Daughter of the Sword (53 page)

“Hold on!” Judith planted herself firmly in the way. “You ain't gettin' close to the border by yourself alone! I'm goin'!”

“Maccabee!” Deborah appealed.

He shrugged. “This place runs to headstrong women. Judith's my wife, not my slave.”

Sara turned to Ansjie. “Could you look after the children for a few days?”

Ansjie beamed. Having the twins to spoil to her heart's content would please her like nothing else except the return of her handsome doctor,
“Ja,
but—”

“We'll do the washing today,” ruled Sara. “We'll bake, roast a turkey, and leave everything so that Ansjie can manage while we're away.”

Deborah stared. “You can't! The twins—”

“The twins have been weaned for six months,” Sara returned tartly. “Hasn't it entered your head,
meshema,
that I get tired of staying home while you and Judith gallop around the countryside?”

Now everyone stared, including the wide-eyed twins. “Let's get busy,” Sara said firmly. “Laddie, before you go to the forge, bring me your dirty clothes—all of them! I hope I can still get into your trousers!”

It was still warm enough to wash outside, so boiling, scrubbing, rinsing, and wringing out went on in the backyard, while the main cabin filled with tempting smells, first of rising, then of baking bread, including Ansjie's delicious rye. Apple struddles and rhubarb pies, fragrant with steaming juices, joined the crusty loaves, and by mid-afternoon the kitchen could have passed for a bake shop.

Before supper, clean sheets were on all the beds, clean clothes were folded away, and the pantry was stocked with baking. “I have nothing to do but with the twins play!” protested Ansjie.

“By the time you feed them and three men and wayfarers, you may not play much,” Sara warned. “But when we come back, we'll give you a vacation.”

“Better it is to be needed!” Ansjie said with a vehemence that made Deborah realize how lost the young woman had felt without Conrad or Doc to “do” for.

Armed with Bowies and carrying enough food for five or six days, the three friends left early the next morning, rigged out in a motley assortment of masculine clothes and broad-brimmed hats.

“If you ain't enough to set dogs howlin'!” chortled Maccabee, while Tiberius, more polite, sputtered on his boiled wheat. “Lordy! Them ladies you wantin' to help may say howdy with loaded shotguns!”

“We don' all have to ride up at once,” Judith pointed out coldly.

Ansjie's blue eyes were worried. “You'll careful be?”

“We'll careful be!” promised Sara, giving the twins a last hug, the daughter, so like her, cuddled close with the son, so like his father.

Stopping that noon at a farm near Lawrence where Deborah had settled refugees to help the widowed owner, they learned that Lincoln had canceled Frémont's emancipation proclamation and that Price's overwhelmingly large Confederate army was besieging a smaller federal force at Lexington, headquarters of Russell, Majors, and Waddell's freighting business, which had gone bankrupt over its Pony Express.

Sturgis's command was supposed to succor Lexington, and so was Jim Lane, but his brigade, making its way north from Fort Scott, instead of attacking Price's rear or flank, was more intent on following Lane's exhortation to clean out “everything disloyal—from a Shanghai rooster to a Durham cow.”

As Lane's men stole, foraged, and burned their way north, Missouri guerrillas sacked and burned Humboldt, forty miles west of Fort Scott. The border wars were on again, more savagely than ever.

“Bad times,” said the widow, juggling a baby on her hip. She was a drawn, frail woman whom Deborah remembered as dancing and gay at the Fourth of July celebration three years ago. “If guerrillas could get as far as Humboldt, they might try for Lawrence.” She laughed bitterly. “My man thought our troubles were over when the drought broke and Kansas got into the Union. Now he's dead at Wilson's Creek, and what's to become of us, God only knows!”

“Gotta hang on, Missus,” encouraged Jerry, the man of the couple staying with her. “We put in five acres of wheat, and there's corn for this winter and plenty of melons and squash.”

“I couldn't have done it without you,” the widow said. She looked at Jerry and his wife and smiled reluctantly. “All right. Maybe all of us together can pull through. For my baby's sake, I'll stick it out as long as I can.” She frowned at Deborah's, Judith's, and Sara's boyish garb. “I sure hope you don't run into jayhawkers or Missouri guerrillas. One named Quantrill was fighting in Price's army, but they say it didn't suit his style and he's cut loose to rob and murder.”

Quantrill again, formerly known sometimes as Charlie Hart. As the women rode southeast, stopping at farms and an occasional settlement, they heard his name often, though he couldn't have been at all the places he was rumored to be, and he was undoubtedly getting blamed for the deeds of unknown brigands, just as Lane, in Missouri, was cursed for every strayed mule or chicken.

“Don' think there be an able-bodied white man over sixteen left in this part of Kansas,” observed Judith as they rode past another abandoned farm. “Wonder if it was drought or war that got this one.”

They asked, as they'd been doing about unused places, at the nearest occupied farm and learned from the woman there that it had been her eldest son's before he volunteered. Widowed before she came to Kansas, she, with ten and twelve-year-old sons, was managing her own land, but she welcomed the idea of neighbors who'd help with plowing and farm her soldier son's acres on shares.

By nightfall of the next day the friends had a list of six available farms, providing refugees were willing to live near the border. And they had matched up two households that, between them, could manage what neither could alone. There were also three women who wanted to join their parents in Ohio and Iowa if trustworthy farmers could take charge till the men came home.

“We'll go as far south as we can tomorrow,” said Deborah, “and then start back. It's already been worth the trip.”

Sara nodded. “It's like trying to keep things rooted in a high wind. The more you can keep the soil held down, the faster it'll heal when the storm ends.”

Gazing across one forlorn deserted field with a few straggling stalks of corn, Judith shifted in her saddle. “Cain't help wonderin' how many of these men are with Lane, ruinin' folks's little farms in Missouri while the men from those farms are burnin' and robbin' here. Be a sight better if they all stayed home and tended to their plowin'.”

Deborah had had the same thought. The “real” war was, for a lot of Missouri and Kansas men, a continuation of their old vendettas. “Maybe this'll thin out the hotheads and get things settled so people can get on with their lives,” she said. “Shall we spend the night outside or try to find a house?”

“It's not cold,” Sara said. “We can go on a ways, and if we don't find a roof, we've got the stars.”

“Better'n jammin' in with a houseful like we did last night,” muttered Judith. Because their hostess had been pitifully eager for them to stay, they'd shared a one-room cabin with her and her five children.

Sara giggled. “Maybe before we call out, we'd better try to look through the windows and see what we'd be spending the night with!”

An acrid odor struck Deborah's nostrils. Sniffing, she peered in the breeze's direction and saw a plume of gray-black smoke waver and swell against the scarlet sunset.

“Horses!” cried Sara.

She rode for a wooded ravine. Deborah and Judith followed, ducking low as their horses found a way through the brush and scrub oak. Reining in, they peered through the leaves as the dull thunder of hooves rolled down the slope.

Four—five—six riders, whooping and shouting. They led two horses and several of them had limp-necked chickens strung across their saddlebows. Besides pistols and knives, each had a shotgun or rifle. One flourished what looked like a woman's nightgown.

Quieting their restless horses, the women stared after the gang till they vanished over a rise, then looked at each other. Without a word, they followed the ravine as far as they could in the direction of the smoke, then glanced to see if the men had doubled back.

No sign of them. The friends rode out of the trees and down the slope, putting the horses to a lope when they reached the level ground. At the end of a long, wide valley, smoke and flames rose from a cabin.

Deborah choked down a scream, her mind flashing back to another burning cabin. A body lay by this one, too, but as they sped up and sprang from their horses, the sprawled figure stirred, shrieked, then tried to crawl away.

“We won't hurt you!” Deborah cried. “We're friends!”

“My baby,” moaned the young blonde woman, dragging at her torn clothes. “Where's my baby?”

Could it be in the cabin? Sara gasped and ran for the blazing house, with Judith and Deborah beside her. It was too late to put out the fire, but if a child were inside, they'd have to get it out.

Deborah almost tripped over a small body. Sara screamed and fell to her knees.

“Good God!” gasped Judith. “Dear, good God!”

The little boy was about Tom's age. His blue eyes stared at the twilight and his neck was fixed at an angle like a broken doll's. There were livid marks on his face, as if a large hand had been clambed over it. He looked as if he'd been literally broken and then thrown away.

“She'll have to see him.” Sara was trembling. “I'll carry him.”

“I'll get some water,” Judith said, “We can get the poor girl washed up, anyway.”

Deborah ran to where the dazed woman was trying to get to her feet. Her ripped garments and marks that would later be bruises told plainer than words what had happened.

“All of them!” she mumbled through bleeding lips. “All of them …! My baby! Where is he?”

She saw him in Sara's arms, then sprang to take him in her arms. “Billy!” His head jounced as she shook him. “Billy, don't be naughty!” She gazed down at his open eyes. “Billy?” she whimpered, sinking down, cradling him. “Billy!”

They let her cry and then they washed her and wrapped her in one of their blankets. Holding her dead child, now and then wracked with weeping, she told how the raiders had come while she was fixing dinner.

The leader, now a Missouri guerrilla, had quarreled with her husband over this farm five years ago, insisting he'd filed on it first. Apparently he'd nursed the grudge and had come to pay it off.

When he'd learned his old enemy was in the army, the Missourian had said he was going to make sure he had nothing to come home to.

“Billy kept screaming. They were holding him. Then I couldn't hear him anymore … couldn't hear anything.…” She rocked her child and wept.

In the flickering light of the burning cabin, the three friends looked at each other. “Let's move away from this”—Deborah motioned at the ruin—“and get her to eat and sleep.” They did, helping Esther, as she said her name was, up on Chica and moving back to the sheltered ravine where they'd hidden.

Esther begged not to bury her child that night. “Let me hold him,” she pleaded. “Just this last time.” After she'd had some soup made from jerky and a handful of dried apples, she huddled in the bedroll they'd put together, Billy pressed close against her, their fair hair intermixed.

Deborah got to her feet. “I'm going to follow that bunch,” she said. “If I'm not back by morning, take Esther on home.”

“There's six of them!” cried Judith.

“I'll be careful.”

“What you goin' to do?”

“Kill them if I can.”

“I'm coming, too.” Sara stood up and sheathed the Bowie she'd used for shredding jerky.

“No, you got the twins!” said Judith. “I'll go. Someone got to take care of Esther.”

“I suppose so.” Sara gave in. “But, Deborah,
must
you?”

“Yes. But I don't want either of you coming along. You've both got family.”

“Well, you're
our
family!” said Judith positively.

“We may have to follow them into Missouri.”

“They can't see me in the dark.” Judith shrugged. “And if they get hold of us, won't matter what color we are!”

Deborah had resolved on vengeance the moment she saw the dead child. It meant desperate risk. She was ready to die, but she hadn't wanted to imperil her friends.

Still, setting out with Judith, she knew there was a better chance of coming back, and it was good not to be alone. “They got an hour-and-a-half start,” speculated Judith. “Reckon we can spot their campfire?”

“That's what I hope. They'll probably cook those chickens they stole, and the smoke ought to hang in the air even after they turn in.”

Judith sighed. “We sure want to wait till they're asleep.”

“Yes.” This Wasn't going to be like the time she hadn't been able to make sure of Rolf. “Judith, can you do this?”

“I've stuck many a pig that never harmed a soul.” Judith's voice was grim. “If we don' kill these devils, they're goin' to rape more women, kill more little children.”

They rode in silence after that, going west, following the easiest route, as the horsemen had presumably done. Stars glittered and the night was almost balmy. Deborah ached from hours in the saddle; she shifted wearily.

The guerrillas might have made for some haven in Missouri, riding through the night. If they were stopping for supper, surely they couldn't be far off, though they might have turned in some other direction. Turning into another valley, letting the horses pick the way, Deborah stiffened.

Smoke. Of course, it might not be the raiders.

Judith touched her arm and pointed. A gleam came faintly from up ahead on their left. Riding toward it, Deborah's heart pounded and her mouth felt dry.