A Moonbow Night

by Laura Frantz

  Tempe chuckled at the latter but secretly fretted that Ma was counted a widow. No good could come of that. At midcentury, Aylee Tucker was still a handsome woman. As for her part, Tempe kept her eyes down, her smiles sparse. But Paige—Paige was a wonderment, always sashaying, flitting, smiling. Did she mean to rile Russell? Goad him into some sort of heartfelt declaration?

  As she thought it, her brother took up the tobacco jar and filled his pipe. He usually kept watch in one corner, overseeing meals and then the customary card playing and talk. Often Ma shed her apron and turned her hand to doctoring, dispensing tonics for those in need of her herbs and simples. Tonight there was naught but a gash brought on by a hunting knife gone awry.

  Ma had bathed and bound the foot of one of Harrod’s men with wild cherry bark. Its distinctive scent threaded the smoky air as Tempe passed in and out of the keeping room, first clearing the table and then sweeping alongside Paige as men moved nearer the hearth or bedded down in the loft overhead.

  “Tempe Grace, fetch me the Reckoning.”

  The Reckoning.

  At Aylee’s request, Tempe felt chilled. The Reckoning. How she hated that book.

  James’s name was written there.

  Her gaze flew to a little board shelf near the door joining kitchen to keeping room. In seconds she brought the ledger to her mother as requested, judging from Aylee’s somber tone that the newest entry wasn’t simply a notation about who had just come over the Gap but another tragedy. Another death.

  Aylee sat by her patient, his expression gathered in a grimace of pain that had little to do with his wound. Her mother’s slender hands were cutting a pen from a goose quill. Without waiting to be told, Tempe brought her the ink they’d made from pokeberries, kept in a smallish soapstone bottle.

  The man heaved a sigh. “’Twas the first of February along the Rockcastle River . . .”

  Picking up a trio of hickory cups, Tempe moved out of hearing and into the kitchen, her throat tight with unshed tears.

  3

  The Cumberland was called the Shawnee River and the Tennessee was called the Cherokee.

  —JOSIAH COLLINS

  In three weeks’ time they’d chained out of April and into a May thick with peavine and clover, the dogwood and redbud shattering and scattering their colorful blossoms in a warming wind.

  Sion had never seen such a wilderness. Such wildness. He was at home in the backcountry and borders of Virginia and the Carolinas and Pennsylvania, knew their rugged, ragged edges by heart. Accustomed to danger, he’d roamed the Alleghenies and the Ohio Valley, pitting himself against earth and sky, his sense of discovery quickened at every turn. But this . . . this vast, unbroken forest was a force to be reckoned with but never tamed. Never counted a friend. Never trusted.

  They’d bid goodbye to the snug half-faced shelter they’d made near a secluded spring. Their horses and provisions were sheltered there, Lucian standing guard. The rest of their party was following the curvaceous Shawnee River, encumbered with the surveying gear that was the heart of their work.

  Sion could hear the river’s steady roar as it boiled over endless, boulder-strewn banks. Not far from the riverbed they came upon dense cane land. The shiny new stalks gave him the shivers. A man could easily lose himself amid the choking reeds—or hide from Indians. Come summer the woody growth, now shoulder high, would shoot six to fifteen feet.

  He felt a peculiar pleasure as the Gunter’s chain was laid out on ground the axemen had cleared, all twenty-two yards of it. Whilst Cornelius oversaw the chain men, Sion led out. They crossed a nameless creek at three miles twenty-five chains, and a lightning-split elm at three miles forty-nine chains. Spencer and Hascal, glad to stow their axes, kept the chain tight and flat to the ground while Nate marked off with chaining arrows.

  Sion paused every few rods to take a reckoning by the sun or the polestar. As their party pushed forward, he felt more and more chary. Time and time again he sensed someone was near at hand, intent on their every footfall.

  Indians . . . or something else?

  The suspicion lodged in his brain like a pebble in a brook. Nate and the others seemed blind to any danger, intent on the work. Sion took care to hide any fretfulness, continuing on at the front of the column in his usual thorough, measured way, talking little and observing much.

  Soon the air would be heavy with the whirr and tick of cicadas and mosquitos and mayflies. He purposed to be well done with the work by midsummer, all the surveys mapped and platted, computations made. They’d made a tentative start.

  It was the forenoon when Cornelius gave a howl. The sound sent up the hackles on Sion’s neck. Even Smokey bristled, ears and tail at attention, posture stout. Turning, Sion spied the barely masked mirth of the chain men a few rods back, Nate included. The Englishman’s britches were unbuttoned and he was gesticulating wildly at a near cane thicket.

  “Cursed cane!” Cornelius was staring at Sion as if he were to blame. “A man can’t even make water in this country without some mischief!”

  Sion slid his hatchet from his belt and blazed the nearest beech tree before backtracking, his soundless steps eating up the greening ground.

  “Yonder comes Morgan,” Sion heard Nate say.

  Cornelius jabbed a finger toward the thicket, a sure spot for privacy but full of menace nonetheless. “How by heaven am I to run the line with a brutal gash to my foot?”

  Sion looked to the ground where a swell of red was seeping beneath a flayed moccasin. The growth of cane was young but sharp, and Cornelius’s cane-stobbed foot was proof. “We’re a ways from camp and you’ll not make it.” Frustration flared but Sion stayed stoic, glad for the river’s proximity. “If we raft down—”

  “Raft?” Cornelius looked at him like he’d announced a hanging.

  “Aye, raft. I’ll not carry you.” Sion’s calm was a stark contrast to the Englishman’s agitation. “Now seems a fine time to learn the lay of the river. Hasten back to camp.” He started down the bank, calling for the equipment to be packed up.

  Cornelius drew himself up like an injured rooster. “And what, pray tell, do we intend to float upon?”

  “Hide and watch,” Sion replied with a wicked wink.

  “You sure about this?” Nate queried, hat in hand. When Sion didn’t answer, he lowered his voice. “Cornelius Lyon is one of them mush-and-molasses sort of fellers. I don’t think he’ll take too kindly to this . . . er . . . pleasurable excursion.”

  Sion glanced at the roiling river. “It just might get his mind off his cut foot.”

  “I misdoubt it. He’ll likely be howlin’ all the way.” Nate jammed his hat back on his head. “The river’s got its big britches on now that it’s spring. If you were a murderin’ sort of feller I’d be a mite more worried than I am.”

  “I don’t aim to hurt him, just ferry him back to camp. You and Hascal can go by land with the equipment and the dogs. I’ll take Spencer. And Smokey.” Beside him, the collie thumped a muddy tail, eyeing his work with almost human intelligence.

  “Maybe we’d best be sayin’ our goodbyes . . . just in case. Offer up a prayer or two.”

  Sion brushed aside Nate’s mournful words. “I’m more in need of hickory,” he said with quiet determination, bent on lashing the tree’s tough innards around the frame they were making of elm bark. Glad he was that the bark slipped easy in spring.

  Farther down the bank sat Cornelius, whey-faced, whether from his torn foot or the ordeal before him, Sion didn’t know and didn’t care.

  Aware they were an easy mark, he looked to the opposite shore and then back to the axemen as they brought both hickory and elm. Nate stood watch, his rifle ready. Sion’s own flintlock, Annie, was near at hand, leaning against a rock.

  In another hour they had the vessel at the water’s edge, testing it for leaks. Once Sion deemed it worthy, Nate removed his hat again, his voice a near shout over the water’s tumult, his Quaker roots coming to bear. “Heavenly Father, hold these men in the
light. Thee alone control the wind and the waves. We beseech Thee for safe passage.”

  They chorused amen, all but Sion, and Nate and Hascal helped launch the vessel before disappearing into the woods. Watching them go, Sion was sure of only two things. The swift, swollen Shawnee guaranteed no Indian could draw a bead on them from the bank, and they’d reach camp long before the others, slowed by equipment as they were.

  He felt a final, fatal misgiving as he took position at the rear of the raft, bracing himself for the ride. Immediately, like a strong man tossing quoits, the current grabbed hold of them and flung the raft into the center of the river. There the water was a peculiar pale green, foaming white around rocks and snags.

  Trepidation gave way to exhilaration. The river itself stretched seventy yards wide and was crooked as a dog’s hind leg. Some of the riverbank was choked with cane, but even this was dwarfed by staggering chestnut, oak, and maple. In front of him, nearly between his knees, sat Smokey, ears forward and expression lively. The rigid set of Cornelius’s thin shoulders was next, and then the broad, fleshy back of Spencer filled the bow.

  They hit a rock, the force of it nearly spilling them sideways. Sion jammed the forked branch he held onto the boulder’s slick surface and thrust them back on course. Breathless now and bewitched by the changing landscape, he barely noticed a slight shift as the riverbed began a gradual drop.

  “Morgan!” Cornelius’s bellow was swallowed in a storm of cold spray. “By heaven—”

  They were picking up speed, sweeping over massive sandstone ledges that were narrowing and propelling them toward a high-walled gorge. The river had altered suddenly from a southwesterly to a northerly course. Sion was unprepared for such a turn and felt oddly out of touch with the careening world around them. In the bow, Cornelius was still shouting but Sion only heard his panic, not words. And then . . .

  The falls.

  Nothing else could account for that unearthly roar, nor the veil of mist that rose like a wall before them.

  “Save yourselves!” Sion shouted.

  He dove right. The water was like ice and he was sucked under, pinned between two jagged rocks. He came up gasping, his breath like a knife in his heaving lungs, his sodden hair hugging his scalp and stealing his vision. It had all happened so fast—the launch, the upset, the near drowning.

  Summoning strength, he fought his way toward the south bank, moccasins full of sand, finally breaking free of the brawling river. Stumbling ashore, he pulled himself to his full height and took in the spectacle before him.

  A deluge of water, a full hundred thirty feet across, spewed greenish-white in a foamy seventy-foot fall.

  No man or animal could survive such a torrent. Could they? Mayhap Nate had been right about the river’s spring rush. Sion felt murderous. A quiver of relief coursed through him that Nate hadn’t been in the boat. If he’d sent men to their deaths, he hated that he felt more of a loss over Smokey than Cornelius or Spencer.

  Since Harper had stormed into his life and sent him unraveling, he’d felt little at all.

  His bleary gaze fastened on the river as it clawed and chewed its way north. Best work his way down and scour the bank for a body . . . the remains of the raft. His head spun and refused to settle.

  Even the weather seemed put out with him. Clouds lay like waves overlapping, black upon gray, heavy with rain. The day was almost spent. An hour of searching turned up nothing but smoke.

  An Indian campfire, likely. The plume of gray hung low amid some distant trees, a promise of stormy weather. He’d sensed rain was coming with the rise of the wind and myriad swallows flying near the ground.

  Heart still a-gallop, he stood poised on an outcropping of dry rock, his hunting shirt chill against his skin, his buckskins black. His hands rested on his blackened belt that still held both hatchet and hunting knife. Exposed here on the riverbank, he sensed every instinct tug him to the hiddenness of the woods.

  Nate had told him that the Cherokee considered the falls sacred. That they sent their dead into the river, believing the path to the spirit world lay in the mist. The irony of the situation bit into him. He’d likely sent two men to their deaths—and his dog. Where their spirits had gone, he didn’t know.

  His gaze fastened on a precipice clear of the smoke and spray. Dizzy, he shut his eyes. He’d hit his head on a rock in the spill. A touch to his forehead came away red.

  Was he seeing things?

  A figure stood on a lofty ledge above as if carved from the sandstone cliff. He squinted. Blinked. The image stayed steadfast.

  The woman was clad in the colors of the woods, her dark hair snaking over one shoulder and hanging braided to her hips. Like Harper. The rifle at her side told him she was smallish. Again like Harper. The muzzle, the very tip, of the upturned barrel shadowed her shoulder. He felt an uncharacteristic shiver. And then, with an ease that belied the gun’s heft, as if she’d had her fill of the sight of him, she took her weapon and vanished from sight.

  The warm pressure of Tempe’s hand stayed Paige’s stirring. They both looked up from the boiling kettle of wash to take in the dark shadow moving haltingly among the trees toward the back of the inn. Tempe said nothing, but her thoughts ran wild.

  A white man.

  But not much of one. His shoes were missing, his clothes torn and muddy. He wore no hat, neither felt nor fur, and looked in sore need of the lye soap they washed with.

  Tempe cast a glance at the woodshed where the honey-hued dog lay, broken leg splinted. The collie gnawed contentedly on a ham bone and swished its pluming tail when Tempe spoke a few low words to it.

  She’d watched the bark boat bearing both dog and men come hurtling down the river, witnessed every detail of their spill the day before. Whoever had decided on such a venture was a bold soul. She sensed it wasn’t the man now struggling uphill. He looked to be puny. No match for the woods. Nor was he the flaxen-headed boy in the bow who’d finally crawled onto the opposite shore, heaving greenish water. Their untimely river journey was the doing of the dark-haired man she’d seen searching the bank long into the twilight.

  Why this odd disappointment that the stranger coming toward them wasn’t him?

  Tempe had told no one what she’d seen. Not even Russell. Paige stood at the kettle, clearly curious.

  When the man was a few feet from them, he offered a stiff bow. “Pardon me, ladies. Cornelius Lyon of Williamsburg, Virginia. And you are . . . ?”

  Recovering her manners, Paige dropped a little curtsey. “Paige Shaw.” When Tempe made no move toward introductions, she added, “And this here is the daughter of the mistress of the Moonbow Inn.”

  The stranger smiled a white smile, revealing no snuff-yellowed or rotten teeth, his gaze lifting to the inn’s far rafters. “Well, Mistress Moonbow and Shaw, might I beg your assistance?” He looked down at his shabby state of dress, clearly embarrassed. “I seem to have had a falling out with the river. The river won.”

  To Tempe’s dismay, Paige giggled just as Russell rounded the corner, half a dozen dogs at his heels. At the sight of the newcomer the lot of them set up snarling and wagging all at once.

  Her brother’s eyes narrowed as he surveyed the Englishman in silent appraisal whilst Tempe fixed her attention on the stranger’s head. He might have passed for handsome if not for the goose egg swelling his brow, though it was his limp, grievesome as Russell’s own, that first caught her notice.

  “A porch chair, Russell, if you will.” Tempe took the wash paddle and resumed stirring. “And some metheglin, Paige, please.” Left alone with the stranger for a few moments, Tempe dared, “You’re one of the surveyors.” His eyes flashed surprise. She’d not tell him she’d watched every detail of their watery ordeal. “What exactly brings you to these parts?”

  “What indeed.” His gaze shifted to the inn and outbuildings, lingering on the May blossoms crowding the back steps as if the knot on his noggin—or the mere mention of metheglin—was conjuring up comely scenes. “The be
tter question is, what brings you?”

  Paige saved her from answering, bringing him the requested cup. Cornelius Lyon murmured his appreciation and downed the drink in two thirsty swallows. Russell returned, bearing a chair he’d recently finished, of stout hickory with a cane seat.

  Tempe spoke with care. “My brother’s got some britches and a shirt you can have, and some shoes.” Russell was still regarding the stranger with a shrewd eye, never one to let his guard down. Tempe struck a deal. “Maybe in exchange you can tell us why you’ve come and how long you aim to stay.”

  4

  There was nobody in the wilderness but God and us.

  —SIMON KENTON

  Just where do you think you’re goin’?” Nate stood by, pulling on a fleshy earlobe in agitation. “You ain’t hardly dried out yet.”

  “I’m going on a little sashay thataway.” With a westerly tilt of his head, Sion began stuffing a few essentials in a knapsack, mainly jerk and a flint box. “I’d be lying if I told you it’s Cornelius I’m after.”

  “It’s Smokey, ain’t it? You can hardly rest for thinkin’ about that dog.”

  Sion sidestepped the question. “We’re not running any line, and I’m getting camp fever.”

  “Wilderness fever is more like it. I’ll come with you.”

  “Nay, you hunker down here with Lucian and Hascal and Spencer.”

  Nate shook his head mournfully. “Spencer ain’t been right since he swallowed all that river water.”

  Truly, the stoutest of his chain carriers looked puny even two days hence. With a last look at the lad, Sion flung the bridle over his stallion’s head. Prime Virginia horse stock, Beck nickered softly, nuzzling his hand. He felt a swell of pleasure at Beck’s sure-footedness on the trace and how willing the animal was to please him. Next to Smokey, Beck was nearly as essential as his rifle. He eased his flintlock into its saddle holster, wondering if he’d have call to use it. He needed to fire Annie to clear her of damp powder after the storm, but an uneasy feeling kept him from it.