She tied off the stallion’s reins, then looked for a place where she and Belle could hide.
***
Knife and pistol drawn, Nicholas followed the tracks away from the river. He guessed there were about a dozen of them—another war party. Judging from their moccasin prints, which were placed far apart, they were moving fast. Strange that they had done so little to conceal their tracks. That meant they felt confident—sure of what lay both before and behind them.
He picked up his own pace and soon smelled smoke. He knew what he would find before he got there.
In the midst of a clearing stood the burned-out remains of a cabin. Smoke still rose from the charred ruins, a grisly pennant against the blue sky. Apart from a few chickens that strutted and pecked in the mud, nothing moved.
The bodies were scattered in the grass outside the cabin—a red-haired man, a dark-haired woman, two small dark-haired children. They had been slaughtered with war clubs and knives, their lives lost, all their worldly goods and everything they had worked for reduced to ash.
Fury, like a sickness, churned in his stomach.
So much killing. Senseless death. Insatiable violence.
This wasn’t the first time Nicholas had encountered such brutality. He’d seen many frontier families slaughtered these past six years—men, women, children, infants. They came to build lives for themselves, but found only death.
Of course Indians weren’t the only ones capable of such mindless violence. Europeans committed their share of atrocities, too—Indian children butchered and scalped by French and British soldiers and settlers, babies on cradleboards dashed against rocks, women raped and mutilated, old men killed while on their knees begging for their lives.
Violence, it seemed, was not the province of one race but a human trait.
Nicholas knelt beside the woman, closed her eyes, which stared unseeing at the blue sky. She was pretty and young, just a year or two older than Bethie. But there was nothing he could do for her or her slain children and husband.
***
Bethie fought to ignore her discomfort. Her stomach grumbled, and her legs had long since grown cramped from sitting confined in this dark thicket. Insects buzzed around her. Spiders and millipedes skittered over the carpet of rotting leaves beneath her. The tail of a snake slithered through the underbrush. She began to imagine—or perhaps she was not imagining—the cobweb brush of many tiny legs crawling over her skin. And once she thought she heard the low, grunting snuffles of a bear.
Remembering how the stallion had given them away last time, she had chosen a hiding place well away from, but in sight of, the horses and was forcing herself to stay put, so as not to create a trail into and out of the thicket. It didn’t matter how uncomfortable she felt. She would do nothing to give herself away. Her life—and Belle’s—might depend on it.
An eternity had passed since Nicholas had left them. Where had he gone? What would she do if he did not come back? What if he were overcome, taken captive, killed?
Fear jolted through her at the thought.
He would come back. He had to come back.
But the afternoon lengthened, and still he did not return. She was beginning to imagine that the most horrible things had happened to him, when the stallion whinnied.
She froze, pressed Belle closer to her breast, held her breath.
It was Nicholas. He called for her softly. “Bethie?”
A warm rush of relief swept through her. She crawled out from the thicket, Isabelle in her arms.
He held three chickens by their feet, their wobbly heads proof their necks had been broken. Over his shoulder hung a new set of saddlebags. But what she noticed was the look in his eyes.
Bleak. Dark. Anguished.
He draped the chickens and saddlebags across the stallion’s back. “We need to ride.”
Bethie reached out, touched his arm. “What—”
“There’s a burnt farmstead a couple of miles south of here. No survivors.”
Horrified, Bethie realized what he was telling her. A family had been attacked nearby. Their home had been burned, and they had all been killed.
She asked the question, though she already knew the answer. “Indians?”
“A Delaware war party.”
