Davey Crockett 6 Read online

  CONTENTS

  ABOUT COMANCHE COUNTRY

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE SERIES SO FAR

  Davy Crockett was born to explore the wide-open county of the untamed wilderness. His unmatched skills and his need for adventure combined to make him a frontiersman like no other. And no other pioneer could have hoped to survive the dangers that Davy faced when he and his old friend Flavius tried to cross the vast Western prairies. A roaring wildfire and a rampaging buffalo stampede were excitement enough for Flavius but Davy knew their troubles were just beginning when they came face-to-face with the rulers of the prairies … the dreaded Comanches!

  To Judy, Joshua, Shane.

  One

  “Is something on fire?”

  Davy Crockett tilted his head back and sniffed. For the past hour, as his weary horse plodded eastward, he had been lost in thought. Instead of staying alert, as he should, he had been recollecting the series of events that explained why he was deep in the dark heart of the vast prairie and not safe and snug in his cabin in Tennessee.

  Decisions were to blame. Bad decisions. His decisions. He was the one who had hankered to go on a gallivant. He was the one whose wanderlust was forever spurring him to see what lay over the next horizon. And he was the one who had persuaded his best friend to tag along in the belief they would be gone only a short while.

  To be fair, Davy had not planned to wind up at the Great Lakes. Or, later, to clash with the Sioux and a band of vicious slavers. It had been his notion, though, to canoe down the broad Mississippi to St. Louis, cutting weeks off their return travel time. He was also to blame for dragging his friend off across the plain to find out why a solitary family in a single wagon had crossed the river and gone off across the grassland by themselves.

  For once, Davy’s curiosity had put him in the right place at the right time. He had been on hand to help the family when they were beset by treacherous whites and bloodthirsty Pawnees. He had saved the mother and her child, but could not prevent the loss of her man or their wagon and belongings.

  It was the youngster, Becky, who had just asked the question that now made Davy aware of an acrid scent in the air. “That’s smoke, all right,” he confirmed.

  “Way out here in the middle of nowhere?” the girl said. “Who could it be?”

  The brawny Irishman wondered the same thing. Few whites roamed the shimmering sea of grass. Indians were another matter, and many of them were hostile to whites. He fingered Liz, his rifle, and rose in the stirrups to scan the prairie in all directions. The wind was blowing from the northeast for a change, but in that direction lay more of what they had been seeing for the past two days—namely, empty plain. “Mighty peculiar,” he noted.

  Flavius Harris, Davy’s boon companion, lifted his moon face and scowled. Like Crockett, he wore buckskins and high moccasins. Also like Davy, he wore a powder horn and ammo pouch crisscrossing his chest, and a possibles bag rested under his left arm. But where his fellow Tennessean’s frame was hard and muscular, Flavius was portly. Not soft, or weak, or flabby. Just stout through the middle, like a wild boar.

  “I don’t care who’s out there,” Flavius said curtly. “I vote we fight shy of them and keep on going.” His worst fear was that a new crisis would arise. After weeks of grueling travel, of one narrow escape after another, he yearned to reach Tennessee. How he missed home! How he missed the simple pleasures he had always taken for granted! Things like gorging on tasty vittles, guzzling ale at his favorite tavern, coon hunting with his hounds. Oh. And his wife, Matilda, of course.

  “I agree, pard,” Davy said.

  Flavius cocked his head. “You do?” Usually, the Irishman wanted to do the exact opposite of whatever Flavius felt was best. And usually, they wound up in a hornet’s nest of trouble as a result.

  Davy nodded. He had no desire to tempt fate and possibly put the girl and her mother in danger. They had been through so much already. Clucking to his sorrel, he rode on. Then Heather Dugan spoke.

  “Hold up, you two. Shouldn’t we investigate? What if white men are close by? Maybe they have supplies they can spare. Food they can give us.”

  None of them craved a piping hot meal with buttered bread and fresh coffee more than Flavius. He was tired of going hungry most of each day, tired of rabbit stew and fried snake for supper. But he quickly answered before his partner, saying, “We shouldn’t go off half-cocked, ma’am. What if it’s more Pawnees or other hostiles?” He shook his head. “No, I reckon it’s a heap safer if we go about our own business.”

  Davy suddenly slowed. Tendrils of smoke had appeared on the horizon. Not one or two, as there would be if campfires were the cause. No, he counted a dozen spiraling strands that climbed to the clouds. Rather than the customary chalky white or wispy gray of most campfires, these were dark and sinuous, twisting snakes that seemed alive and ominous. “What the devil?” he blurted.

  The acrid scent had grown stronger. A gust of wind brought with it invisible waves of heat, like the warm air that fanned Flavius whenever he opened the oven to check on his wife’s pies and sweetcakes.

  “It’s a fire,” little Becky said.

  That it was, and the sight sent an icy chill down Davy Crockett’s spine. He recalled the tale his Sioux friends had told him, about the summer a fire roared down without warning on their village. Half a dozen people had died, scores of horses had perished, and most of the lodges had been reduced to ashes.

  “An awful big fire,” Flavius amended. As near as he could tell, its front stretched over a mile long.

  Davy applied his heels to the sorrel. “Let’s not dawdle,” he hollered. By holding to a gallop for a spell, they could outflank the blaze and travel on in safety. Or so he assumed until more tendrils materialized directly to the east. Figuring there must be a gap somewhere, he kept on riding. But the tendrils soon became thick columns, and the sky filled with what looked like a roiling black thunderhead.

  “Goodness gracious!” Heather exclaimed. “It has us cut off.” She ran a hand through her mane of luxurious blonde hair. Her dress clung to her full figure, the hem hiked up around her knees. She was a striking figure of a woman, a fact both Davy and Flavius were all too conscious of, particularly during the lonely hours late each night.

  “Not quite,” Davy said, and instantly reined to the south. He intended to parallel the fire until a break appeared. But the farther they went, the more apparent it became that the fire was much more extensive than he had imagined.

  “The whole prairie is in flame,” Becky commented. She had the black hair of her father, and frank blue eyes. Showing no panic, she asked calmly, “What do we do, Mr. Crockett? How do we reach the river now?”

  Reaching the Mississippi was the least of their worries. Davy saw red and orange teeth spike out of the grass, devouring it greedily. Another warm gust warned him of a new development. “The wind shifted. It’s blowing right at us.”

  “I don’t like this,” Flavius said nervously. “Let’s hike our tails and skedaddle.”

  Added incentive came in the form of crackling and hissing that rapidly grew louder. The fingers of flame were now broadswords, cutting through the high grass like a scythe.

  Davy motioned at Becky and Heather, shouting, “If you value your hides, ride like hell!”

  The four horses were spurred into a pell-mell gallop. Da
vy deliberately stayed close to the girl. Her mare was a spunky critter, but it lacked the stamina of his sorrel and the other animals. Over his shoulder he fastened an eye on the swiftly advancing sheet of fire.

  All that hissing reminded him of the time he had tossed a rock into a snake den. The crackling was louder than the racket caused by a herd of spooked elk making off through dense timber. And the heat had climbed so much, his face broke out in beads of sweat.

  It became more uncomfortable by the moment. As impossible as it was to conceive, the fire was actually gaining. A yelp from Heather drew Davy’s attention ahead, where another line of flame had flared. Now they were hemmed in on three sides. “To the southwest,” he bawled, jabbing a finger.

  Flavius jerked on the reins of his dun. His initial fear had worn off, to be replaced by rising anger. Just when his fondest wish had finally come true, when they were on their way home at long, long last, this had to happen. How could Providence be so cruel? What had he done to deserve to suffer so? Bending low over the dun, he lashed it so it would catch up with Heather Dugan.

  The next moment, something streaked past on the right. Then on the left. Lithe figures, bounding high with every leap. Davy realized they were antelope, the kind some frontiersmen had taken to calling pronghorns on account of the unique short, broad horns they sported. The males had black bands from their eyes down to their nostrils, and black patches on their necks. The females usually did not have horns, and the does were slightly smaller than the bucks.

  They were the fastest animals Davy had ever laid eyes on. Making bounds of more than twenty feet, they flew by him moving twice as fast as the sorrel. Most had their mouths open—not from fatigue, but to breathe more easily at full speed. The white hairs on their rumps, longer than their other body hair, stood erect, giving the illusion that their backsides were twice as big as they truly were.

  The Sioux had told Davy that in the summer, pronghorns congregated by sexes. The younger males formed bachelor herds, the older ones established territories, while the does and fawns roamed in small groups of a dozen or so. Yet here Davy saw bucks and does and fawns mixed. Fright had banded them together in stark flight.

  Davy’s coonskin cap was jiggling. He clamped it down again, then caught a whiff of smoke so potent that he broke into a coughing fit. The air overhead was becoming choked with the stuff. It stung his eyes, creating tears. He had to blink to clear them.

  “We’ll never make it!” the mother wailed. She was coughing, too, and swatting in vain at a grayish veil that had descended.

  Flavius angled his dun in closer, in case Heather needed help. She had earned his undying devotion by nursing him after he was shot, and he would do all in his power to see her safe to St. Louis. In his idle moments, he fancied that she cottoned to him as much as he did to her, and he felt twinges of regret that he was not single. Twinges he would never own up to, not even to Davy. Should Matilda get wind of it, she’d brain him with her rolling pin or whatever else was handy.

  A new sound fell on their ears—a sullen rumble, swelling to the crescendo of thunder. Davy twisted in the saddle, and his breath choked off in his throat. Not from the smoke or the heat, but from the scores of huge humped brutes pounding in their wake. Scores of shaggy buffalo, living steam engines capable of bowling over and then trampling any living thing under their driving hooves.

  A small herd, terrified by the inferno, was rushing to escape searing death. Eyes dilated, nostrils distended, they stampeded in a compact mass, reducing the grass to pulverized bits. As Davy looked on, a deer blindly bolted into their path. It was a doe, as terror-stricken as the bison. The poor creature vented a plaintive wavering bleat before vanishing under the brown tide.

  Davy could have sworn that he heard the crunch of her bones. Spurring on the sorrel, he yelled at Becky, “Ride, girl! Ride!”

  “I am!” she cried.

  But despite her efforts, the mare was flagging. Davy gave it a few whacks with the muzzle of his rifle, which convinced it to redouble its efforts. They pulled to within a few yards of her mother and Flavius. Sixty feet in front of them vaulted more antelope. To the left, the fire angled in their direction. To their rear was the irresistible tide of sinew and horns. Only to their right, to the west, lay safety.

  “Follow me!” Davy commanded, hauling on the reins. He slowed just enough to make sure the others complied, then slowed even more so Becky could draw abreast of the sorrel. They were now racing almost at a right angle to the herd, which bore down on them like a living avalanche.

  The earsplitting drumming drowned out the chorus of the flames. Davy risked a glance and wished he hadn’t. A formidable wall of huge heads and wicked curved horns rushed toward them. There would be no stopping those buffalo, no turning the leaders with a few shots or shouts. Nothing on God’s green earth could stem that hairy mass until it had spent itself in exhaustion.

  “Faster! Faster!” Davy urged. But he doubted anyone heard him, not over the bestial bedlam. Seventy yards separated the sorrel from the iron wall. Then sixty. Then fifty. Davy focused on the open plain beyond to the exclusion of all else.

  “Mr. Crockett!”

  The child’s wail cut through the Irishman like a red-hot knife through wax. Davy whipped around and saw that the mare had tripped in a prairie dog burrow and gone down.

  Rebecca Dugan had been thrown clear. She was on her knees, her arms upraised, her face lit by fervent appeal.

  “Help me! Please!”

  Flavius and Heather had not noticed. The only one who could save Becky was Davy, and he never hesitated. Bringing the sorrel to a sliding halt, he wheeled the big horse and sped toward the girl, who was rising. Out of the corner of an eye he glimpsed the foremost row of buffalo, now less than forty yards distant, the tips of their horns glinting dully in the sunlight that filtered through the smoke.

  “Hurry!”

  Becky stared at the onrushing herd and froze. Her face turned pale. Young she might be, but she was mature enough to foresee her impending doom. And it filled her with the same fear it would instill in a grown woman.

  “Be ready to catch hold!” Davy shouted, but she was too paralyzed to obey. Holding his rifle and the reins in his left hand, he leaned as far down as he dared and extended his right arm. Becky was gaping at the buffaloes. She started to shift, and for a few moments he dreaded that she would bolt, sealing her death and possibly his.

  The thunderous roar of hooves was near deafening. Davy could not see much of the herd since he was on the off side of the sorrel, but he could hear them, and it seemed as if the very air were being buffeted by invisible mallets. The brutes were so close. So very, terribly close.

  The sorrel reached the child. In the blink of an eye Davy scooped the girl into his arm and straightened, wheeling the horse again as he rose. It was none too soon. The leading ranks of shaggy behemoths were twenty yards off. He jabbed his heels into the sorrel, which spurted forward as if shot from a catapult.

  They had to get past the last of the buffalo on the west edge of the herd. Fairly flying, Davy glanced at the bristling array of black horn tips. Any of them could disembowel the sorrel with one swipe. The horse appreciated its peril, for it tapped a reservoir of endurance it had never before demonstrated and galloped the fastest it had ever gone.

  A dank, sweaty scent rose from the herd. The grunts of the bulls were punctuated by the bawling of cows and some calves. These were fleeting impressions Davy had in the seconds before the sorrel galloped into the clear. The last bull swung at the sorrel’s flanks but missed.

  Without a break in their collective rhythm, the buffaloes surged southward, raising a cloud to mark their passage.

  Davy put them out of his mind the instant they were no longer a threat. Where a city-bred man might have quaked at his close scrape with eternity, to Davy it was just another incident in a routine day. It was part and parcel of life in the wilderness, where a body never knew from one day to the next if he would be alive to greet the new d
awn.

  Besides which, there was still the fire to contend with. The flames formed a solid blazing sheet from north to south and were being fanned westward by the prevailing wind. Davy held the sorrel to a gallop, clutching Becky to his chest. She clung to him, her eyes closed, trembling now and again. Her mother and Flavius were a full hundred yards ahead.

  It struck Davy as odd that Heather had not looked back to check on her offspring. Heather Dugan was a devoted mother. Normally, she hovered over Becky like a proverbial hawk to ensure that the girl did not come to harm. Some might say she overdid it, but her behavior was perfectly understandable once the facts were known.

  Her beauty masked a soul that had suffered more than its share of heartbreak. Her father had died when she was young. Her mother remarried, but the stepfather, one of the richest and most powerful men in St. Louis, turned out to be a demented tyrant who insisted she live by his rules. When she wed a man he did not approve of, the stepfather nursed a hatred that ended in violence.

  Heather’s husband had decided to take her away, to move back east. But he died in a freak mishap at work—or so everyone believed until much later when the stepfather boasted that he’d had her husband murdered to keep them from leaving. But that was after Heather and a new beau had fled.

  Heather, like many attractive women, always drew suitors like honey drew bears. She was lucky enough to fall in love a second time, to a man named Jonathan Hamlin. Together, they conspired to buy a wagon and supplies and strike out for the Oregon country. It had been their wagon tracks, and Becky’s footprints, that so aroused Davy’s concern he had trailed them to warn them of the ordeal they were letting themselves in for.

  Unknown to Heather and Hamlin, Alexander Dugan, the stepfather, had learned what they were up to and had been in feverish pursuit. He caught them, too. Against her will, Heather was forced to head back toward St. Louis. But along the way, the group was beset by a war party of Pawnees. The Indians slaughtered everyone except the mother and daughter, who would have perished along with everyone else if not for Davy and Flavius.