Kendall started to scream, huddling to the earth to shield the boys from the sight. And as she screamed, the boys began to cry. War cries, shouts, and the shrieks of panic continued to rise around her. Heavy footsteps padded against the ground; orders were shouted.
Another woman screamed, and even in her shocked agony, Kendall recognized the sound of death. She would never know if the soldiers had thought themselves attacked, or if they had just lost their sense of right in the bloodlust. Maybe the women did attack them, hurtling themselves against the superior strength of the war-trained males in an act of sudden desperation after Apolka’s death, preferring to die with honor rather than cowardice.
When Kendall did look up, it was to witness a bloodbath. Women and children were now fleeing into the forest. Some escaped; some were struck down. They had no chance against the white invaders; the majority of the braves had not returned from their hunting trips to distant hammocks. The attack had been made on a encampment of old men, children, and women.
Kendall screamed afresh, this time with pain, as rough fingers threaded into her hair and jerked her to her feet. She was spun about to face the cold, hard eyes of her husband.
He was a tall man, broad-shouldered, dark-haired, and sporting a neatly clipped dark mustache. He might have been attractive, had it not been for the mark of cruelty in his gaunt features and the snow-cold hardness in his eyes. There was no flicker of mercy about him. Nothing human in the unwavering gaze he gave Kendall. His expression didn’t alter a hair as he calmly wound her hair more tightly around his fingers, intending to hurt.
“Let go of the brats,” he told her curtly.
She saw his rifle clutched in his free hand, the bayonet tip dripping crimson in the dying sunlight.
Despite her own pain she shrieked out, frantically trying to stop the massacre. “Stop! John! Please, I beg you! This is no war, it’s murder—”
“Let go of the little Indian bastards.”
All around them the screaming and fighting continued. Where was someone she knew? Kendall wondered desperately. One of the Yankees with a sense of kindness and justice. They did exist; she knew they did; she had met many at Fort Taylor.
But not here. John’s crew must have been hand-picked. Military men who had fought in the Seminole Wars and hated Indians.
“Now, Kendall. Or I’ll spear them and spit them right here in front of you.”
She couldn’t move her head. His hold on her hair was too tight. She tried to think of the Muskogee words she needed, and cried out loudly as she pushed the boys blindly away from her. “Run! Run, little foxes. Run into the trees and hide until the blue men are gone and you see your father!”
They refused to move. They were still tightly clutching her skirts in terror. They were too young to understand what had happened.
“Go!” Kendall shrieked, shoving them as hard as she could. She had jerked against John’s hold, and instant tears glazed her eyes at the sharp tearing of her scalp, but she felt the little boys at last leave her.
John said nothing else. His thin lips compressed further, disappearing beneath the fashionable droop of his mustache. He used his hold on her to spin her about, tossing her into the arms of a young soldier, a youth of no more than eighteen who wore a sick expression.
“Get her into a boat,” John ordered quickly.
The youth nodded blankly. It was apparent that this type of slaughter was not what he had expected of warfare; it was equally apparent that he was too stunned to do anything other than follow orders. But his hold on Kendall wasn’t cruel, merely firm. As he dragged her toward the river, she was able to turn back.
A cry rose in her throat; she brought the back of her hand to her mouth in horror and bit into her own flesh, mindless of the pain.
Chicola had obeyed her. She could see him, his little brown legs carrying him from the chaos of the encampment at a steady run. He was already reaching the far line of cypress to the rear of the camp. In a second he would be swallowed up in the trees.
But Hadjo had panicked and run to the warmth and security he had always known. He now clung to his mother’s lifeless body. A retreating soldier tripped over the child and turned instinctively to retaliate. As Kendall stared on in numb and impotent horror, the soldier’s rifle clubbed the child’s head. Hadjo fell on top of his mother.
Kendall started to scream again. Hysterically. Strength born of her frenzy came to her, and she fought her way to freedom from the startled youth who held her.
“Stop it!” she screeched, racing back to the center of the clearing. “Stop it! Murderers! Bloody murderers! Stop it, stop it, stop it!”
Heedless of her action, she beat against the first blue-coated back she came upon. The face that turned to hers was at first frenzied and angered. But it was not a cruel face. Middle-aged and lined, it was just the face of a man caught in the fever of the fight. As Kendall stared at him with wide, tear-filled eyes, his expression lost its wildness. He looked at the carnage about him, and then back to Kendall.
“Oh, Jesus . . .” he breathed.
Two things happened then, both of which Kendall was barely aware of at first. John Moore came up behind her and gripped her rudely by the shoulders, and the sound of pounding feet was coming toward them from the river.
A shout sounded loud in the now bleakly silent clearing. “What in damnation has gone on here?”
Vaguely, very vaguely at first, Kendall recognized the voice.
Travis.
She saw him, handsome in dress uniform, as he strode to the center of the now still Union soldiers. His company waited in awkward silence as the twenty or so men halted behind him, behind the scene of the fight that was not a battle but a heartless massacre.
Incredulous and horrified, Travis took several steps in several different directions, staring at the corpses of the women and children and old men. Only a few braves lay among the dead, the men Red Fox had left to guard the camp in the swamp, which had known nothing but peace in the remote Everglades . . .
Travis moved in a circle, still staring incredulously. At last he looked with a murderous fury at the other Union soldiers.
“What the hell happened here? Goddamn it, we’re not fighting the Indians! We’re at war with the Confederate States, not with a bunch of Indian children.”
“What’s the matter with you, Travis?”
The annoyed question came from John, and his fingers bit into Kendall’s shoulders. “We killed a few savages. An Indian pup is still an Indian. It grows up to attack whites.”
Travis’s face went red with rage, and then white. “I’m the senior officer, John. We were supposed to come in and bargain for Kendall, and warn the chief against dealing with Confederates.”
“Lieutenant Moore’s right, Commander,” a lazy voice drawled out among John’s troop. “What’s the harm in killing a few Injuns? Twenty years ago we had orders to snuff the lot of ’em out if’n we could.”
Travis held silent for a moment, then spoke curtly and cuttingly. “An extra shift of guard duty for a month, soldier. Insubordination. But just for the record, I’m going to tell all of you just what is wrong with slaughtering a few Indians! We are the sailors and marines of the United States Navy. Our immediate job is to preserve our Union. We have been given orders to fight, not to murder. We are the representatives of our country. A country of God-fearing, peace-loving people. We fight for honor. There is no honor in the slaughter of women and children!”
Travis suddenly spun on John, his fury and agitation such that he barely winced at the sight of Kendall. “How the hell could you allow such a thing to happen, Lieutenant Moore?”
John answered between clenched teeth. “The filthy savages kidnapped my wife, Commander. We were ordered to come in—”
“To deal, not to murder.”
John held silent for a moment. Kendall could feel his explosive anger. “You fight your wars, Travis. I’ll fight mine.”
The tension that crackled between the two men
was as tangible as heat lightning; as explosive as gunpowder. All about them there was dead silence. The air was still; no breeze rustled the trees. No birds called out; not even a cricket chirped.
But then a slight sound could be heard; the buzzing of flies as they closed in on the blood of the dead. Perhaps it was the taunt of that parasitical buzzing, or perhaps it was the slow realization that they were surrounded by their men, but John and Travis both fell silent as they realized this was neither the time nor the place to wage the private battle that had turned friends to enemies.
Travis’s eyes touched upon Kendall. They were full of sorrow; they begged forgiveness, and she knew that Travis had come only because he had believed her imprisoned by the Indians. And in his eyes she could see that he already believed she would have preferred being the captive of a tribe of Seminoles—savages or not—to being the captive wife of John Moore.
Travis turned to the men. “Get back to the boats. Now.”
A shuffle of feet followed his command. Kendall and John and Travis stood alone in the clearing with only the dead about them.
“We have your wife, John,” Travis said with soft reproach. “And she does not appear to have suffered cruelly.”
“No?” John demanded. He laughed bitterly. “Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she cozied right up to those brown men like a bitch in heat!”
“Goddamn it, John,” Travis interrupted, embarrassed for Kendall even after all they had been through together.
“Why protect her, Travis? We both know what my wife is more than willing to do. But then, maybe it isn’t the damn savages I need to be worrying about. Maybe you were so eager to come after her because there’s been more than friendship going on behind my back.”
Travis stiffened like a poker. His face was rigid with his anger; his eyes were ablaze. His hands clenched to fists at his sides. “I won’t call you out for that one, John. Because I am your friend. Still. But as your friend, I’m telling you this. You keep up like you’re going, and there won’t be a man in the world that you can call friend. And if you hurt Kendall in any—”
“Kendall is my wife, Travis, and I’ll handle her however I see fit!” John bit out in a thunder of new fury. “You have no right to interfere in a marriage. President Lincoln himself has no damn right to interfere in a man’s marriage; neither does goddamn Admiral Farragut!”
Again Travis stiffened, as if he had been struck. “When this war is over, John—”
“Don’t you think we should be getting the hell out of here, Travis?” John interrupted coldly. “We could wind up being ambushed by some mighty testy Indians, and if one of them savages takes a knife to your throat, you won’t be crying no more over a little spilled blood. You’ve got yourself a couple of troops of men whose lives depend on you.”
Travis swore softly and turned on his heel.
Kendall had stood tensely through the confrontation. Now she closed her eyes, wishing that in doing so she could wipe out the horror around her. Nothing would ever do that for her. She tried to jerk herself from her husband’s grasp, but the talons of his fingers on her back were merciless.
“Oh, no, my sweet love,” John hissed, switching his hold to the nape of her neck and clasping his fingers almost all the way around it. “It’s time to go home—to the Union barracks—and celebrate. Another white woman saved by her loving husband from the barbaric red man.” He brought his other hand slowly up and around her neck, squeezing threateningly, slowly releasing, his eyes stone cold and emotionless all the while. She returned his stare, not caring. John could not hurt her. No physical pain could ease the guilt and agony in her heart.
“What a genteel man I plan to be, my love. I plan to accept you back with all loving kindness, ignoring the fact that you’ve been dirtied and sullied by the Indians. But I do plan to hear all about it. Yeah, I do want to know just why you look so good, Mrs. Moore.”
Despair suddenly overwhelmed her. All she could think of was the kindness Red Fox had offered her; and Red Fox would return from his hunting expedition to find his wife and child slain. Because of her. She wished she had died along with the others.
“John,” she said quietly, “I suggest that you kill me. Otherwise, one day I’m going to kill you.”
The line of his mouth tightened. He released his hold about her neck, only to bring the back of his hand hard against her jaw.
“Try it, bitch,” she dimly heard him mutter.
The world faded to black. She didn’t feel her husband’s cruel grip as he tossed her over his shoulder like a sack.
* * *
Kendall tried to lie still and count the knotholes in the beamed ceiling over her head.
She desperately wanted to fall asleep. There was a slim chance that John would remain in the officers’ meeting until late into the night and that he would leave her alone if she slept.
He hadn’t had much of a chance to confront her yet. She hadn’t regained consciousness until the small rowboats taken by the men into the swamp had cleared the maze of rivers and come to a bay. And upon reaching the two schooners they had left at anchor, John Moore had been forced to give all his attention to commanding his vessel. Torrential rains and high winds had descended on them in a fury.
It had taken almost two days to reach Key West. But in that time Kendall had barely seen John. She had been sequestered in a small cabin, and only a young ensign had come near her, bearing meals and politely asking after her welfare. He seemed to think she had been rescued from some terrible ordeal. Kendall hadn’t had the energy to dispute him. She had spent the voyage in alternating numbness and misery. When she did sleep, she heard the screams; when she closed her eyes she saw the image of Apolka just before she died. When she fell into a restless slumber, she envisioned again and again the way Hadjo had run to his mother’s corpse and died there on her breast.
God, how grateful she had been for the storms that had roiled the sea! She had prayed that the ship would founder on the treacherous Florida reefs. She was immune to fear now. She didn’t care what John did to her. She was glad that he believed a savage red man had received from her what he never could or would.
Her dreams had died as sure a death as the Indians in the camp. She felt as if her soul had been severed from her body.
Upon their return to Fort Taylor, she had been directly summoned to see Captain Brannen. She had bitterly told him the truth—that the Indians had offered her no menace and that the tribe, with mainly young children and women present, had been brutally massacred. But then she had sensed that she was being grilled for a reason—a reason that had little to do with the Indians. And she grew nervously silent because of Brent and his crew of Confederate sailors.
That had been hours ago. Captain Brannen had been vaguely solicitous; he had agreed with John that Kendall must have picked up a touch of swamp fever and was merely behaving hysterically when she begged him to help her escape from her husband. Brannen was basically a kind man. He had shown distress, patted her head, and told her, “There, there, now, Mrs. Moore. You’ve been through a trying experience. Abducted and forced to live with savages. And being in the midst of bloodshed after living with those . . . people. You must understand how difficult this is for a man.” The captain had shifted his eyes to John, and Kendall had barely constrained herself from breaking into shrill laughter. Everyone assumed that she had been raped by the “savages” and that poor John was holding up admirably, still adoring his wife and trying to behave as if none of it mattered.
Brannen had even put the slaughter down to John’s protective feelings for her. Oh, John would be called down. But not disciplined. The Indian action had been “regrettable but understandable.”
And Kendall had to bitterly admit to herself that many Confederates would feel no differently. The Seminole Wars were still too fresh in the minds of all white men for more than a few to understand just what had really happened, and to know and appreciate the Indian code of honor.
Kendall couldn’t count the
knots in the wood. The strange, dark whorls formed faces in her mind. Red Fox’s face first. Red Fox returning and witnessing what had been his people, his home, his wife, and his child.
And then she began to see Brent McClain’s face, because she was alive, and being alive, she hurt. He had made her so vulnerable, because now she knew that she could be held, cherished, and loved . . .
Even if the words were never spoken.
She would never see him again. She was locked in the cabin. And a guard walked past her door. He was very precise; the coming and going of his footsteps were like clockwork.
Kendall stiffened suddenly, and closed her eyes tightly. Footsteps had just sounded—different from those of the guard’s, to which she had become accustomed. Strident, strong steps.
John.
Kendall twisted on the bed and curled into a tight knot with her face curled into her pillow. She tried to make herself breathe slowly and smoothly, but she felt like a cat whose hackles were rising as she heard the door creak and the clipped stride of her husband as he moved into the room.
She felt him pause at the door, then heard him move about the room, stripping away the full-dress uniform he had worn for his meeting with Captain Brannen. His sword clattered on the hardwood floor directly beside her head. She opened her eyes and stared up at him; they both knew she hadn’t been sleeping.
“So . . .” he began softly. “You became quite friendly with the Indians who carried you off?”
She sensed something in his tone instantly. Warily she twisted to her back to keep her eyes on him. She had expected insane anger. It had been obvious when he had come after her that she preferred life in the swamp to that with him. But there was something more frightening about the way he stood before her now than there would be had he walked in wielding a bullwhip.
“Yes,” she said coldly. “The ‘savages’ you slaughtered were extremely decent.”
“Including the warriors?”
“Yes.”
Tomorrow the Glory Page 18