Pregnant Settler Was Thrown From The Wagon Train, Found By A Compassionate Shawnee Hunter
Chapter 6
The journey proved arduous. Eleanor’s leg, though healing, could not bear her full weight for long, and the party stopped frequently to allow her rest. The men treated her limitations not as burdens but simply as another aspect of the journey to be accommodated, sharing dried berries and pemmican, adjusting their pace without complaint.
By the second day, Swift Fox and Strong Water discovered fresh tracks — white men, several of them, moving with evident purpose along the river path below. “Looking for me?” Eleanor asked, fear tightening her chest.
“Cannot know,” Grey Otter admitted. “But they travel with purpose. Armed.”
They changed course, climbing into rockier terrain that horses would struggle to navigate. When Hope’s colic threatened to betray their position with persistent crying, Swift Fox produced a smoothed piece of deer antler for the infant to gum, an old remedy that settled her almost instantly. When rain turned the trail to a treacherous slick, Young Hawk fashioned a rain shield from woven leaves to protect Hope from the worst of the downpour.
On the third night, camped beneath a rocky overhang, Grey Otter told Eleanor the fuller story of Jackson — how, three winters earlier, trappers seeking a bounty on his scalp had very nearly killed him, and how the trader had appeared, appealed to the men’s greed rather than their conscience, and talked them into releasing him before tending his wounds himself. “Said not all white men think alike,” Grey Otter recalled. “Said one day I might do the same for someone in need.”
“And you did,” Eleanor murmured. “For Hope and me.”
“Circle closes,” Grey Otter agreed. “Now Jackson will help again. Different person, same spirit.”
They reached the trading post after dark on the fourth day, approaching through a small door in the palisade wall known only to those the post’s owner trusted. A weathered gatekeeper named Silas admitted them cautiously, warning that riders had been through that very day asking questions about a missing white woman.
Elias Grant himself, a tall, broad-shouldered man with a red beard shot through with gray, arrived to find the unlikely party in his storeroom. “Well, well,” he said, taking in the scene. “When Silas said Grey Otter had brought a white woman and babe to my back door, I thought he’d finally taken to the whiskey.”
Once Eleanor explained her circumstances — the fall from the wagon, Vernon’s betrayal, the land grant he coveted — Elias’s expression darkened. “There have been men searching for her,” Grey Otter added. “Three riders, one wagon, asking at the trading post today.”
“That’d be a Mr. Silas Corbett,” Elias confirmed grimly, “claiming his poor widowed sister-in-law wandered off from their wagon train in a fit of pregnancy madness, offering a substantial reward for information leading to her safe return to his loving family care.” The sarcasm in his final words left no doubt as to his opinion of the claim.
“He pushed me from the wagon,” Eleanor stated flatly. “Left me for dead so he could claim my husband’s land grant.”
Elias’s wife, Naomi — a tall, regal Cherokee woman whose family had fled north ahead of the forced removal decades earlier — arrived to settle Eleanor and Hope into a small room above the trading hall, accessible only by a hidden back staircase. “There’s no debt between women who understand each other’s trials,” she told Eleanor simply, producing baby clothes her own youngest had long since outgrown.
That night, safe for the first time in weeks, Eleanor slept without fear shadowing her dreams — though the question of what came next remained entirely unresolved.