Author: Elizabeth Grayson
Category: Western
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/elizabeth-grayson/page,12,76810-a_place_called_home.html
Livi dropped the empty rifle and jammed her hand into her pocket of her skirt. The pistol butt seemed reassuring in the hollow of her palm, but when she tried to pull it free to aim, the hammer snagged in the folds of her skirt.
Livi watched helplessly as the Indian dealt her boy a slashing, backhand blow. Tad dropped like a stone.
Livi scuttled toward her son, but the brave's glare froze her in place. She gathered Cissy against her instead, doing her best to calm the sobbing child.
Slowly the rest of the Indians eased out of the trees.
As Tad began to stir, Livi knelt and reached toward him. "Are you hurt?" she whispered.
The blood trickling from a gash at the corner of his eye gleamed in the firelight, but the boy shook his head.
"Then I don't want you taking any more chances," Livi murmured and retreated to the circle of logs that ringed the fire.
As she settled, she nuzzled her daughter's hair. "It's going to be all right, Sugar."
The child sniffled and shivered against her. "I w-want Papa!"
Livi's heart withered at the reproach in those three words. She could never protect her family the way David always had, but she'd vowed the day each of her babies was born that she would lay down her life to protect them.
As the circle of Indian braves closed more closely around them, Livi noticed hanks of hair—fair and dark, straight and curly—hanging from their belts.
Scalps! They were scalps, she realized.
Panic swarmed her, itchy and hot. Her muscles burned with the effort it took to sit still. Livi didn't think she could be any more terrified until one of the men jerked Tad to his feet.
"HoOaawa? Takawe," he said, one hand grabbing a fistful of her son's shaggy hair. "NiOakaskitepeena."
Tad tried to pull away.
The Indians laughed.
Livi eased her hand back into her pocket and gripped the pistol hard. If she fired, she'd only have a single shot to protect her children. Such an inadequate defense for something so precious.
The warrior who'd wrenched the rifle out of her hands came to squat beside her.
"Mskwiskitepe," he said as he ran one hand the length of her braid.
Inside her pocket, she raised the pistol's barrel toward the Indian. Her nerves hummed; her muscles quivered. She struggled to order her thoughts, decide what she must do in what were surely the last moments of their lives.
Cissy sobbed hopelessly against her, and Livi looked down into her daughter's face. She took in her baby's soft, sweet mouth, the girl's amber eyes wide and wet with fear. At her heart-shaped face, still puckered with spots...
Spots the churchmen had believed were from smallpox!
Not taking time to consider her actions, Livi loosed her hold on her gun, slid her hands beneath her daughter's arms and turned her child to face toward the Indians.
"Look up at them, Sugar," she whispered. "Look at them just this once."
"No," the girl whimpered.
How could any mother ask so much of her child when her baby was so afraid? "Please, sweet girl. Be brave for me. Give them a look at your face."
Cissy stubbornly shook her head.
"Please!" she whispered.
Cissy raised her head and stared right into the painted face of the Indian beside her.
For a long moment he stared back.
"Noomekiloke," he shouted suddenly, then scrambled away. "Noomekiloke!"
The exclamation of alarm rose from one brave to another as they recognized the spots of what seemed to be the dreaded white man's disease. The scourge that had wiped out scores of Indian villages.
The raiders withdrew—stepping beyond the firelight, melting into the forest, fleeing from what they believed was an illness that threatened them and their families.
Once she was sure they were gone, Livi hugged her daughter close.
"Where did the Indians go, Mama?" Cissy asked.
"Back into the woods, Sugar," she answered, laughing and crying all at once. "You scared them away."
"I did?"
"They were afraid of your spots," Tad told his sister.
"They didn't want the itches, either?"
Livi hugged her daughter closer. It had taken such courage for Cissy to face the Indians, more courage than anyone had a right to expect from a four-year-old. "You were so brave, Sugar," she whispered into Cissy's hair, "to face that Indian like you did."
"It wasn't so very bad," Cissy conceded in a very small voice. "I prob'ly—could do it again if the Indians come back."
If the Indians come back.
The thought stirred up Livi's nausea again. She swallowed hard knowing there might be more encounters with marauding Indians, with snakes, bandits or wild animals either here on the trail or once they reached the cabin.
Her children had seen so much, braved so much; Livi couldn't help wondering what else this wilderness might demand of her, Tad and Cissy. Still, there was nothing to do but move ahead and pray that the worst of the journey was over.
* * *
The sense of foreboding arrived with the dawn. An ache across her shoulders. Pressure at the base of her throat. Livi did her best to explain it away. After the Indian incursion the night before and the hours she'd lain awake, she had reason to be jumpy. She'd relived those moments of fear and helplessness again and again.
Last night she and her babies had escaped the savages unharmed, but next time... Dear God, what would happen next time?
In a haze of restless exhaustion, Livi rose before dawn, cooked them a hearty breakfast and repacked the creels. She helped Cissy feed the cow, the chickens, and the piglets, and worked with Tad to hitch the horses. But in spite of her best efforts to keep busy, the feeling clung like a sodden cloak.
Perhaps it was the mountains that lay ahead that bore her down—slabs of harsh gray stone jutting skyward, with only a sprinkling of trees to prod the lowering sky. She and her children must face that high, rough country alone, and as they rode out it was responsibility for her family that weighed on her most heavily.
With dogged perseverance, Livi and the children put Pine Mountain Gap behind them and forded the Cumberland River just ahead of the rain. In a fine, drifting mist they followed the trail that shadowed the base of the gorge. Along that ledge rocks shimmered iridescent in the wet. Raindrops glittered like crystals scattered on a bed of velvet moss. The leaves of the waving ferns seemed limned with silver.
But even such rare and fragile beauty could not dispel Livi's foreboding. She ached with it, fought for breath beneath the crush of dread. As she led her little party forward, she wrapped her daughter closer than before and wondered if the dampness had compromised the prime of her pistol.
Several miles beyond the ford, a valley opened up to reveal a world awash with rain. The forest swayed. The clouds hung low. The mist boiled out of the trees.
An unearthly chill crawled the length of Livi's back. The rime of fear came bitter on her tongue. Whatever she had been sensing lay just ahead.
The horses felt it, too. They snorted and blew and fought their leads. Livi tried to prepare herself.
"What is that?" she heard Tad ask. "That smell—"
And suddenly Livi knew—knew what horror lay in wait for them. Sick, hot dread filled her to the brim. She had sense enough to crush Cissy against her and draw the protective wing of her cloak around the girl before they topped the little rise.
Livi's fear was given form at the brow of that hill. Vile, violent impressions assaulted her. Images she would carry for the rest of her days. Revulsion that scarred her soul.
Carrion birds rose from where they'd been about their grisly work. The beat of their wings was the only sound in the hollow, hissing silence. Then from somewhere behind her, she heard Tad retching.
What lay in this little valley was too vile for even an adult to assimilate—let alone her twelve-year-old son. What lay in the little valley was the desecrated remnants of Reverend Lindenwood's pack train, the broken bodies o
f the people with whom she and her family had briefly shared their lives.
Crushing Cissy closer, Livi turned to where her whey-faced son was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
She wanted to draw Tad to her and hold him, too. She wanted to beg his forgiveness for not warning him away. But the time was past for all of that.
"Indians?" he finally asked and looked as if he might be sick again.
"I suppose," Livi answered, knowing that the marauders were gone, that they'd been gone for several days.
"Do you think anyone escaped?"
She doubted it, but let her gaze skim the little valley, trying not to look too closely at what was there. She saw piles of wood, a few half-constructed tents. The Indians must have swept down on the churchmen in the bustle and confusion of making camp.
"If anyone got away, they're long gone by now."
She heard Tad draw a shaky breath. "What are we going to do?"
The inevitable question.
"We're going to move on. Around the encampment if we can. Through it if we must."
"We're not—" Tad swallowed and composed himself. "We're not going to stop and bury them?"
"The two of us alone, Tad? How could we do that?"
His voice went raspy and small. "But Sam and Joss might be here..."
She narrowed her eyes against the sting of tears. She couldn't bear to put a human face on what lay in that little hollow. "I'm sorry, Tad. They were my friends, too, but we really have no choice about riding on."
He nodded his head and looked away.
With the river to the left and the rock wall rising just beyond the trees, there was no way around what had been the churchmen's camp.
"Don't look, Tad," she admonished as she tugged her balky pack animals into the shallow valley at Four Mile Creek.
"It's too late, Ma," he said and rode in after her.
Holding Cissy under the drape of the cloak despite her squirming, Livi rode tall, her eyes focused ahead. Still, at the periphery of her vision, images intruded. Broken bodies sprawled where they had fallen. Faces stained dark with blood. Women with their skirts rucked up. She saw a pair of bright red shoes and knew they belonged to Molly Baker, saw Ellen Stewart's fine embroidery ground into the mud. A carved Noah's Ark lay at the edge of the trail. Amos Lindenwood's youngest, Aaron, had been so proud of it.
Not the children, she thought, new revulsion rising inside her. Oh, please, God, not the children. She knew they would fare no better than the adults, though if she remembered what Reid Campbell had once told her, some tribes took children as captives.
Every glimpse Livi caught of the carnage drained away a bit of her strength, annihilated a bit more of her courage. It would be horrific to come upon a massacre if the people had been strangers. That she had laughed with these people and argued with them and cursed them when they'd abandoned her and her family deepened her despair. The scope of the loss, the cruelty with which their lives had been taken, devastated her.
It could have been us.
The realization burst in the center of her chest. If Cissy hadn't taken ill... If they had stayed with the pack train... A wave of cold swept through her, and Livi bound her daughter even tighter than before.
It could have been us!
"Dear God." The entreaty was on her lips before she realized she was speaking the words aloud. "Please receive the souls of these departed friends. They were good people in their way and lived their lives as well as any of us mortals can. Welcome them home to Heaven and give them comfort there."
"Amen," she heard Tad murmur.
And thank you for watching over my family and me, she added silently. Thank you for keeping us safe.
They put Four Mile Creek behind them, pushing themselves and their animals as hard as they dared. They rode so far and fast that they outdistanced the rain. They rode until the sky was streaked silver and peach and peacock blue. They rode until Livi found the campsite that suited specifications she hadn't even thought about the night before—a scrap of high, open ground with rocks at her back—a place where she could see or hear her enemies coming.
Sleep eluded them all that night. Tad tossed and turned. Cissy whimpered softly. And for a very long time Livi lay taut and trembling with the pistol clutched against her chest.
It could have been us, she kept thinking.
It could have been us.
Chapter 8
Livi jerked awake, her hand closing reflexively around the stock of the pistol. For one cold, clammy moment she was sure she was dreaming of the night David died. She could hear the pad of footsteps from outside the tent, feel the same hot dread crawl up her neck. But this was not the dregs of some bitter dream.
A thud from near where she and Tad had stacked the creels made her start nearly out of her skin. For a moment she burrowed deep into the bedclothes. Tears of exhaustion stung her cheeks.
"I can't face this," Livi breathed. "I can't face it again." Except that she had no choice.
Gathering her courage, Livi crept to the head of the tent. It took an act of will to nudge open the tent flap with the barrel of the pistol and peer through the opening.
By the faint red-orange glow of the campfire, she could see two crouched figures going through their packs. The nearest one was a good-sized man, judging by the set of his shoulders. The second was smaller and half-hidden in his shadow. Though Livi looked long and hard, she didn't see the sway of feathers in their hair or the gleam of trade beads. Yet who but Indians would plunder their encampment?
Livi scanned the edge of the woods for other raiders and saw no one. She eased back to where Tad lay balled in his blankets. The moment she leaned over him, he woke with a jerk, his Barlow knife in hand.
"There are two people outside going through our things," she whispered. "Bring the rifle."
Tad nodded, wild-eyed. After being terrorized by the Indians the night before, after riding through the massacre, Livi wondered how much more her son could take. Still, Livi wasn't about to repeat David's mistake and face the intruders alone. Their breathing rasped harsh in their throats as she and the boy crept to the head of the tent.
"Go right," Tad instructed peering out the tent flap. Livi nodded, accepting that his understanding of tactics was instinctive and better than hers. "Keep the fire between us and them."
Tightening her grip on the pistol, Livi burst from the tent. "Stop!" she ordered, training the gun on the taller of the two.
Tad was hot on her heels. "Raise your hands or die where you stand!"
The big man took one step toward them and pulled up sharp. He lifted his hands above his head and his companion did the same.
As the thieves turned toward the fire Livi saw that the man was a Negro, not an Indian. Tall and rawboned, of middling years, he exuded strength and stoicism the way some men did the smell of sweat. His companion was a wisp of a woman in a tattered gown.
"Mama? Mama!" Cissy cried out from inside the tent.
"We're out by the fire, Sugar," Livi answered. "It seems we have visitors."
The child burst out of the tent, her blanket flapping behind her. Though Livi bent and gathered Cissy up on her hip, she kept her gun trained on the man and woman.
"Who are these people, Mama?" the child wanted to know.
"They were just about to tell us."
The man bobbed his head. "I'm Eustace Hadley, ma'am, and this here's my woman, Violet Mae."
"And just why were you rifling through our campsite in the middle of the night?"
"They're thieves, Ma," Tad hissed. "Clear as day."
The creases in the man's brow deepened. "I confess, ma'am, we come to steal food."
"We starving," the woman answered, her voice like drifting smoke. "We ain't had nothing but water in four days."
Livi bent and used the barrel of the pistol to nudge the pan of hoecakes she'd been saving for breakfast in their direction. The way the two of them tucked into the corn bread seemed to confirm the woman's words.
"And just why are you out here in the middle of nowhere," Livi asked, "with nothing to eat?"
"We ain't runaways, if that's what you think," the woman answered around a mouthful of corn cake.
"Truth is," Eustace went on, "we was traveling with Mr. Titus Wagner and his family, bound for Kentucky when we got set upon by Indians. Killed everyone while Violet and me was gettin' water down at the creek. We was too a-scared to go back to the camp after we saw what the savages done and headed off into the woods."
"And how long ago were the Wagners attacked?"
"Nigh a fortnight, seems to me."
"And what do you know about the massacre near Four Mile Creek?" Tad put in.
Eustace shook his head. "We been hidin' in caves mostly, 'cause there be war parties through regular, like."
Livi considered the man's story, watching the way he made sure the woman had eaten what she wanted before he glanced at Livi for permission to take another piece of cornbread. As he reached for it, she took note of the work-roughened hands, the bulk of his forearms and wrists. She looked past him at the woman. There wasn't much to her but bones, defiance, and big dark eyes.
Violet must have spent her life fighting for everything she got, Livi thought. It was an ability she herself was coming to respect.
"Well, you and Violet are welcome to sleep by our fire tonight," Livi offered, "and travel with us, if you like."
"Ma!" Tad snapped sharply.
"But should you choose to do that," Livi went on before either Eustace or Violet could answer. "My family and I are willing to share what we have in return for your work."
"Ma!"
"I'll put up with no refusals or cheekiness from either of you, and if I'm missing so much as a pinch of salt, I'll make very good use of this pistol. "
"Ma!"
"If you stay, I'll have your promise to abide by my rules, work as hard as we are working and see us all the way to Kentucky."
Tad grabbed his mother's arm and dragged her into the shadow of the tent. "What the hell are you thinking?" he demanded in a whisper. "Two escaped slaves wander out of the woods to steal our food—"
"Violet said they weren't escaped slaves," Cissy corrected from where she sat braced on her mother's hip.