Blood Feud Page 2

  No one did.

  Scarlet rammed her shoulder against Woot and drove him back. She was through the ring in a single leap and had taken several more strides when iron fingers locked in her hair and she was jerked off balance and slammed to the ground.

  She fought but they were too many and too strong. Her arms and legs were pinned and spread and Rabon reared above her.

  “Truth is, girl, I don’t care if your kin find out. I’m tired of the stupid truce. My pa and his stories, he had a lot more fun than me. Now I aim to have me some, thanks to you.”

  And Rabon laughed.

  2

  Mulberry Creek was the heart of Shannon country. The valley it drained was the longest and widest and, as the Shannons liked to boast, the most fertile in the Ozarks. A third of their clan lived along its banks and farmed the adjacent land. One of the largest of those farms, the fields as well maintained as a Quaker’s, was that of Buck Shannon.

  Buck was the second oldest of four brothers. Three were farmers like him. The fourth worked in the mine at Haversaw and only got home at Thanksgiving and Christmas and on special occasions, such as weddings or deaths or when someone broke in a new still.

  Buck’s farm was a hoot and a holler west of Wareagle. To the east of the settlement, over a high ridge, was Harkey country.

  On this particular morning Buck had hitched the team to the wagon and was on his way into Wareagle to buy a bonnet for his wife. He thought it would make a dandy birthday gift. He whistled the tune to “Dixie” as the wagon clattered along. The two mules had made the trip so many times, he didn’t have to do anything but sit back and enjoy the ride.

  In the wagon bed were his two youngest. Chace and Cassie were twins, Chace the older by seven minutes. Now sixteen, both had the Shannon yellow hair and the Shannon blue eyes. Both had the Shannon high foreheads and were uncommonly good-looking. Chace wore a shirt his mother had made—the only shirt he owned—and britches but no shoes or belt. Cassie wore a dress the same color as her eyes. He was leaning against the right side, she the left. A breeze stirred her fine long hair.

  “It sure is nice of you, Pa, going to all this trouble for Ma’s sake,” Cassie remarked.

  Buck took his corncob pipe from one pocket and his tobacco pouch from another. “She’s stuck by me all these years—it’s the least a man can do.” He shifted and winked at his son. “Take heed, boy. Your turn at being hitched will come one day.”

  “No, Pa,” Chace said. “I ain’t ever getting married.”

  “So you think now,” Buck said. “But you’ll change your mind. A gal will come along and turn your head to where you can’t breathe without her, and you’ll be doomed.”

  Cassie giggled. “Oh, Pa. You better not let Ma hear you say something like that.” She nudged her brother with her toe. “And you. What makes you think you’re never taking a wife?”

  Chace shrugged. “I know, is all.”

  “Can’t none of us predict the future.”

  “That’s a fact, boy,” Buck agreed. “Human nature is human nature. We all like to think we’re different, but we’re not. You’ll get married and you’ll have kids and one day you’ll be riding in a wagon just like this one.” He tapped the bowl of his pipe against the seat. “There’s nothing new under the sun.”

  Chace raised his blue eyes to the sky. His weren’t the same shade as his sister’s; they were paler, so light a blue that some folks mistook them for gray.

  They had a quality about them that was beyond his years, as if they were the eyes of someone much older. “I know what I know.”

  Buck tamped tobacco into the bowl. He twisted around and placed his arm across the back of the seat. “You sure are a stubborn cuss. Sort of like me when I was your age.”

  “I’m nothing like you, Pa,” Chace said matter-offactly.

  Buck and Cassie swapped glances and Cassie said, “There you go again. Always staying strange things like that. You’re a lot like Pa. You have his hair, his chin.”

  “Inside I’m not.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because I’m not. He’s happy being a farmer. I could never be. He’s happy living in a cabin. I could never be. He’s happy being here.” And Chace motioned to include the whole of the long valley. “I could never be.”

  “You worry me, boy, when you talk like that,” Buck said. “There’s nothing wrong with farming.”

  “Except it’s boring.”

  Buck had taken out a match and wagged it at Chace. “Here, now. I won’t have my livelihood insulted. Farming is good, decent work.”

  “For those as are interested in good and decent.”

  “Are you saying you’re not?”

  Chace shrugged.

  “Answer me.” Buck had been worried for some time now about his one and only son. The boy kept too much to himself. Worse, Chace would never open up about his feelings or what he was thinking unless he was pressed and even then it was like pulling teeth.

  Chace turned his pale blue eyes on his father. “I’m saying your notion of good might not be my notion of good.”

  “That makes no kind of sense,” Buck said. “Good is good. Bad is bad. Either you live a good life or you live a bad life.”

  “What else can there be?” Cassie asked, watching her brother closely.

  “Explain it to me.”

  “There’s what people say is good and what people say is bad. But just because people say it don’t make it so. Maybe my notion of good ain’t the same as theirs. Maybe my idea of good is their notion of bad.”

  “God Almighty,” Buck blurted. “How do thoughts like that get in your head? Didn’t you pay attention in church all these years? Haven’t you ever listened to the preacher?”

  “I paid a heap of attention,” Chace said. “It’s why I know what I know and I’m not shy about saying so.”

  Buck shook his head and turned around. He didn’t know what to say about talk like that. He truly didn’t. Sometimes he wondered if maybe his boy was addlepated. At other times he wondered if maybe his boy was smarter than the rest of them combined. Frowning in annoyance, he struck the match and stuck the lit end in the bowl. He heard whispering behind him but paid it no mind. The twins had been whispering since they were old enough to talk.

  Cassie leaned toward Chace. “You better be careful saying things like that. If Ma found out she’d throw a fit.”

  “It’s her fit,” Chace said.

  “There you go again.” Cassie glanced at their pa’s broad back. “You ever expect we’ll burn in hell? For the bad things, I mean.”

  “Bad according to who? The parson?”

  “Bad according to me.”

  Chace pressed the sole of his right foot against the sole of her left. “You think like that, you’ll end up just like Ma.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “Yes, you can.” Chace pressed the sole of his left foot to the sole of her right.

  He wriggled his toes and she wriggled hers, and she grinned. “We don’t have to follow in their footsteps. We can make our own life.”

  “I wish I had your confidence,” Cassie admitted.

  “You’re my twin,” Chace said.

  “Not in that.”

  “You are where it counts, in here.” Chace touched his chest over his heart.

  “Two as one. For as long as we live.”

  Cassie tilted her head back and closed her eyes. “You make it sound so easy. But it’s not.”

  “It’s up to us and no one else,” Chace said. “We don’t have to live like them. We don’t have to live like anyone.”

  “I’m not as free-minded as you. I’m sorry. I wish I was but there it is. We’re twins but we don’t always think alike. There are times when I think no one thinks like you do.”

  “You’re getting too serious,” Chace said, and wriggled his toes some more. “No, we’re not always alike.” Reaching across, he tenderly touched her chin. “Anyone can tell how different we are. Your n
ose is longer.” He laughed and scrunched up his own nose.

  Cassie loved his laugh. It lit up his face and his eyes and reached her, deep inside. She laughed, too, and cast a quick glance at her father, hoping he didn’t suspect what they were talking about. It would upset him terribly. He was a good man, even if his idea of good wasn’t the same as Chace’s.

  The wagon clattered on and presently the cluster of buildings that constituted Wareagle sprouted where the flatland lay at the base of the high ridge. The settlement was smack in the middle between Shannon country and Harkey country and considered neutral ground. Anyone from either clan could go there anytime. Old resentments were set aside. Old hatreds were smothered. On the surface, at least.

  Wareagle wasn’t much, by Yankee standards. It had a general store and a saloon and tavern, both, and a stable and a blacksmith and a feed and grain and that was pretty much it except for the cabins and houses of the fifty or so folks who lived there.

  “Are you excited?” Cassie asked her brother.

  “About going into Wareagle? I might as well get excited about watching grass grow.”

  “There are people,” Cassie said. She loved to socialize. To see what the women were wearing and what everyone was up to.

  “I’m not as fond of them as you are.”

  “I have never understood that about you,” Cassie confessed. “How you can be so cold toward everyone.”

  “That’s the parson talking.”

  “No, it is me,” Cassie said. “I like to mingle with other folks. I like to talk and dance and eat and have a good time. You’d rather be off in the woods with the bears and the squirrels.”

  “It’s not that I don’t like them as much as I don’t trust them,” Chace explained, adding, “Everyone except kinfolk.”

  “Strangers don’t always mean us harm.”

  “Harkeys do.”

  Cassie frowned. “You’re never going to let that go, are you?”

  “No.”

  “You were little. You didn’t know. Those boys caught you and beat you, but it wasn’t like you were close to dying or anything.”

  “The beating was enough,” Chace said.

  Cassie dropped it.

  Buck stirred and looked back at him, his pipe clamped in a corner of his mouth. “We’re almost there. Remember, I want you young’uns to stick close. I don’t want to have to come looking for you when it’s time to go.”

  “Yes, Pa,” Cassie said.

  “Chace?”

  “I’ll kill a horse and boil some glue and glue myself to your backside. Will that do?”

  “You worry me, boy. You truly do.” Buck clucked to the mules.

  The road was Wareagle’s main street. On the one side was the saloon. Buck looked at it and smacked his lips. On the other side was the general store. Buck sighed and brought the wagon to a stop in front. He hopped down and offered his hands to Cassie and swung her lightly to the boardwalk. “Remember what I told you two,” he said, and went in.

  Chace lithely leaped down and leaned against a post, his arms across his chest. “Yes, sir,” he said, and chuckled. “If this place was any more lively, it would make a fine cemetery.”

  The heat of the day had driven most indoors. The street was empty except for a dog sniffing at a pile of who-knew-what, and a pig and her piglets rooting around a stump. Horses were tied to hitch rails and one was drinking from a trough.

  “Let’s go in,” Cassie prompted.

  “What for?”

  “I want to look at the catalogue.”

  “You always want to look at the catalogue.”

  “Please,” Cassie said, and took his hand. She pulled and he came with her.

  “You must have it memorized by now.”

  “So?” To Cassie, the Sears, Roebuck and Company catalogue was a slice of heaven on earth. Three hundred pages of everything there was in the world worth having: dresses, gowns, skirts, corsets, hats, bonnets, coats, jackets, shoes, china, silverware, brushes, combs, ostrich feathers, plus all that stuff men liked to look at.

  She saw her father at the counter with Mr. Steever and she smiled at Mr. Steever and went to the far end and there it was. Eagerly, she opened it and thumbed the pages. She couldn’t read well, but thanks to her ma she could wrestle with words fair enough, and besides, the catalogue had pictures of nearly everything. She turned to one of her favorite sections, Girls’ and Misses’ Cloth Dresses. “Look at how pretty these are,” she said, and turned, but Chace was over by the glass cabinet that held the revolvers. He always liked to admire them.

  Cassie touched a picture of a girl wearing a dress. The girl who wore it was blond, like her. She bent over the page, her mouth moving as she read, “Girl’s dress, made of the newest plaid material, in the newest shades, large collar extending from front to back, trimmed with lace.” She stopped reading. “Oh my,” she said to herself, imagining how she would look. She bent to the page again. “Pointed yoke in front, made of cashmere to match and trimmed with silk gimp. Two rows of silk gimp around sleeve.” She stopped and said, “Oh my, oh my.” She ran her finger to the price. “One dollar and ninety-eight cents.” It might as well have been ten. She had forty-seven cents to her name and it had taken her a year and a half to save that much. There was fine print under the price and she read it out loud, “If by mail, postage extra. Thirty-two cents.”

  “Like that one, do you?”

  Cassie nearly jumped. Her father was at her side, looking over her shoulder.

  “I like it the most of everything.”

  “I heard you reading,” Buck said. “Wish I could read but I ain’t never had the time to learn. Thank goodness your ma does.” He showed her the bonnet he had just bought. “Do you really think she’ll like this?”

  Cassie had helped him pick it out. In the catalogue it was called a Lady’s Gingham Sun Bonnet. It was made of the best gingham and had a shirred hood and a cape and bow strings. It cost twenty-five cents. “She’ll love it, Pa.”

  Just then the bell over the front door tinkled and in came old Doc Witherspoon. Usually he was cheerful and smiling, but now he was scowling and he saw Buck and came straight down the aisle, saying, “My wife told me she saw you come into town. Here I was, ready to send someone to fetch you.”

  “What?” Buck said. “What for?”

  “It’s your oldest,” Doc Witherspoon said.

  “Scarlet? What about her?”

  “You’d best come quick.”

  3

  The Witherspoons lived in one of the few frame houses in Wareagle. It had a gabled roof and a picket fence and a flower bed that Mrs. Witherspoon watered twice daily in the summer. Their parlor was spacious and cool after the heat of the outdoors.

  Cassie had only ever been there twice. Once when she had the croup and again when she broke her wrist and her pa didn’t set it right and her arm healed crooked, so they had to bring her to Doc Witherspoon and he broke it again and set it so her arm was straight. She loved the parlor with its grandfather clock and polished settee and the rug that tickled her feet. “I hope I have me a fine house like this someday,” she said to her pa, but he wasn’t paying attention.

  “Where’s Scarlet?” Buck demanded of Witherspoon.

  The physician motioned and led them down a narrow hall to the examination room. Cabinets lined one wall; a desk was by the other. In the center was a flat table and on the table lay Scarlet. She turned her head as the door opened and tears filled her eyes. “Pa,” she said simply.

  Buck Shannon stopped in his tracks. “My God,” he blurted.

  Cassie recoiled in horror. She pressed her hands to her mouth and shook her head and said, “It can’t be.”

  Scarlet’s face was black-and-blue. Not just in a few spots but all over. Her left eye was swollen shut. Her lower lip was twice its normal size. Her hair was in a tangle and bits of grass were caught in it. Her arms were covered with bruises. Her legs were worse. Her dress had been ripped and torn nearly to tatters and she sel
f-consciously covered her bosom with her left arm. “I’m sorry, Pa.”

  Buck stared, his face as white as the sheet that covered the table.

  Cassie whimpered.

  Chace came around them and took Scarlet’s hand. “Tell me who did this and I’ll take care of it.”

  “No,” Scarlet said. “You’ll have the law after you.”

  “Out of my way,” Buck said, and shouldered his son aside. He clasped her same hand in both of his and ran his eyes down to her feet and said, “How could anyone do this?”

  Doc Witherspoon cleared his throat. “I cleaned her up as best I could. No bones are broken and she doesn’t appear to be bleeding inside, which is good. I recommend you take her home and keep her in bed for as long as she needs to recover from the other.”

  “The other?” Buck said, and his face became whiter. He turned to Scarlet. “They didn’t?”

  Scarlet nodded.

  “How did you get here?”

  Doc Witherspoon answered. “She dragged herself through my front door about an hour ago. That’s one tough young lady you’ve raised.”

  Buck said, “Cassie, I want you and your brother to go in the other room. I need to talk to your sister alone.”

  “It’s all right,” Scarlet said.

  “I’d rather they did,” Buck insisted. “It’s not something they need to hear.”

  “I’m staying, Pa,” Chace said.

  “Not if I say you’re not.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  Buck started to turn, but Scarlet held on to his hand and said quietly, “They can hear, Pa. It makes no never mind to me.” She smiled weakly at her sister. “And it might be good, Cassie knowing how they are, so it won’t happen to her.”

  Buck nodded at Witherspoon. “What about him? Does he know the particulars?”

  The physician nodded. “She had to tell me so I could gauge the extent of her injuries.”

  “I reckon she did,” Buck said. He touched Scarlet’s cheek and his Adam’s apple bobbed. “All of it. The who and the why but especially the who.”