The response exceeded anything we could have anticipated. In the end, something over three hundred and fifty dollars flowed in. This was enough to replace the pulpit and Prince’s saddle, buy new hymnbooks, and even purchase a second horse for the mission, a chestnut mare, Buttons.
Prince’s return from his unwitting sacrificial contribution to the mission work was that he became the most petted and beloved animal in the Cove.
We had finished breakfast and I had gone out on the back porch to shake the crumbs out of the tablecloth for Miss Ida when I saw the strange tableau approaching. Two mounted men rode silently toward the misson yard. A third in line had a gun pointed at the two in front. The one bringing up the rear had dismounted and was walking beside some sort of burden on his horse—no, it was a man’s body slumped, almost doubled over in the saddle. As they got closer I recognized the two leading the procession—Bird’s-Eye Taylor and Nathan O’Teale. Their hands were manacled to the saddlebows. Then there must have been a raid, a successful raid. Then—where was Tom McHone? Oh no! Let it not be!
By this time the group had seen me. “We’ve a wounded man here.” The voice carried clearly across the yard. “Can you help?”
But I was already running toward the voice, thinking as I ran. “Wounded,” he had said. So if that crumpled figure on the saddle was Tom, at least he was not dead. I stared at Nathan and Bird’s-Eye and I ran past but they were looking the other way.
“Miss, I’m Gentry Long, United States marshal.” He was tall and lean with piercing blue eyes. One hand was laid protectingly on the body of the man in the saddle. I noticed that the other officer was keeping his full attention on guarding Nathan and Bird’s-Eye.
“Didn’t want to take this man clear to Lyleton,” Officer Long explained. “He’s lost too much blood. If we leave him here, can you get a doctor?”
“Surely. Of course.” The wounded one was Tom all right. He looked dreadful, his face white and still, his shirt bloodstained. No flicker of consciousness.
The officer’s eyes were on my face. “Now don’t worry, Miss. He may not be so bad. Mountain men can stand an awful lot.” David appeared then and immediately took charge. He helped the marshal carry Tom into the house to a pallet of quilts which Miss Ida had hastily thrown down on the parlor floor.
It was now within thirty minutes of time for school to open. Already some of my pupils were swarming over the hillside. Naturally they were going to stand and gawk. How embarrassing for Nathan and Bird’s-Eye to have all these children, including their own, see them not only under arrest but handcuffed. Once my pupils saw this drama, there would be little schoolwork done this day.
Though I wanted so much to help with Tom and to be there when Opal arrived—already Ruby Mae had started a message on its way to Opal—I knew that my role was to get school under way as quickly as possible. The children were going to ask questions; it was just as well that I had no information about what had happened.
As I ran upstairs to get my schoolbooks I saw that David and the marshal were having a whispered consultation in the back hall. But David could not have learned much because as I came down the stairs three minutes later, the officer was already on his way out the front door.
I paused momentarily. “How bad is it, David?”
“If you mean Tom, he’s lost a lot of blood. We’ve sent for Dr. MacNeill. Doc’s had lots of practice with gunshot wounds.”
“What happened?”
“Don’t know. Mr. Long says he’s not free to talk yet.” David’s eyes focused on my armload of books. He shook himself as if coming out of a reverie. “Have a good day, Christy.” Something like tenderness crept into his voice. “For a few hours forget all this—and concentrate on Lulu Spencer’s grammar and Mountie O’Teale’s diction and Bessie Coburn memorizing a Shakespeare sonnet or something. And before the morning’s over, I want to hear a lusty, gusty rendition of ‘Oh, For a Faith That Will Not Shrink’ come billowing down the hill. Mine’s shrinking rapidly.” His brown eyes were smiling at me but behind them was a puzzled, hurt look.
Tom had been wounded, Dr. MacNeill told us, with a thirty-two-caliber Smith and Wesson Special. The bullet had penetrated his left shoulder, coursed downward to lodge in his lower back. Of course the doctor had to operate to probe for the bullet. Miss Alice had just returned to the Cove from Big Lick Spring and she offered to assist him. I was relieved because I had had enough of operations and blood and ether for a while. The doctor impressed us all with a combination of surgical skill and intuitive knowledge; he located the bullet so quickly that the operation was mercifully short.
That afternoon after school I passed the door of the bedroom to which Tom had been moved. The door was open with the doctor sitting by the bed. Thinking that I would inquire about Tom, I tiptoed in, but so softly that Dr. MacNeill did not hear me. He was sitting there studying Tom with a look of intense concentration mingled with something else—I read it as surprised shock that it was Tom McHone lying there before him. But the moment Dr. MacNeill became aware of my presence, the odd look left his face as if wiped off, and quite deliberately, he shifted into another mood.
“How is he?” I whispered.
“Sleeping now. Barring complications, he should make it. A couple of days and we’ll know for sure.”
“Thanks to you, he’ll make it. Is Opal here?”
“Down with Miss Ida getting a cup of coffee. Opal’s taking it great.”
As indeed she was. So far, everyone had been amazed at Opal’s calmness and this never wavered in subsequent days. Apparently she had expected something like this and now that it had happened, she appeared relieved that the crisis was over, the still found and broken up. Though technically Tom was under arrest (and that could mean a prison sentence) not even that seemed to bother Opal. She was like a woman consoled: her man was alive; she need worry no more about her Tom “followin’ stillin’.” Somehow they would find th answer to the problem with which they had begun—the need for cash.
For some reason not clear to me, Dr. MacNeill seemed more disturbed than Opal. Though he was in and out of the mission house often, dressing Tom’s wounds and attending him, there was an air of holding himself aloof, a silent drawing apart from all of us, even from Miss Alice. But if Miss Alice noticed this, she gave no hint.
By the fourth day I was beginning to wonder why no officer had dropped by to check on Tom since he was under arrest. I had heard that most federal agents considered all mountain men slippery characters indeed and guarded them with particular zeal. They were certainly giving Tom relaxed treatment, even though he was wounded.
As I was puzzling about this I remembered what Dr. MacNeill had said about Tom being shot with a Smith and Wesson. A picture sprang to my mind of the two men on horseback riding into the mission yard with the agent walking behind, his gun trained on them. I knew little about guns. Yet in my mental picture there was the clean impression that the agent had been holding a Winchester, not a Smith and Wesson. Then a thought washed over me like a revelation: the possibility that Tom had not been shot by a revenue agent at all.
About that time, Ruby Mae—our inveterate scandalmonger—got me off in a corner. “Things is shorely catawampus in this-here neck of the woods,” she began in her doomsday voice.
“How do you mean?”
“Wal, I heered,” she began, her eyes shining as she savored her juicy morsel of news, “that Tom didn’t tote fair with the others. Don’t know what the fraction was between them, but they say—”
“ ‘They say . . .’ Ruby Mae, who is they?”
“Folks all over, guess.”
“Well, go on.”
“They say thar was trickery some-where, that Tom—turncoated.”
“You mean that Tom decided to pull out of the blockade-running?”
“Well’m, more than that. Leastways, talk is that he informed on Nathan and Bird’s-Eye.”
“I see.” And in the Cove, my thoughts went on, that would be considered ab
out the worst thing any man could do.
“Yes’m. They’re faultin’ him all right. Can’t handily blame them, can ye?”
“But Ruby Mae, we don’t know that the talk is true. Let’s give Tom a chance. Please don’t stoke up this gossip-fire by more talk. You shouldn’t mention this to another person.”
Later on that day I had taken a pile of torn-up sheets for bandages to Tom’s room. As I started back down the stairs, I heard the doctor’s voice, “How much do I know about what?”
“About how the still was taken and how Tom was shot? You’re hiding something.”
It was David and Dr. MacNeill in the parlor. Their voices were so loud that I couldn’t help hearing. I paused, uncertain what to do.
“Are you accusing me?”
“Of sitting on information, yes. I’m accusing you of that.”
“And since when is there a law against a man tending his own fences?”
David’s voice was harsh with impatience. “Seems to me I remember some high-sounding talk about our working together. So—when do we start?”
“When do you start minding your own business?”
David’s voice was rising. “Liquor stored on church property is sure my business. A man wounded in a raid and carried into the mission house is definitely my business. The business was dumped on my doorstep.”
Not wanting to eavesdrop, I started to slip back to the kitchen. But the parlor door was open and as I went past, I saw David standing in the center of the parlor, taller than the doctor, slim, with his carefully groomed black hair and the color in his face making his brown eyes seem even darker. Odd, how at stressful moments like this when color creeps to David’s face, that spot where his nose was broken stays so white. And the doctor, stockier of build with broad, muscular shoulders, sandy-red hair—tousled as always—hazel eyes flashing as he lashed out at David, “You’re meddling in stuff you know nothing about. Lay off! For God’s sake, man, lay off!”
Blindly, never seeing me at all, he strode down the hall and went out, slamming the front door.
That afternoon our new telephone rang. It was the jailer at Lyleton wanting to speak to David. Nathan and Bird’s-Eye Taylor had escaped from the Lyleton jail.
Tom’s wound was healing and he was getting restless. He made it clear that no mountain man “puts much stock in doctor-medicine or bedding it for long.” But still he would not talk about the raid.
So long as Tom was with us, we thought him relatively safe. But if the gossip had it right and Tom had been wounded by Bird’s-Eye or Nathan, then they had been shooting to kill. In that case, there would be a second attempt and they would not miss the next time.
This was still speculation, however, and David felt that facts were necessary for intelligent action. Therefore, he decided to go to Knoxville to talk with the federal agents. Surely they would respect him for his part in the first raid and tell him all they legitimately could. At the least, perhaps he could find out how Bird’s-Eye and Nathan had escaped from jail and whether or not Tom was going to have to stand trial.
I felt desperate for Tom, though I tried to hide this from him and Opal. What chance did he have against one of Bird’s-Eye’s ilk? In such heavily wooded terrain as surrounded us, shooting in the back from ambush presented no problem. It was the taking of retribution into one’s own hands, the localized justice of the American frontier all over again: the self-composed posse, the court under the maple tree, ending all too often in the hangman’s noose and a body swinging from a limb of the nearest maple or oak. Only these mountains never had ceased being the frontier, and here—because of the predominantly Scottish background—the “court” was confined to the family or clan, so that there was not even the check of a more objective viewpoint from the men of other families.
It was a system whose weaknesses led to baneful results. Most of the Highlanders seemed to think the government was something separate from them “out thar some-whars.” From their basic lack of respect for law and government officials had come the concept that if a citizen did not agree with a law, then he need not obey it. They thought of such lawlessness as “freedom.” Yet something was wrong because out of that kind of freedom could come no stable society—only, it seemed to me, more lawlessness, violence, and eventually, anarchy.
With this philosophy undergirding him, a man like Bird’s-Eye Taylor knew that if he murdered Tom, he could justify his action in the eyes of the community: the pattern had been drawn too many times in the past. Or, I wondered, was there the least chance that Cutter Gap finally knew Bird’s-Eye for what he was and in this instance, could reverse their centuries-old point of view?
Thus my thinking brought me back full circle to the doctor. Was it possible that he had advised Tom to try to pull out of the blockade-running and that Tom’s attempt to do so had somehow miscarried? Was that what Dr. MacNeill was hiding?
I watched for Dr. MacNeill’s next visit. It came late that afternoon soon after David had left for Knoxville. I caught up with him in the mission yard as he was leaving after checking on Tom.
“I need to talk to you—and privately,” I said, a bit out of breath.
He looked at me in surprise, his sandy-red eyebrows raised. “Well, Miss Huddleston. A pleasant day to you—and I’m just fine, thank you.”
I smiled apologetically. “Sorry. I suppose I did sound a little abrupt.” How was it, I wondered, that the doctor always managed to put me on the defensive? And now he was smiling at me with that other look that I could not quite fathom. “A private conversation with you would be a pleasure anytime.” He sounded almost courtly. “How about your schoolroom?”
I nodded. “That would be fine.”
“Then just let me tether my horse again.” I watched silently as he carefully looped the reins around the fence post. In silence we walked to the empty school, neither of us making any effort at small talk. One of the things I had noticed about the doctor was that conversational gaps bothered him no more than they did Miss Alice.
Inside the school I sat down at my desk, but Dr. MacNeill was walking around the room looking at the children’s work on the walls. I was eager to get into the subject of the raid and Tom and Bird’s-Eye immediately but he was in no hurry to begin.
“You’re doing a good job with these children, Christy,” he said.
Again I was disarmed, the heated words trembling on my tongue suddenly cooled. “Thank you. They’re wonderful children. Only they have so many needs and most of the time I feel so helpless.”
“The children like you too. I know. Word gets around.”
He was trying to beguile me with compliments—and it was working. I sighed and tried to remember how I had planned to start this conversation. “You baffle me, Dr. MacNeill.”
“Do you really mean that?” he asked quickly.
“I mean about your role in this stilling business.”
He pulled up a chair and took his pipe and tobacco pouch out of his pocket. “Can adults smoke in here after school?” he asked quietly.
I nodded and watched his relaxed, methodical movements as he filled the pipe and tamped the tobacco in with his thumb. He was taking his time about lighting it. On a sudden impulse, I asked, “That pipe, Dr. MacNeill, it’s unusual. Would you mind telling me what those words are in the silver? What language is it?”
With his head down, still holding the match to the tobacco, he looked up at me quizzically from under sandy-red eyebrows. “Um-m—” He took the pipe out of his mouth and grinned at me. “It’s Gaelic. I suppose it would seem odd to you . . . Tha mo chas air ceann mo naimhdean.”
It had looked like gibberish, but out of the doctor’s mouth it sounded musical.
“Literally translated, it means, ‘My foot is on the head of my enemies’—a favorite saying of one of the MacNeills.”
“It sounds warlike.”
“The highland Scots were not exactly drawing-room dandies. And they could wield a claymore, and they weren’t noted for their forgivene
ss. But you, Christy, didn’t get me in here to talk about my pipe. What’s on your mind?”
“Several things.” I took a deep breath to get time to think. “Remember the day you and David and I had that talk in David’s bunkhouse?”
“Sure.”
“Well, we agreed to cooperate with one another. Yet David and I feel that you’re keeping facts from us. You seem unwilling to tell all you know. Somebody tipped off the Revs on the second location of the still. Was it you?”
“No.”
“Do you know who helped them?”
“Christy, how do you know the agents didn’t find the still on their own? They’re clever men.”
“Because I hear that they scarcely ever take a still in these wild mountains without a tip. And because when the first raid was unsuccessful, they asked David if he would continue to help them. They told him that they had no leads at all.”
“I see.”
“So somebody must have informed. Was it Tom?”
“Why do you say that?”
“That’s the gossip going around.”
The doctor paused to relight his pipe. “Do you believe all the gossip you hear, Christy?”
“No, but I think the fact that Tom was shot in the back is significant.”
Dr. MacNeill thought about that for a moment. “I could give you five different situations where Tom could have caught a bullet in the back in a normal gun battle between the Revs and the blockaders.”
This was getting nowhere, so I started on a different approach. “But on the night before the second raid, you went to the McHones’ and had a long talk with Tom, didn’t you?”
“I go to the McHones’ regularly,” he replied mildly. “And I talk with everyone in the family.”
“But you were there the night before Tom was shot?”
Christy Page 32
