Then he felt bad for bantering with Morgan when Desdemona’s father had been murdered so brutally just a short time earlier.
She didn’t seem to be dwelling on that loss right at the moment. She had gotten caught up in what Breckinridge was trying to do. She said, “I can see through a little crack in the rocks, and that third arrow landed close enough that I think it’s going to catch the wall on fire, too. That was good shooting, Wallace, especially with such a crude bow.”
“I made a bunch of ’em when I was a kid. I spent more time wanderin’ through the woods than anything else, teachin’ myself how to survive.”
She turned her head to look at him. “Did you know then that you were going to come out here and be a frontiersman?”
“I didn’t have no idea,” he replied honestly. “I might not have ever left that part of the country if it hadn’t been for . . . well, things that happened. Things that made it better for me to light out for the tall and uncut.”
He didn’t want to explain all the bad judgment and bad luck that had caused him to head west the first time. For one thing, a lot of his decisions had been plumb boneheaded, and he didn’t want to revisit them. They didn’t have any bearing on what was going on now.
A couple of thin columns of smoke wound into the sky. Carnahan’s men weren’t putting the fires out, or even trying to, from the looks of it. That puzzled Breckinridge, but he would take all the good fortune he could get.
When he risked a look again, the flames were leaping along the wall in both directions. By now the heat had probably forced Carnahan’s men to pull back. Breckinridge readied his rifle. If part of the wall collapsed, he wanted to put a few shots into the compound. Even if he didn’t hit any of the defenders, raking this rear area with rifle fire would make them retreat into the trading post itself.
Breckinridge wanted as many of them crowded in there as possible. The next part of his plan hinged on it.
Inside the trading post
The burning need for vengeance that Eugenia felt was a welcome distraction from the grief that threatened to overwhelm her. It was almost impossible for her mind to comprehend that her father was gone. Her mother had died while Eugenia was still fairly young, and her father had devoted himself to doing the best possible job of raising her and her sisters.
Some people might say that dragging them out here to the frontier from their home in Pennsylvania was hardly the way to go about that, and Eugenia supposed that to most, that would be correct. There were certainly a lot more dangers here, and now one of them had claimed Absalom Garwood’s life.
But he had always harbored the dream of going west, ever since the first mountain men had started returning to the East some twenty years earlier with their tales of towering, snow-capped mountains and vast deserts and endless rolling prairies. Eugenia’s father had wanted to see such things for himself. He’d planned to do so when all three of his daughters were safely and happily married.
When that hadn’t happened by what most considered a reasonable time, Desdemona—herself inflicted with the same restless nature as her father—had started urging him to travel to the West anyway. It had taken some time to convince him not just to visit, but to move to the frontier permanently and start a business there. Absalom Garwood had owned a successful mercantile in their hometown for many years. Establishing a similar enterprise in the West would be perfect for him. And according to Desdemona’s plan, she and Ophelia and Eugenia would go with him to help him. They wouldn’t travel so far into the wilderness that they would be in great danger, she said.
Their father had resisted that for a long time, but once Desdemona won over the other two, the die was cast. Absalom Garwood wasn’t able to resist his daughters for long. He had given in, sold his business, and made plans to found a trading post and establish what might well turn out to be a business empire in the bright new land west of civilization . . .
That was how they had come to Damnation Valley. They might not have picked this place to settle if they had known at the time what it was called, but maybe they would have. In every other way, it seemed to be perfect.
But horror could intrude into perfection. Eugenia knew that now, and she knew as well that their choices were to give in to that evil . . . or fight back against it.
She chose to fight.
She cradled the crying Ophelia against her and, inch by inch, scooted both of them along the wall. One of Carnahan’s men was watching them, but he didn’t seem to notice that Eugenia was several feet closer to a barrel sitting against the wall than she had been earlier. That was the barrel containing the water brought from the river. Every morning, one of the Mandans used buckets to bring water from the Yellowstone and replace what had been used the day before. It was generally kept about three-quarters full.
Eugenia worked her way over to the barrel and leaned her shoulder against it. Her head slumped forward. Her left arm was around Ophelia’s shoulders. Ophelia seemed to have cried herself out at last. She slumped against Eugenia, and even though she was older and larger, she rested her head on Eugenia’s shoulder like a weary child snuggling against her mother. Despair seemed etched into every line of their forms.
But at the same time, Eugenia’s left hand had stolen behind the barrel, unseen by anyone. She searched for the plug—the bung—near the bottom of the barrel, which was there so the barrel could be drained and cleaned from time to time. That hadn’t been done in the time since the trading post was established.
Under normal circumstances, that plug would be removed by whacking it with a bung starter. One of those mallets was on a shelf underneath the bar, but with Carnahan’s men all around, Eugenia couldn’t very well get it without drawing attention to herself, and she certainly couldn’t put it to the use for which it was intended.
Her only option was to pull the plug out by hand. Her fingers closed on it and tested it to see how firmly it was planted. The plug didn’t budge. She began pushing on it, working it from side to side. It had been hammered into place, and she didn’t know if she could ever loosen it.
Draining the water would be a blow to Carnahan’s plans, though, and right now it was the only thing Eugenia could think of that would cause trouble for him. There was plenty of food and ammunition in the trading post, so the men could hold out for a long siege as far as those things were concerned.
But this was the only water in the place, and if it was gone, Carnahan would have to send men to try to get more. Then Breckinridge Wallace, Morgan Baxter, and the others would kill them. That thought made her heart beat a little faster.
Any progress she made was maddeningly slow. She couldn’t tell if she was actually doing any good or not. Her fingers ached from the effort. Ophelia’s deep, regular breathing told Eugenia that her sister had gone to sleep, seeking refuge in slumber from the horrors that threatened to consume them both.
At first, Eugenia didn’t realize something had changed. Then she rubbed her fingers together and realized they were wet. She wondered for a second if she had scraped them so raw while working at the plug that they had started bleeding. They weren’t sticky, though. She held her breath as she felt a small but steady spurt of water against her hand.
The bung hadn’t come out, but she had loosened it enough that the water was draining from the barrel. There were small gaps between the puncheons that formed the trading post’s floor, so she hoped the water would trickle through them instead of forming a puddle around the bottom of the barrel, which might be noticed. The more water that drained out before anyone was aware of it, the better.
With that accomplished, Eugenia allowed herself to rest a little. She didn’t go to sleep like Ophelia, though. She was too keyed up for that.
As she sat there, she felt her dress start to get wet. Some of the water had seeped over to where she was sitting. As far as she could tell, though, most of it was draining through the floor as she’d hoped.
She didn’t go to sleep, but a stupor of sorts settled over her. She d
idn’t know how much time had passed. It seemed like days, almost, but she knew it hadn’t been that long. Several hours, though, punctuated by occasional bursts of gunfire outside. She prayed that Desdemona was safe with Breckinridge Wallace and the other men. Her oldest sister had taken to frontier life better than either she or Ophelia had. If any of the Garwood sisters was going to survive this ordeal, it would probably be Desdemona.
More gunfire roared outside, a veritable fusillade coming from the rear of the compound this time. Eugenia lifted her head and wondered if Breckinridge and the other men were attacking. Surely not, as badly as they were outnumbered.
Then one of the men rushed into the trading post and shouted, “The fence is on fire in back! The varmints shot flamin’ arrows at it, like red Injuns!”
Carnahan bellowed a curse and ordered his men, “Get buckets! There’s got to be a water barrel in here somewhere! Find it! We need to put out that fire.”
Men scurried around, grabbing buckets from a stack that had been for sale, and one of them came behind the bar and shoved the lid off the water barrel.
“This must be it!” he yelled. One of the other men tossed him a bucket, but he froze as he peered down into the barrel. “There ain’t but a few inches of water left in here!”
“What?” Carnahan ran behind the bar and shouldered him aside. He looked into the barrel, too, and started spewing curses.
It was all Eugenia could do not to laugh.
Chapter 14
The upright logs that formed the stockade wall burned better than Breckinridge had expected, or even hoped for. It had been long enough since Absalom Garwood cut them down and built the wall that they’d had time to dry out.
And for some reason, Carnahan’s men didn’t appear to even be trying to put out the fire. They just let it burn as they retreated toward the trading post. Shots still blasted from behind the burning wall, but Breck, Morgan, and Desdemona returned them right through the flames. Breck saw at least one man fall as if badly wounded. He stayed down, too.
Morgan let out an exultant whoop. “It’s going to burn all the way around!”
Breckinridge glanced over at him and would have agreed, but he also saw the look on Desdemona’s face. She had already been through so much, and now she looked even sadder.
“Thinkin’ about how your pa built that wall, and now it’s burnin’ up?” he asked her.
She nodded. “He and the Mandans worked really hard at it. Now he’s dead, Edward is dead, and there’s no telling what’s happened, or what’s going to happen, to the other men. When we first came out here, I loved this place. I know what the Mandans said, but I never really believed the valley was cursed. Now . . . I’m not so sure.”
“The frontier is a hard place, there’s no gettin’ around that. There’s a million ways it can kill you. But it’s clean and free, too, and dangerous or not, there’s no other place I’d rather be. I didn’t know your pa well enough to say for sure whether he felt that way, too, but I reckon there’s a good chance he did.”
Desdemona swallowed and nodded. “Yes, he did. Coming out here was something he wanted to do all his life, I suppose. Now I wish we had never encouraged him!”
Breckinridge couldn’t blame her for feeling like that. Maybe she would look at things somewhat differently later on, once the pain of losing her father wasn’t so sharp. That was something to consider for the future. Right now, the important thing was rescuing her sisters.
And making sure Jud Carnahan paid for all the monstrous evil he had done.
“The barn’s caught on fire!” Morgan called, jolting both Breckinridge and Desdemona out of their thoughts. “Look at the roof!”
He was right. Embers from the burning wall had landed on the barn’s roof and smoldered until they caught those logs on fire, too. Flames licked up, and Breckinridge knew they would spread quickly. There were no animals in the barn, as far as he knew, but some of Carnahan’s men might be in there, in which case they would be forced to flee into the trading post, too.
That should have been a good thing, but for some reason, he was uneasy, as if he sensed somehow that more was going on here than he knew.
Inside the barn
The five men and four women from the Mandan tribe who had come west with Absalom Garwood sat together in one of the empty stalls with fear on their faces. They had heard all the shooting outside, and now they smelled the smoke from something burning. The two men Carnahan had given the job of guarding them looked worried, too. A lot was going on, and none of it seemed to be good.
One of the other white men came running into the barn. “The fence is burning back here!” he told the guards. “They shot flaming arrows at it and set it on fire!”
“Damn it!” one of the men said. “I knew that smoke smelled close. I could even hear the flames—”
“Look up there!” the third man yelled. “That’s what you’re hearing!”
Everyone in the barn looked up, white and Indian alike. Wisps of smoke curled down through the roof. In the gloom, tiny orange flickers of flame were visible. The roof was on fire, too.
“What are we gonna do?” one of Carnahan’s men asked, obviously frightened. “We’re supposed to watch these redskins, but the barn’s liable to burn up. I’m not gonna be in here when it does!”
“We can’t just let them go,” said the man who had just run in to warn the guards. “Jud wouldn’t like that.” Callously, he added, “Might be better just to shoot ’em and be done with it.”
All three white men turned to stare at the Mandans. The men looked increasingly desperate, and desperate men sometimes do unspeakable things. At least some of the captives realized this, and as Carnahan’s men started to lift their rifles, three of the Mandan braves surged up from the floor of the stall and charged them, shouting their defiance.
The rifles thundered, but the shots were hasty and only one of them found its target. The Mandan who was hit clapped a hand over his chest where blood welled from the wound, but he managed to stay on his feet and barrel into the man who had shot him, driving the man off his feet.
The other two rounds missed and slammed into the barn’s side wall. The Mandans tackled the guards and knocked them over backward. As they began to struggle, the other Indians leaped up and charged into the fray, even the women.
The white men didn’t have much of a chance. The rifle was ripped out of one man’s hand, and the butt crashed into his head again and again until it had been battered into a bloody mess that didn’t even look human. One of the Mandans got his hand on a knife sheathed at his opponent’s waist and ripped it free, then plunged it into the man’s chest over and over. Only the third man was able to get his pistol out, and when it boomed as he triggered a wild shot, one of the women cried out and fell, with blood spurting from her neck where the ball had torn through it. Her killer died mere moments later as a Mandan wrenched the empty pistol away from him and hammered him into oblivion with it.
The man who had been shot in the chest was dead as well, but that left seven of the captives, who grabbed all the weapons they could from the white men and ran out of the burning barn. The structure’s roof was fully ablaze now and would collapse soon. The fleeing Mandans dragged their slain companions out of the barn so their bodies wouldn’t burn.
Then they raced toward the rear of the compound where the stockade wall was still burning in places and had collapsed in others. The Indians headed for one of the gaps. Some of Carnahan’s men fired after them from the corners of the trading post, but so much smoke was in the air it was hard to achieve any accuracy. Rifle balls whistled past the Indians, but all the shots missed.
Then they were leaping over the debris, their moccasins smudged with ashes and embers, running for their lives toward the rocks and brush and trees some fifty yards away.
* * *
“Give ’em some coverin’ fire!” Breckinridge called to Morgan and Desdemona as he aimed past the Mandan Indians who came running from the barn and through t
he fire-destroyed fence. He saw several of them carrying rifles, pistols, shot pouches, and powder horns. If the Mandans threw in with his group, that would go a long way toward evening the odds. He knew that some of Carnahan’s men had been killed already. Carnahan couldn’t have more than a dozen or so left, if that many.
The Indians angled to the left as they cleared the wall, giving Breckinridge, Morgan, and Desdemona more room to shoot past them. They reached the trees and took cover without any of them being hit, as far as Breck could tell.
“Keep those varmints in the tradin’ post occupied,” he told his companions. “I’m gonna go talk to those folks.”
He backed away from the rocks and crawled through the brush until he could stand up and dart from tree to tree. It took him only a few minutes to reach the area where the Indians had taken refuge. The first one he saw was Rose. She impulsively stepped up to him and threw her arms around him in a hug.
“Oh, Mr. Breckinridge!” she cried. “Those evil men! They killed Andrew and Emily!”
Breckinridge knew those were the names Absalom Garwood had given two of the Mandans. He patted her a little awkwardly on the back and said, “I’m sure sorry, Rose. We’ll settle the score for ’em, though, you can count on that.”
“Settling the score will not bring them back.”
Breckinridge shook his head and solemnly agreed, “No, it sure won’t. I wish it would.” He held Rose for a moment longer, letting her take comfort in his big, solid form, then stepped back and rested his hands on her shoulders. “Do you know if Miss Ophelia and Miss Eugenia are all right?”
“They were the last time I saw them. Those terrible men herded us out of the trading post and put us in the barn like animals! The young ladies were still unharmed when they did that. What about Miss Desdemona? She was not in the trading post.”
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