Sword of Vengeance (24 page)

“Not I,” said Wolf Jacket. “Him!” He turned and pointed toward a figure in the shadows, who upon command started forward. The recent arrivals to the Creek village began to marvel aloud as the firelight played off the ruby and gold hilt of the shadow man’s long knife. Here was a weapon of great power and magic.

Bill Tibbs had survived the explosion, survived the river. Battered and bleeding, he had blindly followed where the sword led him. He had lived. And with his every step the Eye of Alexander had fueled the black hatred in his heart for Kit McQueen, this shadow man, Bill Tibbs.

“I
’LL SHOOT THE FIRST
man who starts for home,” the gaunt general bellowed. He had planted himself smack-dab in the middle of the open gate, a few yards out from the stockade walls of Fort Strother. The men who were huddled in the gateway knew they could overpower any guard, but not one of the sixty men wanted to be sacrificed for the good of all the rest.

The volunteers were tired and hungry, and they had lost their enthusiasm for this war. Supplies were low, and reinforcements had yet to arrive. But these farmers had dutifully followed Jackson and did as they were ordered and built Fort Strother on the banks of the Coosa. It had taken the last week in November and the first fifteen days of December to erect the stockade walls and finish a cabin for the general, and cabins, no matter how incomplete, for the remainder of his command. Then the army began to vanish.

Men who had signed up for ten, twenty, or thirty days simply packed their meager belongings and left in droves. Most of the time, Jackson was the last to hear of these departures, as they usually occurred in the dead of night. Some volunteers simply went out on patrol and never came back. Jackson had crossed the Tennessee River with nearly a thousand volunteers; now his force had dwindled in size until it numbered barely a hundred and twenty men. And that wasn’t the end of his problems.

On this morning of the sixteenth of December another sixty men were preparing to depart, anxious to return to their farms and loved ones. Their leader, a hulking, buckskin-clad frontiersman by the name of Axel Griffin, had refused to sneak away. He was a solid, plainspoken man whose reputation for hard work, honesty, and courage had never been questioned. He had brought his Blue Ridge boys down from their hardscrabble farms to serve with Jackson. But their thirty days of service was ended. And as of yet, not a man among them had fired a gun in anger.

“Gen’l, you ain’t about to shoot me,” Griffin said. “Stand aside. If we leave now, chances are we’ll be home before the first snow.”

Jackson remained rooted in place. A wintry December breeze tugged at the hem of his black frock coat. The wind brushed his silvery hair forward, and he looked like some half-starved Medusa, threatening to turn these mutineers to stone.

Jackson leveled the pistol he had grabbed from Marcus Bellamy’s belt when the captain had brought word of Griffin’s intentions. The general had quite literally sprung from his sickbed, stolen his subordinate’s gun, and rushed across the campground to the gate, where he waited in the cold, gray light of morning for Griffin and his Blue Ridge boys to appear.

“What day is it?” Jackson called out to the husky farmer.

Griffin scratched his head beneath his coonskin cap. “Don’t rightly know, Gen’l.”

“It is the sixteenth of December,” Jackson replied in a hard, clipped tone. He aimed right between the woodsman’s eyes. “A man ought to know the day he dies. Even a mutineer like yourself.”

The Blue Ridge farmers behind Griffin began to grumble and move out of the line of fire, an action not lost on the amiable leader. Big Axel Griffin stared down the barrel of Jackson’s pistol. At a distance of fifteen feet the farmer was under no illusion that Jackson might miss.

“See here, Gen’l. There ain’t hardly enough food for the men you got. If’n we go, there’ll be fewer mouths to feed. We ain’t taken nothing but a handful of cornmeal and some jerked beef. Me and the boys can forage the rest and live off the land till we reach home.” Griffin held his work-roughened hands palm out in a gesture of peace. A pistol and a tomahawk remained tucked in his belt. He licked his lips, then scratched at his bushy brown beard.

Behind the men from the Blue Ridge Mountains, the remaining volunteers under Jackson’s command watched from their longhouses or straggled out into the compound for a better view of the confrontation. One man in particular, a tall, brooding figure with long, black hair, watched from the makeshift stable where he’d been saddling Bellamy’s horse and preparing to make a wide circle of the forest in search of any Choctaw scouts that might have ventured north.

Bill Tibbs had appeared at Fort Strother three weeks ago and presented himself as a survivor of the Hope Station massacre. Tibbs remembered with smug appreciation of his own cleverness how he had affixed the blame for the slaughter on Iron Hand and his warriors.

Wolf Jacket’s plan was working like a charm. Jackson not only accepted Tibbs’s story, but appointed him scout since he knew the countryside, and allowed him the use of the horses. Tibbs grinned as he watched the general try to stop another mutiny.

“If only you knew what the Red Sticks have in store for you, General, you’d join those Blue Ridge boys and skedaddle on back across the Tennessee River.” Tibbs adjusted the shoulder strap of the buckskin bag in which he kept the scimitar hidden from the soldiers in the fort.

“Yes, sir,” Tibbs muttered. A horse stamped and pawed the packed earth. Flies cut hectic spirals above the droppings. “Your troubles are just starting.”

Back at the gate Andrew Jackson quickly estimated the strength of his command at a hundred and thirty men. The loss of Griffin’s volunteers would be disastrous, depleting his force by half and leaving him with only a handful of soldiers to defend Fort Strother while awaiting Colonel William Carroll with reinforcements and the supply train. Jackson knew he had to stop this latest threat here and now.

“General, you got no right to call us mutineers,” Griffin exclaimed, stalling for time. He’d begun to believe Jackson meant business and intended to shoot him down. He wiped a hand across his mouth and stared up at the gunmetal-gray sky.

It was a cold, damp day with the smell of rain in the air. Griffin considered making a run for the woods; after all, the general only had one shot. But a man Griffin’s size made a good target, and the land on three sides of the fort had been clearcut, leaving forty yards of open ground. The Coosa River bordered the fourth side, and a man would be a fool to wade it under fire.

For a single fleeting moment the farmer considered a try for his own weapons. But that course only led to the gallows, certainly not home.

“We signed on in Nashville for thirty days. Captain Bellamy was there. Thirty days is up. And that’s what we agreed to. Ain’t that right, Captain?” Griffin turned toward the thickset, nervous officer standing off to one side. Bellamy, while not the most capable of officers, had exhibited an earnest desire to learn and showed compassion for the common soldier, qualities that had won him the respect of the volunteers.

Griffin glanced in Bellamy’s direction, but the captain was no longer paying attention to the confrontation at the gate. He was staring past both parties, toward the direction of the forest opposite the south wall of the fort, where two white men, the smaller one walking with a slight limp and the other nearly as large as a bear, approached the fort. Griffin looked in that direction, stepping aside to stare past Jackson. The general, muttering to himself, turned to look down the well-trampled path.

The trail disappeared once it reached the thicket of red bur oaks and sweet gum trees and shagbark hickory, the dense beginnings of a forest that peppered the hills and offered concealment to a thousand imagined enemies on blustery moonless nights.

But two strangers hardly posed a threat, so Jackson held his ground. He wasn’t about to scurry into the stockade like a frightened pup. He could see now that these newcomers were at least white men. They were no doubt stragglers from some other massacre perpetrated by the likes of that renegade O’Keefe.
Poor souls
, he thought.
Well, I’ll greet them myself.
The general from Tennessee wasn’t motivated by politeness. Whatever news he could glean from these new arrivals, Jackson wanted to be the first to hear.

The closer he came to Fort Strother, the more Iron Hand O’Keefe began to lag behind his companion.

Kit McQueen glanced aside at the big man. “Take courage, my friend.”

“Easy for you to say,” O’Keefe grumbled. “It ain’t you, McQueen, putting your head in the bear trap.”

“You’ve been in worse spots,” Kit replied. If Kit could keep the Irishman talking, the man wouldn’t bolt and make a dash for the tall timber. Kit studied the stockade.

That had to be Jackson standing before the gate, gun in hand. Kit had heard enough descriptions of the man to identify him on sight.

“What the devil is going on?” O’Keefe muttered. He eyed the stockade and counted half a dozen riflemen behind the parapets. More men were massed at the gate, and they looked armed to the teeth.

“Just like your runners said,” Kit replied. “Jackson’s been losing men. Looks like he’s about to lose some more.”

“Blast my soul, we should have waited,” O’Keefe lamented, scratching at his jaw with his iron hook.

“Rest easy, there,” Kit said. “Five can shoot us just as dead as fifty.”

“A discouraging notion—”

“And tuck away that hook, or you’ll have them opening up on us before I say my piece.”

Kit quickened his pace. He was dressed in his linsey-woolsey shirt and leather boots, but the remainder of his attire was Choctaw, from his buckskin overshirt to his fringed breeches that Raven herself had made for him, stitching the leggings with fine sinew.

O’Keefe wore the garb of his adopted people. His shaggy mane was adorned with a raven feather and fell in a silvery cascade across his massive shoulders. Both men could see the growing suspicion in Jackson’s eyes and in the faces of those behind him. Kit reached inside his shirt and removed a leather packet as he crossed the last few feet.

“General Jackson?” he asked, just to be on the safe side.

“Yes,” Jackson replied, studying the new arrivals. “Are you scouts for Colonel Carroll?”

Captain Bellamy left his position by the gate and moved up alongside his commanding officer. Axel Griffin and his Blue Ridge boys hung back inside the safety of the fort. The men on the walls anxiously scanned the line of trees, sensing movement in the underbrush.

“I am Lieutenant Kit McQueen of the United States Army. These papers will introduce me and explain why I am here.” He held out the leather pouch.

“So you are the young Hotspur,” Jackson said gruffly. His gut had begun to spasm, and his side ached. “Harrelson already alerted me as to your arrival. However, he made no mention as to your disregard for promptness, much less for military attire.” Jackson took the pouch and passed it to Bellamy, then briefly appraised Kit. “Save for your hair, I would have took you for a Creek or Choctaw. Hardly an officer.” Jackson stroked his lean jaw as he studied the young lieutenant. “Hmmm. So Dan McQueen was your father. I expected you to be larger.”

“As for my attire, I have been among the Choctaw,” Kit replied. “And I owe them my life. And as to my stature … I can hold my own.”

“The Choctaw let you live?” Bellamy blurted out. “We have heard they take prisoners only to torture them to death. Did you escape?” Realizing he had interrupted his commanding officer, Bellamy lapsed into an awkward silence.

“So you’ve visited the Choctaws,” Jackson continued, his disbelief obvious. “And I suppose you’ve brought Chief Iron Hand here as your prisoner,” he added jokingly. The general had yet to comprehend the identity of the rough-looking man standing behind Kit.

But O’Keefe wasn’t about to keep Jackson waiting. He brought his left arm out from behind his back and held the hook up in plain view.

“I ain’t nobody’s prisoner, General, sir. And never will be. I come along of my own free will.”

“By heaven, it is the renegade himself!” Bellamy exclaimed, and reached for his pistol.

Jackson snapped up the flintlock in his hand. The name spread among the ranks of the Blue Ridge boys and carried to the stockade walls. Iron Hand O’Keefe—war chief of the Choctaws!

One of Griffin’s men bolted across the compound, eager to spread the news that the Choctaw chief was outside the stockade. In the shadowy interior of the stable, behind the stout log walls that shielded the horses from the elements, Bill Tibbs cleared away a layer of chinking with his knife and watched through the peephole he had made for himself.

At the gate, Kit moved quickly to place himself in General Jackson’s line of fire. “Iron Hand comes as an ally,” he said.

“The butcher of Fort Mims and Hope Station and Lord only knows how many farms has the affrontery,” Jackson sputtered, “to come before me and expect me to welcome him instead of clap him in irons?”

“I suggest you lower your gun, General Jackson,” Kit said.

“Not until this villain is in chains!” Jackson answered.

“I wondered how best to convince you of O’Keefe’s intentions,” Kit began. He noticed the soldiers on the walls were increasing in numbers, and many of the men had their rifles trained on the Irishman. “Then it dawned on me, if I couldn’t do it alone, I’d bring help.” Kit slowly drew one of the pistols from his belt. Bellamy visibly tensed as Kit raised the weapon and fired into the air. The gunshot reverberated among the green hills, repeating itself as it faded into the somber gray sky. On his signal, the help he spoke of showed themselves. Three hundred Choctaw warriors materialized out of the forest and moved silently toward the fort. The effect on the men inside the stockade was instantaneous. Even Griffin’s volunteers forgot all about their Blue Ridge homes. They grabbed their rifles and headed for the walls.

Captain Bellamy looked thunderstruck. He stared in horror at the Choctaw host advancing on Fort Strother. His eyes fairly bulged in his head, and his mouth went dry.