Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1966

by Battle at Bear Paw Gap (v1. 1)

  He held out the gun, and Mark took it and surveyed it with the eyes of a practiced hunter. He would have liked to have it himself, had he not grown so used to his own rifle.

  “And take with it this big horn of powder and these bullets, also taken from Moxley when we banished him,” added his father passing them over. “Tell Durwell ’tis lent him to keep and use if need be, until times are once more peaceful and he cares to hand it back.”

  Mark checked trigger action, firing pan and the spark of the flint. Then he rammed down a charge of powder and ball. He slung Moxley’s rifle to Bolly’s saddle horn with a loop of rawhide thong, and helped Celia to mount and sit sidewise on the mare’s back. Taking his own rifle by the balance in his left hand and the bridle rein in the other, he led Bolly away.

  “We’ll not be gone longer than we need to grind the meal for next week’s eating,” Celia called back to Mrs. Jarrett.

  “See that you aren’t,” boomed Mark’s father from the doorway, “else I’ll be coming to see what’s keeping you.”

  Celia laughed at that, and to Mark it sounded like a cheerful, carefree laugh. Celia was glad to go visiting, even three miles away. Mark could have wished that he was as sure and complete a protection for her as she appeared to feel.

  As they came out upon the road, a wagon trundled along from the tavern. It was drawn by two horses and piled high with goods under a brown canvas sheet well tied down. Two men sat together at the front, one driving, the other holding a long brown gun upright with its butt between his feet. They wore broad hats and rough clothes, and gave Mark and Celia a friendly good day. Mark led Bolly along beside the wagon, grateful for the company and that extra gun.

  “Is this the truth we hear from the landlord yonder, that Indians are out in these parts?” asked the driver. “I had thought the Indians had long been pressed away from this country and were hunting in new lands along the Mississippi River.”

  “This is but a straggling band, and we don’t tremble at them,” Mark replied, trying to sound confident and casual. “Mr. Hollon felt that the news should be carried along, that settlers elsewhere might be warned to keep a watch.”

  “I want no redskin imps scrambling and screeching around us,” said the man with the gun. “Here in this wagon are all my friend and I possess in the world— goods for sale to householders in the Tennessee settlements. We hope to make a proper fortune for ourselves, and no shares with Indians or other thieves. That’s why I carry this little popper here,” and he slapped the gun’s long barrel with his palm. “She’s loaded and primed, ready to stand off trouble.”

  “And I have another piece, just under the seat here,” added the driver. “We seek to start no warfare, young sir, but if warfare starts, we’ll finish it the best way a good man can manage.”

  The wagon rolled along, and Mark walked fast to lead Bolly in its company. They approached the mill, and the driver and his companion bade them Godspeed and continued along the road, while Mark led Bolly up to the shed where the millstones waited to grind their corn.

  Mark saw that the door to Durwell’s living quarters was pierced with a loophole, and that rough shutters hung half-open at the windows. Durwell came out and greeted them as Mark unslung the bag of corn. Schneider, too, appeared and trotted to lift the water gate. The wheel began to turn and the stones moved. Schneider scooped out corn and fed it into the hopper. Mark tied Bolly’s halter to a railing and leaned against one of the upright posts that supported the roof above the open space where the millstones worked, while Durwell chatted with him and Celia.

  “Did you have aught of alarm last night?” Durwell asked.

  “None at all,” replied Mark, setting down his rifle butt. “I slept in my new quarters, and I dreamed of eating apples.”

  “Did you so, Mark?” cried Celia. “So did I dream of apples, and of eating them. What might that signify?”

  “Why, probably that we will have good fruit on our orchard trees ere many more seasons,” said Mark.

  Durwell grinned. “It might mean more than that, when a spruce lad and a fair maid chance to dream the same thing,” he said.

  Mark felt embarrassed, and hid the feeling by unslinging the other rifle from Bolly’s saddle.

  “Here, sir, my father lends you this,” he said, handing it to Durwell. “And this powder and shot as well. Pray heaven there’s no sudden need for shooting this autumn.”

  “Zooks, ’tis a handsome piece,” said Durwell, admiring the rifle. “But you won’t leave yourselves short of guns?”

  “Not we,” Mark assured him. “That rifle belonged to Quill Moxley, and when he left Bear Paw Gap we kept it for a remembrance of him.”

  “And now, as Tsukala thinks, he may be back at the Gap to reclaim it,” mused Durwell. “I saw Moxley but the one time, briefly. If I should see him again hereabout, I’ll give him both ends of his rifle, where he’ll sorely regret them.”

  He walked into the closed part of the shed, where he and Schneider lived, and through the open door Mark saw him place the rifle across deer antlers on the wall, where two other guns also hung. Celia gazed upward at bushes along the side of the mill pond, where berries gleamed ripely, and trotted there to pick some. When Durwell came back into the open, he and Mark turned the conversation to more peaceful matters.

  Mark said gratefully that the fall harvest everywhere seemed a plentiful one. Durwell spoke on his part of good business at the mill. He ground meal for all the homes around Bear Paw Gap, and his modest share of each load of corn was enough to feed him and Bram Schneider and to sell to those who stopped on their way through.

  “Indeed, I think I must begin to buy more corn from your family or from the others, and perhaps grow a crop myself next year,” he said. “Travel grows ever more brisk along this road, and the people in the wagons are eager for good, fresh-ground meal. I’ve been thinking that I could set up as storekeeper as well as miller, and do right well at it.”

  “Ja, storekeeping is goot,” contributed Schneider from his post at the grinding stones. “Maybe I start to bake bread and cake here. Many strangers would pay money for such.”

  Celia returned from the berry bushes. She had found broad leaves on a tulip tree, and had fashioned them into a sort of basket with twigs for pins. This she had filled to the top with huge, ripe blackberries.

  “These are better, I think, than those your mother and I have picked for jam,” she said to Mark. “Here, I brought some for you, and for Mr. Durwell and Mr. Schneider, too.”

  “Come, let’s have a true feast,” invited Durwell. “In yonder is a pot of fine honey we took from a bee tree, and we strained it but two nights ago. Celia’s berries will taste sweeter than ever.”

  They went into the main room. Durwell put bowls out on the table and Celia divided her berries into four portions. Durwell poured honey upon these, then took a knife and cut slices from a round, crisp-crusted pone of corn bread. He brought out spoons, and they carried the bowls out into the open mill shed and gave Schneider a helping. All ate with good appetite, laughing and chattering together. When they had finished, Celia carried the bowls and spoons to the dam and knelt to wash them in the bright waters that raced to turn the wheel. Durwell watched her, smiling.

  “Soothly, Mark, young Celia Vesper hath the makings of a good housewife,” he commented. “Are you not asking yourself if she might be a sweet mistress in a house of your own?”

  “Nay, sir, I’ve not thought of such matters,” said Mark, leaning against the post as before and studying his rifle fixedly.

  Durwell’s eyes twinkled shrewdly at him. “You dissemble,” he accused good-humoredly. “Dissemble me no dissembles, Mark. You’ve thought of little else for many a day, or I don’t read young minds. I’ve called you a lad, but you’re growing into a man, and a brave frontier hunter at that. And if you don’t cast warm eyes at Celia, she casts them at you.”

  “We dwell in my parents’ house, like brother and sister,” said Mark, feeling his face grow red
. “I do like Celia well, and doubtless she knows it. But beyond that I’ve not spoken to her.” He drew himself up, trying to be dignified. “Such matters take a long and serious time of thinking.”

  Durwell’s hand clapped Mark’s shoulder. “Don’t think about them while the years pass by,” he advised, seriously now. “That was my policy, to think and to think. And ere I knew it, I’d grown from a young man like you into an old bachelor, crusty and grave. It was too late for any lass to look at me then.” “My thanks for your advice,” began Mark, “but until—”

  He broke off, for Celia was returning. She walked past them and in at the door to put the bowls and spoons away.

  “I haf finished grinding your meal,” Schneider announced, and went to lower the water gate, then came back and bent over the basket to scoop out the miller’s share. “Now, Mark, I help you put it in the sack.” Then he straightened. “But look—vot ails Wessah?”

  The big cat was hurrying toward them around the side of the building. He ran faster than Mark thought a cat could run. He hurled himself upon the platform like a furry missile. Schneider dropped to one knee and scooped him up.

  “Wessah, vas ist?” he demanded. “Vot frighted you?”

  A rifle shot sounded from the scrub down by the river, and a bullet tore a chip from the post just above Mark’s head.

  CHAPTER IX

  Besieged

  Both mark and Durwell spun around where they stood and made for the door, but Schneider, for all his usual clumsiness, moved far more quickly than either of them. He fairly flew across the planks, clutching Wessah frantically to him, and flung himself inside. Durwell sprang in just behind him, and Mark followed Durwell.

  Outside, a ragged volley of shots crackled in the sunny air, and shrill, wild whoops rose on all sides.

  Mark caught the door, slammed it shut, and swung the heavy bar into place across it. He put his eye to the loophole. Across that open porchlike space where the grinding was done, he saw the dam, the water gate, and the road to eastward. But there was no movement anywhere. Behind him he heard the flat noise of shutters being closed and secured.

  “Into our sleeping chamber with you, Mark,” Durwell snapped at him. “There’s a window there, looking northward up the ridge. Be ready to fight them off.”

  Mark crossed the room with leaping strides. Celia stood by the table, the sheaf of spoons still clutched in her hand. She looked at Mark with wide, terrified eyes. Durwell was grabbing his rifle from where it lay balanced across the antlers.

  The bedroom was small and square, not much larger than the addition to the Jarrett house that Mark had just finished building. It held two bunklike beds, a big old wooden chest with brass hinges and lock, and into the walls were driven pegs on which hung clothes. Mark sprang to the window and dragged the shutter across to close it. As he did so, more shots rang out and he heard the bullets slap murderously into the planks of the shutter, flat and hard as the blows of war hatchets. Sliding the bar across the shutter, he looked through the loophole.

  Smoke still quivered among the trees up slope, where a lacework of vines hung from one trunk to another. Mark sighted with his rifle just below that wisp of smoke, and waited. He thought he saw a movement of bronze skin, and touched the trigger. His own rifle spoke, and back came a yell. He heard Bolly’s hoofs stamping outside, and she whinnied in startled fear.

  “I think I’ve taken one down,” Mark said in grim triumph, as he made haste to measure another charge of powder and ram it down, with a fresh bullet.

  “More power to your eye and hand,” growled Durwell through the open door to the front room. “We can see nothing from here. The woods close at hand to east and west are too open for them to crawl close to us.”

  Mark spared a glance around the room where he took his stand. At its eastern side, where a wall divided it from the open milling shed, a chink showed between the logs. That would make a good natural loophole, for observing in that direction or for firing at an enemy.

  “Get that British gun of yours, Bram,” Durwell was saying. “With that, we’ll have four long guns among us, beside my big pistols. Celia, can you load for us if we’re hard pressed to stand off a charge of these savages?”

  “I can load a gun, Mr. Durwell, and fire one if need be,” Celia replied, and her voice did not shake.

  “She speaks truth,” Mark assured Durwell. “I have given her practice at shooting. At fairly close range, she can drill the cross on the target.”

  Schneider bustled into the sleeping room and squatted down to rummage under one of the beds. He fetched out a musket, old and well kept.

  “I carried it ven I vos a Hessian soldier,” he said to Mark, and put his hand under the bed for something else. It was a long bayonet, and this he fixed to the musket’s muzzle.

  “Brown Bess, the redcoats called their guns,” Durwell said from the other room. “I know not why that name. We reaped a harvest of them after the Cowpens, when we drove Tarleton’s men like cattle before us.”

  Mark returned to the loopholed window and studied the outdoors north of the mill. Trees grew there, belt after belt of them, up the rocky steep of Jarrett’s ridge beyond his range of vision. Among the trees grew tufts of weeds, clumps of shrubbery, some of it fairly close to the mill. Mark judged that a stealthy, woodswise Indian brave might approach within a dozen yards of his loophole without being seen.

  In his mind, Mark pondered the plan of the whole mill building. He knew it well, for he had done his part in making it. Perhaps half of it was as yet unwalled, with only a broad-eaved shingled roof held up with posts, to contain the mechanism of the mill and several sacks and barrels of corn. The other half, here at the westward side, was divided for living quarters into the main room at the south, with a door opening upon the decklike floor of the open part and windows to west and south. This smaller sleeping room, where Mark now was stationed, had only the window to the north and the chink between the logs at the west.

  In short, this place was a fortress, with massive walls that could turn bullets even at close range, and loopholes to command the ground in all four directions. Even should those beleaguering Indians be able to muster numbers enough to surround the mill and assail it at pointblank range, they would have bloody trouble opposing the guns of a determined garrison.

  He listened, holding his breath. Outside was no sound at all, save more stamping of Bolly’s hoofs. He glanced over his shoulder into the other room. There he saw Durwell at the loophole of the shutter that covered the south window.

  “I see nobody stirring out here,” Durwell announced. “Who is looking to westward?”

  “I am looking,” said Celia. “No movement this way, either.”

  “Nobody shows to the east,” Schneider added in his turn.

  “Do you see aught, Mark?” prompted Durwell.

  “Not a sound or motion on the slope at our north,” replied Mark, gazing out again. “Yet the woods here may be full of them.”

  “Hark you all,” said Durwell authoritatively. “Mark’s horse is tied just outside, within a step of the door. One of us must mount and ride to the tavern with the news.” He gazed around. “Bram,” he said, “if you will—”

  “Nein, nein,” spluttered the German frantically. “Not for gold or silver do I put mein face from our door out.”

  “Then I will ride,” volunteered Celia boldly.

  “That you shall never do,” Mark said quickly. “You must bide here, under safe cover.”

  “But someone must go,” Celia insisted.

  “Not you, Celia. I forbid it.”

  “Good lack, he speaks as though he means it,” commented Durwell gruffly. “If she must stay, Mark, I make no doubt but that you will stay here, too, and protect her from danger.”

  “You read me truly,” Mark answered. “I stay with Celia, and do you go, sir. Bolly will carry you like a wind.”

  Durwell frowned protestingly. “What, am I to run off and leave the three of you against this savage ho
st?”

  “You yourself have said that the alarm must be carried,” said Mark. “To my mind, he who will ride with the warning is as bold and true as he who stays within these walls to fight.”

  “And Mark is right, Mr. Durwell,” seconded Celia. “Come, arm yourself and try to get away. God protect you.”

  Durwell frowned at them all in turn. His face was creased into lines as hard as furrows cut in frozen ground. Mark offered him his rifle.

  “Nay, I shall take no weapons,” Durwell decided. “No firearms, in any case, only a knife and a tomahawk. I won’t be able to shoot if I ride fast. Hark you all, I leave Mark here in charge, as captain of this fort.”

  “Goot,” approved Schneider, back at the westward loophole.

  “There is my rifle and that other one taken from Moxley, and my two horse pistols,” went on Durwell. “Those pistols are loaded, each with three balls, and they would bring down a buffalo at close quarters. Schneider hath his Brown Bess and Mark his own good, proper gun, and that makes six shot in all for you to check them with. Celia speaks bravely when she says she will fire if need be. I cannot think how my mill can be left in safer hands to hold it.”

  “We’ll hold the mill,” promised Mark. “Here, Celia, watch at this lookout in the sleeping room. Mr. Durwell, make ready for your dash.”

  He came into the main room, his rifle ever ready in his hands. Durwell stuck a tomahawk into his belt and drew his big hunting knife.

  “Stand at the door, Mark, and be ready to lift the bar and let me out,” Durwell said.

  He stared through the loophole there a last time, stepped clear and poised himself tensely. “Now,” he said.

  Mark threw up the bar and snatched the door inward. “Good luck,” he said, as he did so.

  “And God prosper you!”

  Durwell sprang out to where Bolly was tied. A slash of his knife severed the halter rope, and he threw himself upon her back. Yells rent the air, a rifle banged and an arrow hissed like a snake, but neither Durwell nor Bolly seemed to be struck. Still at the open doorway, Mark saw the miller drive his heels hard against Bolly’s brown sides, and she leaped into the air, then sped away and along the road at an instant gallop.