The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn (45 page)

“We won’t go back,” Cade said again.

The horse danced sideways, made nervous by their tension. Jesse fought it around to face Cade. “Why?”

“Thanks to the Trimbles, they’ve put a name to your face. Every county sheriff’s looking out for you. Franklin, Carolina both. You can’t go back to Sycamore Shoals or show your face anywhere Kincaid’s been.”

“Don’t you mean Parrish? Or is there something ’bout that redheaded varmint you ain’t told me?”

“Jesse!” Cade’s tone was harsher than Tamsen had ever heard. “We got seconds to set our course.”

Jesse relented, his voice edged too. “Make for the Cumberland Gap?”

Cade looked at Tamsen, misgiving in his eyes. The horse shifted again, swinging her nearer. “Haven’t I proved I can live anywhere I must?”

She expected argument, but it didn’t come. Perhaps she looked the part of a frontier wife, dressed in deerskins, clutching her husband’s rifle. Jesse chose that moment to pluck it from her grasp and settle it across his thighs. She raised her chin and aimed every ounce of determination she’d earned at Cade. It must have been enough.

“Kentucky, then. Something happens, if we’re parted, make for that bend in the Holston—last winter’s camp.”

“I mind it.” Jesse kicked the horse to follow Cade through the emptying village.

They were heading into the wilds again, this time in the heart of the coldest winter Tamsen could remember. As were Thunder-Going’s people. Guilt thickened in her throat at the memory of White Shell and Blackbird fleeing to the woods. She pressed her face to the bearskin crossing Jesse’s back as he guided the horse between trees, leaping deadfalls, skirting those too large to clear, following Cade along the base of a bluff, then up the side in a break where a deer path climbed.

They’d gone but a mile through ridge-cut forest when Cade pulled up, a hand raised. Jesse reined in. Tamsen’s grip on his waist tightened to keep from sliding off the saddleless horse. He and Cade swung their rifles, pointed back over an icy stream they’d just crossed. Jesse heard the
branch-cracking thud of a rider coming fast, heedless of stealth. He raised his rifle, finger twitching on the trigger.

A shout rang out. Horse and rider came into view. Jesse whipped the rifle’s barrel skyward. “Bears!”

Catches Bears hurtled his horse across the stream. “They come behind me.
S-qui:ya. He-ga!
” Too many. Go!

They whirled their horses, Tamsen clutching Jesse hard enough to pain the ribs he’d broken weeks back. Bears flew past them. They followed, letting the Cherokee pick their route through pine thickets and hardwoods, fallen timber and stones. A half mile on, another shout rose behind them. Jesse glanced back to see the trunk of a beech explode in a shower of bark yards from Cade, bringing up the rear with the packhorse.

He could hear their pursuers as Bears led them up a thinly wooded slope, across the crest of which a massive sycamore lay fallen in twisted chunks over outcrop rock, skirted by a growth of laurel. It was a natural palisade, thicker than a fort wall, yet when he saw what Bears intended, instinct screamed against it.

Fight or flight. The impulses warred. But the riders were too close to elude. They’d make a stand, try to warn them off. Failing that, pick them off.

Cade and Bears had dismounted. Jesse slid down and pulled Tamsen to her feet, shoving the reins of their horse at her. Scanning their position, he saw no better cover for her than the looming wall of rock she sheltered behind. “Keep the horses near. They won’t bolt at gunfire.”

“But if they do?”

“Let ’em go. Stay in cover, no matter what happens.”

She clutched his coat sleeve. Fear trembled her voice. “Jesse …”

He pulled her to him and kissed her, hard and swift. “I love you.”

Rifle in hand, he dodged a break between the rock and a section of the sycamore and crouched beside Cade. Back to the downed tree, he checked his priming, heaved in an icy breath, and whirled to take aim.

Bears popped up from behind a stone several paces beyond Cade, aimed his rifle down-slope and fired, then ducked back to reload. The breeze bore sulfurous powder smoke across their faces, stinging Jesse’s throat.

A shot from below nipped the stone that shielded Bears, sending slivers of rock flying. They missed Cade, crouched low to aim through a gap under the fallen sycamore, but struck the side of Jesse’s face like needles. One missed his eye by a hair. He swiped a hand across his stinging cheek, smearing blood.

Another shot cracked. Cade’s rifle answered. Through the rising smoke, Jesse looked to Tamsen. She was pressed against the stone, white face staring from her hood. The horses shielded her from behind.

Silence fell, ringing with gunfire’s echo. Smoke hung over the hilltop. Cade fished out ball and patch. “I hit someone. Winged or felled, I don’t know.”

Jesse edged to the left, taking up position at the same gap Cade was using, gaining a better view of the terrain below. A drift of powder smoke marked where the last shot was fired. Rifle trained on the trees near the smoke, he looked for a scrap of clothing, a shift of movement. “They got to know Tamsen’s with us. They can’t be firing to hit.”

“Maybe trying to flank us. Cut her out.”

Like wolves with a herd.

“I will see.” Bears started to rise, but Jesse waved him down.

“Stay in cover,” he began, then Tamsen’s urgent voice made him look away from Bears.

“Jesse! Let me go down to them.”

He looked down-slope, pretending he hadn’t heard, chest constricted with fury and fear.

“No,” Cade said for him, ramming patch and ball down the muzzle of his rifle.

“We can’t keep running this way,” she persisted. “Let me go talk to—”

“I won’t let you go to him.” Jesse pressed his shoulder against the
bulwark of the sycamore and took his eyes off the forest below. “There’s nothing you can say would make me trust you to your stepfather.”

Tamsen’s face was torn with pleading. “Mr. Kincaid may listen.”

“Pa,” Jesse said, turning in desperation. “Maybe if
I
go down—”

“No, Jesse,” Cade said with unsettling conviction. “That’s a worse idea yet. He’ll take you in custody for murder, abduction, whatever else Parrish wants, if he doesn’t kill you first. He’ll take what he wants—your wife—and won’t heed even her pleading. Not if he’s anything like—”

Jesse was staring at his pa, baffled at how he could know such things, when another report shattered the cold. Not from below, but along the crest of the slope.

Bears was no longer beside them. Jesse saw him several yards off, on his feet, spinning … falling. Shot.

Rising to a knee in the rimed duff, he raised his rifle toward the distant telltale patch of smoke and fired. Whether or not he hit the shooter, there was no return fire. Bears was up on an elbow, trying to drag himself toward his fallen gun. Jesse started to go to him. Cade yanked him back.

“Take her and leave. Before we’re surrounded.”

Jesse jerked free. “Bears—”

Cade grabbed him again, wrenching him nearly prone. “I’ll see to Bears.”

It sank in like a dagger’s thrust, what his pa was telling him to do. “I’m not leaving you either.”

There was no relenting in Cade’s face. Only his eyes showed any hint of what he’d settled with himself, what he was offering. “Get her away. I’ll hold ’em off.”

Jesse felt his heart wrench. “Pa …”

“I saved you for more than what you’ll get at their hands. Make for the Holston. God willing, you’ll see me there.” Cade thrust him toward the rock where Tamsen hid.

“Wehpetheh!”
he all but shouted.

Go.

Snow sputtered from the hurrying clouds as they reached the foot of the ridge, where cane grew tall, spreading away for a winding distance as the land dropped toward a frozen creek bottom. Jesse guided the cantering horse along its edge until they struck a game trail leading in.

“Keep your knees in tight and hang on,” he told her and plunged them into the brake.

Behind the shield of his back, Tamsen made herself small, arms around his waist, shoulders clenching at the crack of gunfire behind them on the bitter air.

Even in the low-lying canebrake, the ground was iron hard, sheeted with ice that cracked beneath their passage. Jesse slowed the horse to a jostling lope, letting it pick the path—one Tamsen prayed wouldn’t peter out and leave them stranded in canes towering over their heads, growing too thick to see beyond a few yards in any direction.

Another shot rang out. Though its distance was reassuring, anxiety for Bears—and gut-wrenching dread for Cade—gripped her. Jesse reined the horse to a walk and pushed aside a leaning cane. As they passed beneath, he put a hand over hers at his waist. “We’re clean away. You hear me, Tamsen? We’ll be all right.”

She realized she was crying, that he’d felt her sobbing against his back. She dreaded asking. “Is Cade dead?”

In the circle of her arms, Jesse heaved a breath but didn’t answer at once. The horse bore them deeper into the brake.

“He’s come through worse,” he said at last, but his voice held the dread that choked her own throat tight.

They found their way out of the canebrake miles from the ridge where they’d left Cade and Catches Bears. In thickening snowfall, they traveled east, keeping to dense forest when possible, crossing streams, once a river. Already several inches of new snow blanketed the clearings. Jesse wrapped the rifle to keep its firelock dry but was too alert for threat to let it ride snug in its sling. They spent that first night shivering against a rock face near a frozen waterfall. Jesse built a screen of hemlock boughs to hold the heat of a small fire near, and Tamsen picked stone slivers from his cheek, cleaning away the blood.

“We’re some ways south of where we need to be,” he told her the next day, pausing to let the horse drink from the center of an ice-crusted stream. They were out of Cherokee territory now, near the north bank of the Nolichucky—at least he thought so. It wasn’t a place he and Cade had ever hunted. Following a river—any river—would take them in the right direction but over terrain peppered with settlements, which was both good and bad. Good, because if Tamsen needed shelter from this cold at some point, he could find it fast. Bad, because such shelter might prove harder to get out of than into, if their identities were discovered. At some point Jesse meant to pick a trail north to reach Cade’s rendezvous. How long they would wait for him there was a question Tamsen didn’t voice.

“One thing at a time,” Jesse said, reading her thoughts. “First we got to get there.”

At least the bitter cold would limit the chance of running across anyone who might admit to seeing them. Sensible folk would be inside their cabins with the chinking patched and a fire blazing. Tamsen longed to be one of them.

When they started again, Jesse adjusted the bearskin slung around his shoulders so she could bury her hands in its warmth. She pulled her hood
close and clenched her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering, wondering if she’d ever be warm again.

They gnawed on jerked meat as they rode that second day, stopping only to let the horse graze in a clearing where wind had scoured the ground bare in patches. Jesse bade her dismount and conceal herself in a stand of pine, while he stood at the end of the lead line.