Disclaimer: The characters used herein, with the exception of original characters (please don't borrow) are the property of MGM and Trilogy. No profit sought or accepted.
Rating: PG13
Warnings: Language, violence
Notes: Yakoke, Adrian, for a heart deep and true; words cannot say how much you mean to me, and to my writing. And to my new friend, Lynne Smith for beta-reading and valuable suggestions.
Bibliography:
Buck pretty much had to lay on top of J.D. to keep him flat on the ridge when he saw what was happening. Fortunately for the kid, Buck had the experience to refuse that urgent instinct and managed to fling his lanky body across him before he got those damned bird-head colts out of his holsters. J.D. grunted hard and his forehead bounced off the dirt, but he started fighting immediately, madder than Buck had ever seen him.
"Dammit, kid, be still, we ain't wadin' on into a hundred soldiers and you damned well can't shoot 'em from here with a damned pistol!"
J.D. actually bit the hand Buck had clapped over his mouth so hard that Buck felt it right through his gloves; he swore and shoved J.D.'s head down into the dirt again; "Quit now! We ain't no good to 'em dead! Quit!"
He could feel the kid vibrating furiously, stronger than most people thought, but Buck was damned heavy sprawled across the top of his back and he couldn't take a deep enough breath to do anything more. Panting with exertion and fury, they watched with impotent rage as Vin got hammered by Stephen Monroe, Chris pinned to the ground raising a dust cloud and a few yelps out of the soldiers fighting to keep him there. Yelling, they could hear his voice very faintly. That bothered Buck fierce; he couldn't remember the last time he'd heard Chris yell.
"I tell you ..." Buck crooned, his chin nearly resting on the crown of J.D.'s head and his voice light and strangely free, "That's one sonofabitch I'm gonna really like killin'."
For some reason that made J.D. feel better and he squirmed; "Get ... off ... you ox!" Wheezing, and Buck levered his weight up a little on his arm.
"You gonna stay put?"
"Yes."
"Well, alright, then."
Buck's broad flat chest made a hollow thump on the ridge beside J.D. as they squinted down the vague slope. J.D. was still fixed and focused on the struggle going on several yards off the southwest corner of the sprawling infantry barracks, which fronted the western side of the Parade grounds. Buck scanned, setting things in his mind: The brig was situated halfway between those grim iron boxes and the Trader's house and store. The stables stood at the highest point to his right on the rising terrain that ended abruptly at the river overlook, and there was a hospital, bakery and laundry widely spaced between it and the main compound, which was built around a large square parade ground. All of the housing was built around that square, the Infantry barracks on the west side faced on the east by the Commander's quarters and Single Officers' quarters. Cavalry barracks stood adjacent to both on the south side with various store and munitions buildings scattered in and around, and on the north were three small two-story houses intended as Married Officer's quarters, which were currently empty.
No walls, but guards walking a wide perimeter ... Buck liked the relative isolation of the stables, but disliked how near the barracks the boxes and the brig were.
The struggling men were violent shadows backlit by the fires that burned on the parade ground, a macabre dance that both Buck and J.D. itched to end. Vin wasn't moving under his own power when they jammed him into the box, though both J.D. and Buck rose up on their hands after the hint of a struggle at the last. Chris was on his feet, though, and that made Buck feel better until he caught the flash of a rifle-butt driving down into the box. It took him a long moment to unclench his teeth and remember why he was staying put instead of getting down there and bashing that soldier's head in.
"Chris'll want t'fry his bacon, you can bet." He finally said, a feral grin parting his dusty mustache. "Hell, we'll prob'ly have't draw straws ... you see Nathan?"
A faint dissonant clang reverberated up from the fort, the dust beginning to settle and the soldiers broke into smaller groups and moved off, with the exception of a pair of guards pacing the hundred yards between the boxes and the corner of the Infantry barracks. The Monroes, backed by a dozen soldiers, met Judge Travis and Ezra halfway across the parade ground and swept them along back in the direction they'd come, Ezra craning around suspiciously trying to get a better look at those boxes.
"There's Nathan." J.D. pointed down the ridge several hundred yards; Nathan had dropped low enough on the mild slope behind it that his head couldn't be seen above it and was on his way toward them, moving urgently. Buck sighed. This wasn't going to be easy, and he had no idea how to even start. They had to find a way into that fort and to Judge Travis before the Monroes killed Vin or Chris, because if that happened ... well ...
"Buck ..." He turned at the tight amazed alarm in J.D.'s voice and followed the direction of his gaze - two figures crept along behind Nathan, feathered and fringed, but obviously with Nathan, not hunting him.
"Indians ..." J.D. breathed, his hazel eyes widening and his face opening in eager trepidation. Buck squinted at them, not sure what to make of it until he remembered Vin had friends among the nations.
"Well now," His grin could've lit a city, "Ain't this gonna be some fun!"
"James, we have to get them out of here!" Elizabeth hissed, gripping her youngest brother's wrist so ferociously that her nails cut into his skin, "We must!"
"Elizabeth, Gerald has every legal right!" Trying to keep his voice down, trying not to be ashamed of himself as he glanced guiltily toward the closed door to the sitting room where Travis, Mary and Ezra were gathered in low and equally urgent conversation. They hadn't asked for James' help, they'd looked at him like he was part and parcel with his elder brothers and he'd been unable to contradict that low opinion. "Tanner admitted running guns to the Indians - guns that could kill us all, by the way! We can't ..."
"Maybe you can't, but I darned sure can!" Both adults turned around swiftly to find Julianna standing at the bottom of the narrow staircase, her arms crossed hard over her chest and still dressed an hour after being sent to bed for the second time.
"Julianna, you have to stay out of this, I forbid you ..." Elizabeth began, but Julianna was beyond being forbidden or refused or left out of anything - this was her Uncle Vin, and for him she would fight family or strangers or entire nations. Every minute thinking about him in that box was worse than the last. But her Aunt and Uncle exchanged a guilty look and a terrible suspicion blossomed.
Elizabeth and James had both insisted to Travis that Julianna was wrong about where Vin and Chris were, terrified that he or Ezra would go off half-cocked against their brothers without understanding the awful lengths they would go to if pressed - they might have them all killed, it wasn't out of the realm of possibility, James had been grimly certain of that. They were in the brig, they had both insisted, just as Gerald had said, Julianna had not seen otherwise.
"You haven't done anything, have you!" Jules cried, betrayed, "I trusted you to do something, not just sit here doing nothing!" Her blue eyes narrowed savagely at their indecision and she made the choice herself, stalking to the sitting room door and yanking it open so hard it banged against the wall, startling the three people gathered close around a small table before the fireplace. She was fed up, she'd been seething for an hour while they argued and talked downstairs, and now she'd found them still in two separate areas when they all needed to be together. She stood in that open doorway, including both groups of adults in her scathing gaze, and then she warned her Aunt and her Uncle.
"You can forbid all you want." She said in a low and certain voice, "You can lock me in my room, you can put a hundred guards on the door ..." Turning to include Travis in her defiance as well, "But I will find a way! You're going to sit here and dither 'til the cows come home, until my father and Uncle kill them or just let them die - or worse!" The adults looked at each other, dismayed, through the doorway, but Julianna skewered her relations with furious determination; "Auntie, I told you where they were, it wasn't by accident father took them out there! It doesn't take a genius to know what they've done! And you knew Grampa, too, and how he felt about little places! I know you've all got ... oh, all those things you've got going on, all your secrets and everything - but how can any of you just be talking while they're out there in those iron boxes?!"
Travis straightened up at the table, his dark eyes piercingly accusing and Elizabeth paled, her heart plummeting - she'd nearly convinced herself that Vin was safer in that iron box than in her elder brother's hands, but her niece knew it for a cowardly lie. Vin would be better off dead under the open sky than alive in that box.
Memories of her father edging out of a crowded room, a flash of wildness, almost terror, in his unease. Of him habitually opening windows - he couldn't be in a room with closed windows even in winter. Of the contented depth of his sigh one night, one of the few occasions when he'd tried to acquaint his children with the forest. She remembered being frightened, Duley excited by the adventure, her brothers complaining about everything. That sigh when he'd laid himself down that was the most satisfied and comfortable sound she'd ever heard from him. Vin was the same way, and Gerald was too intelligent not to know it and use it with such exquisite cruelty.
"Now see here, Julianna ..." James began, his face coloring when Elizabeth stood up, pulling him after her, saying,
"She's right, James. I'm so sorry, Julianna, oh ... James, she is right. Gerald would be that wicked, we can't take his word for anything. We have to get him out of there as soon as possible, tonight."
James missed that, the 'him' of her concern, but no one else did. "Are you forgetting our brother commands this fort?" He cried, immediately embarrassed to have been so loud and not missing the look that went among the three in the next room, "He's our brother, Elizabeth, and ..."
She leaned close him, her fingers biting into his wrist and hissed in a voice as quiet and intense as her eyes.
"He was Duley's husband, James." Not caring about his shocked gasp, holding him hard, caring only that James understood the ties of blood and loyalty now had to extend to Vin Tanner.
Her brother drew his head back from her, his face knotted with confusion and gaping like a fish hauled out of water.
"Whaa, what?" He choked, glancing into the other room where the three, too far to hear, were yet paying strict attention to the interplay between the siblings as Julianna stared accusingly at her Aunt and Uncle.
"Duley's husband?" He breathed, searching her eyes and seeing the truth in them, unbelievable as it was, seeing love, desperate and afraid. Everything shifting in his mind to accommodate these shocking facts, actions and reactions suddenly making more sense.
"Oh my God! Do Gerald and Stephen know that?"
"Of course not - do you think he'd be drawing breath if they did?"
No, no, Tanner would've been dead long since, and even now this information had to be kept from them or it would be murder, and for more than simply reminding them so forcefully of their father. Numbly James allowed his sister to haul him after her into the sitting room, too startled, too many new possibilities whirling through his head to resist. Julianna was close at their heels as Elizabeth took the chair Ezra stood to get for her, and then she laid her hands on the table top in a gesture that reminded Ezra of a hand being laid face-up.
"Mr. Travis, my niece is correct, and more urgently than you know. I suspect my brother has, indeed, imprisoned Mr. Tanner and Mr. Larabee in the punishment boxes out past the Infantry barracks."
Both Travis and Mary confirmed in their horrified faces what a terrible mistake she had made in thinking Vin safe there.
"It will kill him!" Mary said in a low trembling voice, "Both of them! My God, we have to do something!"
Orrin pulled thoughtfully at his lower lip, regarding Elizabeth with an unblinking stare that shifted to James, standing awkwardly, nearly breathless, behind her. He wondered what Elizabeth had said that had upset her brother so, wondered why he was suddenly willing to rescue strangers he didn't even like when it meant going against his own brothers in the most dangerous way. That worry was sharp in Orrin's gut, wanting desperately to get both Chris and Vin out of this fort and yet restrained by that fact that too much overt concern about them on his part could rouse suspicions and endanger them all. His job here was not done, and he had to find a way to finish it without allowing any of the seven to be sacrificed.
There was the matter of the dead soldier as well - a damnable tragedy and all the reason Monroe needed to hang Vin if he wanted to, he'd made that threat quite clear. Unless Travis could prove self-defense by exposing the plot the Monroes were fomenting; success in this endeavor had suddenly become even more vital, and more personal.
Julianna Monroe was staring at him like she could force him to save Vin with her silent will alone, and he wondered again at the depth of the affection that had so unexpectedly developed between them in so short a time. Vin kept everyone at arms length and was never nearer running than when someone showed an attachment to him, yet he'd allowed it with this girl. Orrin had to trust it, and her.
"Well, then, we'll have to find a way, won't we, Miss Monroe - " Orrin said, opening his arm in invitation. Julianna's glare diminished a bit, stiffly suspicious as she came and stood beside him at the table, knowing he intended to pacify her in some way. She let him enclose her in that arm when his dark eyes were warm, when his small smile told her he would find that way and when he gave her time, regardless of the adults waiting, to believe that. Then she leaned against him, giving the gruff old man she'd never exchanged more than two words with all her loving worry in her face. He jostled her a little reassuringly, showing her in return the iron of his will and the certainty of his commitment to her Uncle Vin. Julianna's small wan smile was a statement of faith Orrin was surprised to treasure. How had he failed to notice what an exceptional child she was?
He turned back to the table and the solemn anxious faces around it, nodding once as if settling matters in his own mind.
"We're agreed, then, that we need to do something quickly."
"There's only one or two guards out there that I can see." Ezra drawled, one eyebrow arching, "I find myself wondering how difficult it might be to draw them away?"
"A diversion?" Orrin asked, but James was shaking his head.
"Those soldiers won't leave their posts, sir, they fear Gerald too much to allow curiosity to draw them off their posts."
"And even if we do," Ezra mused, "It's far too close to the Infantry and Cavalry barracks both if any alarm is raised."
"Then it will have to be a diversion big enough to draw Gerald and Stephen as well." Orrin said, having felt Julianna's fingers grip unhappily on his shoulder at the negatives that were all she heard. He looked around, inviting comment - "Anyone have any ideas?"
"Well, I'm just about brimmin' over with 'em."
"Buck!" Mary gasped as the lanky gunslinger slithered through the door that led to the pantry in the back of the building, winking at her and grinning like a Cheshire cat with pleasure to have surprised them all so completely. He clapped Ezra on the back and presented himself like a prize,
"The one and only! And J.D.'s yonder, too. Nathan's just over the plains-side ridge waiting, got the horses n' mules down in a ravine ..." He laughed again at their dumb-founded faces and glided across the room to pour himself a drink, tossing it back with relish and then gesturing toward Jules, tense and pale beside Travis, with the empty glass, "This fort ain't got no walls," He said with a wink, "Fancy that!"
Jules abandoned Orrin to fling an enthusiastic hug around Buck's lean hips, feeling like victory had just walked through the door and swept out every pessimistic air. His deep blue eyes sparkled with just that promise as he looked down at her, handsome and sure and having the same concerns she did. He tousled her hair with a lazily wicked grin.
"Well, our chances have just improved considerably." Ezra drawled with a broad smile, and Buck greeted Mary and Elizabeth, his hand resting comfortably on the back of Jules' neck like they were partners of long standing.
"More'n you know, Ezra - got a couple three Indians out there with Nathan who're real willin' t'be of help."
This surprised everyone, and Buck laughed anew at their faces, his gleeful confidence infecting them all, "They say they're friends of Vin's, saw the boys bein' dogged back to the fort and took an interest - they suggested it might be a nice distraction t'liberate some of them big American horses. They don't mind takin' the blame for it, either - matter of fact, they seemed right eager for the long-knives to know who they are. That'll set the soldiers chasin' them and help us a whole lot gettin' our asses out of range. First things first, though - you know where Josiah's bein' held?" He asked, inviting anyone to answer.
Orrin glanced at Jules and answered; "Josiah's in the brig. Captain Monroe says Vin and Chris are, too, but ..."
"They ain't." A scowl crossed Buck's face, a hint of vicious fury, "They're in them boxes out yonder, which ain't gonna be doin' Vin a lick of good, be damned."
"That's what I told them!" Jules cried, glad to have someone here who wanted to do something and worry about consequences later.
"So you need a diversion, n' we've got us a doozy. Better get a move on, though, J.D.'s been cravin' a reason to shoot somethin' up for hours. Hell, this is gonna be fun!" Buck's bloodthirsty laugh at their faint disapproval said more about what he'd seen being done to Vin and Chris than anyone wanted to guess. "You all will have to be visible, right? They're gonna be lookin' for you to be tryin' something." He turned thoughtful eyes toward James, "Would they miss you? Think you were doin' anything but shivering under a table if we start shootin'?"
James colored angrily, but then realized Buck wasn't trying to insult him with that truth, only get a fix on what resources he could depend on. He closed his mouth on the retort that had almost escaped him, shoulders squaring under Buck's gravely merry consideration, and he answered bluntly,
"I imagine they'll think I'm too cowardly to get involved, Mr. Wilmington."
"Good; so you can make a move on them boxes, then." Buck decided, and James felt a strength in that offhanded confidence in his ability to carry out so dangerous a part of the strategy.
Elizabeth regarded him thoughtfully, knowing James would need help but not wanting to embarrass him by saying so.
Travis, who had been sitting with his head tucked down onto his chest in desperately earnest thought, finally shook his head with a dark sigh. "My job here isn't finished, I'll be remaining." He said, drawing quizzical looks, Ezra's particularly sharp.
"You can't!" Mary cried, "You'll be alone with them, and if they realize you've helped in the escape ..."
"Not alone." James said quietly, his face conflicted and fearful, but showing a growing determination. "He won't be here alone. I have to stay, too. And neither of us can be implicated in the escape." Orrin regarded him for a long moment, testing the strength of James' conviction and the measure of his own trust. James flushed, but held his ground.
"I have access you don't, Mr. Travis, my brothers don't yet suspect me, and that is critical at this point." Which Orrin couldn't deny, but courage from James Monroe hadn't seemed forthcoming before.
"James, they'll know you've helped in the escape and they won't be any kinder to you than they would to Mr. Travis!" Elizabeth protested, afraid for him and trying not to show the doubts she couldn't help, but Buck had cocked back against one wall with a thoughtful grin.
"Not necessarily. We could make it look like he was tryin' t'help." Not expanding on that, but his grin got a little wider.
James' gingery eyebrows twitched a bit at that grin, but he didn't give way. "Gerald has already written most of the letters to his co-conspirators back east announcing the commencement of hostilities ..." A wry smile, small and bitter, met their incredulity. "It's a habit of his, assuming victory before it's actually in hand, he thinks it ensures success. He's superstitious about it." James had always tried to discourage those arrogant assumptions committed to paper in advance of the fact, they created dangerous written evidence of foreknowledge if failure ensued. But Gerald had never failed yet, and this time James hadn't quarreled when he'd insisted on his traditional 'personal' touch. He wanted to remind his allies who had masterminded the gold-rush that would replenish the government's war-ravaged coffers and establish a new cabal of wealthy and powerful men. "If I can get my hands on those letters, Mr. Travis, you would have all the trails you need to find his allies in the east."
Orrin's eyes were bright and sharp, and James set forth the other, far more personal and important, goal that would require him to remain in this lion's den. "I've already taken the land grants and will give them to Elizabeth for safekeeping. He can't forge them if she's alive somewhere."
"James, they'll know who took them!" Elizabeth said urgently, "You'll never make it out of this fort!"
"They won't be missed for quite some time, Elizabeth, don't worry." James tried to reassure her, even though he was in constant terror that they would, indeed, notice the papers were gone.
Ezra had been sitting back in his chair, slender clever fingers laced across his vest, legs crossed comfortably as he listened, seemingly bored. But Buck recognized the look in those bright green eyes; Ezra was a master at conniving himself out of unexpected tight spots, and Buck figured with all the complications they were running into here, Standish was their best hope. He smiled as Ezra sat up a little straighter, bringing attention to himself.
"My, my, my ..." The gambler mused, brow furrowed dramatically, though Buck knew he'd already found a way. The gunslinger leaned back on the wall and crossed his arms over his chest, anticipating Ezra's unraveling of the idea he'd been forming for the last several minutes. Ezra proceeded to do just that with brazenly methodical logic and solid brass balls.
Orrin, his own brow furrowed in serious doubt, was astonished by how complete a plan it was after such brief contemplation. Ezra had taken advantage of every accidental and deliberate event and set a neat course of action through that mortal thicket of circumstance that, if successful, would ensure the completion of their investigation and still get Chris and Vin out of the fort. Indeed - it could leave Travis in the unique position of being an ally Gerald and Stephen Monroe would have to safeguard with their lives.
Buck was laughing softly, shaking his head in admiration, and Travis had to admit Ezra's audacious plan just might work.
"Of course," Ezra said off-handedly, "That means I'll have to remain behind as well."
"Ezra, that isn't necessary." Orrin said, "You could be on your way and leave it to James and I."
Ezra snorted delicately, not exactly disparaging either Travis or James, but obviously dubious of their abilities to carry out the deception as effectively as he could himself. Travis actually laughed, unoffended.
"Mr. Travis, I do not intend to be chased out of this comfortable house nor be parted from civilized amenities a moment more than is absolutely required. Eloquent as you are, sir, this will require some ... expertise in the fine art of the con, which I possess, as you've reminded me frequently, in abundance." His smile was as sweet and warm as his drawl, as if he were looking forward to the challenge - which he was. Ezra could be as vengeful as the next man.
"Humble cuss, ain't he?" Buck drawled, knowing Ezra had the right of it, and also knowing how far beyond his own comfort Ezra had thought. If the Monroes didn't bite on the line Ezra intended to play out to them, he and Travis both would be in a very bad situation. But Ezra Standish could sell feathers to a bird, and Buck could tell that Travis, despite the worry weighting his dark brow, was glad to have the gambler remain at his back. Funny, the partnerships that could form up sometimes.
"Alright." Orrin finally agreed. "Ezra, James and I will remain behind. And no, Mary." Without looking at her and she scowled as Ezra and Buck chuckled at the exchange, but James was again shaking his head, his eyes almost furtive.
"Mr. Travis, she has to stay."
"Out of the question!" He snapped, furious with James for giving Mary the opportunity she wanted, but there was no way out of it and James raised his hands palm-out, all the pacification he could offer. "Sir, I'm afraid so - it will look too suspicious ..."
"Of course it will!" Mary said, in full agreement with James and not because it validated her own will - she understood the Judge's wish to have her out of harm's way, but this time there was no such thing, it was as dangerous outside as in. "Elizabeth disappearing is explainable by Ezra's plan, but it would make no sense if I disappeared as well and trying to justify it would only compromise everything. Besides - who will look after Julianna?"
"Nobody! I'm going!" Jules declared, but Buck waggled her head back and forth under his hand in a gentle tease and said somberly, "Jules, you goin' along would give your father cause t'call out troops from all over the state, it's gonna be a dicey enough thing with just your Aunt as it is. C'mon now ..." Seeing her stubborn chin set itself for argument but knowing she was an intelligent child, "Besides, hon, you could do us a lot more good here with Mr. Travis and Mary and your Uncle - I got a feelin' you're a pretty good spy." Laughing when Jules didn't confirm that, canny as ever. "We're gonna be movin' hard and fast out there t'keep near the fort 'til your Uncle James gets his hands on what we need, then we'll be back for all of you, alright? There ain't nothin' more important to Vin right now than doin' this thing, and I'd have to run away to France or something if you came along and got hurt - he's a mean one when he wants t'be."
Jules glared at him unhappily, but he'd said the one thing that guaranteed her cooperation - she knew how important this was to Uncle Vin, stopping the Indian war her father intended to start, keeping him from getting rich off the Indian's suffering. She acquiesced with a sullen gracelessly sullen scowl at them all.
Finally Orrin nodded, having looked at Ezra's idea from as many angles as he could and finding it, if not perfect, better than anything he could come up with himself on short notice. He had to trust Standish to know what unscrupulous men would fall prey to, and the gambler's crooked smile when he looked over at him assured him he did.
"Alright. Now, somebody's got to get their horses out of the stable, and we ..." Indicating Mary and Ezra, "Have to be seen as far from the action as possible, innocent bystanders."
"I wouldn't want t'be the one t'tell Vin we left Peso here!" Buck said with a dramatic shiver; "That's where J.D. comes in, he can get us a nice little stampede started and our friendly Indians'll be right happy t'finish it." Jules could've kissed him for that easy certainty that said this was just a bump in their road and they'd all be on their merry way before the sun came up.
"I'd think leavin' that hammer-headed, slab-sided back-buster would be a mercy to us all, Buck. He's not going to just come on along without Vin." Ezra drawled, green eyes sparking with momentary levity for the sake of the girl with the strange attachment to their tracker. She didn't smile back, but her shoulders seemed to set.
"I can get Peso." She declared, and to her amazement, no one denied her. "My father doesn't notice me much, you know, I can get in and out of places."
Buck took a sip off his second glass of whiskey and his eyes sparkled at her over the rim, liking her spunk and admiring her resourcefulness, and she felt that with a great pride. "You sure you can handle that ornery wolf on hooves?"
Her nod was short and sharp and Buck capped her head with his big long hand, grinning down into her wide fierce eyes; "I just bet you can, darlin'!"
He was in her arms, and it was alright to be tight there, the only place it was ever, always, alright. Too hot, suffocating hot, arms and legs constricted and confined, but by the luminous angles and sweeps and coolness of her body against him, so that, too, was alright. Anywhere with her. He couldn't breathe, but her lips were on his mouth and her scent in his lungs so he didn't care. His heart labored and paused, tripped and rose and fell, but it had nothing in it except his love for her and so it didn't matter.
Now and again he got scared in some distant, insistent place, sometimes terror rose dripping blackly out of his own endless depths, but she sent it back every time with nothing more than a whisper. It was alright. He even knew he could be dying, but with the promise of being with her always, her voice soothing in his ear, her lips touching him, her hands and arms holding him - dying would be alright, too.
J.D. knew a lot about calming horses down, and he knew just as much about stirring them up.
"Sorry kid, y'ain't gonna get to shoot nothin' yet." Buck's teeth gleamed in the darkness, already winding himself up for the fight to come.
"I'll shoot me a Monroe if he steps in range." J.D. answered stoutly, and it wasn't his usual naive bravado this time. Buck gripped his shoulder a moment; "The younger Monroe is on our side, J.D., n' Miss Elizabeth, too - we can't be killin' these soldiers, so don't let your mad bust this wide open before we're out."
J.D.'s snort said all he needed to about knowing what was on the line.
Jules approached Peso's stall nervously - sure, she'd said it like sheknew she could do it, but she really wasn't sure the big black would let her get any closer than he'd let anyone else. His powerful haunches were dusty in the dim light so she knew the groom hadn't been able to curry him, one hip dropped and she heard a big-chested breath the moment she touched the stall gate. Quiet as a ghost, she opened the gate and hummed softly as his big blaze-faced head jerked up and around; she'd heard Uncle Vin hum to him sometimes, though when he did it, it sounded more like a warning than a plea.
Tentatively she reached out as she moved toward his head. He shifted sideways toward her like he intended to squash her against the side of the stall and her hand met his warm hide with a firm push. She bared her teeth at him as his neck arched hard and low, threatening, toward her.
"Listen, horse, I don't have time for this, so you're not going to give me any trouble, right?"
The round dark eye regarded her momentarily, big hooves shifting once as if to see whether she'd hold her ground. She did, and advanced, grateful the groom had been too wary of his teeth to attempt to remove his bridle. To her great relief, Peso let her take his lead, turn him in the tight space, and take him out of the stall into the stable row. J.D. appeared out of the darkness a moment later leading Josiah's tall gelding and Chris' black. She grinned at his dubious admiration and Peso just stood patiently behind her, his big whiskered chin almost touching her shoulder and not trying to tear it off or anything.
J.D. snorted incredously; "That's the most contrary horse, I swear ... maybe because you're a female or something."
He looked bright and elfin in the bare illumination of a single lantern, his hair and eyebrows and eyes glossy and dark, the fine bones of his face in sharp relief. Jules had already figured out why Casey loved him, and tonight, she loved him, too, because he put himself aside and did the dirty unglamorous work without complaint. Like a man ought, as her Grampa might say, not like a boy would.
They walked the horses slowly down the line of stalls and out the far side of the stable toward the paddocks, the dim shifting shapes of horses in one, mules in another. J.D. set the horses into the paddock with their kind, but Jules took Peso in amongst the mules where he was guaranteed to make trouble and draw the attention of all the soldiers in the vicinity. He was the fuse, Buck had said, and the big black headed straight across the dusty ground toward the bunched mules with a hard forward prick of his ears and arrogantly arching tail.
"Jeez, this ain't gonna take long." J.D. said, a little worried that Peso would make too much trouble too soon. He laughed softly, glancing down at Jules beside him, "That one's as prickly as Vin about being crowded - crazy way for a herd animal to be, but that's how he is. And he purely hates mules."
Jules had no humor in her right now, "He knows what he has to do, J.D. Don't ask me how, but he knows." Supremely confident, though J.D. had his doubts as one of the mules stepped out from among his fellows, haunches pivoting around to present himself sideways to Peso.
"James - come take a walk with me." Elizabeth said, taking a deep breath and threading her hand through her younger brother's elbow as he rose from the sofa, his brothers glancing up incuriously. Gerald was engrossed in a stack of papers that had been awaiting his command, and Stephen was brooding sullenly over brandy, alternately glad of the revenge he'd been allowed to take and furious to have been stopped short of killing Vin Tanner with his bare hands. Elizabeth was wearing a heavy coat and a shawl over it, the bulk concealing two holstered pistols beneath.
Her younger brother's eyes were too bright, his face almost startled-looking in terror of the role he'd agreed to play. They'd hoped the elder brothers would be asleep, but James had found them both awake and too curious about where he'd been. He'd used Julianna as an excuse, and though Gerald had seemed suspicious of James' uncharacteristic concern for her, his relegation to baby-sitter had reinforced his ineffectuality. Elizabeth had walked into the betrayal supremely calm, and James' look had been so grateful she was afraid her elder brothers might notice.
It was time, and of course she was afraid and knew he was, too, but she was still proud of them both as she'd never been. James' face was grim as death as he got his coat, also heavy with weapons. He was overflowing with the knowledge of what he was risking, but he didn't lose his nerve this time. Not this time, when it mattered as it never had before. If Gerald and Stephen were going to make him choose between them and his sister ... well, they shouldn't be surprised at his choice.
"Alright, sister ... " He said, his voice thin and his arm tense under her hand. They went out together, drawing not even a glance at their departure, and both paused on the porch, breathing deeply and trembling.
Elizabeth's free hand rose to his cheek, encouraging him with her touch, with all of a smile she could manage. "Don't worry, Gerald and Stephen are accustomed to my late-night walks, James, and you often came with me when you were younger. The soldiers won't think anything of it - just act like a Monroe when the time comes, dear, and the ones guarding the boxes will obey you."
That made him snort a little laugh, his heart high in his throat and that throat all but closed. There would be no turning back from this, and he recognized that knowledge in his sister's eyes without being able to take any joy in it himself. She was glad of the choice they'd made, loving her father and Duley and, he suspected, even loving Vin Tanner. Certainly she hadn't raised a single objection to Ezra's delicately worded outline of her role. But he was setting himself in true opposition to his brothers for the first time in his life, and nothing would ever be the same again. It was more dangerous than she knew, more dangerous than he liked to contemplate himself, every outcome crawling with the potential for disaster.
There were many ways this could end, few of them leaving him or Elizabeth unscathed. The rescue could fail entirely, in which case his brothers would certainly kill him, and probably also his sister, as well as Travis, Mary, and any of the seven they could get their hands on. Those who escaped might be hunted down as criminals, and he shuddered at what fate might befall his niece. The one thing they'd agreed on without ever saying so was that Julianna had to be moved out of the eye of the coming storm.
If the escape succeeded, his sister's reputation would be ruined, and he was surprised she'd agreed so readily after years of refusing to give that weapon to her brothers. Gerald would command his soldiers to give chase to retrieve both her and the land grants, but Buck had laughed and wished them sarcastic luck finding them. If he and Travis and Ezra managed to escape implication in the escape long enough to secure the letters and get out of the fort with them, it was still a long and perilous way to Washington. Gerald was no fool, he would know those names alone would be enough to force an investigation no matter how powerful his allies were or high into the government his reach went. He would be rabid, cornered ... James shivered, his teeth clenching.
And if those proofs were, indeed, delivered - James remembered the look that had passed among Travis and Ezra and the dark lanky gunslinger and amended his thought - not if. No, they were not men who would fail, and even one would be enough to get there. Gerald would be court-martialed for crimes that would have to include treason and conspiracy to commit murder and fraud. Both he and Stephen could also be tried in civil courts for the endless briberies and political manipulations ... and he wouldn't escape those indictments himself despite his ignorance of the wider scheme, his own involvement in laying the years of groundwork was undeniable. Doubtless Gerald and Stephen would find it fitting to bring their betrayer down with them, and Elizabeth as well if they could, her name on those land grants could too easily embroil her, too.
James shook his head as he and Elizabeth stepped off the porch on their stroll, dizzy with fear of the destiny he walked out to meet.
Jules stayed in the darkest shadows, as close to the gates as she could get without being seen, as J.D. slipped between the slats of the paddock fence and walked in a fluid shadow through the crowded remuda, touching the occasional shoulder or haunch or neck to keep the horses quiet. Her hand was slippery with sweat, her heart was racing. The grooms who had been sleeping in loft quarters had all come down at the squeal and thump of Peso instigating a fracas among the mules and were now gathered at the side of that paddock considering what to do - none of them wanted to try to put hands to Peso, but the mules were becoming more and more unsettled, the mood spreading into the horse corral and even, by the sounds, the stable. The perimeter guards, bored, drifted near as well until a good half-dozen had clumped beside the paddock, laughing and taking bets on the outcome.
A wild yipping sound had them suddenly clotted together, turning in every direction in surprise as feathered apparitions appeared from either side of the stable.
"Indians!" J.D. shouted, and another voice that could've been Nathan on the other side of the camp shouted the same thing. "Indians stealin' the horses!"
The panicked groomsmen ran for the buildings and the weapons they'd left behind while the guards raised their rifles in confusion trying to find targets. J.D.'s hands flew up like doves breaking white and sudden out of the darkness in the back of the corral, and the heads of the horses flew upward like ripples out from where he was, turning away from him in a quickening eddy. There was a heavy thump and a deep throaty squeal from the mule paddock where Peso suddenly found himself pressed into the detested mules as they startled into motion as well.
Jules dashed out and released the latches on both gates, shoving the one to the horse paddock open and yanking at the one on the mule paddock. It was not so well balanced and required a good deal of strength just to get it moving as the animals came swirling toward the sudden egress, Peso biting at the mule beside him and then crashing into the gate so it banged wide.
Hooves thundered down the incline toward the main compound raising a thick cloud of dust and noise in the night air, stampeding wildly - but not randomly. Dimly, four or five Indians could be seen driving the mules and horses into one herd, squeals and grunts as they jostled together in a dark river of bobbing heads and haunches that might have spread wide and scattered but did not. Indeed, they were running right toward the Parade ground. Barracks doors flung open, sudden shafts of light struck that dark square one after the other as the soldiers roused in alarmed confusion, boiling out of the buildings in various stages of undress.
"Indians!" They took up the cry themselves, and "Indians, sir, after the remuda!" when Gerald and Stephen dashed out onto the porch of the Commander's Quarters. In the confusion and darkness no one noticed that one of those Indians was very tall and lanky under his bright paint, or even that one was darker by far than any Indian they'd ever seen. Gerald's sharp commanding voice rose over the din, alarmed that the Indians were driving the maddened herd right through the center of the compound. Travis, Mary and Ezra let themselves be seen on the front porch of the single Officer's quarters, watching with seeming helplessness, but with a more knowing eye than anyone else.
James and Elizabeth, nearly upon the silent iron boxes on their seemingly aimless stroll, had stopped where they were and turned toward the sudden uproar in concern. The two guards had turned that way as well, but made no move to leave their posts.
James took a quick breath, set his face, and gestured imperiously, "Get over there, we're being attacked you fool!"
A sudden cacophony of hollow rumbling startled them all, but Elizabeth recognized that gleeful whoop as part of the herd got sheared off right up onto the back porch of the Single Officer's Quarters where it created a bottleneck between it and the adjacent empty house intended for the family of a married Officer. There was a terrible splintering crash as the weight of the horses forced against the back wall broke through and the porch-rails split away into the stream of moving animals to add to the confusion, their sounds becoming urgent and inciting the rest into panicked plunging and kicking. Travis grasped Mary by the arm and leapt down the stairs from the porch, Ezra a half-step behind them carrying one of Julianna's dresses stuffed into an approximation of her that was good enough to fool anyone at a distance. They went at a dead run along the wall to the Commander's Quarters next door.
Lamplight inside the Single Officer's Quarters bobbled madly as several out of control animals ran rampant through the bottom floor of the left side of the house, frantically seeking a way out. Glass shattered, furniture and walls crashed and cracked, and a tongue of flame from an overturned lamp started licking up the near corner on that ground floor, sending several soldiers dodging for buckets before the whole building went up. The herd spread across the Parade ground as they came out of the bottleneck like a river opening up into a broad delta, scattering off for egresses between buildings and at all the other corners of the compound, criss-crossing each other as the Lakota and Buck and Nathan kept pushing them from behind.
The noise level escalated yet again and James dared grab the nearest guard with furious strength, "Your Captain's daughter is down there, soldier, and if any harm comes to her from stampeding horses or Indians, it'll be you in one of those boxes!"
Shouting men and screaming horses, smoke billowing high overhead and dust even thicker below, darkening the darkness. Now gunshots as the soldiers began firing at the Indians only to have them disappear over the far side of their ponies secured by a heel over the animal's back and an arm thrust through a loop of rawhide around the neck. Drag lines danced and popped behind them.
"Sir, I can't abandon my post!" The soldier protested, though he was obviously alarmed, even more so when James shook him viciously, temper blazing in his face,
"These prisoners aren't going anywhere, you idiot! Now get moving!" He snatched the rifle out of the man's hands as if he intended to stand the guard himself and pushed the soldier, hard, toward the fray.
Elizabeth was at the hasp of one of the boxes before the soldier was even out of sight, James keeping an anxious watch for any witnesses to the lie he'd be telling his brothers later, his back to her so he could say he hadn't noticed what she was doing. War had broken out in the main compound, horses streaming madly every which way, muzzle-flashes in brief flares from too many directions for him to tell what was going on.
Chris Larabee blinked up at Elizabeth, his hands fisted as he came up out of the box like a rattler out of its own coil. At once he went for the box a few feet away, but he was listening to her rapid-fire words; the side of his face was crusted with blood, one eye swollen almost shut, every move frightening urgent.
"Buck, J.D. and Nathan are here with some Indians, they've turned the mules and horses loose and the Indians are stealing them, we don't have much time, I've got guns ..."
The dark shape of running horses filled the Parade ground, some coming right at them, and then there were soldiers there as well. Elizabeth cried out in alarm, but Chris' hand snaked under her coat roughly and came out with one of the pistols, thumb hammering back and his long body twisting like his spine was made of water to bring it to bear behind them.
"Don't kill them!" Elizabeth cried, catching onto the arm with the gun and nearly falling as Chris ripped open her coat to grab the other gun and the holster belt and thrust her back from him, "Travis says don't kill them!"
Well that was hard to hear and harder to do, he had to yank back on his momentum of killing instincts and settle for driving them back behind the corner of the Infantry barracks as Elizabeth struggled with the hasp on the second iron box, her brother gawping like an idiot at a fair beside her.
The gunslinger looked like he was made of dark silver in the moonlight, all long fluid angles and guns in both hands spitting fire faster than James had ever believed possible. It was the most astonishing thing how calmly he moved, a graceful ceremony practiced and methodical and his eyes coldly determined. They wouldn't take him and they wouldn't take Tanner and he shouted that defiance in a wordless curse as he took down a Sergeant with a bullet through the thigh, two more falling over him. He wasn't killing them, James realized, but he was keeping them away with a stupefying level of skill.
"Get her out of here, that way!" Gesturing into the dark in a vicious slash of motion and James realized with a start that the gunslinger meant he should get Elizabeth clear, and of course he should! The soldiers were under no restraints against killing and she was hunched over the box pushing with too little strength against the pin jammed hard into the hasp. James moved, and felt like he was breaking out frozen numbness into a concussion of noise and dust.
She had just managed to release the hasp and only James grabbing her away kept her from being flattened by the iron door that burst back the instant it was released. Vin Tanner shot out and over the lip in a low hurt scuttle and Elizabeth could feel like a deep pull in herself how badly he wanted to get away from that box. Her heart leapt at the sight of him, hands and arms reaching back for him as James gripped harder around her waist and dragged her further into the darkness. Ragged and bloody and wild as a wounded animal, the front of his shirt spattered and his pants stained in a smear over that flank she knew had been clawed by the cougar, wild ... God, wild with everything the word could mean.
Vin didn't know where he was, why, nothing but the air he sucked into his lungs was real. That, and a huge grieving fury to have been ripped out of Duley's arms. Fortunately, he backed right into Chris's reaching hands, turned at the sudden obstacle fighting and not recognizing Chris, but his legs were already buckling. Chris wasted not even a moment; he caught Vin around the back and held his sinking weight up against his chest, firing over Vin's shoulder, spinning the soldier who'd drawn a bead on him around and down with a bullet that had to have shattered his hand. He stooped over and set his shoulder into the tracker's narrow hip, sweeping him up over his back with a grunt; his own legs shook, his own strength too short, teeth bared in vicious will. But pure will just wasn't enough. Bullets thumped into the ground just past him, his left leg sent a dart of fire from groin to heel and he dropped Vin back onto the ground and just kept shooting.
Buck saw Chris out in the open, a pistol in each hand blazing gouts of fire and Vin's long narrow shape sprawled under him, braced protectively between the gunslinger's legs. Buck was trying to get to him, to snatch him up onto his horse or grab Vin - far less likely since he was on the ground - or at least cover Chris long enough for him to get Vin off into the darkness, but the gunfire was too quick and hot. Gerald Monroe was bellowing somewhere in the dust and smoke behind him, the Parade ground in utter chaos.
Chris sank down in a deep crouch, his long left leg bridged across Vin's body and nearly sitting on his right heel to make himself a smaller target as he plucked shells out of the belt he'd dropped on Vin's chest with one hand and fired with the other, desperately trying to clear enough time to reload before he was completely dry. His glances told him James and Elizabeth Monroe were huddled together just past the last reach of the light, horses were milling around between the buildings and over the parade ground in a confused nonsense of noise and equine upset, there were soldiers running everywhere ... his heart held up a moment as his eye ticked back to something that had caught his unconscious attention ...
Chris would know that tall grey anywhere, snaky and lanky as the wild mustached Indian in the saddle. Buck, coming fast and straight as an arrow, reaching out after him or Vin, Chris didn't know, but getting Vin out was his first priority. A knot of soldiers at the corner of the Cavalry barracks laid rifle-barrels in black lines against the grayed clapboards and Chris emptied the gun in his left hand at them and thrust the hot barrel into the high waist of his pants, grabbing hold of Vin's collar and dragging him backwards like a rolled rug. But it was too awkward and bullets were starting to bracket him in front and behind, he dropped Vin again in frustrated temper and let off three close-quick shots at those soldiers, spanging a bullet off a trough pump with a ringing whine that put the ricochet right into them. Just so they'd know he could shoot around corners, just so they knew he wasn't killing them when he easily could - and wanted to, and was damned close to doing, hang Travis' orders.
Chris kept Buck in his line of sight, jinking and weaving across the Parade Ground using the herd as cover, then Vin jerked at his feet and the gunslinger reached down for the shoulder of his coat. Rawhide fringe broke off in his hand as his first try failed, but the second caught at coat and shirt and suspenders all the way down to skin as he yanked the tracker up into an unsteady sitting position against his own leg and urged him farther.
"Vin! Stand up, stand up! I can't get you up high enough and shoot too, c'mon, stand UP!" Vin's back pressed against his leg, his boots scoring the dusty ground as his legs tried to remember how to work. All he could hear was thunder, someone's insistent voice, a hold on his shoulder that had the hide coat cutting into his armpit.
Buck was almost there, reaching down as far as he could go, having realized Chris wanted Vin out first. Reaching, but too high and too fast and both Chris and Buck knew it in the same instant; even if Chris got Vin up in time the snatch would either kill Vin outright or take Buck out of the saddle. It didn't matter. Two Indian ponies swept around the grey like he was standing still, a rawhide dragline gathered up to the purpose snaking out from one to the other the moment they were clear of him.
"Dho, yo!" Vin's head turned blearily toward the sound, "oo-oohey! Wahi, a-oh c'he!"
(Loosely translated: Hey, you [Vin]! It is time! I am coming, watch out I said!)
Instinct took him where his irrational mind couldn't, half-forgotten memories raised his arms and planted both his hands against Chris' hip, pushed as forcefully as he could, shoving the gunslinger off balance in surprise, stumbling away, out of the way of the approaching ponies. Their hoofbeats reverberated in Vin's bones like a heart beating too hard and too fast, Vin saw nothing but the rope dragging between them in the dust as if all the lucid power he had was being brought by an outside force to bear on that one, small, pivotal sight. He gritted his teeth against the shock of what would come, flattened his legs so the rope would pass over him and catch under his arms.
He didn't make it conscious through the initial jerk that took him off the ground, but it didn't matter; the hands on those ropes knew what to do to keep him and they dragged him into the darkness.
Chris had barely gained his feet, gaping in furious confusion as Vin disappeared, already being hauled upward and his boots knocking the ground between the spotted heels of the ponies.
"Chris!" He spun numbly, the empty pistol hanging leaden in his right hand, just in time to see Buck bearing down hard on him, his right arm outstretched and his purpose both clear and urgent. The pistol dropped with a thud into the dirt and both hands reached out toward the approaching gray, snagging Buck's arm with his right hand while the other scrabbled after the cantle of his saddle, being pulled off his feet as he struggled to get up. To his credit, the grey sped up regardless of the sudden weight hanging so precariously off one side and shot into the darkness.
It was a strange collection of tattered and dusty people that greeted Buck and Chris, the gunslinger behind his old friend and sliding to the ground off the gray's rump as soon as it slowed. They were no more than a three hundred yards outside the reach of light from the camp, but invisible from it in the darkness. Chris saw Nathan, Josiah, J.D. and a Lakota warrior in full paint, feathers and lance, Elizabeth Monroe and her youngest brother holding on to each other wide-eyed as children. But he didn't see Vin or the Indians who'd snatched him away, which didn't make him feel the least bit less like detonating into bloody mayhem. The Monroes were a powerful temptation and he purposefully did not look at them.
"Buck, what in hell is goin' on? What're these two worthless Monroes doin' here, where'd these Indians come from?"
Elizabeth watched him with a quail of fear at his open hostility, knowing he didn't like her, knowing he distrusted her and not altogether sure he wouldn't kill her or James if she forced his attention. But there was no choice; James clutched at her in reflexive alarm when she stiffened her chin and took a step toward Larabee.
Buck had opened his mouth to answer, but instead he settled back into his saddle with a speculative cock to his head and waited to see how the lady would handle Chris when he looked like he wanted to skin someone alive just to take the edge off.
"Mr. Larabee, we are helping ..." She said, and then in a bare dry voice she quickly sketched out the plan they'd devised, coloring in a hot blush. Chris never took his eyes off her and they were cold jade knives pinning her in place. When she finished he was still staring at her, but he was thinking. His eyes flicked to James, and James felt like he should be bleeding somewhere from it. The plan had Ezra's hand all over it, and the Judge going along was a vote of confidence that let his shoulders settle a little.
Buck's grey danced, fidgeting uncharacteristically, and a second Lakota warrior arrived leading a string of saddled horses with his left hand and Peso, by the nasty whicker of temper, separately on his right.
"Where in hell is Vin?" Chris advanced on the warrior, impatience and the urgent need to get the hell away from this fort sharpening him dangerously. The warrior was unimpressed, dark eyes glowing out of a red mask of paint that covered the top half of his face, feathers standing behind the crown of his head and at a slant to the right, his breastplate a symmetrical pallor of slender bones like too many ribs in the ghostly gloom.
"Chris ..." Josiah said, and a nod of his head directed Chris' attention to the pair of ponies approaching, so close together their manes and tails tangled in the dark. They still had Vin between them, one holding on by a ferocious grip on the bunched lapels of his coat and the other with a hand hooked under one of his knees so he seemed to float in mid-air between close between them. Josiah was there first, moving between the horses and taking the tracker's sinuous weight with a murmured word, "Pilamaya ..." that surprised Two Badgers.
"Hau." The warrior replied, wondering now how much of their conversations this burly washiche - a holy man, according to Vin - had understood.
"Good merciful God ..." Nathan was there, dark eyes luminous with anxious temper as he saw the obvious damage - knew with a plummeting stomach that there was a lot more than he could see right then. The tracker's bottom lip was split and had bled down onto his sharp-angled chin, his eyes had faint black crescents under them and the cresting arch of one cheekbone was lost in swelling. "What in hell happened to him?"
"Stephen Monroe, that's what." Chris bit off the name like he wanted the man in front of him, his fingers opening and closing helplessly with the want to deal bloody painful death. Pointedly ignoring Elizabeth and James, he declared, "I'm gonna kill that sonofabitch as soon as I can, and I'm gonna fuckin' enjoy it."
"Well then," Buck grinned wolfishly at him, crossing his forearms on the pommel of his saddle and his hands dangling loose, "You just look for the man with my boot-print in the middle of his chest, 'cause I got 'im a damned good one on the way across the Parade ground."
Chris' smile was humorless, but ripe with a pleasure Buck understood perfectly - and so did the Lakota, by their grins. Stephen had been aiming at the back of the warrior who was now staring Chris down calmly when Buck had come slewing around the corner of the smoldering Junior Officer's quarters; he'd just changed course, stuck his leg out, locked his knee, and called the bastard's name so he'd turn around. Took Stephen down with a satisfying thump that'd hopefully cracked the bastard's sternum from top to bottom. He sure wasn't moving when Buck looked back, and another warrior touched his own painted face to gather some color and dipped down with a sharp whoop as he rode by the fallen Monroe, leaving two blue stripes across his forehead as he passed to tell him coup had been counted on him. That warrior grinned at Buck now, both he and his horse half-painted solid blue with round white hailstones.
Josiah laid Vin down on his back, Buck legging the grey to pace a line between them and the compound, looking for any pursuit and laughing softly at the chaos beyond as the soldiers chased after a few loose horses. Gerald was stomping around waving his arms and shouting so loudly Buck could swear he could hear veins popping. "Man's gonna rupture somethin' ..." He said gleefully as J.D. joined him, but there was a troop beginning to form and they'd have to get moving out of here pretty quick.
Two Badgers looked critically at his friend on the ground, worried by the broken wetness of his breathing and angry, too. But there was nothing he could do about that, so he turned to what a man could do to help. Right now it was important to get the American horses away, to make obvious trails for the soldiers to follow so the rest could escape. A few words set this in motion, his warriors melting into the darkness and soon after the muted rumble of hooves being driven in three split paths onto the plains. When they reached rock, they would turn and push back toward the Rosebud, but it was a long way away still.
Nathan went for his horse, for his kit and canteen and bandages, and Elizabeth hovered over Vin in fear of the battered and bloody mess her own brother had made of him. God, Duley would never forgive her! He was the only unmoving thing in the constant restlessness of excited animals and men, Josiah strapping on his gun, J.D. and Buck trotting back and forth in the dark, his very stillness held her rapt.
Vin drifted, blissfully unaware, happily lost in Duley's embrace. She was music threading through the roar in his ears, honey softening the bitter taste of blood in his mouth, a cool lifeline through the inferno that had its claws hard and holding in him. Death would have him if she let go, he knew that. It was her keeping him alive - he knew that, too, because this had happened before; a fall the year after she left, the desert once when his horse died a long way from nowhere. Times when he came very close to the place where she was, always wanting to go the rest of the way and she never let him. He'd always been mad about that, didn't want her reminding his heart to beat and his lungs to breathe and his blood to flow when he just wanted to let go of this empty world and be with her. This time, though, he had important things to finish.
She'd come to him in that tight small darkness and took him away from the terror, she stayed with him now and blunted what he knew in a vague distracted way was terrible pain so he couldn't use it to wish himself dead. She scolded him for wanting to go over the edge again, she made him go on living, and he let her because it was easier than fighting her. He'd never been able to fight her. Crazy to be happy of a haunting, but there it was. He'd always been crazy for her. He might die despite her this time, though, even without wishing it, he could feel her not wanting that, but it would be alright, meant to be with no regard for argument from either of them.
No, just no, and she moved him up a little from the drift he wanted to sink further into, pushed him as far as she could out of his contentment into the world.
He hurt so badly he didn't want to be touched anywhere, but Nathan was near, he heard his voice and knew what had to happen. He wanted to run, but she didn't let him, and Chris was staring down at him, his face bloody and stark ...
Elizabeth went to her knees beside him as they saw his eyes open, so grateful for that sign of life that she burst into quiet tears, but Chris was seeing something else in Vin's face beyond injury and suffering, and he didn't like it one damned little bit. He'd seen Vin injured before, and this was something different. Like Vin wasn't wholly there, or was at some distance he didn't intend to come back from. Peaceful, he looked fuckin' peaceful, as if content to die no matter what he was in the middle of, and it made Chris absolutely blind-red furious.
"Go on ..." A breath, all Vin had and not half of what he meant, Chris misunderstanding the little he'd managed, oh, he saw that at once in the bright burst of ever-ready fury. Of course he'd think Vin meant they should leave him to die, too jaded to believe anything but the worst never even considering Vin was saying they should all go on. That Duley would make sure he survived whatever it took. But Chris didn't know Duley, she was a Monroe and he didn't like any Monroe he'd met so far.
Duley held him in the world with all her power, but Vin wouldn't fight to stay there and she couldn't make him do it alone, he was too bad off and too content to be with her. In the back of his mind she knew his cowardly and tender thought to avoid her final leaving by dying himself before it happened.
She looked at the temper in the cold-eyed man and did not have to wonder what fed it - indeed, she exalted in this unexpected and desperately necessary ally. This one loved Vin as much as she did, though such words would never be said between men, to whom love was a vulnerability at best. Women knew that power best, the first and greatest, a force that could hold a man to life when he should die, and hold a soul to earth who should have gone on long ago. Rage protected the heart scarred beyond imagining, fury was both the source of his strength and his undoing, but his love for Vin was a stubborn need that wouldn't let Vin just slip away from life. He wanted precisely what she wanted, and he wanted it just as badly. For Vin to live.
She soothed her husband's incorporeal struggle for breath and strength he didn't have to explain himself to his friend, unwilling to let him weaken himself the bare bit it would take to kill him at last. It wasn't necessary. This man would not let Vin leave the world, his anger would hammer Vin to the earth and hold him there like a defiantly planted honor flag he would die himself before seeing lost. He had already lost too much that he loved, and he would hang on to Vin right into the teeth of hell.
Chris jerked Elizabeth aside like she was a curtain in his way and got down into Vin's face in one sinuous lean, knees bent just enough and narrow body folded sharp from the hips until they were nearly nose to nose. His spread fingertips settled on Vin's upper chest and pushed hard enough to rock the tracker back into the ground, enough to hurt just enough for a reaction. James gripped his sister's elbow and Josiah caught at Nathan at the healer's outraged gasp, knowing this was something Chris had to get out, and Vin had to take.
"Oh, you bet we're going, cowboy, and you're going right along with us!"
Almost viciously, so low only Vin could hear, hanging onto consciousness by a thread but hooked on those wide pale eyes hauling him back from the music and the honey and the coolness he didn't want to leave; he felt her nudging, pushing him into the trap of those pale eyes, neither Chris or Duley willing to let him die and fighting from both sides, the quick and the dead. Not fair, he thought vaguely, but this time he didn't set his heels against it. Duley moved her Vin up out of death and as far as she could toward the angry living reach of his friend, wanting him in those fiercely unyielding hands.
Josiah, faceless in the deep shadow of his hat-brim, watched and listened with great attention, hearing in the low thrum of private words the heart of a matter being said out loud, face to face. It didn't matter that they didn't have time for it now, that Vin was barely coherent and Chris nearly too crazy with pain and violence and flat out refusing to let the tracker die to be coherent himself. What stood between them had chosen its own time to break open, and Chris was never more ferocious than when his heart made demands on him.
Because he misunderstood her possession as a taking away rather than a gift of inestimable value, and because Vin's dying was something the dark narrow man would fight with all his formidable will, Duley let him see her in Vin's eyes without caring whether he recognized her as the force keeping Vin alive or thought she was trying to take him away; either way, he would fight for Vin.
Elizabeth held her breath at the look that caught and held diamond-hard between them, and the hairs on Josiah's neck prickled strangely at the power moving in the intensity of their eyes. Two Badgers stiffened, and found confirmation of his own unease in the Holy man's similar reaction: Magic. Then he realized he wasn't surprised; Vin and his wife had always been so, his own wife said the very air had crackled around them from the moment of their meeting.
Chris cocked his head hard, like a predator not sure whether he was being confronted by friend or foe.
Duley needed his stubborn anger for Vin, who had things to finish in the world but was too content to stay with her after that. That was something Duley wouldn't allow - and this man wouldn't, either. She couldn't do it alone, it would take them both to get Vin back to the world of the living and out of her embrace, where he wanted to remain. Vin drifted in her embrace and it was harder than it had ever been to push him back into the world; she needed the gunslinger to pull, and because he was a man who relished battle, he took up her fight without even knowing it was hers.
"You started this," Chris hissed, his fingers pressing hard, "You got us all mixed around in it when we could've kept our asses clear if you'd trusted us - trusted me!"
Ah, there it was - a friend's devotion shining at the heart his fury.
A man wasn't meant to be content with ghosts or he forgot how to love the living, and her Vin burned with life, as much a part of the living world as tree or creature or rock or water and filled to overflowing with those passions and forces. But he'd never known how to give his heart except to her, and it had terrified him even then. Duley intended him to live this life, to have him come back to her by and by full up with all his life had been, with all of time to share it with her. Not for her sake would he never be loved again, or hold a child of his own in his hands, not for her would he forsake the love of such friends as this angry man. Her determination grew, and found its match in Chris Larabee.
"You could've trusted me, Vin, why didn't you know that? You've got things t'finish here with her, and with me." Chris said, harsh with his distress and striking true and quick to the heart of those things - all those things - Vin still had to do. Vin never thought about what he had to finish with her, even now, Duley knew that, he shied and spooked away from that and refused to even go near it. But this man would not let him leave it undone.
Vin just looked at him like it was all he could do, all anyone could expect.
"You could've trusted me, dammit." Chris repeated as Vin's eyes started to lose focus, knowing it sounded stupid and weak and needful as he would never allow himself to be, wishing he could come up with something else. But trust was all it was or could be.
Vin found himself caught between them, then, Chris pulling, Duley pushing, loving him too much to let him go and too much to let him stay with her before his time. He'd already figured that time would come only when death hit him too fast and final for her to stop it, stubborn woman. Smart as ever, his Duley, using Chris against him.
The tracker's bloody fingers crawled up from the dirt and set themselves over Chris' hand, holding it to his chest, patting dumbly like he was offering Chris incongruous comfort. He'd be mighty pissed t'know Duley was moving him the same way she'd moved Vin all this time, using him however she must to keep Vin alive. No, he wouldn't like that at all, but it was damned funny. His heartbeat labored unevenly under Chris' hand, his breathing becoming shallower and more of an effort.
In no way did Chris expect Vin to laugh, and though it was a bare breath of sound and motion, it was sincere.
"Let's go then ... cowboy ... th' two've you are drivin' me crazy ..." His voice was nothing more than a ragged breath and he watched the wide black pupils of Chris' eyes widen on him, not understanding what he meant and mad as a wet cat. Vin knew he had things to finish, he knew ... he wanted to laugh at Chris' face, all that pissed off and nowhere to put it, served 'im right for assuming a man wanted to die when he didn't. But he couldn't get air enough and pain threatened in a huge looming wave he didn't want to feel come down on him. Duley spared him that and let him fall back to her, secure now in the grip of Chris' determination.
Chris' hand gentled on the uneven rise and fall of Vin's chest, but as he opened his mouth to ask what Vin meant by that, to make demands, the blue eyes broke back and closed. Vin slumped to the ground like his bones had disconnected and his long bloody fingers slipped off of Chris' into the dirt.
"Dammit, Tanner!" Chris shoved at him again, not convinced that Vin wasn't dying and not sure at all what had just happened between them but at least sure Vin didn't intend to die, "You come back here!"
"Chris ..." Nathan's dark hand interposed itself, the other on his shoulder drawing him forcefully up and back, and he let him because there was nothing else he could do.
"What'd they do t'him, Chris, I need t'know what t'look for."
Chris groaned in frustration, turned away from them with a wild out-flinging of his hands and a rasping wordless growl of frustrated fury. Then he took a hard harsh breath and dropped his head, set his hands on his hips and got hold of himself, because Buck was moving quicker now, back and forth, back and forth, standing in his stirrups, eyes never leaving the camp. One catch of his old friend's eye was enough.
"Alright, alright ... his ribs are likely broken, I don't know what else, they beat the crap outta him and he wasn't shy about breakin' himself against 'em, either."
Nathan muttered darkly, having not nearly enough light to tell grime from bruises; he slipped the buttons on Vin's vest and shirt and thermals and ran his hands like sensitive instruments from shoulders to pelvis on either side, tracking the bilateral symmetry of sinewy musculature and too-prominent bones and feeling at once the loss of contour on the left. A heat source focused on Vin's flank, wet there and blood-sticky. Nathan closed his eyes, straining to feel with fingertips alone whether the ribs had perforated lung, listened to the broken cadence of Vin's breathing. He couldn't be sure, didn't know if the blood on the tracker's chin was from being hit in the face or from coughing up blood, didn't know if any of the internal organs had been lacerated and were even now slowly bleeding him out inside. He just didn't damned well know.
"We've gotta move, Chris." Buck's urgent voice soft in the darkness, Nathan could feel Chris' look at him and he shook his head,
"We could kill 'im in the first ten minutes puttin' 'im on a horse."
"We've got no choice, Nathan ..." Buck said, wheeling the grey off the slight ride, "They're comin'."
"He won't die." Chris said, ignoring the look Nathan turned up at him and refusing to wonder how he knew that so certainly, but he knew it. Not yet, anyway.
That made the decision and Josiah led his big bay forward and got up into the saddle, nobody questioning he was best to take Vin, strongest, his saddle having that wide Mexican pommel he could brace Vin on if he had to without bruising him further.
James, startled by the sudden movement of men and horses, leapt forward suddenly, reminding everyone, even himself, that he was there and had a part in what would come, "Wait!" He cried, "I can't go with you! They have to find me out here! Buck, tell them! They can't know I was helping you!"
Buck smiled at him and he remembered that same smile from earlier in the evening when he had first insisted on staying.
"That's so, Chris. 'Course, he might have a hard time explainin' how come he don't have a mark on 'im, us bein' so hostile n' all ..."
Chris had no trouble obliging him, hours of pent-up fury released off his fist stopping short on James' Monroe's face. The youngest Monroe went down like a box of rocks.
"Jeez, wish he'd asked me t'do that." J.D. groused, looking fey and nervous in the darkness with the excitement of battle still high in his eyes. Elizabeth Monroe knelt over her brother without recrimination, but Chris had no patience for any female's tender sensibilities, least of all a Monroe's.
"We're gonna stop as soon as we can." Nathan declared as he and Chris managed to hand Vin's loose angles up across Josiah's thighs, powerful arms braced around the slight body.
"And don't jar him more n' you have to - bone shards pierce his lung n' there's nothin' I can do t'save 'im." And that would just about kill Nathan himself, Josiah saw that clearly in the man's helpless eyes.
They left James Monroe unconscious in the dust and darkness.
"Uncle James?" A pat on his cheek that reverberated in his skull like a clang on iron and the pale blob hovering in front of him resolved into his niece's face. He blinked owlishly several times. Julianna was the last person he expected to see and it confused his already rattled brain, but the concern in her face when those details became clear was a wonder to behold. Concern. For him.
"What on earth happened to you? Your mouth is all bloody and your head, there ..." She fisted grubby fingers in his coat to help him as he struggled to sit up, coated in dust, and when she let go he flopped forward between his knees trying to hold the world still by holding his head still.
"Mr. Larabee ... lost his temper ..." He moaned softly, cocking a blearily wry eye at her quick giggle.
"Julianna, what are you doing here? How long have I been here?"
She shrugged, an infuriating habit of hers when she wasn't keen to tell what she was doing, and it was then he noticed that she was dressed heavily and a horse packed with saddle-bags and a bedroll behind the cantle stood behind her. He straightened up a little with growing anxiety. "What are you doing?"
"Going after them." She said, her teeth clamping defiantly when he started shaking his head.
"You can't ..." He said, "That's not the plan, Julianna! You'll give your father all the excuse he needs to call for reinforcements."
"Oh, really now, as if he doesn't have all the excuse he needs right now." She scoffed, and he was nonplussed by the maturity of her scorn.
"I know what the plan was, Uncle James, but if my father and Stephen are going to give chase it won't matter a darned bit whether I'm here or there, I don't make any difference."
Not hurt about that, but knowing as well as James did that Gerald's daughter meant very little to him beyond marrying her off fortuitously when the time came. However, her disappearance would complicate things that were already so complicated his head was spinning trying to recall it all. He encountered wetness in his hair and pulled his hand back, horrified, to find blood on his fingertips from where he must have struck his head when he was knocked down.
Julianna stood up and took a step back as if to avoid his reach should he try to stop her.
"You'll just have to revise the story, Uncle. My father won't believe Auntie Elizabeth left without me, being seduced wouldn't make her love me any less and you know it." She made a rude and very unladylike noise with her lips; "Like Auntie could be seduced - nobody who knows her would believe that for a second." But they both knew Gerald and Stephen would.
"Besides, they'd use me to lure Uncle Vin back and it would work. You know that, too."
He looked up at her, hazel eyes cloudy and not wholly coherent, thick ruddy hair tossed wildly all over his head, dusty and bloody and in such disarray as she'd never seen him in before. Dirt blackening the cuffs and front of his immaculate white shirt, rips in his expensive coat and vest, scuffs on his perfectly buffed boots. It made him seem young and oddly incapable of deception, maybe because he'd been hit in the head and was too dazed for it; that made her bark a little laugh, her Uncles lived and breathed lies. But James' worry was clear, and it wasn't for himself or his brothers this time, but his sister and a niece he barely knew. Who would've thought one of her Uncles hid a noble heart in their avarice and bitterness. It moved her to kneel impulsively in front of him, her hat falling on her back by the latigo across her neck, and hug him so quickly his arms barely had time to rise before she got up and stepped back again.
"Come on." She said, holding out her hand, "You have to get back. Just tell them she wouldn't leave without me and the tracker didn't mind, they know Vin likes me and my father will just think I'm doing it to spite him. Which of course is one reason." A lightening-quick grin that sparked a flash of the sister who would forever be a young girl in his memory. He'd never noticed the resemblance before.
James stood dumbly watching her cast out after the tracks of her Uncle Vin's big black horse with her own following docile as a dog behind her, tracks he was astonished to realize she could distinguish from the rest. Then she mounted with a practiced jump to get her left foot into the stirrup and gathered up the reins with the confident ease of the cowboys they'd been traveling with. Her smile was ghostly in the darkness, but it was a true smile and it was for him, confident in his ability to do what had to be done and trusting him to do it. Lord God - trusting him. He lifted his hand in farewell, bloody fingers glistening in the moonlight, and she said something that would bear him up through all that would come.
"Keep yourself safe." A small and tender smile he'd never had come to him and never wanted to lose; "You know, I never thought I'd have even one Uncle I loved, and now I have two."
Then she was gone on a soft laugh into the night, the flicking tail of her horse vanishing as his heart swelled into his throat. His own bark of ironic laughter caught him by surprise as he realized something. Their father's straightforward courage and convictions might not have been inherited by his sons, but his daughters had them in spades.
He turned then, and began the long walk back to the distant lights of the camp, every step jarring his aching head, but with a determination that would not waver this time.
They had to ride a far loop west to get back to the river and across, and it was J.D. who ran the banks looking for a ford, sharp as a fox and determined to remember everything Vin had taught him. He warned them about the swift underwater currents where their horses' hooves would leave the bottom, because Vin had taught him to look for the smooth constant ripples among the broken flow, a tell-tale sign that the bottom deepened precipitously there. He lead the mules across first, showing the rest by the push he put on the string to get them swimming where those deeps were so no one was surprised and no horses were swept downriver. Buck watched him do a man's sober and thoughtful work with a pride that filled his heart.
There was no way to keep dry and every saddle swamped in the deep spots where the horses lurched off their feet to swim, but Josiah blessed the cold water that swirled up over the cantle and over his thighs, over the radiantly hot tracker's hips, when he heard Vin moan in relief and felt him relax. What was bone-cold to the rest of them soothed Vin, though Nathan wasn't happy about him getting wet. They wrapped a blanket around him from the oilcloth-protected packs and went on. Buck tugged Elizabeth's sodden skirts out across her horse's rump, explaining with a smile too charming and sweet for the circumstance that the animal's body heat would help dry it.
Much as she appreciated that offered reassurance, it was Vin who held her frightened attention, and she remained beside Josiah so closely that their horses often bumped as they went. Vin's head was laid back in the hollow created by Josiah's arm and shoulder, and his face so white the blood and bruises looked like ink in the darkness.
Duley, please ... Ran through her mind over and over, she didn't know why she thought Duley could sustain him somehow but she believed it with all she was.
James made it all the way back to the camp without a soul having set out to look for him, which was so annoying that he staggered straight across the Parade ground ignoring the curious startlement of soldiers putting things right and flung back the door to the Commander's quarters with a resounding crash.
"I could have died!" He cried, Gerald leaping up from his desk, Stephen and a pair of disheveled soldiers spinning around to face him, the expressions on all their faces making it very clear they'd thought he was hiding upstairs or something quivering with terror. Furious, he huffed, "Oh, this is just marvelous! Just damned wonderful! I could've died out there without your notice! They very nearly killed me, and yet you two don't even know I'm gone! Very brotherly of you!"
Once recovered from the shock of seeing James bloody and tattered in the doorway and obviously at the end of his tolerance, Gerald dismissed the soldiers, who edged nervously around James braced on one side of the doorjamb looking like he'd been stampeded over. A gesture sent Stephen after the brandy on the sideboard as Gerald moved to assist his youngest brother, too many things happening that had no part in his plans and the terrible sense of things getting away from his control. "What happened?"
James let his knees buckle as Gerald reached him, his voice rising with a touch of hysteria so Gerald pulled him the rest of the way inside and close the door quickly.
"Killed! Nearly killed! And had to walk all the way back, I don't know how far, bleeding!" Holding his blood-stained fingers out in horrified affront as proof.
"Come on, James, come, let's have you tended to, poor fellow!" Gerald soothed; he needed James' now, his devious and clever mind, his insights, Stephen was of no help whatever and there now six dangerous men on the loose with every reason - and certainly every proclivity and means - to want revenge. "Stephen, go fetch the physician, bring James some breakfast as well. I would have thought you would look out for your brother, Stephen - " Stephen stopped, his shoulders rising, but Gerald needed to displace James' anger, "I manage to keep track of an entire command." He snapped, and Stephen backed down in the face of the threat in Gerald's eyes and played the part demanded of him.
"Yes." He said, sullen but ever obedient. That was all he could manage, and he went to fetch the doctor and the breakfast and anything else Gerald sent him after.
Gerald bent to take the empty brandy glass from James and found his brother's hand on his arm keeping him down beside him awkwardly. James' eyes were not hysterical now; indeed, there was a force there Gerald had never seen before.
"Get Travis and Standish." He said, and Gerald's eyes sharpened; not a request, a command - James knew something, and he meant to control that knowledge until he had the safety of numbers - which meant it was something he expected would ignite his eldest brother's rage. But before Gerald could lay hands on him and demand that information, James hid behind the excuse of his injuries by falling back in the chair with a moan, closing his eyes,
"I don't have the strength to say it more than once, Gerald, my head is spinning, I'm all bloody ... give me some water, will you?"
By the time Orrin and Ezra had been located and brought from opposite ends of the camp, seemingly helping but subtly spreading hints of alarm through the ranks of soldiers sorting out the aftermath, the physician was finishing a bandage around James' head.
"Well, what on earth happened to you?" Ezra drawled. No one answered, Gerald's face was a solid scowl that had the gambler looking to Orrin as if for answers.
"Leave it!" Gerald snapped as the doctor started gathering up his kit, and the man didn't question it, closing the door quietly behind him.
"Elizabeth released the tracker and Larabee."
"What?" From Gerald, and "I told you!" from Stephen, both of which James waved away as if their voices hurt his ears.
"I wish it were that simple, but it isn't, it's the tip of the iceburg." James said, his mouth set in a thin grim frown, and he looked down, took a deep breath and touched his swollen bottom lip with his tongue. Damn man punched like a house falling down, his teeth had gone right through his lip and he'd likely have a scar forever to remind him of Chris Larabee. He slumped wearily, as if heartsick at the betrayal.
Gerald restrained his impatience, an ominous feeling of things he didn't want to hear tightening dangerously inside.
James knew his affection for Elizabeth was known to his brothers and he had to seem reluctant to besmirch her, had to make it look as though he was searching for a way to tell them bad news without further implicating her. Gerald had to think himself still in charge, still in a position to carry out his plans regardless of Elizabeth's defection and the tracker's escape. They had to intercept those letters, Gerald had to send them ...
"Gerald, I don't know how else to say this ... she released them and that was only part of the plot those supposed 'guides' have carried out. They forced me to go with them, kidnapped me, it's only by luck I'm still alive, I'm sure they left me out there thinking the Indians would finish it."
But Gerald knew how deadly Larabee was, and he saw the doubt in his elder brother's eyes, wondering why they hadn't killed him, what reason they might have for leaving him alive, and he couldn't afford such a train of thought to go on so he said,
"The tracker seduced her - it could have been any one of them, they sent her a variety of good-looking men to make sure one of them managed it, a widow, alone for so long ... they were quite frank about it when she was out of earshot. But she's in love with him, Gerald - our sister, in love!" Not having to voice the complications a woman as formidable as their sister could cause if her heart was engaged. "You've nearly killed him, you know ... "
"What do you mean? What do I care who she fucks at this point, or who she thinks she's in love with, for God's sake!" Gerald cried, and James flinched before the force of his anger.
Orrin and Ezra exchanged carefully blank-faced looks, acknowledging a clear sighting of the real Gerald Monroe. Crude and brutal and without conscience or brotherly concern under the carefully cultivated mask of gentility and breeding; quick to temper, and a fearsome temper by the unease of his brothers. That was helpful to know.
"Gerald - they made sure she had the land grants, and you made sure she's absolutely furious with us." James said, and Gerald stilled, everyone stilled. The air froze solid and heavy as his elder brother's eyes bored mercilessly into his. James, uncharacteristically, met that terrible gaze without flinching.
Gerald experienced a deep flicker of panic that he knew James saw; pride and fury banished it and he turned on Travis and Ezra with a snarl so nasty that Stephen reacted by drawing his gun and turning it on the two men.
"What do we have here?"
Orrin didn't flinch, but he allowed a run of angry uncertainty across his somber face that Ezra admired.
"These were your men, Travis! What plot is this? Was it the game all along?"
"Don't be ridiculous, why would we still be here?" Orrin said in a biting voice, seeming as surprised by these revelations as Gerald and Stephen and obviously thinking furiously. He let Gerald glower at him as he tugged at his lower lip, a hand on his hip as if he'd been presented with a thorny puzzle he meant to solve. Gerald cocked his head, examining Travis critically. Travis wasn't afraid even in these circumstances, even being accused of betrayal and intrigue by a man fearsome enough to engender fear in the mightiest. Far more important, he was not panicked, either, despite the obvious nature of Gerald's suspicion or Stephen's hammering back the pistol in his hand.
Obviously Travis had ideas about what was being perpetrated and Gerald wondered for the first time - and with growing anxiety - whether Orrin Travis was, indeed, no more than a spokesman for a more powerful consortium. The degree of cunning it would've taken to play otherwise all this time was considerable, and he did not now comport himself like a man taken wholly by surprise, or without means to extricate himself. That, oddly enough, let Gerald's own panic recede. Travis must have options, contingencies against just such an intrigue.
"You'd better start talking fast, you son of a bitch!" Stephen demanded, understanding none of the subtle byplay, none of the nuances in Travis' dark and angry eyes, but Gerald did, intent as a raven on a bright prize. If there was a way to get those land grants back, Orrin Travis was thinking of it right now.
"She had Julianna with her." James said, and only Ezra cast a worried look at him over this news, Gerald and Stephen weren't the least bit interested. He left it at that, knowing now that she was better off with her Aunt among those men and in that untamed country than in her father's care.
"Mr. Travis?" Gerald said, unable to wait and afraid of his own impatience after a few moments of tense silence, and Orrin raised himself from thought and looked him square in the eyes, starkly unhappy.
"We've been double-crossed, Captain."
"Double-crossed?" Stephen cried furiously, "The hell you say! I say shoot 'em right now!" Ccking the gun and locking his elbow so the barrel knocked into Ezra's cheekbone painfully. In a smooth blur the gambler's hand snatched and drove down that gun-barrel, and the beady eye of a single-shot derringer in his other hand dead-centered on Stephen's face. Ezra smiled, sharp-toothed and bright-eyed as a fox, and said in a pleasant drawl,
"I suggest you reconsider your attitude before I reconsider the current placement of what I assume are your brains." And to Gerald over Stephen's shoulder, recognizing Stephen's lack of wit with insulting coolness; "It would be wise to restrain your brother from ventilating your only hope of rectifyin' this situation, sir."
Stephen's jaw clenched and he jerked at the gun in his hand, but the dapper gambler was strong enough to hold it down, and before a struggle began in earnest Orrin said sharply,
"Stop it." Stephen surprised himself by obeying, but Travis addressed Ezra; "If they want to kill us, Ezra, we can't stop them - "
Gerald's murderous look agreed, but he was biding his time because obviously Travis wasn't really worried about that. His brown eyes churned as he regarded Travis across the small room. James was holding his breath, wide-eyed, praying Travis would have the chance to set the plan in motion before Gerald, indeed, killed him.
"They have your sister, and they have the land grants, Captain - they've left us to our own devices as scapegoats and certainly assumed you would kill us trying to discover a plot we're unaware of."
"Why should I believe a word you say, Travis? Your men did this!" Gerald said threateningly, "What use are you to me if you really don't know what they were up to, and what makes you think I believe you didn't know this was going to happen?"
"Why would we still be here, Monroe, think, man! If they have her and the land grants, what use do they have for you?" Orrin hissed furiously, disregarding the flare of deadly insult from the Captain. "They have all they need to take those gold-bearing lands right out from under you, Monroe, and legally if she marries Vin Tanner. It would be damned convenient if they had a murder charge against you to keep you in line, they'll be able to use you until you're old and gray. Think!"
For a moment that seemed endless the two men faced each other down, Orrin ignoring the pistol in Gerald's hand as Gerald studied his fury, his utter lack of fear.
"At such levels, Captain Monroe, and with such partners, a careful man always has contingencies." Travis' dark eyes ticked back and forth between Gerald's, and the Captain saw an authority and a certainty that gave him pause. "I am an extraordinarily careful man."
At one point Josiah became aware that Vin was swearing, faint and broken, the rise to consciousness bringing an acute awareness of pain.
"Shit ... stop ... stop ... Just for a fuckin' second will you please ... stop."
The excruciatingly tight honesty of limits over-reached and Josiah stopped at once on the trail. Elizabeth reined in with a worried look and reached across to touch Vin's arm, but Josiah said nothing in explanation, only waited, watchful and gentle, until Vin caught his breath and could go on. He stopped intermittently from then on, whenever he felt Vin start to shake, and stood still a moment or so until he either passed out again or got hold of the pain. Nathan remained by his side now as well so the Preacher was bracketed by worried faces. No one questioned him, they simply slowed and stopped themselves, eyes bright with anxiety in the darkness, wanting to hurry off the open plain into the shelter of the ravines and gorges near the foothills before daybreak.
As the sky lightened this became an urgent concern, and Chris purposefully forced his mount between Josiah's and Elizabeth's, pushing her aside like water off the bow of a boat and reaching out to lay his palm alongside Vin's scruffy and battered face. His own didn't look much better. Elizabeth couldn't say that he did it on purpose, but his horse's haunches danced outward, driving her even further off, as he frowned at the dry heat of the tracker's skin.
"There isn't anything to be done for it until we stop." Josiah said, his voice calm and somber, which Chris had to accept. Nathan was not so agreeable to further delay.
"Chris, we have to stop soon." He said, the whites of his eyes flashing in the grey of the coming day, "We have to, Chris, just for a little while. I have to be sure he ain't bleedin' inside or we're doin' nothin' but making a corpse out of him by going on."
Buck hovered off to the left, J.D. just behind him with the mules, turned slightly in his saddle and looking worriedly at the dust rising behind them that would soon be too visible.
"Not yet, Nathan, it's too damned open." And when Nathan opened his mouth to argue, "Not yet, I said, we'll find a spot t'go t'ground." Nathan saw the fearful doubt in his simmering anger and knew that as soon as Chris felt safe, he would have the time he needed. Chris' instincts had saved them all many times, and though his worry gnawed at him, Nathan subsided.
Elizabeth, however, ground her teeth in helpless anger as they continued on while Larabee considered Vin, and the dust column, and his own bleak and constant anger.
Vin was all Elizabeth cared about and he was in pain no matter how matter-of-fact the preacher was during his pauses. The big man's worry showed in his hold on Vin, keeping him as upright as he could against him, looking down often into his face like a mother anxious over a sick child. He prayed to God, she heard the deep timbre of his voice now and then. As for her, she prayed for Duley's intervention.
J.D., riding drag with the mules and turning periodically to check their progress and the stability of the loads that might've shifted in the river, was the first to see pursuit, and he hauled back hard saying Buck's name sharply. Buck had ridden ahead to check for a ravine deep enough to conceal them through the day and had just settled in beside Nathan when J.D. called. He spun his gray and legged it back toward J.D., his haste at the sound of the kid's voice raising faint alarm in everyone else - with good cause.
"Rider behind us, spotted 'im there n' then he disappeared." J.D. pointed down their backtrail and, indeed, there was a faint small line of dust a mile back. Buck's spine crawled - Vin would never survive a hard run.
"There's a gorge 'bout quarter mile up on the right, that's where we'll be. Gimme the leads, kid, and leg on back there to see who's sniffin' up our asses." Buck said, "Don't let 'em see you, and don't shoot 'em, alright?" J.D. tossed the leads to the lanky gunslinger and was gone at a ground-eating lope.
They made it to that gorge an hour after sunrise and switch-backed down the steep side to the bottom, grim and grimy and not one feeling the slightest bit safe despite the fact that they'd put four hours and a lot of miles between them and Ft. Fetterman. J.D. hadn't come back yet, but they'd heard no gunfire either, so they hoped for the best.
Nathan and Chris took Vin down from Josiah's arms, damp and limp and hot as a coal in a stoked stove, laying him down where a few scrubby cottonwoods cast some shade. Elizabeth immediately set about gathering what meager fuel there was nearby for a fire only to have Chris Larabee interrupt with a grip so abrupt that she dropped what she'd gathered. She would've fallen backwards but for that unyielding hand and her other arm rose defensively at the physical force of his threat.
"What do you think you're doing? Do you want them to find us? Sending smoke signals?" Words bitten short and eyes blazing cold fire.
For a moment she held frozen as a bird in a snake's basilisk stare, but Vin moaned softly and that was all it took to give her back her spine. She was Elizabeth Anne Monroe, a respectable woman of substance, a leader in her society and a power in her community, and she would not suffer such rude rough treatment in passive silence. She wrenched her arm out of Chris' grip heedless of the bruise it would leave and her own fire flared, willing to fight, now, for Vin, willing to confront and do battle if he needed her to.
"The wood is dry, Mr. Larabee - no smoke - and Mr. Jackson needs hot water."
Nathan didn't deny it when Chris glanced his way and his worry stepped up higher. He was so surprised to feel her finger poke into his chest that he actually took a step back. His face was hard as a bronze sculpture, but she was far past fear now, stepping in so close she had to crane her neck up to look into his face, his chin tucking into his chest to look down. The expression on her face was as stubborn as any he'd ever seen, like she was sizing up an obstacle she intended to have out of her way.
"Vin is what matters this minute, Mr. Larabee - to you and to me, whether you like it or not. Your approval or lack thereof of my feelings for him matters less than nothing to me, I don't recall asking for your blessing, nor do I need it any more than I need a hole in my head. Now get out of my way." Imperious as a queen, her delicate face flushed and her eyes blazing and her mouth set as a wolf over prey. He didn't stop her when she pushed past him, her shoulder thumping into his side hard enough to make him sway.
She snatched wood up off the ground like she was throttling each piece, furious down to her bones, and very nearly knocked Buck down with her defensive elbow when she felt him brush past to help her. She looked up with a scowl creasing her forehead and he lifted his palms in protest of innocence and mock fear so her breath ran out of her on a tired sign. But there was something in his eyes that made her heart quail, a man who understood women so profoundly ... sorrow he was too honest to altogether hide. Knowing she had feelings for Vin, and knowing Vin. She looked away quickly and went back to the task before that wise anticipation of grief stained her foolish hopes.
She got the fire going with no help - and no smoke - and set a pot of water on it, then a pot of coffee as well, and sliced two loaves of bread which she laid on top of her saddle-bags for the men. Did it efficiently and without asking for either permission or assistance, as if it were a job that had been hers for years. Josiah watched her with an abiding sympathy, a fine and gentile woman caught up in terrible circumstances, but rising gracefully to the challenge, doing what had to be done.
Nathan wanted Vin conscious so he could tell where the broken bones were, but Vin wasn't cooperating. Chris stood over them with a glower that threatened to break into a storm at any moment, obviously unwilling to stop for any significant length of time and just as obviously torn by his concern for Vin. Nathan finally entreated,
"Chris, can we stop awhile? A few hours at least? I need to have a look at that flank - hell, I'd like t'get him outta these clothes, they're still wet n' he's burnin' with fever, I ... "
"It is safe to stop."
Elizabeth dropped the coffee cups in a tinny clatter as Chris blurred into motion a heartbeat before all their guns cleared leather in a snapping wave, Josiah dropping into a crouch to aim under his horse's belly toward the voice, Nathan on his heels, one hand on Vin's chest and his gun ranging nervously in the other, Buck's gun laying over Chris' shoulder. Two Badgers stood at the wide end of the ravine, his horse behind him, as if he'd just been dropped there out of the sky, patiently - and fearlessly - waiting for them to recognize him and put their guns away.
Chris was getting damned tired of this Indian sneaking up on him and took his time releasing the cocked hammer of his gun.
The Lakota warrior made a vague gesture behind him and said, "They are chasing their horses north, you are safe here for a little while."
"Oh yeah? And then what?" Chris asked coldly, and Two Badgers did not smile at the impatience in his voice. Deadly dangerous, this dark and narrow shadow of a man, having no manners or gratitude in his worry for his friend. It was that worry that made him easy to forgive, because Two Badgers was worried as well, which was why he'd come to be sure they were somewhere it was safe to go to ground.
"Then we go to a camp I know a day's ride west, a safe place the soldiers do not know of."
Chris' hand rested on his gun-butt as he considered Two Badger's offer, not wanting to go deeper into the mountains and damned well not wanting to end up in an Indian camp with pissed-off soldiers and dangerously provoked Monroes on their trail. He started and spun around, his gun leaping again into his hand as J.D. came down the rough incline to his left, another horse behind him ...
"God damn it!" Chris shouted, jamming his pistol into the holster and advancing on J.D. like he was going to drag him right off his horse and beat him into bloody splinters. Buck straightened up defensively and let Chris see him do it, but J.D. just shrugged and smiled and went right on by him, letting him stare daggers into the defiant face of Julianna Monroe.
"Julianna!" Elizabeth cried, coming to her feet, "My God, what are you doing here?" The girl had the temerity to leg her own horse right by Chris after J.D. to jump down into her Aunt's fierce embrace.
"I couldn't stay there, Auntie, you never asked me when you were planning all of this or I could've told you it was impossible. It won't make any difference, I swear it won't, I won't be any trouble, either, you'll see!"
J.D. dismounted and looked at Chris, half challenging as he wouldn't have even thought to do a month ago, but he was finding his feet as a man out in the wilderness and Buck crossed his arms over his chest and grinned.
"Found her trackin' us a mile or so back, Two Badgers found her. She said her father and Uncle would use her to get Vin back t'the fort and I couldn't say it wasn't so."
Chris couldn't either, because Vin, a man with no family and no ties even, it seemed, to Four Corners, had taken the role of Uncle to heart and would want the girl out of the Fort. The girl knew that, too, and had acted on it without hesitation.
"Spirited little filly, ain't she?" Buck said with an easy smile, feeling Chris humming and popping and crackling with frustrated violence such as Buck just couldn't help teasing now and then, a man who lived dangerously. Chris was on the far edge of dangerous and had moods on him lately that Buck couldn't wholly read, but he'd go to Hell for Vin, and he'd go to a Lakota camp, and he'd take that troublesome little girl along because she'd face down the devil himself for Vin, too.
Two Badgers smiled at Chris, infuriatingly friendly, and Chris had to forcibly remind himself of the part the Lakota had played in their rescue, and the affection they had for Vin. They never would've made it out of the camp without them, though they'd made off with a good-size herd of American horses for their trouble. The wind went out of him all at once. All he wanted was for Vin to be alright, for all of them to get home whole, and together. All the rest, hurt and fury and confusion, suddenly seemed unimportant.
Hot, southern woods in August hot, fecund and wet and would've been anice smell but for the coppery taint of blood in it. Memory or wherever he was now, he didn't know, only that blood had a smell he'd never forget. He tried to tell Duley that something was trying to kill him from the inside out, scraping and gnawing and now and then biting hard with sharp teeth so he couldn't breathe nor scream nor even sob. She knew, she gentled it as much as she could, but she was pushing him away from her and he couldn't stop her ... and the further she pushed him, the worse the pain got. Chest hurt like Peso'd stomped on him ... wait ... latching on to that solid thing in the tumbling drift - he had ...
"Nettie ..." Hardly a sound but urgent, his hands jerking up to be caught in long dark fingers he recognized. Vin bent his arms into his chest before he could be released and pulled Nathan's sweet face down close so he could be heard, "Nettie, is she OK?"
"Yeah, Vin ..." Rich voice reassuring as a lullaby, slow and dark, "She's fine, Vin, Nettie's fine, rest easy now ..."
No choice there because his strength ran out of him all at once, vision diffusing into dim colored shapes, diffusing himself like air into Duley. Strange and wonderful how mixed together with her he felt even at this distance, like someone had turned them both into ash and stirred them 'round together and left them there. But then he felt the ground under him, the hammer of hot blood in his veins and sweat and things inside the lids of his closed eyes that made a terrible fractured sense. Nettie's face, her blood speckling the straw under her head and wanting to die rather than see that ...
"She's ... bleedin' ..."
"I'm tellin' you, Vin, Nettie's fine, that happened a long time ago."
Long time ago ... seemed like yesterday and a hundred years past at the same time. Vin couldn't hold a thought more than a second, it seemed, everything wandered in him, pivoting around Duley where she tethered him to the world. He wished she wouldn't. Wished she'd let him be with her all the way.
Nathan kept glancing up at his face as he got Vin's pants unbuttoned and slipped the suspenders down inside the arms of his coat - they'd help hold his arms when he got down to what he was afraid would be nasty business. It would be far too intimate for a woman's eyes, but Elizabeth answered his quick look at her approach with a direct stare that made it plain she was going nowhere. Guilt stained her pale skin red at the cheeks and throat - her brothers had done this, and she carried that burden in her determination.
Two Badgers dropped down on his heels and laid a bundle of sweet sage on the coals of the fire, wafting their fragrant white streamers over Vin's body with fan made of pinion feathers from a golden eagle. No one tried to stop him, as he had known they would not. In fact, their pejuta wicase touched his shoulder as they exchanged positions to go to their separate tasks; dark eyes met and understandings were reached. Was it because this medicine man was not white that he respected the spirits called to attend his healing? Two Badgers had often wondered if the pallor of their skin blinded wasichu to the invisible world, the sunlight bouncing off them like a chalk cliff rather than being absorbed, maybe creating a glare they closed their eyes against. Whites were strange. They didn't see or hear or feel what was right there in front of them unless it was a thing they wished to possess or use, no respect for what was wakan or even a thought for how ruthlessly they ruined the balance. Tashunke Witco called them children, but such children frightened Two Badgers in a deep and very ominous way. Such children were like giants in the ignorant havoc they wrought.
His head turned toward a sudden fuss by the mules where the boy and that bold bright girl had been working to hobble them. He was not surprised that she would insist on her right to be at Vin's side, she was as brave as any warrior Two Badgers had ever met, stubborn in the way of creatures knowing themselves right. She was Duley's hankasi - this made a dry smile twist across his coppery face - flesh and spirit, she was unmistakably cousin to Vin's wastilakapi, his Beloved.
"Let me go, I can help, you don't know ..."
"J.D., you keep that child away from this right now, you hear me?" Nathan said as he retrieved his packs from his horse.
"I hear you, Nathan, but ... " J.D.'s answer was interrupted by a disgruntled yelp as Julianna kicked him in the shins, he was holding on to her by one arm but it was like trying to contain a weasel the way she struggled. Buck moved toward the scuffle to help.
Nathan watched the Lakota warrior climb up the side of the ravine to stand guard, saw Buck squat down in front of Julianna Monroe holding her shoulders in his big hands and talking earnestly to her, eye to eye. Whatever he said made those shoulders slump in reluctant surrender and Buck cupped her cheek with one of those tender smiles he seemed to have in such abundance. For a moment Nathan lowered his head in desperate prayer to overcome the familiar sweep of inadequacy that accompanied every effort to deal with the extremities of injury and sickness. That feeling was always strongest when it was someone he had feelings for. Finally, though, he set his jaw and took a deep breath: He might not be the best, but he was all Vin had, and it was time to get to it.
"Josiah." He said, throwing open the flaps of his bag and laying out on the groundcloth beside Vin the few clean rags he had left, lye soap to wash with, the precious bottle of carbolic. The Preacher appeared beside him, salt and pepper whiskers softening the plated bones of his face. Calm sky-blue eyes endlessly reassuring. The soft weight of a pair of expensive towels from Gerald Monroe's supplies landed across Nathan's shoulder and Buck folded down beside him like a graceful grasshopper, his angular face somber and harsh as he looked down at Vin.
"Boys, I'm gonna kill that man unless one of you gets to him first. "Acknowledging the common bond of vengeance for Vin's sake that united them in that goal. One way or another, Stephen Monroe would not live long enough to spend any ill-gotten gains he managed to acquire. It was a measure of Buck's distress that he said this out loud despite Elizabeth Monroe being right behind him, not a man who would ordinarily disregard a woman's sensibilities.
Elizabeth wasn't offended, though guilt spiked in her heart. She wanted to kill Stephen herself and there was an urging to mayhem in her that reminded her powerfully of Duley in a ripping temper.
Vin kept trying disjointedly to curl up on himself and that worried Nathan, that the tracker guarded his belly even hardly conscious. No guesswork even from the first minute he'd seen him that Vin had some broken ribs, the quick pace and shallowness of every breath he managed hurt to see. How much more might be broken inside him frightened Nathan to consider, so he didn't just yet. It took a lot of coaxing and pulling to get Vin to move his hands out of the way, and when he finally surrendered, he relaxed entirely, falling back into the painless oblivion of unconsciousness.
Vanished into himself where Duley hummed pleasantly, soothing his struggle, a vibration he felt more than heard thrumming in his bones, settling like cool numb peace.
Nathan looked at him uncertainly, grateful that he wouldn't be struggling just yet but knowing he'd need him awake again before long. Knowing he'd have to feel what Nathan would have to do. Two Badger's quiet voice in a sonorous cadence of prayer reached him, Josiah's hand cupped over his knee for a moment and he could feel Buck's eyes on the side of his face, waiting with the absolute trust they all had in him. He was no doctor, and he'd never known why they had that kind of confidence in him, never said how much harder it sometimes made things, but right now it gave him the courage to do what no one else could.
Shirt, and then faded red long-johns got peeled back from shoulder to hip like blooded muscle under flayed skin and exposed Vin's pale battered torso. Elizabeth's gasp went unheard in the curses that answered the sight, Nathan and Josiah's soft vehemence overlaid in more violent tones by Buck, whose knuckles went white on his own knees. Nathan had to look away a moment just to get the rage in his heart under control. A man who had been a slave knew very well what wickedness men could do against each other, ruined flesh and broken bones and suffering ... but this - this was perverted and wicked in the purposeful blows struck over half-healed injuries, new bruises deep blood-purple spreading over what had begun to yellow and fade.
Elizabeth felt faint and faded and unable to draw breath as she watched the crease between Nathan's brows deepen, his eyes intently focused, but not unflinching. He made a small sound of angry dismay she didn't think he was conscious of when he tipped Vin's head back and saw the abraded bruise across his whiskered throat, no reason but hurt to hit a man there. With every sound he made, every wince, every tender touch of his hands even on Vin's clothing, knives of guilt and fury drove deeper. She wanted to look away but refused that cowardice ... penance was due Vin Tanner from the Monroes, and she was the only one here right now to pay it. Despising her brothers was not a new emotion, but wishing them harm - oh, wishing them to feel ten-fold every blow they'd laid on Vin and wanting it to hurt them, really hurt them ... feelings swamped over the edges of her control that she barely recognized, passions demanding action, impulses toward tears and rage at the same time.
Nathan glanced up at her, the fine bones of her face hard under skin too tight, her eyes ashamed and her shoulders bowed but her chin incongruously firm and upright. Her instincts had been right in insisting on that fire because he would need hot water, and as much carbolic as he had, he'd need patience and skill ... he'd need a goddamned miracle. She saw that shade of despair in his darkly liquid eyes and her own eyes flared in absolute refusal. Nathan was almost startled by the change that came over her, a feral posture and a bright hard fire that he knew wasn't natural to her. It was as if she were stirred by a a soul more fearsome than her own, even more dedicated ... loving Vin with a possessiveness and defiance that Elizabeth Monroe had no experience of.
"Save him, Nathan." She said, and even the voice was different, rougher and bluntly threatening in a way that made his eyebrows rise, but also pleading with a need that moved him. He reached across Vin and touched her on the forearm, smiled into the strange violent devotion of her eyes. Then he forgot everything but the task at hand.
"Vin ..." He said, then a little louder when he got no response; "Vin ... c'mon now, wake up, c'mon ..."
"What in hell you want him awake for, Nathan?" Buck asked, querulous with worry, "He's trouble enough passed out."
Nathan ignored him, tapping on Vin's unbruised cheek as his eyelashes fluttered and his brows contracted suddenly, as if surprised to feel pain.
"C'mon now, Vin ... that's it."
Vin's head turned toward his touch; "Thirsty ..." He whispered without opening his eyes, but Nathan only wiped a sympathetic hand across his brow and shook his head.
"In a bit, Vin, we got things t'do first."
This gentle refusal got Buck's unhappy attention at once, and Josiah's, a shared understanding in the fearful glance they exchanged. Nathan was afraid Vin was punctured somewhere inside, both knew that from helping Nathan in the past, it was about the only time he'd refuse water. Buck's stomach tightened into a hard knot and sank.
"I need you awake right now, Vin, you've gotta tell me where things hurt ..."
A rough cough erupted out of Vin's mouth that yanked him tight with pain, half a crazed laugh in the wheezing rasp of his answer; "Everywhere."
"I'm sure that's so." Nathan said grimly, his whole demeanor quiet and calm except for the bright worry in his eyes. "When I tell ya, take as deep a breath as you can, alright?" He bent over Vin's face and tubed his hands over Vin's mouth. "Go on, now." Hardly a tablespoon of air got in before Vin caught it up short on too much pain, but it was enough for Nathan to hear wet in the lungs and smell blood on his exhalation.
"God dammit." He muttered, drawing a surprised glance from Josiah, since Nathan wasn't given to blasphemy in his swearing. Nathan tried to keep the terror off his face that stomped a big bloody path into his heart. Things could tear and bleed inside, things that could collapse in a man and kill him slow that Nathan had no hope of doing anything about. But then Vin's eyes opened on him, and there was something calm there that shouldn't have been possible, a lucid faith Vin should hardly be capable of feeling right now. The tracker's bloody lips curved crookedly.
For the next quarter-hour, Nathan's fingers worked their way methodically down Vin's body from the shoulders cataloging the terrible damage Stephen Monroe had inflicted. Cracked collar-bone on the right, deep arching bruises on his chest from boots. He spread his fingers along Vin's sides and trailed down the curving cage of his ribs, twelve pairs palpated from sternum to spine, sliding his hands again and again under Vin to follow the curvature, to press for any unnatural give, hurting like torture, he knew it, though Vin swallowed the sounds. Seven pair of true ribs attached by articulating cartilege at sternum and spine, three false ribs ending long before the sternum, and two floating ribs that were mere brackets under the rest. He wondered all the while what power it was that was holding Vin still and quiet through it, that kept his eyes half-open, calm and distant like he was somewhere else and only the small part necessary for Nathan's examination remained outside that pleasant wherever.
And Nathan was astounded to the point of running every rib three times by what he did not find.
Vin's hipbone ran sharp and fragile under the pale skin, and the three deep punctures where the cat's claws had been stopped on the crest of that bone were red and unhealthy. Obviously he'd begun to heal, but the beating had broken open every stitch and that cursed box had likely broken down Vin's ability to fight off infection, the wounds seeping and presently smeared with dried blood. It was the longer gash that concerned him most because it was very likely the source of the fever gripping him now, the one that had slid around and down the front of his body to his groin, puckered with swelling. Vin was too pale, his skin too cool and clammy - further signs of internal bleeding. The hollow of his tight-latticed stomach sunk too deep off the rise of his ribs. He'd reached the limit of what body and soul could endure, and yet he would have to endure having those wounds opened to clean them.
They turned him gently on his right side opposite the worst of the bruising so Nathan could examine his back. Bruised over the kidney with a hard-edged crescent margin from the toe of a boot, smooth skin scraped and sticky here and there, Nathan's hands again working across the sinewy yoke of his shoulders, down his spine, across the narrow square cradle of his pelvis, searching out further unseen damage. He watched Vin's expressions, listened critically to every sound, every gasp that could tell him where it hurt too much to be touched much less pressed on, because the pain was too damned big for Vin to verbally define it for him, he wasn't nearly aware enough for that. Nathan's eyes grew more and more bewildered, afraid to hope at the evidence of his own eyes and hands.
"Nathan?" The soft rumble of Josiah's voice at his ear startled Nathan, who had fallen into a thoughtful stillness when they'd put Vin on his back again and the tracker had drifted off.
"Yeah. Yeah, well." Nathan said, shaking off the odd feeling in his hands from Vin's skin, like an entreaty was coming from inside him and passing into his fingers as he touched him. Like there was a force no one could see buoying him up from dying, sustaining him in a cocoon where he didn't feel how much Nathan knew it hurt to be poked and prodded. But by this time he understood with a shiver of prescience that only God could have done what the evidence of his examination insisted, against all reason ... Only God could have so miraculously kept what could have been - and should have been from the location and lividity of the bruising - killing blows from actually killing him.
"Hell, I can't be sure, Josiah ..." But the Preacher just looked at him patiently, waiting, and finally Nathan let it spill out in a quick rush, as if afraid to hope he was right.
"I figure these two ribs, six n' seven, are busted, maybe pierced the bottom of his left lung, but it isn't filling with blood, so it might take care of itself. Ribs got muscles n' sinews pulling' on them from just about every direction, holdin' 'em steady even if they're busted, n' the cartilage makes them more flexible than you'd think. I can't believe it, Josiah, but I think only those two, maybe three of 'em are busted, hardly seems possible. The problem is here ... " His dark hand spidering gently across the indrawn slope of Vin's stomach under the last rib on the right, "Maybe ruptured the liver, which could bleed him out inside or fix itself, too, I can't do a damned thing about either ... but ..."
"Brother Nathan, why don't we just not look this gift horse in the mouth?" Josiah said softly, and Nathan took hope from the quiet faith in the Preacher's eyes. "Neither of these things have killed him, right?"
"That's right. Don't know how in hell ... Josiah, the bruises say where bones ought to be broken, and from the look of them, he should be bloody shards inside, but ... "
His silence was almost an unwillingness to accept a result better than he had anticipated, a lack of injury in places that, by the bruising, defied explanation.
"But he's not?" Josiah asked, seeing amazement on Nathan's face, a confused apprehension as if believing the evidence of his own hands might doom Vin to die from something he'd mised. Indeed, amazing as it was, impossible as he knew it to be, Vin had far fewer broken bones and less internal damage than he should.
"I'm not sure, but it doesn't appear so. That don't mean he ain't in a bad way, he damned well is and we could lose 'im anyway. Beatin' him up when he was already hurt - n' damned if Monroe didn't know it, too - bein' crammed in that damned box was the worst of it - " Just imagining that made his heart stop because he knew, as they all knew, what a nightmare that had to be to the tracker, a man who needed the open spaces like he needed air and water. Nathan got his voice under control and shook his head; "Well, that's what got this infection goin' and it's feedin' his fever. He's a far piece from bein' well, a far damned piece ... but he's either the luckiest man on earth or he's got an angel on his side I'd like to have on mine."
Duley was on his side, Elizabeth thought with a shudder, her breath catching hard in her throat. Duley was with him right now, with her, between them and around them and Duley had been with him in every blow her brothers had laid upon him, protecting him somehow even dead and gone these many years. Loving him so much that not even death could keep her from his defense. Doing for him what Elizabeth, alive and loving him, too, had failed to do. She knew it, and the surge of guilty hope brought tears spilling down her face. They could help him, he wouldn't die out here, murdered by her own brothers, and she closed her eyes for a moment wondering ... then certain that Duley was protecting her as well from the killing burden of guilt and grief Elizabeth would carry lifelong if her brothers, indeed, killed him. Such evidence of her sister's love for her filled her with gratitude. She stood up and went to the fire for the pot of water, poured half of it into a basin, and came back with it, sitting it down beside Nathan's knee.
"Josiah's right, Nathan - let's not question our good fortune. Shall we get to work?" Nathan nodded distractedly, studying the old wounds now, gauging what had to be done with a new sense of possibility. Whatever inside Vin that might be punctured or ruptured or bleeding was in God's hands, so Nathan left that matter there and set out to do what a man could do.
As it turned out, he needed Buck and Josiah both to hold Vin down as he removed the broken stitches and opened the festering wounds to clean them with painstaking attention. Whatever had been holding the tracker in a distant numb twilight had left him on his own now, and he suffered it conscious and aware.
Elizabeth knelt on the ground-cloth by Vin's side half behind Buck, handing Nathan his things as he asked for them and taking back bloody strips of toweling. Transfixed by the patterns of muscle rising and stretching and bunching under the thin gleam of sweat, sinews stretched to shuddering in urgent protest and Vin's head rising and falling, pressing back hard into the ground. Living was not easy, life had to be fought for ... she wasn't sure where that thought came from but it ran in her mind over and over. A battle that cost this much meant the victory would be that much dearer, life's value upheld in the pain and sacrifice required to live it. There was a battle going on over Vin Tanner's life; his friends, Duley, she herself, allied against death.
How bluntly competent Nathan's hands were, seeming too large to move so delicately, quick and careful, tender in the spread of long dark fingers across Vin's left hip and the flat of lower belly to hold him down as he worked on the deep slash with the other. Buck and Josiah were grim in the soft hazy morning, the light not kind to men pressed so hard for so long and she saw them with a detached affection she didn't entirely understand. They perservered without complaint, they would not give up. They would never surrender, even to the point of death - and they would not let Vin surrender, either.
Sometimes Vin alarmed them all by jerking so hard against the hurt that even men as strong as Josiah and Buck had a hard time keeping him flat, but to her amazement, he never cried out. Even the sounds no man could help, being conscious while such cruel necessities were being done to him, carried no more than a few feet. Hiding vulnerability with a wild thing's instinct that was still so strong in him it made her want to weep. Made her long to be a safe place, a place of rest and peace, and even dream of it with so much more that was so much more important going on.
Buck handed her back his bandana at one point, hearing tears in her breathing, ever-sensitive to women's emotions, and he was right without having to look. She took it with a grateful slide of her fingers across his, his big hand and her small one both stained with the same blood. She seemed to be noticing things without knowing why, sensing significance in things that had no conscious meaning to her.
Chris came nowhere near them and seemed to see nothing but the backtrail he guarded. Two Badgers looked down often from the top of the ravine, his dark angular face somber and strangely patient. Jules and J.D. stayed away, sitting disconsolately as children comforting each other by the remuda, close together. All focused on Vin, each in their way. Such friends Vin had who had witnessed the depth and breadth of character and heart he showed to so few, men who understood how and why he was the man he was so much better than she did, familiar with the hardships and grief and the terrible forces of fate that shaped them all. They accepted the way he was, his silences and his absences and the basic unexplainable wildness of his soul that he could never suppress. For a little while she understood that, too, with an off-balanced profundity of experiences that were never hers, that were second-hand recollections and a hint of what Duley had lived. Then that understanding slipped away, leaving her faintly bewildered and at the same time uplifted by a vague feeling of promise she neither understood nor questioned.
Now was not the time to question how Duley had made herself known, if, indeed, she had and it was anything more than the wishful needs of a sister pushed too far past her own experience and capacities. It didn't matter right now; the sense of her sister comforted her, and comfort was all she looked for.
Nathan wrapped a bandage around Vin's narrow body to support his ribs, not tight enough to do anything more but that. He used folded squares of one of the fine towels buttoned up inside Vin's pants to hold poultices against the festered cat-claw wounds. More than once he palpated Vin's abdomen on the left trying to gauge the degree of damage to his liver before giving up, knowing there was nothing he could do about it but hope whatever protective force seemed to be with the tracker would continue to sustain him.
Buck was trembling by the time Nathan finished, Vin looking flat as a dead cat and way too much like dead for his liking, pale as milk. The need to give it back to Stephen, compounded blow for blow, burned in his heart like acid, and he knew how much more dire Chris' instinct had to be. Indeed, he was kind of surprised the gunslinger was still there and hadn't jumped on his black and gone hell for leather to kill Gerald and Stephen Monroe outright. Was a time nothing would've stopped him, not good sense or bad odds or a job not yet done that still needed him. One thing for sure; the Monroes wouldn't escape him unscathed, and could not have made a worse enemy this side of Hell.
All of them looked down at Vin in silence for an exhausted moment, and only then did Elizabeth see helplessness on their haggard faces. Perhaps not as hurt as they'd thought, but nor was his recovery a certainty, either, they were worried like brothers would be, such different men of such relatively brief acquaintance yet bound as if by blood and birth and will. It was beautiful to her, she hadn't realized before how beautiful men could be in their wordless devotion to one another. She wondered, though, where the faint surprise she felt came from to realize Vin was the focus of that love, she shouldn't be surprised by that after all this time among them, and on one level she wasn't at all. Perhaps Duley was; she almost smiled at that fanciful thought and embraced the sense of her sister among them.
"Thanks, boys." Nathan said, and the sound of his voice, quiet as it was, startled her like she'd been caught dreaming. "Go on and get some coffee, eat." The healer sat back on his haunches as Josiah and Buck got up with oddly harmonious groans, carefully working the stiffness out of their legs and backs. When they went toward the fire, a silence settled down over Vin and Nathan and Elizabeth that seemed almost protective.
Buck squatted down next to Chris with two cups of coffee in his hands and passed one over. Chris' mouth pursed and then flattened, his shoulders so tight and high they were at ear level and the flat brim of his hat a razor-straight line above the distant focus of his eyes. After a tight-strained moment he reached for the cup and took it without looking, because he didn't want to know if Vin wasn't alright. He didn't want to see it or hear it, and anyone bringing him such news had to expect to get killed for it.
But after a moment when Buck didn't move, he realized that Buck knew him pretty well and would certainly be aware of the risk of his reaction to news as bad as Vin maybe dying. Buck wouldn't tempt that, and Buck knew he wouldn't be able to help it. So things must be alright for now. He relaxed marginally, enough for Buck to smile into his coffee cup.
Nathan's hand rested lightly on Vin's bandaged chest and he sighed, hoping he'd done everything that could be done and going over it methodically in his mind to be sure as he always did, but this time perplexed by peculiar impossibilities he couldn't explain. Distractedly he dipped a cloth into the tin basin only to find Elizabeth's hand over his, taking it gently from him. He hadn't noticed her move. The water ran tinted red over her pale slender fingers as she wrung it out, glancing up to catch his eye and then tipping her head toward Chris, who was folded into a watchful knot where he could watch their backtrail. Buck had just risen and walked away from him toward J.D. and Julianna, and to her knowledge not a word had passed between them.
"His leg, Nathan." She said matter-of-factly, nodding toward Chris and wiping Vin's face with broad motherly sweeps. She felt Nathan's speculative eyes on the side of her face but was too tired to explain why she should care about Chris Larabee's discomfort. That steely-hard man loved Vin, too, and needed him in the way of strong men that could never be said aloud or probably even admitted to themselves. So proud of needing nothing and no one and still their skittish and mistrustful hearts forged unbreakable bonds once given - and woe to anything that threatened someone taken into those hearts. Chris Larabee wanted for Vin what Elizabeth also wanted, whether he believed she might be able to give it to him or not. They were solidly on the same side, and she trusted he would discover that for himself eventually. Vin would not befriend a fool, nor would Mary love one.
Nathan watched her wash Vin down gently, a slow thorough rhythm that was almost hypnotic and must feel good to Vin, who lay quietly and let her do it. He blotted his face on his shirtsleeves, the wide yoke of his shoulders bowed deeply before he stood up with a grimace for knotted and aching muscles. His big hand touched Elizabeth's shoulder as if for balance as he bent down for his pack, but she felt the grateful grip of his fingers without knowing why he should be grateful to her for anything. She didn't question it. On the last legs of his strength, his shoulders braced as he went to do for Chris what the gunslinger would probably fight having done for him.
J.D. let Jules go then, relieved of the nearly impossible task of keeping her away from them while they did what had to be done for Vin, and she took off at a dead run with the blanket she'd been clutching for the last hour. The need to see him was so urgent she'd almost attacked J.D. to make him let her go until she saw the queasy look on his sharp scruffy face at the sound of Vin's helpless struggle and realized how hard the waiting was for him, too. For the first time Jules understood how important her Uncle Vin was to J.D., that maybe he'd been like an Uncle to J.D. before she came. Not once had he shown any jealousy or resentment, but now she saw the love and the fear pouring out of his amber eyes as he stared, transfixed as she. She'd put her arm around his waist and felt him shiver, knowing it for the same fear that made her shiver, too. He'd put his arm around her shoulders and they'd sat there together, watching and praying like siblings.
But now she needed to see Uncle Vin, and even more her Aunt's face to know, truly, how he was. She hadn't considered before tonight that he could die, and even now it seemed illogical that the stubbornly fluid force in him could just ... cease. That just couldn't happen, her aunt Duley would never allow that to happen, and as ridiculous as that faith was in a woman she'd never known, a woman dead before she'd been born, Jules knew it down to the marrow of her bones. The steady rise and fall of her Uncle Vin's chest under her hand when she covered him reassured her, and though her Aunt's smile was wan, her hair tumbled loose and dark circles under her eyes, her smile was calm and stoic. They exchanged a smile between them that made a fact of the belief that Vin Tanner could not die with the Monroe women looking after him.
They were nearly ready to go; Josiah was helping Two Badgers complete the travois that would carry Vin, a buffalo robe thrown around two long saplings the warrior had ridden away without explanation to fetch before Nathan had finished his work. His pony stood patiently, the ends crossed over his withers and resting on a folded pad of leggings, accustomed to such burdens as the American horses and mules were not. The ground would be rough for a travois, but Josiah and Buck figured they could pick the ends up behind the pony if they had to, and Two Badgers agreed thoughtfully.
Elizabeth sat by Vin alone, having sent Julianna to help, his hand in hers absently examining the abraded knuckles, stroking them as though the touch would somehow take that small sting away. He stirred slightly, heels pushing and his fingers tightening around hers almost painfully, and his eyes opened on a sudden gasp, as if he'd been pushed into the air from underwater. Lucid, she saw that as immediately as Vin saw her, and he said, quite clearly,
"When?"
She had no idea what the question meant, only that it was important to him.
"The trader's son ... when?"
Then she understood. Even now, stopping her brothers was foremost in his mind, broken and unable to even stand, yet his spirit ... not finished, his task not done, and all that mattered to him. It broke her heart, it filled her with strength; her hand laid along the sharp curve of his cheek tenderly.
She bent down close to him and said, "Eight days." He sighed, relief so profound that she knew his thoughts without him having to voice them. He would be ready in eight days, he would make himself ready in eight days, and he wouldn't fail. He wouldn't die before that was done and even refusing herself to consider the cost of that fight to come didn't diminish her gratitude that this cause would keep him alive.
His eyes slid closed for a long moment, then opened again, cloudy this time, but still looking at her. The smile in those glittering blue eyes was so beautiful that she barely noticed his hand reaching for the lock of hair over her shoulder, sliding it between his shaking fingers with an aching tenderness, and a look so lavishly loving ...
The rough rasp of his hand behind her neck made her shiver and she let him urge her down further before she knew why. And when she did, she would not have stopped him for the world. He kissed her. Not like he had on that ridge, not like that, but like it was the most natural thing in the world, like he'd kissed her a thousand times, lips clinging hot and liquid and so familiar, they could not be so familiar to her ... Though she knew in her captive heart that she was accepting something that did not belong to her, though she felt like a thief of her sister's treasure, her eyes closed at the breathtaking sweep of emotion and sensation and stayed so even when his hand slipped down and away and his mouth left hers and his eyes closed on a deep sigh. She couldn't have moved to save her life, her fingers tight on his and her mouth softly open in a trance of strange wonder.
It was not an easy day and they didn't dare stop, ironically needing to get Vin somewhere he could be still. The travois was easier on him, but 'easy' was relative with broken bones grinding and fever making him fight being covered. Near twilight, Two Badgers pulled up and halted them, turning the mule he was mounted on about on the trail. He would have liked to have ridden Vin's black horse, but that creature was in a nasty temper and barely tolerated being led. The gunslinger had taken him in hand and the two had exchanged a few looks and a few dire sounds, equine and human, before reaching an understanding. Not a horse that wanted pats or praise or signs of human affection; indeed, such gestures seemed to be an offensive reminder of his service to men, it made Two Badgers laugh. But that snake-thin man in black ... a daunting man, that one, Two Badgers had admired his skills in the battle, and even more his unyielding heart.
They had come to a sheltering valley that fell away in undulating declines, a run of crooked river down the middle that formed deep pools here and there among the boulders, the banks opening up further down into a chain of tree-lined meadows.
Chris scowled, but Josiah and Nathan dismounted and Elizabeth was already at the side of the travois with Jules trying to get Vin to drink. Nobody even asked for an explanation, which ticked Chris' temper a notch higher. He was getting damned tired of having no say in anything; being a follower wasn't natural to him and he didn't like it, either. Hostility radiating from every long tight line of face and posture, he watched Two Badgers move to the side of the trail and take down his parfleches off the mule, laying out several items from within and then taking several more off his belt as well.
The warrior stripped off his deerskin shirt and folded it away, then donned another of soft buffalo-hide bearing bright intricate stripes of beads across the shoulders, down the arms, and yoking across the top of the chest and back. The hem retained the rough curls of buffalo hair, beaded strands of horsehair dangling from the longest edges.
Josiah, coming out of the woods after having relieved himself, stopped to watch also, leaning comfortably against a tree with his arms crossed over his broad chest. Two Badgers combed his long black hair with a carved bone comb from one of the many little bundles that festooned his belt and then neatly braided most of it on either side of his face, leaving a glossy ribbon down the center of his back from a knot at the crown of his head.
There was a certain attention to these homey and seemingly informal tasks that suggested reverence to Josiah, and he let the broad flat brim of his hat cover a smile at Chris' disbelieving irritation. Julianna Monroe was leaning against the side of the travois watching the Lakota go about his ablutions with an absorbed wonder that was lovely to see. Carefully, the warrior thrust several feathers into his scalplock, both upright and horizontally, some painted with red spots or notched or barred, all signifying an act of honor recognized by his people.
Squatting beside his horse as if he was quite alone, Two Badgers rubbed bear-grease into the dark skin of his face over which he dabbed red color, blending and spreading the pigment. What color was left on his fingers he stroked onto the top half of an eagle feather and set it down beside him. A little bone tool drawn down the left side of his brow left three straight lines in the pigment; a subtle movement over his cheek and down his jaw jagged the lines three times like lightening. He would have put red hand-prints on the haunches of his pony, too, for having stolen so many fine American horses, but those horses were not with him right now, and this mule was not his honored mount - and the soldiers may have rallied enough to steal them back, that happened many times.
"Looks like he's goin' to a party." Buck cracked sotto voce, more to break Chris' tension than anything else, and Chris let out a short sharp breath and shook his head, his hands on his hips. He opened his mouth, but Josiah's quiet voice stopped him.
"It's customary for them to make an entrance to the village when they've been gone awhile on a raid or a hunt." Josiah said, watching Two Badgers with great interest and making his respect for the Lakota warrior plain. "We're close to the village, Chris."
Which had the intended effect of easing Chris' hackles down a bit. Hell and damnation, the gunman thought disgustedly, unused to feeling so helpless about so many things. That he'd put up with it, and would put up with it to the end, didn't improve his humor any, because it thrust his attachments right into his face where he couldn't deny them. The thought of Mary in that Fort gnawed at his gut constantly, he should never have allowed her to come along in the first place. A dry chuff of a disgusted laugh escaped him; as if he could've stopped her, yet another thing he had no control over. Why in hell couldn't he just get on his damned horse and high-tail it out of here, leave 'em all to their own devices? It's what he should do, what a mighty big part of him wanted to do, and yet here the hell he was, and here the hell he'd stay, made him want to kill something.
"If they're anything like the Cheyenne," Josiah went on, satisfied that Chris wouldn't interfere, "They'll want to be prepared for us in the village - hospitality is very important. They'll be clearing out a lodge or two for us, doubling up themselves. Likely cooking, too." Obviously looking forward to a hot meal with great relish.
"Now that's somethin' I like to hear." J.D. agreed sincerely, his stomach had been growling for hours, but he looked over at Josiah with a squint of misgiving; "They don't eat skunk, do they?"
Josiah's teeth flashed long and white in the dimming day and his laugh was indulgent, he shook his head and pushed J.D. away from him with rough affection.
"Not usually, son - but I'll guarantee you'll eat whatever's put in front of you, and you'll do it without complaint, mind me. These folks have been more than good to us already, n' it's a significant risk having us among them just now after we've stirred up that Fort."
J.D. swallowed, coloring a little as he went back to checking the harnesses on the mules. He always managed to say the wrong thing and have that look come back to him like he was a kid and not a real bright one at that. Words just popped out of his mouth like there wasn't a brain behind them, he embarrassed himself so often without meaning to. Truth be told, he wanted nothing more, really, than to be one of the boys - just one of the boys - not the youngest one, the least-experienced one, the dumbest one, or the one everyone else had to look out for. Josiah was warning him to be careful among the Indians, which took a little of his excitement away and reminded him gloomily that he could probably get himself killed for insulting them without ever having any idea how he'd done it. But not the food this time, he decided, if it was skunk, he'd damned well eat it, he was hungry enough to eat anything cooked and set in front of him, so he was safe there, at least ...
Every eye came to Two Badgers as he rose fluidly and went to the travois, Julianna gawped up at him like a little fish and received the smiling glance of his dark eyes as he tied that half-red feather in Vin's hair, the honor due a warrior wounded in battle. He did not explain this, of course, despite feeling their curiosity sliding around him; some things lost power in explanations, or could not be explained at all to a people with no frame of reference from which to understand. Vin would know, and the people would know, that was all Two Badgers cared about.
Two Badgers replaced his plain moccasins with a pair that had blue and red bands of quills patterning the top and tongue, folded them down at the ankle to reveal a brilliantly beaded cuff. He tied around his neck a choker of tubed bone and beads centered by a round of iridescent abalone shell. He put on his best belt, also brightly beaded, and hung from it his many beaded and painted pouches and bags that kept all his necessaries, awl and lengths of sinew and paint. With an air of finality, then, he stood up and thrust his knife sheath, fringed and intricately beaded, under the belt, threw his parfleches across the mules' withers, and swung up onto his back without fuss.
"Wait here." He said, "Follow when the stars come, there." Pointing overhead and east where the stars would first appear at twilight, another thirty minutes or so.
Josiah thought Two Badgers must know the noble sight he made riding off in the light of the setting sun, his shoulders proud, his head high, coup feathers fluttering. Some moments got remembered, and this one would resonate a long time in him.
They waited dutifully, although Chris paced and muttered and glared at everything that came under his baleful eye, and he got them mounted and moving the instant the first star made its first spark. He set Buck and Josiah out from the trail in case of ambush, and neither objected, knowing a waste of breath when it glowered at them.
Twenty or more lodges were scattered along the river banks among the small shallow meadows, nearly invisible until they'd reached the valley floor and approached the first grouping.
The Lakota did not usually camp in the timberline where enemies could approach under cover, and Josiah realized that their own concealment was important now. The lodges were mostly unpainted but for the occasional red border along the bottom so they blended with their surroundings, the fires carefully smokeless. This was not a village camp, then, there would probably be no children here and few women - it was a war camp set up to be struck easily if a quick escape was necessary.
Nearly thirty warriors stood among the scatter of half a dozen lodges, their faces impassive, in some cases faintly hostile. War shirts had been hastily donned, coup feathers displayed and paint applied, rifles hung with feathers. It was a daunting sight that stilled the hearts of all the whites until Two Badgers came from their midst, and beside him that warrior Buck had saved, grinning at him, his rifle cradled in his arm. The warriors parted and opened ranks as they came among them like welcoming arms that nonetheless made Chris very nervous closing behind their small party the way they did.
Other campfires from flickered low further along the river, the lodges scattered in small groups, and as the travois drew even with the centermost of the lodges there, a woman in a deerskin dress decorated with shells and quills and swaying fringes efficiently lifted the crossed poles off the pony's withers and laid it down gently.
Elizabeth hovered hesitantly nearby, quite out of her element but her desire to control Vin's care stronger than her uncertainty. She reminded herself that she was a power to be reckoned with in her society, a respected matron and accustomed to accommodating herself gracefully to all situations. More than that, though - it was a surprising point of pride to realize that she'd risen to every unforeseen challenge she'd faced since leaving Virginia, and discovered capacities and strengths in herself she would never would have realized otherwise she had. She thought Duley would be proud of her, and her shoulders squared up, her chin rose.
When Two Badgers and the warrior with the blue face freed the buffalo robe from the frame and grasped the ends to carry Vin into the lodge, Elizabeth took a breath and ducked in right behind them, her pale face set. Nathan went through after her, and behind him the Lakota woman followed respectfully, picking up a bowl of hot water with a heated stone in the bottom, a medicine bag made from the whole skin of a cougar hung over her shoulder. Two Badgers had told them the black man was a powerful pejuta wicase, that they were accomplished warriors and even had a holy man among them. The people were very curious, but let them be just now for politeness sake; that they had traveled hard and were hurt and tired was very obvious.
"Ioyacin, hwo?" Josiah, who had dismounted with a stifled groan, looked down into a dark squarish face that appeared out of the darkness right beside him, wizened and bright-eyed. He did not understanding what was being asked and raised his hands helplessly. The old woman looked impatiently at Two Badgers, who explained, "She asks if you are hungry."
Josiah smiled broadly at her with a definite nod of his grizzled head, "Yes, grandmother, pilamaya!"
"Ai, unci." Two Badgers translated, and Josiah was rewarded by a smile and a straightening of narrow shoulders under her deerhide dress to have been named 'grandmother' by this wasichu wakan. Wanbli Cikala's husband had been a holy man, too, and she had said she would look after these white men and this holy man whether he knew the people's ceremonies or not, since she knew how these things must be done. Taking him by the arm like a bird leading a buffalo, she took him toward one of the lodges where food waited, and comfortable sleeping pallets with good buffalo robes. She crooked her fingers at the honey-eyed boy to come also, at the raw-boned mustachioed man with the spirited smile, even at the tall scowling man in black who stood narrow as an unsheathed knife-blade outside the lodge where Tanner had been taken.
It made her cackle a little laugh to think that a woman who had ridden against the whites with her husband, bringing him fresh horses and weapons in war and even killing some herself was now welcoming them into her home, feeding them out of her own stores. Heh; it was a strange time, her dreams were hard to understand these days.
Chris caught Buck's arm as the lanky gunslinger followed Josiah eagerly, head up after the scent of meat in the air. He almost didn't stop, he was that hungry and the smell was that good, but Chris' fingers tightened like a vise.
"Buck, you and Josiah get going back to Fetterman soon's you eat." Chris said, and it was an order, unmistakably.
Bit if he'd expected argument, Buck surprised him by nodding. That was the plan already, but Buck hadn't yet told Chris all the details - not that he was surprised Chris had come to the same conclusions on his own.
"Did you find out when this plan of the Monroes is supposed to go down?" Asking all the right questions; Buck glanced longingly toward the lodge where the good smells were but resigned himself to taking care of this now, Chris chose his own times and was unstoppable as a bullet once he had.
"A little over a week according to James and Elizabeth." Buck replied, reminding Chris that those two Monroes could no longer be lumped in with the villainy of their brothers. "James says Gerald is likely to send the letters a day or two in advance of making their move - it's a funny habit, but it'll work for us, we just have to intercept the courier."
"Yeah? And what if it's more than a funny habit, Buck? What if it's a signal to set something or somebody in motion? And what if that damned courier has already left, Buck? What if Gerald doesn't stick to patterns this time?" Aggressive, almost hostile.
Buck spread his hands, his chin dropping defensively at the harsh challenge in the question - at how right he might be, too, on several fronts. "You don't think Travis or Ezra could figure out a way to do what needed doing if that happened?" He said, and Chris scowled just like he knew he would. Chris had a gunman's eye to what could easily be overlooked - and easily kill the man who overlooked it. Chris' smile to see him think of that was a mere stretch of thinned lips.
"I think Orrin Travis n' Ezra are two men with a couple hundred armed and unfriendly soldiers around 'em is what I think, Buck. I think they're two men in the middle of something a hell of a lot bigger than anybody thought at the get-go." Buck fought the instinct to bristle, knowing it wasn't those two men who were uppermost in Chris' mind. Mary Travis was in Fort Fetterman too, impulsive and righteously blunt-spirited and far too beautiful right in the middle of a dangerous intrigue Chris hadn't wanted her in from the first. Buck knew as well as Chris did that neither Gerald nor Stephen would show her an ounce of mercy if they discovered the truth, and Buck had seen the way Stephen's eyes traveled her generous curves. Stephen was still alive only because Chris hadn't seen that lechery directed at Mary.
Buck considered his old friend carefully; there were times when pricking Chris' temper was the right thing to do, when it deflated counter-productive impulses so he could think straight. Sometimes a good fist-fight was just how they settled things between them, he'd always thought it kind of brotherly, even if it was sometimes painful. But now wasn't the time, not when Chris was torn so obviously between riding hell-bent right now to pluck Mary out of Fort Fetterman and staying with Vin. A man who denied emotional entanglements of any sort, who avoided them like a fire-scarred man avoided conflagrations … well, he'd be a damned unhappy men to end up solidly trapped between two people he cared about more than he could admit.
"Alright, Chris. We'll be back there by dawn, we'll ride hard. Alright? One of us'll come back, now that we know where you'll be, once we talk t'Ezra or the Judge. I reckon I can sneak in or Ezra can sneak out if he gets a signal we're there. Sure thing Ezra's got at least a dozen contingency plans by now."
Chris still hesitated, unwilling to give the responsibility for Mary over to anyone, but even more unwilling to leave Vin, so Buck reached out with a grin and slapped his black-vested chest with the back of his gloved hand. "One of these days, Chris, you oughta tell that woman how you feel." Diverting some of Chris' frustration, as he so often did, into annoyance at himself.
Chris didn't let him down; "Yeah, and one of these days you'll learn t'mind your own damned business, Buck."
"Well sure, sure, Chris, just speculatin' is all." Grinning as he walked away feeling Chris' eyes boring into his back.
The old woman, Little Eagle, was nodding against her backrest when the girl-child sneaked into the lodge. Her Aunt had gone for fresh water with White Moon, Two Badgers' wife, and the girl probably thought no one would notice her; indeed, she stopped short to see Wanbli Chikala, but the old woman pretended to sleep, her chin on her.
It was highly improper that a maiden girl, even a not-yet-menstruating girl-child, should be in the lodge of an unmarried man, but Little Eagle was curious about the power she had noticed in the girl's connection to Tanner. The child resembled Tanner's beloved wife to a startling degree and the spirit also, and that had given Little Eagle pause earlier. She had seen that woman a few times when she'd come to visit her sister from her own clan, as she had seen Tanner. She remembered being surprised at the time and not entirely approving that two white people had been so drawn into the lives of the people, but he had proven to be a fine fearless warrior and good brother to the camp, generous and kind and spoken well of by respected elders, so ...
However, when the white girl lifted the buffalo robe nearest the painted hide liner that insulated the lower half of the lodge and crept in with the man, the old woman's back straightened in affronted astonishment. Her first urge was to correct in no uncertain terms this unseemly breach in behavior as the girl tucked herself down as if by him was the place she always slept ... but something stopped her. Unsure whether it was some spirit that attended Tanner or simply her own heart softening at the turn of his head and the contentment in his sigh when the child settled against him, Little Eagle lay back again. Her old eyes narrowed in nets of wrinkles earned from a lifetime of paying attention to such things.
Yes. There was significance there, a power moving, as she sensed moved in the whole world in this season, as she had always sensed spirits and great changes coming, where the buffalo would come. She could not see the whole pattern of the big change coming now, too big for her to grasp and, she thought, mercifully so. But the little pattern within this lodge she thought she could see, and this spirit she respected and would serve.
So it was that Elizabeth returned to find the old woman unmoved and apparently deeply asleep, and the bright head of her niece unexpectedly nestled against Vin's far side where she slept, curled up facing the hide wall. She reached across him to wake her but then stopped with a helpless look at their contentment; both slept deeply, although she was worried that Vin was more unconscious than asleep. He shivered, a quiet tremble, and her niece's somnolent reaction was to press closer, her hand a clumsy disturbance under the robe as she reached back to stroke his forearm comfortingly before falling still again.
Elizabeth was exhausted herself and freezing cold. She looked longingly over at the smaller pallet on the other side of the fire that glowed low in the center of the lodge, but she assumed that pallet was for the old woman who'd been helping Nathan, or perhaps for Nathan himself, as he'd been coming in and out every hour or so to give Vin white willow-bark tea and meat broth. Uncertainly, she looked in the direction of the other lodge where J.D. and Chris were sleeping, wondering if Nathan was sleeping there, too, by now, or expected to sleep here, or whether the old woman would rouse from her nap and resent finding the white woman sleeping on her pallet, or even climb right on in with her to sleep ... she didn't have any idea what was proper to do, and she didn't want to wake anyone to find out, she was so tired and so cold and so confused.
She imagined she could roll up on the floor, but the night was so chilly that she could feel it in the ground through the soles of her shoes and she groaned to imagine how stiff she'd be in the morning! It was nearly impossible to think straight; she was cold, and she was tired, and even the repetitive thought sounded petulant in her head.
Distractedly she wrung a cloth out in the basin and wiped the sweat from Vin's face. Cold as it was, cold as he was by the shivering, he was radiating heat. Which was very tempting, though she scandalized herself by even considering it. And then she shook her head and laughed and thought nothing could be more proper to this place and time than for Vin Tanner to be held warm and loved through the night by Duley's sister and niece. Virginia was far away, and so was what mattered there that meant less than nothing here.
Refusing, selfishly perhaps, any urge to second thoughts, she lifted the heavy robe and rolled under it, moaning softly in pleasure at the warmth he was generating. Careful to put her back to him, she nonetheless couldn't help scooting near enough to feel his arm against the back of her body, and she relaxed into the bedding and the warmth with bone-deep appreciation of that comfort. This time she didn't care what anybody thought, it felt utterly correct and perfect, and she was asleep in moments.
Little Eagle, nonplussed by this strange boldness in a woman who wore so many layers of clothes it would take a man a week to peel her out of them, nonetheless decided to keep private this bad behavior. She would uphold the reputations of these white females without questioning why she felt moved to do so, it was enough that the sick feelings in the air softened and the man's breathing deepened from struggle to true rest.
The firelight laid highlights on his face in the gloom, and Little Eagle looked at that to see what small unnoticed thing had caught her eye. Heh; maybe his wife comforted him from beyond death this night, moving her kin to his side this way. Perhaps she was being fanciful to think so, but the thought was still very beautiful. Love was a marvelous and powerful mystery that few men ever wholly realized, bending time and place and logic to its own need. Love was what she saw in the golden light flickering over this white man with a Lakota warrior's honor-feather in his hair.
To be continued...
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