The whip cracks behind me.
I launch from my chair and turn, just quick enough to see one of the Indians, eyes glazed with golden lantern light, as he topples face-first into the mud. Abel Topper stands behind him, whip hanging limp.
Everyone is as silent as rabbits in their burrows.
Finally Lowrey hollers, “What is the meaning of this?”
“Beg your pardon, Reverend,” Topper says. “But this man was disrespecting the word of God.”
No one says anything. The Indians beside the toppled man are frozen like statues.
“He was muttering some heathen nonsense to himself,” he insists. “Swaying back and forth. I told him to shut it, but he didn’t listen.”
“Let’s have no more interruptions, yes?” Hiram says.
My uncle grabs my arm and pulls me back down into my chair. I give one last glance to the fallen man. He remains crumpled in the mud, as still as the grave.
Muskrat catches my eye, and I shake my head slightly. Please don’t do anything, I warn silently. Not here, not now, not with all the guns and the foremen wary. Everything inside me tenses up, like I’m bracing to take a beating, as Lowrey picks right up where he left off.
Will no one tend to the fallen man? To my right, Jefferson leans over and whispers something to Tom, who nods. Then they turn to find me, and the look on Jefferson’s face makes my throat tighten. He’s angry and worried sick that something awful’s going to happen, or I don’t know him at all.
Lowrey drones on, with considerably less fire than he started with. He quotes Scripture from the Apostle Paul, enjoining slaves to be obedient and to please their masters in all things.
Gradually I become aware of a hubbub growing around the fallen man. I risk Hiram’s wrath to twist in my seat and take a look.
His companions are whispering and gesturing among themselves. One shakes the fallen man’s shoulders, but he doesn’t respond.
Hiram’s hand goes to the Colt at his hip. Lowrey’s singsong sermon dribbles away. One of the Indians begins to keen, high and loud.
Topper’s whips snaps toward the keening man.
But he misses, snagging the cheek of a Chinese man sitting nearby, opening a line of bright crimson across his cheek.
So Topper tries again, and this time his whip lances across the Indian’s shoulder.
Everyone starts yelling. The Chinese are yelling at the foremen, and the foremen are yelling at Topper, and Muskrat is suddenly beside the other Indians, talking low and fast.
The man who was whipped shakes his head at Muskrat, yelling something back. Muskrat pleads with him.
The mood is like water twitching toward a rolling boil. Everyone has a breaking point. You think you can endure anything, you can take just one more day, and then suddenly you can’t. The smooth surface bubbles over all at once, and fear makes you do something desperate just to escape.
“We need to get you back to the cabin,” my uncle says in my ear.
“They’re scared!” I say. Take the kettle off the fire and the water doesn’t boil. “They want a way out, they don’t want to get hurt. If we just back off, it’ll settle—”
A gunshot pierces the night.
Everyone freezes. Frank Dilley stands there, Colt pointed toward the sky. A warning shot only.
Suddenly a man lurches up, hands aiming for Frank Dilley’s throat. A foreman jumps to Dilley’s defense, knife raised. He stabs the man in the back.
A cry of rage and grief tears into my soul as more leap toward Dilley and the foreman, who disappear beneath a blur of flailing limbs. I can’t tell whether people are attacking, or just trying to climb over to escape.
Everyone is out of their chairs now, the Chinese fleeing in all directions. Hiram yanks at my elbow. “Let’s go,” he commands.
I am sick with fear, with rage, with disgust, but I recognize an opportunity. “You have to stop this!” I yell. Muskrat’s people don’t have a chance if Hiram doesn’t intervene. He hesitates. “Please, Father!”
It’s the “Father” that does it.
“Get to the cabin and lock yourself inside,” Hiram says. He yanks his gun from his holster and rushes forward. He’s a big coward, though, because he stops short of the fray, refusing to get into the thick of things.
Slowly I begin to back away, glancing around for Jefferson or Tom, Mary or Muskrat, anyone who can give me an indication of what I should do.
Another gun goes off. Someone screams. A ragged thunder of gunshots follows.
I stand frozen, covering my ears.
This was not the plan.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Jefferson is suddenly at my side. He pulls a hand away from my ear and says, “We have to find cover.”
I’m only too happy to comply. He yanks me out of the light and into the shadows. Guns continue to fire. My head pounds with them, and my ears ring.
We reach the Chinese tents. “No one will look for us here,” he says, and he ducks into the headman’s tent, pulling me down behind shelves filled with sundries. In the dark, the jars look like black blobs that occasionally spark with reflected lantern light.
After a moment, my heart calms and my head clears enough to say, “Was this how the plan was supposed to go?”
“No,” he says, his voice fierce. “But it’s the way it’s going now. Same plan, just a day early.”
More shots ring out.
“We have to get to the stockade,” I say, yanking on his sleeve. “The ones who are left, the women and children . . . Frank and Hiram might go for them next. And we have to . . . Oh, God, Jefferson, what’s happening?”
It’s too terrible. A mind is not meant to see these things, or even think of them. But I’ll see them forever. I’ll remember the way that Indian was whipped during the sermon. The knife in the back of the other man. People going down like sacks of wheat, screams of pain. The dead body lying limp in the mud of the stockade. The way the man’s head snapped back when Frank Dilley shot him in the mine, and how his blood sprayed the nearest lantern, casting mottled shadows all over the walls.
Jefferson’s arms wrap around me, and I’m snugged tight to his chest. He smells terrible—of sweat and gunpowder and dirty creek water—but I don’t care. It seems like I’ve wanted his arms around me forever.
He says, “We’ll have to be silent and quick if we’re to get there before Frank and his men.”