Follow the River (25 page)

They reached the end of the ridge and began to descend through a copse of junipers, emerging then on a clear slope overlooking a vast and brilliant stand of mountain ash: a profusion of small yellow leaves and stark red berries. Cedar waxwings, bluejays and finches shot to and fro among the ashes, feasting on the berries. On the distant slopes, forests of dark evergreens stood among the fading hardwoods, while shadows of clouds slid slowly up the valleys.

The riders converged with a narrow mountain stream about
halfway down the slope, a gushing, roaring, leaping watercourse among boulders. The descent was so steep that the horses all but slid down on their rumps. In half an hour then they rode out onto a gentle, U-shaped valley full of dry grass and pine growing in reddish earth. Here they could ride abreast. They went at a trot for an hour, their eyes shaded by their wide, three-cornered hats. Gander Jack wore a yellow bandana circled around his head. His hat hung behind his shoulder on a strap.

Jack pointed ahead, and Will noticed a haze of smoke hanging along a wall of dark pines a mile ahead. “Cherokee town there,” Jack said. He reined in his horse; Will and John did the same, though uncertain why. After a full minute of listening and watching, Jack clucked his tongue and they moved forward again, but at a slow walk. Will had broken out in a sweat in the still heat and ominous quiet. And suddenly, in the corners of his eyes, he detected the movement of figures. Glancing about, his hand tensing involuntarily on the rifle that lay across his saddle, he saw that they were flanked by perhaps a dozen warriors on foot, some of them armed with bows and hide shields, others with guns. These were escorting them toward the town. It was eerie how they had materialized out here on this open space.

They rode in among pines and the smell of woodsmoke, and found themselves suddenly within a clean, orderly village of remarkably substantial log houses, some bigger than his own home in Draper’s Meadows had been, roofed with split wood. Stick-and-clay chimneys showed that the dwellings even had fireplaces. Handsome, brown-skinned young women, naked from the waist up, working at grain mortars and kettles and looms in the pleasant shade alongside the road, paused and stood up to watch these white men ride in. Children wearing not a stitch paused in their play and looked in awe at what Will presumed were the first white men they had ever seen. A clear stream curved in toward the heart of the town, and it was full of naked children and women washing. Will was impressed by the air of peace and order. He turned to look aside at Johnny, who caught his eye at once and remarked:

“Nice town, ain’t it?”

Looking back, Will saw now that much of the population had moved in behind them, following quietly and watching with great curiosity.

“Chief,” Gander Jack said softly, and Will turned to see a well-formed old man with grizzled hair coming toward them down the sun-flecked street, carrying a long walking staff with white and yellow feathers at its tip. Jack raised his hand to him and reined in. The chief returned the salute, and Jack dismounted, stood before him and offered his hand. They clasped forearms and Jack began talking. The chief nodded, his quick eyes occasionally darting up to look at the white men. “Get down,” Jack said. “He don’t like you a-lookin’ down on ’im.” They slid off, eager to please.

Will and Johnny and Gander Jack went into the lodge, a spacious and cool structure with a high ceiling, and there they smoked a pipe with the chief and some leading men of the town. They ate a meal from a large bowl containing beans and squash flavored with strips of a meat they could not identify by taste. Gander Jack was canny enough to wait until they had finished before telling them it was dog. Will felt a twinge of nausea, then put it out of his mind and forgot about it.

The Cherokee chief was reserved but hospitable. He listened as Will described, with Jack translating, the massacre at Draper’s Meadows and told of his hope that the hostages might be located in the Shawnee country and ransomed through the offices of the neutral Cherokees. He told of the gifts of great beauty that he could bestow upon both the Shawnees and the Cherokees if his beloved family were returned to him. The chief listened to all this with his eyes hooded, and if his soul was stirred at all by the mention of the presents, he did not show it. He spoke quickly to Gander Jack and then stood up.

“He’s never had a chance to talk directly to Englishmen,” Gander Jack said. “He has a few things on his mind and wants you to listen.”

Johnny leaned close to Will, smiling with half his mouth. “What say y’, Will? Shall we hear ’im out?”

“Can’t say as I’ve got anything more pressing t’do. Tell
him,” Will said to Gander Jack, “that we deem ourselves lucky to share his wisdom.”

Gander Jack let the chief get a few seconds’ head start talking, then stepped in at his first pause for breath and began translating:

“He says he’s seen his cousins the Shawnees two times this year … and they’ve told him what’s in their hearts …

“The Shawnees took up the tomahawk against the English white men because they’ve been drove from place to place by ’em. They used to live a good life but had to move away north to strange places when the English white men came close and made big farms and killed all the game …

“Then they had to move west and find new lands, on the O-y-o, because more white English came …

“He says he understands the hearts o’ the Shawnees … that he himself got wary when he saw your white faces come today … He fears that the Cherokee nation may one day have to fight the white English too, to keep from being driven afore ’em …

“He says the Shawnees won’t give up their captives easy. He wants you to understand that they take captives and adopt them into their families to replace people who been killed or died because of the white men coming …”

“Ask him if that means they’re likely alive,” said Will.

Jack exchanged words with the chief, then told Will:

“That’s up to the families. They’re given a captive to replace someone they’ve lost. If their anger’s too strong, they might torture or kill that prisoner to have revenge. But if they believe that person is of good blood, they’ll adopt him, or her, and give the same comfort and protection they gave their own.”

Will and Johnny traded anxious glances. Then Will extended another question that had been bothering him. “Ask him why the Shawnee, if they hate white men so dang much, hire on with the French. They’re just as white as we are.”

The chief was not stumped for a second by that question. “He says,” replied Jack, “that the French are different from you. They hunt and trap and fish, just like the Shawnee, and
they make small villages like the Indians, and farm only for food to eat themselves … He says they don’t try to drive the red man out and destroy his land and kill all the game. He says the French and the Indians can live side by side in a land and help each other. But not so with the English white men, and that’s why the Shawnees use the help o’ the French …”

At this point the chief sat down. A buck, at a signal, brought forth the pipe again, with coals to light it, and it was passed around. Then the chief began talking again, this time with a less pontifical demeanor.

“He says he’s glad you come to see him. He thinks y’re brave to come here alone and your reasons are kindly. The Cherokee, too, love their families, and would do as you do … He says he’d like to help you ransom your families, and he’ll say good words for you to any Shawnees who come here. But he says it ain’t likely any will. Wait …”

The chief talked again, and waved toward the southwest.

“He tells me there was a Cherokee named Snake Stick, from a village out yonder, came through here two days back, an’ this ’ere Snake Stick told him he was going up to talk with the Shawnees afore winter. He says if Snake Stick ain’t gone yet, y’ might hire him as y’r go-between.”

Will’s eyes blazed with eagerness. “How far to this Snake Stick feller?”

“I know where his town is. Five days south an’ west, barrin’ floods or trouble.”

Will pondered that a moment. They had ridden two weeks already into this strange country, and considered themselves lucky to have come so far unharmed. Five days deeper into the Cherokee lands would be risky indeed. He turned and glanced at Johnny.

“It’s f’r Bettie an’ Mary an’ them,” Johnny said. “I can’t go back knowin’ I hadn’t done all I could.”

“Nor me.” He turned back to their guide. “Will y’ take us there, Jack?”

The half-breed shrugged, a sickly smile on his face.

“I take it that means f’r a price,” Will said.

The half-breed nodded. Then the Cherokee chief spoke again. Jack translated:

“He says y’ oughter know that Snake Stick might not be inclined to do anythin’ for a white English. He thinks like a Shawnee, talks like a Shawnee. His heart ain’t ’xactly neutral. He goes up t’ visit the Shawnee an’ listens to ’em t’ git his blood all hot. Th’ chief warns us we oughter know that.”

Will Ingles curved his forefinger over his upper lip and stared at the chief, thinking. Finally he said:

“I reckon this ’ere Snake Stick’s like any other man. Like as not he’d do f’r us—f’r a price. Thank our chief here. Tell ’im I have some gifts for ’im, in pay f’r his hospitality. Then we’ll be a-gettin’ on, to go see this Snake Stick.”

Gander Jack thought it would be a good idea to give the Cherokee chief and his friends some whiskey in return for their opinions and advice, but Will refused, knowing it was Jack’s own thirst that had prompted the suggestion. “And don’t you by God tell ’em we’ve got any, either,” Will warned him. “This evenin’s goin’ smooth. No need to waste good liquor makin’ good Cherokees bad. Now hear me, Jack: I’m a-sleepin’ with these jugs, and with my gun, and if I wake up hearin’ one squeak of a jug-stopper, I’m shootin’. D’ye get my drift?”

Nobody came into the hut that night to steal whiskey, but Will might as well have been standing sentry duty; sleep just would not come, even though he was bone-weary and the pallet was far softer and drier than anything he had slept on for weeks.

It might have been the sounds that kept him awake; it might have been the smells. Now and then he would hear sounds of soft movement go past the hut, like moccasins on soft earth, like legging brushing against legging. When he heard something like this, he would stare at the oblong patch of lesser dark that was the doorway of the hut and would put his thumb on the cold flintlock hammer of the rifle, which lay across his waist. He would stare at that black-gray oblong until it swam; then he would look a little way above it, realizing that he could see it more clearly in the edge of his vision. A child coughing in its sleep somewhere in a nearby shelter made Will jump in his blankets and his heart pound for five minutes.

The fact was, though Johnny Draper and Gander Jack had seen not a hint of it, that Will Ingles was scared halfway to death. It had been getting worse night by night during their long ride into the Cherokee country, but he’d been able to put it down. Now, lying in the dark in the middle of a Cherokee town, he was almost shrieking scared. And the thought of going a week deeper into tribe country, to parley with a nasty young Cherokee instead of a nice old one, made it worse. One minute he’d be thinking how scared he was now, and the next he’d be thinking how scared he was going to be next week.

Damnation, it’s awful what a man’s got to go through to keep people believin’ he’s got guts, Will thought.

Nobody had ever said Will Ingles didn’t have guts. There had been too much evidence over the years that he did have. Anybody could say, and many did, “That Will Ingles, he’s got no fear of man nor devil.”

Well, it was true Will Ingles had guts. But there were times, like now, when it seemed the main item in those guts was a white liver.

I wonder if Johnny’s scared as I am, he thought. I wonder if he’s asleep or lyin’ there havin’ the gollywobbles like me. You can see it when Gander Jack’s scared. You can’t ever see such a thing on Johnny. Nor you can’t on me, neither.

But I am. And I bet Johnny is, too.

He heard a whisper of a sound outside and his hair stood up. His eyes bulged and he raised his head and spread his ears. It had sounded something like the noise when a man half-whistles. Like a sneak-signal. Like an Indian imitating an owl, maybe.

Or maybe like an owl imitating an Indian, he thought, trying to smile it away.

He kept his neck craned, listening, till it ached, until his ears were ringing so hard that he couldn’t have heard a hoot owl on his shoulder. Nothing happened. He let his head back down and stared at the invisible black ceiling, the gray of the smoke-hole in its peak, and he poured cold sweat and listened to his heart clomp around in his chest like a mule on a plank floor.

It’s just from bein’ in an Indian town, he thought. A white man don’t belong in an Indian town.

Nor does a white woman, he thought. He had just thought of Mary.

That was why he was here in the middle of the night in the middle of an Indian town: because his Mary was somewhere else in the middle of the night in the middle of an Indian town.

I mean, he thought, if she’s still alive, that’s likely where she is.

He lay now, trying to pick up what she would be thinking. They had used to talk fanciful about being able to hear each other’s minds and see through each other’s eyes; that’s how close they had been.

He imagined her thoughts as hard as he could, and came eventually to the conclusion that she was thinking about him.

What if she’s doing this same thing and she hears how scared I am, he thought. I got to stop thinkin’ scared. It wouldn’t do her good to know.

That thought reminded him of something awful: It reminded him of the day of the massacre when he had seen her in captivity and had had to run away.

She may read what’s in my heart about that, he thought. If she do, how could I ever look in her face again?

Pray God, she don’t know that, he thought.

But he was afraid she did. When she started thinking about what he was thinking, she usually knew.

She might think I’m a poltroon, he thought.