Billy stopped long enough to pat Fly on the head, another rush of tears silvering his vision. He and Fly had grown up together. Hunted side by side, played in the forest, gotten in trouble. For most of Billy’s life, Fly had been a best friend. Forever forgiving, a companion without complaint and unstintingly faithful. Right up to the end when the half-blind dog had obviously given his life fighting for his family.
Propping his rifle over his shoulder, Billy started down the lane at a trot. He still had a couple of hours of light left, and there just weren’t that many places Dewley could have gotten off to. Not with a wagon filled with corn and squash … and an obviously captive white girl.
The rage was a smoldering heat in his belly when he determined they’d turned south on the Huntsville Road. Seeing the country in his head, he had a hunch where they would go. Down by the ruins of Van Winkle’s mill. Someplace accessible for the wagon, but off the road. Out of sight of Yankee patrols, but close enough they could take the wagon into Fayetteville to sell the produce. It was a gamble, but that’s where Billy would go. To do it smart, he’d have to take the mountain trail.
The thought of their dirty hands on her soft skin, of them throwing her down and exposing her. Of an unwashed man grinning as he drove himself into her …
Billy threw his head back, throat swelling in rage as he screamed his pain up at the evening sky.
41
October 30, 1863
The midday sun shone behind a haze of high, thin clouds. They looked like finely drawn feathers stretched across the blue. Billy Hancock, weary, almost stumbling from fatigue and hunger, worked his way down the old deer trail that descended a steep and thickly wooded slope. The trail wound around outcrops of weather-grayed limestone, the footing rocky and loose.
It had been a couple of years since Billy had taken the mountain trail, and then he and John Gritts had been on horseback. He hadn’t realized how long the thirteen-mile loop would take on foot, let alone at night, where—to his self-disgust and frustration—he’d gotten lost in the dark and had to backtrack.
He worked his way through colorful autumn forest as he descended the ridge trail, easing down slopes that were barely covered by the newly fallen leaves.
What if I’m wrong? What if I took too long?
The very thought of it left him sick to his stomach. If he were too late … No, trust to God and Cherokee spirit power, he would find her. She had to be all right!
Men didn’t treat a girl that way. Even the worst of the guerrillas maintained a code of honor when it came to women. He had to believe that.
Desperation built until he wanted to explode.
Struggling to keep his feet light, he stepped from stone to stone as he made his way down a water gap that led to a sheer drop-off in the limestone rimrock.
He’d been here before. From the rim he could look down into the War Eagle Valley, and more specifically into the cove where Angus McConahough had had his little farm and distillery, with its corn, barley, and wheat fields.
If the raiders were Colonel Dewley’s, they’d been in the country long enough to know this place. It was close enough to the main road that they would have arrived here at dusk the night before, and the road in and out was passable by a wagon.
Billy dropped to his belly and slithered out on the limestone outcrop where it overlooked the rounded hollow.
In McConahough’s little pasture, eight horses were grazing. The cabin, however, was a charred shell with weeds growing up through the fallen-in roof. McConahough, a known Union sympathizer, had burned his house, loaded up his still, and followed in Curtis’s tracks when the victor of Pea Ridge took his army away.
A campfire sent a single wreath of blue smoke up from before a stand of pines. It was just back of the willow-filled creek bottom and the spring that had once provided water for McConahough’s famed whiskey. Four men were seated around the fire, looking relaxed. A man dressed in brown with a shapeless felt hat and a rifle in his hands walked past an opening in the trees on his way to check the horses.
But there was no wagon.
Is this the right place?
He heard distant male laughter, the clink of metal.
One way to find out.
Billy eased back, stood, and made his way to the steep trail. Most of the way it wound down through square limestone boulders tumbled from the rimrock above. Scrubby oaks, chinquapin, and gnarly-looking maples, all densely wound with honeysuckle, grape, and bindweed, were losing their orange, red, and yellow leaves.
He took his time, fighting against his desperate urge to hurry.
“Done teached you better than that,” John Gritts’s voice echoed in his head.
He tried not to think of Maw’s blood where it stained his pants, of her dying in his arms. Or Sarah, and what she might be enduring. The thought of men sucking on her breasts, crawling between her legs brought a hellish bile to the base of his throat.
At the sudden whiff of tobacco, Billy froze short of a great, square, moss-covered boulder broken off from above.
Sniffed.
Caught it again.
Close.
He lifted his rifle. The sound of a shot would spoil everything. But where was the guard?
The trail led down around the wagon-sized rock. Again the tobacco’s aroma filled a curl of breeze.
Billy eased forward and stopped short when a booted foot scuffed dirt and was followed by a man clearing his throat. Then came the sound of the dottle being knocked out
