War Path (3 page)

Stark turned his back on the warriors arranged before him. He half expected a volley from their muskets to cut him down. He crossed to the Medicine Staff and tugged it from the ground, faced the Abenaki, and raising the Staff before him, broke it over his knee then tossed the shattered length of wood aside.

Still alive
, Stark thought, and swallowed, dry mouthed, amazed they could not hear his hammering heart. He had begun to feel the bruises now, for he had not run the gauntlet unscathed. But he willed his body not to betray him, refused to limp or favor his left shoulder that felt as if it were fractured; pain shot through his right side with every breath.

The wall of warriors barring his path gave way at a word from Atoan. Stark walked from the river, retraced his steps, paused a moment as if in silent communion with the dead then continued past the bodies of his fallen companions, and ascended the grassy slope to where the Abenaki had left his belongings, intending to contest for them later after their prisoners had been dispatched.

He leaned down to gather up his leather shot pouch, powder horn and possibles bag, his knife and tomahawk, brass hunter's horn and Pennsylvania rifle. A shot rang out as he straightened. The report reverberated among the emerald hills. Stark froze, steeling himself against an impact that never came. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Kasak had armed himself with a musket. But the gun had discharged into the air, through no fault of Kasak's. Atoan had apparently batted the barrel upward as his son had drawn aim on the long hunter. The sachem angrily wrenched the weapon from his son's hands and tossed it aside.

Johnny Stark deliberately took a moment to load and prime his rifle then tucked the weapon in the crook of his arm. He brought the hunter's horn to his lips and blew a loud, clear blast of defiance that reverberated through the trees and to the hills beyond. Then without so much as a “by your leave,” Stark vanished into the forest, heading southeast on a deer trail that would eventually bring him home.

“You should not have stopped me,” Kasak snapped, his features flush with indignation.

“Johnny Stark …” Atoan said the name aloud. “This was a man,” he added, determined to remember everything he had seen this morning. The sachem returned the French dirk to his son, the same weapon the Yankee had taken from the proud young warrior. The blade was stained from the superficial wound it had left across Kasak's throat.

“His blood was not yours to spill,” said Atoan. “By taking his life you would have dishonored yourself. And you would have dishonored me.”

“Then why didn't
you
stop him?” The younger man scowled.

“Johnny Stark returned your life to me. And I will not take his,” Atoan matter-of-factly replied. And then he grimly added: “At least not today.”

The Gathering Moon

1757

1

T
he pert young woman in hunter's garb knew Johnny Stark was miles away, leading a detachment of English troops to aid the beleaguered garrison of Fort William Henry. He had to be a good two-day's march from this clearing, yet Molly Page heard the long hunter's words of caution whisper in her mind.

Gently now, curl your finger around the trigger, breathe easy 'cause this white-tailed rascal will hear you sigh. Be like one of the trees around you, lass, be like the faintest breeze. Like the Injuns, let your spirit call out and hold that young buck in his place. See, hunting's a lot like praying, only something's gotta die when you “Amen.”

Molly sighted along the barrel of her rifle, allowing for the wind, the angle of the shot, taking into account how the white-tailed buck grazed a moment on the sweetgrass then ambled forward, raised its head, senses searching the surrounding countryside for any threat.

Molly Page willed herself to merge with the shade of the tamaracks that surrounded her hiding place. The decayed remains of a lightning-blasted hemlock that had toppled last January concealed her in August, in the summer of her twenty-first year.

The barrel of her rifle nestled firmly in the crook of the fallen hemlock's forked branches, served to steady her aim. The Pennsylvania rifle with its 46-inch barrel took some handling for Ephraim Page's niece. The young woman was all of five feet two inches tall. The ladies of Fort Edward considered the skill of the hunt to be a man's domain. But Molly Page preferred the heft of a well-made rifle to the spinning wheel and reading trail sign to the chatter around a quilting circle.

It was whispered that the wilderness had bewitched her, for even at an early age she would abandon her chores and venture off into the woods, to learn the ways of places untamed by the farmer's plow.
Dear child
, Aunt Charity would say, hoping to talk some sense into her charge,
women are not supposed to be deerstalkers
.

Oh no?
Molly inwardly replied.
Wait and see
.

She placed her cheek against the curly maple stock carved by Johnny's own hand, squeezed the front trigger to release the second. Now the slightest pressure would fire the weapon. Stark had carved the stock over the course of a winter month and tempered the gun barrel on her uncle's forge. He christened the rifle Isaac. It was one of a matched pair, the other, Old Abraham was with the relief column and in the hands of Johnny Stark. No pair of long guns ever shot as true, of that she was certain.

Ease your breath out, Molly, then let him have it.

The young woman did as she had been told, as she had practiced a hundred times before with Stark. But don't be thinking of his intense brown eyes and deep-hearted laugh. For heaven's sake, not now. She must concentrate on the task at hand or there would be naught but cowpeas and squash in the Page stew pot come the following week.

Molly exhaled, touched the trigger, a flash in the pan and the rifle roared, sending its .50-caliber ball hurling through space. The buck darted forward as the slug ripped through its vitals and lodged in its heart. The animal made a dash for a birch grove but only managed to cover a few paces before its legs buckled. As the last echo faded the wild creature collapsed.

Amen.

The young woman resisted the urge to immediately run to claim her kill. Molly didn't show herself until she had reloaded her rifle as Johnny Stark had taught her. Even this forest, south of the friendly, thriving environs of Fort Edward, was still a place of danger. The Abenaki had become emboldened with the encouragement of their French allies. From time to time, war parties had circled downriver, past the fortified settlement where the Hudson River nearly doubled back on itself and descended on small farms and isolated hunters, burning and looting before vanishing back into the forest, like will-o'-the-wisps.

A person couldn't be too careful. Well, anyone expecting to relieve Molly of her kill had better come loaded for bear. She would not surrender it lightly. She rammed home powder, ball and patch, primed the weapon and eased the flint onto the frizzen. She slung her scrimshawed powder horn over her shoulder, and quietly climbed out from the deadfall.

Sunlight filtered through the trees, illuminated the forest floor littered with decayed leaves, pine boughs, lichen spattered gray stone outcroppings; and where the sunbeams struck, wild sarsaparilla, scarlet wormroot and pink-petaled gaywings flourished. A pair of quarrelsome gray squirrels announced her passing as the woman rose from concealment and cradling her rifle in the crook of her arm, started across the clearing.

Her gaze continued to sweep the forest for any telltale sign of movement and halfway to her kill she heard a twig snap and froze in her tracks. Her grip tightened on the rifle as she tried to locate the source of the sound. Something moved among the birch thicket. Molly's heart began to quicken, her mouth turned dry. She brought the rifle up to her shoulder, holding it steady despite the weapon's considerable weight. But she knew how to adjust her stance to compensate for the rifle's heft.

“Don't you be shooting me, Miss Molly Page,” a gruff voice called out. Cassius Fargo emerged from the thicket. His features were unmistakable; short of stature, blunt-featured, broad at the shoulders, his legs like twin tree trunks grounding his deep chest and wide thick waist. Like Molly, he wore a loose-fitting hunting shirt, earth-colored breeches and carried a Pennsylvania rifle. But Fargo preferred square-toed leather shoes to the buckskin moccasins that Johnny Stark had given Molly before marching off with the relief column. He removed his tricorn hat and waved it in the air. “I see you've found my buck. I shot it back yonder. My aim was poor and the beast gave me a run for it.”

Molly scowled. It wasn't for nothing that Cassius was often referred to as “Bully” Fargo. But if he expected her to stand down, the man was in for a surprise. A wayward breeze tugged at her thick, curly hair, the dark red ringlets of which she had gathered at the nape of her neck with a leather string. Her eyes, like twin emeralds, aglow with a rare beauty, grew hard as granite. She quickened her pace and arrived at the downed whitetail a few seconds before Fargo and placed herself between the advancing farmer and the carcass.

Cassius was a difficult man to figure, quick tempered and dangerous when the black mood was upon him. Here was a man whose temperament, like the knife blade sheathed at his waist, had been honed to a cruel edge by frontier life. She glanced down at the buckskin pouch dangling from his belt, remembering the rumors that it contained a braided loop of hair woven from scalps, all of them Abenaki, the trophies of a private war Fargo had waged since his brother's death during the hunting trip that had also taken the life of Molly's cousin.

“I see only one kill here, Cassius Fargo, and it is mine.” It troubled her, meeting him alone like this, as if it were more than mere coincidence they should have hunted the same hillside. Had he followed her from Fort Edward? The bustling settlement at the bend of the Hudson with its presence of English troops and Colonial Militia had attracted families from a variety of outlying communities, upriver and down. But where most of the local militia had marched off with the relief column on its way to lift the siege of Fort William Henry, “Bully” Fargo had remained behind.

“Now that's pretty meat,” Cassius remarked, running a calloused hand across his stubbled chin as he studied the downed buck. The farmer's beard was as coarse as hog hair, shot with silver but black as pitch around his thick lips. He looked hungry, and not just for venison.

His gaze shifted from the carcass to the woman confronting him. She was small and supple-looking and he appreciated the curve of her hips, glimpsed every time the breeze ruffled the hem of her hunting shirt.

“Looks just like the one I've been tracking. My mistake I reckon.”

“I hope you find your kill,” Molly said. “Next time aim for the heart.”

“I always do.” Cassius scratched his chin. “You'll need help packing this over to the river.”

“I'll manage.”

“Uh huh, I 'spect you will.” He grinned. Save for the wind in the branches of the tamaracks, their voices were the only sound right now.

Fargo made no attempt to conceal his lust. But there was more than just carnal desire at work here, there was curiosity and suspicion. Ephraim Page's niece was a peculiar young woman. It was rumored she had some kind of second sight, a way of sensing trouble that had nothing to do with reading trail sign. It was the kind of talent that had sent women to the stake in Salem years ago. Things were different now, and folks like Molly might be regarded with distrust but they were not openly persecuted. Then again, it was common knowledge John Stark had taken a special liking to the young woman, as if he had tried to fill the void left in her life by her deceased cousin.

And Stark was not a man to cross. He threw a long shadow in these parts. Not that Cassius Fargo was afraid of the big man. But he was wise enough to pick and choose the time and place to settle their differences. Of course, the long hunter was miles away from this secluded hollow and the more Fargo lingered, watching Molly and breathing in her woman smell, the weaker his will became and the more he fantasized how it would be with her …

“You know, I've always fancied you, Molly. No matter if folks think you're a mite … er peculiar.” He puffed out his chest. “A woman like you could do a lot worse. I'm strong and steady and own more land than most in these parts. And I warrant if'n you try me, you'll have none other. So come and give us a kiss.”

“I'd sooner eat wormwood,” Molly retorted.

“Harsh words. I've heard the talk, that when Molly looks to the horizon she can only see John Stark crossing the far hills. But it shouldn't be that way. We share the same wrong. Stark killed both our kin.”

“The Abenaki killed Abel and your brother. You know Johnny had nothing to do with it.”

“I only know that two years ago, Stark came home all on his lonesome from a hunt. Nary a one of the lads he took with him survived and I find that mighty peculiar. I warrant he sold them out to save his own topknot.”

Molly's eyes flashed with anger. Her cheeks flushed. “You're the only man who says that, and not to Johnny's face I charge.”

“I am not afraid of John Stark.”

“No?” Molly took a deep breath and allowed her ire to cool. “You should be.”

“I'll speak no more on it,” Fargo said with a shrug. “But to show I do not begrudge you, I'll stay at your side. These here woods are no fitting place for a woman alone,” he said.

“I'm never alone,” Molly replied. “Not when Isaac is with me.” She hefted the rifle in her hands, and did what needed to be done for Cassius to see it was now half-cocked and primed.

“So be it,” Fargo growled, shrugged, touched the pointed brim of his tricorn hat and started off down the trail. He strode boldly, as if daring the underbrush to impede his progress. Molly was happy to see him go.