Long Hunt (9781101559208) (14 page)

T
he town growing up around the stream called Crockett Spring lay up the Holston River from Fort Edohi and White's Fort, in a new county organized by the state of Franklin and called Spencer County. Fain had visited the locale many times in past years and knew many of the settlers, including Colonel Thomas Amis, who lived in a fine stone house surrounded by protective palisades, and who had also been instrumental in building a separate fort on Big Spring.

On the morning Fain and Potts rode slowly into the little settlement that a few years hence would be called Rogersville, Potts said, “Crockett Spring. Who's that named for?”

“That would be David Crockett. I knew him, just a bit. He's gone now.”

“Moved off?”

“Dead. Killed in the Year of the Three Sevens by Indian raiders. Him and his wife and some of their children, slaughtered. Had a deaf-and-dumb boy named Jimmy who got carried off prisoner, and another boy captured, too. Three of their sons were away from home when the raid happened. That saved their lives, probably.”

“There's another David Crockett now,” Potts said.

“There is? Where?”

“Limestone Creek over where it enters the 'Chucky River. Just a little baby, born the day I passed by their house. I met the father. . . . He was drunk at the time.”

“His name was John, I'll wager.”

“That was him. ‘Just plain John' Crockett, as he put it to me. Said he'd named his new baby boy David, after his own pap.”

“John was one of the sons who was away from home when the Indians killed the Crocketts. John, he loves his spirits.”

“I could tell.”

“Come with me and I'll show you something.”

The “something” was a pair of graves, one crudely marked with the name of David Crockett, the other marked Elizabeth Crockett. “This is them?” Potts asked.

“It is. This land around here used to all be theirs. Colonel Amis has it now.”

Potts looked around. “Now that we're here, how do we find out if Bledsoe's daughter is around?”

“Well, I don't think we can just start going up to every woman we run across and looking to see if she's got a gray streak in her eye. All I know to do is start asking people who might have seen such a gal if she ever really was in these parts.”

“Innkeepers and such?”

“That's right.” Fain shrugged. “It's clumsy, but all I can come up with.”

Potts frowned silently a few moments. “Why the deuce did you agree to do this? And why did Eben Bledsoe believe a man skilled in tracking wild game and such would have any particular advantage in tracking people? It's a whole different situation.”

Fain shook his head. “I don't know. I think the man is just desperate to know what became of his little girl. I understand that. That's why I agreed.”

Potts exhaled slowly and said, “I can understand that.”

“Well, I figure we'll be around here for two, three days at the least. Let's go find us an inn where we can get some lodging. The older I get, Potts, the less inclined I am to sleep out if I can have a real bed.”

“I ain't old, but I'm the same way.” They went back to their horses. “Mr. Fain, sir, I've found myself wondering—”

“Call me Crawford. I've told you that before. Or Edohi if it suits you.”

“All right . . . Edohi.”

“You been wondering what?”

“How many folks have streaks in their eyes like Deborah Bledsoe does.”

“Potts, that's a question I got a feeling we're about to become experts in answering.”

 

Micah found a sinkhole in the nearby forest, and there they interred the corpse of the “white Indian” named Sisalee in his chosen world, Cecil in the one he was born into. It was important that the old man's body not be found by any Cherokee who might come through, because a visible bullet wound in the forehead would be clear evidence of murder and likely further inflame Indian passions and violence. So they hid him and vowed to put the matter out of their minds. What Mary had done could not now be changed.

The girl was nearly destroyed by realization of what she had done. All her earlier talk of hating Indians and vowing to kill them had been only chatter, a mere verbal venting of emotion. She hadn't meant it.

Obviously, though, some portion of her had meant it. Something inside her had caused her to rise in her sleep and carry out an act she could never have done had her full wits been about her.

“I'm going to hell,” she said to Micah, through tears. “I'm a murderer, and I'll go to hell. Won't I? Murderers go to hell.”

“Mary, there's only one great judge of mankind and sin and guilt, and it ain't me. Don't look to me for answers to that question. And another thing—it ain't you, either, so don't judge yourself just yet. Right now all you can do is face what happened, ask the Lord to forgive you, and move on. There's not many who would condemn you for what you done, considering what you've been through yourself. You shouldn't have killed the old Indian, true enough . . . but that band of raiders shouldn't have killed your kinfolk, either.”

Micah and Titus had agreed not to tell Mary that the old man had not been Indian by blood. In her mind she had killed a member of the race who had brought harm to her family. For her to learn that she actually had killed one of her own people would only redouble her sense of guilt.

Micah asked in private: “Titus, you reckon it's possible for somebody to do something big, something bad, while he's not himself, and not really be guilty of it? Responsible, maybe, in the sense that it was him who done it . . . but not guilty?”

Titus weighed it in his mind. “That kind of question makes me glad I don't sit a magistrate's bench in a court of law,” he said. “I don't know how to answer.”

“Well, I'm thinking that the Mary who went in there and killed old Cecil wasn't the same Mary as we know during the waking daylight. She was asleep. On her feet, but asleep. And you know how things can be in your dreams and such. . . . It's all different. You can do and say things in your dreams that you'd never think of doing or saying in the light of day.”

Titus shrugged. “All I know is that what's done is done, and the best all of us can do is to never talk of this again, to anyone. She's just a little girl. She'd never have done what she did if not for the things she'd gone through. Old Cecil's corpse will likely never be found, so no Indian vengeance is likely to come from him being killed. Best to leave things where they are and move on down the trail. You agree?”

“I agree.” Micah looked over to where Mary sat stiffly on the ground, rocking back and forth mechanically, staring into the woods around her like a scared animal. “The question is whether Mary herself will agree. In the state she's in, she might just go and confess what she done to somebody, trying to lay the guilt burden off her shoulders.”

“We've still got some travel time with her ahead of us. Maybe we can explain the situation to her and persuade her not to do that.”

Micah nodded. “I sure wish I hadn't let her see that I had that pistol in my saddlebag. If she hadn't had that pistol, none of this would have happened.”

“Let it go, Micah. It wasn't your fault that a little girl's mind got so overburdened with sorrow that she couldn't stop herself from doing a bad act.”

Micah nodded. “I'm ready to travel, Titus. Shall we?”

“Let's go.”

Minutes later they were on the trail again, heading east toward Fort Edohi, still many miles distant.

 

The three travelers found Fort Edohi in a jovial state when they arrived. The family of Dr. Peter Houser had returned unannounced from family business in the East, and Houser was so glad to see them that he hosted a celebration for one and all: food, drink, even a couple of Irish fiddlers who played reels. The site was the courtyard of the stockade, where Houser had made a pit to be dug and a hog now roasted aromatically in the ground.

“I fear your father isn't here at present,” Houser said to Titus. “He's taken on a job, a hunting quest, and has gone up toward Crockett Springs in hopes of finding who he's seeking.”

“Did you say ‘who'?”

“I did. He's engaged to find the long-missing daughter of the Reverend Eben Bledsoe. She was taken as a child by Indians, but her father has reason to believe she is still living. He hired your father to find her. A different kind of long hunt for an old long hunter.”

“Bledsoe . . . the camp meeting preacher?”

“No, no. That one is this one's brother. Very different kind of preachers, Eben being more an academic type. He's the one founding a college over near White's Fort.”

“I've heard about that.”

Houser looked across the stockade yard to where Mary was sitting on a bench beside Houser's wife, Beth. The two were talking intently and cheerfully, Mary actually smiling, so Titus had no fear the child was revealing what had happened in the hunter's shelter. There would be no smile if she were.

 

Sitting at a roughly made table outdoors, in the shade of a big maple standing inside the stockade, Titus and Micah looked across the tabletop at Houser. The physician was wiping his mouth rather daintily on a linsey-woolsey rag after having finished a trencher full of steaming roast pork. Torchlight played across the scene, adding an unwelcome heat to the already sticky atmosphere of late August.

Houser yawned and stretched, feeling the effects of a filling, fatty meal combined with the evening heat. “Ah, nothing better than good food and good company,” he said.

“I'm glad you consider us so,” said Titus.

“Oh, I do. Your surname alone is enough to recommend you to me, Titus. I have come to admire the name of Fain through my associations with your father.”

“Tates are a good bunch, too,” Micah muttered, swatting at an insect buzzing his ear.

“I'm sure of that,” Houser said. “I simply haven't had the pleasure of knowing your people.”

“I'll vouch for them,” Titus said. “Good family. Only one disappointment among the whole bunch.” He lightly kicked Micah's ankle under the table.

Micah ignored it. He was looking past the doctor to the next table over, where Beth Houser was still keeping company with Mary Deveraux. Mary was looking quite cheerful, very different than she had on the long trail. Clearly Beth Houser was the kind of company the girl needed. Titus supposed that he and Micah had probably not been the most comfortable or natural companions for a ten-year-old girl freshly bereaved of her family and guilty of a murder she had done literally in her sleep. But they had done for her what they could.

Peter Houser followed Titus's gaze and looked over his shoulder. Turning back, he said, “Beth seems to have taken quite a liking to your little friend. And I think the sentiment might be mutual.”

“That little girl bears a huge burden,” Titus said.

“Yes . . . losing her family in a massacre . . . God, what a tragic thing for one so young to have to deal with!”

“There's more burden than that,” Micah muttered. Titus flashed him a look as if to shut him up, but Micah was not in a humor to follow direction. “It needs to be said, Titus,” Micah stated. “It's a burden on me, too, just knowing it and having to keep my mouth shut.”

Houser looked puzzled. “I seem to have failed to pick up on what we are talking of,” he said.

Titus sighed. “I'd not figured we'd say anything of it,” he said. “But I think it is grinding on Micah to hold silence.” He looked the doctor squarely in the face. “And perhaps he is right. Can I trust you, Houser, to hold what we tell you in confidentiality?”

“Well . . . certainly. But I'm still mystified by what we are even talking of here.”

“There was a sad event along the way here, involving Mary. She stumbled across an old long hunter shelter, and inside was an old Indian who had been stricken with apoplexy and seemed likely to die. It didn't seem Christian to just leave him, so we tended to his care. But Mary was still full of all the misery of what had happened to her, and she sleepwalks, and she got her hands on a small pistol, and in the night . . .”

“I think I understand,” said Houser. “She killed the Indian.”

Titus nodded.

“She didn't even know she'd done it until the sound of her own gunshot woke her up,” Micah said.

“Good God!”

“She was a misery to herself after that,” Titus said. “Not saying much, never looking us in the face, riding along like there was hell-smoke surrounding her—all the way here. Not a trace of joy in her until your wife took her under wing.”

“Beth has a way with children.” The physician paused, deeply thinking. “She has no kin, you said?”

“None. She's alone in the world, and I promised her I'd find her a home to take her in.”

Houser said, “You've found one.”

“You mean . . .”

“I mean exactly what it sounds like. I'll agree here and now to take her in. And Beth will agree. I know my wife well enough to tell you that without any hesitation. The question is whether Mary will want it.”

At that moment Mary laughed loudly at something Beth had said, and Beth laughed as well, putting her arm around the child with obvious affection.

“I think we have our answer,” said Titus.

“
E
dohi!”

The voice came from somewhere behind them. Fain and Potts reined to a halt and twisted their heads. A ruddy-faced man with a shock of white hair was walking up behind them rapidly, face alight with health and a broad grin, hand waving widely.