Ride the Panther (20 page)

“You all right, Mr. Roberts?”

Tullock glanced up. It took him a moment to clear his thoughts. He blinked, looked at Sawyer, then over at Buck Langdon, Chris Foot, and Johnny Teel, who did not share his parents’ abolitionist sentiments. Chris Foot was a full-blood Choctaw whose family ran a gristmill a few miles from Honey Ridge. Buck Langdon was a big-boned young ne’er-do-well who had ridden into town the night before but had lacked the funds to remain with Sam Roberts and the girls of the Medicine Wagon Saloon. Buck had fallen victim to “faro fever,” as Sawyer called it, and squandered the last of his money on the fickle affections of lady luck. Tullock trusted these four. He had stood with them as Sam and those four young men had sworn their allegiance to the Confederate cause around a golden circle of fire almost a year ago. In the matter of his son, pride had turned to deep misgivings overnight.

“What is it?” Tullock said, flustered. “I’m fine. What were you saying?” He shooed the dark-skinned children away and sent them scampering off to the cotton fields stretching out from the house in a vast snowy expanse. Negro men and women dragged long cumbersome canvas bags from row to row and bent their ragged backs beneath, the blind and unforgiving eye of the sun as they picked the cotton plants bare. It might take all day to fill a bag, but these poor souls weren’t going anywhere, and when “master” wasn’t looking, they saw no need to hurry.

“Sawyer here was telling us how you got friends among the Knights to the north of here, up in Cherokee County,” Buck said. Meat juices dribbled down his chin. He wiped his mouth on a bandanna that he kept tucked in the hip pocket of his trousers.

“My sister married a Cherokee named Andrew Wallace. He and his men have just about driven out the Federalists.” Tullock knelt and wiped the butcher knife clean in the dirt. He couldn’t shake the hold his dream had locked on him. The more he tried to drive it from his thoughts, the more tenaciously the images clung, like burrs to a horse’s tail. “They have twice our number,” Tullock added, straining to follow the conversation.

“Maybe we ought to bring ’em on down and send packing the likes of Carmichael Ross and them others in town who dance to the tune she plays,” Chris Foot suggested. He was the youngest of Truett’s crowd and, next to Sawyer, the most headstrong. Like the others, he had followed Pacer to Lawrence and felt betrayed by McQueen’s conduct. He had nothing but contempt for the Choctaw Kid, a rebel he had once idolized for his solitary raids into Yankee-held territory.

“That’s not a bad idea,” Sawyer concurred. He looked at Tullock for a response. Now he knew something was the matter, for the “bull of the woods” failed to respond. However this time, instead of daydreaming, he was studying the dirt road that cut through his fields. He shaded his eyes against the glare of the sun.

“Rider coming.”

“Who is it?” Buck Langdon said, cramming another strip of pork in his mouth like a chaw of tobacco.

“Jesse McQueen,” Sawyer answered. Chris Foot had brought news from town about Jesse’s return to Chahta Creek. Tullock could only guess at the reason for Jesse’s presence. Now it appeared he was going to find out.

“McQueen here already?” Buck muttered. “He didn’t waste any time.”

“His kind never do,” Tullock said. They were standing off to the side of the house, near the smokehouse. He turned to Sawyer. “Tell Willow to keep Arbitha inside. Then take Chris and Buck with you and stay clear of things until I’ve talked with McQueen. Johnny here can work on the hog. At least he won’t eat as much as Buck.”

“I don’t like leaving,” Sawyer told the master of Honey Ridge.

“You don’t have to like it. But by God you’ll do as I say!” Tullock’s features seemed etched in stone. Now this was the man that Sawyer remembered. Tullock Roberts seemed his old self again.

“Yes sir,” the overseer quickly replied. He gestured to Chris and Buck and headed around behind the house. He was anxious to prepare a personal welcome for the plantation’s uninvited guest.

Jesse sensed he was being watched. He didn’t know by what or whom, but the tingling along the back of his neck had bothered him for the past couple of miles as he rode among the live oak dotted hills. The feeling lingered even when he reached bottom land and fields of golden corn and cotton, prime for harvesting by Tullock’s slaves for whom a war was raging and proclamations issued. Emancipation had yet to reach Indian Territory. Jesse corrected himself. It had now. As a territorial ranger and a Union officer, he was the personification of Lincoln’s decree. He passed unnoticed among the laborers in the fields, and the puff of dust kicked up by the gray mare quickly dissipated in the warm September breeze.

Jesse glanced over his shoulder to check his backtrail for the last time and saw nothing but the woods he’d ridden through and the rolling hills like the swells of some emerald sea, frozen in time.

The two-story plantation house was an imposing structure with a whitewashed front that gleamed bright in midmorning. Jesse could tell at a glance it was hog-killing time by the carcass hanging from the A-frame and the scalding pot and the fresh-roasted chunks of pork clutched in the hands of eager dark-skinned children running past him to join their parents toiling in the fields of Honey Ridge.

A blue jay swooped past and alighted on a nearby fence post and proceeded to scold the horseman as he passed by. A pair of coon hounds scampered through the garden in pursuit of a gray rabbit that bounded over the turned earth, darted to left and right, leaped the pumpkins, and vanished in tall cotton just out of reach of the dogs with their baying and barking and snapping jaws.

He saw Tullock walk across the front yard and climb the low steps to stand in the center of the broad-beamed high-roofed porch that fronted the plantation house. He also spied a trio of riders galloping away from one of the barns behind the plantation house. The distance was too great for him to recognize them. They kept their hats pulled low and faces hidden. The man in the lead on a cream-colored horse led the others in a hurried dash to the timbered hills north of the house. Jesse suspected the three might be circling around to come up behind him and block any attempt at escape. He sighed and suppressed his misgivings. He’d been riding into traps ever since the war began, first as a spy in New Orleans, then Vicksburg. Now he’d returned home, alone, gambling the name of McQueen and his own quick wits could keep the Choctaw Nation from tearing itself asunder as the states had done.

He tugged on the reins and walked his gray the remaining few yards to the porch. Tullock lifted his red-stained hand and motioned for Jesse to halt.

“You don’t need to dismount,” he called out. The broad-shouldered man hooked his thumbs in his suspenders. His eyes were underlined with shadow, from the restless night he’d spent. The heavy door behind him opened and Arbitha emerged from the foyer and joined her husband.

“Jesse McQueen, as I live and breathe, back from the war. Not wounded, I hope.”

“No, ma’am. Thank you,” Jesse answered. Once the two families had been friends, but the hostilities had sorely tested such bonds.

“Tullock, invite him in. We can be civil to one another, surely.”

“He’ll not step foot on my property,” Tullock replied, unmoved.

“But…”

“Woman, I’ll not be argued with.” The master of Honey Ridge turned to glare at Jesse. “Hear me out, Arbitha. He comes to bring us all down. The end of everything we hold dear follows in his wake.”

“You’re wrong, Tullock,” Jesse said, relaxing in the saddle. “I’m trying to save what I can for you and everyone else.”

“Your colors show through whether you’re wearing the uniform or not.” Tullock shook his head. “Have you forgotten the Trail of Tears, how we were betrayed by the flag you’re fighting under? Ask Raven. Ask your grandmother. We were forced to leave our homes and plantations in Mississippi and come to the Indian Territory.”

“It was the farmers and planters of the South who moved onto the land the Choctaw left behind, the same Confederates you’ve chosen to support,” Jesse countered. “If anyone should be taken to task it’s you.” Jesse was struggling to control his temper. He studied his surroundings. Honey Ridge displayed none of the ravages suffered by the plantations along the Mississippi River. Cotton stood knee high in the fields, tasseled corn was as tall as the laborers. The slave shanties were out of sight and out of mind, beyond the barns. It was ever the way; the plantation owners wanted their Negro slaves but didn’t like to have to look at them.

“Why should you speak for the Choctaw? You’ve little enough of the blood in you.”

Tullock had left an opening without realizing it. Jesse wasn’t about to let it pass.

“I don’t intend to speak for anyone—but myself—this Sunday evening in the Council House. Why don’t you join me?” Jesse carefully studied the man on the porch. “There’s no call for the Choctaw people to destroy themselves in this war. And that’s exactly what will happen if the Knights continue to raid. There’ll be killing and more people driven out and suffering on every side. Ruination and wholesale slaughter await us. I’ve seen the destruction. Fathers and sons lost forever. The dead are beyond embracing. They are lost to us forever.”

Hearing his remarks, Arbitha gasped and crossed to her husband’s side and placed a hand on his arm as if in warning.

“Why come to me about the Knights? I know nothing of them.”

“Many people respect you, Mr. Roberts. With your help I might be able to work out a truce that both sides can abide by. The Knights will listen to you. Together we might be able to avert a catastrophe and save the lives of our friends and families. You’ve only one son, Tullock. Think of him in harm’s way. Join me and save his life and that of all the other sons who won’t have to die if we can just reach some kind of accord.”

“Mr. Roberts, you just say the word and I’ll escort McQueen off your land,” Johnny Teel called out as he rounded the corner of the house, a muzzle-loading rifle cradled in his arms.

“What do you say, Mr. Roberts?” Jesse asked, ignoring Teel, which only infuriated the storekeeper’s son. He marched forward and nudged the gray with the muzzle of his rifle.

Jesse’s eyes hardened as he looked down at the man with the rifle. When he spoke, his voice held all the warmth of a death rattle.

“Touch my horse again, Johnny Teel, and it’ll be time to root hog or die a poor pig.” Jesse’s hands never left the saddle pommel but the menace in his voice was starkly real.

“What the devil is that supposed to mean?” Johnny nervously replied, trying to shrug off his lack of confidence. Most men would have turned pale and nervous staring into a rifle barrel. But Jesse Redbow McQueen was not most men.

“He means you’re a dead man if you don’t back off,” Tullock said from the porch. “Get on back to the hog, Johnny, there’s a good lad.”

At Tullock’s insistence Johnny lowered the rifle and retreated to the corner of the porch. Jesse returned his attention to the man on the porch. Arbitha still stood alongside her husband, ready to support him whatever his decision. Her hand on his powerful forearm served as a silent reminder of the dream that had torn his night’s sleep asunder and left him counting the hours till dawn, haunted by premonitions of disaster. When Buck Langdon had arrived at sunrise with news of Jesse McQueen’s arrival in Chahta Creek, to Tullock’s way of thinking, the spirits were telling him something, perhaps even giving him a warning that only a fool would ignore.

“I’ll join you,” Tullock muttered. “But I don’t know what good will come of it.” Arbitha breathed a sigh of relief and gripped her husband’s arm to assure him of her approval. Johnny Teel stared in amazement at the master of Honey Ridge. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Sawyer and the others must be told.

“You won’t regret it,” Jesse said.

“Maybe,” Tullock said. “Where’s Ben? I expected him to come home to try and patch things up.”

“He sent me,” Jesse replied.

“You took a chance in coming here,” the plantation owner told him.

“Peace was worth the risk.”

“I’ll listen to what you have to say, but I’m not promising anything,” Tullock cautioned.

“But he’ll keep an open mind. I’ll see to that,” Arbitha added, making her own feelings on the matter quite clear. Her husband’s dream had been the final straw and given credence to her own misgivings about her family’s involvement in the Knights of the Golden Circle. “Now I shall have Willow prepare us some lunch.” She whirled about in a flurry of skirt and lace underdresses and vanished through the front door.

“Well, you’ve won over my child bride,” Tullock glowered. “I won’t be so easy. I built Honey Ridge up from nothing but buffalo grass and coyotes. I’ll not allow some Northern aggressor to take it all away.”

Jesse glanced around at the fine house and the fertile fields and the orderly rows of crops; acres upon acres tended by families in bondage. In contrast, Jesse’s grandparents had no stomach for slavery. Those same convictions had been passed down from generation to generation. The McQueen homestead on Buffalo Creek might lack the size and wealth and sense of order of Honey Ridge, but neither had the McQueen fields been watered by the sweat of enforced servitude. The hills had never echoed with the rattle of chains or the crack of some overseer’s whip. In the Kiamichis a man was bound to the land by a love of the mountains, not by shackles or hopelessness.

“No one wants to take your land, Mr. Roberts, or your home. But winds of change are coming. They’ll blow across the country no matter what you—or I—can say. And a man must either bend with the wind, or break.” Jesse touched the brim of his hat, bade good-bye to the master of Honey Ridge, and started back down the wheel-rutted drive. Jesse doubted Tullock Roberts would call him back and repeat Arbitha’s invitation to dinner.

He was right.

J
ESSE KNEW HE WAS
in trouble when the three hooded riders rode out from behind a dense thicket and blocked the road along which he was traveling. Honey Ridge lay about two miles back through the winding low hills of oak and hickory forest. Jesse refused to show alarm and continued without breaking stride. He rode straight for the leader of the three, who sat straight on his cream-colored gelding. The men were armed with ax handles, which made for sturdy clubs. Jesse considered freeing his rifle but decided against it. He didn’t want to escalate the situation into gunplay. He’d had some success with Tullock; maybe this was another situation he could talk himself out of.