Long Hunt (9781101559208) (27 page)

She had left Corey sleeping in the cabin and gone to a nearby creek for a wash, but when she returned he was awake and waiting for her. “I'm going to go on to Jonesborough this morning,” he announced. “The ones I was traveling with are probably wondering what became of me. When I left them I told them I was going back to look for a dropped knife.”

“I hope what you found was better than just a knife.” She smiled coyly at him. She secretly loathed the men she consorted with, and despised their very looks and touch, but she was a woman of business. Teasing and flirting with good-paying customers such as James Corey were simply part of what had to be done.

Corey laughed. “Oh, much better, much! And if I didn't feel the press of time on me, I might be ready for another round of ‘knife hunting.' ”

“I'm going nowhere. If you can put off leaving for a little while, and if you've got another coin or two tucked away somewhere, we can . . .”

Corey didn't reply directly. He waved a hand at the cabin. “Is this yours?”

“Oh no, no. Just one of the places I'm allowed to stay when I need to. This is a Crale cabin.”

“Crale cabin?”

“One of Tom Crale's lodgings, in fact.”

“Am I supposed to know Tom Crale?”

“No. Few folks know the Crales, or even know
of
them. The Crales keep it that way. Most of them don't even use the Crale name, just to keep themselves that much more hidden. They ain't a usual kind of family. Tom's the most different of all of them, the most secret. He uses the Crale name, but it don't matter in his case because he's almost never met or seen by anyone.”

“Is he one of your paying customers?”

“Oh no. No!” She paused and shuddered like a cold wind had hit her. “The very thought of—No! I wouldn't be able to bear touching him, much as I 'preciate him.”

“What's wrong with him?”

“The Crale lump.”

“The what?”

“The Crale lump. There's been several Crale men to have that over the years. At least one or two Crales with such a lump are alive at any given time, as a general rule. It grows out of the forehead and goes down over one eye, usually. Tom's is that way. His grandfather had the Crale lump, too, but it didn't cover his eye.”

“What a family! How did they come to be like they are?”

“I think they kept too much amongst themselves. In ways they shouldn't have, if you follow me. That's one of the reasons they use other family names besides Crale. It helps them disguise that they're marrying among their own kin.”

“Oh.” He looked at the cabin again. “Why does this Tom Crale let you stay here, if you give him no favors?”

She looked Corey square in the eye. “Because Tom Crale may be the single kindest, tenderest man I've ever known. You know how I met him?”

“How could I know?”

“I ran into him way over by the Nolichucky River. He was returning baby birds to a nest. They'd fallen out in a storm, and he found them, and took time to use the one working eye he has to find their nest. How many men do you know who would do that? Tom Crale is a good man. A truly good man.”

Corey had known a few truly good men in his day. He didn't like them because they were so different than he.

“Why isn't Tom Crale here now?”

“He has places he stays all over the over-mountain country. Mostly with other Crales, but he's also got cabins like this one, and old hunter stations, even a couple of big hollow trees he's been known to curl up inside of to sleep. Little secret refuges. He goes wherever he can be that people ain't likely to see him. That's why so few know of him. He lives in secret, and listens, and watches. Everything. He watches cabins being built, settlements going up, fields being broken. He watches the Indians along with the whites. Some of them know him; they respect him as having a special place on the land. They believe his face, the way it is, comes from being touched by God and made special. They don't hurt him and he doesn't hurt them. But whatever he does, wherever he is, he hides. He might as well be a spirit, the way he can hide himself.”

Corey thought about that. “He hides because of his . . .”

“Because of his ugliness. The Crale lump. He spends his life mostly apart so folks won't make sport of him or be afraid of him. Children cry to see him, and it torments him. He loves children, loves birds, animals, hates even to hunt, though like anybody he does hunt to stay alive. He's like the Indians in thanking the prey he kills for having given up their lives to help him keep his.”

“How do you know so much about him?”

“I've spent hours talking to him on those rare times I'm able to find him. He's one of the few men I've known who is happy just to talk to me. He doesn't judge, or condemn; he's just kind. And he listens. He's one of my few real friends.”

“But even somebody like you, who thinks the world of him, can't even consider touching him.”

“It's true. And sad.”

“All I can say is better him than me. I'm too fond of the female touch to even think what it would be like if every woman ran from me. Hey, all the Crales don't have that same kind of growth on them, I take it?”

“Most look just like anybody else. Though there's been a lot of them sickly in various kinds of ways because of kin marrying kin.”

“Kind of a sorrowful tale,” Corey said. Though in fact he cared not at all. Empathy was not part of his nature.

Sadie paused. “Come here,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

“Well!” Corey declared with a nasty smile. “I like the sound of
that
!”

“That's not what I'm talking about. Nothing like that at all. This has to do with Tom.”

“Well . . . ain't
that
wonderful!”

She led Corey across a small meadow to the base of a hillside pockmarked with great limestone outcroppings. The entrances to narrow caverns and tunnels, most of them mere cracks in the rock big enough to accommodate a small animal but certainly not a human, covered the face of the rumpled stone bluff. But when Sadie led Corey around a large, slablike boulder embedded in scree at the base of the escarpment, he saw a larger cavern entrance, wider than a cabin door and big enough for a man to enter without having to stoop very deeply to do it. Sadie led Corey to that entrance, then paused to look at the angle of the morning sun. She nodded happily. “Good,” she said. “We've come at the right time. For a little while in the morning, there is enough sunlight spilling onto this cave door to maybe let you see what I want to show you. I hope so, anyway.” She ducked inside.

“You've got me puzzled, woman.”

“Come on in.”

 

At first Corey thought what he was seeing was the product of some earlier people who had roamed this land, some native tribe who had left their marks in colored images on stone. He'd seen a painted cliff like that once in one of the more rugged mountain areas of North Carolina.

A closer look at this particular bit of artwork on the stone, though, showed it to be the product of a much more recent hand. For one thing, the art, apparently produced mostly in the media of colored clays, coal, crushed berries, and chalky stones, depicted cabins and wagons and men bearing long rifles.

“Tom Crale drew these?” he asked Sadie.

“He did. He's quite an artist.”

“I reckon so.”

There was more farther back in the cave, where the wall was smoother, but the light was mostly lost and Corey could not clearly see what Sadie pointed out to him. All he could tell was that it was seemingly the image of a face. Farther back yet, there was something else painted, but Corey could not make out at all what it depicted.

“We need light,” he said. “I've got my fire makings.”

He exited the cave, gathered what he needed, and with his flint and steel and punk got a small fire blazing. Lighting a little bundle of sticks and shielding the flame with his cupped hand, he reentered the cave and illuminated the image of the first face on the wall.

“So that's him?” he asked Sadie. He was looking at a quite well-rendered image of a deformed face, one side of the brow expanded and drooping like melted wax, lolling out and over, completely hiding one eye. Though it was merely an image, Corey found himself reflexively pulling back from it, moving his little torch away so darkness could mask the unpleasant visage again.

“Good God! Is it really that bad for him? Is he really that . . . ill made?”

She nodded sadly. “He is.”

“Why would a man take time to paint a picture of his own face on the wall of a cave? Especially if he is so ashamed of it that he hides it from the world?”

“Bring your light down a little farther.”

The fire played on the next image, the one that could not be made out at all before. Corey studied it by the flickering little torch flame, and when he glanced around at Sadie, he saw that her face was tearstained.

The image on the wall was another face, yet also the same one. It was Tom Crale as he would have been with no deformity. The man had drawn an image of himself, from his imagination, as he would have liked to be.

“I'll be,” Corey muttered.

“He showed it to me himself,” Sadie said. “It made me cry to see it, and he couldn't understand. He asked me why I was crying to see his face when it was beautiful.” She tried to say something further to Corey, but her voice choked and she could speak no more.

He studied the face on the wall. “I'll be,” he said again.

Sadie spoke. “Tom has drawn pictures in hidden places like this all over the mountain country. This is the only place I have seen him draw his own face, though.”

“What does he draw other places?”

“Mostly the kinds of things he drew at the front of this cave. Things he has seen while watching people. Farmers digging, hunters bringing in game, Indians building their homes or traveling . . . things like that.” She paused and looked again at the rendering of Crale's undistorted face, drawn to it. “Most people don't know of Tom by name, or that he is the one who makes these images. Most just attribute them to the ‘cavern man.' But I know it's Tom, bless him. I've seen him doing his work.”

I
t was Stuart who found the body of Gilly Cobble, alias Caleb Clark, lying dead on the floor of the little cell room. The blood pooled beneath him was substantial, having drained by pull of gravity out of the ugly chest wound that pierced clean through him, and was needled in and out with splinters of wood.

“Great God above,” Stuart muttered when he got a close look at the injury. “How in the name of heaven . . . and
who . . .
”

The sheriff was summoned and questions both official and informal were fired all around. The story spread fast through town and it did not take long for suspicion to be cast on the peg-legged man who had come to Jonesborough with the Reverend Abner Bledsoe, Lyle Kirk. And Kirk, intriguingly, had apparently vanished in the night. His rented bed in the Harkin Inn was unused, and the horse he had stabled earlier was gone.

It was none other than John Crockett who suggested that the murder might actually have been committed with the wooden leg as the weapon. He had taken a close enough look at the prosthesis to see that it had a split in it held together by an iron band, and that one of the separated portions had possessed a sharp point the size of the wound in Clark's pale chest.

“So he killed this poor sod by stepping on him with a sharp-pointed piece of wood,” the sheriff said after Crockett pronounced his theory. “Little different than having a stake drove through the heart. Makes you feel like we ought to be burying this gent in a crossroads with a stake through him, like you bury a suicide.”

The sheriff's band of manhunters were duly gathered and sworn in under authority of the state of Franklin, and then, for good measure, one of the number had the others thrust their hands up and swear under authority of North Carolina as well. “Must make sure we're legal all around,” he said when questioned about it.

“Maybe we should swear to act in accordance with the laws of the emperor of China, too, just in case,” a wag commented.

“Gentlemen, we're missing an opportunity here,” said another of the group when they were ready to set out. “We have in town one of the great trackers and hunters of the west, Edohi himself. Should we not include him in this group?”

Micah Tate, who had volunteered his services to the manhunt, spoke. “Edohi is not here at the moment. He and his son left for the Doe River early this morning.”

“We can surely track down a peg legger without Edohi, gentlemen,” the sheriff commented.

“Has his horse got a peg leg, too?” someone asked. “Because a peg-leg man can ride as fast as anybody else.”

“Then all the more reason to move on without delay,” replied the sheriff. “Gentlemen, you are all duly sworn. Pay heed to my orders should confrontation arise, and good fortune to all of us.”

The band rode out on what seemed the most likely route, though they had no clear indicator what direction Lyle Kirk had taken. Outside town, though, they found a good and fresh set of horse tracks, and a mile on, a spot where the horse had been stopped and someone had dismounted, apparently to urinate beside the trail. The tracks showed one footprint and a round depression of the sort a peg leg would make in the ground.

Confident now they were tracking in the right direction, the sheriff's party moved on, the best tracker among the group taking the lead and riding bent forward so he could keep in view the tracks that led them.