The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn (23 page)

Besides, she didn’t know how long she’d be the one managing their hearth.

The arranging of supplies took the afternoon, since Jesse sorted through every sack and cask to be sure she knew the contents of each. Cade hadn’t returned when Tamsen came down from the loft a final time and found Jesse at the table, reading. Jesse told her that along with bullet lead, sugar, coffee, and the rest, Cade never failed to bring home a new book each autumn, when one was to be had.

“Gulliver’s Travels,”
he said, looking up from its pages with a brow quirked. “You read it?”

“I have.” And never felt more sympathy with the titular character in his outlandish travels as she did now. She moved to the hearth to take stock of the utensils with which she had to work, putting from her mind the kitchen house in Charlotte Town, richly appointed by comparison.

Behind her Jesse said, “Don’t go telling me how the story ends. I best stop now, though. I told Cade I’d milk that cow.”

Tamsen faced him as he stood, closing the book almost reverently. “I can do the milking.”

“You can milk a cow?”

She hadn’t milked a cow since she was little—they’d had Dell for such chores. “I told you, I don’t expect to be waited on hand and foot.”

It came out sharper than intended, but Jesse only paused a beat before he said, “I’m coming with you all the same.”

“I don’t need company.”

“You might need this.” He reached for a low stool set near the hearth, used to spare a back when bending over pan or griddle. Then he took up his rifle. “And I’ll show you where the piggin’s kept.”

The milking took longer to master than she’d hoped, but finally her fingers remembered the way of it and the creamy liquid squirted into the
piggin. The cow proved as gentle as its eyes, taking to her awkward handling without fuss.

“She likes you.” Chewing a blade of straw, Jesse leaned one shoulder against a post.

Tamsen glanced at the rifle propped beside him. “Did you mean to shoot her if she didn’t?”

He laughed. “No. I never leave the cabin without my rifle.”

“Even to go to the necessary?” She’d found that needful structure, set back behind the stable.

She’d been trying to lighten their mood, but his tone sobered. “The Overhill Cherokees know me and Cade and none got quarrel with us. But it don’t do to let your guard down. There’s others none so peaceful, like the Chickamaugas.”

Tamsen’s fingers fell slack on the cow’s teat. “You’re talking about Indian raids?”

“I’m talking about paying heed to what’s around you. Never assuming that stick-crack you hear when fetching water at the creek is a harmless coon or deer. And never striking off into the woods without me or Cade alongside you.”

Unnerved, she turned back to the milking, temple pressed against the cow’s warm side. “I won’t go into the woods.”

“Not till I teach you to shoot.”

She raised her brows at that but decided not to argue. Maybe learning to protect herself wasn’t a bad idea. “What was that word you said? Chick-something?”

“Chickamaugas.”

“I’ve heard that name before. Who are they?”

“Cherokee, most of ’em.” Jesse laced his arms across his chest. “A few years back some of the warriors split off from the Overhill chiefs who wanted peace but kept making treaties that just got broke over and over. A warrior called Dragging Canoe leads them. They settled on Chickamauga
Creek and took that name for themselves. There’s others joined ’em now. Creeks. Some Shawnees from up north.”

It sounded as complicated as Franklin and North Carolina, though more terrifying. “Is there something in the water hereabouts that makes people turn against their own?”

Jesse gave a low chuckle. “I’d say you were on to something—if we hadn’t just come through that war with the Crown. Seems it’s human nature, taking sides. Only one thing brings folk together, preacher says.”

“What’s that?”

“Love.”

She turned her face toward him and saw his eyes widen. Blushing faintly, she looked to the milking. “Coming from Reverend Teague, I suppose—”

A flit of movement at ankle height made her jump. A gray cat slithered between the stall boards and took up post near a cloven hoof, tail curled over paws, gaze expectant. It licked its mouth with a pink tongue.

Tamsen smiled as her heartbeat settled. “Presumptuous creature.”

“You fancy cats?” Jesse asked, sounding glad for the distraction.

“Better than dogs.” In truth she’d never called either a pet. Animals in the house had made Mr. Parrish sneeze.

“Cade must’ve told this one we got us a cow. It’s from over the ridge. One of the Allards’.”

“I’m getting the milk into the bucket but doubt I can aim at a cat’s mouth. That seems to be what it wants.”

“Likely so. Janet keeps cows and goats. She made the butter and cheese she brought us.”

The cow brushed its tail across Tamsen’s head and shifted its stance, making the cat leap to a safer spot. Tamsen stroked a warm flank, her thoughts sliding away from cats and cows. They settled on Jesse’s father.

He put her in mind of the mountains, did Cade. Earlier he’d reassured her with such strong and touching words, yet she sensed much of
what went on in his mind he chose to conceal, like the misty haze that often wrapped the mountains they’d crossed. She’d learned how treacherous those mountains could be, up close. How much of Cade was still that warrior, Wolf-Alone?

“I was wondering … about your father.” Her words broke into the shuffling of contented stock, the liquid spill of milk.

Jesse tossed away the straw he’d been chewing. “What of him?”

She averted her face while she moved to the last teat. “How old is he?”

“Forty, maybe, give or take. Why not ask him?”

“I wouldn’t dare.”

A beat of silence passed. “You aren’t afraid of him, are you?”

Afraid
wasn’t the word. But before she could reply, the horse nearest the barn door loosed a whinny. Jesse snatched up the rifle so fast it seemed to leap into his hands. As Tamsen rose to see what had alarmed him, he lowered the weapon.

Bethany Allard, capless and barefoot, stood in the stable doorway, bathed in the light of sunset, much as Tamsen had last seen her. With one difference. Instead of hostility on her peaches-and-cream face, there was a tentative smile.

Jesse exhaled a breath. “What’re you doing here, Beth?”

“I’ve come to say a thing to your … wife,” the girl said, faltering over that last word.

Jesse glanced at Tamsen. She moved the piggin so the cow wouldn’t overturn it, drew herself straight, and nodded. He looked back at the girl. “She’s listening. Go on and say it.”

Bethany took a step inside the stable. The gray cat bounded over to coil itself about her ankles, ignored. The girl’s face was shadowed, her voice childlike as she tossed back her unbound hair. “I’m sorry for my meanness yestereve. I come hoping you’ll kindly look past it so as maybe … we two could be friends?”

The man who abducted Miss Littlejohn had done a passable job of throwing him off their tracks. That much was clear to Charlie Spencer.

They’d crossed to the French Broad’s north bank by ferry, needing several trips to get horses, mules, dogs, men and their kit over safe. A day out from the crossing, stopped near the remains of a blockhouse once enclosed by a ridge-top palisade, Charlie fessed up to what was weighing on his mind. “Well, see, I ain’t certain for a fact now he
said
he was bound for the French Broad. As I recollect ’twere me named the place. All the feller did, best I remember, was say nothing to the contrary.”

Thunder grumbled among the lowering clouds, but the heavenly muttering was nothing to the storm gathering on the brow of Hezekiah Parrish, who flung a pointing finger east at the peaks they’d crossed. “Are you telling me my stepdaughter could be anywhere west of those mountains?”

Charlie clenched the lead mule’s rope, aware of the dogs ranging up along the crumble-down fort, leaving little squirts to mark the place. “Reckon so. Anywhere but on the French Broad.”

With pinched-set face and burning eyes, Kincaid looked toward the Tennessee country, spreading out to the north. “Much as I am loath to admit it, I believe someone would have given her up by now, was she here.”

Kincaid had got the notion to offer a reward for the girl’s return, hoping to spur help from folk inclined to hold their peace and protect a neighbor in his wrongdoing. Charlie’s brows had soared at the amount named, thinking he could skip a winter’s trapping on such a windfall. Twice
Kincaid had upped the prize, but nary a man had claimed it, though Charlie had seen a heap of want-to in many a hardscrabble farmer’s gaze.

Kincaid was no happier with him than Parrish, but he did what Charlie had seen him do a dozen times and more—swallowed back his anger and held himself in rigid silence.

It’d take a bigger fool than Charlie to expect the same from Parrish.

“You reckon so?” Parrish spat, dropping his horse’s reins and advancing on Charlie. “Why didn’t you
reckon so
back in Morganton, you scruffy, inept—”

Weren’t no knowing what Parrish meant to do with no weapon but his raised hand, on account of Kincaid bursting out of his rigid stance to step between them, catching Parrish by the arm. One of the dogs rushed over and pressed against Charlie’s knee, hackles raised. He needn’t glance down to know it was Nell, showing sharper teeth than Parrish could boast.

Kincaid strong-armed Parrish back a pace. “How well are you able to recount the speech of the man who ferried us across that river yonder?”

Parrish snatched his arm free. “To what purpose should I recall his blather at all?”

“Precisely so,” Kincaid said with better grace than Charlie could’ve mustered. “What reason had Mr. Spencer to recall the exact words of a stranger met in passing, knowing naught of the need?”

Parrish grudgingly accepted the point as fair but was no less livid for it. “What, then? Do you both mean to abandon me—and her?”

It was a chill wind blowing those heavy clouds overhead. A cold spatter of rain pelted Charlie’s face.

“We’ll find Miss Littlejohn,” Kincaid said. “It will simply take longer than anticipated.”

Taking leave to doubt the
simply
part, Charlie saw the question coming before Kincaid put it to him. Was he willing to act their guide through the settlements to the north, perhaps along the Nolichucky? There would be compensation for his services …

“To that we ought both to be committed.” Kincaid cut a look at Parrish, whose face closed up tight, leaving nothing to read but resentment careening across his eyes like rocks down a slope.

Parrish’s lack of answer didn’t escape him, but Charlie had seen enough of Kincaid to trust he was a man of his word. If he said he’d pay Charlie for the aggravation they were asking of him, he would pay. If he said he’d find Miss Littlejohn, by heaven or the other place, he’d do that too.

“I aim to be on the Holston afore snow falls,” Charlie said, reminding himself this was for the sake of that suffering girl he’d seen back in the mountains. “But I can go by way of Greenville. That’ll take us back along the Nolichucky.”

As they led their animals down off the ridge into the trees, moods darker than the weather, Charlie resolved that, girl or no girl be found, beyond Greenville he’d be done with these two.