Wild Abandon

Lauralee straightened her shoulders. She wiped the tears from her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she said as she looked into Dancing Cloud’s dark, troubled eyes. “I’m all right now. I’ll gather my things. I’ll place them in my buggy. I shall be ready to go in a minute.”

“Now is the time that your buggy must be left behind,” Dancing Cloud said, seeing the shock register in her eyes. “To travel more quickly and to be able to ride to a higher plateau to give us better cover, we both must travel on horseback.”

Lauralee glanced over her shoulder at her buggy. Should she leave it behind she must also leave most of her precious clothes that she had only recently purchased. She could carry only one valise on her horse. And there was only so much room in one embroidered valise. She might not even have time to search through her things for those belongings that meant more to her.

Seeing her disappointment and how troubled she was over what was required of her, Dancing Cloud placed a finger to her chin and turned her face around so that she was looking sadly up at him.

“O-ge-ye, we would have been forced to leave your buggy behind soon, anyhow,” he said softly. “When we neared my mountains, you would have soon seen how impossible it would be to travel up the steep mountainside.”

Her eyes searching his face, Lauralee said nothing for a moment, then nodded. “I understand,” she murmured. Then she sucked in a wild breath. “But there is no extra saddle. I . . . I . . . would be forced to ride bareback. I’m not sure that I can. I will be slipping and sliding all the time. That would make it impossible for a quick flight from the sheriff.”

“You shall ride in my saddle on my horse,” Dancing Cloud said. “I shall ride yours bareback.” He walked away from her in a rush and set his rifle aside only long enough to detach her horse from the buggy.

Lauralee looked into the distance and went limp with fright when she saw that the men were no longer just a dot along the horizon. She could make out their shape. She knew for certain to expect Sheriff Decker and Deputy Dobbs among those making up the posse. More than likely Paul Brown was riding with him. He had probably been the first one to even suggest forming the posse so that he could look big in the eyes of the community if she and Dancing Cloud were brought back to stand trial.

She gasped. She was almost certain that she could make out her Uncle Abner riding tall in a saddle! It made a keen melancholia sweep through her to think that he would go along with such a thing as a posse, when in the end it might mean that she would hang beside Dancing Cloud on a hangman’s noose.

Exhaling a quavering, frightened breath, she ran to her buggy and dumped all of her belongings from her valises. Her fingers trembling, she sorted through it all and finally had one of her valises filled with those things that she felt she would need the most. Especially her toilet articles and dresses and skirts and blouses that would travel easier.

Grabbing up the valise, she ran to Dancing Cloud’s horse. After tying it in with the other things that were secured to the saddlebags, she gazed with a longing at her buggy again, then at the bed that Dancing Cloud had made for her on the ground.

She then swung herself into the saddle just as Dancing Cloud mounted her horse. He edged the horse next to his own, his eyes steady with Lauralee’s. “Keep up with me,” he said flatly. “Never lag behind. We will be riding through the dense forest. You could be lost to me quickly.”

Lauralee looked at the buggy and bed again. “They will for certain know that we were here,” she said worriedly.

“As long as we have a good head start on them, it does not matter that they realize they have come close to catching us.”

“But won’t that make them more determined than ever to keep on coming after us?”

“Yes, that is so. But there is not much we can do about that except put many more miles between us today and keep far enough ahead so that they will soon tire of looking for us.”

“Dancing Cloud, did you get any sleep at all?” Lauralee asked as they nudged their horses and rode away.

“Sleep will come later. During tests of endurance at my village I learned as a child the art of going days and nights without sleep.”

Knowing that she was not as trained in the art of staying awake, or of riding for hours on horseback, or of surviving in the wilderness, Lauralee wasn’t sure if she could withstand all that now faced her before reaching Dancing Cloud’s village.

At least for now, though, she felt that she no longer had to be afraid of Clint McCloud causing her harm. He would not be among those who were after her and Dancing Cloud. He would most definitely steer clear of them. He was, himself, a fugitive from justice!

She leaned low over Dancing Cloud’s horse, wondering where Clint McCloud might be at this moment, where he might have gone to elude the law. . . .

* * *

His shoulders slumped, exhausted from the long ride from Mattoon, Clint McCloud drew a tight rein beside a log cabin. He had built this cabin with his very own hands amid a thick forest in North Carolina to bide his choice of wives, and especially the son who had come from his union with the Cherokee squaw.

Fog laying like a heavy-laden band of steel over the treetops reminded Clint of the Gr

eat Smoky Mountains. The mountains were only a half-day’s ride from his cabin, a place that jarred his memory of the war every time he gazed upon the mysterious haze that could lay like puffs of smoke over the mountains for days.

The massacre.

The massacre had been his show of power over the damn redskins.

His wooden leg seeming to be even more heavy than usual, Clint moaned as he lifted it over the saddle.

Finally standing, he swayed and groaned again and held onto the saddle horn to steady himself.

Reeking with perspiration, his dark suit dust-laden, Clint stood there for a moment longer, then secured his horse’s reins to a hitching rail.