Bride of the Shining Mountains (The St. Claire Men) (36 page)

The countryside between Saint Louis and Bloodroot still remained
largely unsettled, and decent accommodations would be hard to find. She would
be spending countless hours waiting out the darkness, listening to the night
sounds, feeling frightened and alone... and this time no one would be coming to
rescue her.

The mare pricked her ears and whickered low, dragging Reagan from
her musings. Much to her surprise another animal, startlingly close at hand,
whickered back. A crashing of the underbrush sent Josephine hurtling into the
tall grass in the opposite direction. Left alone to her fate, Reagan clawed for
the pistol in her pocket, and as she leveled it, a great, dark beast of a
horse, his flanks slick with sweat and his reins hanging slack, stepped into
the road.

Euripides.

Reagan’s thundering heart sank as she hauled on the reins,
bringing her mount to a stop. She’d been found out, her plan to escape him
thwarted, and any moment now he would step from the shadows, a triumphant look
on his handsome face.

Yet as Reagan nervously sat her mount, nothing happened. There was
no Jackson, no one to stop her progress down the darkened road except for the
quivering stallion and the niggling insistence deep in the pit of her belly
that something wasn’t right.

“Damn it all, Jackson, show yourself this instant!” Reagan cried
to the night-shrouded countryside, thinking that her choice of unladylike
language would goad him into appearing as nothing else could. “This ain’t no
time for games!”

The words shot out over the water, resounding off the tree-lined
shore, flinging their way back to smite her hard... and then, a highly charged
silence.

His reckless bent had landed him smack in the midst of some sort
of trouble. She knew it as well as she knew her own name. She just wasn’t sure
what to do about it.

Glancing around, Reagan scanned the roadside ahead and behind. Yet
she could detect no lifeless form lying in the ditch, a fact that eased her
mind not a single whit. She tried to think what to do, tried to decide if she
should search or return to town and seek some help, and that was when she heard
it: a low murmur, a man’s voice, with the same deep resonance, the same
inflection as Jackson’s, coming from the south. In the near distance, she spied
a small black square, the roof of which was outlined against the lighter sky.

Reagan’s heart warred against her head in that moment. He
certainly sounded hale enough, capable of tending to his business without her
assistance. She should leave, she knew. There was still a chance—despite his presence—that
she could skirt Euripides and slip by unchallenged. Her heart, however, was
more reluctant, more foolish than its counterpart, and argued staunchly that to
ascertain that all was truly well was the only decent, Christian thing to do.
“A fleeting glimpse, no more,” she promised the mare. “And from a distance.”

Gathering her courage, she dismounted and, taking Euripides’
reins, tied both mounts to a cottonwood well away from the roadside. Then she
circled around, approaching the building from the rear.

It was a dwelling of the meanest sort, with wide cracks visible
between the clapboard siding, and a stone chimney that was leaning and askew
against the sky. Only a thread of smoke rose from the chimney. There was no
light at all within. Reagan pressed her eye to an unchinked crack and, seeing
only blackness, continued on, stealthily making her way to the comer of the
structure, where a large rhododendron blocked the view of the sagging portico.

Carefully parting the branches, she peered through the crack
provided, and softly gasped.

It had not been Jackson’s voice she had heard, but his uncle’s.
He’d been bending over the lifeless body at his feet, but at her soft intake of
breath he straightened, peering directly at her. For one brief second their
eyes met, and a shock went through Reagan at the cold ruthlessness in his gaze.
Then a hand clamped over her mouth, and she was dragged slowly back... back
into the safety of the shadows, and away.

Impulse told Reagan to scream, yet the strange notion that Navarre
Broussard posed a greater threat than whoever it was that held a hand clamped
over her mouth kept her from it. In the next instant she turned her head and
stared into the bleary eyes of an ancient Indian. Putting a finger to his lips,
he moved aside a wide plank at the corner of the cabin, indicating that she
enter the gaping black hole.

Reagan hesitated, yet in the end, Navarre’s smooth voice issuing
from the side of the cabin, and coming closer, proved the deciding factor. “You
may as well show yourself. I know that you are here.”

It was incentive enough for Reagan, who scurried through the
opening. A heartbeat later the plank swung noiselessly into place. “Come, come,
boy,” Navarre called to the night at large. “I assure you there is no need to
be frightened. Boy? Boy! Filthy gutter trash! It would not be wise to test my
patience!” He was standing just beyond the loose plank, so close that Reagan
could have swung the board aside and touched him, and the fury and frustration
in his voice were unmistakable.

“Boy!” he shouted, his voice echoing through the night, so loud,
so fierce, that it rode over and above the soft, unintelligible curse that
issued from just inside the cabin doorway.

Careful not to make a sound, Reagan crept toward the long, dark
shape lying in the doorway. It couldn’t be, she thought in stunned disbelief,
it simply could not be.

But it was. Jackson.

He lay sprawled half-in, half-out of the doorway, too large to
drag very far unassisted, not conscious enough to know that a very real threat
lurked just outside.

Her heart in her throat, Reagan braced herself against his
shoulder, levering hard. “Roll, damn you!” she whispered harshly.

“Kaintuck,” he said groggily,
“cher,
is that you? The bed is
cold. I miss your warmth. Come, lie with me again.”

“Ssshhh! Onto your side, quickly! The villain who laid you low is
just outside. I must close and bar the door, and you’re in the way.” She pushed
and tugged at him while he lapsed in and out of consciousness, and finally
succeeded in moving him just enough to close the door.

As she slipped the bar into place, someone struck the door hard
from the outside, a sturdy blow that caused the panel to shudder and creak.
“Insolent whelp! Do you think that weathered piece of kindling can hold me at
bay for long? I’ll kick it in, by God, and drag you out by the ears!”

Crouched beside an unconscious Jackson, Reagan trained the pistol
in the general direction of the feeble portal, and thumbed the lock into the
firing position.

Then came the tread of a heavy foot on the portico, and a voice
that chilled Reagan’s marrow sounded just outside. “What game is this you play,
Navarre?”

“No game,” Navarre replied. “We’ve been compromised. I found a boy
watching from the bushes, and when I called to him, he barricaded himself and
that damnable interloper in the Indian’s cabin.”

Reagan knew a moment of absolute terror. That rumbling voice was
one she still heard in her nightmares, and she would have recognized it
anywhere.

Abe McFarland and Navarre Broussard.

It was a match made in the blackest pit of hell, and it made no
earthly sense. Laboring under a crippling fear, her breath coming fast and
shallow, and her heart beating so violently she feared it would leap from her
chest, it took every ounce of determination she could summon just to
concentrate on what was being said. “It would not take but half a kick to break
it in,” Abe told Navarre.

“Did you not hear that click?” Navarre demanded. Then he chuckled
darkly. “No, I don’t suppose you did. Like a bull moose in the throes of rut,
you were too intent upon the tugging of your heartstrings to notice anything.
Go on, then, and kick it in, while I stand aside and watch the outcome. And
when the lad cowering behind it drills you with a pistol ball, I’ll dump what’s
left of you in the Mississippi.”

The groaning protest of the floorboards told Reagan that Abe had
left the portico. But in a moment he was back. “Are you mad?” Navarre said.
“This is no time for a bellyful of whiskey!”

“This here ain’t for drinkin’,” Abe replied with his typical calm.
“It’s for smokin’.”

With a deepening sense of dread, Reagan listened to the soft
splash of liquid dousing dry wood, followed by the unmistakable click of metal
against stone.

Oh, God.
He was firing the cabin. Unable
to cajole or intimidate her into coming out, he was attempting to smoke her
out.

A strange glow illuminated the cracks on both sides of the
building, while threads of acrid wood smoke seeped slowly through the cracks in
the cabin wall.

A cold panic congealing in her belly, Reagan spun toward the loose
board in the rear wall, where the bright yellow of sprouting flame shone
clearly through the cracks.

Abe had set fire to three sides of the building. The door, outside
of which he and Navarre waited, was the only exit remaining, and she would
rather die than to walk through it, knowing what awaited her on the other side.

From outside, Navarre’s voice came. “You have made your choice,
but there is no need to die with it.”

Smoke poured through the unchinked cracks, rolling in noxious
waves over the rough plank floor, stinging Reagan’s eyes, nose, and throat,
making each breath sheer torment.

Beside her, Jackson stirred once more, groaning low in his throat.
He coughed, then groaned, raising a hand to his head. “Merciful God, what is
that smell?”

“Smoke,” Reagan said with a gasp. “Abe McFarland’s fired the
cabin. We’ve got to get out of here, right now. Can you move?”

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “Of course I can move.” He made to sit
up, and promptly passed out again.

Grasping his shoulders, Reagan shook him hard, tears coursing
down her cheeks in a scalding stream. “Wake up, damn it! This ain’t no time to
take a nap!”

Tongues of flame licked vertically along the wall, sprouting
through the cracks, consuming everything in their path. Escape would be
impossible once it reached the roof.

They had no time to lose. They had to get out. But how?

Both entrances were a veritable wall of flame, and the windows,
set high in the walls, were too narrow for Jackson to squeeze through, and
Reagan would not leave him.

“There must be another way,” she said, battling the growing sense
of impending doom that crowded close about her. “I’m not about to turn up my
toes and die so easily, and by the saints, neither are you. You hear me,
Broussard?” she shouted, grasping his shirt with both fists. “You can’t just
lie there and die!”

A deep, racking cough. Another groan. A wheezed reply. “I hear.”

Reagan touched his scarred cheek lovingly, watching as his eyelids
fluttered, then opened. “Try to stay with me. We can’t stay here. Do you
understand?”

He nodded once; then, taking a deep breath, he rolled to his side
and pushed to his knees, where he wavered drunkenly.

At least he was upright and lucid.

Reagan felt her heart swell with emotion, and for an instant she
feared it would burst. “You look terrible,” she said.

“And you look ripe for a change of scenery,” he said harshly. “A
circumstance we shall discuss at length the moment we get out of here. Come,
help me with this board, but stay low.”

He crawled to the far side of the cabin, opposite the hearth, and,
levering his fingertips into the widest crack, pried at one of the boards that
comprised the wall while Reagan helped him. He pulled and strained until the
sweat ran in runnels down his cheeks, until Reagan’s fingers were raw, yet the
board refused to budge.

“It’s no use,” Jackson said. “We’ll have to find another way.
Come. I’ll hoist you up and through the window.”

Reagan shook her head adamantly. “I’m not leavin’ here without you.”

Jackson bent, seizing Reagan by the arms, dragging her up so that
they knelt close together, their faces inches apart, and their gazes locked.
“You must!” he said in a snarl. “It’s the only way!”

Before she could reply, a portion of the floor slowly lifted, and
a cold draft of fresh night air swept through the cabin, stirring the smoke and
whipping the flames into a fiery tempest.