The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn (32 page)

She looked up to find him waiting for her response. Warily she nodded. To her surprise Cade put aside his rifle, wiped his hands on a rag and took the Bible onto his lap.

“Teach me thy way, O L
ORD,”
he read, “and lead me in a plain path, because of mine enemies. Deliver me not over unto the will of mine
enemies: for false witnesses are risen up against me, and such as breathe out cruelty. I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the L
ORD
in the land of living. Wait on the L
ORD:
be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the L
ORD.”

Cade raised his face, and the gentleness in his eyes was that of a father, meant for her. It brought her to the swift brink of tears.
Wait on the Lord, be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart. Wait …

Wait and do nothing? She blinked back the tears, searching for words to ask what had prompted him to read that passage. Jesse’s presence didn’t register until he spoke.

“Tamsen? You all right?” He stood in the doorway, head bared, brow furrowed.

She sprang to her feet, wanting to go to him, hold him, beg him to stay with her, but she’d just told Cade she was fine with his going.

“I’m fine,” she’d blurted, and because she wasn’t, and couldn’t hide it, she’d taken the unfinished cloak to her room.

Now, as the venison juices sizzled on the embers, she tied off the final stitches of the lining, while her heart ached with wishing she’d been courageous like the passage admonished. In the morning Jesse would leave, and she vowed she wouldn’t cry again. At least, she amended, wiping at a defiant tear, she wouldn’t be
found
crying.

She almost missed the scurry of movement at the edge of the sunlight streaming through the open door. When she saw what made it, she forgot the venison. Forgot Jesse’s leaving and Cade’s surprising tenderness and the cloak she’d spent hours lining.

A bushy-tailed squirrel had gotten into the cabin.

At first she didn’t move, disbelieving her eyes. A squirrel so brazen as to come into the cabin in the middle of the day? But there the creature was, flitting through the sun patch into the shadowed corner where Cade kept his things, including the sack of dried venison and parched corn he’d put together for their journey. She couldn’t let the squirrel get that corn,
yet an irrational fear of its invasion held her frozen to the bench. For the tiniest instant, she wished Bethany were there.

Then something rose up in her, an indignation so great it shoved such immobilizing thoughts from her mind. Hurling the cloak to the floor, she snatched up the nearest weapon to hand, a long-handled twig broom. With it she rushed the corner where the squirrel had retreated.

It was no longer there. In the seconds she’d taken to grab the broom, it had scurried for the loft ladder and was climbing it like a tree, heading for their stores.

“No, you don’t. Shoo—get out!”

The squirrel froze at her advance, clinging to a rung halfway up. Brandishing the broom, she darted at it, hoping it wouldn’t climb higher but leap to the floor where she could swat it toward the door.

The squirrel did neither. Defying expectation—not to mention gravity—it sprang straight up the cabin wall, streaking up and over, higher than her head, scuttling across the logs like a giant furry spider.

Tamsen screamed. Broom extended, more shield than sword, she rushed after it. The squirrel leapt from the wall, narrowly missing her head, and dashed beneath the table.

Tamsen followed, overturning a bench with a clatter. The squirrel darted from under the table and dove beneath her discarded cloak. With a bark of triumph, she threw down the broom and scooped the creature up, muffled in wool and rabbit fur.

She had it trapped, but not subdued. It struggled wildly against the furs she’d painstakingly stitched. The horror of a live squirrel with teeth and claws in her hands overcame her nerve, and she hurled it away with a screech. Squirrel and cloak hit the puncheon boards and parted company.

Surely now it would make for the door and escape.

It didn’t. It darted back to Cade’s corner and whirled to face her, tiny legs splayed, chittering at her, scolding as if
she
were the intruder.

Fury drove out fear, and maybe all good sense as well, for afterward she wondered why she didn’t pick up the broom again instead of going for Cade’s pistol, still on the table after last night’s cleaning.

Perhaps by then she’d lost all sense of proportion.

After snatching up the weapon like a club, she hurtled toward the squirrel. It made another dash—for the door. With a curdled scream Tamsen flew after it and nearly sprawled over her own feet at what she saw blocking the creature’s exit—a man, silhouetted against the sunlight. The breechclout, leggings, and long shirt were right for Jesse or Cade, but the head wasn’t crowned with a hat or thick hair pulled back. It was plucked smooth save for a crest on top, tied with feathers and something that flashed and glinted.

As the squirrel ran a panicked circle in the doorway, the man spoke a word. It sounded like “see you.” He took a step inside the cabin, where she could see
him
better. Bronzed face. Black eyes. Silver earbobs. Tattoos. An Indian.

The squirrel leapt.

The Indian gave a startled cry, grabbing for the doorframe as the squirrel clawed its way up one fringed legging, launched itself into the air, and was gone—leaving Tamsen nowhere left to spend her fury save on this new and more ominous intruder.

Still screaming, she came at the doorway, pistol raised, while a part of her brain calmly informed her that she’d been dead wrong about how fierce a full-blooded Indian could look. Then she swung the pistol at his head.

He ducked. The pistol swept through empty air, throwing her off balance. A sinewy hand shot out and plucked the weapon from her grasp.

Tamsen scurried to the corner where the squirrel had sought refuge. The Indian straightened and faced her, pistol clenched. She thought of trying to reach the hearth, grabbing for tongs, poker, frying pan—but it was too far. They stared at each other, Tamsen with her heart galloping,
scalp prickling at sight of the gleaming hatchet at the Indian’s belt. He didn’t reach for the weapon. Aside from her pistol, he seemed to have no other on his person.

“I do not know you, little squirrel chaser,” he said, wariness in his jutting face, something else dancing in his eyes. “But if I give this back, you promise not to hit me with it?”

Grasping the pistol by the barrel, he offered her the stock. Struck dumb by his flawless English, Tamsen moved to take the proffered weapon. The Indian didn’t loosen his grip.

“Or hit me with any other thing?” he added in addendum to his terms. “We have peace between us, you and me?” He waited until she nodded, then released the weapon to her.

“
Osda
. Good. I seek Wildcat—known as Jesse Bird. This is his cabin still?”

Tamsen worked her mouth, soundless as a landed fish at first. “I—He—You know Jesse?”

The Indian’s brows were plucked clean, but the place where they should have been arched high. “You are his woman? Ha! A wildcat and a squirrel chaser have joined blankets? Or maybe it is two wildcats. Ha-ha!”

It dawned on Tamsen then—what she’d seen dancing in the Indian’s eyes before was laughter. He was fizzing with it now, his whip-lean frame convulsing. Shock and bewilderment swirled around her like stars, but uppermost in her mind was relief—brought on as much by the sight of such a terrifying face crinkled in glee as his speaking Jesse’s name.

“Osda,”
he said again. “It is only too bad the squirrel got away.”

Tamsen felt a smile tug her own mouth. Then a giggle rose in her throat, born half of hysteria, irrepressible.

That was how Jesse found them, Tamsen clutching the pistol, giggling in helpless mirth with an Indian in the cabin’s front room.

“Bears? What’re you doing here?”

The Indian turned to Jesse, blocking the light from the doorway. “
Siyo
, brother. I am making peace treaty with your woman.”

It was amazing, in a day of amazements, the shade of red that bloomed in Jesse’s face at the Indian’s words. And that he didn’t correct the assumption. “Sounds like you’re making headway. But how’d you know I had a woman here to be making treaty with?”

“I did not know. It is why Creator sent me, maybe. My father sends me for another purpose.”

“Sit and tell me about it.” Jesse glanced at Tamsen, the fierce color ebbing from his still-bruised face. He started to smile at her, perhaps in reassurance, then sniffed the air and looked to the hearth. Tamsen set down the pistol and rushed to tend the roasting meat as Jesse said to the Indian, “You’ve arrived in time to fill your belly, as usual. No dead cows this time. You’ll have to content yourself with venison.”

“It is good,” the Indian said, then added with a sliding glance at Tamsen. “Since I cannot get squirrel.”

She muffled the urge to break into hysterics again. Jesse looked between them, then shook his head and ducked out of the cabin. He brought in a rifle and bow, which the Indian must have left outside the door. As they were seated, Jesse explained for Tamsen’s benefit that Catches Bears was the brother of the woman whose wedding they were shortly to attend.

She felt Jesse’s gaze as she took up a platter and began carving the venison to fill it.

“You all right? You weren’t fixing to shoot Bears, were you?”

“No. I meant to club him.”

Bears threw back his head and laughed. “I will have a story to tell my father about this one. He will be amused.”

Jesse glanced at her, but his attention was soon diverted as Bears explained his presence. His father, it fell out, had moved his family away from Chota. Others had followed. “Dragging Canoe has Chota’s warriors
all stirred up,” Bears said. “We found a new place where my father thinks we can be left in peace. I am to show you the way.”

The Indian angled a look at Tamsen as she set the meat platter on the table, the teasing glint back in his eyes as he said to Jesse, “It is a thing to wonder at, finding such a woman as this to put up with you—despite your misfortune to be found by Shawnees before a Cherokee could come along and make a proper man of you.”

Jesse suffered the ribbing with a wry smile. “I wonder at it with every breath I draw,” he said and leveled her a look of such unabashed admiration it rooted her to the floor, unable to look away.

Cade came into the cabin then, breaking the moment, Tate Allard on his heels. Tamsen turned to fetch a pot of corn soup left from dinner, heart pounding with joy for what she’d seen in Jesse’s eyes, wishing desperately that her cabin wasn’t suddenly full of men, when she wanted only one.

The clouds hugging the sodden hills had sunk as low as Charlie Spencer’s spirits. Bedeviled by a cold and cheerless rain the length of the Nolichucky, he, Kincaid, and Parrish had found no trace of Miss Littlejohn. Despite his vow to the contrary, Charlie had agreed to stay the course to Jonesborough.

Inside the hamlet’s log tavern, a cup of applejack cradled in reddened hands, from his bench by the hearth, Charlie half-listened to the talk of patrons in the smoky taproom, while Kincaid showed ’round the portrait—a scene reenacted too many times to recount. Parrish had left them to it, gone to the courthouse to make inquiries.

Sick to death of the fruitless mess, Charlie sent his thoughts scouting down other trails, one of which, to his surprise, still headed east—down the Yadkin River to his farm in the Carraways. It was years since he’d seen it, tucked up in those hogback ridges rising from the piedmont … But the Holston, the long hunt, buffalo, beaver, bear … that was the second trail unspooling before him. Yet the more Charlie gazed down it, the fainter it grew. He faced his mind east, considering. He’d dipped deep into his supplies, but there was the promised payment from Kincaid to make it up. Maybe wintering back east wasn’t a bad proposition. Might be right peaceful after the past few weeks.

Going east to find peace and solitude—who’d have thought such a notion would cross his mind? Maybe fire and applejack had fuzzed his thinking. He ought to go outside, clear his head. Too much damp hide and woolens stinking up the place.

“Spencer!”

Kincaid stood over by the cage bar, next to a table where a man and woman sat, grizzle headed both, gesturing as if at odds. Charlie thought at first it’d been more time and breath wasted. Then he knew their luck had changed. Kincaid wore the look of a man shaken from fretful dreams.

Charlie crossed the room, cup in hand. Half-cleaned stew plates and crumbled bread littered the table. At the edge of the boards was Miss Littlejohn’s face, staring up from its tiny oval frame.

“She was there,” the woman was saying, not for the first time, going by her tone. Fleshy cheeked and sharp nosed, she jabbed the board next to the miniature. “Perched on the end of that bench inside the door.”

The man grimaced, showing a string of meat stuck betwixt his teeth. “Which time? We been to that confounded courthouse thrice trying to square that deed.”