Long Hunt (9781101559208) (12 page)

“Very well,” Titus said. Looking around, he noted, “Plenty of brush here. You can hide easy enough, but if you hear or see anything at all to give you a fright or make you think anybody besides us is around, you come back up here, straight off. Now go ahead.”

The girl got down from her horse and vanished into the lush August green to the left of the trail, if trail this could really be called. It took a woodsman to discern it, mostly by following occasional blazes on the sides of trees or faint phantoms of tracks left by earlier travelers. With such poorly delineated trails, there were those who had set out through this country who had simply vanished, reaching no destination and returning to no point of earlier embarkation.

The two men dismounted to let their legs stretch a bit while Mary was out of sight. Titus considered walking beside his horse for the next several miles. He changed his mind as he remembered how his father had suffered for years from rheumatism exacerbated by his years of on-foot wilderness traversing. Don't walk if you can ride, his father had often advised. Such will preserve your joints longer.

The girl safely returned and travel resumed. Mary hurried her horse forward so she could ride directly beside Titus to speak easily. “Mr. Titus,” she said, “who will I live with?”

He smiled rather sadly at her. “We don't know yet, Mary. But I promised you we'd find you a new situation you can be happy in, and we will.”

“Where do you live?”

“In a way I kind of live all over. I travel, answer the call if there's a need for men to protect a fort or settlement against Indian attack, and I hunt. I explore for good lands that I might someday want to live on, if ever I get settled down and have a family. But if I do have a home, it's at the place we're heading, Fort Edohi. My father's station, over near White's Fort. You heard of those places?”

“Yes. You got no wife?”

“I don't, Mary.”

“Ain't you lonely?”

He smiled. “Sometimes I suppose I am.”

“Well, you ought to find you a wife, then.”

“You tell him, Mary!” said Micah from behind. “I been telling him that for nigh forever now.”

“He has, Mary. Can't deny it. And one of these days I will marry. Hope to, anyway.”

“I wish I was older so I could get married,” Mary said.

Titus smiled. “If you was older I might just ask you to marry me.”

Mary laughed, and Titus thought it was good to hear this little bereaved girl sounding happy, even if only for a moment. “I couldn't marry you even if I was older,” she said.

“Why not?”

“ 'Cause I'll be married to somebody else. To him.” She tossed her head back in the direction of Micah.

Micah roared in laughter. “You hear that, Titus? Looks like you've been passed over in favor of a better man.”

“Uglier man is more like it. Mary, you telling me you'd marry an ugly gent like Micah there?”

“He ain't ugly,” the girl said. “I think he's right fine-looking. Handsome.”

“You're mighty young to have eyes going bad like that, girl.”

“She sees just fine, thankee,” Micah said. “But, Mary, you're a bit young for me.”

“I'm getting older. Every day.”

“So am I. You'll never catch up with me.”

Titus said, “Consider yourself lucky that you dodged that bit of trouble, Mary. You don't want this one.”

Mary, growing ever more comfortable in the company of the two men, turned and smiled back at Micah. “You never been married?” she asked.

A slight pause. “I was, once. She died, Mary. I lost her.”

Mary's smile went away. “I'm mighty sorry.”

“I 'preciate that.”

“ 'Cause I know how it feels, losing family.”

“You do. That's a fact. A sad fact for both of us.”

The conversation died away, Mary withdrawing into herself and her grief again. But the brief round of levity had been good for them all.

They rode farther, then paused to rest the horses and eat a meal of jerked beef and hardened biscuit while the horses ate from the supply of grain Titus carried in a pack behind the saddle of his mount.

Then back on the trail, moving steadily east.

 

Mary found the old hunter's shed the next day, while away from the others for a few moments of privacy to see to personal needs. It blended so naturally into the leafy environment that she looked at for several moments before she began to discern it.

It did not startle her to see such a man-made structure here in the forest. She knew that this country had been extensively explored years before by long hunters and trappers such as Titus Fain's father, and such men had built many shelters in the wilderness, particularly to see them through the winter months. Most hunter shelters were mere “half-faced” structures made of leaning pole frames topped by branches and sheets of bark. Others, like this one, were squatty, very rough cabins notched just well enough to hold them together and support whatever crude roofing their builders could provide them.

Mary stood where she was when she saw the little hut, looking closely at it to make sure there was no one in or around it. She doubted the place had seen human occupancy for years, but her father had taught her to be cautious. She finally began edging toward the structure, eyes fixed on its uncovered doorway and tiny window, the latter being no more than a gap cut through two adjacent logs in the front wall.

When she reached the shelter, she was confident it was empty. She paused at the door and quietly called, “Hello the house. Is anyone there?”

No sound. She put her head inside the door. “Hello?”

A moment later she withdrew, gasping hard. Turning on her heels, she ran away from the little cabin and back toward the trail. “Mr. Micah! Mr. Titus! Come here! Come now!”

 

“Is he dead?” Mary asked, barely able to speak. She was standing again at the door of the little hunter's cabin, which was now occupied by Titus and Micah and the man Mary had found unconscious inside the structure.

Titus, kneeling beside the supine man, shook his head. “Not dead. But in a bad way.”

“Apoplexy, almost sure,” Micah said. “I've seen it before. You can tell it from the way his mouth pulls down on the side like that. His eye, too, on the same side. See it?”

Mary nodded. She was struggling visibly to maintain her composure.

“You got to kill him,” she managed to say.

“Kill him? Mary, why would we do such as that?” Micah asked.

“He's an Indian,” she said. “He's an Indian and I know what they do. You got to kill him!”

“He's old, Mary. Very old. And he's dying; I'm sure of it. We're decent men, good men. And you're a good young lady. We wouldn't want to do such a thing as murder.”

“He's just an Indian!” Mary said sharply, tears coming now. “He's an Indian, just like the ones who . . . who . . .”

Titus rose and came out of the shelter, taking Mary by the arm and leading her aside. “Mary, this poor old man ain't nothing like the Indians who killed your family. I'm sure those were much younger and stronger men. This fellow is probably eighty years old, maybe older. I don't even believe he knows anybody's with him. He can't move, can't speak. He would have had nothing to do with what happened at your cabin.”

Mary gazed at him through tears. “He's an Indian. Indians killed my family. So now I'm going to kill Indians, whenever I can.”

“Even them who had nothing to do with hurting you? Even them who are too old to walk?”

“He's an Indian. Just like they were.”

“Mary, what you're saying is the very thinking that has cost so many people their lives. Maybe even what cost your family theirs. You see, what happens is that somebody somewhere kills another person—an Indian kills a white man, say—and other white men decide to even the balance by killing that Indian in turn. But maybe they can't find that same Indian, so they kill another one, or another one or two or three. And you know what? The Cherokee have a whole system they follow of vengeance that calls for them to pay back them who kill one of their own, even if it ain't the same ones who did the original murder. One white man kills a Cherokee, and other Cherokees pick out a white man in turn and kill him. Usually not the guilty one. And so it goes, killing going back and forth, never ending, just growing. It's not the way things ought to be. It just ain't.”

“I saw them do it. I see my family dying when I close my eyes.”

“But you didn't see that poor old man in there do it, did you? He couldn't have. He's no more guilty of it than you or me. He's old and dying and can't even walk.”

“If he can't walk, how'd he get in there?”

“Somebody might have put him in there and left him to die, by his choice or theirs. Or he might have been out here, walking, and got struck with apoplexy and dragged himself inside for the sake of shelter. I think he went into that little cabin expecting to die, however he got here.”

“I'll make him die, if he wants to die.”

“Mary, that's no kind of talk to be coming from the lips of a girl so young as you.”

“But I . . . I . . .” She burst into a loud wail and Titus embraced her gently. Her small frame shook violently with her sobs.

“Mary, I'm not an old man, but I've lived long enough to learn that sometimes, you just have to scribe a line across everything and make a clean start on the far side of it. You have to draw in a deep breath, and as much as you can make yourself, try to forgive.”

“I don't think I can.”

“Nobody can do it perfect. You just got to try.”

“I hate 'em. I hate Indians.” A tear glistened.

“Put that out of you, Mary. Hate is a poison that only hurts the one carrying it around.”

Micah called for Titus to return to the shelter, and Titus told Mary to stay where she was. He went back inside.

Mary stayed still only a few moments, then went around the stand of trees between her and where the horses remained tethered beside the trail. She went to Micah's horse and from a saddlebag drew out a small flintlock pistol she'd seen him place there earlier after loading it. Her hand trembled as she held it, and she bit her lip.

“I got to,” she said to herself. “I got to do it.” She hid the pistol in her clothing and went back around the trees to the hunter's shelter.

C
rawford Fain knew he had to make a stop at White's Fort on his way toward Crockett Spring, where Littleton's note had indicated the women with the marked eye had been seen. He didn't want to do it, because he didn't doubt that the Reverend Professor Eben Bledsoe probably believed he was hundreds of miles away by now, tracking down his long-missing daughter. He dreaded seeing how Bledsoe would react when he learned that Fain was only just now getting started on the task he'd agreed to do.

As he and Potts rode into view of the White's Fort stockade, Fain halted his horse and leaned forward wearily, sighing aloud. “What are you thinking about?” Potts asked.

“Ah, I just don't look forward much to talking with old Bledsoe,” he said.

“Is he like his brother?”

“Hardly at all.” Fain grinned. “Eyes don't even cross. But it's a lot more than that. They're both preachers, but they don't agree on much, it seems. And Eben hints that his brother is a downright bad man. I don't know all he's talking about with that, but maybe it's about him and that woman he travels with. The false Molly Reese.”

“I heard you tell Houser that you knew she wasn't the real Molly Reese even before he figured it out. How did you know?”

Fain sighed again. “I might tell you that story sometime, Potts. Not now.”

Potts did not argue. He'd spent just enough time with Fain to realize he was not a man to be persuaded away from something he'd already settled upon.

“Well, let's head on down,” Fain said.

 

Fain was not unhappy to learn that Eben Bledsoe was absent. He'd gone to Virginia in pursuit of financial donations for his fledgling college as well as to lay claim on a library's worth of books he'd been promised by a wealthy benefactor who was believed to be wheezing through his final days.

“I confess I'm relieved,” Fain said to Potts. “I wasn't looking forward to talking to him just now.”

“On to Crockett Spring, then?”

“On to Crockett Spring. But not until tomorrow morning. It's late enough that there's little gain to be had from leaving earlier.”

Potts wasn't inclined to argue. It was always best to sleep in a real bed, under a real roof, if such was an option. Better to undertake a journey in fresh daylight than fading dusk.

 

The man with no hair wiped sweat from his broad and fleshy brow and reset his position on the puncheon bench in his log-walled workshop. Around him, in various degrees of completion, lay or stood assorted chairs, stools, tables, benches, and other items of furniture, surrounded by mountains of wood chips.

Adding to those mountains moment by moment were abundant shavings and chips flying off a log clamped in place on a shaving horse, a simple but effective device that held worked wood items in place by pressure of a foot on a plank pedal. The log was being shaved down rapidly by the hairless man's expert and experienced efforts with a two-handled draw knife. The bearded man for whose benefit the work was being done sat watching from the side of the workshop.

“How long do you think it will be?” asked Jeremiah Littleton, still going by his alias of Lyle Kirk.