Voices brought him around, angry voices in heated conversation, and he listened to them while struggling to fully revive, handicapped by a splitting pain in his head and terrible agony in both shoulders. Try as he might he couldn’t get his mind to function properly. He seemed to be floating in a bizarre nether realm somewhere between dreams and reality.
“—told you it would never work! Now we’ve gone to all this trouble for nothing. When will you learn that sometimes I know what I am talking about?”
That was the voice of Rhey Debussy.
“I’ve never said otherwise, have I? And my plan would have worked perfectly if those bumbling guards hadn’t let that African escape. Until then I had Nate eating out of the palm of my hand.”
That had been none other than Adeline Van Buren.
“Don’t be so sure,” Rhey responded nastily. “King isn’t the same gullible boy you courted in New York City, as I’ve tried to tell you many times. He’s a mountain man, damn it, and one of the best. You can’t play your little games with a man like him.”
“Games?” Adeline hissed. “I’m doing this for us, you fool. And if you hadn’t gambled away what little money I had left, I wouldn’t be doing this at all.” She paused. “What I ever saw in you I will never know.”
Nate heard a slap, then Adeline uttered a mocking laugh.
“That’s it! Beat me silly! Violence is your answer to everything, isn’t it? Why couldn’t you be more like your brother? Jacques knows how to treat a lady.”
Rhey’s retort was laced with venom. “Show me a lady and I will treat her as such. All I see before me is a conniving tart who was so spoiled by her precious papa when she was a girl that she has yet to grow up and become a mature woman.”
“I am not a tart!” Adeline snapped.
“What else would you call someone who uses her considerable physical charms to lure a former lover into marriage just so she can have him murdered and claim his money as her own?”
Adeline sputtered. “Nate was never a lover. He was too kind, too decent to even think of taking me to bed. All he ever did was hold my hand and kiss me now and then.”
“How charming,” Rhey said in disgust.
“And as for the rest of your allegation, how else are we going to raise that much money? From your gambling? You, the perennial loser? Or perhaps from your brother, who has rarely spoken to you in a decade and who only let us stay here because I talked him into it?”
Rhey Debussy made no comment.
“What? No more blistering insults? Could it be I’m right after all. Taking Nate’s money is our best hope.”
“You don’t even know for certain if his father really bequeathed it to him,” Rhey said lamely.
“Like hell I don’t. I never told Nate, but Worthington confided in me that Nate is the sole heir. So all I have to do is lead Nate on until he’s begging for my hand in marriage and we’re fixed for life.”
“Conveniently forgetting to inform him, of course, that you are already married to me.”
“He’ll never know. We were married in New York, and there is no way he can find out about it here in St. Louis. My plan is perfect.”
“It’s too late now,” Rhey said. “He must be disposed of.”
“It’s not too late. I’ll concoct some story, blame everything on Jacques or Yancy. I’ll say I had no idea Jacques is a slaver. Nate’ll blame them and I’ll be in the clear,” Adeline said. “Then we’ll move him to a hotel and take adjoining rooms. It will work perfectly.”
“Too risky,” Rhey replied. “Sooner or later someone he knows will see him.”
“Then we’ll convince him to go to New Orleans. As far as I know he’s never been there so we should be safe.”
“I don’t know ... ”
The voices drifted away, and Nate waged a silent war with a great black could threatening to engulf his mind. So now he knew! Not everything, but enough to understand the real reason Adeline had traveled to St. Louis and gone to such lengths to find him. The revelation stunned him. How could demure, sweet Adeline have been transformed into such a cold-hearted temptress and potential murderer? And here he thought he had known her inside and out. Apparently he hadn’t known her true nature at all, and had only admired her for her beauty.
He tried to open his eyes and his eyelids fluttered.
Vaguely, he discerned a mound of hay and several stalls, but then the cloud overwhelmed him and oblivion claimed him once more.
The acrid scent of horse urine tingling his nostrils awakened him the second time, and he opened his eyes immediately. The pain in his head had diminished to a tolerable level but the agony in his shoulders was worse. He found out the reason why when he glanced to his right and left.
Rhey Debussy, or some of the guards, had secured his wrists with a stout rope and tossed the other end of the rope over a high beam in the stable, then hoisted him into the air until his moccasins were twenty feet above the earthen floor.
His shoulders hurt so badly because he had been dangling for hours and they had been bearing his weight all that time.
He hung in a back corner of the stable, to one side of the wide center aisle. By twisting his neck he could see that the great door hung open revealing a portion of the sunlit sky. He couldn’t be sure, but from the angle of the sun on the door he calculated it was early or mid-afternoon, which meant he had been out for many hours.
Where was Tatu?
The question jarred him. He hadn’t thought about her earlier, preoccupied as he had been with the discussion he overheard. Was she still alive? He recalled her being shot and shuddered. Within him an intense rage flared and smoldered, and he craned his neck back to study the beam fifteen feet overhead. Reaching it would be impossible.
He turned to his left and spied a hayloft. Maybe, just maybe, he could get there. He swung his legs to one side, then swept them toward the loft, and repeated the motion until his body began swinging like a pendulum. Each swing took him a little closer to the loft and also worsened the misery in his shoulders. He gritted his teeth to keep from crying out and kept swinging.
Gradually he neared his goal. The tips of his moccasins were no more than a yard from the loft when he heard voices approaching the stable. Instantly he stopped swinging, but his momentum carried him back and forth in ever-decreasing arcs. Would he stop in time?
The voices grew louder and louder. There were two or three men joking and laughing.
Nate guessed they were at the great door. He was still swinging, but not much, and he held his body rigid to slow himself down even more. With luck they wouldn’t be able to see him until they advanced down the aisle a dozen feet or so. He closed his eyes, feigning unconsciousness.
“—didn’t like it at all. I thought he would shoot Rhey then and there.”
“Do you blame him? Rhey never told Jacques about this Nate King. Jacques has too much at stake, and he’s worried what will happen if friends of this King fellow come looking for him. Rhey never should have brought him here.”
“You know Rhey. He probably figured he could do whatever he wanted before Jacques came back. Too bad for him Jacques came back a month early.”
The rope continued to sway as Nate scarcely dared breathe. He cracked his eyelids enough to see the aisle and saw three guards standing fifteen yards off. None were paying any attention to him. Slowly the rope ceased swinging entirely, and finally he was hanging limp.
“Let’s get this over with,” one of the guards was saying. “We’ll carry him to the quicksand east of here, slit his throat, and dump him in. No one will ever find the body.”
“What about his weapons?”
“Jacques said we could divide them as we see fit. They’re in the tack room.”
Nate tensed as the trio strolled toward him. One of them moved to undo the rope while the other two waited below to catch him as he was eased to the floor. Only one of the men below was armed, with a large knife on his right hip. Nate had to remember to stay limp as he was enfolded in strong arms, the rope around his wrists was removed, and he was slung over the left shoulder of the biggest guard as if he was no more than a sack of potatoes.
“I want to get back by dark,” the big one commented. “Promised Marie I’d see her tonight.”
“You’ve been seeing a lot of her, Vern,” said the man with the knife as he came toward them.
“So?” the big one retorted. “What business is it of yours?”
Nate’s mind raced. Should he make a bid for freedom now or wait? If he waited, he might be tied again or more guards might join these three and he would be so outnumbered he couldn’t possibly escape. As near as he could tell no one else was in the stable at the moment. If he moved fast he would take them totally by surprise. The one with the knife had fallen in behind Vern. To his right walked the third guard.
He uncoiled with the speed of a striking rattlesnake, swinging his right fist around and up. The guard on the right started to turn, having detected movement out of the corner of his eye, and Nate slammed his fist into the man’s nose, crunching cartilage and causing the man to stagger backwards with blood gushing from his broken nose. Never slowing for an instant, Nate straightened and boxed Vern on the ears with all his might. Vern bellowed and let go to clasp his ears, which was what Nate wanted. He swiftly gouged his thumbs into Vern’s eyes, then pushed off from Vern’s shoulders and alighted on the balls of his feet in the center of the aisle.
Two of the guards were hurt and momentarily distracted. But the third man had already drawn his knife, and now he began to step past Vern and attack Nate. Vern, who was rubbing his eyes in a frantic effort to clear them, stumbled and collided with the knife-wielder, throwing his companion off stride.
Nate sprang, his flowing form as lithe as a panther’s, his hands clamping on the wrist of the arm bearing the knife at the same moment he pivoted, bending the arm down as his knee rose to ram into the guard’s elbow. There was a loud snap and the guard screeched and dropped the knife.
There was no mercy in Nate’s heart, no compassion in his soul. These men had helped consign countless blacks to a bitter life of hard toil. They had hunted him down the night before, and for all he knew it was one of them who had shot Tatu. In his heart was a craving for revenge, and so it was he scooped up the knife in a fluid move and rammed it to the hilt into the stomach of the man with the broken elbow. The man doubled over, wheezing pathetically. Nate kept moving, knowing another loud cry would draw more guards if the fight hadn’t already attracted attention, yanking the blade loose and swinging his right arm in a wide arc. The blood-covered blade bit deep into the throat of the man with the shattered nose as the man’s mouth widened to yell. Then Nate shifted, spearing the knife at Vern.
Only Vern was ready for him. Blinking rapidly as tears streamed down his face, Vern had recovered sufficiently to see the knife aimed at his chest and to step to the side with agility surprising in one so large. He rumbled deep in his chest like an enraged bear and swung a ponderous fist.
Nate ducked, slid in closer, and lanced the knife into Vern’s midriff. Vern grunted and grabbed at his abdomen, his fingers closing on an empty hole because Nate had the knife out and was sweeping it up and in, straight into Vern’s neck, puncturing the jugular. He pulled the knife free and stepped back, prepared to stab again.
It wasn’t necessary.
Vern collapsed on the floor beside his fellows. All three thrashed and convulsed violently. The guard with the broken nose became still first, then Vern, and lastly the man who had been stabbed in the stomach. This last one still breathed shallowly.
Nate spun, fearing additional guards would pour into the stable at any second, but all was quiet. Several of the horses regarded him nervously although none whinnied. He ran toward the great door, remembering the statement about the tack room. Near the entrance, to the left, was a partially open door, and he sprinted to it and threw it wide.
He smiled in relief on spying his Hawken, both pistols, and his tomahawk and knife lying on a work table. Taking a stride, he reached out to grab the rifle as his foot bumped into something on the floor. He looked down, thinking it might be a saddle since there were many others in the room, plus all the tack typically found in a stable of such size. His smile evaporated, replaced by commingled horror and sorrow.
Tatu lay on her back, the front of her tattered clothes tinged crimson from dried blood, her eyes locked open in death, her lips parted as if about to deliver a kiss.
“No,” he said softly, and crouched. He gently touched her cheek, feeling constricted in his chest. She had been a kind, decent woman, and she had not deserved such an unjust fate. He swallowed hard, then rose and quickly reloaded all three of his guns. In under two minutes he once again possessed all of his weapons, and he cast a final look of misery at Tatu before stepping into the middle aisle.
Outside the sun shone. Outside birds chirped and somewhere someone laughed. In Nate a storm raged, a storm so intense he wanted to scream with sheer fury. He thought of rushing to the mansion and slaying Jacques and Rhey and as many as he could take with him. But it would be certain suicide. Better to get his vengeance in another way, and he had just the way to do it, a way to close down the slave plantation once and for all.
He brought a blanket, saddle, and bridle out of the tack room and placed them near a fine bay in a nearby stall. Saddling took but another minute, and he swung up and turned the horse toward the great door as two armed guards appeared.