“I won’t hear any more of your insults. It’s true I don’t know where Devon is, but I will not believe the snide remarks you have made about him.”
“Believe them or not, they’re true. This morning he came to my house and traded me this for some supplies, enough to get him back to Sweetbriar.”
Linnet looked at Devon’s knife that the Squire held. “I don’t believe you.”
“You should ask Nettie if Macalister’s horse is still with them. It isn’t, because he took it with him and several people in Spring Lick saw him riding away on it.”
“I don’t believe you!” It was all she could say, over and over.
He laughed. “That’s your right. Now I got to go. You think over what I said and ask yourself if you want to raise Miranda with a father like that.” He paused at the door. “By the way, did he get what he wanted from you?” His eyes carefully went over every part of her body, but she stood straight and did not answer him, and he closed the door behind him, laughing.
“I don’t believe it,” Linnet said. “Whatever problems Devon may have, he is not a liar.”
Nettie put a generous scoop of the precious tea in the pot. “I don’t know the man so I can’t say. All I know is, his horse was gone this mornin’.”
“He wouldn’t steal away in the night like that, I just know he wouldn’t.”
And I know how much you’d like to believe in him, Nettie thought. “What are you gonna do now, now that he’s gone?”
“I…I don’t know. I have to go to Phetna, she’s been expecting me all day.” She looked out the open door toward the setting sun. “It’s getting late and I don’t know what to do.”
Rebekah ran into the room, breathless. “I found out, Mama, I found out.”
“All right, sit down,” Nettie said, “and tell us.”
Linnet looked from mother to daughter in wonder. “Nettie, you didn’t…,” she began.
“I shore did,” Nettie said and smiled fondly at Rebekah. “This child has a special talent for listenin’, through cracks in the chinkin’.”
Linnet didn’t like the idea but she wanted desperately to know what had made Devon leave Spring Lick so suddenly.
“I heard the Squire talkin’ to Mrs. Yarnall. They was havin’ a fight, leastways a argument. Mrs. Yarnall said she wanted somethin’ to be done about Miss Tyler and Mr. Macalister, and the Squire said that somethin’ already had been.” She looked from one woman to another to make sure they were hearing her every word.
“What did he say?” Nettie prodded.
“The Squire said he sold Mr. Macalister to the Injuns.”
“To the—!” Nettie gaped, wide-eyed.
Linnet appeared to be very calm. “What else did he say, Rebekah?”
“That’s about all. He said he saw this Indian in the woods and he knocked him over the head and tied him up. He said the Indian was watchin’ Miss Tyler and Mr. Macalister kissin’!” The girl looked at her teacher in wonder.
“What else?” Linnet ignored the girl’s curiosity.
“He said when he got the Indian back to the house he found out the Indian had been chasin’ Mr. Macalister all over everywhere, said the Indian wanted to kill Mr. Macalister but he didn’t have no horse or gun to take him back to his men.”
“So the Squire made it possible for the Indian to take Devon,” Linnet finished.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well.” Nettie let out her pent-up breath. “I guess there’s nothin’ we can do then.”
“We can go after him,” Linnet said, her eyes staring.
“You and me?” Nettie asked. “Two women alone in the woods? Ain’t nobody else in this town gonna help you, and my Ottis won’t be back for another week. Who you gonna get to help you?”
“I don’t know.” Linnet stood. “I don’t know yet what I’m going to do, but I can’t let them have Devon.” She paused at the door and looked back at Rebekah. “Did you by any chance hear the name of the Indian?”
“Ah…oh yes, it was Crazy Bear.”
Nettie at first thought Linnet was going to faint. The color drained from her face, her eyes immediately became glassy, and her knees seemed to weaken. “Linnet, are you all right?”
She shook her head to clear it. “I must go. I must go and find him.”
Nettie started to protest, but then Linnet was gone and she turned back to the bread she had to knead.
“You think she’s gonna go after that Indian that took Mr. Macalister?”
“No, of course not,” Nettie told her daughter. “She’ll have time to think it over and see how impossible it is. No woman can go alone through the woods, and even Linnet knows that.”
“I would!” Rebekah said. “I’d go after him. I wouldn’t let no Indian have my man!”
“Hush,” Nettie said sternly. “You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. There’s just some things a woman can’t do, and get on a horse and ride through the night after a bunch of Indians is one of ’em. And even if Linnet sometimes doesn’t seem to know her place in the world, she at least has enough sense to…” She stopped and stared at the bread.
“What’s the matter, Mama?”
Nettie wiped her hands on her apron. “Linnet doesn’t have any sense at all when it comes to that man and she’d do just what she said. She’s gonna go after him, and I know it as well as I know my own name. Rebekah, you finish up that bread and set it to rise.”
“Ah, Ma, I wanta go see you talk to Miss Tyler.”
“It’s more likely Miss Tyler is gonna talk to me.”
Chapter Twenty-one
LINNET’S CABIN DOOR WAS OPEN AND SHE SAT quietly at the table, absently watching Miranda play with her kitten. She didn’t hear Nettie enter.
“Well, where you gonna get horses?”
Linnet looked up and they understood each other. “I’m going to steal one from the Squire.”
In spite of herself, Nettie smiled. “You think you could get two horses?”
“No,” Linnet said seriously. “This is my own problem, and you can’t go with me.”
“I’d like to know why not,” Nettie said indignantly.
Linnet looked at her, very calm. “You’d be a hindrance. I’d be worried about you all the time, and you can neither ride well nor shoot.”
Nettie looked startled for a moment and then laughed. “You shore do lay it on the line, don’t you?”
“I have to. This is a serious undertaking. Crazy Bear hates Devon and he hates me. If I don’t free him, then we will both forfeit our lives.”
“Lord!” Nettie sat down in the chair. “I don’t know how you can sit there and talk about dyin’ so easy.”
“I’m sure my calmness is only a facade. Devon’s life is at stake, and there’s a chance I can save him, a small chance, I know, but as long as there is a sliver of hope, I plan to take it.”
Nettie sighed. “All right, I can’t go but I can take care of Miranda.”
“No, I’m taking her to Phetna. These people may harm her if I leave her here. They’d be afraid to go to Phetna’s.”
Nettie looked at her friend in admiration. “I ain’t never seen nobody with a cooler head than you. What can I do to help?”
“You can help me steal a horse.”
Nettie smiled, mostly to herself. “I’ll be glad to, more glad than you know.”
They waited until full dark before slipping through the blackness to the Squire’s corral. Nettie held Miranda at some distance while Linnet slipped between the split rails. Nettie couldn’t see her once she was inside the pen and she began to worry that something was wrong. The horses walked about quietly, undisturbed at Linnet’s presence. Once she could have sworn she saw the brightness of Linnet’s hair underneath one of the horses’ bellies, but she told herself that she had to be wrong. After what seemed to be hours, Linnet led a horse through the gate.
“What took you so long?” Nettie whispered.
“Saddle,” was Linnet’s curt reply. ??
?I must go now. Good-bye…friend.”
They hugged one another.
“Good luck, Linnet, I wish you all the luck in the world and please, please be careful.”
She swung into the saddle on the tall, black horse.
“You sure you can handle this animal?” Nettie asked as she lifted Miranda up to her mother.
“Certainly.”
“I’m gonna miss your funny way of talkin’,” Nettie said as she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, but Linnet was already reining the horse away, her mind on the journey ahead.
“Where’s the boy?” were Phetna’s first words when she saw Linnet and a sleeping Miranda.
“The Squire—” she choked on the name, “turned him over to the care of Crazy Bear.”
“Crazy Bear? Ain’t he the one killed your folks?”
“The very same, but he’ll take no more of my family.” She handed Miranda to Phetna.
“You ain’t thinkin’ of goin’ after him, are you?”
“I am going after him, yes.”
“Alone? I thought you had some sense, but you ain’t.”
“Please, I’ve already been through this with Nettie.”
Phetna was silent a moment before she spoke. “All right, you’re gonna go after him but you ain’t goin’ alone.”
“You can’t go with me, Phetna. You’re too—”
“Don’t even say it. It ain’t me what’s gonna go with you but Yellow Hand.”
“Yellow Hand? Is he here?”
“No, he ain’t but he will be. I got a signal in case I need help. You just get on down here, and Yellow Hand’ll be here in no time.”
Inside the cabin, Phetna took a hollowed deer horn from the mantel and went outside and blew it, several times in each direction and the women began to wait. Phetna prepared packages of food, cornmeal and jerky, while Linnet wrote in the flyleaf of Phetna’s Bible. She made out her will, making Phetna the child’s guardian.
“If I’m not back in two weeks, you can—”
“Hush!” Phetna cut her off. “I’ll take care of the young’un till you get back and I ain’t gonna think of it no other way. Here now, eat this and don’t talk so much.”
Linnet carefully unwrapped Devon’s four carvings. “I brought them in case—”
“’Cause you ain’t goin’ back to Spring Lick. Now shut up and eat, then I got somethin’ I wanta give you, might come in useful.”
Neither woman heard Yellow Hand’s arrival. He just seemed to all at once be standing inside the cabin. “I am here,” he said quietly.
Linnet told him what had happened to Devon, and the young man listened carefully. “I do not ask you to go with me,” she said softly. “I will go alone.”
The boy puffed out his chest. “How you find him? How you read trail?”
“I…”
“Woman not trained to do this. You can ride horse?”
“Yes.”
“Then we go now. Too much time lost already.” His words were hardly out before Linnet was outside and on her horse.
Phetna came to them and handed her a rifle, powder and shot. “You can use this?”
“Yes.”
“Then go with the Lord’s blessin’ and come back safe, all of you.”
When they were gone, Phetna sat down in the rocker and watched the sleeping Miranda. Somehow, it seemed hopeless, the two young people setting out after somebody as wily as Crazy Bear. Phetna sighed and remembered how this was to have been the day when they were all to go to Sweetbriar.
She closed her eyes and leaned her head back. Sweetbriar and the days of her youth, the time before the fire. She could remember the face of each person in Sweetbriar.
“I wonder if Doll’s as ugly as he always was?” she murmured. Now Doll’d be the one to help find Slade’s boy, Doll and Gaylon and Lyttle, they’d all be able to help. She smiled as she thought of the formidable sight of Agnes Emerson behind a six-foot-long rifle. Warn’t no Indian gonna threaten her.
Suddenly Phetna sat bolt upright. Sweetbriar. The word rang in her head. She looked down at her lap and stuck out her legs. “A mite rusty,” she said aloud, “but they’ll make it.”
She began to throw provisions into a bag. For once she thought of something good about her face. At least nobody, white or red, would harm her while she made the trip. No siree, nobody’d bother her. She smiled as she thought of leaping out at Doll Stark and watching him jump. Lord! She hadn’t felt so good in twelve years, not since before the fire.
“Come on, Miranda.” She lifted the sleeping child. “We got work to do.”
Phetna was gone, and the three masked people who later stole through the night and burned the little cabin never knew it was empty. “The Lord’s will be done,” said a woman’s voice, but she never noticed the doubt in the other two pairs of eyes.
Linnet followed Yellow Hand quietly and she never gave him any cause to doubt her or sneer in disgust at the softness of white women. She seemed indefatigable, almost as if she were not human in her drive to pursue Crazy Bear and the man he held captive. They stopped once to sleep by the side of a stream, and he watched her, saw that she slept lightly, as if she resented the time spent in the necessity of sleep.
The terrain was rough, the underbrush thick. Once they had to go through swampland and later stop and pull leeches from the horses’ legs. Linnet’s arms were scratched, there were mosquito bites along her cheek, yet she seemed not to notice any discomfort.
“We’re getting closer to them?”
They were the first words either had spoken in twenty-four hours.
“Yes,” he answered. “Crazy Bear is careless. He does not hide his trail. He thinks no one follows him.”
“No.” Her eyes looked into the distance. “He has no reason to think he would be pursued.”
“Come, no more talk now.”
They rode hard for two more days, Linnet’s dress becoming torn and ragged, her hair dirty and full of matted grasses and twigs, yet her eyes burned feverishly bright as she looked ahead, expecting any moment to see Crazy Bear’s men and Devon.
Yellow Hand made them stop to eat a small amount of the jerky and some wild strawberries. They sat facing one another, the rifle loaded and by Linnet’s side when she saw a slight movement by Yellow Hand’s leg and saw a cotton-mouth prepare to strike. Instantly she grabbed the rifle and fired, her years of training and practice with a rifle making her perfectly accurate.
Yellow Hand stared at her and then at the dead snake by his leg. He lifted it before looking back at her. “You have saved my life,” he said quietly, “but you have killed us both. Come, we must hide for a while. They may not find us.”
Linnet understood what he meant, that they were really close to Crazy Bear and his men. It seemed only seconds before their peaceful camp was surrounded by men and Linnet’s mind was swiftly taken back to the time her parents had been slaughtered and she had been led away by these same men.
She was pressed against Yellow Hand under a clump of blackberry bushes. The sharp thorns pushed into her skin. Suddenly her mind was very clear. Crazy Bear would find them and he would kill them, just as he’d probably already killed Devon. She could not save herself from the man but she could save Yellow Hand.
She kicked against the boy and rolled down the little incline and landed at the feet of Crazy Bear.
The Indian grinned, bent, and pulled her to her feet by her hair. He turned to the others and said something, pulling Linnet’s head back until it threatened to snap away from her body. The four other Indians grinned as Crazy Bear threw Linnet across his pony’s back and mounted behind her.
They rode for hours, the pony’s backbone hammering into Linnet’s middle. When they stopped, Crazy Bear pushed her from the little horse, and she had every intention of landing on her feet, but her knees gave way and she fell into a heap on the ground.
A sharp stick and a woman’s shrill voice made her look up. A horrible sense of déjà vu overcame her as she
saw the same woman who had hit her before when she’d been in Crazy Bear’s camp. It didn’t seem like nearly three years ago. In fact, it seemed as if she’d never left the dirty camp. She looked at each of the faces watching her, expecting to see a pair of blue eyes, but there were none.
Crazy Bear pulled her hair, and she stood in front of him. He said something to the women in his own language, and they giggled in unison and approached Linnet slowly, their eyes menacing. They stopped when a man, old, his thin body hanging with fatless flesh, ran into the camp. He seemed to be very excited and kept pointing at Linnet and then to something in his hand, waving his arms in the direction where Linnet had been captured.
Crazy Bear grabbed the object held by the old man and shoved it in front of Linnet’s face. She recognized it as a pouch which had hung at Yellow Hand’s side. She gasped, thinking they had caught the boy. Crazy Bear slapped her face hard, and she struggled to remain standing.
He gave some orders to the women, who knocked her to the ground and tied her hands with coarse, cutting rawhide. Then they bent her legs back and tied her hands and feet together, causing her body to form a painful, twisting loop. The women lifted her, and as they swung her to and fro in the air, hands loosely holding her, she heard horses near her. A sharp bark of an order from Crazy Bear, and the women tossed her into a dark and empty hut, the fall stunning her. When she regained her breath, she saw she was once again in the same sort of low hovel that she had been in after her parents had been killed, but this time there was no hope of rescue from a blue-eyed half-Indian.
Chapter Twenty-two
“HELLO, TAR BABY.”
Linnet couldn’t move, her legs bent behind her, tied to her hands, but she knew that voice, knew it well and the tears that filled her throat choked her. The joy of knowing he was alive! Not for long maybe, but alive.