The Renegades: Nick (18 page)

That rocked him back on his heels. All he could do was stare at her.

Her eyes filled with tears. He didn’t care.

“I never figured you for a liar.”

Or a betrayer, like Matilda
.

“I’m not!”

“It would be fair to say that you are,
Mrs
. Sloane.”

“What did you expect me to tell people?” she cried, throwing up her hands in despair.

Every line of her body pleaded with him.

“I want to teach school. I’m going to have a baby. No one way out here would ever know the difference—and you wouldn’t have, either, if I hadn’t been honest and told you!”

He turned on his heel and walked away.

Callie couldn’t move. She couldn’t have moved if an angry rattlesnake had uncoiled from around the post she leaned against and struck at her, fangs bared.

Nick would never love her now.

And she was
married
to him.

Worse, she loved him.

She ought to get up, pack up, and leave.

She ought to drive her wagon straight to Arkansas City and find a place to live and a job. It was a settled town; she’d be safe enough there.

That thought held firm for a moment, but
then it was gone. If she did that, she’d never see Nickajack again.

Her whole life, for endless days just past, had been nothing but losing people she loved whom she’d never see again. She’d endured more loneliness than she had ever imagined could exist. Only when she was with Nickajack had it eased.

One night with him had healed the terrible wound in her heart.

Callie stood up, wrapped her arms around the post, and leaned on it to steady her. The heat-blasted trees and rocks, already reflecting the early-morning sun, led her eye farther up the hollow from the house to a trailing patch of sumac turning red.

The cyclone that had stolen her wagon top had brought the only rain in months, but it must have been enough to keep the sumac alive. That one night in Nick’s arms had done the same for her spirit.

She leaned her cheek against the weathered wood and looked out across the homey old place. That feeling still lingered, deep inside her somewhere—the feeling she’d had the day of the Run that this valley was where she was supposed to be.

Nickajack would get over his surprise at her news—he was a fair person, in spite of his prejudice against farmers and homesteaders. Wouldn’t she be prejudiced against them, too,
if a bunch of strangers had come rushing in to the Sloane Valley to carve out farms for themselves?

Yes, he would get used to the thought of the baby. Didn’t men always get overexcited if they had a big shock of some sort? Wasn’t that why Granny and Mama always said not to tell a man bad news or ask him for something he didn’t want to give until after he’d rested a while and had his supper?

Once he’d become accustomed to the idea, he would see reason.

That thought gave her strength, and so did looking at the hard land. Those trees, that sumac, had endured for no telling how many years, and so could she. Hadn’t she come this far?

Callie let go of the post and walked steadily back into the house, went straight to the stove and set the coffee off the fire. From the feel of the pot, it had half boiled away.

She was beyond getting sick from the smell. Right now, she was beyond everything but hope.

Hope sustained her during the long days and helped her go to sleep each night. Nick spoke very little.

“What are you doing, trying to prove I need a wife?” he had said on that first day at supper, when she’d covered the table with a fresh
apple pie from the drought-stunted fruit in his orchard, a venison roast from his smokehouse, potatoes from his cellar, and shucky beans and jelly from her own meager stores.

“You’ve got one whether you need me or not,” she’d retorted.

He had raised a wry eyebrow at that and she imagined she saw his ghost of a smile.

The next day he did come in to eat at noon, which he had not done the day before. Callie had spent the morning baking yeast bread and cleaning the main room of the cabin to a gleaming shine.

“Now, look here,” he said, glancing around the room as he sat down to hot bread, butter, and sliced leftover venison, “cooking is enough. It’s not your place to clean up after me.”

“It’s not your place to sleep in the barn, either,” she said.

“This marriage is in name only,” he snapped. “I told you that from the start.”

The hurt that stabbed through her surprised her with its strength.

“I intend to earn my keep,” she snapped back. “But you needn’t worry about my baby’s. I’ll be gone before he comes.”

She looked down at her plate and steeled herself.

Then go now. I want you off my place. I never want to see you again. I wish I’d never thought of
marrying you. A marriage in name only can easily be undone
.

But he said none of that. He ate his food, looked her in the eye when he thanked her for the meal, pushed back his chair, then got up and strode out to the round pen. Callie couldn’t stop herself. She rose from the table, crossed the room, and stood just inside the door, watching him.

Desire moved through her in a surging wave, desire for more than the pleasure he’d given to her body. His arms had held comfort, a comfort so splendid.

Ever since the moment he’d ridden up to her during the Run, his eyes had searched hers and seen into her heart. Surely he would get over being angry that she’d kept the baby a secret.

But when should she try to talk to him? He had to give her a chance or she had to make one.

If he wasn’t going to forgive her, she didn’t know if she could stay.

Even as the thought came to her, though, she realized she had no choice. He had merely looked straight into her eyes and had let his gaze linger for the first time in two days, and she was wanting desperately for him to take her into his arms. One look every
thirty
days would most likely do the trick just as well. She was as trapped by her own desires as if he’d
built a gate at the mouth of the canyon to keep her here.

Callie went back to the table and started clearing away the food. She had just finished wrapping tea towels around the leftovers and putting the jelly into the pie safe when she heard the thunder of hooves.

“Callie!”

He hadn’t called her by her name since she’d made her confession.

“Callie!”

She was already running toward the front door and out.

“Go and stand down there by those trees,” he called, pointing toward the pond and the creek which eventually led to the mouth of the draw. “If they come that way, don’t let them past. Get in front of them and wave your arms until they turn.”

Blindly, she ran toward the spot where he’d sent her.

Once there, she turned to see that Nick had ridden the colt he was training around the house, toward the oncoming hoofbeats, and was waiting to the right of the horses’ path as they ran down the draw.

“I can slow them and probably haze them into a circle,” he called to her. “Don’t worry if they come toward you, though—a horse won’t run over a person.”

Her heart was beating fast. What if these
horses didn’t know that rule? She wasn’t a very
big
person—what if they didn’t even see her?

Instinctively, she laid her hand on her belly as if to protect the baby.

“We’ll jump out of the way if they get too close,” she told him. “Nick can do without three more horses.”

Yet she wasn’t scared, she realized. She was excited—because she trusted Nick. He wouldn’t put her in a spot that was dangerous.

He began to move his horse in beside the three running ones as they came on. Pushing his mount close to the nearest, a tall bay, he began to guide them off the path onto the grass at the front of the house. They started to slow, then gradually turned in a circle. A steadily slowing circle.

“Come on up this way, Callie,” he called. “Keep to that side of the bunch and we’ll drive them into the corral.”

She saw then that he had left the wide gate open on the pen where he’d been riding.

“They’re tired,” he said, as she walked toward him, “they must’ve been running all over the hill up there.”

Callie laughed.

“That’s not a hill. I haven’t seen a hill since I got here.”

Nick flashed her a quick smile. Her heart lifted.

“These are the three young ones I brought from the Nation as weanlings,” he called, in a soothing, sing-song tone meant to calm the slowing horses. “They’re pretty gentle, but they’re young, too. Somehow they let themselves out of the brush pen I built up the canyon.”

She took in a deep, long breath. Nick was talking to her again. Maybe it was for the horses’ benefit, but he was talking to her again.

Working together, with Nick directing her with words and hand signals, they guided the horses in through the gate. Nick closed it from horseback, then he dismounted and stood beside her as she watched the three nose around inside the pen.

“They know they’ve been naughty,” she said.

He laughed.

“Maybe so, but they wouldn’t hesitate to do the same thing again,” he said. “We’ll keep them here for a few days while I fix that fence on the south pen. They can benefit from some human attention.”

Callie hardly listened to what he said, only to the sound of his low, rich voice. They stood there, leaning on the fence, looking at the horses for a moment more, and then he swung back up into the saddle.

“I’ll take this one down the creek a ways,” he said. “Thanks for your help.”

She watched him go and remembered the last time he took that trail with her in the saddle in front of him. When he was out of sight she walked slowly back to the house. Maybe those renegade horses had given her her chance.

N
ick was still friendly and talked some at supper, so when a cool breeze sprang up afterward and he went out to sit on the porch that ran across the front of the house, Callie joined him.

Suddenly, though, as she sat down in the old rocker handwoven from strips of bark that sat opposite his, she resented needing to explain anything to him at all. Any man ought to understand that a woman wouldn’t simply blurt out the news of her condition to a man. And any man ought to understand the powerful pull of a person’s body toward someone she loved.

Maybe that was it. Maybe Nick was judging
her for not being married to Vance.

“Nickajack, do you think I’m a loose woman?”

He whipped his head around to look at her.

“What did you say?”

“You heard me. Are you thinking bad of me because I was with Vance without being married to him?”

“No!”

He looked genuinely shocked. “That’s nobody’s business but yours. What riled me was the silent lie of not telling me about your baby.” He shrugged. “Call yourself ‘Mrs.’ for the sake of a school, if you want to, but tell me the truth about what I need to know.”

“Have you told me all
your
secrets?”

His only answer was a long, straight, angry look, his eyes full of pale fire in the gathering dusk.

“Well, I’m glad you’re not judging me for Vance, anyway. I can’t bear to think what I’d do without this baby.”

Nickajack couldn’t stop looking at her. She had turned away to stare out across the yard with her determined chin lifted just a little to prove she was right.

“What you’d better be doing is thinking what you’ll do
with
this baby.” His voice came out hard as stone.

She whirled around to look at him.

“What do you mean? That I can’t stay here
after he’s born? I
told
you I’d leave in the spring.”

“No,” he snapped. “I’m telling you that you can’t take care of a baby and hold school at the same time.”

“Oh, yes, I can.”

Her belligerent tone made him want to smile but he didn’t. He wanted her to know he meant what he said.

Suddenly the thought of her baby became real and he wanted to see it, wondered if it would have huge, green eyes like its mother. Her gaze held his, wouldn’t let go.

“What are you thinking?” she demanded.

“Reckon that baby will have a stubborn chin like its mama’s?”

She frowned at him, then smiled.

“Yes,” she said, “and lots of sand. This is a baby who made the Cherokee Strip Land Run.”

Her smile widened into that big, brilliant one that lit up her face and the whole world besides. The smile that could break the heart of the meanest man.

Any woman with a smile like that surely could be trusted. Any woman blunt enough to walk out on the porch and ask straight out if he considered her a loose woman surely was honest enough to be trusted.

Somehow it seemed comforting, the thought of having a baby around. And interesting. He
had always loved being with his young cousins in the Nation.

He couldn’t let her go, once the winter was over. Yes, he’d told her he’d build her her own cabin on half his claim, but she couldn’t go there and have the baby alone!

But, oh, Lord, she certainly couldn’t stay here and have it with him. He’d not know how to help her; couldn’t bear to hold those two lives in his hands.

Terror trickled like icy water into his veins. He was losing his mind, because the gravity of this situation had just now hit him.

“Here, now,” he said, too roughly, “who’s going to help you when your time comes?”

She bristled.

“You don’t have to worry,” she said sharply. “I’ve told you more than once that I’d be gone as soon as winter’s over.
Before
my time comes. I’ll keep my word.”

She was so appealing, glaring at him with the high color rising just beneath her fine skin. He ached all over his body, he longed to reach out and pull her into his arms, but he would die before he let her see that.

Because she might not feel the same way about him. She must not, or she wouldn’t be constantly talking about leaving. She’d be hoping that their marriage might somehow turn out to be real—like he was, much as he hated to admit it.

She had cared for him, for his safety at least, when she found Fox’s letter. That was no sign that she
loved
him, though. And she’d never told him so.

Except with her body, all of one whole night
.

But who could say? The way she’d so carefully kept her baby secret, despite how close he’d felt to her …

Look, Smith, she’s carrying another man’s baby. She loved that other man, she told you so, and she still loves him. So get a hold on your runaway feelings
.

And, knowing Callie and her honor and her sense of obligation, she might’ve been merely pleasuring his body on their wedding night, doing it out of a feeling that she owed that to him for offering her a place to winter. She was bound to be scared—out here alone with no place of her own now and a baby to provide for, come spring.

If he had a grain of sense, he’d take her somewhere else right now and make her go back to civilization, where she’d have help with the baby—before he really fell in love …

But it was too late for that. Way too late.

“Callie,” he said, his throat tight with wanting her, every muscle in him tense with wishing he never had to let her go, “maybe you should think about a school in town.”

She stood up and brushed the dust from the back of her skirt, clearly too touchy tonight to
consider a sensible suggestion. One from him, at any rate.

“Nickajack, I told you. You will not have to do one single thing concerning this baby. I’ll take care of it. There’s no need to start trying to run my life again, either—soon we’ll both be out of your hair.”

She sounded very adamant and very sure. Callie knew what she wanted; she always did.

He sat there like a bump on a log and let her walk away from him. She stopped at the door.

“I hate to put you out of your bed,” she said, “but I know you won’t hear to anything else.

Let me know if you change your mind.”

Then she went inside, huffy as could be.

It made him smile in spite of the mixed-up emotions roiling in his heart. Yes, she was bound to be scared about taking care of a baby, and yes, she had no claim anymore and she had worked all those days on her soddy only to hand it over to Baxter, but she still had her tough spirit—none of her trials had dampened her fire. If anybody could hold school and take care of a baby at the same time, Callie Sloane could.

Callie
Smith
. According to that preacher’s piece of paper, she was Callie Smith now.

He sat there, looking out across the wide yard sloping down to the dry creekbed, watching the mares move about in their pasture and
the young horses in theirs as they all settled quieter and quieter beneath the night, falling dusky and sweet from the east while the sundown claimed the sky in the west. He could feel the faintest hint of coolness in the air. After all, it was October.

This might be one of those years when October passed hot and dry as one of the summer moons, and then November blew in cold and wet as sudden winter. It was a good thing Callie had given up her claim, much as he’d hated for her to do it for him. She and a baby couldn’t survive over there without a man to haul water and cut wood and make a shelter that would protect them when the blizzards blew.

Finally, the moon began to rise. He needed sleep. He needed to get away from the house and to his bed in the barn. He needed to stay away from Callie until he knew her true feelings about him.

That made him smile. He sounded like some prissy woman demanding to know if a man’s intentions were honorable.

He stood up, and the chair rocked back and gently thumped the wall. One of the colts raised his head and whinnied at the moon, which was full and bright and beautiful coming out to ride the sky.

But instead of walking through its mellow light toward his bed in the barn, as he intended,
he turned to the door of the house. Callie had had plenty of time to wash up, go to bed, and get to sleep. He wouldn’t wake her.

Silently, he stepped inside the big room. Callie had made it look like a real home again, the way it had when his mother was alive. Callie was a whole lot like his mother, except for her blunt openness. His mother had kept her own counsel.

Something drew him to the table-desk, and he stood in front of it before he realized that what he wanted was to look at that marriage certificate again. He’d barely glanced at it when he and Callie had signed it.

He felt sheepish but he picked it up, anyway. Callie had thrown it and the registration papers for the claim there at some point—he’d noticed that in passing to get his clothes from his room.

He needed to put the papers into the tin box hidden in one log wall behind a weaving his Cherokee grandmother had made. But first he really wanted to look at the marriage paper. Somehow, he needed to look at its words and Callie’s handwriting, although it was all meaningless if she didn’t love him, too.

Her bedroom door was open for the breeze, so he left the lamp unlit and silently crossed the room to the light of the low fire. He sat on
his haunches in front of it and stirred the coals until some small flames leapt up.

The registration paper slipped from his fingers and fell onto the floor.

Calladonia Sloane
.

That was the only name on the front of it.

He picked it up, unfolded it, and read it rapidly, front and back.

Calladonia Sloane was the only name on it anywhere. The legal land description was the correct one for his claim.

A flash fire burst up the back of his neck and that whole half of his scalp began to burn.

He let out a roar so terrible that it nearly tore out his throat.

Callie leapt from the bed reaching for a weapon, for anything to fight with.
What was it? It was in the house!
She tried to yell for Nickajack, but was so wildly scared that not one sound would come out.

A panther? No, it wasn’t that scream. A bear? How could a bear get into this house without making a sound?

“
Goddammit
, Callie, get out here!”

Her toes grabbed the wood planks of the floor.

Nickajack?

Her heart raced at a gallop.

What in the world was he doing, terrifying her like this?

He filled the doorway, his face awful in the moonlight.

“What the
hell
did you think you were doing?”

His voice was anguished now but it was that same roar.

He waved pieces of paper in both hands.

She couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, could only stand there in her night shift and stare at him while she tried to hold her heart in her chest with both hands.

“So this is how you get a home for your baby,” he snarled. “You planned it all along, didn’t you? Were you and Baxter in league? Or did you see your chance and take it when you saw me sitting helpless in jail?”

Her mind was racing, doing its best to take that in, but she must’ve been asleep even though she thought she hadn’t. Not one word of this made the slightest bit of sense.

Gradually, though, her pounding blood began to slow. This was Nickajack and he wasn’t attacking her. Not physically, so the baby wasn’t in danger. She wasn’t in danger—except of dying of heart’s pain.

How could he talk this way to her?

Her tongue felt thick as cotton wool, her lips stiff as the paper he was brandishing in her face.

“What?”

She finally managed to get that one word out of her mouth.

“You’ve stolen my claim, that’s what!
My
land,
my
homeplace, where my mother’s bones are buried. If you think you can get away with this …”

Just as suddenly as he’d appeared in the door, he thrust past her and staggered to the bed. He dropped onto it as if someone had knocked his knees out from under him.

“You
can
get away with it, though, can’t you? And you know it. All you have to do is side with Baxter and shout to the world that I’m Cherokee.”

Finally, at last, her brain began to work again. So did her legs.

She ran to him in spite of the fact that his eyes were burning the skin off her face.

“That’s why I had to do it, don’t you see?”

The words came out in an anguished cry.

He stared at her, shaking his head, uncomprehending.

“Baxter was in the Land Office with me—he was talking about you being Indian, and the other people were speaking up about their white relatives that didn’t get any claims,” she said desperately. “There was going to be big trouble over it, but your bald-headed clerk saved the day.”

“By giving my claim to you?” Sarcasm dripped from the words.

“
Yes
. He pretended that your note on the permit was to sign your claim over to me and he passed it off that way. I couldn’t say anything in front of everyone, and I knew I could deed it over to you when all the excitement had passed.”

“But the excitement’s just beginning, isn’t it?” he said with that biting sarcasm meant to wither her.

Reckless, irresistible fury wiped out her fear.

“You do not trust me at all,” she said. “After all we’ve been through, after I signed away
my
homeplace, the only legacy I could have for my baby, to get you out of jail, you ungrateful, abominable
wretch
, you do not trust me at all!”

A flash of startlement showed in his eyes.

But he stood up and towered over her like an avenging angel.

“I don’t trust any woman,” he said, in a dead voice. “After Matilda, I should’ve known better than to put any faith in you.”

Callie stepped back so she could look him in the eye. The devastation she saw in his soul broke her heart.

She
certainly hadn’t put it there. She had done him no wrong, if he would stop jumping to conclusions long enough to realize it.

“I don’t know Matilda, I have no connection to Matilda, and I resent being compared to Matilda,” she said firmly.