. We dug some rocks out of the wall of the turnip hole. Tad and Cissy squeezed through, but I was too big. They're supposed to stay down there until I say it's all right, or tell them to crawl out from under the cabin and run for the ridge."

  It was a resourceful plan, as good as any Reid himself could have devised.

  "Is it all right?" Livi asked above the groans of thunder and the hiss of rain. "Are the Indians gone?"

  Reid turned to look. The fields also seemed to have been spared the worst of the destruction. Across the creek, the men from Logan's Station were rounding up the wounded Indians and stacking the dead. The years of war had taught them well.

  Big blond William Harris came slogging across the yard. "The savages took heavy losses. There are two wounded and eight dead, counting that one over there," he said with a jerk of his thumb. "Jim Langdon took a ball in the arm. Frank Marshall ended up on the wrong end of an arrow, but he'll be all right. And there's a Negro woman, dead off there in the field."

  "Violet." Livi's voice wavered as she spoke. "And we haven't seen Eustace since he went up the ridge to check their cabin."

  "I'll have someone look for him," Harris offered. "And your young ones, Mrs. Talbot?"

  "They're under the house."

  "As good a place for them as any."

  "Then carry on," Reid acknowledged. "We'll be leaving as soon as we can bury Violet Hadley."

  "I'll put someone to digging the grave."

  "Thank you, Mr. Harris," Livi murmured as the big man took his leave.

  Standing with Livi in the rain and knowing the children were safe should have settled Reid, eased the gnawing in his gut. Instead, he was quivering inside, shaken in a way he'd never been before.

  Anger ripped up his spine and he turned it on Livi. "Jesus, woman! Couldn't you have waited at the station until I got back? Instead you risked everyone by coming here!"

  "But Phillip Wyant said—" Livi defended herself, struggling to twist out of his hold.

  "It doesn't matter what Wyant said," he shouted at her. "You should have stayed put. You and the children were safe at Logan's Station. You had food and protection and a place to sleep. While you were there I didn't have to wonder..."

  A stab of helpless fury turned him inside out. He wasn't sure if he wanted to hang on to Livi and thank God she and the children were safe, or shake her until her teeth rattled.

  Tad spared him the decision.

  "Ma? Is it all right, Ma?" the boy asked, peering at them through the half-open cabin door. He was carrying Cissy and, even from this distance, Reid could see her arms were twined around Tad's neck like bindweed.

  Livi pulled out of Reid's grasp before she answered. "It's as all right as it's going to be for a while. We're going back to Logan's Station."

  Chapter 17

  Livi needed Reid. As much as she hated to admit it, as much as it rankled her to ask him so much as the time of day, Livi was turning Logan's Station upside down in search of him. She didn't seem to have another choice.

  It had been three days since they'd returned to the fort, three days since she'd slept. She'd spent those days coddling her children. Livi had indulged both her ne
ed to hold her baby girl and Cissy's need to be held. She had talked to her and read to her and petted her, hoping that somehow the tenderness and the stories and the affection might dim the memory of what Cissy had heard and seen at the cabin.

  She spent time with Tad, conveying—with what she hoped was appropriate subtlety—her pride in him. Tad was thirteen and a boy to boot, so she hadn't been able to tell him outright how brave she thought he'd been, how clever and resourceful. She'd had to couch her praise in gruff half-compliments. She'd had to pat his shoulder instead of holding him the way she wanted to.

  She spent the nights sitting with Eustace. The men had found him tortured and half dead on the floor of the cabin on the ridge. It was a wonder he'd survived the journey to the station, a miracle he was holding his own against the fever and his injuries.

  As she'd bathed him and fed him and crooned to him, Livi came to believe that Eustace's recovery had less to do with his injuries and more with accepting Violet's death. In the depths of those black eyes she could see the agony of knowing his wife was gone, of realizing that the future he'd struggled to make for both of them was irretrievably lost.

  Livi understood that. She knew how hollow life could be when you'd lost the core of your world, when you'd forfeited the other half of yourself. Livi still woke up some mornings aching for David and drifted to sleep feeling empty inside.

  Yet she'd lived long enough without him to know that somehow you survived. Somehow you came to believe that a new life lay ahead. Somehow you realized that though you'd never forget how much you'd lost, it stopped hurting so much to remember.

  Just as surely as Livi knew all that, she knew Eustace wouldn't believe her. His loss of Violet was fresh and breathless and unbearable. All Livi could do for him was see that he received the care he needed and hope that he found the courage to face the rest of his days without the woman he loved.

  Livi was nearly as haunted by Violet's death as Eustace was. It seemed impossible that in these few short months she had amassed so many memories. Memories of Violet's calm, smoky voice, of her sharp-edged wisdom, of her initiative and her willingness to work. Livi hadn't realized how much that wisp of a woman had lightened her load. Or how much she would miss her. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Violet's face. Every time Livi tried to sleep, the horror of Violet's death crept into her dreams.