Long Hunt (9781101559208) (30 page)

The man held her firmly by the wrist and all but dragged her to the door of the cabin. It stood ajar and he pushed it in without hesitation, as if confident the place was empty.

It wasn't. Inside was a fat, very dirt-encrusted old man, his massive bulk spread like a blob of melting grease on a buffalo-skin pallet spread out across the floor in a corner. He looked up with weak-looking eyes as they entered, and grunted in some sort of apparent greeting at Maggie's captor.

“Hello, Sam,” said the captor.

“Sikes,” said the blob on the pallet, his voice as slimy as his appearance. And now Maggie knew at least part of the name of her abductor.

Sam, who didn't seem to see well, noticed her for the first time and thrust his fleshy face in her direction. “What you got there, Nate?”

“Something you'll like a lot. Something we'll both like. Going to have us a good time this evening, Sam. I can promise you that.” Then Sikes laughed in a way that would have made Maggie toss up her gorge if there was anything in her stomach. There was not. She had already heaved up her breakfast during their hurried travel as she pondered what was likely to become of her.

Sam squinted hard as Sikes pushed her near, and the smell of the amazingly obese man, a smell like that of one who had literally never washed in his life, was revolting beyond description to the little girl. And from the words Sikes had just said, she knew there was an intent that this man would misuse her right along with her captor. That thought was so indescribably horrific that Maggie's throat closed up tight and for long moments she could not breathe at all. Then came the inevitable compensatory gasp, and her head and lungs filled with the loathsome stench of the cabin and its occupant.

Sikes didn't seem to notice the smell. He was grinning happily, but the look turned evil when he turned his face to the girl. “You ain't even told me your name yet, girly. What is it?”

She shook her head and said nothing. His look turned more wicked yet. “You tell me, or I'll grab a handful of that hair and tear it clean out. Then I'll give it to Sam here and he can use it to wipe hisself with.” That notion seemed to strike Sikes as hilarious, and he laughed wildly, his breath battering the girl.

“Maggie,” she managed to whisper, noticing her voice sounded strange, as if it belonged to someone else.

“Maggie,” repeated Sikes. “Hear that, Sam? This here is Maggie, and she's going to be a good little friend to you and me tonight.”

“It's pretty. I like it,” said Sam. “I like it a lot.” He licked his lips with a tongue the size of a child's hand.

“Don't you get your feelings hurt, Sam calling you an ‘it,' ” said Sikes. “Sam always calls the girlies I bring up here ‘it.' That's just his way.”

Maggie was beginning to feel faint, but she was afraid to let herself lose consciousness even if only for a few moments. A lot could happen in a few moments, and none of it, in this place, would be good.

“Where's old Wash?” asked Sikes of the other man. “I figured to hear him baying and barking at me when I drew close in.”

“Wash is dead,” Sam replied. “Lay down and just died one day. I boiled up his meat and et on it for near a week.”

“Well, sorry to hear he's gone. I liked that old dog.” ‘

Sam pointed up to his left, and Sikes saw a fresh canine skull, boiled clean of all hide and flesh, stuck on the wall by means of a branch stub extending out from a wall log. Sikes looked closely and nodded.

“Yep, that's old Wash. Fine old hound you were, Wash.”

“Tasted good, too,” said Sam. “Needed salt, but I got nary of that.”

Sikes was looking at something on the floor in the corner opposite to where Sam was sprawled. “How long's Wash been dead?” he asked.

“Two week now. Two week.”

“Well, that pile over yonder is way fresher than two weeks,” Sikes said.

Sam grinned and showed gums with only a few teeth. “That ain't Wash's pile.”

Sikes laughed and Sam laughed, too, and Maggie, sickened nearly to her stomach, lost her battle not to faint. She went limp and collapsed straight down on the dirt floor, eyes rolling up into her head beneath lids that fluttered closed.

A
sharp, flat sting on her face, the ugly sound of fingers slapping flesh, and Maggie came awake. Her eyes opened and she found herself staring at the feet of Sikes, who was kneeling beside her and had just slapped the upturned side of her face to try to bring her out of her faint.

“It fell down,” the great blob of flesh slurred in his stinking corner. “It hurt?”

“No, Sam, it ain't hurt,” Sikes replied. “She—
it
will be up in a few moments.”

“Then we commence,” Sam said, and chuckled.

“Oh yes. Oh yes, we commence.”

Maggie, coming around quickly, heard it all, and fast as her own thoughts, saw opportunity and seized it. There was no time to plan, only to act, and act she did. Seeing that Sikes was crouched on his heels and delicately balanced, she lunged upward and shoved his chest, knocking him back onto his rear. Shaking off the lingering dizziness of her swoon, she turned and darted to the open door and out.

Behind her, curses and shouts, Sikes's voice high-pitched and nearly wailing, Sam's a molten slurring of sound. She ran toward the path they had followed to get there, knowing that, at least, that route was open and passable. She did not want to attempt a run through untrodden forest and risk hanging herself up on laurel or rhododendron.

As she entered the head of the trail, she glanced over her shoulder and saw Sikes bearing down upon her, much more fleet than she would have expected. Beyond and behind him, the cabin door was filled with the bulk of Sam, who had managed to push himself to his feet and stagger after her, but who had literally wedged himself in the doorway, too big to get out of his own dwelling. He was red-faced, sweating, and shirtless . . . and had lost his trousers, too, in the process of rising. All in all, an uglier vision young Maggie had never seen.

Hastening, she pounded along the pathway, hearing Sikes keeping pace behind her and sometimes gaining. Surely, she thought, she could outrun a grown man. She was young and light and fleet, and surely far more motivated to escape than he was to catch her.

He would
not
catch her! The thought couldn't be tolerated. She would outrun him if she had to wear her feet off doing it. She pushed harder, her heart hammering as fast as her feet.

Her foot struck a root and she went forward, hard, her chest hitting a humped area of ground and driving every bit of air from her lungs. Her vision swam and blackened a few moments and she thought she would faint again. Stunned, she forgot for a moment that she was being pursued, but when she remembered, she rolled onto her back and prepared to kick her feet upward and pound him heel-to-crotch.

He was not there, not where she had expected him to be, anyway. She sat up and gaped.

He was back down the trail, having been stopped in midpursuit, apparently about the same moment she had fallen. The one who had stopped him was fighting him hard at the moment, big fists pounding and guttural voice grunting with each blow. Sikes was making sounds, too, high and almost girlish wails of pain as he was trounced by the one who had come bursting out of the brush beside the path and knocked him down.

Maggie, with lungs gasping and refilling with air, looked at the one who had stopped her pursuer and now seemed intent on beating him to death. Her eyes bulged. She recognized the stranger who was protecting her.

Loafhead
.

For the second time in mere minutes, Maggie Harkin fainted.

Above, the sky was making a fast change, suddenly darkening and going gray, thunder rumbling like an angry deity off to the west. A storm was coming in.

Maggie lay swooned and senseless, unaware of the approaching storm and no longer hearing the sound of fists on flesh coming from a short distance back on the trail. The guttural sounds had stopped now, as had Sikes's reactive squeals.

Finally even the sound of blows came to a halt, and the big man with the misshapen head left the body of Sikes where it lay and walked up the trail toward the spot where Maggie lay unmoving. When raindrops began to fall, driving down through the trees, Maggie stirred beneath the impact of the cold drops as the man knelt beside her.

Back behind them, Sikes's form also was pounded by the mounting rain, but he did not move at all, and never would again.

Maggie was only partly aware of it when strong arms slid beneath her knees and shoulder blades and lifted her up. She groaned softly and felt herself carried along through the rain.

 

The storm covered almost the entire over-mountain region, whipping the waters of the Holston, causing surges in the Nolichucky, hammering the Watauga, turning Lick Creek from a mere stream to a temporary wide river.

Riding along on increasingly skittish horses in the Doe River area, a region of gorges and bluffs and wooded ridges, Crawford Fain was beginning to reassess a statement he had made to Titus earlier, that the storm would pass over quickly. At present it looked likely to linger for an hour or more.

Lightning fired down suddenly, striking a tree atop the ridge beneath which the two frontiersmen rode. The tree splintered in an eruption of fire and noise, and smoking wood dropped toward the riders, a large piece barely missing Edohi. The crack of thunder was simultaneous with the strike, as close as it was, and as loud as a cannon fired mere yards away.

“Pap, we have to find shelter,” said Titus. “This ain't one we can ride out here in the open.”

Crawford Fain nodded. “Let's go over yonder way . . . might be some shelter amongst the rocks.”

They rode toward the base of the escarpment and into a maze of boulders and slabs that had collected there over a century or more as the bluff eroded and broke apart above. Hoping for an overhang to keep the worst of the rain off them and the horses, they did better than that, finding a large natural tunnel opening into the hillside, a cave that instantly put Fain in mind of the cave in which he had lived far away in England's Skellenwood in the days of his boyhood. They were able to enter the cavern without having even to dismount.

“Have you known this place before, Pap?” asked Titus.

Fain shook his head. “Never seen it, although I've traveled the Doe country many a time. But never in this exact part of it.” He looked around. “Quite a place.”

With the storm darkening the region, combined with the natural shadowing of the cavern, it was difficult to see much except when lightning flashed outside. With each flare the cavern flooded for a second with penetrating light, revealing dank stone, fingers of rock reaching from cavern floor to ceiling, and places where water trickled down the stone to stream out in a rivulet that ran in a gully along the base of the wall.

The light also revealed evidence of previous human use of the cave, mostly in the form of places where fires had been built for light and heat, fire locations perhaps generations old and used by both native and later-settlement inhabitants of the region.

“Son, I say let's scrounge up some wood and get us a fire burning,” said Fain. “You look about and see what firewood might have been left in this place by folks before us, and I'll pull in some from the outside.”

“Anything from the outside will be soaked, Pap.”

“Lord, son, you shame your name! Wet bark pulled off uncovers dry wood.”

“So it does.”

They began their separate quests for fuel. Fain didn't much mind the rain—his attitude had always been that it was only water, after all—and he gathered up several armloads of wood quickly and deposited them inside the cave. When lightning flashed, he could see Titus moving about, gathering wood scraps carried in by past users of this cavern. At length Titus used some hickory wood he'd found to create a torch and explored farther back into the cave, where the cave ceiling was lower and the open, broad space of the entrance diminished to tight, small passages that appeared to simply vanish into the rock of the mountainside.

Fain watched Titus's light go dark as the young man entered one of the passageways, the torchlight suddenly hidden. Fain returned to the outside and fetched one last armload of sodden wood, and when he came back into the cave, Titus was waiting for him, a strange, intense expression on his face.

“Come here, Pap. There's something you have to see.”

“What?”

“Just come and I'll show you.”

Fain followed his son back into the cave, following the light of Titus's torch.

 

Rain on her face as she was carried along is what awakened Maggie Harkin from her faint. She had no idea where she was or what was happening to her at the beginning, and her body stiffened in fear as she thought for a moment that she was being held by the man who had captured her and taken her to the foul cabin with the horrible fat man in the corner. The memory of that swept back, and then she wondered if maybe the wicked men had already misused her, and she simply didn't remember. With a great feeling of dread, she sent her mind roaming through all the parts of herself, examining every feeling, every nerve . . . until at last she decided she had not yet suffered any intimate physical abuse. Relief overwhelmed her, but tempered by fear.

Who was carrying her? The memory rushed back of what she had seen that had caused her to swoon: a figure that appeared to be the legendary Loafhead himself, beating her captor. Drawing in a shuddering, deep breath, Maggie forced herself to move her head until she could see the face of the one carrying her now, and when she did, she thought she might faint again.