Dorothy Garlock - [Wabash River] Read Online Free

to dig a grave.”
    Rain followed the frozen creek bed, leading the boy’s horse. His breath and that of the horses rose in clouds. The boy rode with his face buried in the blankets. Even though there was no evidence of activity, Rain exercised caution, approaching every blind spot with care. In the open places he had plenty to think about.
    Why would Hammond Perry, Farr’s old enemy, want him dead? Rain had thought it no more than a coincidence when he had seen him again in Cahokia after having spotted him just a few days earlier in Saint Louis. Perry owned several large keelboats that took freight downriver to New Orleans and smaller ones that went up the Missouri and the Arkansas. It was said he also owned stores in a half dozen forts up and down the rivers. Nathan Boone had told Rain that Perry had been in Arkansas for the past year. Was he planning to move in and set up a trading post on the Arkansas River below the fort at Belle Point? Rain wondered.
    Hammond Perry and Will Bradford, Rain remembered, had both served in the Ninth Military Department with headquarters at Belle Fontaine, fifteen miles north of Saint Louis. Will Bradford had been ordered to ascend the Arkansas River to the Poteau and build a fort at Belle Point—the important job Perry had hoped to get—but instead he had been dismissed shortly after Bradford and his company left on their assignment. If Perry had learned that Rain had gone to fetch Will’s bride, that was probably the reason he had set the kid on him. Anything, Rain decided, was possible when Hammond Perry was involved.
    He glanced back at the boy. How like Perry to get a down-at-the-heels kid to do his dirty work! He had actually convinced the boy Rain was one of the raiders who had killed his family. To a backwoods kid, a rich man like Perry must have seemed as reliable an authority as the governor of the territory, Rain mused. He didn’t blame the boy for trying to kill him, but he wasn’t going to let him keep him from spending Christmas at Quill’s Station.
    Quill’s Station. Would Amy still be there? Rain remembered the way she had cried when he left the station seven long years ago. He had held her, kissed her, and promised to come back for her someday after Juicy had passed away. She had promised to think about Rain every day and to wait for him no matter how long he was gone. They were kids’ promises, he thought now with a silent chuckle, although he had really meant them at the time. She was the first white girl he had known, the first girl he had talked to alone, the first one he had kissed. He remembered his surprise that her body had been so soft and her breasts so firm when he held her against him. She had smelled so fresh and clean that the memory of it lingered for days.
    At times during the first few years he had thought about her, especially at night when he was on the keelboat feeling lonely, cut loose from everything that was familiar to him. As the years passed it became harder and harder to visualize her face, and gradually he stopped thinking about her.
    Little Amy with the long skinny legs and freckles on her nose would he grown up now. When Farr’s letter telling about Juicy’s death reached him a year earlier, Amy had already been a widow for more than a year. Two years. That was a long time for a pretty woman to remain unwed among the woman-hungry men in the wilderness along the Wabash.
    Pretty? Now why did he think that Amy had grown into a pretty woman? Because her sister looked like an angel didn’t mean she would too. More than likely she had married again, turned to fat, and had a child or two.
    Somehow the thought didn’t sit well in his mind.

CHAPTER
    Two
    “This turkey is as old as I am!” Liberty Quill pushed the pan containing the huge bird back into the wall oven and gave her husband a disgusted look. “And he’s as tough as shoe leather.”
    “You said you wanted a big one, love.”
    “Fiddle faddle! I didn’t think I’d get one