Only The Strong

Chapter Nine

It was a gorgeous, sunny day, painting the prairie in vivid hues with added splashes of color from wild-flowers.

Nate King loved days like this—the sun warm on his face, the fragrances in the air. He breathed deep and felt some of the tension drain from him like water from a sieve.

Nate had spent the past two hours scouting the river for sign. He hadn’t found any, hostile or otherwise. Drawing rein, he swung down. “We’ll water the horses and then head back.”

“Fine by me, hoss,” Peleg Harrod said. He dismounted stiffly and put a hand to the small of his back. “These old bones of mine ain’t what they used to be. Too much saddle and I’m a bundle of aches.”

“You’re spry enough for someone your age.” Nate brought his bay to the water’s edge. “My wife will be happy to hear there aren’t any Sioux about. We’ve tangled with them a time or two.”

“Who hasn’t?” Harrod laughed. “They love to count coup on whites more than they love to count coup on just about anyone. Except maybe the Shoshones.”

Nate grunted. The long-standing animosity between his adopted people and the Sioux was well known. “It’s too bad all the tribes can’t live in peace.”

“Peace ain’t human nature. Red or white, they live to make war.” Harrod led his own horse over.

“Most folks I know favor peace over spilling blood.”

“Maybe they say they do. But name me one time in all history when there wasn’t a war somewhere. Killing is in our blood. Has been since Cain and Abel.”

“So we forget about the part where it says ‘Thou shalt not kill’?”

Harrod chortled. “This from a coon who, from what I hear, has sent a heap of souls into the hereafter. Don’t take this wrong, but you’re a fine one to talk.”

Nate squatted and dipped his hand in the river. He couldn’t deny his past. But he could, and did, defend his deeds. “I’ve only ever taken a life when I had to.”

“Is that a fact? Then that ‘Thou shalt not kill’ doesn’t count when it’s not convenient?”

“I don’t know as I like your tone.”

“Sorry. It’s just that a lot of those who say they live as God wants them to live tend to break His rules as much as the rest of us.”

Nate splashed water on his neck and felt cool drops trickle under his buckskin shirt and down his chest. “I can’t argue with that. I’m only saying most people would be glad to go through their entire lives without taking someone else’s.”

Harrod picked up a small flat stone. He threw it, skipping it across the surface as boys were wont to do. “I’d have been content to go through my life that way. But it wasn’t meant to be.”

“Life never goes as we think it should.”

“Ain’t that the truth.” Harrod picked up another flat stone and skipped it—four times before it sank. Searching for more, he came around the bay. “You probably never figured on nursemaidin’ a black family, did you?”

Nate glanced up. “Why mention them?”

“No reason, except that it shows things happen to us we never plan on.” Harrod bent and picked up a stone, but it wasn’t flat enough and he dropped it. “Take me, for instance. I’ve done things I can’t believe I did. Nearly always, I did them for money.”

Nate set down his Hawken and dipped both hands in the water. “I try to get by with needing as little as I can.”

“Wish I could. But I’ve got me a few vices. I like to drink. I like whiskey an awful lot. I like cards on occasion, and now and then I pay the painted ladies a visit. All that takes money.”

“You could always give them up.”

“I wish it were that simple. My vices are as much a part of me as what ever virtues I have.” Harrod sighed. “Precious few, I’m afraid. No, I’ll do just about anything for money except hurt women. That’s the one thing I’ve never done and won’t ever do.”

Nate cupped water and pressed his hands to his face and welcomed the relief it brought from the heat. Through his fingers he said, “But you’d hurt a man for money. Is that what you’re telling me?”

Harrod selected a rock as big as his fist. “As a matter of fact, it is. I’m being paid extra in this case, seeing as how the man is more dangerous than most and the gents who hired me want him alive.”

“ ‘This case’?” Nate started to turn. He saw the frontiersman’s reflection in the water, saw Harrod’s arm sweep down, and the back of his head exploded with pain.

His last sensation was of pitching into black emptiness.

“Well, this a fine how do you do,” Emala complained. “Our Chickory went missing. Mrs. King went after him and never came back. And now Mr. King and that Harrod are overdue.” In her anxiety she plucked at her dress and fiddled with a button.

“Want me to go look for them, Ma?” Randa volunteered.

“And have you taken captive by some red devil? I should say not.” Emala planted her thick legs. “The three of us will stay right where we are until someone shows up.”

Samuel had been quiet a while, but now he said, “I don’t think that’s smart.”

“What would you suggest?”

Samuel stared to the west at the reddish orange ball a few hours from setting. “It’s been so long, they must be in some kind of trouble. You two wait here while I go look for Chickory and Mrs. King.”

“Without a gun? What will you do if they are in danger? If it’s Indians, you wouldn’t stand a prayer.”

“We can’t sit here doin’ nothin’.” Samuel turned to the horses, but he only took a step when his wife had his arm in a vise.

“No, you don’t. I’ve lost my boy today and I’m not losin’ my husband, too. The only way you’re gettin’ on that animal is if you lift me up with you.”

“I’m strong but I’m not that strong.”

Randa, anxious to end their bickering, stepped between them. “Why don’t we go together?”

That was what they did, in single file, with Samuel in the lead and Randa bringing up the rear.

Emala gazed about them with eyes as wide as saucers. “Lordy. I see now why you like havin’ that gun. These woods are spooky even in the daylight. We never know but that one of them big bears or a bunch of hungry wolves or a pack of them big cats will jump us.”

Randa said, “Mrs. King told me they’re called mountain lions. And they don’t go around in packs.”

“How can they be mountain lions when the highest thing we’ve seen in weeks was a puny hill? Maybe they’re mountain lions in the mountains, but here they’re prairie lions or maybe plains lions or even grass lions, but they sure ain’t mountain lions.”

“I could use wax to plug my ears,” Samuel said.

Emala took exception. “There you go again, speakin’ ill of me. And you don’t even have the courtesy to do it behind my back.”

Randa wished she had some wax, too. She remembered how nice her parents were to each other back when they were slaves, and she wondered why they argued so much now that they were free. It seemed to her it should be the other way around. She shut out their squabbling and admired the scenery. The blue-green of the river, the various greens of the trees, yet another shade of green for the grass, and over all the brilliant blue of the sky. She never saw anything like this back on the plantation.

Nate King had told her that the sky back east was different from the sky in the west. How that could be, Randa couldn’t fathom. To her, sky was sky. Why should it change from one place to another?

Out in the river a fish broke the surface, spawning ripples. Randa couldn’t begin to guess what kind it was. In Georgia she had known every animal and plant by name. Out here so much was new, it was like learning how to live all over again.

A big yellow and black butterfly fluttered past, and Randa grinned. To find such beauty in the midst of so many perils…Winona King mentioned once that there were just as many dangers in the mountains, but that the valley they were bound for was a paradise where they could live in peace the rest of their days.

Randa would believe it when she saw it. From the time when she was old enough to remember, life had been hard. Granted, the most danger she was ever in as a slave was when Master Brent took a liking to her. But no place on earth could be as wonderful as Winona King made King Valley out to be.

Suddenly Randa realized her mother was talking to her.

“…bad enough your father treats me so shabby, I won’t have it from my children. Now you answer me and you answer me this second. You don’t want me riled.”

“Sorry, Ma,” Randa said. “I was thinkin’ of how our life was before we ran away.”

“No sense in livin’ in the past, girl. We’re free now and we’ll have to make the best of it.”

Samuel said quietly, “Hush, woman.”

“There you go again!” Emala was stupefied. “Now that we’re free I will talk when I feel like talkin’ and there isn’t a thing—”

By then Samuel had turned his horse, reached out, and clamped a hand over her mouth. “Hush!” he said again. “Someone is comin’.”

They all heard the thud of hooves. Riders were approaching at a gallop. Quickly, Samuel reined toward the Platte River. Up ahead, part of the bank had washed away, leaving a drop of some ten feet. He rode to the cutoff and motioned for his wife and daughter to do as he was doing.

Emala balked. “Will you look at him? Hidin’ down there when it could be Mrs. King and our Chickory.”

“It could be Indians, too,” Randa said.

Emala ficked her reins and flapped her legs and got her horse down next to Samuel’s.

Samuel placed a hand on his belt where his pistol should be. He moved it to the hilt of his knife.

The drumming grew louder.

Samuel bent low. Randa copied him, but Emala sat there straight as she could sit. “Get down, woman.”

“I have a cramp.”

“What?”

“In my leg. From when I slapped it against this horse. It hurts somethin’ awful.”

Randa asked, “Would you rather it was an arrow in your leg, Ma?”

Emala bent, but she wasn’t happy about it. She wasn’t built for bending. She was too thick across the middle—she liked to think of herself as pleasantly plump—and besides, her bosoms were so big that she had to press them against the horse’s neck and get its sweat all over them. The only sweat she liked was her own. “What did I ever do to deserve all this sufferin’?”

Then the bank seemed to shake and the water to stir and riders flew past above them.

Samuel twisted his head to look. He counted four, all white, men he never saw before. One was short and one was young and another had a bushy mustache and held a shotgun. The last man had a hard cast to his face. They went by fast, staring straight ahead.

Samuel waited until the thunder died, then straightened. “I didn’t like the looks of that bunch.”

“Me neither,” Emala said. “Praise the Lord they didn’t see us. We have enough troubles.”

“What worries me,” Randa said, “is that they were comin’ from the direction Chickory and Mrs. King went.”

“We best keep goin’.” Samuel rode along the bank to a grassy incline, and up it into the trees. He twisted in the saddle. The four men were nowhere to be seen. “We were lucky.”

“Luck had nothin’ to do with it,” Emala disagreed. “I keep tellin’ you the Lord is lookin’ after us. I prayed, and He made us invisible.”

“That is the silliest notion you’ve ever come up with, and you have come up with some whoppers.”

“I’ll whopper you, oh ye of little faith. The Lord is our rock and our salvation.” When Samuel didn’t say anything, Emala prompted him with, “Well?”

“No, you don’t. Every time you bring religion into things, I get a blisterin’ that would bring Samson to his knees.”

“At least you remember his name. Given how little you read Scripture, that’s somethin’.”

“See what I mean?” Samuel said to Randa.

“ ‘Unto thee will I cry, oh Lord, my rock,’ ” Emala quoted. “ ‘Be not silent to me, lest, if thou be silent to me, I become like them that go down into the pit. Here the voice of my supplications when I cry unto thee, when I lift up my hands toward thy holy oracle. Draw me not away with the wicked, and with the workers of iniquity.’ ”

“I’d sure like to know the Bible as good as you do, Ma,” Randa said, with a wink at her father.

“It’s taken a lifetime of study, child. If more people kept their nose in the Word and out of the affairs of others, this world would be a lot nicer place.”

Fresh clods of dirt marked the trail. Samuel studied the tracks, trying to make sense of them. Nate King had promised to teach him how to read sign. He couldn’t wait. He was so intent on the ground that he didn’t realize the trail was blocked until his horse stopped and nickered.

Samuel looked up.

“Dear God!” Emala blurted.

Not ten feet away, lying on their backs and bound hand and foot and gagged, was their son and Winona King.