Ride the Panther (25 page)

One of Cap’s “doves,” a red-haired woman in her midtwenties whose pockmarked features were concealed beneath a layer of powder and rouge, stood alongside the piano set in the alcove beneath the stairway and sang a melancholy rendition of “Campfires on the Tennessee.” The harlot’s clear sweet voice had mercifully escaped the ravages of strong drink and tobacco smoke and the other hazards of her profession: disease and violent abuse.

Tandy Matlock’s black bony fingers skimmed over the keys in a trilling finish and then proceeded into a chorus of “Dixie,” which the songstress in her faded frills and feathers exuberantly sang. If Tandy minded the song, the wise old freed man kept his opinions to himself. At the Medicine Wagon he had food and a dry place to sleep, and if Cap and the others thought of Tandy as more of a fixture than a person, so much the better. In times of violence and guerrilla warfare it was best to be invisible.

Cap watched as Sam Roberts, Sawyer Truett, and their three companions descended on a nearby table whose occupants, Hack Warner and a friend, glanced up into the sullen young faces surrounding them and grudgingly vacated their chairs. Johnny Teel grinned and waved as Hack unsteadily brushed past them. He stopped and stared at Sam Roberts, standing nose to nose and toes to toes with the younger man. Cap tensed, awaiting the explosion. At the last second Hud Pardee materialized out of a drifting fog bank of tobacco smoke and whispered something in Hack’s ear. Hack paled and continued on across the room, shadowed every step of the way by Pardee, who congratulated Warner on his choice of behavior and bought him a drink. Buck Langdon and Chris Foot wasted no time heading upstairs. They cornered China on her way down and took her along, arguing every step of the way as to who would take the first “poke.”

Cap caught Pardee’s attention and motioned for the gunman to join him in the office. Sam Roberts also left his table and headed for Cap, reaching the barrel-chested owner before Hud.

“Why, it’s young Roberts,” Cap said, and extended his hand in greeting.

“Evening, Mr. Featherstone,” Sam replied. His voice was hoarse from a spasm that had left his reed-thin frame trembling. An hour earlier, as the Knights debated their course of action on the bluffs overlooking the Kimishi River, Sam had been wracked by a brief but exhausting fit of coughing.

“We’re always pleased to have you here,” Cap continued in a silken tone.

“Pleased enough to extend my credit? I should like to try my hand at the faro table. I believe your new dealer, Enos Clem, is vulnerable tonight.”

“Why, certainly,” Cap said, and in a magnanimous gesture produced a pad and stub of pencil from his coat pocket, scrawled “$100” on the piece of paper, and initialed the amount.

“Present that to Enos and claim your chips.”

“Thanks, Mr. Featherstone. I’m good for it,” Sam said, brightening. “I’ll pay you back.”

“Of course you will,” Cap exclaimed, and clapped the younger man on the shoulder and sent him on his way. His gestures were expansive, his smile wide and full of teeth. But his eyes were cold as the double-edge steel blade concealed in his cane as he softly repeated more ominously, “Of course you will.”

Pardee had been holding back, allowing Sam Roberts to finish with the owner of the Medicine Wagon. As Sam departed for the faro table in the center of the room, Pardee took his place by the office door. The one-eyed gunman was ominously attired in black coat and trousers, black shirt and sash. As it turned out, for what Cap Featherstone had in mind, Pardee’s choice of colors was most appropriate.

The Medicine Wagon Saloon and Gambling House wasn’t the only site of celebration. Back at Buffalo Creek the McQueens were having their own humble celebration centered around a ten-foot-long, hand-hewn table flanked by two equally long benches and set outside beneath the spreading branches of a red oak. Raven McQueen looked from her place at the head of the table over her new-found brood and thought how this was one of the strangest assortments of guests she’d entertained in quite some time. Moses and Theotis Tellico took up one side of the groaning board. What these rough-looking mountain men might lack in the way of manners they made up for with their hearty appetites and good-natured banter. Pacer, Lorelei, and Si Reaves sat across from the Tellicos. A Confederate guerrilla, a headstrong girl, and a runaway slave. And at the other end of the table, Captain Jesse McQueen, Union officer and territorial ranger.

The Tellicos had missed the confrontation with the Knights but had listened in bemused and respectful silence to accounts from Jesse, Lorelei, and Pacer as to the manner in which Raven had disarmed Sawyer Truett and just about single-handedly defused a very dangerous and volatile situation.

Theotis slapped his thigh and loosed a mighty laugh that sprayed the front of his shirt with stew juice. Moses wiped his mustache on the sleeve of his buckskin shirt and wagged his head and sighed.

“Glory be, Miss Raven, you got more grit than a buffalo wallow. I’d have liked to seen you take the measure of them boys and that’s for sure, that’s for durn sure.” He scratched his crooked nose and his pale eyes twinkled merrily.

“I’m with Moses,” Theotis added. “You can back me anytime, Miss Raven. Of course, me and my brother usually get the job done on our own.” His right hand patted the heavy octagonal barrel of a .52 caliber Hawken rifle leaning against the table. Like the Starr revolvers the brothers shared, Moses had a Hawken rifle identical to his brother’s within easy reach of his right hand. Both men were expert marksmen. In the mountains, a poor shot went hungry and either moved into the flatlands or stayed and starved to death.

No one was going to starve to death at Raven’s table. She had built a fire in a rock-lined pit, hung a black stew pot over the flames and tossed in chunks of beef, potatoes, corn, and beans and covered the ingredients with water. The stew had simmered all afternoon while Raven and Lorelei made cornbread.

It was a pleasant evening, with a cool, whispery breeze that set the firelight flickering and caused the smoke to trail off in a southerly direction. In the glow of the fire, Raven watched as Lorelei crumbled a couple of wedges of cornbread into a tin plate, softened the bread with milk from a clay pitcher, and ladled meat broth over the mush. Raven had an idea what the girl was up to. Another change had taken place in the girl, and this time Moses and Theotis were to blame.

The Tellicos had returned late in the afternoon. They were tired from chasing cattle out of the underbrush-choked hillsides flanking the valley. The brothers had worked their way to the gap, where the hills closed in and almost choked off the creek. The gap was at the end of a dogleg and roughly forty yards from hillside to hillside. Ahead of the gap stretched a hundred yards of clear ground, devoid of cover and carpeted with buffalo grass and, in the spring, tiny white flowers, red blossoms and Indian paint brush, blue stem grass and weeds. The Tellico brothers had not returned from their labors empty-handed. Theotis had found a litter of week-old pups underneath a deadwood red oak that time and the elements had toppled into decay. The elder Tellico, after a brief search, had found the remains of the bitch down by the creekbank. The carcass had been picked clean by scavengers. Two of the pups had died as well, but miraculously enough, the other three were weak but still game.

When Lorelei mumbled an embarrassed thank-you for the meal, and rose from the table with plate in hand, she headed straight for the barn. She had taken charge of the puppies’ welfare and had spent most of the afternoon in the loft where a warm, straw-filled wooden box served as the puppies’ new home. Pacer watched her depart, then dawdled with the food on his plate for another minute or two, while trying to think of some appropriate excuse to leave the table. Raven took a moment to accept Moses’ compliment concerning her “grit,” then leaned toward Pacer.

“It’s been my experience pups like those in the barn can be quite a handful. Maybe you ought to go see if Lorelei needs any help.”

“I might do just that,” Pacer said, and shoved clear of his plate and the congealing remains of his dinner.

Si Reaves appeared to relax when he was no longer sitting beside the Confederate-gray shirt of the notorious Choctaw Kid. Jesse noticed the black man’s obvious sense of relief.

“He’d never turn you in, Si,” Jesse commented.

“I look at him and I sees a Johnny Reb,” the former slave said.

“Neither Pacer or I have any use for slavery. No man has the right to own another.”

“Then why ain’t he fightin’ for Mr. Lincoln like you?”

Jesse glanced over at his grandmother, who merely nodded as if anticipating what he was about to say.

“Pacer may only be an eighth Choctaw, but his heart is one with the full-bloods. The government has a poor record when it comes to treaties with the red man. Pacer cannot bring himself to support the Federals. I’ve tried to talk sense to him, but he’s stubborn, like his grandmother.” Jesse smiled at Raven, who brushed her hair back and blushed with amusement. “Pacer has his eyes turned toward yesterday,” Jesse continued. “I’m looking toward the future. This nation cannot last divided. The country must come together again if any of us are to survive and live free.”

“Dang if you don’t talk pretty as one of them politicians me and Theotis seen over in St. Louis once last spring,” Moses said. He sopped up the last of the broth on his plate with a wedge of cornbread, then looked over at Raven with an unspoken request for a third helping.

“A hearty appetite is the best compliment to any meal of mine,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am. Thankee kindly,” he replied, and made another trip to the cookpot.

“You know, when Si here brung you in and I seen you lookin’ stove up and swollen,” Theotis remarked to Jesse, “I figured it served you right for helpin’ Parson Marshal Booth bring us in. Then your grandma showed me as to how you probably kept me from shooting that no-account banker and that would have been some real bona-fide trouble. So then I kinda felt sorry for you.” The mountain man speared a chunk of fatty meat with his fork and plopped the morsel in his mouth, then lifted the plate to his lips and began to slurp the remaining juices. Moses, returning to his place, glanced disdainfully at his brother and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Mind your manners, big brother.”

Theotis looked around, then continued his noisy practice, although this time he held the plate with the little finger of each hand politely raised.

Moses flashed a condescending smile and attacked his third plateful of stew. He made no attempt to hide the fact he relished every mouthful.

“Well, I’m glad you Tellicos don’t hold a grudge,” Jesse told them. “Because I’m going to need your help. This council I’ve called could blow up in my face.” He wore a shrewd expression now, and his humus-colored eyes searched the faces of the two mountain men as if judging just how much he could reveal to the brothers. The Tellicos, by their own admission, didn’t much care who emerged victorious from the war. Like many mountain folk, they felt removed from the conflict. But Jesse was here to bring their isolation to an end.

“What do you have in mind?” Theotis asked. He set aside his plate, pulled his napkin from the front of his shirt, and dropped it on the table. He leaned forward, his belly straining the buckskin lacings of his shirt.

“I want you to dig a few holes—well, more than a few—and some of them need to run three or four yards in length and maybe six to eight feet deep. And I want them covered with a woven net of branches and grass.”

“Bear traps. That’s what you want,” Moses said.

“Yes,” Jesse told him. He removed a slip of paper from his pocket and placed it on the table. It was a hastily drawn map of Buffalo Creek bordered by the Kiamichis. He traced the terrain to the gap at the northwest end of the valley where the mountains closed in and formed a bottleneck and the spring-fed creek bubbled out of the base of an upthrust limestone cliff. “I want them here,” said Jesse, and placed a finger on the gap.

“What do we get out of this?” Moses asked, his gaze narrowing.

“The satisfaction of knowing you’ve helped your country,” Jesse said.

“Horsepiss,” said Moses, then he turned to Raven. “Pardon me…uh…” He couldn’t untie his tongue quick enough to think of a proper apology.

“And I’ll see you get your farm back.”

“You can do that?” Theotis asked in a skeptical tone.

“I am not without authority,” Jesse said.

“It’d be a powerful lot of digging,” Moses added.

“Pa kept a cache of blasting powder back in the hills. You can use all you want. That ought to save your backs.” Jesse held out his hand. “Have we an agreement?”

“I reckon so,” Moses said, reaching across his brother to clasp Jesse’s outstretched hand before McQueen had second thoughts.

“I’m for it,” Theotis said, then rubbed his bristly chin and sighed. “But it seems you taken leave of your senses, all them bear pits. Why, you’re a-wasting your time, Jesse. We ain’t seen any bear around these parts for ten year or more. They all been hunted out. So you ain’t about to catch one in all them traps no matter how many we dig.” He chuckled, and winked at Moses. “No sirree, Captain McQueen. You been gone too long. There just ain’t any bear.”

“I know.”

Moses jabbed his brother with an elbow. “Jesse wants us to dig him some holes in the ground, we’ll do it. Seems a better way than most to get us back our farm. What do you want to use for bait in these here pits?”

“Just dig them,” Jesse said. He stared out at the night-shrouded hills. “The bait will come later.”

The puppies were three satin brown bundles of fur that tugged and ripped and burrowed to safety beneath the straw as Lorelei plucked one after the other from the box and set them on the wooden floor of the hayloft. She placed each pup near a tin plate of crumbled cornbread and milk. The pups recognized the milk smell. The bravest of the three, a mongrel with a diamond-shaped patch of white fur on its face, was the first to venture to the plate, but once he began to greedily devour the contents of the plate the other two joined him and proceeded to lap up their share of dinner. Lorelei continued to stroke the frightened little animals and speak to them in a soft and gentle voice.