Dark Stranger by Heather Graham
(Slater Bros #1)
PART 1
The Stranger
CHAPTER ONE
Summer,
The Kansas /Missouri border
The hoofbeats were the warning. The relentless, pounding hoofbeats. The sound of them sparked a sense of primal fear deep inside Kristin. Strangely, before she'd first felt the staccato rhythm through the ground, she hadn't contemplated such a danger. The day had been too ordinary, and perhaps she had been too naive. She had expected a storm, but not of the magnitude that was to come.
It began with the stillness in the air. As she came along the path through the orchards from the river, Kristin paused. The breeze had dropped. The day had gone dead still. The sudden calm gave her a strange feeling, and she searched the sky. Overhead, she saw blue, a beautiful blue. No clouds marred that endless blue.
It was the calm before the storm, she thought. Here, on the Missouri side of the Kansas-Missouri border, storms were frequent and vicious. Blue skies turned to smoke, and vicious twisters whirled out of nowhere.
Then she heard the hoofbeats.
She looked out across the plain that stretched away from the house. A tumbleweed caught by a sudden gust of wind blew across a patch of parched earth.
Bushwhackers.
The word came unbidden to her mind, and raw fear swept through her, fear and denial. Please, God, no…
Pa! Matthew, Shannon…
Kristin began to run. Her heart began to race, thundering along with the sound of the hoofbeats.
Pa was already dead, she reminded herself. They'd already come to kill him. They'd come, on a cloudless day, and they'd dragged him out in front of the house. He had drowned in a pool of his own blood while she had stood there screaming. There had been nothing, nothing she could do.
Matthew was safe. He'd gone off to join up with the Union Army near the Mississippi. He had said she would be safe. After all, they'd already killed Pa in his own front yard, killed him and left him bleeding.
Bleeding. They called it "bleeding Kansas," and though they were on the Missouri side of the border here, the blood ran thick and deep. The War Between the States had boiled down to a barbarian savagery here. Men did not just fall in battle here, they were cruelly, viciously executed — seized, judged and murdered. Kristin had few illusions; one side was almost as bad as the other. The dream of freedom, the dream of endless land and a life of dignity and bounty had drowned in rivers of blood. The dream was dead, and yet it seemed that was all she had left to fight for. Her father had died for it, and they thought she would flee, but she wouldn't. She couldn't. She had to fight. There was nothing else to do.
Shannon.
Cold dread caught in her throat. Shannon was up at the house. Young, frightened, vulnerable.
Her feet slapped against the dry earth as the hoofbeats came closer. How many of them were there? Maybe twenty, like the day they had come to kill Pa? Maybe not so many. Maybe they knew that Matthew had gone off to fight in the war and that no one remained behind but the girls, the foreman, a maid and a few young hands. She almost felt like laughing. They'd tried to take Samson and Delilah the last time they had come. They didn't understand that the two were free, able to make their decisions. Pa wasn't a fanatical abolitionist; he had just liked Samson, plain and simple, so he had freed them on the occasion of their marriage. Little Daniel had been born free, and they'd all come here together in search of the dream…
Kristin stumbled and fell, gasping for breath. The riders were just behind the trees to her left. She heard screams and shouts, and she knew they were slaughtering whatever cattle they could lay their hands on. This wasn't war.
This was carnage.
She staggered to her feet, smoothing back stray tendrils of hair still damp from her early-morning swim in the river.
They could hold the attackers off. She would be prepared this time. She wouldn't assume that some of these men would be old friends and acquaintances. She wouldn't assume that they were human, that they knew anything about morals or ethics or simple decency. She didn't think she would ever trust in such things again.
Suddenly, while Kristin was still several hundred yards from the house, the horsemen burst through the trees.
"Samson!" she screamed. "Samson! Get me Pa's six-shooter. Samson!"
Samson, a tall, dignified black man, burst through the front door. He glanced at Kristin, then at the horsemen racing through the corn, trampling the tender green stalks.
"Run, Miz Kristin, run!"
She could hardly breathe, could hardly speak. "Pa's Colt, get me the Colt! Tell Shannon to get to the cellar!"
"Samson, what is it?"
Samson turned to see Shannon standing behind him in the hallway.
"Bushwhackers," he said grimly. "Where's Delilah?"
"Out back, feeding the chickens."
She was in the barn. His wife was in the barn. God, he prayed silently, give her the good sense to stay there!
"Shannon," he told her, "you get yourself in the cellar."
She turned away, and Samson hurried back to the hallway, then paused. He thought he'd heard something around back. When the sound wasn't repeated, he looked out the front door again. He could see the riders, and he could see Kristin running.
There were about twenty men, Samson reckoned. Just an offshoot of a bigger raiding party, probably. Some of Quantrill's raiders.
Quantrill himself was a damned butcher. He sanctioned the horror, and the death. Once upon a time he'd been friends with Gabriel McCahy, Kristin and Shannon's father, but one of his henchmen, a man named Zeke Moreau, had wanted Kristin. She hadn't wanted anything to do with him, though. She was in love with Adam Smith. But Adam was dead now, too. Dead like her pa, dead like hundreds of men.
Now Zeke Moreau was coming back. He was coming for Kristin. Samson was sure of it.
"Samson!"
Her eyes met his, desperate, pleading.
Those might be God-fearing gentlemen out there, but if they captured a black man after he had leveled a Colt at them, even in his own defense, they would skin him alive.
It didn't matter. Gabriel McCahy had been the most decent man Samson had ever met. He would lose his skin over old Gabe's daughter if he had to.
He swung around, ready to rush into the house and get the guns. Then he paused, his eyes going wide and his throat closing up, hot and dry.
Zeke Moreau was already in the house. He was standing in the hallway, on the polished oak floor, and he had a double-barreled shotgun leveled right at Samson.
A slight sound caught Samson's attention. He turned swiftly to see that another man was holding Delilah, one arm around her waist, a hand tight against her mouth.
"Watch it, Samson," Zeke said. "Be quiet now, or I'll hang you, boy. Hang you 'til you're dead. Then I'll see that your woman and your kid wind up on the auction block down Savannah way."
Zeke Moreau smiled slowly. He was dark-haired, with a dark, curling mustache, and Samson thought he would look more at home on a riverboat with a deck of cards than he did now, standing there in chaps and a vest, holding a shotgun. He was a good-looking man, except for his eyes. Cold, pale eyes, just like Kristin had always said.
Samson smiled back. "You murdered Gabriel, didn't you?"
Zeke rested his shotgun against his thigh. Samson was a big man, a good six-foot-six, and he was all muscle. But Zeke knew Samson wasn't going to move. Not while Delilah was being held.
"Now, Zeke, Gabe was my friend. He had some bad acquaintances, and he shot off his mouth too much, but I was mighty sorry to hear what happened to him. And it hurt me, hurt me bad, to hear about young Matthew running off to join up with them Yanks."