Chancy (1968) (2 page)

Westward, the Indians we would meet would be wild Indians, out for scalps and horses, and I had an idea this rawhide outfit would be glad they had me along. But I knew that folks can sometimes come to hate a man they owe; and as time went on, they would find reasons for liking me less and less.

When I came in to the fire at noontime they had been talking about it. There was no friendship for each other among these men, only a kind of cold toleration.

Taking hold of the pot, I used my left hand. Gates looked up at me from his seat on the ground. "Young, ain't you?"

"Nineteen," I said, "nineteen by two months, but don't let the years fool you. I've covered country."

"You killed that man mighty easy. You killed men before?"

"I've been shot at, and shot back. I never took to counting scalps."

"That was a lawman you killed."

"He lied when he told you that. This is Indian Territory, and the law is the United States Marshal and his deputies."

The coffee was good, I'll say that for them. "You got off easy," I said. "Once that outfit got away with the cattle they claimed, they'd have come back for the rest." I glanced over their heads at that redhead girl. "And that wouldn't have been all they'd have taken." After that they talked among themselves, leaving me out, so when I'd finished eating I saddled up and returned to the drive.

Now, I'd never asked anything of anybody, nor expected anything from folks. Nobody could be held to account for what his people did or didn't do, but I'd had to answer for pa.

Pa was hung for a horse thief when I was a tall thirteen. After a lifetime of hard work and self-denial, in which pa had few of the things he set store by, he had made one foolish mistake and got hung for it.

It was never in me to judge a man, because each of us does his share of sinning, one way or another. Other folks prospered and pa didn't, but it was no fault of his that I could see, although that cut no ice with the folks down on the flatlands. They called him shiftless and no-account because he was poor, but pa had never been either of those things. But they hung him by the neck and made me stand to watch. To teach me a lesson, they said.

"You stand and watch, boy. This is what comes to thieves."

You'd think there'd have been some Christian kindness in them, but there wasn't an ounce. It was Martin Brimstead whose horse was stolen, and there was no sympathy in the man, nor any understanding, and some say he even wore a name he'd no right to. He was there to see the job was done, but the man who led the mob was Stud Pelly. And it was Stud Pelly who grabbed me and twisted my head, forcing me to look at pa, hanging there.

When it was all over they just walked off and left me standing there, and I climbed the tree to cut pa down ... he was dead, all right, a good kind man gone ... and then old man Dunvegan came up the road, and he took pa's body as I lowered it down, holding him in his arms to ease him to the ground.

"It was the drink did it, boy," he said. "Your pa was no drinking man, and had no head for it. He'd been standing off sighing for that horse for a year or two, so when he got a couple of drinks in him he just mounted up and rode around.

"It was a mistake he made, and with the wrong man. There's no forgiveness in Martin Brimstead and that Stud Pelly, he'd hang any man he could hang legal. He's got the taste of blood in his mouth."

Dunvegan helped me to bury pa, and arranged for me to travel down the country with a pack peddler. After that I lived hand to mouth around Charleston for six months or so, holding various jobs and learning what the outside world was like. Then I went up to Boston as a ship's boy, down to New Orleans as a sailor before the mast, and up the river to Natchez and St. Louis on river boats.

After a while--four years it was--I hankered for the mountains and followed the Trace back over the rough country into the Smokies. The cabin pa and me had called home was still there in the clearing near the tall pine, and the grass stood high all about as if nobody had been near the place since.

By the time I'd cleaned out the cabin and the well, I was getting low on supplies that I'd packed in over the back trail along Chancy Ridge--named for pa--so I walked the old Cherokee trails to the flat lands to buy seed corn and supplies. I also bought me a brown mule to pack it.

Most of the Cherokees had been forced to leave their lands and move west to Indian Territory, and their trails were no longer used except by some hunter or an Indian from afar. Not many of the flatlanders knew of those trails up there along the ridges, so I could come and go with nobody bothering their heads about me. After I spaded the garden plot, I plowed up a patch for seed corn, and did my planting.

Sometimes of a nighttime I'd get to yearning after folks and I'd walk away out on Chancy Point to look down into the valley where I could see the lights of homes. Nobody down there wanted to see me--they'd think of me as that horse thief's boy, if at all.

Of course--and the thought kept a-nagging--there was old Jerry Dunvegan. He'd been friendly when no one else would be, when I was a scared, heart-broke boy.

It was lonesomeness started me down the mountain, and an evil day it was when I decided to call on old Jerry.

The mule taken me down. The night was a quiet one, with a sliver of moon holding its shadow in its arms, and the darkling pines were a fringe along the sky. A ghost wind moved among the trees when I rode down to the village that had hung my pa, down to see the one man I could call friend.

His house stood nigh the brook that tumbled down the mountain from my own ridge, and a white cow looked over the rail fence at us as we came by, with the barn and the barn smells close to hand. It was when I was turning in at the gate, with what surmising I could only guess at, that I turned and rode back and tethered my mule in the pines near the brook.

Closing the barnyard gate behind me, I went to the kitchen door and tapped light. There was a moment of stillness within, then a footstep and a voice. "Who's there?"

"A friend, inquiring for Jerry Dunvegart"

The door opened a bit, and a woman stood inside. It was Jerry's oldest, a tall, thin girl, looking out at me. "I don't know you. Who is it, calling on pa?"

"It's Otis Tom, Otis Tom Chancy, ma'am."

She kind of caught her breath, and her features stiffened as she looked at me. "Go away from here!" she said. "You've caused trouble enough!"

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but Mr. Dunvegan treated me kindly. I thought to bring him thanks, and news of me."

"Go away! He's had his fill of you, and so have we all. Befriended you, did he? And a sight of trouble it caused. When they found out--"

Her voice was getting high, and sound carried in the still night air, which made me nervous. "If you'd let me step in--" I began.

She drew back. "Never let up on him, they didn't. They read him out of the church, and nobody'd take to him at all. That was Brimstead's doing."

"I'd no idea. Your pa was Christian kind to me, ma'am, when I was a boy alone, and--"

"You get out now. I've told you what trouble you caused, and if they knew you'd come here again they'd be meaner than ever."

"Can I see Jerry?"

"No, you can't see him. Pa's abed."

The door behind her opened a mite, and a slim bit of a girl was standing there. It was Kitty Dunvegan, old Jerry's youngest, scarcely fourteen.

"Kit, you get back!" the tall girl said. "And close that door!"

"Who is it, Priss?"

"It's that no-account Otis Tom, the horse thief's boy." She turned on me, fiercely angry. "Now you get, or I'll call Stud Pelly."

It was no use. Stepping back from the door, I said, "Sorry ma'am, I just wanted to see your pa. He stood by me. And you know, ma'am,I never stole any horses. I don't deny pa was up on that horse. He was drunk at the time, and him unaccustomed to strong drink. When he sobered up he'd have taken that horse back, with apologies. He was that kind of man. Trouble was, Brimstead and Stud, they wanted a hanging, and they got it."

"That makes no difference. Your pa stole that horse, and Mr. Brimstead's an important man. Why, he owns nigh half the county!"

When the door closed I held still a minute, listening. Then I went through the barnyard, climbed over the fence, and made it to my mule.

Behind me a door closed, so I sat my saddle, listening. Who could that be, I wondered. It had sounded like the Dunvegan door.

Time was a-wasting, so I walked my mule off up through the trees, only returning to the trail after I'd put half a mile behind me. It was fetching up to daybreak when I reached the cabin.

A mite hungry, I put a fire together and started to fry some hog-meat, when of a sudden I heard a whisper of sound from outside. Having no cause to expect friendship in a place where so many held hatred for me, I caught up my gun and stepped to the door.

A girl was coming across the yard from the woods. Not from the path, but from the brook. Now a body could come up from the village that way, and much faster than by the path, but it was a climb and a scramble among rocks and brush. It was that skinny Dunvegan girl ... the young one.

"Kit," I said, "what are you doing up here?"

"Priss told them. I came to warn you. She told Stud and them, and they're fixing to come for you the lot of them."

"Why? I never did anything wrong."

"That don't make no difference to them. Stud's talking it up that they want no thief's kin around here. He's got his rope, but he says you'll get a whoppin' and a running start. He's all the time talking about that rope. It hung one man, he says, and if need be it'll hang others. Folks are afraid of him."

"You borrowed trouble, Kit. You shouldn't have come. Now, what did you do that for?"

She dug her toe in the ground. "Pa likes you. Priss didn't speak true, because I know pa would have wished to see you. It's true folks have treated us shabby, but pa's proud, and he pays them no mind. It's cost us a-plenty, because nobody would do business with pa. Some didn't like what he did, but most of them were just afraid to cross Brimstead."

"You get back before they find out," I told her.

"What will you do?"

"I could run, but I'm of no mind for it. I'll wait and let them speak their piece. If worse comes to worst, I can get out."

She was a slim youngster, and she had come far to warn me, so I taken her by the chin and kissed her lightly on the cheek. "You go along now," I said, "but you tell your pa I'll never forget what he did, and if he ever needs a friend, he's only to sing out and I'll come runnin'."

She was gone in a moment, slipping into the woods like a wraith. And they were coming. From the sound of them I knew where they were on the trail, and as there seemed to be time enough, I led my mule around and down by my sneaky trail and hid him in the brush below the cabin where the rock wall fell sheer away from the cabin foundation. I tied him there and went back and filled my water bucket.

When I heard their voices to, I stepped back inside and barred the door, then closed the shutters and barred them, opening only the loop holes. From the back window, which they could neither approach nor see, I hung a rope where I could slide down to the mule.

There looked to be nine or ten of them, mostly loafers and no-accounts.

"You!" came a voice. "In the house there!" That was Stud Pelly. He was a big man, not taller than most, but wider and thicker, a strong, mean man with the name of being a bully. "Come on out of there!"

I just sat there, a-watching and a-waiting. It was in me to even the score for pa; but no man takes a life lightly if he's in his right mind, and I wasn't about to kill anybody unless they forced me to it. Besides, I'd put some miles behind me since I was the kid whose pa they'd hung. Though I was still nothing but a slim, tall boy, I'd met men and faced up to them before this, and I knew the kind of rabble I faced now.

Pelly strode up and banged his big fist on the door. "Open up, kid! I know you're in there!"

Softly I crept up the ladder to the loft. The cabin was built with an overhang so defenders could keep Indians from building fires against the log walls that was back in the old days.

There was a plug right over where Pelly would be standing, a plug that stopped up a loophole. Easing it out, I looked down on Pelly, who was banging on the door again Then I taken out my pistol and thrust the muzzle through the hole, aiming at the log wall beside Pelly. The bullet would miss him, but he would get a face full of slivers. I squeezed the trigger.

In the loft the gun boomed like a cannon. There was a startled cry, then a scramble of boots running and I went down the ladder to the door. I peered through one loophole after another, but I saw nothing. All was dark and still. My unexpected shot had scared them off, but they would come back, twice as many and twice as mean.

Stud Pelly was a bragger and he would want to say he'd run me off. Well, he could say it, for I would be gone. When I came back again I would be a bigger, tougher, older man, and then I would have something to say to both Pelly and Brimstead.

Taking what was worth taking, I slid down the rope to the mule, and took off down the old Cherokee trails. And that time I was gone for a year.