Sword of Vengeance (8 page)

A gun barrel jabbed Kit in the side. The guard who had struck him groaned and tightened the bandage around his arm to stanch the flow of blood. The fatigued Spaniard sucked in his breath and winced at the pain. He made no attempt to hide the hatred he felt for the Yankee. His lips curled back in a snarl, and he raised his musket and aimed the weapon at Kit’s heart, determined to finish Kit once and for all. His finger, curled around the trigger, slowly tightened.

“No!” Father Ramon stepped in front of the gun barrel. “We are not murderers. This Yankee is a prisoner. He must be taken back to St. Augustine to await the arrival of the new
comandante
.”

The dragoon retreated a step, confused by this development. Vengeance was one thing, damnation quite another. He could not shoot a priest. The sergeant’s timely arrival saved him from his dilemma.

“Chico,” Morales interceded gruffly. “Tie the
Inglés
to the cart.” The sergeant indicated a two-wheeled wagon that Escovar had left in the center of the clearing. The wounded dragoon grudgingly lowered his musket, to the relief of his intended victim. Morales had shoved the pistols into his belt, and now he stood, hands on hips, his wary gaze searching the vine-shrouded forest surrounding them.

“God bless you, Sergeant,” the priest said.

“Sí,” the sergeant replied. “God had better bless me. Maybe the Yankee’s friend hides somewhere in these woods and he comes back and sees the red-haired one is my prisoner. And this friend, he attempts to rescue Red Hair.” Morales brought his face close to Kit’s. “You will be my bait this night. I watch and wait. And if no one comes, I shoot you at sunup.” Morales whirled on the priest, who had started to protest. “No! Keep silent, old priest, or on my oath you join him!”

And so the afternoon hours crawled past and Kit McQueen endured in silence as the moist, heavy heat settled from the stark blue sky in invisible layers. It clogged a man’s lungs and made each breath a labor; he felt as if he were drowning. Kit whiled away the hours, once he realized escape was impossible, by imagining himself an osprey or any kind of falcon, one of those illustrious hunters who ride the wind’s slipstream or hang poised above the ancient land and callously observe the foolish antics, the sufferings and joys of earthbound humankind, then rise airborne to reach with feathery fingertips and brush the cheek of God.

The priest brought Kit food and water and waited with him while he ate, under guard. As soon as he was finished, his hands were quickly bound to the wheel of the cart once more.

For a long time Father Ramon had very little to say. Responsibility for the deaths weighed heavy on him; he counted Kit’s imminent demise among those burdens that bowed his shoulders and shackled his spirit. Solace was beyond his reach, locked away behind doors for which he had no key. Kit assumed the priest would not wish another death on his conscience and so might find some way, under cover of night, to set the prisoner free.

Kit found a few brief seconds of privacy when the dragoon guard walked around the cart to relieve himself, and in a soft voice, audible only to the old priest, Kit suggested Father Ramon was his last chance and only hope.

The priest returned to his own bedroll by another campfire he had built for himself and settled down with his thoughts and misgivings into a troubled sleep. Sergeant Morales placed one man beneath the cart. He pitched his own blanket in the cart. He trusted no one but himself to watch the prisoner and apprehend the Yankee’s partner, should the man be foolish enough to return.

The remaining men of his command settled by twos and threes around their cook fires. One by one the Spaniards succumbed to weariness. With the onset of night, the soldiers in their blankets drifted off to sleep, and their snores mingled with the night sounds of the forest and distant bayous.

Kit leaned against the wheel listening to the rush of night wings overhead and heard, somewhere beyond the black woods, the deep, bloodcurdling bellow of a bull alligator and the startled, pitiful screech of some animal turned prey. Kit noticed several of the soldiers, startled from their rest, bless themselves.

“Lord strengthen us against our enemies and deliver us from the hungry jaws of predators,” Kit muttered to himself.

“And false friends,” Sergeant Morales added from his bedroll in the cart. The sergeant laughed softly at his cleverness.

Kit, however, was not amused. He stretched his legs and worked the kinks out of them. His shoulders ached, and he tried to relax despite his bound hands. His wrists were securely tied to the wheel’s wooden rim. Its construction wasn’t all that sound, but any attempt to free himself or dislodge the rim from the spokes was bound to alert the soldier nodding off to sleep beneath the cart, not to mention Sergeant Morales, he of the immense gut and quick wit whose snores rivaled the alligators in the night. Some sentries, Kit thought. Some guards. A lumbering sot could stumble through camp and cut him loose, much less a man with skills like Bill Tibbs.

But Bill Tibbs wasn’t coming. Neither was any benevolent drunkard. Kit sighed and looked up at the stars. Determined as he was to stay awake, for what might well prove his last hours on earth, he failed. Sleep mercifully overtook him. The night passed without incident.

Come the first gray hours of morning, Kit was awakened by Sergeant Morales, who told him it was time to die.

T
HE SMELL OF BOILING
coffee drifted through the clearing and mingled with the aroma of venison steaks roasting over open campfires. Kit was offered neither, though Sergeant Morales apologized with restrained sincerity. Surely, he had said, the Yankee could understand that such a courtesy only delayed the inevitable. And why waste food on a man who would soon be dead?

Kit didn’t bother to reply. If these were indeed his last moments, he was not about to waste them conversing with the sergeant. As Corporal Galvez led him across the clearing, Kit studied the surrounding woods as if seeing them for the first time. Lavender and yellow butterflies lazily spread their wings upon broad-leaf plants and lichen-covered rock. The moss-draped, twisted branches of a scrub oak were a miraculous display. Field mice underfoot were flushed from hiding as the men trampled a patch of ferns, and scampered off through the grass. Night would bring slithering reptiles and a blur of winged owls in search of such delectable prey.

Life and death were integral parts of an unfathomable mystery, a mystery Kit McQueen was about to grudgingly embrace if he didn’t do something fast.

To everything there is a season: a time to reap, a time to sow, a time to philosophize, a time to run like hell. Heaven brought him his opportunity in the form of Father Ramon, his hands still dirty from digging a grave for Alsinop Escovar. He was not about to dig another.

“No! This is wrong,” the priest cried out, and stepped between Kit and Galvez. Father Ramon looked back at the dragoons halfheartedly attempting to place themselves in some sort of suitable arrangement for a firing squad while Sergeant Morales continued to berate them unmercifully for their ineptitude. “It is wrong before the eyes of God!”

“God does not see this cursed country. He has forgotten it long ago,” Morales shouted back at the robed man. “I do not hear you anymore, priest.” He waved his hand as if brushing off a bothersome insect.

“Come along,” Galvez said to Kit. “At least you will have a pleasant place to be buried in. A less charitable man than Morales would dump you in the bayou for the alligators to feed upon.”

“The sergeant’s generosity touches my heart.” Kit wasn’t smiling.

Corporal Galvez led the way, his Yankee prisoner falling into step behind him. Father Ramon took up the rear, reciting in a gentle voice a prayer for the dying. And as he prayed, he pulled a knife from his voluminous sleeve and with a quick flick of the wrist sawed through the ropes binding Kit’s wrists.

The prisoner immediately began to work the blood back into his fingers. Feeling quickly returned, as his arms were more sore than numb. Behind Kit, the padre started back toward the cabin and the hastily formed firing squad, and in so doing masked Kit’s attempted escape. Corporal Galvez continued across the clearing to the newly mounded earth of Escovar’s grave.

Twenty-five feet from the cabin, where the ground was soft and easy to dig, Father Ramon had placed the earthly remains of the murdered trapper. Another fifteen yards, and the dense forest beckoned with its ancient silence and mossy gloom. Though a forbidding place to the unwary, to the eyes of Kit McQueen it offered sanctuary.

If he could outrun the dragoons and dodge their first fusillade, he just might elude them. That was the task at hand, to reach the forest without being shot down. There was no time like the present to make the attempt.

Kit lunged forward. Galvez caught a glimpse of movement and started to turn. Kit drove his hardened fist into the corporal’s left side, staggering Galvez. Kit yanked the corporal about and snatched a pistol from the man’s belt. He heard the outcry behind him. Morales roared the order to fire. Kit dove for the only cover that presented itself, Escovar’s grave.

He cleared the mounded earth and hit the dirt as a musket volley thundered in the clearing. Geysers of soft earth erupted from the mound. That crudely fashioned cross of branches Father Ramon had erected to mark the grave all but exploded. And poor Corporal Galvez, who inadvertently had placed himself in the line of fire, choked back a scream as lead slugs ripped his bony frame and left him belly down on the grave. He shuddered, attempted to rise, then fell back, mortally wounded.

Kit scrambled to his feet and ran toward the forest. The firing squad broke ranks. Most of the men hurried to reload their muskets, while four of their number gave chase.

“Idiots!” Morales bellowed. “The Yankee is getting away. Stop him before he reaches the trees. Run, you fools. Run!” The stout sergeant made no effort to give chase. He wasn’t built for speed. But four of his dragoons most certainly were. The soldiers had rested well and in relative comfort, while Kit had been bound the entire night.

Kit glanced over his shoulder, knowing such an action was a mistake even as he made it. His boots caught on a vine, and down he went, stumbling and then falling forward. He twisted and landed on his shoulder, then immediately rose up on one knee and leveled the pistol he had taken from Galvez. Kit’s pursuers had just passed the grave where the unfortunate corporal lay dying.

A well-placed shot might slow them up and give Kit time to reach cover. He sighted on the lead runner, a lithe-looking Spaniard in a rumpled green and white tunic. The dragoon was armed with a pistol and chanced a shot at a dead run. His aim was wild.

Kit fired, and the corporal’s pistol bucked in his grasp. Galvez must have loaded his weapon with a heavy charge, for the gunshot sounded unusually loud.

Even more surprising, two of Kit’s pursuers, running several feet apart, dropped and doubled over, one staggering a few steps and falling backward, clutching at his throat. The other two Spaniards spun around on their heels and retreated at a dead run toward the cabin. Kit stared in disbelief at the gun in his hand. What the devil? he thought. Then he ducked as another volley of gunfire rippled from the emerald shadows behind him. A bugle trumpeted like the horn of Roland as powder smoke blossomed in the underbrush, and war cries filled the air as if a horde of banshees had been loosed among the pines.

Kit hugged the ground and gripped the pistol by the barrel, ready to use the weapon like a war hammer if need be. The army in the forest was no friend of Morales’s. The Spanish dragoons bravely held their ground, but their muskets were no match for the rifles of their hidden enemies. Sergeant Morales looked on, furious, as first one, then another of his men yelped in pain and staggered off, wounded. The skirmish line began to waver.

“Hold bravely, now,” the sergeant roared above the gunfire, sensing his dragoons’ growing panic.

“We are outnumbered!” one of the men shouted.

“It is the Yankee army! They’ll kill us all!” a second soldier exclaimed.

“Then we must drive them—ahh!” Morales’s words were cut short as a slug ripped his shoulder and knocked him on his backside.

Seeing the sergeant fall was the last straw for the remaining Spaniards. Sergeant Morales’s presence alone had held them in place. Leaderless now, three men bolted for their horses, and then the rest of the skirmishers followed suit. They rode past the cabin, raced across the clearing, and galloped into the woods.

Morales, struggling to his feet, cursed them through his clenched teeth and ordered his men to stand and fight. But his bullying commands fell on deaf ears. The dragoons were routed. Morales groaned and clutched at his shoulder. He could stay and probably die—or join his men in flight and live to battle another day. The choice, though obvious, was no less bitter. Sergeant Morales was a proud man. Defeat did not come easy to him.

He turned slowly, ignoring the lead slugs spattering the earth at his feet. With the bugle taunting him from across the clearing, the sergeant lumbered off toward his own mount.

“Come along, old priest,” he said, glancing at the robed figure huddled in the shadow of Escovar’s cabin. “I see your hand in this.”

“Not mine, but the hand of God,” said Father Ramon, sagging against the wall.

“Well, your heathen bunch of Creeks shall feel the hand of Morales for all the trouble you have caused me, and there is no one to blame but yourself,” the sergeant growled as he caught the reins of his frightened stallion. The animal had been tethered to a tanning rack. It only took a second to free the animal. “I’ll take the rest of the horses, and you can walk back to the damn village—that is, if your Yankee friends let you live.”

The sergeant steeled himself against the pain and prepared to swing up into the saddle. The firing behind him had ceased, which only filled him with a deeper desire to get the hell out.

Back in the clearing, Kit scrambled to his feet. He had watched the Spaniards break rank and flee. He saw the sergeant fall and rise again like a wounded whale. The sergeant was attempting to escape, the same man who had taunted him and would have shot him down in cold blood. Fury filled him, perhaps for the treatment he had received at Morales’s hands. Then again, it might have been the hate that welled in his heart for Bill Tibbs, the supposed friend who had abandoned him to die here among the bayous. Suddenly Kit McQueen could stand aside and watch no longer. Oblivious to the slugs whirring past, he stood and, armed with his unloaded pistol and the rage burning in his veins, charged the cabin.