Ride the Panther (32 page)

Cap Featherstone came along quietly. He liked none of this. Tullock’s arrival in town had forced him to choose sides and commit himself. He glanced over his shoulder and spied Hud Pardee several yards away, watching him with a bemused expression. Hud enjoyed seeing Cap trapped into doing his own dirty work. Pardee was flanked by Shug Jones and Dobie Johnson, who was excited about the prospect of a fight. The same could hardly be said for Enos Clem, who hadn’t counted on becoming involved in a battle. The gambler wanted no part of this. But he didn’t want to rile a man like Cap.

Raven McQueen watched the four men ride into her front yard and missed Hecuba. The place seemed empty without the loyal watchbird. Raven made no sudden motion. Indeed, she seemed the epitome of calm, as if these riders were invited guests and meant her no harm.

“You know why I’ve come,” Tullock called out as he walked his mount in front of the house.

“I know. But do you?” Raven asked. She sat in the chair by the quilting frame and began to pick at a loose thread, then she looked at the men with Roberts. She spied Cap Featherstone.

“Where is your son?” Tullock asked her.

“In the gap,” she replied. “Waiting for you, Tullock.” She shifted and looked directly at Cap. “And for you.” Then Raven turned back to Tullock. “Perhaps you have a common enemy,” she added. “My son has a letter from Lucius Minley. If you will give him a chance, he might let you read it. Or Cap can probably give you an idea what the letter says. After all, he and Lucius have been busy lately.”

Cap’s expression noticeably changed. He turned pale but managed to recover his composure as Tullock glanced around at him.

“What’s she talking about?”

“I bought some property from the bank.” Cap shrugged. “Other than that, I don’t know. I’ve had no other dealings with the man.” Cap mustered all his indignation. “I and my men are riding with you. What more do you want from me? I didn’t raid your plantation and steal your slaves. I haven’t joined the abolitionists, the same ones who killed your son. If there’s any reckoning to be done, I’d suggest you take it up with Jesse and Pacer McQueen.”

Cap jerked savagely on the reins of his mount and spun the horse away from the farmhouse and galloped out of the yard. The Creek rancher joined him with a condescending sweep of his hat and a guttural farewell toward the woman on the porch.

“Tell me, woman, did you send me the dream of Samuel’s death? I must know the truth. One night I saw him dead. And it came to pass. I sensed your hand in this.”

“The dream was of your own creation, Tullock Roberts, as was your son’s death.”

“God damn you, Raven,” Tullock growled, his features mottled with the fury he struggled to contain.

“Don’t be here when we come back,” Sawyer warned.

“You aren’t coming back,” Raven said.

“Don’t listen to her,” Tullock replied. He motioned for Sawyer to follow him, and with a touch of the reins and the rider’s knee, the stallion turned its head toward Buffalo Gap.

“Sawyer, let him go alone,” Raven said, hoping to change the mind of the boy she had helped to raise. But Sawyer had always had a bitterness in him, an anger she had never been able to reach.

“I’ve sided with Tullock,” he told her.

“Then you are lost,” Raven said.

“See here, Raven. A lot of the boys have been drinking. When they finish with Jesse they’re apt to come back through and fire the farm just for spite.” Sawyer leaned over the pommel of his saddle. “I wouldn’t be here when they do.”

“No, you wouldn’t, Sawyer. And I’m sorry for you.”

The overseer frowned and urged his horse first into a trot and then a gallop. A wind began to stir the grasses. Lazy cattle ambled out of the way of the night riders and protested the intrusion in their low mournful-sounding voices.

Raven left the porch and in the fading daylight made her way up the knoll behind the house, carrying a lantern with her. When she reached the summit, the medicine woman added several branches to the glowing ashes and dumped the reservoir of coal oil onto a mound of glowing embers. Flames leaped up to greedily feast on the fresh timber. They danced like spirits caught in a whirlwind of time and space, leaping high in a column of fire and sparks to rage against the dying of the light.

Raven began as her mother taught her, adding from her parfleche the roots and dried wildflowers she had gathered in the mountains. She opened a pouch and removed a pinch of soil which she had brought from the ancestral lands of the Choctaw. This was sacred earth and would purify the fire. She pulled her shawl close about her shoulders as a north wind swept over the hill. She knelt and looked up as sacred smoke dispatched against the deepening purple sky. Then she returned her attention to the prayer flames. She took an obsidian-bladed knife from the parfleche and gouged the palm of her hand and allowed the blood to drip into the fire.

“All-Father I offer myself for the

lives of my grandsons.

Shield them from the weapons

of their enemies.

Be the strength in their

arms.

Come spirit of war. Come slayer

Stand at the side of Redbow and Pacer Wolf.

And strike fear in the heart of those who

would harm them.”

She closed her eyes and in her mind’s eye saw the faces of her grandsons. Kit would have been proud to see them, standing tall and strong. And Ben to find his boys at last side by side. Raven had never doubted for an instant they would find each other. They just got lost for a little while was all. She opened her eyes. A wind gust seemed to blow right through her willowy frame as flames like winged creatures conjured from the burning branches shot upward through the prayer smoke. Gunfire sounded in the distance. The battle had been joined. But when she looked toward the upper end of the valley, she spied an ominous number of riders already returning from the gap. There were five men, two of whom she recognized in the twilight—Cap Featherstone and Hud Pardee.

“You reckon Tullock saw us leave?” Dobie Johnson grumbled as he sat astride his mount alongside Shug Jones, whose cheeks bulged from a chaw of tobacco, and Enos Clem, the dour-looking gambler who appeared relieved that Cap had brought them out of the gap.

“Naw,” Shug answered. “Tullock and his boys was charging them wagons. He weren’t about to stop and look over his shoulder just to see if we was bringing up the rear.”

The five horsemen were in a line at the base of the knoll behind the McQueen farmhouse. Raven’s medicine fire had drawn them like a beacon. Cap had led the men to the hill and found that Hud Pardee was only too anxious to climb to the summit and force Raven to reveal everything she knew about Lucius Minley and Cap’s schemes.

“Crazy old woman,” Dobie muttered, staring up the hill. “Hud will put the fear o’ God in her.” His youthful features radiated confidence and a firm belief in his own immortality.

Hud was older but no wiser. The one-eyed gunman felt the same way. He reached the summit of the knoll and came face to face with the half-breed medicine woman where she knelt by the fire she had built. Hud tucked the flaps of his frock coat back, ran a hand through his ash-gray hair, and sauntered over to the woman. He stood with his hands resting on the guns in his waist sash.

“We meet again, you harridan. But this time I advise you to keep a civil tongue in your head or I’ll cut it out.”

Raven continued to watch him through the flames. The wind lifted the strands of her long black hair and whipped them about her face. She made no reply. She saw no profit in trading threats with the gunman.

“What do you know about Cap’s arrangement with the banker?”

Raven did not reply.

“I asked you a question.” He waited. “No?” He shrugged. “Suits me. I don’t give a good goddamn whether you answer or not. I’ll just drag you downslope and toss you over the saddle. Cap has plenty of ways of making you talk.” Hud chuckled softly. “I just came up for the pleasure of telling you I killed your son, Ben. That was me in Kansas City. And I’m going to kill Jesse, too. Maybe even Pacer, although after what he and his friends did in Lawrence, I kind of think of him as a kindred soul.” He waited for her reaction. Hud was disappointed to find his remarks seemed to have no effect on her. “The hell with you,” he muttered. Hud started to circle the fire and happened to glance toward the woman as the wind shifted the column of prayer smoke. For the first time he realized she held a big-bore flintlock pistol in her slender hand. The barrel of the pistol, one of the “Quakers,” looked as big as a cannon. Hud brought up sharply and started to retreat. Raven stood, but the image was one of a woman rising out of the flames.

“Just you wait a second,” Hud said, and dropped a hand to one of the guns in his waist sash. It was said of Hud Pardee that along the Natchez Trace and the length and breadth of the Mississippi he was without equal with a gun. No man was his match. But a life ended and a legend began in Indian Territory, hundreds of miles from the Natchez Trace. The “Quaker” spewed fire and smoke and thundered in Raven’s hand. A .50 caliber slug in the chest knocked Hud off his feet and drove him into the ground. He rolled over, crawled to his feet, and staggered half a dozen yards, clawing at the front of his ruffled shirt now matted with a crimson stain that continued to spread. He slowly turned and found himself face to face with Raven. Hud’s eye was wide with disbelief. The gunman tried to speak, but words failed him. It was Raven who finally broke her silence.

“Don’t look so surprised,” she said. “I told you we had enough snakes.”

Hud rocked back on his heels as his eye glazed over and he toppled backward and rolled down the knoll, tumbling as limply as a discarded doll until he reached the bottom of the slope and came to rest at the feet of his former companions.

Cap gave Enos the nod. “Go on up there and bring that woman down here.”

Enos cleared his throat and spat. “The hell you say.”

Cap glared at him, then shifted his attention to Dobie and Shug. The youth could not tear his eyes from Hud Pardee’s crumpled form. Shug wore a look of iron.

“I ain’t gettin’ near that old woman. I ain’t lost nothin’ up yonder.”

Cap looked up the hill and sighed. “C’mon. Minley’s woman ought to be able to tell us what’s happened. Anybody wants me, let them come to the Medicine Wagon.”

The horsemen turned their mounts away from the hill and the woman who waited indomitable and defiant. Raven McQueen saw them leave, but just to be on the safe side she reloaded her gun. Then she returned to her vigil by the sacred fire, for the violent night was far from over.

The battle that had taken almost two weeks to come about lasted but a few minutes. Like a sudden, lethal storm, it sprang up, claimed its victims, and vanished.

One minute Tullock Roberts was charging hell-bent-for-leather and the next, the ground opened beneath him and dumped the master of Honey Ridge Plantation along with several other riders into an eight-foot-deep trench that had been dug and concealed in the floor of the pass. Tullock was thrown clear on impact and managed to scramble up the side of the trench as another three horsemen followed those in the lead and came crashing down on the men still trapped below and struggling to get out. Riders swept past him and Tullock waved them on and limped forward, his revolver drawn. Pain shot through his left leg. His ankle felt fractured or at least badly sprained.

All about him, pandemonium reigned as men and horses crashed into the hidden pits. Tullock saw a pair of attackers disappear, then further along, Buck Langdon and half a dozen men nose-dived into a trap amid a flurry of broken bones and screams of agony. Tullock’s plan had been so simple—mass a headlong charge against McQueen’s barricade, weather a volley or two from the defenders, and sweep them aside by sheer force of numbers. The only danger came if the attack slowed. With horror, Tullock saw his column of men not only slow but even halt about fifty yards from the wagons, uncertain of the ground that lay ahead.

“No!” he shouted, struggling to be heard above the din. But his voice was drowned out by a ripple of gunfire that blossomed all along the barricade. Men toppled from horseback, clutching at their mortal wounds. Some of the Knights tried to continue the attack. Four of the horsemen crashed through the branches and woven grass covering a trench. Again the horsemen hesitated as the winnowing gunfire reaped a harvest of death among them.

Jesse McQueen patrolled the barricade, shouting instructions to the field hands to make every shot count. Whenever he saw men waver, he hurried to support them with his presence and coolness under fire. The covered pits had done the job and halted the attackers. In their confusion, they made perfect targets.

Theotis Tellico loosed a wild Rebel yell and blasted a man from horseback and laid his Hawken rifle aside. “C’mon, Moses! You leavin’ all the work to me.”

“The devil I am,” Moses shouted. His Starr revolver spewed powder smoke. He ducked as a slug fanned his cheek, and he returned fire with deadly accuracy. Libby Whitfield moved among the men, loading revolvers and handing them back for the men to use. She stopped by her husband and admonished him to keep his head down, then passed him a loaded gun. Whatever reticence he might have had about firing on these Confederate sympathizers vanished when they came charging down the pass. Now it was a matter of his life or theirs.

Jesse McQueen returned to the center of the barricade, levered a shell into his Spencer, knocked a man from the saddle, loaded, and fired again. A Creek breached the wagons. Jesse shot him as the man rode past. The Creek yelped and pitched forward over his saddle horn. His horse carried him from the fray. Pacer, at Jesse’s side, emptied his revolver with uncanny accuracy. When half a dozen men tried to charge the barricade on foot, Pacer climbed over the barricade and placed himself in front of Albert Teel and two of the field hands struggling to reload their rifled muskets. Pacer’s second gun boomed in almost a single thunderous roll, and when the smoke cleared two men lay mortally wounded and another cradled his battered arm. The other three veered from the Choctaw Kid only to be dropped by Theotis Tellico and Parson Marshal Booth.