Long Hunt (9781101559208) (21 page)

He clamped his hand to his mouth to keep himself from yelling, and his straining bladder gave way and streamed urine down his legs beneath his nightshirt. Whimpering and terrified, he backed into the darkness of the dogtrot, went back to his room, and spent the rest of the night cowering in his bed, afraid even to open his eyes.

Loafhead was real. And he was here. Michael knew. He had just seen him, treading down the middle of the street in Jonesborough, carrying a man slung over his shoulder like a sack of dirt.

I
t was often easy for Crawford Fain to forget that he was a famous man in his part of the world, and even in parts he had never set foot in. In his own mind he was simply one more frontiersman, one with particularly apt skills for playing out his role in life, perhaps, but in the end, merely another man.

His arrival in Jonesborough had provided a quick reminder that others were not so casual in their assessment of him. He was more than a man; he was a symbol, of his time and his place and his frontier. Like Franklin leader John Sevier, who found himself thrust into leadership both political and military virtually everywhere he went, Fain could not live the life of an ordinary man. It simply wasn't allowed by those around him.

He had not been in Jonesborough a day before word of his arrival spread and visitors began to pay call. Fain had intended to reside in an inn or boardinghouse, but instead he and his entourage were invited, almost compelled, to join the household of Matthew Stuart, a local merchant and active citizen who had already made a moderate fortune for himself on the east Carolina coast before coming west on a quest to see what further fortunes life might bring him in a new country.

Stuart's house, one of the first and best frame houses in the over-mountain backcountry and considered a mansion by frontier standards, was outside town on property bordering an expansive wooded area. It held two distinctions setting it apart from other properties in and around the town: The first was that Stuart, an avid horseman, had built a substantial racetrack on the one portion of his land suitable for such development. The second was that he had also given over a section of land to provide space for a jail, and on that land had built a facility made of heavy, hewn logs, spiked together to make them virtually impossible to separate. A local smithy made a door of heavy, crossed iron bars and devised a clever locking mechanism.

Fain had never previously met his host Stuart, but had heard of him, and Stuart certainly knew of Fain's reputation. Stuart was eager to host a famous man, and show off his land and buildings to the frontiersman, and welcomed Titus and Micah as part of the bargain. When Potts rejoined his old companions after completing his messenger journey to White's Fort, he, too, was enthusiastically hailed.

The jail building Stuart had erected held a single occupant, a man who Stuart said had identified himself as one Caleb Clark. “He's in quite a weakened state,” said Stuart to Fain, privately. “As best anyone can tell, he was choked with a cord or rope. In fact, it appears from the marks on his gullet that he was hanged, then taken down again before he had time to expire. He must have fallen some distance after he was taken off the rope, because his ankle is broken.”

Fain looked at the man through the barred door, which was closed but not locked, the man not being there as a prisoner. He was sleeping, snoring loudly, and also making a strange, hissing-air noise in his throat, apparently the result of his throat injury. His left ankle was splinted and firmly bound up in cloth. By the light of a lamp Stuart held in his hand and thrust through the bars of the door, the indentation and abrasion of the rope that had hanged him could be seen.

“I never knew a man could be hanged and survive it,” said Stuart.

“I've heard of it,” Fain said. “Depends on how the hanging is done, to large measure. Let a man drop a sufficient distance and he'll break his neck and be gone right off. Give him a rope with little or no slack, or haul him up slow and let him dangle, and he might strangle for a long time and still make it through if he's took down in time, especially a light bird like that man there looks to be.”

“I'll be!”

Fain went on: “Ever hear of Jack Sheppard, the old English robber? He was a skinny, light-bodied fellow, condemned to the gallows about sixty years back, and he had friends who planned to haul him down from the noose at Tyburn before he expired, and revive him. As it turned out, there was interference and them friends couldn't save Sheppard's life after all. The crowd cut him down and hauled him off before his friends could claim him, thinking maybe those friends were really just folks working in league with the dissectionists.”

Stuart gestured toward the man on the cot. “Well, Clark here had better luck than that. I can't tell, though, how much damage might have been done to him that isn't going to go away, at least not very fast. The strange breathing like he's doing there, the way he can hardly get his voice out, and the fact that when he does talk, he strains to make any kind of sense.”

“A man has the blood cut off to his head for long enough, no telling what it might do to him,” said Fain.

“I suppose so.”

“Tell me this, Stuart: Since he can't walk, how did he come to be in town here?”

“That's the oddest part of the tale. He was carried in by someone in the middle of the night on Saturday, and placed on the doorstep of a church where he'd be sure to be found the next morning.”

“That's a mite strange. Why bear him in and be secret about it?”

“As best I can figure it, Mr. Fain, I think whoever brought him must have had something to do with his hanging. So he wanted to keep his involvement and identity unknown. Hence the secret visit by night.”

“But why would somebody hang him, then rescue him?”

“I couldn't tell you. My guess is that there were second thoughts about the hanging. A change of mind, for some reason.” Stuart abruptly chuckled. “Whoever it was who brought him in, he wasn't as covert as he thought. He was seen doing it. Little boy here in town up in the night to go to his outhouse—he saw a man carrying Clark on his shoulder, passing down the street in the dead of night.”

“Did he recognize the one carrying him?”

Stuart laughed again. “He says he did. But his identification isn't much helpful unless you believe in bogeyman tales.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, this hasn't been told out across the town, but this boy told his mother that the one he saw was . . . well, have you ever heard of the old English bogey called ‘Loafhead,' Mr. Fain?”

Fain made a sudden noise in his throat and took a backward step. Stuart lost his smile and held the lamp up to illuminate Fain's face more clearly.

“Are you well, Mr. Fain? Your face just drained of color.” Stuart paused. “I'm not to take it, surely, that you
believe
in this ‘Loafhead' bogey?” Fain shook his head. “No, of course not, sir. I beg your pardon for my reacting like this, which I know seems odd. Suffice it to say that there is a reason for it. Your mention of that name strikes close to home for me. In the old legends, you see, Loafhead lived in the deepest part of Skellenwood Forest. And Skellenwood is the very place I spent many of my young years.”

“You are an Englishman?”

“By birth only. By life and choice I am an American and a free man, obliging to no king or royalty. But a man's birth is what it is, and it was in old England I was born.”

“I am intrigued that such a great American woodsman as you had his beginnings in an English forest. How did you come to live in such a place?”

“My father was a huntsman and woodsman in the employ of the landowner. I learned to track, to make shelter, to hunt and fish and harvest foods that grow in the wild . . . all in Skellenwood Forest. An unusual home indeed my father made for his brood there. Walls of split logs, but roofless, built inside a hillside cavern that provided good shelter from rain. Thus the lack of need for a roof.”

“Fascinating, Mr. Fain. And unexpected. From Skellenwood to the over-mountain backcountry . . . what a journey!”

“Aye.”

“There is a man in this town I want you to meet, Mr. Fain. A silversmith and himself an Englishman. I have heard him tell the Loafhead legend to the children here. . . . He will be intrigued indeed to meet someone who grew up in the forest that is at the heart of the legend.”

“I'd be pleased to meet him. As will my young friend Micah Tate, who has with him a piece of rock he has been planning to have a silversmith or goldsmith examine. It came from a family he met on the Cumberland.”

“Crawley will be able to tell him what it is. The man knows his stones, precious or plain.”

“I'll look forward to meeting him.”

The sleeping man moaned and moved and his bleary eyes opened slowly. He looked around the log-walled cell until at last his gaze settled on the men looking in at him. His focus centered on Fain.

“I know you,” he croaked out. “I know who you are, Edohi.”

“I can't say I know you, Mr. Clark, sorry to admit,” Fain replied. “I am sorry, though, that you have been hurt.”

Clark lifted his hand to touch his damaged and tender neck.

“How do you know Mr. Fain?” Stuart asked Clark.

Fain said, “I've learned over time how familiar a figure I am across this wilderness, Stuart. I'm known by sight to more people than I can account for.”

Fain knelt by Clark's bed and squinted at the creased abrasion around his neck. “Hanged?” he asked.

“Yes,” Clark croaked out in his damaged voice.

“Then they took you down.”

“Not them. Another.”

“The same one who carried you into town?”

“Yes.”

“Why did he do it as he did? Why did he just leave you on the church doorstep and vanish?”

“Don't . . . know.”

“Who was he?”

Clark shrugged, tried to speak but this time couldn't, and lifted his left hand to his brow. Cupping the hand, he covered his eye and extended his fingertips up to his hairline.

“A lump over his eye and brow?” Fain asked.

Clark nodded.

Stuart asked, “Do you know who it was, Mr. Fain?”

“Can't say I do. But I know of a family that has—No. No. I'll not go linking somebody up to a situation like this when I've got naught but secondhand knowledge of the matter.”

Stuart grinned. “Well, it sounds like Mr. Crawley's Loafhead character to me.”

“Loafhead lived in Skellenwood. Not in the American backcountry,” Fain replied.

“In the legend, you mean.”

Fain paused, then grinned. “Of course. In the legend.”

 

When the pair was gone, Gilly Cobble, now going by the name of Caleb Clark, rolled over and tried to find a posture that would relieve some of the discomfort in his throat and neck. It was difficult, and his ruined ankle was stabbed with jolting pain as he moved.

He lay there wondering why the famous Crawford Fain had come to visit him. He'd never known the man, though he'd seen him several times before in public settings, or from a distance as he had that day with Littleton beside the camp meeting ground at Fort Edohi. Thank God he'd had the foresight to give a false name when he'd been found on that church doorstep. Fain and others would probably have known well who Gilly Cobble was, if he'd let his real name slip. And then that cell door standing open nearby would have been locked, and Gilly would have been soon facing a noose from which there would be no last-moment rescue.

He pondered the strange figure who had removed him from the rope, and wondered who the man was. If man he had been at all. . . . What Gilly had glimpsed in that moment just after he'd been taken down had looked only somewhat human. The head had been horribly misshapen, a great mass of flesh growing out of the brow and covering one of the eyes. Horrible to see.

But the man or creature or woodland ogre or Cherokee skinwalker or whatever it had been, had certainly been strong. He'd managed to carry Gilly for miles, on foot.

Most of what had happened between the time Gilly came out of the noose and awakened on the doorstep of that church with Jonesborough townsfolk gaping down at him, he was unaware of. But he did recall occasional moments of consciousness when he was being hauled along over the big man's shoulder in the middle of the night. He'd tried to look around but found it too painful to move his neck enough to see much.

He knew why he had been hanged. What he didn't know was why he had been rescued, or just who had done it.

“T
here ain't no such thing, you know,” said Maggie Harkin to her brother. “You sound like a fool, saying you saw Loafhead carrying a man into town in the night.”

Michael glared at his sister. No such thing as Loafhead? That certainly didn't match what she had told him time and again as she mocked him for his bed-wetting.

“You'd best not say anything like that to anybody besides me and Mother,” said Maggie. “The whole town will laugh at you.”

“I
ain't
saying it to nobody else. Even though it's the truth. I know what I saw.”

“I know what
I
see right now. A fool. A fool who believes bogeyman tales are real.”

“I got you figured out, Maggie,” Michael said. “You change your story to be whatever suits you, as long as it makes me feel bad or look bad or whatever it may be you want. Next time you're trying to scare me into not pissing my bed, I bet you'll tell me Loafhead is real
then
!”