Sword of Vengeance (25 page)

“My God,” the captain croaked. “What have you done?” He began edging toward the gate.

Jackson glanced over his shoulder at his subordinate. “Hold your ground, dammit!” Then, to Bellamy’s surprise, the general lowered his pistol and returned it to the captain.

“Tuck this back in your belt, Marcus. If this was an attack, we’d be dead by now.”

“But General—” Bellamy began to protest.

Jackson silenced him with a castigating glance. He faced Kit and the lumbering giant of an Irishman. “Well, Lieutenant McQueen, perhaps you’ll kindly inform me as to just what the hell is going on.”

“I’d be glad to, General,” Kit replied. He nodded to O’Keefe, who waved to the advancing Choctaw. Acting on his gesture, the warriors halted and waited in the meadow about thirty yards from the fort.

“First of all, Wolf Jacket and his Creeks are responsible for Hope Station. They raided the Choctaw camp as well.”

“Killed a bunch of old men and boys and carried off many of our women and children,” O’Keefe said. Truth seemed to radiate from the Irishman’s ugly, honest war map of a face. “We aim to fight ’em to the death,” O’Keefe finished. “The Red Sticks have us outnumbered. But the way I see it, General Jackson, together we could give them Creeks a licking that they’d never forget.”

“And to show good faith,” Kit added, “Chief Iron Hand and his people have brought supplies for your command. There’s corn and meat, dried berries and squash. Enough to tide your men over until your pack train arrives.”

He searched Jackson’s stern countenance and hawk’s eyes, hoping to find some manner of acceptance. The general’s resolve began to falter. Such an unexpected development had caught him completely off guard. Kit pressed his point while Jackson seemed to be wavering, struggling to comprehend all Kit was telling him.

“I’m sorry to make such a show of this, General Jackson. You see, it’s the Creeks who are working with the British. Agents—renegades, actually—are issuing guns to the Red Sticks. I caught one of the turncoats, a man named Bill Tibbs, and would have brought him to you, but he was either killed or escaped me when …” His voice trailed off as the general’s jaw went slack and his eyebrows arched in astonishment.

“Who did you say?” Jackson leaned forward.

Kit glanced at O’Keefe. The Irishman shrugged. “Bill Tibbs,” Kit repeated. “He was in the pay of the British. I lost him, though, on the Alabama River.”

Andrew Jackson’s sallow complexion grew livid. His emaciated frame trembled, and there was murder in his burning gaze. “Tibbs lost? I think I can help you find him.”

Kit reached the door to the stable a few paces ahead of O’Keefe and the soldiers. Brandishing the “Quakers,” those heavy-bore pistols that had served his father so well during the Revolution, Kit ducked through the doorway and flattened himself against a dark patch of wall. He crouched in the shadows until he could see past the horses in their stalls to the rear of the stable, where a crudely fashioned back door swung ajar. Several soldiers immediately filled the entrance and crowded through the doorway, their rifles cocked and primed. One sandy-haired young man in woolen breeches and a waistcoat over his naked, hairless chest yelped as Kit dislodged himself from the darkness. The soldier whirled and fired. Kit’s reactions were lightning quick. He slapped the rifle barrel up away from his face, causing the startled soldier to blast a hole in the roof.

“Christ!” Kit said, staggering back, his ears ringing.

“Sorry,” the Tennessean replied sheepishly, and lowered his rifle. Powder smoke trailed from the barrel. He began to reload. Kit snatched the powder horn from the soldier’s grasp and tossed it aside and, after one final glower, trotted off down the middle of the stable and out the rear door. He had just stepped into pallid sunlight when a second round of gunfire shattered the autumn stillness.

“McQueen!” It was Iron Hand, bellowing Kit’s name from the compound. Kit groaned and came on at a dead run, wondering what other trigger-happy fools were up to mischief.

Kit could see the burly Irishman lumbering back toward the front gate and with sinking heart feared what he’d find, that Bill Tibbs had eluded him again.

He dashed past the stable and caught up to O’Keefe as the man turned toward him.

“Your friend Tibbs came galloping out from behind the longhouse yonder.” O’Keefe hammered out his words. “Rode right past the lads at the gate. Shot one, on my oath.”

Another volley sounded from the men on the walls, the crack of gunfire rolling back toward the soldiers in the compound. Andrew Jackson was just ahead, walking with a long-legged gait that brought him up to the wounded Tennessean sprawled in the shadow of the log walls.

It was Axel Griffin. One of his kinsmen had propped him up against a water barrel. He watched as Andrew Jackson and then Kit McQueen and half a dozen soldiers reached him.

Kit limped outside the walls. The Choctaw warriors waited with their weapons ready and fearing treachery. Tibbs had skirted O’Keefe’s people and followed the winding riverbank. Kit shaded his eyes and glimpsed the fleeing horseman as he left the Coosa and vanished at a gallop into the forest.

“He took my horse,” a voice beside him spoke. It was Captain Marcus Bellamy. “She’s a born runner. Fastest horse in the command. Even faster than General Jackson’s, but he doesn’t like to admit it.” Bellamy sighed and wiped a hand across his mouth and double chin.

Kit started back into the fort and waved O’Keefe forward.

“You better settle your warriors down. Those rifle shots made them kind of nervous.”

“Weren’t any tonic for me, neither,” the Irishman muttered. “That Tibbs lives a charmed life.” The war chief started down the trail toward the Choctaw warriors, who seemed to visibly relax at his reappearance.

Kit thought on what O’Keefe had said.
A charmed life.
Maybe there was something to that damn evil sword. Maybe it had not only corrupted Bill Tibbs but protected him as well. It was hard to disregard such a notion as he stood off to the side and watched Griffin die. At last the Tennessean’s chin tilted down toward his blood-soaked chest.

When it was ended, another of Griffin’s Blue Ridge boys stepped forward, his coonskin cap in hand. He looked around at those companions who had elected him spokesman.

“General Jackson,” the volunteer began. “I be Otis Potts. And I speak for us mountain folk.” He glanced down at Griffin, then back to the general. “If it’s all the same to you, we changed our minds and figger to stay on with ye for a while, till we settle things, eye for eye, blood for blood.” Potts turned on his heel and returned to the ranks of the volunteers.

There would be no desertions today.

T
HERE WERE DRUMS IN
the afternoon. They beat a solemn, reverent cadence, accompanying the soft, trilling melody played upon wooden flutes. The ceremonial music, though muffled by the settling snow, managed to rise from the Choctaw encampment outside the walls of Fort Strother and settle on the log cabins where an army of Tennesseans endured the bitter cold. For this troop of recent arrivals, a warm fire and boring inactivity was reward enough, for they had just returned from a skirmish with the Creeks and there had been casualties.

In the cabin that served as his headquarters, Andrew Jackson loomed like a brooding gargoyle over his map of the territory. His shadow covered all of Alabama and stretched as far as New Orleans, his silhouette shifting in subtle ways with the flickering of the lamplight and the flames leaping up from the logs in the fireplace.

To his left stood Colonel William Carroll, a man in his middle years, short and stout and solid, a man who loved a good fight. Across from Jackson, Carroll’s own adjutant, Captain Owen Kelly, a darkly handsome young man, showed fatigue in his spattered blue waistcoat and trousers; the dull brass buttons on his wide lapel no longer gleamed in the lamplight.

Kelly came from a good family of Tennesseans who owned several hundred acres of rich bottomland a few miles south of Nashville. Up until a few months ago Kelly had been studying medicine at Yale, but the lure of the frontier had caused him to abandon his schooling in Connecticut. Returning home, he had gained his father’s grudging consent and joined Carroll’s infantry. Kelly’s parents had permitted him to embark on this campaign if the young officer promised to take up his studies once the Red Sticks were defeated. Kelly had happily struck a bargain, though it was one he had no intention of keeping. He’d found soldiering to his liking.

The former student touched the point of his dagger to a scrawled line that indicated the upper reaches of the Tallapoosa River. Despite his weary state, he eagerly described the excursion that had taken him into battle. He had run into a Creek war party quite by accident. After a liberal exchange of gunfire both sides had retreated to opposite banks of the river. At last Kelly finished his vainglorious account of his first battle. He smiled smugly at Captain Bellamy, standing to his left. The two adjutants had become rivals since Carroll’s infantry had joined with Jackson’s command. Kelly came from a better family and considered himself Bellamy’s superior.

Captain Marcus Bellamy figured quite the opposite. He was older and more experienced and was Jackson’s trusted aide, and that ought to settle any claim to rank, he felt.

“Well, Marcus, did you and your Choctaw allies have any luck?” Kelly asked. “I understand you beat me back to the fort by three days.”

Bellamy nodded and indicated another location on the map that Jackson had already marked with an X. He had taken the men from Blue Ridge along with a contingent of Choctaws led by Kit McQueen and a warrior named Young Otter.

“We met a force of Cherokee some twenty miles from the fort,” Bellamy said. “They brought word of a Red Stick war party ranging along Emuckfaw Creek. We caught up with them a couple of days later.”

Kelly tried to remain unimpressed. “And your Choctaws, did they actually fight?”

“Like a pack of red wolves. And Potts’s lads held their own as well. And when we had left the field, there was no doubt as to who had carried the day, on my oath,” Bellamy replied pointedly, to put this upstart Kelly in his place.

The former medical student sipped his brandy and struggled to remain impassive, but his companion’s tone got the better of him.

“See here, sir, if you are implying any cowardly defeat on my part, I heartily take offense.” Kelly’s cheeks reddened, and he was already reaching for the glove in his belt.

“Enough,” Jackson interjected. “Both of you have deported yourselves with honor.” He glared at Kelly. “I will not permit either of my officers to engage themselves in a duel. I need all of you in good health.” The general winced. The cold seemed to aggravate the pain in his side. Carroll had brought a physician, but Jackson would not allow the man to probe for the pistol ball.

“All your officers?” Colonel Carroll grumbled, taking a seat in the nearest chair. “One seems conspicuously absent.”

“Ah, the young Hotspur.” Jackson chuckled. He’d begun to take a liking to Kit despite himself. The lieutenant had proved true to his word and brought the Choctaws under General Jackson’s command. Next, the Cherokees had followed O’Keefe’s example and come into Fort Strother. Carroll’s reinforcements had entered the fort on Christmas day. Jackson had never received such a welcome gift. He could now place almost a thousand men in the field against the Creeks. But how best to use his men and when to use them, that was the question. The door to the general’s cabin swung ajar, and a frigid gust of wintry air followed Kit McQueen into the room.

“Hmmm. Speak of the devil,” Kelly replied haughtily. He could not help but hold in contempt this man who so preferred the company of another race to his own. Kelly was appalled at the rumors he had heard concerning Kit and a mixed-blood Choctaw woman. The two were often seen together.

Kit ignored the captain’s tone of voice and dusted the snow from the greatcoat he wore over his shirt of brushed buckskin, military breeches, and boots. His red hair was as shaggy as a Choctaw’s. A reddish blond beard covered his jaw now. His sharp eyes revealed caution and wariness befitting that of a hunter. His experience with the “long-haired people,” as the Choctaws called themselves, had seasoned him in ways a man like Owen Kelly could never guess. Kit walked to the fire and held out his hands to the blaze in grateful supplication to its warmth.

“You are late, sir,” Kelly added. Kit walked to a table set against the wall and laden with round loaves of bread, a quarter wheel of cheese, and an enameled bowl of beans and chunks of pork.

The table, like all the other furniture in the general’s quarters, was hand-hewn and fastened together with wooden pegs. Patches of bark on the side of one of the legs revealed the carpenter’s haste. It was a roughly appointed room, with only a few touches of home to make the winter seem not so interminable to the man the Tennesseans had taken to calling “Old Hickory.” A silhouette of Jackson’s wife, in a gilded gold frame, rested on a small table near the general’s bed. A matched pair of engraved dueling pistols in a black walnut case had been left upon the table with the map.

Jackson filled a blue enameled tin cup with a measure of hot buttered rum. He slid the cup across the table for Kit.

“Captain Kelly is tired and therefore a trifle brusque,” Jackson said.

“I understand him, General,” Kit replied. He tried the rum and found it to his liking. Warmth spread from his belly to his limbs. “The Choctaws are burying their dead, the two warriors who scouted for Captain Kelly. And I was obliged to be there.”

Colonel Carroll was quick to rush to the defense of his well-to-do subordinate. “Well, now … a tragic loss … but it could not be helped. In war, men die.”

“I had no way of knowing the damnable Red Sticks were on the opposite bank when I sent your Choctaws across the shallows,” Kelly spoke up, his mouth full of cheese. “They were killed in the first volley. Were they … uh … friends of yours?” He swallowed and ran his tongue over his teeth, searching for any remnants of cheese.