Dance on the Wind (56 page)

When she began to groan—low at first—he quickly stopped and reared back in wide-eyed surprise: mystified, more afraid than anything. Great God, if he went and hurt her, what the devil would her brute of a father and halfbreed brothers do to him?

“No! D-don’t stop!” she ordered, squeezing her legs about his hips even tighter, dragging his head back down as her hips gyrated insistently.

Obedient was he, willing captive that Titus was. A prisoner of his own sudden appetite, aroused to a fever pitch by those patches of smooth flesh he stroked beneath the crumple of her dress pulled high above her waist, compelled by the moistness he had penetrated, made dizzy by the strong smell of fragrant wood chips, sweat, and potato beer clinging to her like hickory smoke clung to his pap’s hams suspended above the smoldering fires in the smoking shed.

It wasn’t long before her groan became an insistent whimper. As the sound grew in volume at his ear, the primal grunt of it began to hammer at him every time they
collided. Then she nearly scared him out of his skin when she suddenly grabbed one of his hands and clamped it over her own mouth as she thrashed back and forth. He ripped the hand away.

“Keep … keep it there!” she huffed in a high-pitched whine.

Seizing his hand again, the girl slapped it back over the bottom of her face as she went back to lunging up at him. He’d never had a woman throw herself into this mating with such fight, at the same time wanting him to keep her quiet.

Then he knew why she had clamped his hand where she had.

The instant she began that muffled scream, he stopped his thrusts and started to pull the hand away. Terrified at the wild shriek from the beast below him, he clamped the hand back down over her mouth as she threw herself into a hissing, snarling tantrum there in the shadows of the dogtrot. Titus jerked his head this way, then that, afraid to his core that at any moment the elder Colbert would appear at the corner of the cabin and find him not just rutting with his daughter—but bodily harming the frightened young girl to boot.

Why, it sounded as if someone were killing her!

Then, as her hips slowed their lunging gyrations, she reached up and took a bunch of his hair in each hand, dragging his face down so she could lather it with her wet mouth.

“Ain’cha ready?” she huffed breathlessly at his ear.

“I … got so scared—”

“Do it. Just do it now,” and she let go of his hair, locking her hands on his buttocks poking above the wide waistband of his britches like two bare hillocks rising above a line of timber below.

She clawed and scratched them, kneading his skin while thrusting herself up to him. No longer did she have her eyes closed. Now they were intense, snakelike slits. Her lips pressed together in a line of determination.

Again she asked, “You’re ready, ain’cha?”

For the moment he could not answer. Suddenly everything above and below his groin seemed shut off from all
sensation, incapable of any function aside from assisting what eruption was about to occur. And with his first explosion she moaned and whimpered beneath him again—small, feral yelps of pleasure.

As he ground to a halt, fully spent within her, the girl slowly, softly stroked those bare mounds she had been pulling tight against her.

The next thing he grew conscious of was her voice in his ear.

“We cain’t sleep here all night.”

“No … no, we can’t.” His mouth tasted pasty, as if he’d been sucking on a trencher filled with lye ash.

Groggily Titus raised his head. The air was cold, damp too of a sudden, on the bare flesh of his buttocks. He was surprised to find that she and he lay just as they had finished—fallen asleep locked in that final embrace of afterglow.

But then she was pushing him to the side, rolling the other way herself. The cold shocked him all the more as his limp flesh flopped against his belly, shrinking quickly.

Scrambling to her feet, the girl tugged down her skirt, shuffled that loose blouse back into place, and smoothed it over those young breasts he had wanted to taste so badly while they had been dancing. He realized he wanted her again. When he reached up for her, the girl pushed his hands down.

“Get your britches pulled up,” she ordered in a harsh whisper.

“C’mere. I wanna—”

“No,” she answered harshly. “Maybe ’nother time. My father come out looking for me if I’m gone too long.”

“Just go let him see you, then come back.”

“Maybe you go on to your bed. Your cabin yonder,” she countered coyly. “Maybe I’ll come find you later. You was good, boy. Better’n a lotta the men I had me.”

That raised his ire. “I’m every bit a man like them.”

Behind her hand she giggled, turning away. “Like I said, better’n most every one I had.”

The shadows absorbed her so quickly, he never got another plea out. It took a few moments more before the cold breeze brushing his bare flesh seeped back into his
consciousness. Hobbling to his knees, Titus heaved himself from there to his feet, hopping about while yanking up the britches.

With them buttoned he slipped around the side of the cabin, stole a long last look in the open door. There he found everyone still in full revel. Kingsbury turned, saw him, and motioned Bass back in.

Titus shook his head, pointing to the hut. After the pilot nodded, Bass moved out of the splash of flickering torchlight as the wind picked up. The night air smelled rank with rain as he reached the second of the two huts where the boatmen had stowed what blankets and belongings they were packing north to the Ohio. Inside the shanty, out of the wind, his nose pricked with the smell of another. Eyes were slow growing accustomed to the dark as he searched the walls, while dancing torchlight from across the yard spilled in through the hut’s single, small window.

“Hezekiah?”

“Yes. Me.”

“You’re awake.”

“Not sleep. The noise. Guns.”

“Yeah,” he said, searching the floor with his hands. “You got both our blankets?”

“Right here.”

Titus settled in beside the big slave as Hezekiah held up both blankets. “Cold night.”

“Sure is,” the slave agreed. “Warm now.”

He let out a sigh and closed his eyes, sensing the body heat from the big man’s back beginning to warm him.

“Ask you question, Titus?”

“What’s that?”

“You with woman tonight?”

“How you mean?”

For the longest time there was no reply. Then Hezekiah said, “With woman: like you was with Nina back to Miss Annie’s boat.”

“Yepper,” he answered, remembering Ebenezer Zane always answering in the affirmative just that way.

“Thought me so. Goo’night, Titus.”

For a moment he wanted to ask the slave how he
knew, then decided he wouldn’t. Eventually Bass said, “Good night, Hezekiah.”

Sometime later he had awakened, hearing that first roll of thunder come their way from across the ridge to the west, the same heights they had struggled up, over, then down to reach this ford on the Tennessee River. For the longest time he lay there in the dark, feeling the Negro snore with a rumble like dull thunder itself, listening to the other two boatmen snore.

He was just slipping back into sleep when he heard footsteps outside. Sensing immediate alarm, he laid a hand on one of his pistols as the small oak door creaked open on its own swollen wood hinges, grating across the pounded clay floor beneath it.

“Reuben!” Kingsbury’s voice whispered harshly like the rending of new canvas. “Heman! Ho, Titus! Pull yourselves up.”

Then a sudden flare of lightning backlit the river pilot, stoop-shouldered in the half-opened doorway. At the crack of thunder he vaulted into the hut, stumbling over a pair of feet before catching himself against the far wall.

“That you down there, Titus?”

“My feet, yes.”

“Get you and that Negra up,” Kingsbury ordered as he straightened. “We gotta be off now. Up, up—be quick about it now.”

“By the devil—it ain’t even light yet, Hames,” Root hissed as he sat up, rubbing grit from his eyes.

“Gonna be soon enough,” he replied with an urgent bite. “I wanna be long gone from that bunch afore dawn. Now, up with all of you and get down to the ferry. I’m off to fetch Colbert and his boys now to haul us away to the far shore afore this storm breaks.”

The first drops fell as they were nearing the north bank of the Tennessee, hauled across by the power of the Colbert muscle. The half-dozen wayfarers hurried off the rough planks of the unwieldy craft as rain slicked the wood and bare ground where they turned momentarily to watch the old man bark orders at his three boys. The sky chose that moment to open up as the ferry disappeared behind shifting sheets of rain. When they struggled up the
slick bank to huddle beneath the first of that canopy of trees sheltering the well-worn groove of the Natchez Trace, another flare of that terrifying electrical storm lit up the whole of Colbert’s Landing.

In that daylike brightness it was plain to make out the main cabins, the wayfarer huts. The corral.

“Shit,” Kingsbury growled.

“Them horses ain’t there,” Titus said.

“Jesus God,” Ovatt added his own oath.

All six of them stood there, soaked and chilled, staring across the river as another flash of lightning starred the far settlement of crude buildings. The post corral was empty—not one of the eight horses the six slave hunters had brought with them still there.

“Where you figure they gone?” Root asked, something pinching his voice into a taut string.

As Bass hunched over, squinting in the sudden flares of the storm, searching the muddy ground for some clue, Kingsbury shouted against the roar of approaching thunder.

“Wherever they gone—it’s for no good.”

“W-why you say that?” Beulah asked.

The pilot turned on her, gripped her shoulders firmly. “They ain’t gone to bed—pulled out afore us. None of that’s no good.”

“What we do now?” Ovatt asked.

They looked at one another for a moment, then Beulah said, “There ain’t no ferry coming to fetch us, fellas. We just sit here, or get on down the way home like we ’tended.”

“Woman’s right,” Kingsbury said. “Maybeso the dark help us more’n them sonsabitches.”

Root grabbed hold of Kingsbury’s soppy coat. “How you so sure they ain’t just gone looking for runaways?”

“They’re coming after us, Reuben,” the pilot answered with a wag of his head. “Didn’t you see it plain as paint?. They want this here Negra.”

Root whirled on Hezekiah. “I say we get rid of the son of a bitch right here and now. Let ’em have him.”

“No!” Titus bellowed against a clap of thunder.

Root turned to Bass, snagging up a big handful of his
oiled jerkin in both hands, shaking the youth. “That bunch hunts down men for money. Likely they kill’t their share.”

“So have we,” Ovatt replied.

“But they’re the paid killers,” Kingsbury argued. “And we mean nothing to ’em but money.”

Root flung Bass back from him. “Get rid of the Negra right now!”

“Maybe Reuben’s right.” Ovatt aligned himself with Root. “We give ’em the Negra—they’ll leave us be.”

The wind came up, strong in Titus’s face as if it were siding against him too. “You can’t—”

“It won’t help a damned thing,” the woman suddenly interrupted Bass. “Hames, you know damned good and well they ain’t after just the Negra here.”

Nodding with some reluctance, his skinny face glistening with rain as the next bolt of lightning lit up the countryside, Kingsbury said, “She’s right. It ain’t only the Negra. They’re coming after the money.”

Ovatt scoffed, “They don’t know we got no money.”

“They goddamn well do know!” the pilot replied. He seemed to square his narrow shoulders as he turned to Bass. “Best keep our guns under our coats—right, Titus?”

He swallowed hard, seeing the rest of those wet faces staring intently at his. “Yeah. Keeps your pan powder dry, out of the rain.”

“Not just that,” Kingsbury added morosely, gazing up the dark corridor of the Natchez Trace, “that bunch never did see for sure that we was armed, the hull lot of us. Maybeso they show up, that ignernce’ll count for something.”

“I pray it does count for something, Hames,” Beulah agreed. “When it comes down to the killin’.”

The horsemen had gone sometime in the night. It had to be after that gal had finished with Titus and he looked in to find everyone still celebrating—going off to bed himself. Had to be after Kingsbury, Ovatt, and Root had limped across the yard to their blankets. When the one called James had ordered his men into the saddle only then.

Bass wished he knew more about horses, to know
how far and how fast an able man could travel on one. Then he would have some idea how far the boatmen had to go before counting on bumping into those slave trackers.

But then—he thought, with his teeth chattering like a box of ivory dominoes in an ox-horn cup—the how far didn’t really matter, did it? Because once a man was out ahead of you, he no longer had to travel any great distance. He could pick his place. A spot most favorable to acting on his plans. Just hunker down and wait for you to come along at your own pace.

They could be waiting up there no more than a hundred paces. Or as much as a hundred leagues. That was the thing about not knowing that scared him down to his roots. This wasn’t like any of the dangers he had faced before. Oh, he had been scared in having to face the Falls of the Ohio, just as scared of the prospect of running the Devil’s Raceground or the Devil’s Elbow on the Mississippi. Deep water had always frightened him.

Still, he had confronted his fear time and again—staring it in the eye, and not giving an inch. But this … Titus had never had to stew in his own juices over the very real possibility of staring down danger in the form of another man driven by deadly intent.

Not even when that Chickasaw hunting party had caught him alone in that timber. Not when that war party had slipped down the river to surprise Ebenezer Zane’s flatboat crew. Not when Titus had been so crazy drunk he couldn’t even get his pecker excited and that eye-gouging fight had broken out on Annie Christmas’s gunboat.

On every occasion Bass had suddenly found himself thrust into the vortex of events. With no time to fret, or worry, much less get himself scared until all of it was damned well over and done with. And—by God—there really was a tangible advantage to not having to put one soggy moccasin in front of the other, minute by minute, yard by yard, worrying all the while when and where in the rain-soaked darkness of this wilderness they were going to strike.