Red River Revenge (Remington Book 1) Read Online Free

and stared up at Remington with eyes that were as cold and hard as two nuggets of black coal.
    “I do not know the man you ask for,” he said in stilted English. He turned and hobbled away, using the stick as a cane. He entered the dark adobe hut and pulled a buffalo hide across the adobe entrance.
    “What was that all about?” Ned asked.
    Tom Beck shrugged his shoulders. “I guess he doesn’t know Charlie Killbuck.”
    “Or he won’t tell us if he does,” Ned said. “I thought you said the Cherokees were friendly.”
    “They are. We’ll try someone else.”
    “Are you sure Lina Miller said she was coming to Tishomingo?”
    “Yeah, maybe you misunderstood her, Tom,” Frank Shaw offered. “Maybe Charlie Killbuck doesn’t live here.”
    “No, dammit,” Beck said. “Lina said Tishomingo and when I told her I’d been here before, she described the valley to me. This is the place. I think that old man’s spent too many days in the sun. I think his brains have shriveled up with age.” He reined his horse to the left. “Come on, let’s find someone else.” Beck led the way this time. He didn’t bother to stop and call out to the shepherd boy who was in the midst of a small flock of sheep out in the field, and too far away to hear him. Instead, they rode some distance to the next adobe where two Cherokee women were busy at the outdoor fire ring near their hut.
    Both women wore buckskin dresses that were decorated with colorful beadwork. The one who stirred the contents of the big black kettle was older and heavier then the pretty, young girl who knelt by a flat rock and kneaded a lump of thick dough. The two women had long black hair. The older woman’s hair hung loose about her flat, puffy face. The girl wore her hair in a long braid that fell to the middle of her back. She also wore a bright red ribbon at the top of her braid, as if to hold it in place.
    Remington figured them to be mother and daughter. He knew both women had been watching them.
    When the lawmen stopped nearby, the women turned away and went back to their chores.
    Tom Beck called out a greeting in Cherokee.
    The older woman stopped stirring and looked up at Beck, the ladle poised in her hand. The younger girl rested her sticky hands on the dough and turned her head toward them.
    “No English,” the older woman replied, even though Beck had spoken to them in their native tongue.
    Beck continued to speak in the guttural Cherokee language, explaining that they were looking for a man called Charlie Killbuck and that they had come to help the girl who was with him, Lina Miller.
    “No,” the older woman said curtly. She turned away and began to stir the pot again. The younger girl hesitated only a minute before she, too, turned her head and went back to her kneading.
    “We aren’t going to get anywhere with them,” Beck said. “Let’s go.”
    “Something funny’s going on here,” Remington said.
    “What do you mean?” Beck snapped. “Just because the old man’s too old to think straight, and the two women don’t want to talk to strangers? I don’t see anything funny about that.”
    Remington, sensing Tom’s frustration, let it go. Tom got moody sometimes and Ned didn’t want to deal with that right now.
    They stopped at the next adobe, but they couldn’t find anyone there. When they left there, Ned spotted an Indian on horseback on the road ahead of them. “Let’s catch up to that fellow,” he said. “Maybe he’ll be kind enough to take us to Killbuck’s place.”
    The deputies urged their horses to a faster pace. When they were closer to the lone, bronze-skinned rider, Tom Beck called out to him, both in English and Cherokee. The Indian, who rode bareback on the pony, looked back over his shoulder, then stopped his animal and waited until the marshals caught up with him.
    Remington and Frank Shaw held back a few feet and let Beck do the talking. Remington saw that the Cherokee boy was young, maybe twenty, maybe only