Читать книгу Blackstone's Bride - Bronwyn Williams, Bronwyn Williams - Страница 8

A hand-lettered sign warned against trespassing. Traveling cross-country as he often did, that was one big word Jed had learned to recognize. But roadways were roadways, and while this one was overgrown, the rutted tracks were still visible.

He could hear the sound of rushing water close by. Evidently McGee heard it, too, from the way he picked up his pace. Jed gave the gelding his head and held on to his own hat as the horse broke through a dense laurel slick to emerge on the banks of a shallow creek some ten feet wide.

He could use a break, and this was as good a place as any. He had saved some of the cheese and soda crackers he’d bought earlier that morning—but first a drink. The sight of all that water made him realize how thirsty he was. Dismounting, he slapped McGee on the hindquarters, knowing the horse was going nowhere until he’d drunk his fill. Founder at the trough, if he let him. Damned horse didn’t have a grain of sense.

He was on his knees lowering his face to the rippling surface when a sound and a scent made him glance over his shoulder. One look was all it took.

Ah, Jesus, not now.

Guns and whiskey spelled trouble in any language, but in the hands of a mob of dirty, grinning polecats like the five lining up behind him, the odds weren’t all that favorable. His best bet was to get to the other side of the creek, but something told him he wasn’t going to have a chance. “You fellows want to talk about it?” he asked, his mind reeling out possible excuses for being here.

One man held an old Sharps bear rifle; another one carried a newer Winchester and the tallest carried a spade over his shoulder. That left two men unarmed, which helped even the odds.

But not a whole lot.

“Have at ’em, McGee,” Jed whispered, his hands closing over a river rock.

“We wanna talk about it, boys? ’Pears to me we got us a traipser.” Winchester grinned, revealing a total of three long, yellow teeth.

A traipser? Would that be a trespasser? Jed wondered.

“I might have got lost and—” That was as far as he got before the shovel caught him on the side of the head. From that point on, things went rapidly downhill. Later, he would dimly recall hearing a lot of hooting and hollering, rifles being fired and a gleeful suggestion that they tan his hide and nail it to the side of the barn as a warning to “traipsers.”

His head ringing with pain, he fought back, the fear of death lending him strength. He even managed to get in a few good licks, mostly with his feet, but five against one pretty much settled the outcome. At least they didn’t shoot him outright, but that damned spade was almost as lethal. All he could do was roll with the punches, try to protect his vitals and hope the sumbitches would fall down dead drunk before they managed to finish him off.

His boots… “Ah, Jesus, no!” he yelped, feeling his ankle twist in a way it was never meant to twist.

The smell of whiskey was everywhere. If they doused him with the stuff and set him on fire—

He tried to roll toward the creek. Someone kicked him in the ribs, and then the others joined in, cackling and shouting suggestions. On his hands and knees, Jed tried to crawl toward the bushes, but they followed him, kicking and jabbing him with the butt of a rifle.

“Git that there hoss ’fore he gits away!” one of them shouted.

“Hit ’im wi’ the shovel ag’in, it won’t kill ’im!”

“You git the hoss, them boots is mine!” The voices came from all sides, like buzzards circling over a dying animal.

“I got ’is hat. Gimme yer jug, ’Laska,” someone yelled.

“Go git yer own jug, mine’s empty.”

They seemed to come from a distance now, the voices…but then everything came from a distance. Either they were leaving or his head wasn’t working properly. He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, but God, he hurt!

For what could have been minutes, could have been days, he lay facedown in the dirt, hurting too much to move even if he could have found the strength. He could still hear the bastards, but the voices came from much farther away now. Unless his ears were playing tricks on him.

He was afraid to lift his head to look around, afraid that damned spade would connect with the side of his head again. Better to play possum until he felt like taking them on.

Oh, yeah…that would be right after Sam Stanfield apologized for any discomfort he’d caused him eight years ago and invited him to take dinner with him and his family at the Bar Double S ranch.

“McGee?” he rasped. God, even his voice hurt.

No answering whinny. If the damned horse would just move in close enough, he might be able to reach a stirrup and haul himself up. In the bottom of one of his saddlebags he had a Colt .45, but it wasn’t going to do him much good unless he could get to it before they came back.

“Git that hoss.” Had he heard them correctly? McGee would eat them alive if they laid a hand on him. Wouldn’t he?

Jed listened some more. Had little choice, lacking the strength to move. From time to time, hearing the sounds of drunken revelry from farther and farther away, he called to McGee, but either the horse had taken off or he was ignoring him.

Or he’d been stolen.

“Hellfire,” he muttered. Groaning, he rolled over onto his back and blinked up at the treetops.

The sun had moved. He was maybe twenty-five feet from the creek now, and there was no sign of McGee and his saddlebags. Or of his boots.

Sunovabitch. They’d stolen his boots, Jed thought, fighting the urge to rid his sore gut of the only meal he’d had since yesterday.

Now what? Lie here like a lump of buzzard bait until they came back and finished him off? It wasn’t his nature to run from a fight, but five against one, even when the five were drunk as coots, that was just asking for trouble.

Downhill would be easiest. Trouble was, downhill was where the sound of all that hooting and hollering was coming from. The storekeeper had said it was rough country. Like a fool, Jed had thought he meant the condition of the road.

Varnelle set the basket of supplies on the edge of the porch and turned to go without a single word, despite the fact that Eleanor was standing in the open doorway.

“Varnelle? Do you have to leave? I could make us some tea.”

No answer, unless the toss of a mop of red hair could be construed as a reply. Of the entire clan, the shy, peppery Varnelle had always been her favorite. Any sign of friendship had ended when the bachelor parade had begun. “Is it because you’re jealous?” she called after the retreating figure, not expecting an answer, not getting one.

Why on earth would such a pretty girl be jealous of a plain woman nearly ten years her senior? It could only be because they considered her an heiress, the sole beneficiary of Devin’s unwritten will. Unwritten only because the Millers didn’t bother to write their laws, but obeyed some primitive slate of laws all their own.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, this is beyond absurd,” she muttered. “If I don’t soon get away, I might do something desperate.”

Like shoot her way out. She didn’t even have that option any longer since the men had gone through the house and shed, claiming everything of Dev’s except for his tooth powder. They had taken his guns, his clothes and every bit of mining equipment he owned, most of it bought with the proceeds from the sale of her house and furniture.

She hadn’t argued at the time because—well, because one didn’t argue at such a time, one simply went through the rituals, a few of them rather bizarre, and quietly made plans for the future.

For all the good her plans had done her.

“Help me, Varnelle,” she whispered to the glossy dark rhododendrons. “Come back and tell me what to do. Help me to get away and you can have anything of mine you want, including this cabin.”

Her clothes? Varnelle was short and nicely rounded, while Eleanor was tall and skinny as a walking stick. If anything could be made over to fit her, Eleanor would gladly hand over every stitch she possessed, even the rose-colored silk she’d been married in.

Oh, yes—especially that.

Her books? Varnelle could read and write—just barely. But she had never expressed the least interest in borrowing any of the books Eleanor had brought with her.

They could have found something to talk about, though, Eleanor was sure of it. “You could tell me how you manage to make your red hair so shiny and smooth,” she whispered, touching her own hair, which she managed to tame only by ruthless brushing, braiding and pinning it up before the braids could unravel.

“I’m no threat to you, Varnelle,” she said plaintively, seeing a glimpse of faded pink some five hundred feet below as the younger woman left the laurel slick and hurried past Alaska’s cove. “In my best day, which was too long ago to recall, I was never anywhere near as pretty as you are. Why do you resent me so?”

Dropping down to sit on the edge of the porch, she nibbled a cold biscuit from the basket and wondered idly how close the kinship was between Varnelle and Hector. Hector was easily the best looking of all the Millers now that Devin was dead. He’d been guardedly friendly to her whenever he’d been the one to bring her supplies.

Miss Lucy had explained when Devin had first taken her down the hill to introduce her to his family, that for years she’d been responsible for keeping track of such things in order to prevent inbreeding amongst the clan. The old woman had seemed pleased at the time that Devin had married an outsider, saying that new blood in the clan would make arranging marriages easier in the future.

Come to think of it, she had mentioned Varnelle and Hector at the time. Eleanor remembered thinking that Varnelle was still a child. She was definitely no child now, not the way she had filled out her faded gowns. As for Hector, Devin had once told her that his cousin had gone all the way through the third grade.

My God, Eleanor thought—she had taught the third grade.

“One day, when Heck makes his strike,” Varnelle had confided back in those early days when she hadn’t been quite so resentful, “he’s a-gonna marry me and move to Charlotte or maybe even New York, and we’re not niver comin’ back here n’more.”

“Then who would work Heck’s share?” Eleanor had asked. The gold shares were vitally important to everyone in Dexter’s Cut, whether or not any more gold was ever found.

“They’s plenty that would for a cut.”

Share and share alike, that was the Millers. Hound dogs and chickens, moonshine and occasionally even women, but not the gold. At least not with outsiders.

Looking back—an occupation that filled far too much of her time lately—Eleanor marveled at how any woman who had once been considered intelligent could get herself into such a fix. She’d been a whiz at mathematics, good at literature, history and geography, although not quite so good at the sciences. When it came to the subject of men, however, she was no wiser now than she’d ever been. In other words, dumb as a stump.

Rising, she swept up the covered basket that had been left on her front porch in exchange for the empty one she’d set out that morning, and went inside. The house smelled of lye soap. She’d scrubbed the floors and washed the curtains again that morning, more for something to do than for any real need.

Just last week someone had left her a quarter of salty, hickory-smoked ham. She’d been eating on it ever since. Today’s piece of fried chicken was a welcome reprieve. Still, no matter how hard she worked, she never felt much like eating. Years from now, she thought, bitterly amused, another generation of Millers would be bringing food baskets to the batty old woman who lived alone on Devin’s Hill, leaving them on her porch, dashing back down the hillside, giggling and telling yarns about her.

Probably call her an old witch.

Maybe she would grow a wart on her nose, cultivate a cackling laugh and practice riding her broomstick. Maybe she would send a note down the hill asking for a cat, preferably a black one.

Or maybe she would write a note, put it in a bottle and drop it in the narrow, whitewater creek that churned its way down the mountainside, where it would doubtlessly be panned up by one of the damned Millers downstream, who in turn would guard her closer than ever.

Now she rummaged through the basket again, in case she’d missed some little treat. The last time Heck had brought her supplies she’d been so desperate for someone to talk with that she’d asked him to stay for supper.

“Can’t.” Crossing his arms over his massive chest, he’d looked her square in the eyes. Not for the first time she noticed that no matter what he was saying, whether he was being friendly or noncommittal, his expression never varied. Blue eyes, clear as a summer sky and just as cool.

“Then let me go home,” she pleaded.

“Can’t.”

He didn’t have to explain. By now she knew all the reasons by heart. She’d heard them often enough. As Miss Lucy had explained, “Chile, they ain’t niver gonna let you go. They’re all a-wantin’ Devin’s share and you’re a-settin’ on it.”

“But I offered to give up any claim I might have,” Eleanor had explained countless times. “Besides, you keep telling me I don’t even have a claim.”

The old woman shook her head. “You do and you don’t, that’s just the way things is. We let you go back to the city, next thing we know they’ll be flatlanders a-swarming all over the place, lookin’ for old Dexter’s gold mine. If they’s any gold left, it b’longs to us. My best advice is to take your pick of the men here, hitch up and commence to breedin’.”

And so they kept her here. Knowing she wouldn’t have any one of them, they all watched over her lest she escape, for if that happened, Alaska had told her, the first single man who saw her would want her.

A fallacious argument if she’d ever heard one. A woman wearing gowns that had been several years out of style three years ago, that were now so faded as to be colorless? A woman whose hair had grown wilder than ever for lack of decent care? A woman valued only for her property—a three-room log cabin perched on top of a hill that was riddled with more holes than a gopher farm?

She was twenty-seven years old, for heaven’s sake. Too old to want to attract another man even if by some miracle she could, but far too young to spend the rest of her days in isolation.

In desperation she had offered to deed them all her interest in everything her late husband had once owned. “As a widow, I can certainly do that.”

“Might be, but that’d take a lawyer. Once he got a whiff of gold, he’d move in with his fancy papers, and then first thing you know, he’d be a-holdin’ his papers agin’ us and a-driving us out, just like what happened to the Cherokee.” It had been Heck who had explained it to her, patient and enigmatic as ever. “Short o’ shootin’ him and buryin’ the evy-dence, there ain’t much we could do ’bout it.”

She’d been playing the same game ever since. Trying to escape, and when that failed again and again, trying to reason with the world’s most unreasonable people.

“There has to be a better way,” she told herself. “No one can keep a woman prisoner in her own house, not in these modern times. Not here in the United States of America.”

The trouble was, the modern times had never reached Dexter’s Cut, much less Devin’s Hill.

A bitter laugh escaped her to mingle with the sounds of birds, the soughing of the wind in the trees and the distant yapping of those dratted dogs.

Nice dogs, actually—she’d lured one of them up here a few times for something to do. Something to talk to. He’d even allowed her to scratch behind his long ears. But the dog was free and she wasn’t, and so she railed against the dogs, and against her gentle and not so gentle backwoods prison guards.

Devin’s Hill, every wild, wooded acre of it, including the creek and the three-room cabin, was still a prison, no matter how lovely the surroundings in the springtime.

No matter how cold and lonely in the winter.

At least she was finally learning to control her anger and resentment, knowing it only made her poor company for herself. But on a day like this, when spring was more than a promise, she was frustrated beyond bearing. Was she fated to grow into an embittered old woman here all alone?

Scratching idly at a poison ivy blister on her wrist—her first of the season—Eleanor sat on the edge of the porch again, her limbs spread apart in a most unladylike fashion, and tried to think of some means of escape she hadn’t yet tried. She couldn’t think of a single thing. Lacking stimulus, her brain had ceased to function.

Maybe she could bribe them by offering again to hold classes. The last time she’d offered, Miss Lucy, spokes-woman for the clan, had told her the Millers didn’t want her teaching them any of her highfaluting notions. Miss Lucy herself taught any who wanted to learn how to make their letters; their parents taught them whatever else they deemed worthy of knowing. All the rest was the devil’s handiwork. A more narrow-minded lot she had never met.

It explained a whole lot, to Eleanor’s way of thinking.

And now another winter had gone by. Two years since she’d become a bride, five months since she’d become a widow and a prisoner.

It was spring again, and she was so blasted lonesome she could have howled. Beat her fists on the floor, kicked rock walls—anything, if it would have done her a lick of good.

“A lick of good,” she whispered. She was even beginning to talk the way they did—a college educated woman.

Some days, she questioned her own sanity. What if by some miracle she did manage to escape? Where would she go? She had no money, no relatives—she certainly would never beg from her friends—but unless she managed to secure a position immediately, she would have no place to live and no way to support herself.

Here, she at least had a roof over her head and enough to eat.

But if she stayed here she would eventually turn into that other woman. The Elly Nora who went barefoot and talked to herself—who whistled back at birds and carried on conversations with chickens. The Elly Nora who’d been known to stand on a stump and loudly recite poetry to keep her brain from drying up like a rattling gourd.

She was just plain lonesome, dammit. And growing just a wee bit strange in the head.

Fighting a sense of hopelessness, she licked her fingers, greasy from eating fried chicken. “Miss Eleanor, your manners are shocking,” she said dryly. “Simply shocking.”

She shrugged and stared out at the hazy blue ridges in the distance. “Miss Eleanor, you can take your blasted manners and go dance with the devil, for all the good it will do you.”

She shook her head. “Talking to yourself, Eleanor?”

“And who else would I talk to? Oh, I do beg your pardon—to whom would I speak, if not myself?”

Lord, she missed the sound of another human voice. Days went by between the briefest exchanges. After nearly half a year of living alone, she would even have welcomed Devin’s constant carping again.

From the day a few weeks after they were married when he had rushed in all excited, claiming to have struck a tiny new vein of gold, all pretense of being a loving bridegroom had disappeared. Gone was the handsome, charming young man who had come down from the mountain in search of a rich wife. In his place was a taciturn stranger who came up from his precious mine only when hunger and exhaustion drove him above ground. He even…stunk! No time to bathe, he’d claimed. No time to do more than gobble down whatever food she had cooked and look around for something else of value that he could sell in order to buy more equipment.

She would see his measuring eyes light on the slipper chair that had belonged to her mother, or the little desk where she had once graded papers. Then, in a day or so, one of the Millers would roll up to the front door with a wagon, and Devin would apologize so sweetly.

“It’s just an old chair, Elly Nora,” he’d said when the slipper chair had disappeared. “A few more months and I’ll be able to buy you a whole set of chairs and a table to match. We’ll drive right up to the front door of that factory over in Hickory and you can pick out anything you want. If it don’t fit, we’ll build us another house to hold it all,” he promised.

Soon she discovered just how worthless his promises were. Convinced he was only days away from the vein his grandfather had found and then lost, he had worked day and night. Too tired to eat, drink or sleep, he had soon ceased even pretending to be polite to Eleanor.

Eleanor was convinced that his exhaustion had contributed to his death. Hector said he’d miscalculated the length of fuse. For whatever reason, he hadn’t made it out of the drift in time. In a single moment, Eleanor had gone from being a disillusioned bride to being a destitute widow.

They needn’t worry about her marrying an outsider. Having once been married for her tiny savings account, a small house and a few pieces of old furniture, she would wither up and blow away before she considered marrying another man.

Wiping her fingers on a square of gingham that had been torn from one of her old aprons, she stood in the doorway and tossed the chicken bone outside. “You’re welcome, my friends,” she said, knowing that sooner or later some creature would come creeping out of the woods to snatch up the bounty.

In the distance, the dog barked again. Someone was firing a rifle. She’d heard several shouts earlier, but couldn’t tell what they were yelling about. Drinking again, no doubt. Run a few traps, plant a few rows of corn, pan for hours and dig more holes in the ground—that was the daily life of a Miller of Dexter’s Cut. After that, they would take out the jugs of white lightning and celebrate whatever it was such people found to celebrate.

Evidently they were celebrating now. Perhaps someone had actually discovered a few grains of gold, although the noise sounded as if it were coming from higher up on the hill rather than lower down, where most of the panning was done.

Curious, Eleanor sat and watched the shadows lengthen, watched the lightning bugs come out. She listened to the sounds of the dying day, to the bird that always sang just at dusk, whose name she could never remember. To the sound of some small animal thrashing through the underbrush.

Thrashing through the underbrush?

Not her animals. They crept. They clucked and scratched or browsed. They hopped or flew, and a few even slithered. None of them ever thrashed.

Swinging her bare feet, she continued to watch the edge of the laurel slick, searching for whatever had made the odd noise. It sounded almost like…a groan?

And then her eyes widened and she was on her feet. “Oh, my mercy!” Racing toward the edge of the clearing, Eleanor reached out to catch the battered creature that stumbled through the rhododendrons and staggered toward her. A few feet away, she stopped, suddenly wary.