The Outsider (24 page)

His own turn came as an Indian stepped in front of Brice with his tomahawk at the ready. Brice stared at him without flinching. If death had come, then he would face it squarely. He only regretted not seeing Gabrielle one last time. As if in answer to his unspoken prayer, she stepped into his thoughts in front of the Indian warrior. She wore the Shaker dress but her cap had fallen away and her dark hair lay in soft curls about her shoulders. She was so beautiful he could hardly bear the thought of never feeling her in his arms again.

The Indian’s face changed. He lowered his tomahawk. “You look strong. You come with me.”

“You understand English?” Brice asked.

The Indian stared at him without answering, so Brice spoke in the Indian language he’d learned as a boy living with the Indians as he asked for mercy for the wounded men.

The Indian didn’t answer his question. Instead he smiled and kept speaking in English. “You know sounds of the red brothers. Right to let you live.”

“But the others?” Brice insisted. “It cannot help you to kill them.”

“They die,” the Indian said. “No more talk or you die with them.”

Before noon all the men were either prisoners of the Indians or dead except for some of the most severely wounded men. But the Indians were thorough. They set fire to the two houses where the last of the wounded men lay in their beds unable to move. The flames licked hungrily at the wood and the smoke came up thick and made a cloud around them. Brice had pulled some of those men back from death, and for what? To burn to death.

Brice trembled as the first screams came from inside the house. He wanted to spring forward to help, but his death would not save the men in the houses. Then a man from inside one of the houses dragged himself to the door only to be met there by an Indian’s tomahawk.

The same fate awaited each man who tried to crawl out of the flames. The others lay in their beds and died. Brice hoped that Nathan had never awakened, that he had breathed the smoke and died without ever seeing the flames leaping around his bed.

By mid-afternoon the houses had been reduced to smoldering rubble and the smell of burnt flesh hung heavily in the air. Brice counted about thirty men still standing, waiting with silent resignation for whatever might happen next as they tried not to look at the bodies of their comrades all about them.

When the other men were ordered into line to march out toward Malden, the Indian who’d claimed Brice as his prisoner motioned him aside. “You stay.” He handed him a load of plunder to carry.

The other men marched out in the middle of the Indians. They kept their eyes straight ahead and didn’t look back. They’d already seen too much. Even before they got out of the town, two more of the men were struck down when they lagged a couple of steps behind. He wondered if any of them would ever see Fort Malden.

When the Indian handed him another pack to carry, Brice spoke in the Indian tongue again to ask why they didn’t go with the others.

“Talk too much,” the Indian answered in English and banged the flat side of his tomahawk against Brice’s head. Brice staggered back but stayed on his feet. To fall would surely mean instant death.

The Indian motioned for Brice to follow as he moved out of the town in the opposite direction from the other men. The Indian was taking him into the wilderness land of the Indian tribes. He’d walked this same path into captivity once before. He’d not known what was going to happen to him then, and because he was just a boy, he’d adjusted his life to fit into the Indian village where he’d ended up. But now he couldn’t bear the thought of being a slave to the Indians again. It would be better to die. With each step he took behind the Indian, resistance grew in him until nothing mattered except the thought of escape.

It might not be this day or even for months, but he would escape. It was a prayer without words rising from deep inside him.

27

The Indian didn’t go toward the fort or join up with any of the groups of Indians they met on the trail through the woods. Sometimes the Indian would stop to talk while the other Indians fastened their eyes on Brice and fingered their tomahawks. They wanted to kill him, but the man who’d taken him captive always shook his head as he pointed to first Brice and then himself.

Brice half-closed his eyes and pretended to be too near exhaustion to even care what his fate might be, but he grabbed on to every word he knew and turned the unfamiliar words over in his mind to try to understand what the warriors were saying. The other Indians called his captor Lone Hawk. That seemed to fit the man since, even while his friends were there beside him on the trail, his eyes were looking beyond to the woods.

When they moved away from the trail deeper into the forest, the only sounds between them were their grunting breaths as they pushed their way through the ever-deepening snow. Near the end of the first day, the Indian pulled a coat and a pair of moccasins from the plunder and shoved them at Brice. Without a word, Brice put down his load to put on the coat. When he leaned over to put on the moccasins, blood was soaking through the blanket strips he’d wrapped around his feet after an Indian had taken his shoes during the massacre.

But he had no time to worry about his feet now. He shoved the moccasins on over the blanket wrappings. When he was free again, he’d tend to them. First he had to be free.

By the end of the second day they were completely alone in the wilderness. No more Indians passed their way, and they saw no signs of camps. Lone Hawk was moving west as if guided by an inner sense of urgency. Brice followed without speaking and did his best to keep his mind trained on the direction they were moving even when the clouds and trees hid the sun and stars.

When they made camp the second night, Brice gathered wood and made the fire the way the Indians had taught him so many years ago. He cooked the rabbit the Indian had shot with his bow earlier in the day, and cleared away the snow and gathered branches for their beds.

“You make good Indian.” Lone Hawk spoke the first words between them since they’d left Frenchtown. Then he added as though Brice would be glad to hear the words, “You prove brave, my tribe adopt you. You won’t have to be slave.”

Brice raised his eyes to stare across the fire at him. Just three days ago, this man and his kind had gone through Frenchtown, striking down helpless men without mercy. As Brice thought of the wounded men struggling to the doors of the burning houses only to be struck down by the tomahawk of a waiting Indian, it was all he could do to stay crouched there and not spring across the fire at the Indian.

The Indian smiled slowly. “You have much anger.”

Brice didn’t lower his eyes. “Much.”

“White man worry too much about the dead. Dead are dead.”

“Does the red man forget his dead?” It had been so long since Brice had spoken that his voice sounded strange to his ears.

“Red man, white man not the same.” The Indian narrowed his eyes and stared at Brice. “You be red man, you might live. Be white man, you die.”

Brice just stared back at him without speaking.

After a long moment, the Indian pointed at one of the piles of branches. “Sleep.”

Brice obediently lay down. Lone Hawk settled on his own bed. He kept his hand closed around the handle of his tomahawk. Brice closed his eyes and breathed in and out slowly and evenly.

He had the feeling they would reach Lone Hawk’s village the next day. Then the odds would be against his ever making it out of the woods alive. Brice didn’t doubt the Indian meant to give him a chance to live, but it wasn’t easy for a white man to prove worthy of becoming a red man. There would be gauntlets to run and other tests of his endurance and bravery.

Brice opened his eyes a slit. The Indian was just a fuzzy shape in the flickering firelight. The man might be asleep, but Brice thought he was too still, like a cat tensed ready to spring on a bird. Brice sat up to test him. Slowly he leaned over to place another piece of wood on the fire. Lone Hawk’s hand tightened around the tomahawk as he raised it a bit off the ground.

Brice settled back down on the branches. He was in no hurry, but before the sun came up he or the Indian would be dead.

While the night deepened, Brice thought of Kerns and how the boy had looked death right in the eye and reached for his Lord’s hand to lead him across the divide. Brice stared up toward treetops so thick he couldn’t spot a single star. He wished he’d asked Seth more about praying, because there in the deep of the night as he waited and the screams of the wounded men burning in the houses echoed in his mind, he felt the need for prayer.

He tried saying prayer words in his mind, but they just circled in his head and found no wings. Perhaps he was praying for the wrong thing. As Lone Hawk had said, the dead were dead. Nothing he or prayer could do to change that. He could pray for the prisoners who had been marched away. He even thought a prayer for Hope even though he figured the old woodsman had probably already found some way to slip away from the British. Hope had chafed even under the rules of the militia. He’d make a poor prisoner.

It was hard for Brice to think of Gabrielle as Hope’s child. Hope was a wild thing ruled by the woods and his desires. Then Brice remembered Gabrielle’s eyes and the deep well of trusting innocence there that only the very young ever have. That kind of innocence should have been destroyed long before she even joined the Shakers.

So perhaps she was more like a wild thing than he’d thought. A wild thing born without a fear of the world, but with a special trust in the goodness of all things and all people. At least until he’d brought the doubts of the world to her. Had it been right for him to disturb her innocence? The old sister had thought not. In her eyes, Brice had brought discord and evil into the Shaker village.

But Brice had no wish to ever do anything to harm Gabrielle. He loved her. Even here lost in this wilderness, his love for her sprang up fresh and strong inside him like an ever-flowing spring. She was life to him.

He whispered the words in his head and Gabrielle was there in his mind as she’d been the last time he’d seen her. He’d felt like an intruder as he watched her come to her private place to pray. She was afraid when he stopped her. Not of him but of the feelings within herself. Then when he put his arms around her, she yielded so sweetly, lifting her lips up to meet his.

She loved him. She admitted it. Yet her words had been sure and determined when she sent him away, but Brice couldn’t accept those words as final. He would make her send him away again and again if he lived to return to Kentucky. She didn’t belong with the Shakers. She belonged with him.

It had been months since he’d seen her, but her image hadn’t faded in his mind. He could call her forth and she became almost real before his eyes. This night as he lay in the darkness she felt even closer to him than usual.

What was it Nathan had said the day of the massacre? “She’s praying for us. I always knew when she prayed for me.”

And Brice understood now what he meant. He felt her prayers for him reaching out to the Lord when he could find no words to pray himself.

Poor Nathan. Her prayers hadn’t saved him. Brice looked out of the corner of his eye toward Lone Hawk. He could only hope Gabrielle’s prayers would do him more good.

The Indian wasn’t asleep. He was waiting just as Brice was for the moment to come between them. Brice wondered if he too was praying or if he was simply lying there anticipating burying his tomahawk in Brice’s head as further proof of his bravery.

Brice shut away all thoughts of Gabrielle as he practiced in his mind what he was going to do in the next few minutes just as he did before he made the first cut with his lancet. When he had the first move clear in his mind, he even pushed that aside. In order to survive, he had to be ready to react instinctively to whatever happened.

Then it was time. The moment was no different from the last, but Brice knew the time had come.

He sprang across the dying embers of the fire and landed on top of the Indian. Lone Hawk was ready. Brice twisted to the left and the Indian’s tomahawk bit deeply into Brice’s shoulder. The Indian tried to pull it back to strike again, but Brice knocked his arm down against a branch. The tomahawk slid out of the Indian’s hand and disappeared in the snow.

Brice’s blood splattered down on Lone Hawk as they grappled in the dark. They were closely matched in strength, and if Brice had given in to the pain of his shoulder, Lone Hawk would have won easily. Instead Brice fought as if he were whole. Their breaths came in grunts and gasps as they rolled about in the snow with first one and then the other taking the advantage.

Then the Indian had his knife out of his belt, and Brice felt the point of the blade on the skin of his neck. He shifted away from it and threw his body against Lone Hawk’s arm. Brice’s sudden movement to the side caught the Indian by surprise when he thought he’d already won the battle. Brice came down hard on Lone Hawk’s arm and drove the knife into the Indian’s chest.

Lone Hawk made one last effort to shove Brice off of him, but the knife had gone deep. He fell limply back on the snow.

Brice kept his grip on the Indian as strong as ever until he was sure Lone Hawk was playing no tricks. Then Brice sat back on his heels and drew in a long breath. Finally he took hold of the hilt of the knife and pulled it out of the Indian’s chest with one clean jerk. He wiped the blood off in the snow and stuck the knife in his belt before he put his ear close to the Indian’s mouth and then to his chest. The man was breathing shallowly, but his heartbeat was strong. He had a chance of surviving the wound.

Surviving to kill more. Brice took the knife back out of his belt and held it above the Indian’s heart. Then slowly Brice put the knife back in his belt. He tore strips off a blanket and quickly tied Lone Hawk’s hands and feet. The man was surely too severely wounded to lunge at Brice, but if Lone Hawk regained consciousness, Brice had no doubt he would try.

Brice built up the fire. Then in the flickering light of the flames, he pulled his shirt back and probed his own wound with his fingers. It was to the bone. The shock and the cold kept the pain at bay, but blood was streaming down his chest. Already he felt a little lightheaded. He almost smiled thinking that if he had a fever he’d surely survive with all the impurities in his blood leaving his body so freely.

All traces of a smile faded away. If he had any chance of walking out of this wilderness, he’d have to stop the bleeding. He wished for his bag of medicines, but they hadn’t been part of Lone Hawk’s plunder. Awkwardly with one hand, Brice bound up the wound as tightly as possible. At first light he’d search the woods for the right kind of bark to make a poultice.

With his good arm, he pulled Lone Hawk back up on the branch bed. The Indian’s wound was seeping blood. Brice wrapped a strip of blanket around the Indian’s chest and tied it tightly. Then he covered him with one of the coats before he went through the Indian’s plunder from Frenchtown. He laid aside a portion of the Indian’s corn and tucked the pouch holding the rest of it inside his shirt.

Brice took the Indian’s tomahawk and gun to his side of the fire and put them under his blanket. He didn’t lie down to sleep but sat up and fed the fire to keep away the cold while he waited for first light.

Dawn was just sneaking fingers of gray light in under the trees when Brice left the Indian to find wood and something to treat his wound. The sun was up when he came back into camp warily, but Lone Hawk didn’t rouse. Brice built up the fire and melted snow in the pot before adding the bits of bark and the one chip of root he’d been able to dig out of the frozen, snow-covered ground.

While he stirred the mixture, he felt the Indian’s eyes on him, but he didn’t look up at him. When the bitter brew was hot, Brice poured some into a cup and faced the Indian. The bindings on his hands and feet were tight and secure. He approached him carefully and offered him the drink.

Lone Hawk raised his head and let Brice pour the hot liquid into his mouth. Brice backed away and drank the rest himself. Lone Hawk lay back and stared at Brice with narrowed eyes. “White man not brave enough to kill Lone Hawk. White man coward.”

“Our fight is done, Lone Hawk. There’s no reason to kill you now. I’m leaving.”

“Lone Hawk follow.”

“No. You’ll need to get to your village while you have the strength.”

“Lone Hawk send red brothers after you.”

“That’s a chance I’ll have to take.” Brice piled more wood on the fire and picked up his pack. “I’ll leave the brew for you.” Brice pulled out the Indian’s knife and with a quick motion cut through the strips that bound the Indian’s hands.

“No need white man’s medicine.” Lone Hawk started to push himself up off the ground.

“Stay there. I could still kill you.”

The Indian made a sound of contempt. “White man got no stomach for killing.” But he stayed where he was.

“I’ll kill you if I have to,” Brice said softly, not taking his eyes off the Indian.

“You take gun and knife and tomahawk. White man let bear and wolf kill for him.”

Brice didn’t say anything as he backed slowly away from Lone Hawk until he was sure the man wasn’t going to try to lunge across the fire after him. Then he turned and trotted away from their camp. Just before he got out of sight, Brice turned back and with his good arm he threw the tomahawk into a tree some distance from where Lone Hawk lay.

“Lone Hawk not forget,” the Indian called after him.

But Brice wasn’t sure what it was Lone Hawk wouldn’t forget. The tomahawk or the promise to come after Brice. Brice left the camp behind in a few steps. He couldn’t worry about Lone Hawk. He had to stay on his feet and find the way out of this snowy wilderness without stumbling across any other Indian warriors.

By the middle of the day, the pain in his shoulder raged through his whole body until everything around him seemed unreal. All he knew was the pain. He struggled to keep enough of his wits about him to stay moving to the south. Always to the south, but sometimes he came to himself and realized he’d walked a circle. Each time he shook his head to clear his thinking, faced south, and kept moving. He had to keep moving or die.