The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn (46 page)

Even with the pines for a windbreak, the cold bit deep. It began to snow again. Tamsen clutched her cloak tight while heavy flakes sifted down, making a shushing as they clung to dark needles all around. Flexing her toes inside her fur-lined moccasins in hope of warming them, she peered through the boughs at Jesse. He faced away from her, rifle nested in the crook of his arm, moving only to keep pace with the horse’s grazing. It was a darker horse than Jesse’s that had been shot but as hardy and used to the cold. As was Jesse. He stood as though indifferent to the elements, scanning the falling snow, turning so she caught the angle of his jaw, shadowed with a day’s beard.

What was he thinking, staring out into the snow? Fearing for Cade? Looking for pursuit? How did he bear this cold with such stoic patience?

She remembered the swimming hole and that he was raised Shawnee. “Wildcat,” she whispered. Love for him came surging to her throat as she glanced across the clearing.

Through the snow, the tree line at the far edge was an indistinct blur. Something moved against that blur, stabbing her with alarm. When she trained her gaze on the spot, whatever it was had vanished.

“Jesse,” she hissed. “Someone’s out there.”

He had his rifle raised before she’d ceased speaking. He didn’t look her way. “Where?”

“Across the clearing. Something moved.”

He shifted to see past the horse’s rump. Tamsen’s heart pounded. She
wanted to edge closer to Jesse, even if it meant leaving cover, but was too frozen to lift a foot.

Movement came again, near where she’d seen it before. Jesse sighted down the rifle … as a rack of antlers lifted, emerging from the snowfall.

Jesse lowered the gun and darted her a look of relief. Her quickened heart had sent blood surging to her numb extremities. Now warmth flooded her face as well, a disconcertingly delicious feeling. If this was the price of embarrassment, she hoped a deer would jump from behind every bush to fool her now until spring.

They spent another freezing night, only to have the temperature drop even further the third day. By early afternoon, Tamsen’s feet were again benumbed, though Jesse had unrolled the bearskin to swathe them both. She huddled inside its shelter, pressed against his back. She wondered what they were meant to do come nightfall. They were exhausted, miserable, hungry, and with the temperature fallen, they’d never make it through another night in the open.

Sometime later the horse beneath her stopped, jarring her awake to the most bone-aching cold she’d never known. She’d missed the sun’s setting. Barely a hint of gray showed the massive, snow-dusted trees spreading away on every side. She must have dozed for hours, clinging to Jesse in her sleep. Her back and rump screamed with soreness, and her ankles were too stiff to bend.

“What?” she managed through cold-chapped lips.

Jesse, apparently
not
frozen with cold, got a leg over the horse’s withers and slid to the ground. He tried to hand her the reins, but her fingers wouldn’t grasp them. He led her forward and hitched the horse to a bare-limbed sapling.

“A cabin’s yonder, through the trees.”

She made out a wall of hewn logs, a snowy roof, a zigzagging line of rails. Wood smoke tainted the air. No glimpse of firelight. The window, if there was one, was shuttered.

“Are you g-going to ask f-f-for shelter?” Her voice stuttered and slurred, as if she’d drunk too much hard cider. Oh, what she’d give now for some cider, spiced with cloves and warmed with a poker red from the hearth. What she’d give for a hearth …

“Can’t risk it.” Jesse’s low voice snatched her back from the edge of a lovely dream. “Aim to see if there’s a barn we can shelter in. Bide here.”

Before she could muster protest, he’d slipped away. The horse rocked her, shifting uneasily, as miserable as she. She looked down at the snowy ground and wondered how she’d ever reach it.

Of a sudden Jesse was back.

“Cowshed’s empty.” His breath billowed as he untied the reins. “Reckon they lost their stock, else Sevier’s militia’s been by to requisition.”

She wanted a fire, not a cold, deserted shed.

Jesse put a hand on her knee. She felt the pressure of it through leggings, cloak, and snow-crusted bearskin, yet the sensation seemed removed from her, as if she watched from a distance. “Can you get down? Best we come at it on foot.”

A plan formed in her mind. Once off the horse, she’d run for the cabin, hollering for help. For warmth. The idea overwhelmed her with yearning. Only one problem. She couldn’t bring her leg up to swing it across the horse. She was stranded, all her joints frozen.

Jesse pulled her, bearskin and all, off her shifting perch. He steadied her, then turned to lead them, whereupon she crumpled at his feet. Her legs might have ended at the knee for all she could feel them.

“Should’ve left m-me on the h-horse,” she murmured as he bent to hoist her up again. “Now you’ll have to c-carry me.”

Grunting, he scooped her into his arms. She turned her face into his neck, felt his lean cheek against her brow, rough-whiskered. “Like a bride over the threshold, eh?”

“A b-bride with cold f-f-feet.”

He led the horse inside and loosed it while he set her down in a strew of hay, cold and prickly. The wind ceased when Jesse shut the door, closing them in. The weight of the bearskin came down on her, as did the scent of old manure, thick and stale. The blowing of the horse as it found the hay sounded in her ear. Very near her ear.

“Don’t let the horse eat my hair,” she murmured, too near sleep to turn her head.

Jesse’s breath brushed her cheek, warm enough to make her shiver. “Your hair’s inside your cloak, sweetheart. The horse can’t get it.”

His body came around her. He found her hands and chaffed them between his own, until something resembling feeling prickled back into her flesh. Then he moved to her feet.

“So much for my plot to reach the fire,” she tried to say, but she might only have dreamt it.

For a time Jesse resisted the images that spiraled through his thoughts, holding them at bay. Instead, he focused on the physical, on those parts of him most chilled—those not touching Tamsen—and the horse that had eaten its fill and stood dozing near enough he could reach out and grasp a fetlock. He listened for noises beyond the shed. All was quiet. No reason the inhabitants of yon cabin should venture out on such a night. Not to an empty cowshed.

When such distractions lost their power, he set his thoughts on Thunder-Going’s people, praying for each by name. Especially Bears. Had Cade gotten him to safety? Did he live? Did either of them live?

He had no fitting words to pray for his pa, only groans that tore through him with gutting pain. The Almighty heard those, Cade himself had assured him when, still a boy, Jesse’d grieved hard for a dog he’d briefly loved. God spoke that tongue, as He did all others.

At the end of his groans, the images still beckoned, drawing him to look … to wonder at the toy that spun away from him across a puncheon floor, its defection provoking him to squawk in protest and reach stubby fingers for the … 
twirly-top
. That was its name. A much larger hand reached down, stopped the toy midflight, and put it back into his greedy fingers. It made him happy, though it was a crude, homemade thing, the ridges of its whittling rippled to the touch.

Was it his? From before?

Lord, let me finally remember
. He concentrated, giving himself over to the memory—if that’s what it was—mining it for detail. The hand that had fetched the twirly-top was a man’s, work-roughened, smelling of … 
deerskins
. And there was a hearth. He could almost feel the heat on his face. That buzz and rumble beyond its crackle … the cadence of voices. A man’s and a woman’s.

His heart skittered a beat, jolting something through his bones that felt like recognition. If only he could
see
them. He couldn’t make this memory-child turn its head, look up at their faces.
Jesse
, he willed one of them to say. Only that was wrong. He hadn’t been
Jesse
to them.

“Say my name. Say
something
.”

He came to himself blinking in the dark and cold, stunned at what had transpired. The twirly-top … the reaching hand … Was it a true memory at last of his life before the Shawnees? Or was it only that those warriors had told the tale of finding him so often—described what remained of the cabin, the things they found there—that he’d merely stitched together a crazy quilt of secondhand memories into something resembling whole cloth?

Maybe so. Because the hand that had grabbed the renegade top and given it back to him hadn’t been a white man’s hand. Against the tender skin of his own pudgy fist, it had been brown as an Indian’s.

Jesse jerked his head up, alert. Somewhere beyond the shed, hooves crunched the snow. The horse snorted awake. He rose to calm the animal before it did something foolish like whinny in greeting. Tamsen stirred at his absence but didn’t wake. He went to the shed door, heard the chink of harness, the blow of horses. More than one. From the cabin came the muffled bark of a dog—thank the Almighty it was
inside
—then a
thud
like a musket’s butt against a door.

He was half out of the shed before he wondered if he should wake Tamsen, make a run for it in the dark. If it was Kincaid, Parrish, there wasn’t a moment to lose. If not … the night was brutal cold. He didn’t want to force her out into it unless he must.

Someone opened the cabin door. Voices rose.

Jesse eased the shed door shut and crept around the structure, ducking along the gap between it and a woodpile blanketed in snow, the dog making racket enough to cover his footfalls. The snowfall had tapered to a flurry. He edged around to the corner of the shed, far enough to see across the cabin yard.

There were five of them, bundled for riding in bitter cold. Four mounted men with baggage heaped behind their saddles, and a fifth, dismounted. The latter was speaking with a blanket-wrapped man who barred the doorway, thrusting out a smoky pine torch as if to ward off the nocturnal visitors. Behind him the spill of firelight showed the lithe shape of the collie still barking its head off.

“My shed’s empty, thanks to Sevier,” the man was saying in a tone devoid of neighborliness. “You boys done took my mule weeks back. Now ye want more?”

The man fronting him spoke over the racket. “Militia’s got John
Tipton’s house under siege. Tipton’s harboring property belonging to Governor Sevier—and upward of forty-five Carolina troops holed up with him. I’ve authority to requisition for the Franklin men waiting him out.”

“Hush yer noise!” the farmer shouted, turning on the dog and a wailing child that had joined the din.

Jesse felt the news run like ice through his limbs. It had been hard to judge distances with the falling snow, so many detours. They were farther east than he’d reckoned. How nigh the besieged Tipton home? He didn’t know this region well.

The farmer gave the militiaman on his doorstep no ground. “Sevier’s property? Back-owed taxes to Carolina more’n like. But Franklin ain’t getting no more help from me. I got no more to give.”

“You’ve a cow,” said the man on his porch.

Panic seized Jesse at the thought of Tamsen lying asleep in the shed, but the farmer stoutly denied the assertion.

“Do not.”

One of the riders in the yard spoke up. “I can smell it from here, Cap’n. He’s got it in the cabin.”

“I brought her in out th’ cold!” the farmer thundered. “My wife’s done lost her milk, and the least’un ain’t weaned. You’d take the milk out’n my baby’s mouth?”

Silence. Then, “Have you aught in the smokehouse to spare?”

“Empty.”

The captain nodded to one of the riders, who turned his horse toward the side yard. The farmer shut the cabin door and hurried out with his torch. “I’ll fetch ye a ham—and hope you choke on it.”

The man had shut the dog inside. Jesse drew back into shadow as the farmer passed with his torch not a dozen feet away, trudging through unmarked snow to a smokehouse behind the cabin, returning with the promised ham, cursing under his breath as he passed.