Long Hunt (9781101559208) (10 page)

“Thank you, sir. Though I ain't really a boy, no more than Titus is. We're both men now. Been men for some years.”

Fain grinned. “You're right. I just lose my bearings sometimes and forget. He's a man, and a good one.”

He slumped back against the log wall. “I surely do wish that boy would come home.” Then he began repeatedly casting his eyes toward a nearby shelf. Potts noticed.

“Want your pipe?”

“You're a good boy—good
man
—indeed, Potts. Sot weed pouch ought to be right there with it. And if you can bring the flint box, too, I can make a little fire for it.”

Potts got up from the bench and fetched the items. Fain used his flint box to get a small piece of punk burning in a little recess made into the side of the box, and from that lit a splinter he had fingernailed out of the log wall. With that he lit his pipe.

Potts left the frontiersman contentedly puffing and made his way back up to the loft and his sleeping pallet. When Potts awakened the next morning, Fain was slumped to one side on the bench, sound asleep, the now-cold pipe having been dropped to the floor long before.

Littleton was gone, pallet empty. And when Potts checked, he found his own horse missing. He hurried back inside and told Fain.

“I'm smote,” he said. “Plumb smote. I thought he might try to get away like that, but I didn't figure him to do it right off like that, with his leg fresh gone.”

“He took my horse,” Potts said, trying to make himself believe it. He'd raised that horse since it was a colt.

“He did?” Fain replied. “He's stout to do such a thing. Hard flint and oak tree stout. Got to give him credit for that—hop out of a stranger's house in the middle of the night on one foot, fresh-cut leg stump swinging and hurting, then steal another stranger's horse and get himself up on it to get away, and nobody catch him at it. Yep. That's stout as they come. And bold.”

“He stole my horse!”

“He did, son. He did.”

 

It was Houser who spotted the note.

Littleton had written it on a page torn from a Bible, using ink Fain had manufactured the year before from the juice of pokeberries and kept stored in a little crockery bottle on a nearby shelf. The letters were dim but well formed despite having been written without benefit of light sometime after Fain and Potts had gone back to sleep.

Heard you speak
, Littleton had written across the Bible page, which he had left in the middle of his sleeping pallet.
Saw yellow-hair woman marked eye Crockett Spring three month past.

“I'm smote yet again,” Fain said. “Who would have thought he could have got away like that, the shape he was in? And I never even thought about him hearing what we said, him snoring away like he was.”

“Will you go to Crockett Spring to look for this woman? Is this fellow somebody whose word you can take?”

“Likely not. It's not much of a clue, coming from such a source as our one-footed friend. But it's the only real clue I got, and following it holds more promise than just launching out without any hints at all. Will you come with me, Potts? I need the help of younger muscles and bones, and I can't know when Titus will return.”

“I'll go, sir. Be glad to. But do you think it's real, what he says? Maybe he's just trying to get us chasing off to find this yellow-haired woman so we won't follow him. If we're off after her, we ain't off after him.”

“That could be. But the fact is I've made a bargain with Eben Bledsoe, and I must fulfill it. You and me, Potts, we're going to Crockett Spring.”

T
he cabin door stood open and movement was visible in the shadows inside. Even so, the watching frontiersman on the ridge facing the cabin was unable to discern exactly what he was seeing.

A man approached quietly from behind and dropped to his belly beside the first man. “How many killed, Titus?” he asked softly.

“Don't know for certain. There's one man visible there by the woodpile—he's been scalped. Around the back there's a woman and a boy, both dead, both scalped. But somebody is inside the door, moving around. Can't see enough to know who or how many, though.”

The other man reached beneath his hunting shirt and drew out a small spyglass, which he slowly expanded after examining the angle of the sun to make sure no reflective glint from the lens would reach into the cabin.

“What can you see, Micah?” Titus Fain asked. He was a youthful-looking man, in his midtwenties, his hair a sandy brown and tied behind his head in a queue. His lean face mirrored his late mother's visage, except for the eyes. His eyes were those of his father, and just as keen of vision.

Micah Tate squinted through his spyglass and said, “There's a body in there. A man, I think, though I can't see anything but the feet. But there's somebody else, too. Can't tell much, but I think it may be a child, still living.”

“A child—Lord! What a fearsome and sad thing for a child to see!”

Micah handed the spyglass to Fain, who adjusted it to his eye and peered into the shadowed doorway. Fain lowered the glass slowly. “It's a little girl, Micah. I'd say ten years old, maybe eleven.”

“Any other sign of movement?”

“None. I'm going down there.”

“Hold a moment. That may be just a little girl, but she's seen her people slaughtered, and if she has a gun within reach, she could shoot you dead as you approach.”

“So she might. Life is risky, Micah. I'm going down there. It's likely the poor little gal needs help.”

“Then we'll go together.”

“Fine. Now's the time.” He came to his feet and stepped down the slope, Micah joining him.

“Hello the house!” Titus called. “Little miss, don't be afraid. We are friends coming down to help you! We are not Indians, but white men!”

They were halfway there when the girl appeared at the door, and true to the warning, she had in her hand a flintlock pistol, already cocked. The two men froze and then Titus made a slow display of laying his rifle on the ground, nodding to Micah to do the same. The two frontiersmen raised their hands and looked at the little girl, thinking how incongruous it was that a mere child had them at bay.

They were near the corpse lying beside the woodpile, and Titus said, “Is this your father's body lying here on the ground, miss?”

“No,” said the girl in a voice more clear and strong than they would have expected. “That's my uncle. His name was Tom Deveraux.”

“And what is your name?”

“I'm Mary. Mary Deveraux.”

“Mary, my name is Titus Fain, and this is Micah Tate. Like I said before, we're friends. You can count on that. Friends. We've come to find out what happened here and to help you and anybody else who may yet be living.”

This time her voice wasn't as strong, and quivered some as she spoke. “There ain't no others living. They're dead, all of them but me. Indians done it. Did . . . did they take Tom's hair off him?”

Titus said, “Yes, Mary, they did.”

She nodded sadly as if she'd expected nothing else. “Poor Uncle Tom. He was always so proud of his hair. My papa's pate was clean bald, but Tom's had a lot of hair, and he used to laugh at my papa for not having any.”

“Mary, could you lay down that pistol so we can feel safe as we approach you?”

The little girl gently placed the pistol on the doorstep of the cabin. Then she stepped back inside a single step.

“We're going to pick up our rifles now, and come on in,” Titus said, keeping his voice gentle.

The little girl nodded back in the interior shadows, shoulders slumping as the strength and courage seemed to drain from her. By the time they reached her, she was crying, her thin body shaking.

Titus had little experience with children and felt frozen with helplessness. But Micah, himself an uncle to several little ones, knelt and put his hand out to touch Mary on the shoulder. He spoke softly. “We're so sorry for what has happened here, Mary. I wish we could have been here to stop it.”

The girl, who had rather stringy brown hair, quite dirty and limp-hanging, looked into his face and sobbed loudly. She threw her arms around Micah's neck and hugged him strongly, seeking a protection that was now too late to make a difference. When Micah looked up at Titus with the girl's frail arms encircling his neck, there were tears in his eyes, too.

“You're safe now, Mary,” Micah said, patting her shoulder. “Titus and me, we've been traveling all around here today, and there's no Indians hereabouts now. We'd have seen them if they were still about.”

She sobbed again and hugged him even tighter.

 

The story was simple, sad, and typical of such tragedies. The Indians had simply appeared, almost ghostlike, at the front edge of the Deveraux cabin clearing. No words had been spoken. Mary's uncle had been the first to die, tomahawked by a warrior who had rushed down upon him so swiftly he hadn't even had time to cry out or reach for his nearby rifle. Mary had been at the door and saw her uncle fall, head ruptured. But apparently he hadn't died at once, because the same Indian who had felled him picked up Deveraux's rifle and crushed his head a second time with the butt of the stock. Then he knelt and took the scalp, which he waved tauntingly for the little girl to see.

Mary had withdrawn into the cabin and hidden in the little loft, and all else that followed she had more heard than seen from her elevated hiding place. The sounds alone had been terrible: her father being shot and cursed at with English-American vulgarities the Indians had picked up from white men—cursed because he had no hair and therefore no scalp to take—and then the sounds of her mother and older brother falling victim to belt ax and scalping knife, her older brother fighting hard and screaming at his attackers before he died, her mother dying quietly with a prayer on her lips.

Mary did not know why the raiders had not climbed to the loft to seek her, because they had seen her in the doorway and surely knew she was hidden somewhere. “I wish they had killed me, too,” she said to Titus and Micah. “My family is dead. I should be dead, too.”

“That's no way for you to speak, Mary. God has spared you,” said Titus. “He's got something ahead for you, so he has saved you. Something good and happy, not bad and sorrowful like today.”

She cried again, and went to the corpse of her father, which was clad only in trousers and moccasins. “They took his shirt,” she said. “Why did they take his shirt? I had decorated it for him. I stitched a red flower into it for his birthday. It was here.” She touched her chest. “He said it was the finest flower he'd ever seen. Why did they take his shirt?”

“I suppose they thought it was a pretty flower, too,” said Micah. “But they shouldn't have took it. And they shouldn't have done this to your kin.”

She was crying again now, and Titus wondered whether the child would ever grow past this and be free of the ghosts of this terrible day.

“Mary, where is your mother's body?” Titus asked. “And your brother's?”

“They dragged her out when they killed her,” Mary said weakly. “My brother they killed outside, in the back. I saw them cut off his scalp through a crack in the wall up in the loft.”

“Put those visions out of your mind as best you can, Mary,” Titus said. “You are alive and now you must do your family's living for them, since they can no longer do it themselves. Do you understand me?”

She nodded, staring at her father's dead face.

“Mary, Micah and I are good men, friends, men who will help you and get you to a safe place. We can't bring your family back, nor make you able to forget all that happened here, but we can be good to you and give you protection and friendship. But you must be willing to come with us, to go away from here.”

Titus wasn't at all sure the child would be willing to do that. He knew of many cases in which individuals inexplicably clung to the site of calamities and loss. But Mary was differently inclined. She seemed pleased to hear that she could leave this scene of horror.

“I'll go. I'll go now.”

“Titus,” Micah said, “what about the dead ones?”

Titus pondered the matter, then felt Mary's gaze upon him. He asked, “Mary, I'm going to leave this up to you. Me and Micah can bury your family here, and leave here later on, or we can leave now and send somebody else back to do the burying. But if it would make you sad to think of them left lying here for a time, we can bury them now.”

Her chin shook and eyes welled. She shook her head. “I want to go now,” she said. “They aren't really here. This ain't them. . . . This is what used to be them, but ain't anymore.”

Titus hugged the little girl. “You are a wise young woman, Mary. Wiser than many who are a lot older than you. Have you got kin anywhere else, Mary?”

“No, sir. No family at all now.”

Titus said, “Don't worry, Mary. We'll take you with us, back to a safer place, and we'll find you a home and a family. I promise you that.”

She nodded and wept.

 

The sound of approaching horses drew their attention. Riders came over the rise and down toward the house, armed frontiersmen, each with a bit of white cloth tied to his hat. The hats were of many varieties: animal skins, French-styled woven caps, battered tricorns, and common slouch hats, those being the most numerous among the group of nineteen.

Titus came out of the cabin as they drew near, eyes shifting between him and the corpse by the woodpile. The apparent leader of the group rode down near Titus and dismounted. Micah remained inside with the girl.