The Carroll Farm Fight

by Greg Hunt

  It didn’t take them long to pass out of Mel’s line of sight. He risked moving to the edge of the woods and even stepped out into the open for a better look. But they were gone, and for a few moments tranquility seemed to have returned.

  That didn’t last long. When the shooting started he was tempted to hurry in that direction to see if he could watch the fight. He was curious how men fought from horseback, thinking that if he ever did get dragged into this mess, that would suit him better than being afoot.

  But he didn’t have to move forward to the fight, because the fight began to roll back toward him. When the band of mounted men came back into view, they were short a few men and horses. Clearly they had run into more fight down there than they knew what to do with. They rode flat-out hunched forward over the necks of their mounts, not looking back, not shooting, intent only on escape.

  Seconds later Mel heard, then saw, the reason for their flight. Two or three hundred yards behind them dozens, perhaps hundreds, of mounted men were racing up the valley after them.

  On some signal from their leader, the fleeing men began to scatter, each man seeming to choose his own route either up the valley or into the bordering forest. One of them cut his horse sharply left and began streaking toward where Mel stood. Only then did Mel realize that, like a dolt, he was still standing out in the open. By the time he leaped back into the edge of the woods, the man had drawn a pistol and was firing wildly in his direction. But nothing connected, and within seconds the gun was empty.

  Mel figured he still had a fight on his hands, and ran like a rabbit deeper into the woods. When the sound of the horse’s hooves sounded ready to crawl up his backbone, he threw himself off to the side, hitting the ground hard and rolling in the damp leaves and humus of the forest floor.

  The rider cursed him desperately as he thundered past, and seemed to fling something dark and heavy in Mel’s direction. In an instant he had disappeared into the woods ahead, leaving behind only the vague familiar stench of leather, horse sweat, and fear.

  Mel started to rise, then changed his mind. Back toward the open valley, a group of pursuing horsemen had broken away from the main band and were hot after the soldier who almost rode Mel down seconds before. Crawling forward, he burrowed into the dense, thorny undergrowth of a blackberry thicket, then lay still until the pursuing horsemen passed.

  Intermittent gunfire started popping from several directions, some near, some distant, all confusing. Mel worked his way carefully out of the blackberry thicket, but still didn’t get up. This wasn’t like the fighting he had seen before when the two sides went at it nose to nose until one side or the other had enough. This fight was broken up and scattered out. How did they even know who to shoot at?

  Mel knew he had to leave this dangerous spot, but he had no clear idea which way was best. There seemed to be little pockets of fighting all around him, and with everyone mounted and riding hell-bent this way and that, how could anyone know where it would break out next?

  Finally he decided that, with no better choice to make, he’d do what instinct and sound reason told him. He’d head for the deep woods. That meant going due south, the direction the lone rider and his pursuers had taken.

  As he started to rise, his hand rested on something firm and moist. Brushing the leaves away, he was surprised to find a haunch of the deer the men in the valley had killed and butchered earlier. That, Mel realized, must have been what came at him when the rider raced by him.

  As a hungry man not eager to build another meal of squirrels, crawdads and water plants, Mel took it as a good omen. He’d fill his belly with venison tonight, providing he could find a place secluded enough to build a fire and roast his prize. He stuck the haunch in his pack and gave his guns another going-over before starting out. He wasn’t as familiar with these woods as he was with the ones closer to home. But he knew enough not to get lost, and enough to be able to chart a new route to the Adderly farm when an opportunity came along.

  Somewhere a couple of miles to the south was Vesper Mountain, a rugged, heavily wooded outbreak of rock that nobody would ever be tempted to climb without an important reason. The country around Vesper Mountain was nearly as forbidding, slashed with deep ravines, jagged stone outcrop-pings, and dense, nearly impenetrable forest and undergrowth. Local legend had it that a breed of tall hairy ape-men had once lived in there, and that hunters had been known to disappear forever in that vicinity.

  Mel had no yearning to confirm or disprove the legends, but he figured if it was as thick and nasty as folks said, it might be a perfectly secluded place for a man to cook a meal and have a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.

  He took off south at a trot, pleased to hear the pockets of gunfire fading behind him. The forest floor was level and clear hereabouts, and for the first few minutes he made good time, even with the heavy pack and the weapons he carried.

  When he came across the bodies of the horse and rider who had fled in this direction earlier, he sorted out pretty quickly what had happened. The men pursuing him had shot the horse out from under him. The rider was thrown clear as the horse fell, but was killed on the landing. The horse wasn’t as lucky. It lay on its side, bleeding heavily but not trying to struggle to its feet. The gurgling rasp of its labored breathing told the story of a lung wound, only its eyes moving as it tracked Mel’s cautious approach. Mel dispatched it with a smooth, deep knife stroke across the throat.

  There wasn’t much at the scene worth taking, but he did remove the belt, holster and revolver from around the dead man’s waist and put it in his pack. It was clear enough that while he was in these parts, there was no such thing as having too many firearms.

  Gunfire snapped in fits and starts from all directions, some too close for comfort’s sake, but most farther away. This whole business was unsettling and confusing. Back at his farm both sides had lined up face-to-face and had at it. Eventually the side with the most men, guns and grit won out. It was bloody and barbaric, but at least a man could get his mind around what was happening.

  Out here was different. There were little pockets of fighting all over the place, here now, then somewhere over there next, and then away off yonder someplace. They fought one time on open ground, next in the woods, now in the valleys, and then up the steep hillsides. There weren’t any roads back in here, and very few trails except the narrow winding pathways that game followed. There was nothing to defend, no place to capture.

  It occurred to Mel that the men on both sides of this scrap probably had little idea where they were or what direction they should go to reach the safety of their own lines. They seem to fight almost for the sport of it, only knowing that if another man had on a shirt and trousers different than their own, that made him fair game.

  All of that only made things more difficult for Mel. His clothes weren’t the same as anybody else’s, so anybody he came across out here was likely to draw a bead and fire away at him for safety’s sake.

  By sundown he had reached the rugged landscape that marked the fringes of Vesper Mountain. With all the crazy armed men riding around these woods, he was tempted to lose himself in that wild terrain ahead and wait things out. He had meat enough to last at least three days, and was confident that he could find water and shelter in there. The landscape was too broken and perilous for any mounted man.

  But he had started this trip with a whole different purpose, and some feeling or instinct told him that if he delayed, it could be too late to be of any help to Rochelle and her family.

  As night approached, he settled in to rest and eat in a narrow crevice in the rocks beneath the spreading branches of an ancient oak. He could only be approached from one direction, and the tree would provide some protection if it rained again during the night. He felt reasonably secure there, as secure as anyone could feel in a wilderness landscape peppered with armed, dangerous men.

  The night fell far short of being a restful one. Between the random gunfire that still flared up occasionally, and the anima
ls that crept near from time to time, drawn by the smell of his food and his own unfamiliar man scent, he spent most of the nighttime hours only half dozing, startled awake again and again by disruptions far and near.

  One particular noise, a few hours before sunup, jangled his nerves like none of the rest. A lifelong woodsman, he prided himself on his ability to identify even the strangest nighttime wilderness sounds. The wild hogs and bears, the various kinds of big cats, the wolves, foxes and coyotes, all had their own set of unique cries, grunts, signals and warnings.

  But there was a mournful, almost human, texture to this particular cry that made it different than anything he had ever heard at night in the big woods before. A primal chill made his flesh tingle as it rose almost to a scream of pain, then subsided slowly into something profoundly sorrowful. It was impossible to tell whether the noise came from near or far. The cliffs, caves, winds, and stark rock faces played mysterious games with sounds in these mountains, carrying one on seemingly forever while smothering another almost before it began.

  Yet Mel could not shake himself of the eerie feeling that, whatever had made that cry, it knew he was there and possibly meant him harm.

  The old front porch and campfire tales of the ghosts and unknown creatures that inhabited Vesper Mountain returned vividly to his mind. It was said that as far back as any white man in these parts could remember, people had been disappearing in the rugged terrain around the mountain. The first settlers had reported unearthly sounds and hair-raising sights, and before them the Indians had passed down similar legends.

  It brought Mel little comfort to decide that what he had heard was almost certainly a ghost, or even something worse. His mother had assured him in his childhood that, as frightening as they might be, ghosts were simply sad, mournful spirits that had somehow lost the way during their journey from this life to the next. They were searching, always searching, for they knew not what, and in God’s own time they would move on.

  But there were also the horrifying tales told by old men who swore they had seen things with their own eyes that were neither man nor ghost nor belonging to the animal kingdom, things that made their hearts stop and their bladders empty in absolute terror.

  Off and on the cries continued every few minutes, sometimes seeming far in the distance, and sometimes so close that he raised a cocked revolver in each hand and stared into the pitch darkness until his eyes ached. Finally, he could stand no more of it. Firing wildly into the night, he cut loose with his own chorus of shrieks and howls, defying whatever, or whoever, it was to come on and get it over with.

  But no one and nothing came. After that the forest fell deathly silent, as was usual for the predawn hours, and Mel fell into a deep, undisturbed sleep.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The rain started soon after dawn. Mel crawled stiff-legged and hungry out of the split in the stone, knowing how suddenly such places could fill with surging runoff. Now in the daylight, the terrors of the moonless night seemed far away, as if it had happened to someone else. His mind sought ordinary explanations for the extraordinary things he had heard, even the mournful human-sounding wails and moans. Two tree branches rubbing in the wind, perhaps. Or the death throes of some woodland creature, or even a human being.

  He resolved that he might never know for sure unless he spent another night here on a moonless night, which didn’t seem likely. But it would make one heck of a yarn anyway.

  He struck a course as straight west as the broken terrain would allow, and after the first hour of steady walking, it occurred to him that he had not heard a single gunshot since starting out. Maybe all the scattered bands of fighting men had moved on as unexplainably as they had appeared. Even better, maybe both armies had pulled out of the area. After all, what was there to fight over way out here in these steep hills, dense woods, towering cliffs, and winding valleys? This area was so remote that there were no roads to it, and nobody had even thought about settling out here.

  That gave him hope that he could complete his trip to the Adderly farm without further risk and delay. And maybe he would find them all safe. Maybe the war had moved right on past them without stopping to ruin everything, as it had at his place.

  A sudden crazy idea came to Mel, and, as he turned the thing over and over in his mind, looking at it from all sides, it began take a hold on him. What would happen if, when he first reached the Adderly place, and the instant he laid eyes on Rochelle, he came right out and declared his intentions to her and her parents? It was the honorable thing to do, and maybe they might even let him stay on and help work their fields until the fall crops were in and he and Rochelle were properly wed. There wasn’t much to return to at his place, and he could spend the winter building a new cabin for himself and his bride. He might even give some thought to a frame house with sawed plank walls if he could somehow come up with the money for the lumber.

  That gave him plenty to think about over the next couple of hours as his long legs moved him closer to his destination. Old Ezekiel Adderly might be a trial to get along with day in and out over the next summer and fall, but at least he was a man of the cloth. The way Mel saw it, he and Rochelle could tie the knot any time they chose because her daddy could marry them.

  The earlier rain slackened to a drizzle and then stopped altogether. By mid morning the sky was clear and the sun was midway up in the sky behind him. He stopped for a time to dry and reload his rifle and the holstered gun at his waist. He cooked a few slices of venison over a damp, smoky fire before starting up again.

  He came across the next dead man in a creek-lined draw between two steep, forested hills. The buzzards and crows scattered reluctantly as Mel approached, but settled on the low tree limbs nearby waiting expectantly for him to pass on by. The man’s face and hands were a torn bloody mess from their work, but the larger animals hadn’t gotten to him yet, so his parts weren’t scattered.

  Mel retrieved another handgun from the corpse, although the weight of the pack was becoming cumbersome with weaponry. He also took a fine-looking pocket watch that was still ticking, and some odd paper money that might or might not have any value once the armies had taken their fight someplace else.

  He felt uneasy at the realization that he was becoming almost comfortable with the notion of robbing the dead. Back at the farm he had scorned the greedy men who rifled the packs and pockets of the dead men, and sometimes even the badly wounded. It had seemed shameful and depraved the first time he witnessed it. But that was days ago, and a lot had happened since then. Out here the logic was undeniable. What would become of the guns, the money, the clothes and personal effects, and even the body of a fallen and forgotten man like this? Nature and the beasts of the forest would claim everything Mel left behind.

  As the draw he was following began to wind gently but steadily to the left, he realized that he was not only veering off in the wrong direction, but he was also lost in country a lot more rugged than he intended to pass through. There was more than one kind of lost, though, and Mel figured this wasn’t the more serious kind where you scarcely know up from down, and began to feel like any direction you chose only took you farther and farther from where you wanted to be.

  Good sense told him that all he had to do was find a manageable route up and over the steep rocky hill to his right, and then find a way to point his nose west again. In this country there was scarcely such a thing as traveling in a straight line, whether you went by river, road, or overland.

  Struggling under the weight of his pack, nearly toppling backward a couple of times, and stopping often to catch his breath and rest the weary muscles of his arms, back and legs, it took Mel nearly half an hour to reach the crest. Ahead another draw awaited him, this one wider and flatter than the one behind. A swift, tumbling stream flowed down its middle two hundred feet below, splitting in spots to form small, brush-covered islands, then merging again beyond them.

  Here was a possibility, Mel saw. If the stream was a tributary of the Little Bold River, as he s
uspected, and if its banks were passable, it could lead him back to known territory.

  Making his way down the steep, broken rock face proved more difficult than climbing up had been. By the time he reached the bottom his palms and elbows were scratched and bleeding, and the knees and backside were nearly torn out of his britches.

  Mel started downstream, making his way as best he could, walking sometimes on the wide sandy shoals and sometimes in the creek itself when the water was shallow and the footing was sure. In places the walls rose steep and rugged on either side, and in other stretches sheer limestone cliffs rose straight up a hundred feet or more. The place had a certain familiarity about it, and reminded him of other carefree times. He couldn’t have sworn that he had ever been in this valley before, but if not, he had spent time in others like it.

  As a half-grown boy, when the hardest of the spring farm-work was done and the crops were laid by for summer, Mel used to head out with his friend Pook for days at a time to hunt, explore, and live off the land. Pook was a Quapah Indian, two years Mel’s senior, part of a dwindling band that had migrated here to the high country during the hottest summer months, probably for centuries.

  He was just eleven that first summer when he asked to head out into the wilds for a few days with his friend. His mother was apoplectic at the thought of her only son striking out into the wilderness with a filthy, heathen Indian boy, carrying little more than a slab of bacon, cornbread, a hatchet, and a battered old single-shot twelve-gauge that nearly knocked him down every time he set it off.

  After considerable debate, Daddy had overruled her, contending that it was good for a young man to go out exploring like that, to make it on his own and learn what the wild country had to teach him.

  So he and Pook took to the woods that summer, and for the next few summers that followed. Each knew only a smattering of the other’s language, but they managed to communicate, and became solid comrades over time.