Bride of the Shining Mountains (The St. Claire Men) (2 page)

One at a time she could best them, but in force she knew she could
not. Whatever they had in mind, her best chance at escape lay in outwitting
them, then taking to her heels—over the fields and into the woods, where she
could hide until the trio lost patience and gave up the search.

As the two circled around her, she kicked off Luck’s old boots and
feinted to the left.

Lafe dashed in to stop her, but Reagan was ready, coiling her arm,
and let go with a blow that rocked him right off his feet.

Lafe let loose a hideous howl, but the blow had only stunned him,
and in an instant he was on his feet again, grappling for a hold on her arm.
Reagan shook him off, landing another wild punch, while Luther called advice
from a safe distance, “Circle ’round her, boys! Get hold of her arms! She can’t
best two of ye at once!”

Reagan danced back and away, ducking beneath their grasping
hands, slipping and sliding in the greasy mud. “Get clear from me, you apes!”
she cried. “I warn you, I’ll not be carted off bodily and dumped on that old
reprobate’s doorstep while there’s breath left in my body! You’ll have to kill
me first!”

Luck lunged, the sack at the ready. Reagan skidded to one side, and
almost fell. She tried to skitter away, but the ground was too slick, and she
slid to a wobbly halt a hand’s breadth away from Luck and his sack.

Before she could cry out, before she could launch a counterattack,
he swooped, and Reagan’s world went dusty and dim. In an instant the rope was
tied tightly around her, pinning her arms at her sides.

Enveloped in the grimy burlap shroud, she coughed and sputtered,
the smell of moldering corn and dust assaulting her sensitive nostrils. “You
miserable”—
cough
—“unshod heathens! When I get loose, you’ll rue this day, I
swear!”

Luck’s toneless voice came through the sack as they grasped the
short length of rope that held up her breeches and flung her face down over the
waiting mule’s back. “Easy now, sis. No need to fret yourself sick; we won’t be
cartin’ you off to Jim Singer’s. We’re takin’ you with us to the Shinin’
Mountains to get you a man, whether you want one or not.” Chuckling, he patted
her sack-shrouded head as Reagan loudly vented her fury. “Take care, now, not
to wriggle too much. You’re liable to fall off the mule halfway to Saint Louie,
and drown yourself in the muck.”

On the Popo Agie River The Rocky Mountains August, 1829

The day had been uncomfortably warm, with the sultry sort of
airlessness common in towns and cities in late summer, but exceedingly rare in
the higher elevations. Even now, with the sun slipping down behind the red
sandstone bluffs and twilight close at hand, not a whiff of a breeze was
evident.

Crouched in the shadows cast by a rickety wooden dais, with her
hands bound behind her back, Reagan Dawes scanned the sea of leather-clad
scarecrows milling near the base of the platform, trying to ignore the nervous
thudding of her heart.

It was impossible. As much as she wished it otherwise, she could
not ignore the ugly, terrifying truth: that unless she could escape her bonds,
she would soon be forced to mount those steps, to stand before this very crowd
and be sold as a mate to the highest bidder, a fate she was desperate to avoid.

Biting her lip, Reagan clutched the sharp sliver of stone all the
harder, contorting her hands so painfully in an effort to reach her bonds that
she thought her bones would snap.

The stone was small and difficult to maneuver, but the agony of
stretching and straining sinew and tendon was nothing compared to the anguish
failure would bring.

That knowledge alone kept Reagan doggedly working the improvised
tool back and forth, back and forth, while darting occasional glances at the
twins standing guard a short distance away, waiting—every bit as anxiously as
the milling throng—for the auction to begin.

As Reagan paused to ease the cramp in the base of her thumbs, a
chill of pure foreboding slithered up her spine, and for what seemed the
thousandth time that day, she mouthed a fervent prayer: “Please, God, if you
can’t see fit to help me escape, then at least strike me dead before this farce
begins.”

The cramp eased, and Reagan redoubled her efforts, as determined
to elude her fate as Luther seemed to seal it.

Three months had passed since she’d laid her mother to rest in the
small family plot and walked into Luther’s ambush. Three months, and she still
could not seem to countenance the fact that he truly meant to find her a man in
so cruel and uncaring a fashion.

Oh, it was true that Luther had been something less than an ideal
stepfather. He’d been hardheaded, and at times even unreasonable, yet he’d
never been cruel or abusive to Reagan or the boys... at least, not until that
last day in Bloodroot, when with the help of her half brothers, he’d bound her
hand and foot, slung her across Mariah’s back, and carted her off to the west.

At first she’d thought the kidnapping a ploy to frighten her into
accepting Jim Singer’s proposal. Yet as the days turned into weeks, and the
weeks to months, and Reagan found herself being borne across the broad
Mississippi and high into the Rocky Mountains, she began to realize the depth
of Luther’s determination.

Having grown impatient with her reluctance to wed, he intended to
find her a mate, and that end seemed to justify his means considerably.

Sweeping the gathering with a hurried glance, Reagan felt a surge
of alarm. Strangely enough, Jim Singer, eighty years old and as cantankerous as
a colicky mule, was looking a good deal more desirable as a husband just now
than he had back in Bloodroot.

The men who were gathered in tight little knots across the open meadow
were a hard-looking lot. Most made their living plying the rivers and creeks
here in the high country, in search of brown gold—beaver pelts—which they in
turn brought to rendezvous like this one. Rendezvous—annual gatherings of
hunters, trappers, traders, and Indians—were held each year at a predetermined
location somewhere in the mountains, and served a number of needs.

Most men came to sell their furs and to resupply, to buy or trade
for sufficient sundry items, traps, horses, or firearms, to see them through
another year. Others came to socialize, to drink, to game, to break the
monotony of life in the high country... to escape for a little while the
hardships and dangers of their peculiar existence, where far more men met an
early and often violent death than ever made their fortune.

It was a life that Reagan was not anxious to share... and so she
ignored the cramp in her thumbs from clutching the stone too tightly, and kept
up her
scrape, scrape, scrape,
pausing at intervals to test her bonds.

Luck sashayed near enough to send her a squirrel-eyed look. “What
you wriggling for, Reagan? You got an itch or somethin’?”

Luck’s question caught brother Lafe’s attention before Reagan had
time to answer. He approached his brow furrowing and a look of keen concentration
coming over his thin face. “Looks more like quiverin’ than wrigglin’ to me, but
maybe we ought to ask Pa, just to be certain.”

Luck’s expression darkened. “Ain’t no need to ask Pa. She’s our
sister, ain’t she? And we kin tell what’s what. Now shut up ’n’ watch her for a
spell. I’ve gotta take a leak, ’n’ I don’t mean to do it with all these strange
folks watchin’.”

“Better stay clear of the bushes, Luck,” Reagan quipped. “If a
panther jumped out and, with a swipe of his paw, changed you from a he to a
she, Luther’d connive to sell you, too; make no mistake!”

“Would not,” Lafe said in his brother’s absence; then after
pondering a moment, he added, “Would he?”

Reagan shrugged her slim shoulders beneath her too-large shirt.
“He’s sellin’ me, ain’t he?” Then, with feigned concern, she said, “Maybe you
ought to go with him, just to make certain he stays out of trouble. That boy
can’t lace his own boots without help.”

“Boots is sometimes passin’ stubborn,” Lafe mused, “but I expect
that you’re right. One sister’s enough. I don’t need no other.” Lafe turned and
started off in search of Luck, while Reagan pulled and strained with all her
might. She worked the rope until she feared she’d pull her hands clean off,
feeling the hemp bite into the tender flesh of her wrists; then all at once her
bonds gave way.

Freedom!

A heartbeat later she was sprinting through the tall grass,
ducking and weaving her way through the throng.

At the edge of the crowd, she glanced back and saw Lafe pause,
then slowly turn toward the dais. Then, seeming to realize that he’d been
duped, he set up a hue and cry. “Ah, damn it all, Reagan! You get yourself back
here this minute, or I’ll have to tell Pa!”

The threat spurred Reagan on. She’d had enough of Luther Garrett
and his crazy schemes.

Somehow she had to elude them, outwit them, find a place to hide,
to gather her wits and decide just what to do next.

Holding her battered felt hat tightly to her head, she rounded a
wagon and, from the cover it provided, dared another look back.

A dozen yards to the rear, Lafe was coming on fast. Close upon his
heels came Luck, who, gaining ground, grabbed his brother’s arm and swung him
around to face him. “Jackass! What’d ya leave her alone for, when I told ya to
watch?”

Lafe bellowed a defensive reply, and in an instant their exchange
dissolved into bickering and the placing of blame. Luck, insulted and outraged,
swung his fist at his brother, and the two went down in a confusing tangle of
limbs.

Giddy with relief, Reagan left the shelter of the wagon and ran
through the clearing, past hide-covered tepees, outside of which Indian wives
tended their cook fires, past bark lodges where men lazed in the tall grass
under the emerging stars... not slowing until the stitch in her side became too
much to bear.

On the fringes of the encampment, a few yards from a crudely
fashioned lean-to, she finally paused.

The structure, a three-sided affair built of supple skins
stretched over sapling poles that had been driven into the ground, was empty,
and except for the sleek bay stallion grazing nearby and the campfire burning
before the lean-to, the place appeared to be deserted.

Glancing around, Reagan warily approached, catching a whiff of
whatever the absentee owner had left on the spit. It was charred beyond recognition.
Edging closer, she sniffed the stuff suspiciously and felt her stomach rumble.

How long had it been since she’d eaten? A day? Two? Long enough
that her stomach felt hollow and her limbs shaky and weak, barely able to
support her now that the crisis had passed. She couldn’t go on much longer
without some sort of sustenance, and she reasoned that at this moment, she had
a far greater need of a meal than did the person who’d so carelessly left his
supper to broil over an open fire.

With barely a twinge of conscience, Reagan lifted the skewer off
the spit and slid the blackened meat from it.

To her delight, she found that only the outside was blackened. The
meat within was tender and succulent. Reagan picked her portion clean, threw
the bones into the red coals, and was reaching for the remaining piece when
Luther Garrett’s voice issued from the lengthening darkness. “Well, she can’t
have gone far, so find her, ye simpleminded ....
”

The rest was lost on Reagan. At the sound of Luther’s voice her
throat had gone tight and that same sinking sense of desperation that had
clawed at her vitals since this nightmare had begun back in Bloodroot came
winging back full force.

The untouched portion of her pilfered dinner still clutched
tightly in her bloodless fingers, she slowly shrank back into the lean-to.

There was safety in the shadows, and only the sure knowledge that
more than a thousand miles of rough country lay between her and civilization
kept her from dashing headlong into the night.

Missouri Territory was a vast wilderness teeming with all manner
of dangers unheard of in Kentucky, and there was not a farm nor a settlement to
be found between here and Saint Louis. A woman alone, unarmed, and without
adequate provisions could not hope to survive the journey back, and Reagan was
terribly aware that if she was going to make good her escape, she must find
another way.

Pressed tightly against the wall of the lean-to, Reagan peered out
around it. The moonless night had completely overtaken the encampment; the
hundred-odd campfires flickering in various stages of combustion, combined with
the flaming pine knots affixed to the foremost comers of the wooden dais, could
no more dispel the darkness than could the blue-white stars overhead.