“I promise,” he whispered huskily.
She finished cutting through the rope, then placed the knife back in her boot—and they waited.
And she did not have long to wait.
The men were singing, jostling each other, turning up their bottles and jugs. One by one, they passed out, until only Luke Tate was left swaying. He stumbled toward the tree, a jug still in his hand. “Betcha been waitin’ on me, haven’t you, pretty tiger?” His voice was thick and heavy. “Been rememberin’ all those good times we had, huh?”
“Damn you, Tate, leave her alone,” Lonnie cried.
With a loud snort, Luke whirled to send his foot crashing into the soldier’s stomach. Kitty felt a wave of panic. What if he knocked him unconscious? It would not be hard to do. Lonnie was not fully recovered from his wound. If he should slump forward, hands untied for Luke to see, then it would be obvious she had cut him free. And with what? Luke would naturally search for a knife. Her plan would fail. And he would make her suffer even more.
Miraculously, Lonnie fought the pain. Gritting his teeth and pressing his back against the tree trunk, he said nothing more. Satisfied that he had conquered once again, Luke reached down and brutally dragged Kitty to her feet, wrapping his fingers in her long hair.
“Beautiful, you are…” As he spoke, she fought the wave of nausea that rose in her body at the smell of his sour breath. She tried to turn her head away, but he held her tightly, his lips moving across her face, covering it with wet kisses.
“Come on…got somethin’ for you.” He laughed. “Been a long time…probably be quick the first time…make it up again and again and again.” He dragged her along, away from the dying campfire and the loud drunken snores of the other men.
When they had walked perhaps fifty feet into the woods, Luke stopped in a small clearing and glanced upward through the bare branches of the tree above. “Ain’t much moonlight tonight, damnit. I wanted to see you naked. Best damned body I ever seen on a woman.”
He gave her a shove that sent her sprawling to the ground and he started fumbling with his pants. “Now get them clothes off…no, just shove that skirt up…let me have it quick. Then we’ll play while I get ready again. We’ll do it all night long.”
With her skirt covering her ankles, Kitty was able to slip the scalpel out of her boot, clenching it inside her fist. Luke fell to the ground beside her as she lay motionless, seemingly frozen. Grumbling as he shoved at her skirt, he pushed the material up and yanked her drawers down. She felt his hands pulling her thighs apart and then he probed, about to make his first savage plunge into the recesses of her body.
And then it happened. She came to life as she felt that first hot stab. And the indignity of what she was forced to endure, of what was being inflicted upon her, woke her from her trancelike stupor. She brought up the knife, intending to stab him right in the back of his neck; but Luke felt the motion, the hysteria of it, and just as the blade came slashing down, he jerked quickly to one side and Kitty felt the flesh of his shoulder being ripped apart—felt the gush of warm blood splash down onto her face as he screamed in agony.
Footsteps came crashing through the fallen leaves, and voices were yelling. Luke rolled to one side, clutching himself, cursing. Kitty was on her feet, still holding on to the scalpel, holding it above her head threateningly as the men rushed into the clearing, one of them holding a torch high.
“What the hell…” It was Jabe, stepping forward to look in shock at the blood rushing from the wound in Luke’s shoulder. “I’ll be damned. You bitch…” He whirled on Kitty whose face was illuminated by the flickering torch. Her eyes shone purple, glittering yellow darts, like a caged, trapped animal staring out of the darkness. Her lips were trembling wordlessly, but the hand she held above her head was steady: it held the knife firmly.
“You put that knife down.”
She did not move.
“Go get that soldier—that Reb—and kill him.”
One of the men moved back toward the camp. Kitty still stood her ground, holding the knife menacingly. No one took a step forward.
“Somebody help me, damnit, I’m bleedin’ to death,” Luke moaned. “She bared me to the bone.”
The sound of shouting came from the woods beyond where one of the men had gone after Lonnie. She prayed he had escaped as she had told him, prayed that he would not stay behind in an effort to save her. If need be, she was prepared to die.
But that hope was short-lived as someone yelled that the Reb was untied and had been knocked unconscious. “Want me to kill him?” a soldier asked.
“Wait…” Jabe was smiling, a slow, taunting grin, his scar twisting grotesquely in the glow of the torch. He took a step toward Kitty. “Hand me that knife, girl, or I’ll go back to camp and cut that boy’s legs off—one by one—and then his arms and his hands and…”
“Stop it,” she screamed, unable to envision the horror any longer. “Stop it, please.” But still she held the knife and then the thought washed over her: plunge it into her own chest. End this madness, this nightmare, once and for all.
She brought the knife down, but then, at the last instant, flung it to the ground. “I can’t,” she sobbed, burying her face in her hands. “I can’t even kill myself.”
Jabe stepped forward quickly to yank her to her feet, then he slapped her once, twice, three times, snapping her head to and fro. “Now you listen to me,” he roared. “You’re going to sew that cut up. You’re going to fix Luke up or so help me, woman, we’ll kill that Reb and then kill you. Now what’s it going to be?”
He yanked her along, not waiting for an answer, and snapped at the others to bring Luke back to camp. When they reached the clearing, he barked orders to build up the fire. She saw Lonnie lying on the ground unconscious. Jabe told someone to throw water in his face to wake him up and then tie him tight. “We’re going to start chopping on him—toes first. Get me an ax.”
“No!” Kitty shook her head from side to side, her whole body heaving with terror. “No. Don’t do it. I’ll…do whatever you want.”
Jabe laughed, a nasty, ugly sound. “That’s better. I kind of figured you’d see it our way.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Kitty was mad—with herself, with the whole world and everyone in it. She sat beside a rushing stream, watching the sparkling waters dance along the rocks, and thought about the hell her life had become. The night before she’d held a knife to her breast but at the last moment could not make that final plunge. There had been too many times in the past months when she had succumbed to tears. Weak. Damn it to hell, she was getting weak
Picking up a nearby pebble, she sent it splashing into the stream, a scowl on her face. Had she been noble in sewing up Luke Tate’s shoulder to keep his men from mutilating Lonnie? If so, there was no chest-swelling over saving his life. Instead, there was only a heavy shroud of defeat, hopelessness—and that shroud was, at the moment, smothering her. The wound had not been deep, but there was a blood vessel that had to be tied off. Doc had taught her how to use boiled horsehair for ligatures in an emergency. He had even been using flax thread to sew the flesh together. Luke had allowed her to do this, all the while howling with pain each time the tenaculum she’d found in the satchel entered the skin. And after it was over, as she prepared to bandage the wound, Luke had insisted that a red-hot knife be applied to the flesh to cauterize it. Kitty felt it wasn’t necessary but said nothing, feeling actually gleeful when the searing blade made the flesh burn and sizzle and Luke screamed and passed out. How she hated that man!
At sunrise Kitty went to the stream to bathe and she sat there, brooding. What would happen next? Luke and the others were heading west. Did they plan to take her along, raping her at will? God, she might as well do what Travis’s sister had done when faced with the same future—commit suicide. But no, she’d had her chance for that and was angry now that it had even been contemplated. That was not the way out. No. She was not an ignorant farm girl and certainly
she was not about to give in to the weakness of being female and do nothing about her plight. There had to be an answer somewhere.
From behind, up the little loping hill, there was laughter. The men were drinking again. Feeling eyes upon her, she turned in time to observe one of them checking to see if she was still there. They were keeping a closer watch on her than on Lonnie, who had not even been retied since the events of the night before and was now sitting listlessly against a tree trunk nursing a throbbing headache from the blow he had received. Why did he have to be so damn noble, Kitty cursed. Why didn’t he go on and leave when he had the chance and find help for her? It was extremely doubtful they would have killed her so quickly. Then she checked herself. They might have, for had it not been for Lonnie, she knew there was no power on earth strong enough to have made her tend to Luke’s wound. And they might very well have been angered to the point of shooting her.
So what difference did it make? Digging her bare feet into the mud, she watched the reddish-brown slime ooze between her toes. On how many summer days had she done the same childish thing back home in North Carolina? But that was a lifetime ago.
A cool wind was blowing. Her skin felt chilled. How she hated to put on those uncomfortable ankle-high shoes. The next dead Yankee I find, I’ll steal his boots, she thought defiantly.
Footsteps crackled in the dead leaves that covered the slope behind. Whipping about, Kitty saw Jabe coming toward her and a wave of defiance swept through her. If he made one move to touch her, she would jump right into the stream and let it carry her to the thundering falls below. Better to take a chance with nature than with this evil man, she figured.
“Kitty, I think it’s time me and you had a talk.” He sat down beside her, his voice somber, his eyes stormy.
“I have nothing to say to you or any of your hoodlum friends. I just wish I’d had the guts to let that bastard die…that I’d cut his throat like I tried to…”
“Shut up! I ain’t interested in listening to the ravings of some fool woman. I come down here to talk to you and tell you that I’m gettin’ rid of you.”
She blinked. He was talking so calmly about getting rid of her? It was unreal. “If you’re going to kill me,” she managed to find her voice, “then go ahead and do it and not sit here and talk about it.” Strangely, she was unafraid.
“Ain’t gonna kill you, Kitty. I’m gonna trade you off in exchange for quick passage through these mountains. You see, you’re big trouble for me. Luke’s got quite a hankerin’ for you and you are a right smart pretty woman. I wouldn’t mind having some of you myself. But the thing is, Luke’s got this hankerin’, like I said, and he ain’t ready to pass you around yet. My men ain’t gonna like riding with a woman and not being able to take their pleasure with her. It’ll get harder and harder. Sooner or later, there’ll be some bad trouble and I don’t want any of my men killed over some damn woman. So, the only thing to do is get rid of you.”
She shook her head from side to side, puzzled.
He grinned, his scar twisting his eye downward in a grotesque grimace. “I’m gonna trade you off to the Indians. Talked to a scout this morning that says, as best I can understand sign language, that he’ll go back and see if his chief agrees. Winter’s comin’ on and if them Indians will show us an easy way over these mountains before the snow comes, we’ll be that much ahead. The war can’t last much longer and whichever side does win, me and Luke and the likes of us will be better off if we ain’t around.”
“Indians…” Kitty turned her head to stare at the rushing waters, which seemed to be crashing toward the falls along with any hope she might have had for freedom. “Why? Why do you have to do this to me? Why not set me and Lonnie free—here? By the time we found civilization in all this wilderness, you and your men would be far, far away. Why do this thing?” She shook her head from side to side, not frightened, not pleading, but merely bewildered by the sudden turn in events. She thought of her mother back there in that hotel room. Would she die? Would anyone help her? And she thought of her father. Would she ever see him again? And then there was Travis who was probably dead, but was ever present in her thoughts and memories. And Nathan. Had the war destroyed their love? Would there have been a chance for them later? Now she would never know—not living with Indians.
Indians. What was it she had heard about them? Savages, some said. Killers. Murderers. But they had been moved out west to reservations, or so she had been taught in school. She could remember her teacher in the community school telling about the “Trail of Tears” which began in October of 1838 and ended in March 1839, when the Cherokees in the western North Carolina mountains were forced to walk to their reservation in the state of Oklahoma. Of the twelve thousand who started the twelve-hundred mile journey, four thousand had died. A great tragedy, her teacher had said, both for the Indians and the American people.
Frantically searching the recesses of her mind for any other information she might remember, it came to her that some of the Indians had hidden in the hills and caves of the mountains and managed to escape the troops rounding them up. Were these the Indians, or their descendants, to whom she was being traded almost thirty years later?
“There’s no other way,” Jabe was saying tonelessly. “I don’t say it’s right, trading a white woman to the Indians, but I got myself and my men to look after. Now we’ll do it quiet, so’s not to rile Luke. I’ll tell him about it later when it’s too late for him to do anything about it. ‘course the shape he’s in, he couldn’t do anything now if he wanted to ‘cept holler when the Indians come for you, and that might scare ‘em off, make ‘em think you’re bad medicine.”
Kitty felt as though everything within her had just died. Then she remembered Lonnie. “What will you do with him?”
“Lonnie? Don’t rightly know. He ain’t good for much. We might keep him around to fetch wood for campfires, stuff like that. We don’t have to worry about him giving us no trouble. Hell,” he threw back his head and laughed, “Pete says when he went back to the camp and aimed to kill him, he didn’t have the heart ‘cause the son of a bitch was down on his hands and knees scared shitless and beggin’ for his life. So Pete just knocked him in the head ‘cause it made him sick to see all that grovelin’. Naw, we ain’t got to worry about old Lonnie, not as big a coward as he is.” He laughed again.
Kitty felt sick. Was there no hope? She had always taken pride in being a bit above the average mealy-mouthed woman who merely accepted her lot in life without question. She had looked in scorn upon the women who were content only to have a baby every year and sit around and sew and tat and do the “proper” things. She had wanted more—had wanted most of all to be free and independent to do what she wanted to do with her life, not to be destined to do as others of her sex had done before her merely because she was born a woman. She remembered thinking defiantly that it didn’t take a penis and a pair of testicles to be a doctor, but merely a good brain, and she felt she was equipped with sufficient intelligence to pursue the education required to practice medicine. And there had been those who were appalled at such an idea. A woman’s place was to marry, give her husband pleasure, have his children, keep his home. Kitty had defiantly thought otherwise. But now, what did any of it matter? She was about to be traded off to a bunch of savages, probably to be raped over and over till she became pregnant with some buck’s child and then she would sit among the ranks of squaws for the rest of her life. Bitter tears filled her eyes.
“This young buck rode right into camp this morning, brave as could be,” Jabe was saying. “He was hopin’ we’d have some whiskey or guns we wanted to trade. We let him know we were poor on both counts. Then he got to lookin’ at Luke’s arm, the way you sewed it. He started askin’ a lot of questions in sign language and I got him over to one side and started trying to make the swap, because already the idea had hit me that here was a great way of getting rid of you quick.”
Kitty had to make her choice: to leap into the madly rushing str
eam and perhaps be dashed to death on the rocks below the falls, or to stay and be given to the Indians. She put one foot into the water, felt the strong current rushing against her ankle. Already her toes could feel the slope of the land. Another few feet and the bottom would drop off sharply and she would plunge right into the charging water and be swept away. But perhaps, she thought frantically, she might be able to make it to the other side. She’d taught herself how to swim—and she’d been able to outswim any of the boys back home as a child. There might be a chance and she had to take it.
She lunged forward. The waters closed about her head for one quick instant. The current wasn’t all that strong, she realized, and she was able to move her arms to fight against it. The thing to do was move away from shore toward the other side and try to make it to the opposite bank. Whatever awaited her there—wild animals, Yankees—anything was better than what lay behind. Gasping for air, filling her lungs, she found it extremely hard to keep the current from taking her away completely. In spite of her struggling, she was being carried down. Jabe was running along the bank, yelling that he was going to kill her if the falls didn’t. Some of his men were scurrying out of the woods to see what all the screaming was about.
A few feet. She had made a few feet of progress toward the opposite shore. How much farther? It was difficult to gauge distance in water. From the bank, it had appeared to be fifty or sixty feet. Now it seemed miles away. Suddenly, she was slammed against a rock and she lay there, pressed back, gasping, resting against the current that gurgled and pushed about her neck, splashing into her face. It was a welcome rest for the moment, but then she realized that Jabe was standing at an angle to her right with a rope in one hand and his hand gun in the other.
“It’s your choice, Kitty,” he yelled across the thunder of the rushing waters. “You grab this rope when I throw it and let me pull you in, or I’m going to shoot you here and now.”
Love and War: The Coltrane Saga, Book 1 Page 45