by Lori Benton
Seona sighed. If this man knew anything at all, it was gardening. And his Lord.
“I know what you’re saying is true. Still I long for this day to be done. For them to be back safe, the danger past.”
“Amen to that.” Malcolm leaned close and kissed her brow, his old man’s scent enveloping her. “One day all the troubles will be past, and we will count them as fleeting shadows in light of what we’ve gained by trusting Jesus. But even now our Father in heaven sees Gabriel and Catriona, just like He sees ye. Choose to trust Him, no matter what this day, or tomorrow, brings.”
Malcolm sagged a little as he finished, as if their talk had drained him. Seona leaned against him, more to support now than to draw her own comfort. “I choose,” she said—and immediately felt those fears clutching at her again. She closed her eyes and said it in her soul. I choose to trust, Lord. I choose to fear not. Help me endure this waiting. I choose. I choose . . .
She didn’t open her eyes as Malcolm said, “The Almighty will never leave ye, child. Read His Word for yourself, every page of it. Then read it again. Learn who He is. Who He says ye are. That’s how ye learn to trust Him, to love Him.”
He prayed then for Gabriel and Catriona. For Ian, Joseph, and Matthew. For Neil and those working to mend him. He was still praying when Seona sensed a shining through her eyelids and opened her eyes upon a glorious sight framed by the open stable doors.
Somewhere over the mountains, sunlight had broken through a chink in the clouds to blaze out golden toward the east, where a rainbow arced in colored bands across the rain-swept sky, filling her scoured soul with wonder.
41
Matthew lay unmoving in the cabin-yard. Aram Crane stood between them, pistol aimed at Ian, demanding to see the gold hidden in the folded leather he clutched.
“Listen, Crane,” Ian said, certain the man wouldn’t be satisfied with the ransom he had to pay—yet something urging him to give the man a chance to walk away from this. “Ye don’t have to die today. I’ve done ye no harm and won’t, if ye let the ones ye’re holding go, leave this place, and never show your face again to trouble me and mine or anyone in Shiloh.”
Crane spat on the ground next to Matthew. “You want to talk harm? He’s the one wrecked my camp.”
“And ye pilfered his traps. Ye were seen at it.” Crane was inches shorter than he, wiry of build, probably twice his age, yet there was about the man a sense of ruthlessness, a wolfish cunning Ian knew better than to underestimate.
“Seen by who? Waring’s half-wit! I paid him at last for running his mouth all those years ago. Ruining what chance I had at keeping my place with Waring.”
Rage at the offhand admission of Francis Waring’s murder, and the irrational blame, clouded Ian’s vision red. By the time Francis had spoken against Crane, that night Willa’s cabin burned, the man had lost any hope of keeping his position as a groom with Colonel Waring. Had he forgotten Joseph Tames-His-Horse?
Ian hadn’t but clamped his lips over the threats eager to leap off his tongue. Joseph would come. He had to trust that—without arousing Crane’s suspicion that there was anyone left to challenge him, besides Ian. If he could delay a little longer . . .
“I’ll see my son and sister before I give ye anything.”
Crane drew back the pistol’s hammer. “First I see that gold. I’m losing patience.”
Ian’s gaze flicked sideways as Crane’s mare stepped close to Matthew, nosed his face, snorted a breath that elicited a faint moan. Relief crashed through Ian.
“All right.” One measured step at a time, he closed the distance between himself and Crane, holding out what he had to offer.
The man gestured with the pistol. “Open it.”
The rain had nearly ceased, but when Ian had the leather folds lying open on his palm, a fat drop hit its contents, making the bits of gold shine. Crane’s eyes lit with surprise, as though until now he hadn’t fully believed in the gold’s existence, despite all he’d done to obtain it. He licked his lips. His head lifted. Grizzled brows drew down. “Where’s the rest?”
“Ye’ll let me inside that cabin before I promise ye anything more.”
“That’s not the plan. I want every bit you have. Then you’re going to show me where you’re getting it. What’s in that cabin will keep.”
Ian’s heart thudded a hollow rhythm, realizing there would be no peaceful way out of this. Even if he managed to get Gabriel and Catriona away, Matthew too, Crane would never believe no endless source of wealth was hidden somewhere on his land. He would never stop threatening. They would never be safe.
A raindrop struck Ian’s jaw, leaving a cold trail down his neck. Clouds sagged low and ragged over the pointed crowns of trees ascending toward the mountain’s summit. Pistol aimed, Crane awaited his answer.
Ian doubted he could get his hand to his tomahawk, much less throw it, before the man shot him . . . unless he made a false move, invited fire, threw himself to the side enough to sustain a wound that wouldn’t incapacitate him completely. Before Crane could reload, he would take him down. Or maybe Crane’s powder was wet and the pistol would misfire . . .
Where was Joseph?
He made up his mind to risk it. An instant before he set his plan in motion, a noise from the cabin reached them. A rhythmic thumping, like someone kicking a wall. Another sound joined it. A muffled voice attempting a scream.
Ian’s hope soared. “Catriona!”
Crane’s face twisted with rage. With a shouted oath, he whirled toward the rickety shack and fired the pistol, the report like a final peal of thunder on the mountainside.
“No!” With horror tearing through him, Ian dropped the gold and charged through acrid smoke, plowing into Aram Crane before the man could turn, pulling free his tomahawk as they fell.
When they hit the earth, he rolled off the man and clubbed him over the head with all his strength.
Scrambling away from Crane’s body, he sprinted the short distance across the muddy yard, where he yanked open the cabin door so hard it wrenched off its rotting hinges. He shoved it behind him, into the yard.
Three paces away, across a narrow span of earthen floor, Catriona and Gabriel huddled on a low bed frame, bound, gagged, overjoyed at sight of him. Crane’s shot had penetrated the cabin wall but missed his captives, embedding in a log inches above Catriona’s head. Particles of exploded wood sprinkled her hair.
Weak with relief, Ian took a step inside. Above her gag, Catriona’s eyes widened. Violently she shook her head, emitting a muffled shout.
Ian understood a second too late. Yanked from behind with such force he lost his footing, he stumbled backward over the fallen door, landing flat in the yard with the breath knocked from his lungs. Crane loomed over him, face half-bloodied, tomahawk raised. Ian’s own had fallen out of reach.
Sucking in breath at last, he rolled to the side. Crane’s blade cleaved the saturated earth, missing Ian’s face by a handbreadth. As Ian got to his knees, Crane wrenched his tomahawk free and came at him again, so fast Ian knew he would never make it to his feet in time to meet the blow.
Just shy of delivering it, Crane staggered to a halt, staring at something beyond Ian. Breaking off his attack, the man lunged instead for his mare, which had been cropping bits of grass in the yard. She bolted at his coming, kicking out her hind legs.
Cursing, the man dodged his horse’s hooves and halted, gone still as stone, eyes widened in terror. Then he whirled toward Lacey’s plot of corn and sprinted across the uneven ground as if the hounds of hell were at his heels.
Only one. Joseph Tames-His-Horse, tomahawk in hand, had come from around the back of the cabin at a run. He paused beside Matthew, still lying stunned in the yard.
Ian scrambled to his feet. “He’s alive. But Crane . . .” The man had plunged in among the cornstalks, heading for the creek trail. “Did ye come that way—up the ravine?”
“No. From above. But that one will not escape.” Face suffused with a terrible eage
rness, Joseph bolted after Crane, leaving Ian torn. He needed Gabriel safe in his arms—and to see Crane taken down.
Conscious now, Matthew pushed himself off the ground. In a voice dazed and strained, he said, “I’ll get them—go!”
Ian hesitated a second before memory of that deadfall trap, down along the trail, seized him. Joseph hadn’t come that way, hadn’t seen the warning Ian left. Crane would need none, but Joseph was running straight into that trap.
He snatched up his tomahawk and raced across the narrow yard into the cornstalks. Bursting out the other side, he saw Joseph disappearing around the first bend in the trail, where it angled close to the ravine.
“Joseph!” The rush of creek water drowned his voice.
Praying not to slip and fall, Ian ran, boots slogging, churning mud. As the mountain’s slope on his right pressed the trail close to the ravine’s edge, he glimpsed the creek thirty feet below, its storm-fed level higher than an hour past. Ian rounded the first bend in the trail. And saw no one.
He ran on, nearly losing his footing half a dozen times on the descending trail pocked with stones waiting to slide from under a boot before another bend brought him in sight of the warrior.
He heard Joseph’s thunderous shout. “Crane!”
Several yards on from the running warrior, Ian spotted the yellow birches that marked the spot where Crane had set his trap, their slender forms clinging to both sides of the trail. Crane had nearly reached them. He must have heard Joseph’s shout. He glanced back as if to judge the nearness of his pursuer.
“Joseph!” Ian called again and this time made himself heard. Joseph looked back, slowing his descent.
Crane faced the trail again and quickened his stride, taking advantage of Joseph’s distraction to gain ground—and went down in a flailing slide as he reached the birches. He disappeared among their white ranks.
Ian heard a scream, cut off by a clattering rumble. Beyond the birches, the deadfall tore flood-like across the trail and hurtled over the ravine’s lip, the form of a man glimpsed among the falling debris.
Joseph descended as far as the birches, where he paused. He was grasping a slender white trunk, leaning out to peer into the ravine, when Ian overtook him. Red stained his shirtsleeve where the gash Neil had stitched bled afresh. Below them the creek was silted brown, foaming over rocks, writhing its way out of the mountains.
Of Crane there was no sign.
“He’s gone,” Ian said, voice lifted above the rush.
Joseph met his gaze with fierce intention. “He will be.”
“Ye’re wounded,” Ian argued, realizing what the man intended, but Joseph was over the side and gone before Ian’s reaching hands could halt him. Certain the warrior had followed Crane to his death, Ian leaned out as far as he dared.
Joseph had found what might have been the only path down the ravine’s face to the creek below. As Ian watched, he dropped off the final precipice into the churning flow, letting the swollen creek take him downstream.
Stunned, bruised from battle, Ian made his dazed way back up the trail with a sense of loss as great as his relief in knowing Gabriel, Catriona, and Matthew were alive. Joseph. Neil. The day’s casualties crashed over his soul, knocking him off his feet. Seona. He would restore to her their son, but what of her trust?
He went to his knees on the trail, knowing once again he hadn’t done enough. Wasn’t enough. He bowed his head to his muddied fists.
Grace . . . it is enough.
The creek rushed on in the ravine below, but Ian was no longer on that rain-swept mountainside where death and violence stalked. He was far away at Mountain Laurel, on his knees at the bedside of his dying wife.
“Your grace is enough. That was all she meant. I could never be enough but Ye are. Ye have been all along.”
A truth Judith had tried to make him understand so many times. The grace of almighty God went beyond his deserving as far as the east was from the west. Not just for salvation—for every choice, every situation, every moment that had followed. It had nothing to do with how hard he had striven or how wise he had been, whether or not he had foreseen every evil coming and safeguarded those in his care against it. He wasn’t all-seeing. Nor was he powerful enough to shield Seona and their children from every hardship for all the years to come.
He didn’t have to be. The grace of a good and loving God who did see all was enough to carry them through this veil of shadow, to weather whatever troubles it would bring—holding fast to all the joys—until they arrived at last in that Kingdom ruled by peace and righteousness.
With a cry of release, Ian Cameron rose from the trail and stumbled on, eager now to hold his son, embrace his sister, get them down off that mountain—clinging to the hope that grace was enough to safeguard his and Seona’s hearts as well and give them a future.
42
“Ian!” His sister’s voice reached him while he was still among the dripping cornstalks. They were outside the cabin when he emerged, Matthew with Catriona in his arms, Catriona with Gabriel in hers. The black mare had settled and was back to cropping the sparse grass browning in Lacey’s cabin-yard. Where, he wondered, was that old man?
Then he reached them, took Gabriel from his sister, and relief swept all other thought away. Vociferously past his fright, Gabriel babbled about his adventures with his auntie and the bad man who took them away from getting schooled.
“Getting schooled, were ye?” Ian said shakily, rattled with the aftershocks of terror as he patted his son’s sturdy little back.
“With Mandy! She went with Mama, and that’s when the bad man took me and Auntie Catweena away and then . . .”
While his son recited his grievances, Ian opened his eyes to Matthew, bloodied from his head wound, and Catriona, pale and shaken, a bruise darkening on her swollen cheek. Ian ground his teeth to see it.
“Come here,” he said, shifting Gabriel and holding out an arm.
Bedecked in his discarded cape, holding the hat that had tumbled from his head in the scuffle with Crane, his sister came to him, placed the muddied hat on his head, and leaned into his side. “He’s gone?”
“Crane? Aye. Over that ravine into the creek.”
“Dead?” Matthew asked as Catriona pulled away.
“Before he hit the water, maybe. He sprang his own trap. A deadfall. It knocked him off the trail.” When Matthew stared blankly, Ian asked, “D’ye remember any of it, after the blow ye took?”
“I heard Crane admit to killing Francis. But you . . . you gave him a chance to walk away from this and live. He didn’t take it.”
“I didn’t think he would.”
Matthew frowned. “Still you offered.”
“I think it was the Almighty offering it through me. A last chance to escape the fires of hell, maybe.” All of them, even Gabriel in his arms, stared at him with widened eyes.
“I wouldn’t have done it,” Matthew said. Not in anger. Admission.
“Ye might have, had ye felt God’s nudging ye to it.”
“I did feel it,” Matthew countered. “Right before I loosed his mare. I didn’t heed it. Maybe had I done as ye bade me . . .”
“There’s no looking back,” Catriona said. “At least not to brood over what cannot be changed. There’s only what we do next—repent if need be and resolve to do what we know is right.”
She met Ian’s gaze with a trembling smile that spoke of sorrows past and wisdom gained. Then she shivered, despite wearing his cape. Her cloak must have been left in the school cabin. The gown she wore beneath the cape was wet. All were wet through and the air behind the storm was biting. But it was Matthew most concerned him now, with those dazed eyes staring through his bloody mask.
“Can ye ride?” Ian asked him. “We need to round up the horses and get off this mountain.”
“Of course.” Matthew drew himself straight as Catriona snaked an arm around his waist. He turned his face and brushed a kiss against her hair, come unpinned to curl around her shoulde
rs in rain-darkened hanks. “You are the bravest woman I’ve ever known,” he told her.
Catriona suppressed another shiver. Not her blazing smile. “Brave enough to marry you.”
Matthew closed his eyes. “Don’t I know it.”
“Do you? Good. Let’s hear no more talk of who isn’t suitable for the likes of me.”
Matthew’s blood-streaked lips curved. “Not a word.” He opened his eyes and fixed Ian with a look of dawning concern. “Uncle Joseph . . . did I dream him?”
“Ye did not.” Ian felt a plummeting in his gut, saw the same in Matthew’s eyes.
“Where is he then?”
Hating to do so, he told them what Joseph Tames-His-Horse had done. Matthew’s gaze questioned—ought they to search for Joseph?—concluding as had Ian that they needed to get Catriona and Gabriel home. “What of Lacey? Where is he?”
“The cabin was empty when . . .” Catriona’s teeth had begun to chatter. “When Crane brought us here. He must have been scared off. Before today, I mean.”
“Let’s go,” Matthew said. “Up to my horse. I’m taking this one.” He crossed the yard to where the black mare grazed. Despite the smell of blood on him, she didn’t shy. They found Joseph’s mare hitched with Matthew’s horse, which Catriona mounted, taking Gabriel up with her. Ian and Matthew led them down the mountain, horse hitched to horse, circling around by other paths and coming back finally to the sheltered spot where he had left Ruiadh.
They found the roan still waiting, happy for the sight of them.
The surgery door off the kitchen was shut. Maggie had finished cooking the dinner Naomi started before the need to tend Neil MacGregor drew her away. Mandy had eaten. So had Ally and the boys, then gone back out to the stable. Lemuel Waring had stayed, rifle propped nearby, baby Josephine asleep in his arms. She was starting to fret as Seona and Malcolm came into the kitchen. Lem jiggled her, crooning.
Maggie turned from the hearth and stilled, watching Lem holding her sister. A smile tugged at her mouth before she looked to Seona and Malcolm. “There’s stew left. I can fix you both a plate.”