Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1966

by Battle at Bear Paw Gap (v1. 1)

  But Wessah only gazed at each in turn with round, calm eyes.

  CHAPTER VII

  Defense Measures

  SlMON DURWILL swore that with the earliest dawn he and Schneider would hew out slabs to make heavy shutters for their windows, and pierce them with loopholes for rifles. Esau volunteered to spend the night at the mill and help make the shutters the following day. Mark slipped out into the night to carry the report back home. With him he took the rag of homespun he had torn from the visitor.

  It was a nervous trip he made along the road through the darkness, but no suggestion of threat or challenge came to him. Back at the Jarrett home, he sat in the living room and told his father of what had happened, while his mother, Will, and Celia listened with wide eyes.

  “If only you’d fastened upon his wrist instead of his shirt,” said his father when Mark had finished. “I wish we had that rogue here, a captive. Look at this cloth, wife, you’re skilled at weaving. What can you tell us of it and its wearer?”

  Mrs. Jarrett spread the scrap across her palm and held it up to the light of the candle. “This is home- woven, and good work,” she said. “Here’s a stain upon it.” She brought it closer to the light, gazed at the smudge, then held it to her nose.

  “It hath a tang of tobacco,” she reported.

  Jarrett put out his big hand for the piece of cloth, took it and sniffed it in turn. “I apprehend that there’s snuff upon it,” he said. “See, there’s dark powder, ground into the weaving. What does snuff mean to you?”

  “A fine gentleman, sir,” volunteered Will. “A dainty spark, dipping his fingers into a silver box, and bowing and sneezing a dainty sneeze.”

  “Like Captain Harthover, who was at the tavern when summer began,” added Celia.

  “But Mark says this fellow wears rough cloth and paints his face like a wild Indian,” said his father.

  “He disguises himself,” said Mark. “I am of Tsukala’s mind, I think that this white leader of Indians is a criminal outlaw, driven from the doors of honest folk.”

  “We’re honest folk, and he’ll be driven from our door if he should dare show himself,” promised his father harshly. “Tomorrow we must make plans for double vigilance against him.”

  Mark went to his sleeping shelter outside, along with Will, who soon was asleep. But Mark lay in his blankets and gazed toward the house. Soon the weather would be too cold for comfortable nights in this breeze-swept spot. Perhaps Mark might cut down more trees and build a shedlike addition to the cabin for himself and Will, so as not to crowd his parents and Celia and the little Vesper children. He sighed. He was no dull plodder who enjoyed work for work’s sake, but just then he could wish that there were no menacing Indians, no weird night runners, no rumors of war, in Bear Paw Gap. He would be happy just to work to good purpose, at peaceful, necessary matters, to ply the axe and the spade instead of the rifle.

  He woke at dawn, as was his habit. Heading for the river, he plunged in his head and washed his face and neck and arms. He looked up, shaking water from his soaked hair, and almost within reach of him sat Tsukala on a gnarled root, his unstrung bow in his hand.

  “Zounds,” said Mark, embarrassed. “Had you been an enemy, you could have struck me to the heart before I knew it.”

  “Ahi, that is true,” Tsukala agreed with him. “I taught you to watch better than that, young warrior.”

  Mark came and sat on the root with Tsukala, and told him of the previous night’s events at the mill. Tsukala heard him silently, and nodded his head once or twice as he listened.

  “That bad white man knows this country,” Tsukala said when Mark ceased talking.

  “To be sure. Tsukala, many know this country.” "Xo. They go through it. They know the road, not the country. This is someone who has hunted here.” Tsukala gazed at his bow stave. “A bad white man who knows this country,” he summed up. “Remember, young warrior. Remember one like that.”

  “Why should he be someone I know?”

  “You said his face was painted,” said Tsukala. “Aye, to disguise it. To hide it.”

  “Yuh. Hide his face from eyes that might know it. From your eyes. What bad white men do you remember?”

  “There have been several,” said Mark. “Barney Cole and Epps Emmondson and Quill Moxley.” **Moxley,” Tsukala repeated. “Once he wanted your land.”

  "But he was arrested,” Mark said. “He was carried away and shut up in prison.”

  “A man can be shut up, and then get out,” said Tsukala. “A shut door can be opened.”

  "Nay, we would have heard the news if Moxley had escaped,” protested Mark, but at the same time he remembered Moxley and the mischief he had done at Bear Paw Gap.

  On the very first day the Jarretts had come to their new home, they had met both Tsukala and Quill Moxley. Tsukala, a quiet-spoken Cherokee, had at first excited their suspicions, while Moxley, tall, plausible, and a ready profferer of help, had seemed a most sympathetic friend. But Tsukala proved to be the true friend, and Moxley, unmasked as a schemer who wanted to own the pass at Bear Paw Gap and profit by it, had been driven from the region. He had returned, had helped Barney Cole with weird tricks in an effort to frighten the settlers away, and had been captured, condemned, and taken eastward to stand trial and go to prison. A man at home both in a parlor and a woodland camp, Moxley could be a false friend and a dangerous enemy to anyone.

  “If Moxley got out of jail, here would be the last place he would come,” Mark tried to argue. “He would know that any of us would shoot him down on sight.”

  “He would stay out of sight,” was Tsukala’s rejoinder. “He would paint his face like an Indian.”

  The two rose and headed for the Jarrett house. Mark debated no more. He thought of Esau’s insistence that Bram Schneider must be leading the Indian raiders, and of how Schneider had been proven innocent of the charge. But Tsukala’s guess about Moxley might be shrewder. Let his father and other wise heads decide.

  Breakfast was cooking when Mark and Tsukala came into the yard, and his mother fetched fish and hot bread and coffee out to them. His father came out, too, a corn dodger in one hand, a coffee mug in the other, and heard Tsukala repeat his theory about Moxley.

  “Nay, I’m of Mark’s opinion,” announced Jarrett. “Moxley plagued us here because he wanted our lands. Had he won his way out of jail, he’d be a condemned fugitive and outlaw, with a price on his red head. He could never profit by possession of an estate hereabouts.”

  “A man with a bad heart wants revenge,” pointed out Tsukala.

  “He wants revenge, true,” nodded Jarrett. “But if that were Quill Moxley who prowled around the mill last night, why did he only seek to tomahawk Durwell or Schneider inside? For revenge, why did he not set fire to the mill?”

  “Maybe he wants the mill,” Tsukala said.

  “I say again, Moxley would never dare set up claim to these houses and these acres,” said Jarrett impatiently. “Hark you, friend Tsukala, if Moxley came putting his sharp nose into our affairs, it would give me pleasure to meet him. I fought him once, barehanded, and made him measure his length upon the ground. Should I ever fight him another time, I’ll warrant you I’ll put him so flat that he’ll never get up again. In any case, Esau hath just come home to the tavern to say that our neighbors, Stoke and Durwell from westward along the road, are coming for a council. And Mace Hollon is sending his man riding to fetch those from beyond the ridge. They’ll all be here by mid-morning.”

  Mark sought out Will, and the brothers took axes and went to cut timbers for their new sleeping room. They felled light young trees from among nearby thickets, trimmed them of branches and made them into small logs, six inches through and ten feet long. In short order they had laid a good beginning for the addition to the house, course upon course. Esau arrived, axe and saw in hand, to help.

  “Wisely decided, this enclosed chamber,” Esau said to Mark as he sawed logs to make an opening for a doorway. “You’ll do well t
o sleep with protection from strangers coming to visit without invitation.”

  “I was thinking that,” said Mark. “Now, we’ll want a doorway into the house, and another leading out. That must have a strong wooden bar to hold it closed. And but one window, with a loopholed shutter.”

  “What of the floor?” Esau asked. “You need to split puncheons for that.”

  “Nay, the floor will come later,” Mark decided. “What we want at once is four stout walls and a roof.”

  Celia came out. She carried a wooden bucket, and she went to the spring and put in clay and water. These she worked with her hands to make a crude mortar, and found an old shingle for a trowel. As Mark and Esau built the poles higher for the walls, Celia and Will chinked between the poles, using bucket after bucket of well-kneaded clay mortar.

  By the time Durwell, Stoke, and Ramsey had arrived to confer with Jarrett, the walls had been raised and partially chinked. Esau was fitting in rough frames for window and door, and Mark was riving a bigger log into planks, to fasten with cleats for the door itself. Mace Hollon came to join the council. As Mark labored, he heard Durwell tell of the strange visitor to his mill. Then Tsukala spoke, and the settlers listened attentively.

  “Sore trouble is coming upon us, and that soon,” declared Ramsey. “I would it was not so far eastward to Pine Fort. We might send a call for a company of militia, to find and fight these red devils.”

  “They’d never wait to face a strong force of fighting men,” was Hollon’s comment. “But I am like you others, I think they’ll try ere long to do whatever they came to do. And Tsukala thinks they want to capture Simon Durwell’s mill, not destroy it outright.” “There is food there,” said Tsukala. “Corn is there, ground into meal. So many Indians have a hard time to find food. They can eat up a deer in one day.” “They are eating up our deer,” grumbled Leland Stoke. “I begrudge no hungry man his food, but these are enemies.”

  “I’ll send news of this danger to both the east and the west, by the next travelers who stop at the tavern,” promised Hollon. “But meanwhile, what should we do? Must we only sit where we are and wait?”

  “Nay, I can think of naught else to do,” said Ramsey.

  The men spoke of what preparations they could arrange. Every household had several firearms. At the tavern there was a small arsenal, no less than three rifles and four muskets. The Jarretts had Hugh’s hunting rifle and Mark’s, a lighter gun for fowling, and a pistol. Stoke told his friends of good armament at his cave, which he, his son, and their two wives could use handily. And Ramsey told of the Sheltons and the Laphams moving to his house for the time being, which meant a fair garrison beyond the ridge.

  “Again I say, none of us must venture lightly into the woods below the river,” Jarrett ordered. “At present, I think that at this point we are strong—my household and my brother Mace’s, and all ready to face and fight any rascally raiders. Leland Stoke, you say the same for those at your cave—’tis a true natural fortress, and can be held. The gathering at Seth Ramsey’s is likewise strong. Only at the mill, as I deem it, have we a chancey point in our line.”

  “Yet I’ll hold the mill,” pronounced Durwell stoutly. “You neighbors of mine need that mill, and ’tis my home and my castle. I’ve not come through a bloody war with England to be faint at the thought of more fighting.

  It was voted that men from the various households make it their business to visit the mill frequently, always armed and vigilant. On that decision, the meeting broke up.

  Mark and Will spent the rest of the day adding final touches to their new sleeping room. They laid rafters and put a shed roof of split slabs upon it, then covered this roof with sheets of bark and then carried clay to spread upon it to make it fireproof. The door was constructed, pegged, and hung in place upon leather hinges. Mark chopped hickory branches into proper lengths and whittled them into bowed brackets. These he spiked within, two on the door and two more at the jambs. Through these he fitted another length of hickory, to serve as a bar. He gouged a loophole in the door, and another in the shutter which he hinged to the window hole.

  Finished, the small addition stood against the wall of the house at the southern end, flush with the front. The window looked to rearward. All sides of the Jarrett home could be commanded by defending gunfire if necessary.

  “Our next task will be to cut a doorway into the house, and fix a floor within here,” Mark said to Will.

  “But tonight it is already stout enough for us to sleep well protected.”

  “I’ll sleep the better to know that you’re not outside,” said Celia, putting final big chunks of wet clay between the logs.

  “We thank you for your help, Celia,” said Mark, fitting forked twigs inside to hold his rifle and Will’s bow. “Come, it’s near supper time, as I judge.”

  But supper time at the Jarrett’s was a quiet meal. Everyone pondered what a new day would bring. Later that night, Mark and Will lay down in their new room upon beds of evergreen boughs, and Mark felt wakeful, as he had the night before.

  Resolutely he drove worries from his mind. He set himself to thinking of how bountiful the crops had been, how gratifying the first harvest at Bear Paw Gap.

  Their various corn patches had yielded famously. Three corn cribs were well filled with ripe ears. Mark had heard that one might estimate the store of shelled corn at a bushel for every two cubic feet of corn in the ear. He lay and thought of a corn crib— six feet by four, he judged, and the corn within stacked four feet high. That meant twenty-four by four—ninety-six cubic feet. Divided by two worked out to nearly fifty bushels. At a bushel a week, the Jarretts had enough in one crib for a year, and the other cribs would feed the horses Oscar and Bolly, and the cow Meg. He and his father and Will had reaped grass in the clearings to stack hay for their animals, too.

  And he thought of how his mother and Celia had strung the latest gatherings of beans in their pods, made long ropes of them to hang and dry in the kitchen. In mid-winter, those dried beans could be soaked and cooked with savory smoked meat. Out in the yard, buried in a row of holes with pine needles raked above them, were stores of potatoes.

  Future years would bring future harvests. He thought of young fruit trees, planted in the spring. They had been no more than switches, but they had taken root, put forth leaves. Soon they would bear cherries and apples.

  He slept, and he did not dream of Indians or fighting. He thought that Celia came to him and gave him a red apple to eat, and that it was the sweetest, juiciest apple he had ever tasted.

  CHAPTER VIII

  The Attack

  Before breakfast, Tsukala appeared at the riverside again and talked to Mark. “I go into those woods,” Tsukala told him. “There, below the river.”

  “My father does not want us to go there,” Mark said. “He thinks we should make ourselves ready and wait here, for whatever they may try to do.”

  Tsukala shook his head. “I will not wait,” he said slowly. “Your father is the chief of these white people. But I was here before you came. I am my own chief. I go now.”

  “Go, then,” Mark bade him, the Cherokee fashion of farewell, and Tsukala slipped into the woods and out of sight.

  Mark worked in the early morning hours to cut an inner door from the new sleeping chamber to the living room of the house. He sawed through log after log, setting in short chunks to support the logs where they were newly severed. When the opening was complete, he spiked heavy split slabs within it for a jamb, then went out to chop out more planks for a door.

  Then he heard his mother and Celia, arguing at the front door, and strolled around to see why they disputed.

  “But we are almost out of corn meal, Mrs. Jarrett,” Celia was explaining. “Alice and Anthony and I shelled a full bushel of corn these last two days, and ’tis only a short trip to the mill.”

  “You shall not make that trip alone,” Mrs. Jarrett decreed firmly. “Where have your ears been, Celia, with all this talk of murdering, sneaking
Indians at hand. Let my husband or Mark carry the corn for grinding.”

  “But I have scarce ventured out of the yard for so long,” Celia pleaded. “I feel like a prisoner.”

  “But you are safe,” Mrs. Jarrett told her. “You do not go to the mill alone.”

  “If Celia wants to go, I’ll go with her as a guard,” Mark suggested, looking at Celia’s pink cheeks.

  “And I, let me come,” put in Will, hurrying toward them.

  “Not you,” Mark said. “Stay here and spike together our inner door. When I come back, we’ll hang it.”

  Will grimaced, but subsided.

  “We can carry the corn on Bolly,” Mark went on. “She’s a swift runner, and Celia will ride on her next to the sack. In case of any breath of danger, Celia will gallop back home. I’ll challenge any foe, red or white, among these woods I know so well.”

  “And I will not fear to travel any path with Mark beside me,” said Celia, her eyes bright as she smiled.

  “Be it so, but both of you keep your eyes and wits sharp,” Mrs. Jarrett admonished them soberly.

  Mark strode to the stable yard and saddled and bridled Bolly, a sprightly, clean-limbed mare. He led her to the house, and fetched out the bag of shelled corn and hoisted it across the saddle bow, then took his rifle and horn and bullet-pouch.

  “Here, Mark, if you’re for an errand at the mill,” said his father from the door.

  Jarrett appeared, holding another rifle in his big hands. “Take this, for Simon Durwell to add to his weapons,” he said. “One more ready shot in a hurry might be needed there some day.”

  “Do you let him have one of our guns?” Mark asked. “Nay, I do not know this one, which is it?” “You, too, have forgotten it,” his father grinned. “I myself did not call it to mind, back there in its dark corner, when we sat yesterday and counted the firearms we had. Why, Mark, we took this from Quill Moxley himself, last spring when he was discovered to be an enemy and not a friend. ’Tis a right good gun, too, better and truer by far than the man who fetched it to Bear Paw Gap.”