Two in the Field (55 page)

I pulled off my jacket and dropped it near my feet, trying to position it with the gun pocket up.

“Kick it away,” LeCaron ordered.

When I hesitated, he pushed the blade harder against Cait’s neck, drawing a thin line of blood.

I kicked the jacket out of reach. No decoy pockets now. No derringer in my boot. No tricks left.

“I got ’em!” LeCaron cried out, taking his hand from Cait’s mouth and yanking a pistol from his belt.

“Samuel,” she cried out. Fear threaded her voice, but something else, too. Her eyes held mine. She was trying to communicate something.

“Shut up!” LeCaron shoved Cait ahead and told me to walk behind her. He was careful to stay far enough back that I couldn’t surprise him with a sudden lunge.

For an instant I thought I heard a muffled drumming of wings, and then I thought I knew what Cait was trying to say:
We aren’t alone
.

If Colm’s here, I thought dispiritedly, he’d better get to work in a hurry. Our options were running out. LeCaron ordered me to halt at the edge of the swamphole.
This is it
. I calculated the distance, looking for a chance to charge him, thinking I’d rather end it that way than however he had in mind.

But that would mean abandoning Cait to them.

McDermott crashed through the brush with Tim in tow, his mouth curved in a triumphant grin. Cait called out to Tim, who seemed not recognize us. This close I could see tears streaked on his face and marks where they’d beaten him.

Holding fast to the boy, McDermott covered me while LeCaron collected our weapons and tossed them in a pile. He
ran his hands slowly over Cait and pulled a second revolver from her jacket. With a leer he pressed against her from the rear and cupped his hands over her breasts. She twisted to claw at him, but he was too strong.

This isn’t happening
, I thought, starting toward them.
This isn’t real
.

“Leave off that,” McDermott barked, both at me and at LeCaron, his threatening pistol bringing me to a halt. “I been waitin’ a long spell for the fancy bitch.” He shoved Tim toward LeCaron and advanced on Cait.

“We’ll do her together, the both of us,” LeCaron said happily, “while Fowler watches.” With that, he ordered me back to the edge of the swamphole and with a leer commanded, “Strip!”

One time in the past, after he tried to murder me, I’d left him bound and naked. Now it was his turn and he was relishing every instant of it. I moved slowly to the swamphole, my brain racing desperately to find a course of action. To garner more time, I pretended to have trouble unfastening my shirt buttons.

LeCaron guffawed and said to stall I wanted, he had plenty of time. McDermott, meanwhile, had retaken possession of Tim and dragged him near Cait, his pale blue eyes bright with hungry anticipation.

A movement caught my attention. It was Goose’s head rising ever so slightly, his face turned toward me. I saw the Lakota’s lift his eyes to the trees overhead. Then again. What the hell was he doing?

I noticed a small round stone several feet to my right. Exactly the type I’d skipped across lakes as a boy. Not much of a weapon, but it would have to do.

Staring at LeCaron with as much disdain as I could muster under the circumstances, I folded my shirt into a neat bundle and bent deliberately to place it on the ground. The instant my
knuckles touched the earth, I snatched the rock and sent it spinning sidearm with all my strength, exactly like a third baseman after a barehanded pickup. It was a move I’d practiced hundreds of times in my youth. The stone rocketed at McDermott, whose eyes widened in surprise, then alarm. He dodged sideways but the missile seemed to follow him, curving in its flight and striking him squarely in the back.

He yelped in pain but by then I was oblivious to him. Nerves screaming, brain shrieking
Here I come, Cait!
I was charging at LeCaron, praying he’d been distracted long enough for me to reach him. But almost from the first I knew it was hopeless. I was still twenty feet away and already he was training his revolver on me. I zigzagged desperately, my guts going icy.

Unnoticed on the ground near LeCaron’s feet, Goose raised the bloody arm that held his tomahawk. The stone hatchet brushed LeCaron’s calf, startling more than hurting him. He brought the gun down to finish off Goose. Then he would deal with me. There was plenty of time.

I looked in vain for another rock to throw.

Something moved in the branches overhead. As if by magic, an arrow appeared in LeCaron’s chest. It made a solid chunking sound as it struck. He froze in wonderment, eyes staring down at the shaft. I stopped in my tracks, mesmerized, and everything seemed to go into milky, frame-by-frame movement.

Goose had risen to one knee and was trying to force himself to his feet.
Chunk!
Another arrow thudded into LeCaron, this one below his heart.
Chunk!
A third lodged in his thigh. Clutching at the feathers protruding from his chest, LeCaron screamed like an agonized cat and stared at Goose, who stood upright now, as if somehow he had done this.

Goose raised his tomahawk.

Realizing what was about to happen, LeCaron tried to bring
up his gun.
Chunk!
A fourth arrow emerged from his eye. His final wail was extinguished by the tomahawk smashing into his brain, the effort sending Goose to the ground atop his victim.

“I’ll shoot yez all!” McDermott was yelling, looking around balefully as he yanked Tim back to him. “Keep away!”

The boy tried to wrench loose.

“Goddamn you!” McDermott swiped at his head with the barrel of his pistol. He missed. With a move worthy of the prize ring, Tim slipped the blow and landed an uppercut to McDermott’s exposed jaw. The punch was too weak to do much harm, but it enabled Tim to spin free.

“All right, then,” McDermott snarled, and leveled his pistol at the boy.

“No!”
I bellowed.

The sound was deafening.

But instead of emanating from McDermott’s weapon, it came from behind me. I wheeled and saw Cait kneeling with a revolver. She must have snatched it up from LeCaron’s weapon pile. Staring at her dumbly, my ears ringing, I wondered why she didn’t fire again.

Then I turned and saw the reason.

A hole gaped in McDermott’s throat and an agonized gargling came from him. He reached for the wound but his hands made it only part way. His eyes rolled upward, showing white; he fell hard to his knees and onto his face.

Cait ran forward to gather Tim in her arms. They held fast to each other, crying. For my part, I was still quaking from fear and rage and relief, equally mixed. I bent over LeCaron and prodded him. No pulse. His one eye stared up at the sky. I studied him tensely, half expecting him to spring at me. But he remained still.

This time, finally, he was gone.

McDermott’s lifeless body must have nearly matched my
weight, but I scarcely felt the effort it took to throw him bodily into the swamp hole. He sprawled on the surface for a moment, then began to sink. In a minute or so, all that remained visible of him were concentric circles on the surface.

“Samuel,” I heard Cait say in a soft warning tone.

I turned and saw an Indian lifting Goose. He was tall and fairly light-skinned, with sharp features and scar tissue running across one cheek; his face was painted with zigzags similar to Goose’s; a single feather emerged from his braided hair.

I stepped forward but stopped when Goose motioned me back. The tall Indian turned and regarded me. His black eyes seemed to burn into my soul as he tossed his head contemptuously. He could kill me before I took another step, and we both knew it. With LeCaron’s knife he cut the arrows from the corpse, then fitted one to his bow and drove it deep into the ground. He pointed to it, then slid his hand laterally in a swift gesture that said clearly to leave LeCaron where he was.

I nodded. Fine with me.

The Indian pointed at Cait, at Tim, at me, and finally up toward Linc’s position. He thrust out his arm imperiously, pointing southward.

Telling us to get out of the Hills.

Again I nodded. Nothing I wanted more.

He steadied Goose on his feet, and together they moved slowly toward the trees. Just before they passed from view, he glanced back with the same contemptuous look. If we hadn’t been with Goose, there was little doubt what our fate would have been. A few moments later, the clopping of a pony’s feet came to us.

I was holding fast to Cait and Tim when we heard somebody sliding down the slope. Linc! He’d tried to bandage his face with a shirtsleeve, but blood still seeped from beneath the fabric. The
bullets fired at him had sent stone fragments into his face and filled his eyes with blood. Stunned and disoriented, he’d tried to come down to help, but had trouble finding the rope and then hanging on to it once he did.

Cait gently pulled away the makeshift bandage and stifled a gasp. Linc’s wounded eye was a mess, and it was instantly plain to us that he would not see out of it again. While Cait daubed at the blood, I told him what had happened.

“You didn’t need me at all,” he said wonderingly.

“Not with these two.” I nodded toward Cait and Tim. “And a little outside help.”

While the tall Indian had hacked his arrows from LeCaron’s flesh, I’d seen that they bore the same design as those beside the murdered prospectors. I felt fairly certain that I was one of very few whites to have seen Crazy Horse close-up during a hostile confrontation and lived to tell of it.

I described Goose’s tapping Brown Hair with his tomahawk handle and asked if he’d been counting coup.

Linc nodded. “For a Lakota, it shows more courage than killing to deliberately risk yourself while dishonoring your enemy. Winkte or not, Goose became a warrior today.” He looked around with his good eye. “Where’d the soldier go? Was he one of Pollack’s troopers?”

I looked at him. “Soldier?”

“As I came down the slope I caught a glimpse of him heading away through the trees,” he said. “Blue Federal coat with brass buttons.…”

Cait and I looked at each other.

 TWENTY-EIGHT 

“I felt him leaving,” Cait said. She sat in her kitchen doorway, shelling peas, while I stirred laundry starch into water in a kettle on the stove. The starch was intended for bedskirts she had just washed. “I
felt
it, as sure as I’ve ever felt anything.”

“When?” I asked. The subject of Colm had come up a lot between us in recent days.

“As soon as I knew they were all dead and Tim was safe,” she said. “Only then did I realize how strongly he had been within me, Samuel, and for so long!”

I was about to reply when Tim pushed through the partition to his room, rubbing his eyes sleepily. He’d gotten most of his weight back in the month since we’d returned to O’Neill City. But he was still pretty withdrawn, and he spent a lot of time sleeping.

“Too late to go fishin’?” he mumbled.

I caught Cait’s encouraging glance. Beyond the beatings and other privations he’d suffered, Tim had encountered the existence of evil in this world. He wouldn’t again be the same innocent boy, but he was slowly coming out of a protective shell. We hadn’t yet tried baseball or sparring, but contemplating the eddies of the Elkhorn and watching our lines bobs in the clear water seemed therapeutic enough for now. We went out together nearly every day.

“Got to get ourselves spiffed up for the big shindig tonight,” I told him. “But maybe we could sneak in an hour’s worth.”

The colony was about to celebrate a number of things, not least of which was our safe return. Two days after our showdown in the Hills, troopers had taken us to Fort Kearney, where
Linc and Tim received medical attention—such as there was. With a military escort we’d proceeded safely through Red Cloud’s agency and returned to find things in much the same disorder here as when we’d left.

Part of the reason was that John O’Neill had been stricken with recurring fevers and chest coughs. But now he was on his feet again and seemed to have turned the corner. New settlers had recently arrived, including some from the anthracite fields. Noola had made them feel at home. She was flourishing here, and so was Catriona, who’d been helping Kaija care for Lily. Building was going on everywhere, and stores of food were plentiful for winter. The settlement exuded a new atmosphere of confidence.