The Soldier's Wife

by Cheryl Reavis

  For the briefest of moments, she actually thought he might intervene, but the moment passed. One of the men came out of the cabin carrying the remaining box of Royal Doulton china. He threw it into the yard, causing it to bounce once, then tip over on its side, the shattered pieces spilling out on the ground. But there wasn’t enough breakage to suit him. He dumped what was left of the china out and ground the remaining pieces under his boot.

  Amity was crying hard now. Beatrice came running and hid her face against Sayer’s shoulder.

  “Halbert—!” Sayer cried, trying again. “Make him stop! Don’t let him hurt her!”

  “Don’t go wasting your breath, Sayer,” Rorie said. She pointed her finger in Halbert’s direction. “Even I never thought you’d sink this low, Halbert Garth. It’s a good thing for you your brother and Thomas Henry are in their graves.”

  “Where is he, old woman!” Halbert yelled. “We mean to find him!”

  “If I knowed, I wouldn’t tell you,” Rorie said, never taking her eyes off him.

  Amity gave another long piercing scream as the man holding her swung her around and tucked her under his arm, her head dangling toward the ground. “You got a well?” he asked. “Maybe you’d like to see her go down it headfir—”

  The man abruptly stopped talking at the same moment Sayer heard the report from the musket. His left knee buckled, spurting blood, and he collapsed on the ground, dropping Amity hard on the way down. She scrambled up, and ran to Sayer, screaming again. Sayer had no idea where the shot had come from, and neither did Halbert and the others. Another shot came. This time the man who had thrown the box of china fell, his wound midthigh. The remaining men looked around in panic, and in the chaos that followed, Sayer began pulling the girls away toward the woods.

  But the well-dressed man suddenly spurred his horse forward and cut off Sayer’s escape. He jumped to the ground and grabbed her around the neck, pressing the barrel of his revolver hard against her right temple.

  “Go,” she whispered to the panicked girls. “Go to Rorie. Now! Go!”

  They both ran in Rorie’s direction.

  “You see this?” he yelled loudly, holding Sayer so tightly she could barely breathe. He kept moving both of them around, trying to find something in the woods that would tell him where the man with the musket was hiding. “She’s dead where she stands if you don’t surrender now!”

  Sayer was off balance, and it was all she could do to stay on her feet. She couldn’t see Rorie and the girls now—she could only see straight ahead into the dark depths of the woods, apparently where the man holding her had decided the two shots had come from. Halbert moved into her line of vision. He was looking past her, where she thought Beatrice and Amity must be. Were they all right? She couldn’t turn her head enough to tell.

  “‘Trust in the Lord with all thine heart...’” she whispered, and the man laughed.

  “She’s praying!” the well-dressed man yelled. “What do you think of that! She knows I mean it!”

  There was a long moment of silence. Sayer could hear nothing but the girls crying and the groans of the two wounded men on the ground.

  “‘...and lean not unto thine own understanding...be not afraid of sudden fear, neither of the desolation of the wicked, when it cometh...’”

  “Shut up!” he hissed against her ear.

  “I believe—your desolation is—at hand, sir,” Sayer struggled to say as his grip on her tightened. He pressed the gun harder against her temple. “Halbert Garth will look out—for himself, no matter—what.”

  “Call Murphy in,” the man said. “Call him in now!”

  “No,” Sayer said.

  “Call him in!”

  “No!”

  “I want your word you won’t hurt her!” Jeremiah yelled from somewhere off to the left. “Not Sayer, and not the girls, or Mrs. Conley.”

  The man kept trying to locate where the voice was coming from and dragging Sayer with him.

  “Don’t, Jeremiah!” she cried.

  “Shut up!” Vance said. “You have my word!”

  “I don’t want your word, Vance! I want Halbert’s. Halbert, you have the most to lose here. Willard’s been of a mind to hang you for some time, I believe. It would be better for you if you didn’t give him a reason. I want you to swear that you won’t let any harm come to any of them!”

  “All right!” Halbert said after a moment. He looked in Farrell Vance’s direction, whether in defiance or collusion, she couldn’t tell. “I swear!”

  Sayer could see Jeremiah now. He was coming through the trees, and he was holding a musket over his head. She thought his limp was less pronounced, but it was still there.

  It was all Rorie could do to keep Beatrice and Amity from running to him.

  “Well, well, if it ain’t Jack Murphy,” Halbert said. “Good to see you again, Jack. Wish I would have known who you was the other day when I was up here. It would have saved me a lot of aggravation—and I would have been rich a lot sooner.”

  “Sorry about that, Halbert,” Jeremiah said. “You can forget about being rich, though. Whatever Farrell Vance said he’d give you to bring him up here, he’s not going to do it, are you, Farrell? He’s too much in the habit of getting things on the cheap and lining his own pockets with somebody else’s money. I doubt if any of you gets paid.”

  Sayer kept looking at Jeremiah. She didn’t understand why Halbert was calling him “Jack,” but she understood the look Jeremiah gave her.

  Trust me...

  “Get him,” Vance said to his men. “Tie him up. Bring me a rope.”

  “You going to hang me right here, Farrell? No trip to the magistrate in Jefferson? No due process?” Jeremiah asked, and Sayer thought his nonchalant tone was driving the man deeper and deeper into a rage. She could feel him trembling with it.

  “Do I at least get to know what I’m being hanged for?”

  “Halbert,” Sayer said, twisting in Farrell Vance’s grasp to see where he was. “Don’t let him kill him! Please!”

  “You all that worried about your step-husband, Sayer?” Halbert said. “The way I hear it, he was a busy man before he ever got here. The story I could tell you right now.”

  Sayer could feel Vance react to Halbert’s remark. Apparently whatever Halbert thought he knew hadn’t come from the man who held a gun to her head.

  “I already know the story, Halbert. I’m more worried you’ll have the blood of an innocent man on your hands,” she said, and he laughed.

  “Well, that’s right nice of you, Sayer, but I don’t reckon I need you to save me.”

  “Do you need me to get off this land?”

  “Sayer!” Jeremiah called just as one of Halbert’s men reached him. The man grabbed the musket out of Jeremiah’s hands, then struck him hard with the butt end. Sayer cried out as he kicked Jeremiah forward so that he was lying facedown on the ground. He tied Jeremiah’s hands behind his back, then dragged him the rest of the way into the yard. She could only watch as Jeremiah struggled again and again to get up.

  “Halbert!” Sayer cried. “This man has no authority here. Make him stop if you want your birthright!”

  “Be quiet!” Farrell Vance said, tightening his hold around her neck again.

  “What are you talking about, Sayer?” Halbert asked in spite of Vance’s command.

  But Sayer couldn’t answer him. She couldn’t breathe; her knees suddenly buckled and she slipped from Farrell Vance’s grasp. She sat hunched over on the ground at his feet, struggling to breathe.

  Vance tried to make her stand up again.

  “Leave her be!” Halbert said sharply, his revolver pointed at Vance’s head. Vance took a step backward.

  “If you think you can bring that gun of yourn up faster than I can pull this here trigger, go ahead,�
� Halbert said. “Jim! Get that gun of his!”

  The man called Jim, the one who had wanted the half-smoked cigar, ran up behind Vance with his gun drawn and jerked the revolver out of his hand.

  “Go on,” Halbert said to Sayer. “I’m listening.” But Sayer was trying to see Jeremiah. He had stopped trying to get up. She got to her knees and would have made a run to get to him if Halbert hadn’t grabbed her back.

  “You leave him be,” Halbert said. “I want to hear what your offer is.”

  “Don’t let him kill Jeremiah,” she said, causing Vance to make a noise of disgust.

  “He is mine,” Vance cried.

  “Halbert,” Sayer said urgently, looking into his eyes for some small sign of his humanity. “Let him go free—unharmed. If you do, I’ll take the girls and leave here. There’ll be no blood on your hands. You can say whatever you want to say to explain our absence, and I won’t be here to interfere with anything you do. You’ll be free to offer whatever legal claims you want to about Thomas Henry’s land—”

  “It’s my land!”

  “Not if I don’t get out of the way,” Sayer said. “You’ve been too open about trying to take it. If anything happens to me, you won’t get anything. Listen to me. Please.”

  She looked over her shoulder once, trying to see Jeremiah before she began to plead for his life in earnest.

  * * *

  Jeremiah had to work hard to get upright. His head was still pounding from the blow from the musket butt, and he was having difficulty keeping his vision focused. He didn’t think Sayer was hurt, but her being dragged around by the likes of Farrell Vance and his men was nearly more than he could bear. Even looking at her from this distance, he could tell she was determined—he had seen that look of determination before. He could only hear a word now and then, and he had no idea what she was doing. Whatever it was, she had apparently managed to get Vance at a disadvantage—something for which she would pay if the tables turned again.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of Rorie. She’d left the girls sitting on the ground, alone and afraid near where the broken china was scattered about, and she was coming in his direction. The girls were clinging to each other for comfort and crying still.

  Rorie hobbled over to the second man Jeremiah had wounded as if she had no idea she was putting her very life in danger by doing so, completely ignoring the numerous commands for her to stay where she was.

  “I’m an old widder woman,” she said without stopping. “And I ain’t armed. I’m going to see how bad these two men is hurt—do something for them if I can—if one of you don’t put a hole in me first. It’s my Christian duty. Not that any of you would know anything about that.”

  “Rorie,” he said under his breath, alarmed by her defiance and expecting one of Vance’s men to oblige her at any second. But they didn’t, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Rorie said a few words to the nearest wounded man, looked at the place where Jeremiah had shot him, and then hobbled in Jeremiah’s direction, stopping by the younger of the two men, who was still writhing on the ground.

  “If you’re wanting to bleed to death, then don’t let me look at it,” Rorie said to him. Surprisingly, she struggled with her painful knees and with gravity until she managed to sit down on the ground beside him. Clearly it was a painful maneuver; she had to rest for a moment before she continued.

  “Well, get your hands out of the way,” she said to the wounded man—who was not much more than a boy, Jeremiah suddenly realized. He glanced in Sayer’s direction. She was still talking to Halbert.

  “Rorie, what is she doing?” he asked as loudly as he dared.

  Rorie stuck her finger in the blood-soaked hole the minié ball had made in the young man’s trousers and ripped the fabric apart, making him cry out as the effort it took to make the tear heightened his pain.

  “I reckon she’s trying to save your life,” she said, concentrating on what she was doing. “Whatever it is, you need to stay out of it.”

  “Rorie—”

  “You’re a sight worse off than your friend over there,” Rorie said loudly to the wounded young man, clearly trying to hide the fact that she and Jeremiah were having a conversation.

  “He ain’t no friend of mine,” the young man snapped.

  “You two just ride around together hurting women and young-uns and doing murder if somebody tells you to, is that it? I don’t know about you, but I’m twice glad your mama ain’t here to see this.”

  “You don’t know nothing about my mama, old woman.”

  “Don’t be telling me what I know and don’t know, boy. I knowed her for a long time, and you got her eyes. I ain’t never seen nobody else in this world with eyes like hers except you and your brother and your sister. I know what she was accused of. I know they locked her up. I know what happened to her three young-uns because of it. And I know it was all because of a lying, black-hearted man just like that one standing over yonder, the one you think is going to pay you for doing all this. Your mama, she was innocent. Did you know that? No. You never bothered to find out, did you? You was too busy wasting your life when you could have been giving her some joy in this world.”

  He didn’t say anything. He was very pale now and seemed to be having trouble keeping his eyes open.

  “Weren’t nobody to ask,” he said after a moment.

  “Could have asked me,” Rorie said. She tore the bottom of his trouser leg off and stuffed it hard against the still-seeping hole above his knee. “The minie ball didn’t go all the way through—I can feel it just under the skin. You keep that knee still. The more you bend it, the more it’ll bleed. If me holding the blood in don’t make it stop, you’ll be needing to get that hole packed with spiderwebs lest you bleed to death,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “He did this!” he cried, glaring at Jeremiah.

  “Well, I reckon if he’d wanted you dead, you’d be dead, so you might want to think on that. And while you’re at it, if I was you, I’d think about finding a better class of good-for-nothings to run with. When they go, they ain’t taking you with them. I reckon you know that.”

  Jeremiah saw the panic in the young man’s eyes.

  “You got to find a way to get your hands loose,” she added mildly, and the young man seemed not to realize that the remark wasn’t meant for him.

  But Jeremiah couldn’t get his hands free. The man who had tied him apparently had had a great deal of practice, and if Jeremiah dared to look as if he was trying to slip his bonds, he’d likely meet the business end of the musket this time.

  He looked in Sayer’s direction. Farrell Vance had taken a few steps to the left, and Jeremiah could no longer see her. He could hear her talking still, and he took what comfort he could from that. All the while, his mind raced.

  Find something you can do and do it!

  There were two wounded men, both of them still armed. And two not wounded—and armed. Farrell Vance no longer had his revolver—and Halbert was apparently in charge of whatever they now planned to do.

  And Sayer was right in the middle of it.

  Jeremiah shifted his position. No one was looking in his direction. He began to work at the knots in the rope binding his hands.

  “Where’s your brother and sister?” he heard Rorie ask the man he had wounded.

  “My brother’s dead in the war. My sister—she died when she weren’t but ten.”

  “I reckon it’s up to you then,” Rorie said.

  “What is?”

  She didn’t answer him; she moved until she was sitting closer to him—and to the revolver he had stuck in his belt. The man didn’t know what Rorie was capable of—and he was too far gone to comprehend what she was likely planning.

  “That was a bad thing you did, scaring that young-un over there like you did,” Rorie said, her
voice almost soothing. “And she never done nobody in this whole wide world any harm, especially not you. The sad thing is I reckon you done plenty worse than what I just seen. Ain’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said, his voice trembling.

  “If you don’t die, then I reckon you got a hard row to hoe—that is, if you’re wanting to make it up to your mama for all that suffering she went through—and I ain’t just talking about her getting locked up. Her suffering come from knowing you might have turned out better if she hadn’t been. Ain’t nothing worse for a mother than that, thinking all the time she could have helped her child have a better life if she’d just had the chance.”

  “I can’t make it up to her.”

  “If you was to do your best to be a good man instead of what you are now, then it—”

  “She’s dead!”

  “Her body’s dead, boy. She ain’t. People don’t get a lot of chances to fix the trouble and heartache they cause, but just maybe, you can—Jeremiah!” Rorie cried out in alarm.

  But Jeremiah didn’t need Rorie’s warning. He had seen Farrell Vance suddenly whirl around and begin striding in his direction. Vance drew a pistol from inside his coat, something small—a four-shot pepperbox.

  Jeremiah struggled to get his hands free, but the rope still wouldn’t budge. He gave up and tried to get up, despite pain in his injured knee. He had no intention of dying under Farrell Vance’s feet.

  Vance was almost on him and he was taking aim. He heard Sayer cry out and the sound of the gunshot almost simultaneously, just as he rolled sharply away. He expected to feel the impact of the bullet, but it was Farrell Vance who lay sprawled on the ground.

  The wounded young man Rorie had been so earnestly advising fell over into her arms, his revolver still in his hand.

  Chapter Twelve

  Sayer began to run. She couldn’t tell if Jeremiah was hurt or not. She had seen him falling to the side as the gun was fired, and her heart was pounding with fear.