Long Hunt (9781101559208) (32 page)

“We will go see her. I will go with you.”

“You must go back to your home.”

“After we go see Polly. Then I will go back.”

Crale's one visible eye glared deeply at the girl. “Are you hoping to get gold from her?”

Maggie was jolted by the question, but had to admit, reluctantly, that such a hope probably was part of what made her willing to extend her absence from home a little longer. Her late father had once told her he believed there was gold to be found in the mountains, and the thought of that had always intrigued Maggie. She did not want to miss a chance to see if it might be true.

“I don't want her gold,” Maggie said. “I just want to see what it looks like. And I want you to have a chance to see Polly if it is important.”

Crale's rather broad and crooked mouth crumpled into a smile. He bobbed his oversized head at Maggie and said, “You are now my fourth kind woman.”

She was touched, but said, “I am not a woman, Tom Crale. I am just a girl.”

“You will be a woman someday. A great one. I hope you will think of me as your friend.”

“You are my friend indeed, Tom Crale. You are my rescuer and hero.”

He smiled a little more broadly and looked back out at the forest, still ragged and glistening from the storm.

Tom had hardtack and parched corn in a little bag slung over his shoulder, and he and Maggie ate before moving on. Maggie wondered about the wisdom of leaving shelter when the day would soon be through, and the threat of a renewed storm still existed . . . but she trusted Crale. He lived as a free-roaming denizen of this mountain country, and he would keep her safe.

They passed the night at another of Crale's many lodgings, this one a vast hollow tree with a large opening at the base, opening into a space just the right size for Maggie to curl up in and sleep.

Tom Crale slept outside the tree, guarding the girl and unheeding of any lingering threat of storm. He told Maggie that he knew the mountains, and that despite the distant thunder, he knew it would not rain again that night.

It did not rain.

As fate would have it, Crawford and Titus Fain approached the clearing where the Atley cabin stood from the angle that brought them directly to the graves nearby it. Fain looked at the grave that bore the name of his old friend McCoy Atley, and touched a tear away from his eye. “I'm too late, then,” he said. “He really is dead and gone.”

“His wife, too,” said Titus. “Her name was Polly, right? That's the name marked on this grave beside McCoy's. It's fresher than his grave. Looks no more than a few days old to me.”

“God, I'm sorry she's gone. I've frittered away my time and come too late to see either of them,” Fain said. He pulled a rag from his hunting shirt and loudly blew his nose. “I wonder who buried them.”

The voice came from behind. “I don't know who buried McCoy, but it was me who buried Polly.”

They turned in their saddles and looked over their shoulders to see a yellow-haired woman with a gray mark in her left eye looking coldly at them, a rifle leveled.

 

“Deborah Bledsoe Corey, I presume,” said Fain, hoping the woman did not have a nervous finger, the rifle in her hands being on full-cock. She did not appear nervous. Her gaze was as flinty as that of old Hanging Maw, a Cherokee chief with whom Fain had once had a tense stare-down.

“The Deborah is right, but I know nothing of Bledsoe, and I have decided never to use the name of Corey again. I am free of him now and forever, and I choose my own name. I am Deborah Atley, by my own choice. Who are you, old man?”

Fain calmly replied, “I'll begin by saying that I am not old. Gray, to be sure, but not old. Age is in here, and youth.” He tapped his head with his finger.

“Reckon you could lower that rifle?” Titus asked. “Ain't no cause for us to be threatening each other.”

“It appears to me that I'm doing most of the threatening here,” Deborah said. “As such, I'm the one who decides if or when we change things, not you.”

“Understood,” Titus said, hands in the air and his eyes flicking back and forth between the woman and the butt of his flintlock rifle, which hung on the side of his saddle.

“Finish telling me who you are, old man,” she said to Fain.

He sighed. “My name is Crawford Fain, sometimes called Edohi,” he said. “This jumpy young fellow with me is my son, Titus.”

The rifle lowered slowly. “I know you, then, Edohi. Who you are, anyway. I beg your pardon for raising my rifle on you.”

“I don't blame you at all, ma'am. May we talk? I have things I must tell you.”

“We will talk,” she said.

 

“So you recall nothing of your youngest days?” Fain asked Deborah. “You truly did not know that your original surname was Bledsoe?”

They were seated in the cabin where both McCoy Atley and his wife, Polly, had died. Deborah had been occupying it for some days now since she had found the freshly deceased body of Polly Atley lying on the bed.

“I was very small when I was taken,” she said. “No, I scarcely remember anything of my young childhood. What little I do remember is pain. A man with rough hands, quick to strike blows. I remember him telling me I was his daughter and it was his duty to spare not the rod.”

“Eben Bledsoe,” said Titus.

“I've heard that name, and I confess that there have been times when I have heard others speak the name ‘Bledsoe' and have felt a sense of dread I could not account for,” she said. The woman was clear-spoken and articulate, intelligence shining through both her eyes almost as visibly as the gray marking glistening in her left one. “Maybe some part of me did remember my last name, and associated it with cruelty and fright.”

“He sent me to find you,” Fain told her. “He wants me to bring you back to him.”

She shook her head unhesitatingly. “I will not go back to him. The brief time I knew him was enough.”

“I don't blame you for that, ma'am. Though I will say I don't believe he has any ill intent in wanting to see you. He is simply an old man wanting to see the daughter he lost.”

Deborah thought that over deeply, and finally said, “He is creating a school, I have heard. That is a good thing. I will send him gold, by you, that he can use to help build his academy.”

“He'll be grateful, I'm sure. May I ask how a woman living alone in this wilderness comes by gold?”

“There is a mine, the location of which I alone know. McCoy Atley found it, and took some ore and nuggets from it, and showed it to me after I befriended him and Polly once when they were both very ill of an ague. He seemed to view me as a kind of daughter . . . and better it would have been for me, I can imagine, if such a man as McCoy Atley had truly been my father.”

“McCoy was a fine man. I regret I didn't get by here to see him before he passed on. How did Polly fare without him?”

“Not well. She was old and sickly and at the last was mostly in her bed. I was here with her through her very last days, but before that she relied mostly on the help of a family here in the mountains. The Crales. They brought her food and saw to her care, particularly John and Tom.”

“There's that name again,” said Titus. “Crale.”

Crawford Fain was suddenly looking very ill at ease. He quickly shifted the subject. “Deborah, we found a picture of you painted in a cave wall. A very good image, too, for being able now to look in your face I can see that it caught your looks almost exactly. Did you make that image?”

“I did not. That would be Tom Crale's work. Tom makes images of those things that matter to him, the things he thinks on and sees from his hiding places.”

Crale again. Fain looked unhappy, and Titus wondered what was behind his father's strange reaction to a mere family name.

“Tell us your story, Deborah, if you would,” Fain encouraged.

She drew in a long breath and began to speak.

 

The next day, Tom Crale walked across to the Atley cabin, young Maggie at his heels.

When Fain saw Crale, he went pale as snow and was unable to find his voice for a long time thereafter.

 

Just short of three weeks later, Fain repeated most of Deborah's story at White's Fort to Eben Bledsoe, who looked as if he'd aged a decade since Fain saw him last. Recovering from the shooting he'd suffered at the hands of his brother had drained much life from the man, and Fain had his doubts that the reverend professor would live to see the full-scale operation of his own college. He might linger to see it begin, but Fain was quite sure the man would be gone before the first graduate passed in review.

The clergyman received his daughter's donation of gold gratefully, and seemed also to accept Fain's explanation that Deborah had been unable to come see her father because she was recovering from a broken limb. Titus had urged his father not to lie about Deborah's reasons for not coming to see her birth father, but Fain was a man of empathy and put himself in Bledsoe's place, imagining how it would be to be told one's own offspring chose to absent herself from her own father's life in his failing days. So he lied to spare the man pain.

Fain accepted Bledsoe's payment for services rendered, but gave half of it back for use of the new college because he had failed to bring Deborah to his bedside.

Bledsoe said, “Tell it to me in brief, one more time, Fain. I want to be sure I heard it rightly.”

“Very well. Deborah was never taken by Indians at all,” he said. “She was taken instead by a man whose child, a girl of her own age, had died. Deborah became the replacement for that child, but she did not remain long in that family, whose name was Pells. The man of that family sold her to a younger man, named James Corey, who was only a few years older than Deborah herself. She became Corey's companion and servant, though he called her his wife and insisted she use his name as her own.

“Corey was not a good man, and Deborah ultimately escaped him, and found friendship and refuge with an old friend of mine, as chance would have it: McCoy Atley. Had she simply stayed there, she might have avoided much later trouble. Instead she decided to go to Virginia. Corey somehow found her there, and made her more his captive than ever. She never revealed to him where the Atleys lived, in fact did not reveal even their existence, because she wanted to be able to find refuge with them again should she manage to flee Corey another time. And there was also the fact that McCoy Atley had discovered a source of gold along a particular stream in the Carolina hills, and she knew it would not do for Corey to learn of it.

“Escape Corey she did, one more time, and made her way back to the Atleys. Corey did his best to track her, but with little success. The short of it is that the Atleys died and Deborah reclaimed the gold mine, which she worked entirely in private, hoping to put the gold to good purpose. I think you should be proud, Reverend Bledsoe, that her ‘good purpose' has ended up being your new academy.”

The old clergyman nodded. “Her gift will help generations that come after her,” he said.

“Amen, preacher. Amen.”

“But how I wish I could have seen her! There are many things I need to say to her. Things I regret from the earliest of her days.”

“You write them down and seal them and I'll take them to her with my own hand,” Fain said.

“You would do that for me?”

“I would.”

“Bless you, sir. God bless you!”

“He often has.”

 

“Pap, did you do what I asked and keep a bit of gold aside so that I might have a ring made of it in Jonesborough?”

“I did. Felt a bit like I was stealing . . . but stealing's just an old practice of the Fain family, I suppose.”

“You'll like her, Pap. Prettiest girl I ever saw.”

“DeVault, you say? Sister to Andy of the Cumberland Scouts?”

“That's right.”

“Good family, anyway. Good family. But, son, you just barely met this gal. Why you figure she's going to marry you?”

“Some things you just know, Pap. I don't know how you know, but you do.”

“I'll trust you on that, son.”

There was a long pause as they rode along side by side. “One more question, Pap: I noticed more than once that you reacted kind of odd to mention the Crale family name. And when you saw Tom Crale, I thought you would fall out senseless on the ground. He's a hard sight to look at, I'll grant you, but that just ain't your way, being weak of stomach. What is it about that name and that family that stirs you up?”

Fain sighed and finally answered. “Let me answer you by telling you the one remaining piece of our family history I ain't told you yet.