Wicked Angel (Blackthorne Trilogy) (45 page)

      
Alex knelt and stroked the dog's coarse fur. "I wonder if he could track her for me." He stood up and said, "Show me the place where she was abducted."

      
Within the hour Alex and four other warriors from the village set out with the dog. The men were armed to the teeth and each led a pair of spare mounts, well provisioned. Alex would not return until he found his wife.

      
The first day the tracking was easy. In their haste to put distance between themselves and Coweta, the kidnappers had not bothered to hide their trail. Pray God the weather held until he could overtake them. At dusk he and his men came upon the place where the Red Sticks had rested and eaten. The signs were unmistakable. Taking heart, he ordered his men to make camp and sleep until moonrise.

      
When they set out again he had to rely on Poc's sense of smell. The rocky ground of the ridges obscured any trails, but the tenacious little terrier forged ahead with growing excitement. That was when Poc found the chunk of lavender soap.

      
Dismounting, Alex picked it up and inhaled the familiar fragrance. Tears choked in his throat as he clutched the talisman. "Ah, Joss, always resourceful." They were on the right trail. Whether the little dog was detecting the scent of his mistress or that of the mounts of her captors, Alex could not be certain, but with renewed hope he continued following where Poc led.

      
The men who held his wife were pushing hard to the south, scarcely taking time to eat or sleep. Remembering how Joss felt about horses, he knew she must be terrified as well as exhausted. Those sons of bitches would pay dearly when he caught up to them.

      
After that the trackers began to find a slow but steady series of markers dropped along the way, more chunks of soap interspersed with teeth from her comb and small strips torn from her clothing.

      
"We are catching up with them. They cannot be more than a day ahead of us now," Blue Fish said to hearten Alex when a moonless night forced them to stop.

      
"She's probably so hurt and tired they couldn't drag her any further," Alex said, his voice breaking as images of Joss's slim, pale beauty flooded his mind.

      
"They have not harmed her," Blue Fish replied. "They wish to keep her safe. To bargain with, I think."

      
"I thought the same," Alex said hollowly, praying it was true. He would give them anything, do anything, to secure her safe return.

      
Be strong, Joss. I will find you, my love.

Chapter Twenty-two

      
Several times they almost lost the trail and were forced to backtrack. Poc would lose the scent when Joss's captors rode their horses up or down the stream to obscure their trail. Then the rescue party would be forced to search up and down the banks until they found the spot where she had exited. Since the swampy lands of the southern Alabama River country were honeycombed with streams, they began to lose time.

      
Alex grew increasingly desperate. On the fourth day Tall Crane, Pig Sticker and Devon, with a larger party of Coweta warriors, caught up with them.

      
That night while everyone else lay exhausted in their blankets, Devon and his son huddled before the campfire. Alex stared into the flames as if hypnotized. His face was drawn and covered with heavy beard, his eyes hollow and red-rimmed from smoke and lack of sleep.

      
“Tall Crane says there's a fort another ten miles or so to the south on the 'Bama. Although neutrals hold it, the kidnappers may have taken her there."

      
"Once they reach the main channel of the 'Bama, they can take to the water and we'll never catch them," Alex said with rising despair. He held his head in his hands and shuddered.

      
Knowing what he would have felt if it had been Barbara who was captive, Devon understood his son's bottomless anguish. "If they can take to water, so can we," he said with determination.

      
"She's terrified of horses. She can't even swim. I should never have brought her to this wild, dangerous country."

      
"Don't underestimate your wife, son. Your mother taught her to swim and she learned to ride just getting here from Savannah. You were afraid she wouldn't fit in, weren't you?"

      
Alex's head jerked up. "How did you know?"

      
Devon smiled sadly. "I was certain your mother couldn't survive out here either. An English noblewoman living in a Muskogee town?" he scoffed to himself. "I tried to send her back repeatedly. But she loved me so much that she wouldn't go. I think Joss is the same way."

      
As memories of Joss's appalled reaction to Muskogee life flashed through his mind, Alex replied, "Joss isn't like Mama." She certainly could not love him that much. .. could she?

      
"Oh, I think you're wrong. She's wonderful with the children according to your grandmother."

      
"The children?" Alex asked, puzzled.

      
"I assume you didn't have time to discuss much the night you came home," Devon said dryly.

      
Alex flushed, remembering their argument and the way it had ended...in passion.

      
"She came to your grandmother and asked if she could help with the school. After all, she was a teacher in London."

      
"She taught in Grandma Charity's school?" Alex asked as his throat tightened.

      
"Your mother says the children love her. She has a natural way with the little ones."

      
"She always did," Alex replied quietly. All the while he had brooded about her rejection of his mixed blood, his fears that she scorned the Muskogee...she was teaching in the school. J
oss, Joss, I never gave you a chance.

      
With the first rays of light, Alex left with Poc, who seemed especially eager to reach the Alabama River, which lay ahead of them. The rest of the men followed behind them to check signs carefully to be certain they were on the right trail.

      
Alex rode like a man possessed and the dog, now considerably more wise to the dangers rife in swamplands, led the way. The little terrier was tough and tireless. Finally they broke through the dense foliage of scrub pines and hickory and reached the open marshlands of the delta. Alex's gaze swept across the vast flat plains of sedge. In the distance a thick curl of smoke rose ominously against the clear blue of the western horizon. Alex kicked his mount into a gallop as Poc took off racing.

      
When he reached the charred ruins of the fort, Poc circled the blackened timbers of the stockade, then crawled inside an opening created by the fire. The ashes were still quite warm but neither dog nor man noticed the heat. Poc whimpered piteously as he circled the compound where a number of small cabins had once stood. Now all of them were reduced to blackened piles of logs and stone.

      
After investigating three of the gutted buildings, the dog nosed inside the door of the last one, which was at the very back of the stockade that faced the river. Guts knotted, Alex shoved the scorched wooden door further open and followed. The interior was completely destroyed except for what looked like the remains of a table and a heavy old sea chest in one corner.

      
"What is it, Poc? Was she here?" He could not see in the smoky confines. His eyes stung and his lungs burned.

      
He'd seen the charred corpses of half a dozen defenders outside, almost unrecognizable but for the heavy metal jewelry and weapons that marked some of them as Muskogee males. Others were clad in the badly burned remains of buckskin shirts and trousers. Mixed bloods. He had seen no women, thank God.

      
Until now. His heart hammered in his chest and a great roaring filled his ears. In the corner of the room two figures lay huddled together, their bodies all but unrecognizable as female. One looked like a ten- to twelve-year-old girl, judging from her size. The other was a grown woman... a white woman? The absence of Indian jewelry suggested as much, although the clothing and hair were too badly burned to be certain. She held the child in her arms protectively.

      
Alex knelt beside Poc, who paced frantically back and forth around the corner where the bodies lay, sniffing the ground. Surely this was not Joss, his wife. Then the glint of something shiny flashed in the dim light streaming in through the door. Poc was already sniffing at it. The dog sat back on his haunches and let out a long, low, bone- chilling howl.

      
Alex's blood froze. He could scarcely move as the roaring in his ears reached a crescendo of unbearable intensity. He half walked, half crawled to the shiny object. It was gold, melted slightly yet still easily distinguishable. A man's timepiece. The Reverend Elijah Woodbridge's timepiece.

      
Joss was never without it. Barbara had told him she carried her personal belongings in a leather pouch and that it was missing along with her. From it she had left the trail of soap and combs. She would never have left her father's timepiece behind. Nor would her captors, had they been alive, have tossed away something of such value, he was certain.

      
He knelt beside the charred bones and laid his hands over them as if to protect them. And he cried. The dog licked his face and hands, whimpering in despair, trying in vain to offer comfort.

      
That was how Devon and the others found them.

* * * *

      
In the vain hope that Joss had somehow been taken away by river, the men spent the next week scouring the low marshy banks of the Alabama for miles in either direction. Alex took Poc and walked the course of the river, up and down, on both sides, but Poc could find not the slightest trace of Joss.

      
The fort had indeed been held by mixed bloods who had tried to remain neutral in the brewing war between the various factions of the Creek Confederacy. Apparently they had been surprised by a large Red Stick war party, burned out without any chance to escape, barely able to fight back before they were massacred. An entire cache of burned canoes was found neatly banked beside the river door of the stockade, their frames standing like skeletons. Not one space on the tiny quay was unfilled.

      
Devon and Tall Crane reached the tragic conclusion that the woman in the ashes, whom they had buried beside the young girl, must have been Joss. But Alex refused to believe it, even when his wider and wider ranging searches yielded nothing. Pig Sticker led the other warriors from Coweta back to their town while Alex's father and uncle waited for his grief to spend itself enough so they could convince him to give up the useless quest.

      
Finally a messenger located them, sent from Benjamin Hawkins, another government trader to the Confederacy, asking that Devon and Tall Crane come at once to his agency on the Flint River. The Shawnee prophet Sickaboo had convinced several of the influential Lower Creek
miccos
to join Tecumseh's rebellion and become king's men. Golden Eagle and Tall Crane were the only men with enough influence to dissuade the chiefs.

      
Tall Crane set out at once to respond to Hawkins's summons. Devon went in search of his son. He found Alex that evening seated on a hollow log at a bend in the river, staring out at the swiftly flowing current, watching the sun set across the water. The bloodred ball cast a ruddy glow over his somber, gaunt features. Poc welcomed Devon with nervous whining, seeming to say, "Do something to help him."

      
"It's late, son. Time to build a fire and make camp for the night," Devon said when Alex continued staring at the river.

      
"She's gone, Papa. Gone forever. I never told her I loved her. Not once. What a cold-blooded bastard I was. I never deserved a warm, intelligent, good-hearted woman like her."

      
The raw, anguished words tore at Devon's heart. "I love this land of my birth but it's harsh and cruel at times. I wish there were something I could do to make it easier for you, Alex, but I know there isn't." He placed one hand on his son's shoulders and squeezed the tense muscles, then set to making a fire.

      
Watching his father perform the familiar task, Alex said at length, "I offered her an arrangement, did you know that?"

      
Dev nodded. "Your mother explained how things stood between you two...at least as much as she understood of it," he said, hoping to encourage his son to speak of his grief.

      
"We were friends. I convinced myself that a marriage in name only would be of mutual advantage."

      
"From what I saw, it was a great deal more than that," Dev replied. He had never understood what had set Alex against the institution of marriage, but he would not question, only listen.

      
Alex shook his head. "It could have been so much more, more than I ever deserved...but I... Ah, hell, I ruined it," he said, his voice thick with tears that he refused to shed. "I couldn't make up my mind to be a husband, to ask her to...to love me—to admit that I loved her."

      
"Women have a way of sensing those things, son. Joss knew that you loved her."

      
"If only I could believe that, Papa." He sat staring into the flames of the fire as Devon prepared a simple meal of coffee, bread and cheese.

      
Offering him a plate, Dev said, "Hawkins has asked for help at the Flint Agency. Sickaboo's stirring up some trouble. I don't know if Kent's behind it or not. Tall Crane went to speak with the miccos. I still have to locate Weatherford." He left the rest unspoken, leaving it up to Alex to decide what he would do.