The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn (48 page)

The riderless horse came plunging through the snowfall, reins trailing, sides heaving. At sight of them, it swerved with a plume of snorted breath and was gone again into the swirling white.

Tamsen smelled the smoke of battle on the air.

Seconds later, the first fleeing soldier blundered out of the swirl, dressed in butternut woolens. White-eyed, powder-blackened, he seemed barely to register them until he slipped and sprawled to a knee, crying out as Jesse wrenched the horse sideways to avoid trampling him. The man was up and running again.

Another crashed through a stand of laurels, cursing, whimpering. They saw him weaving through the trees before the snow swallowed him as well.

Gunfire continued, sporadic but unnervingly close, each shot a blow to Tamsen’s senses. She was first to spot the clearing ahead. “Jesse—look!”

He saw where she pointed and called to Cade. Beyond a scrim of leafless trees, they could see the edge of a fallow field, a line of rail fence, and through the driving snow a log house in the distance, two-storied, outbuildings crowding close. Between the house and their position, a line of men was breaking, a few pausing to fire their weapons before turning to flee again. Straight into their path.

Other figures gave chase, some streaming out of the house, some from the surrounding woods, mounted and afoot.

“Back!” Cade shouted. “Go back!”

A bullet spit past, cracking through tree limbs. A trio of horses, one mounted, raced into the trees, and a man, astonishingly barefoot, nearly collided with them running at cross direction. They whirled their horses to flee. Someone coming behind the barefoot man yelled Sevier’s name, but Tamsen hardly registered it. Her mind felt suspended, thoughts shuddering to a halt at the horror of having blundered straight into the battle.

Not a battle anymore. A rout. And she couldn’t tell in which direction safety lay.

“There!” Jesse pointed at a stony outcrop looming out of the snow—a refuge, at least while they gained their bearings. He groaned as he hit the ground but turned and pulled Tamsen from the horse. He hurried her to the lee of the rock before he staggered to the snow, clutching his rifle. Cade took the horses in hand. Jesse put his back to the rock and reloaded his gun. His fingers shook, lacking their usual smooth efficiency.

Tamsen was shaking too, a bone-deep trembling she couldn’t restrain. She pressed against the stone, conscious of its lichened face, cold and rough and wet. In breaks in the gunfire, she heard the shouts of men in retreat and pursuit, the occasional scream of a horse. Twice, men ran past within yards. One paused behind a tree, knelt to aim, and fired toward the house. Then he was up and reloading as he vanished in the snow.

Jesse sat pressed to the rock, rifle ready, wounded leg extended. Spots of crimson blotted the snow beside his thigh. Tamsen knelt, shielding the wound with her cloak. “Jesse, you’re still bleeding.”

“Like a stuck pig.” The face he turned to her was fearfully leeched of color. She tried to spread the torn legging to see the wound, but he pushed her hands away. “Pa, what do you see?”

Peering over the edge of the rock, toward the field and house, Cade shook his head. “Too little in this snow.”

“Maybe if we try and circle the farm, just walk the horses … take it slow?”

Cade put the reins into Tamsen’s hands. She stood to take them as he took her place in the snow beside Jesse. “I’m seeing to that wound first.”

To Tamsen’s irrational vexation, Jesse didn’t protest Cade’s cutting open the legging to inspect the wound. She took the opportunity to get a look for herself, and her knees nearly buckled. The ball had passed across the muscle atop his thigh, but the scoring went deep.

“Bloody mess,” Cade muttered, stripping down to the linen he wore beneath hunting shirt and coat. His tawny shoulders stippled against the
blowing snow as he used the shirt to bind Jesse’s thigh. “Got to slow this bleeding, or you won’t make it far, whichever way we go.”

Jesse’s jaw bulged as the binding tightened. By dint of will, Tamsen didn’t swoon. “Can he make it at all?”

“Aye, he can—” Jesse grabbed hold of Cade’s bare arm to wrench himself to his feet. While Cade donned his hunting shirt and coat, Jesse got a look at her. “You’re hurt.” He drew her close, cradling her face in bloodstained fingers.

“The rifle banged my nose, is all.” She could barely breathe through the swollen tissues now. “Forget about me.”

“Never.”

The intensity of that word pulled her straight into his soul. She clung to him, every fiber fixed on one hope—to find a way through this turmoil of blood and snow to a life in the sun with Jesse Bird, to bear his children and keep his hearth and make for him a haven from the world’s calamity. She poured it into her eyes, giving back the unreserved devotion he’d shown her all along.

“I love you,” he said, lips trembling blue.

Before she could reply in kind, Cade thrust between them, leading the packhorse over. “All right, you two. No time for—”

Tamsen heard the click of a hammer cocking behind them, but Cade was faster to react. He lunged in front of her and Jesse as the shot fired. Blood spattered Tamsen as Cade bore them both down into the snow.

The horses shied, revealing Hezekiah Parrish striding out of the snowfall, tossing his spent pistol back to Dominic Trimble and pulling another from his belt. He halted with it aimed. Sprawled in the snow and half-tangled with Jesse, Tamsen was frozen, though not now with the cold. Only her heart careened inside her, frantic with the paralyzing fear.

“Pa!” It tore from Jesse’s throat like an animal cry as he struggled to extricate himself from Cade’s inert weight, fresh red blooming on the linen binding his leg.

The ball had taken Cade in the chest. He lay still, his blood bright in the snow now too. Red and white. The whole world was red and white, and the cold black of a pistol barrel. Grief and helpless rage tore through Tamsen’s chest.

“You didn’t have to do this!”

Ignoring her, Mr. Parrish said over his shoulder, “The Indian’s down. Bird’s wounded. Get the horses and find Kincaid—I can deal with them alone.”

“Do what you want with those two.” Dominic jerked his head at Jesse and Cade. “But we got us a deal with ’Brose.
She
goes to him.”

“Then find the man!” The pistol in Mr. Parrish’s grasp swung a few inches sideways. Dominic cursed and sprinted off through the trees.

Tamsen got to her knees, but Jesse grasped her arm as she tried to stand. “Stay down.”

“Just let me go with him. Let this be over.” She fought his hold. “Jesse, please. I’ll make Ambrose under—”

“Wasted breath, girl,” Mr. Parrish cut in. “Months ago you had that
chance, but not now. And since you are of no more use to me, I cannot let you live with what you know.”

The pistol hammer clicked.

“No!” It was a moan, low in Jesse’s throat. His rifle had fallen too far out of reach, but too late Tamsen realized that beneath the cover of Cade’s out-flung arm, Jesse’d worked loose the hatchet at his belt. Too late she saw a third man emerging from the swirling white, a man with a red blaze of hair spilling below his hat, a pistol of his own aimed.

Ambrose Kincaid roared something incoherent.

Shoving her off balance into the snow, Jesse raised up and drew back his arm. The report of a shot fell across Tamsen’s heart like a thunderclap, as Jesse hurled the hatchet.

Bullet and blade each found their mark, but Tamsen hadn’t another thought to spare her stepfather. Neither did Jesse. He was too busy clasping her, running his hands over her shoulders, arms, face. “Are you hit? Did he fire?”

“No. I’m well—but Cade!”

They turned as one to peel away Cade’s blood-soaked coat. The ball had pierced his chest, high on the right side. Tamsen pressed her hands to the wound, hoping to staunch the bleeding.

Jesse bent his face to Cade’s. “He’s breathing.” Fear tempered the relief in his voice. There was so much blood, and Tamsen’s efforts weren’t stemming the flow. They had to find him shelter and help.

In unison they raised their heads, seeking the enemy that had so long pursued them. Yards away, Ambrose Kincaid knelt over her stepfather. In contrast to their frantic hovering, his stillness told her Hezekiah Parrish was beyond aid. Mr. Kincaid was staring at the body sprawled in the snow as if he couldn’t credit what had transpired, or his own part in it.

There would be time for coming to terms, but not while Cade’s life was seeping into the snow. “Mr. Kincaid—please—help us!”

His bright head lifted at her plea. Stiffly, he rose and came toward them, gaze fixed on her. His face beneath its coppery stubble was the dingy white of unbleached linen, his blue eyes almost feverish as they darted over her buckskin garments, her unbraided hair crusted with snow, her swollen nose, all of her spattered with gore.

“Miss Littlejohn …?”

Amidst dread and cold and crippling anxiety, a giddy spark leapt within Tamsen. The man wasn’t sure he recognized her. Then Jesse’s hand gripped her shoulder. Pressing down on Cade’s bleeding chest, she said, “My name is Tamsen Bird, and I mean to keep it so.”

Mr. Kincaid flinched, but she had no delicacy of feeling to spare him. She’d had no attention to spare the battle these last moments either. The sporadic din had faded. The Franklin militia that had surrounded Colonel Tipton’s house had scattered into the hills or fallen. Her scrabbling mind latched on to the one pertinent result of this development. “Where are they taking the wounded?”

Mr. Kincaid halted. Beside her Jesse stilled, waiting on the word of this man who had long loomed a threat in their minds. Tamsen took Jesse’s hand from her shoulder and placed it over Cade’s wound, pressing down on it.

Covered in the blood of her menfolk, she stood. “Please, Mr. Kincaid. Will you help us?”

Ambrose’s gaze flicked hard at Jesse, as though taking him in fully for the first time. Something darted across his features, a spurt of startlement Tamsen couldn’t fathom. He looked toward the Tipton farmhouse, then met her beseeching gaze.

“I have found you. The rest will wait. Can we get them onto the horses, do you think?”

Daylight fell in wan stripes through the parted curtains of the room in Colonel Tipton’s house, where some of the wounded were being tended. Cade lay on a folded quilt, blanketed against the unrelenting chill the fire across the room couldn’t dispel.

The ball had been dug from his chest by a harried surgeon who’d arrived in time to pull some of the gravest injured in the skirmish back from death’s door—for now. The torn flesh was dressed with a poultice, but Cade had bled out alarmingly before they’d gotten him across the snowy field to shelter. He’d yet to speak with anything resembling sense. For now he was gone away to some place Jesse couldn’t follow. A fitful place, troubled by pain and dreams.

Others besides wounded came and went, bustling through the room with its fine furnishings in contrast to its log walls. Women of the house, neighbors, servants—a blur of petticoats and bending backs and basins on hips. A man lying on a pallet near the fire moaned. Two others on a bed slept, or tried to. A fourth sat against the wall, arm in a sling, taking food from a woman helping him eat one-handed.

Jesse’s wound had been tended. He sat on the hardwood floor beside Cade, back to the cold wall, bound leg bare below his breechclout. Movement caused him throbbing pain, but not as consuming as the need to will his pa to draw breath, and again, and yet once more.

Kneeling nearby, Tamsen dipped a cloth in warm water. She’d ceased trying to coax him to eat the venison stew someone had left beside him, congealing in its bowl. He watched his wife gently sponging away the crusted blood from his pa’s flesh, and through the capstone of his worriment came bursting up a love for her that stung his eyes. He let the tears fall unashamed, warm on his skin. Her nose was still swollen from its run-in with his rifle stock, her beautiful doeskin clothing bloodstained, but with her face washed and her hair braided, she looked otherwise recovered from their ordeal. He’d yet to thaw, though he’d spread his coat over his bare leg. Blood loss and exposure. He’d come right in time. But Cade …