by Shirl Henke
With a calmness borne of utter madness and despair, Richard Bullock carefully reloaded and primed his pistol...
* * * *
Olivia looked up at the darkening sky and shivered. There were no clouds per se. The sun simply vanished behind a lowering slate gray veil. Not a breath of wind stirred but a strange hint of sulfur hung ominously in the cold, damp river air.
“Chilly, my dear? You’d best go back inside else you’ll take a lung fever,” Wescott said solicitously, walking up behind her as she stood in the door of the keelboat cabin, looking at the dark churning waters of the mighty river that bore them relentlessly downstream, farther and farther away from Samuel.
“And we couldn’t have me take ill and die before claiming my inheritance, could we?” she replied acerbically, pulling her woolen shawl more tightly around her shoulders. Before he arranged her abduction, Wescott had seen to it that the best of the wardrobe she had left behind at his house was carefully packed for the trip.
“What’s this talk of dying?” he scoffed jovially. The last thing he wanted was for the troublesome chit to get the idea that he planned to kill her once the Durand wealth was securely in his hands.
She raised one eyebrow disdainfully and fixed him with a cold green glare. “You’re the one who talks of dying. You threatened to have Samuel murdered if I didn’t cooperate—you even leveled your own pistol on that poor messenger boy at the tavern. You’d have shot him in a trice if I hadn’t given him that note for Samuel, pretending it was from me.”
Samuel. Would he come after her? Or did he believe Wescott’s awful letter? She had been foolish enough to fall for his skillful forgery and place herself in his hands. For the hundredth time since he had seized her at the deserted racetrack, she cursed her folly. You wanted the note from Samuel to be true so badly that you abandoned all common sense.
“That ugliness is past and behind us now, gel Once you see the bright lights and elegant refinements of the Queen City, you’ll soon forget about your colonel. You’ll be rich beyond your wildest dreams, Olivia.”
“No, you’ll be rich, Uncle Emory,” she said, emphasizing the formerly affectionate title with utter contempt. She had to stop him before they reached New Orleans—even sooner if Samuel was following her. If Wescott got Shelby in his sights, she knew he would kill her love.
He muttered to himself and walked off to the front of the boat where several of the men were sharing a bottle, leaving her alone with her thoughts. Tonight when they moored up for the night she would escape. She had eluded Pardee and his Osage. Surely she could outsmart the likes of Emory Wescott and the pack of half-drunken river rats he had hired. Olivia stared at the river that carried her south, looking to the northern horizon. Would he come?
Darkness fell, sullen and cold. Not a star shone in the night sky. They were nearing the Chickasaw Bluffs, a particularly rough stretch of river called the Devil’s Race. No one, not even the most experienced rivermen dared to attempt it at night. They moored up beneath a steep bluff and began preparing an evening meal. One of the men, a lecherous looking little weasel with dirty yellow hair and a pockmarked face, was assigned to watch her. His name was Gruener.
Olivia sat in the bow of the boat on a small barrel, clutching a tin pan filled with burned beans and a greasy unappetizing hunk of pork. She pushed the noisome mess about with her fork after taking a few mouthfuls of the less charred beans for sustenance.
“You are not hungry tonight, Leibchen?” Gruener said in a thick Westphalian accent.
She shoved the plate at the ugly riverman. “Here, you eat it. I’m going to get some sleep.” She walked calmly to the cabin box and slipped inside the darkness, knowing he would not dare to follow, but would position himself outside the door. Emory and the boat’s captain would sleep at the opposite end, effectively sealing off that exit to her. The best she could do was prepare herself for when everyone slept except for the sentry on land and Gruener.
Olivia felt around in the dark for the flint, then used it to light a tallow candle. Setting it down beside her trunk, she opened the lid after making certain no one else was inside the crowded room. There beneath a froth of lace gowns and undergarments lay her secret weapon—a high-heeled boot made with a decorative nickel plating on the bottom edge of the heel. Hefting it against her palm, she felt the cool weight and smiled grimly. If wielded properly it should put Herr Gruener to sleep for quite a while, perhaps forever, and at this point, she cared not which.
Dousing the candle, she crawled beneath the covers, preparing for a long night’s wait. Gradually the men retired one by one, falling into drunken slumber. Wescott and the captain were among the last to go to bed. Unfortunately, she could tell from beneath veiled lashes that although the captain was in his cups, Emory remained sober. She would just have to be very quiet when she disposed of Gruener.
On the shore, Samuel climbed through a thick stand of cattails and reeds, then peered at the keelboat Wescott’s men had secured for the night. Shelby waited patiently, watching them retire for the evening. A sentry was posted ashore and a squat little man sat watch in front of the cabin box where Olivia must be held.
Several times during the course of the afternoon he had caught sight of Wescott’s boat from his own. Using the spyglass he had brought along, he saw her on deck, seemingly unharmed. He had not dared to approach closer in the smaller, swifter craft for fear of what Wescott might do to her. Instead he had bided his time, waiting until they moored up for the night.
As he crouched in the wet cold, Samuel felt an eerie premonition of doom. The sky had been dark all day and the air peculiarly becalmed with a nasty acrid aroma permeating it. All the wildlife was restless, too, as if sensing that something unnatural was about to occur. In the faint reflection from the water, he watched a rabbit bound out in the darkness, dashing erratically across an open stretch of shoreline grass, heedless of danger. Frogs croaked loudly, though they should be in hibernation by now, and swarm after swarm of wild birds and geese moved across the sky, screeching deafeningly as they flew blindly in the darkness.
Nervously he rubbed the back of his neck, then turned his attention back to the boat. One dim lantern flickered on the prow of Wescott’s keelboat. He began moving through the brackish water toward the sentry, coming upon him from behind. Since there were seven men aboard with Wescott, Samuel knew he must move swiftly and silently to get Olivia free without alerting anyone.
Just as he reached the tree stumps where the guard sat dozing lightly, leaning on his musket, Samuel saw Olivia appear in the cabin doorway. She raised some sort of a cudgel and smashed it against the squat bloke’s head. Taking his cue from her, Shelby raised the butt of his pistol to crack the sentry, but in that very instant a noise like the scraping of a boat running aground filled the night air, a rasping, irritating sound, followed by a dull roar. The earth began to vibrate, at first only a low tremor, but quickly accelerated in intensity.
The sentry jumped up, snorting with surprise as the earth beneath his feet moved. Shelby whacked him hard on the back of the head and he crumpled silently. Samuel almost followed him down, so great were the tremors growing. He struggled to stand, then took off running toward the dim gleam of the lantern on the boat where Olivia was attempting to regain her balance on the shifting deck.
Suddenly all the forces of hell broke loose. The ground began to buck up and down like a crazed horse. The earth rumbled, hissed and cracked open with a sound like hollow deafening thunder. Now the sulfurous smell became overpowering as a miasmic vapor filled the air, issuing from the crevices. Whole circular sections of ground around Samuel simply disappeared as if being sucked into the bowels of the earth that belched forth mud, water, sand and a hard black substance that looked like coal.
One such giant sink dropped right beside him. He scrambled away from the vile debris being hurled skyward thirty yards into the air. Nearby a giant cottonwood split at its roots as the earth opened beneath it, splintering the tree upward until it w
as rent in two like a ninety-foot matchstick.
Looking with horror at the scene unfolding on the river, Samuel struggled to reach the riverbank where the keelboat was moored. He could not see Olivia, but he could hear the cries of Wescott’s men when several were thrown overboard. The roar of angry water grew louder. Across the wide expanse of the river an entire bluff collapsed, a massive avalanche of trees and earth sliding into the foamy, boiling waters with a deafening noise, creating a tidal wave. In the middle of the channel the waters rose up, a solid wall rolling toward the boat. Where was Olivia?
Screaming for her, he jumped and dodged, struggling to keep his footing as he drew nearer. The heavy keelboat was picked up on the crest of the water with a sickening crack. He clawed at the bow, feeling it lift, knowing if he did not hold fast, he would be swept away downriver to certain death.
Suddenly Olivia was there, her hands frantically seizing hold of him, hauling him aboard as the boat pitched wildly, flying toward the bluff in front of them. He took her in his arms, throwing them both onto the deck and covered her with his body. In an instant the craft landed, crashing loudly into the soft wet earth on top of the bluff.
Olivia felt the force of impact knock the breath from her body, then heard the sharp splintering as the cabin box broke free of the deck. The sides of the craft split like kindling wood, sending debris flying through the air. When the boat finally settled on the continuously vibrating ground, Samuel raised up and looked down at her. With the lantern extinguished, all was in blackness.
He could hear a few faint groans from the men around them but none seemed nearby or inclined to menace them. “Are you hurt?”
“I don’t think so—no,” she replied, sitting up next to him, feeling numb from shock. “This is like the end of the world,” she rasped hoarsely.
He could barely hear her over the low insistent rumbles echoing up and down the churning river below them. The acrid stench of sulfur was chokingly strong now, borne aloft on the wind, which had picked up just as the cataclysm began. “It’s what the mountain men in the far west call a shake, the biggest one I’ve ever heard of,” he replied as he struggled unsteadily to his feet and pulled her with him.
“I can’t see anything,” she said, coughing and blinking her eyes in the dark.
“Neither can I but I know we need to get off this bluff. It could be pulled down into the river like the one on the other side.”
They groped through the jagged wreckage of the boat, climbing free of it, then stumbled across the uneven heaving, bucking earth, away from the roar of the river. After struggling for several hundred feet, they collapsed in the darkness, amid the screams of wildlife, the cracking of timber and the ever present rumble from the belly of the earth. High-pitched whistling noises heralded further eruptions from the sinkholes still opening up and down the river valley.
“We’re away from any tall stands of trees but the ground could sink or crack open anyplace. All we can do is wait it out and pray we can stay one jump ahead of the shake until daylight,” he said.
“That’s at least two or three hours,” she replied. “Do you think any of the others escaped alive?”
“No way to tell until morning,” he said fatalistically, wondering about the grizzled old boatman he had hired to bring him downriver after her.
“Hold me, Samuel.”
He did, enfolding her in his arms. “I love you, Livy,” he whispered.
She dug her nails into his shoulders, molding herself against the reassuring beat of his heart. “I love you, Samuel.”
Over the next few hours the ground quieted for brief intervals, then resumed its self-destructive fury, splitting and erupting all around them. Twice a sinkhole opened up near enough to spray them with water and sand, but the earth they rested upon remained intact. In the distance the river roared and hissed unceasingly like a wild beast in a frenzy of torment.
They waited it out, holding onto each other, shivering in the damp December air, murmuring indistinct love words and reassurances barely audible over the chaos of nature. Then the first low gray threads of light filtered across the eastern horizon and they could see the cataclysm they had thus far lived through.
The landscape looked as if a berserk giant had trod across it, uprooting whole stands of timber and kicking them into the river, leaving his giant footprints thirty feet deep where the earth had dropped into the sinkholes which had spewed up sand, coal and mud, then filled with water. In other places, low swampy swales had ballooned up, raising the overgrown vegetation into haphazardly formed hillocks. But the change on the river was the most dramatic of all.
“My God in heaven,” Olivia breathed. “Look at those islands. They weren’t there when we moored up last night. That stretch was open water.”
“The whole course of the river’s been altered,’’ Samuel said, squinting to see in the dim sulfurous light. “The main channel never used to curve to the east like that. Look at the chasm where it left its original path.”
As they stood overwhelmed by the destruction of nature’s fury, the rumbling resumed, more fiercely than ever. Suddenly a fissure several yards wide began to zigzag its way toward them. Seizing Olivia’s hand, Samuel began to run at a right angle away from it, praying it would not shift its general direction that now headed toward the river.
They outran it, then stopped, panting with exhaustion, able to see what they had only heard and felt before. The earth buckled up, sunk in and cracked open, releasing more noxious fumes. The river, too, erupted. Whirlpools formed when the bottom of the channel dropped into sinkholes with a loud sucking noise. Islands vanished and others were formed in moments as if the hand of an erratic god stretched itself upon the face of the churning deep, creating and then destroying at whim.
Then as another great cracking shudder threw them to the ground, the noise of the current stilled for an instant. When Samuel and Olivia were able to stand, they stared in stunned amazement at the Father of Waters.
“It’s flowing upstream!” Olivia said in awe.
“This is one for the history books. The whole Mississippi has reversed its course from south to north!”
“Can it stay this way?”
“I doubt it—the force of gravity eventually has to make it flow downstream again, but who knows what upheavals farther downriver caused this—or how long it’ll last?”
Olivia bit her lip. “I wonder how long we’ll last.”
“The sky’s getting lighter and the shake seems to be subsiding. We’ll need supplies to build some shelter and to eat. I’m certain we won’t be able to travel on the river safely for a while—at least not until it reverses its course downstream.”
“Look, Samuel,” she said, pointing to the southern horizon where a black cloud began to fill the sky, accompanied by shrill cries. “Geese, thousands and thousands of them.”
“All the wildlife’s panicked. Even before the shake I noticed how jumpy and erratic the rabbits, deer—even frogs were, as if they knew it was coming.”
“I wonder if Micajah’s all right,” Olivia said worriedly.
“Surely, he’s too far away to be harmed. I suspect we were almost at the center of the damn thing, but I bet they felt the vibrations pretty far away.”
Samuel looked across the jagged landscape toward where the wreckage of the keelboat lay like a smashed toy. “If there’s anything left of their food and weapons, not to mention blankets, we need to find the stuff.”
“Be careful, Samuel. If any of Wescott’s men are alive they’d just as soon shoot as not. He told them to be on the lookout for you.”
He turned back to her with a smile. “Did you believe I’d come for you?”
“You mean after that letter? I didn’t write it, Samuel. Emory forged it—a skill he acquired as a smuggler. He bragged to me about it.” Quickly she outlined to him how she had been duped and taken prisoner so that Wescott could use her to gain control of the Durand fortune.
As she explained, he realized
Liza had been right. He had failed to trust Livy as he should have. Once a spy, always a cynic. Sadly, he vowed to change his suspicious nature.
As they approached the boat he could see several of Wescott’s men lying on the ground. All of them appeared to be dead, their bodies thrown clear of the wreckage like rag dolls tossed away, heads and arms jutting at grotesque, twisted angles. He did not see Wescott.
“Stay here while I look inside the cabin box. It seems to have survived relatively intact,” he instructed. The small wooden rectangle lay on its side a dozen or so yards away from the shattered prow of the boat.
“I can’t believe we survived that landing with nothing more than a few bruises,” she said, climbing over the splintering debris.
“You both have the devil’s own luck, as do I, my dear,” Emory Wescott said in a businesslike manner as he stepped out from behind a clump of coyote willow where he had lain in wait for them. He held an expensive over-and-under barreled pistol in his hand aimed directly at Samuel’s heart.
“I need my impetuous young charge to accompany me to New Orleans, but as for you, Colonel, well, you’ve been a thorn in my side for far too long as it is.”
Wescott raised the pistol and took aim.
Chapter Twenty Three
Just as Wescott pulled back the hammer, Olivia slipped the knife she’d taken from Gruener out of her boot and threw it quickly, aiming for Wescott’s chest. Seeing the blurry motion from the corner of his eye, Wescott jumped aside, firing wildly. That was all the opening Samuel needed as he dove toward his foe, intent on beating the vicious schemer insensate before he could discharge the second barrel of his weapon. The two men went down, kicking and punching, just as another tremor began to rock the already riven earth.
So intent were they on each other, Shelby and Wescott felt the shaking earth only as an extension of their own fury. They rolled forward and back, locked in an embrace of hate. Shelby had the advantage of height but Wescott was barrel-chested and exceedingly powerful, fighting with the desperation of a cornered animal. Olivia quickly retrieved the knife which had missed its mark, the only weapon she had managed to keep during the night’s upheaval. Samuel had his own blade strapped to his hip, but as yet he could not draw it. He was too caught up in staving off Wescott’ s attempts to cock the pistol he still clutched.