“Zeb, please, please…put that cat down and quit doing that. You’re making folks here believe you’re downright lunatic, acting like that with that blasted dead critter,” Jedd told him.
McSwain looked sorrowful, sighed, and put the preserved animal aside. “I know. It’s a habit, I guess, something to keep my hands busy, and to keep me in touch with better times from my past.”
“It’s a dead cat, Zeb, that’s what it is. I know it’s Cicero, and I know you cared a lot about that animal. But it remains a dead cat, and you can’t pat and scratch on a dead cat without making folks think you’ve gone out of your head.”
“Do you think I’m out of my head, Jedd?”
“Not really. But I got to admit that watching you with Cicero like that makes me…nervous, I guess. On edge. It ain’t natural.”
McSwain drew in a long, slow breath and resettled himself. He glanced over to where he had just placed the stuffed cat, but he did not reach for it. He gave Jedd a forced smile. “And what is this idea you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Well, Zeb, it’s simple. I’d like you to consider setting up some classes to help some of the folk in this group learn to read. There’s a goodly number who can’t, and you’d be a prime fellow to teach them.”
McSwain said nothing at first but stared out the back of the wagon, thinking hard.
After a while, Jedd asked, “What are you pondering so?”
“Just wondering if I’d be able to do it.”
“You were a professor for years. Even while being president of that college, you were still teaching.”
“Teaching adults who already had the basics of an education. It’s very different, teaching something so basic as reading. You’d probably have better luck rounding up a former schoolmarm or schoolmaster out among the people there.”
“Ain’t got a former schoolmarm or schoolmaster amongst us. Just a former professor and college president.” Jedd paused, then added with a smile, “One who sits around scratching the ears of his dead cat in the back of an emigrant wagon.”
McSwain looked unsettled, fidgeted, then shrugged and laughed. “When you put it that way, it makes me think that maybe there is indeed some way I could better spend my time.”
“Think what you could do for somebody, teaching him to read. He could read all the great books. He could read his Bible. He could read a dictionary or ’cyclopeeder or whatever that word is, and keep on learning more and more. You could give that to folks, Zeb, and you could even do it while you were panning gold most of the time, if you’ve truly got the notion of that.”
McSwain mulled a minute or so more, then glanced toward his luggage and moved as if to dig something out of it. Jedd sat up straighter. “If you’re about to start cat-scratching again, time for me to go.”
McSwain chuckled. “Sit tight. No cat this time.” Then he reached behind a small trunk and pulled out a bottle. He held it up with a smile. “Wine. Good wine. I refused to leave for California without it. I’d like us to have a glass in honor of your brilliant idea.”
“I’d be pleased. Does this mean you’re thinking of…”
“It means I’m saying yes. I may prove to be the least effective reading teacher ever born, but I’ll certainly give it my best try.”
“Obliged to you. Touched, even.”
From elsewhere in the bundles and boxes, McSwain produced a couple of mugs. Jedd worked on the cork in the wine bottle and managed to somehow get it out. They poured and drank, then repeated the process.
Jedd laughed, and McSwain asked him what had amused him.
“Oh,” Jedd answered, “just imagining Ben Scarlett out there somewhere in the camp with his nostrils twitching, knowing that somebody’s hid out somewhere, having some wine without him being there.”
McSwain laughed, too. “Do you suppose Ben can read?”
“Believe it or not, he can. I’ve seen him do it. Stood and read a newspaper once that old storekeeper Baumgardner back in Knoxville had pinned up outside his store, so I know it wasn’t just like a sign he’d memorized. He was reading.”
McSwain sipped from his mug, hesitated, and looked solemn. “I despise asking this, but I just realized I don’t really know if, if you…”
Jedd smiled. “Yes, I can read. And I ain’t offended by the question, for there’s plenty of good folks who can’t. Treemont can just barely work his way through a printed sentence, if it’s simple, and there’s many others who can’t do even that.”
McSwain nodded and raised his mug. “To the rolling Zebulon McSwain Academy of Literacy.”
“Hear, hear!” The men clicked their mugs together and drank. Just then someone stuck his head in the back of the wagon.
“What you gentlemen up to?” asked Ben Scarlett, nostrils moving as he caught the smell of wine.
“Come on in, Ben,” McSwain said. “Let me see if I can find us a third cup.”
Five days later, Jedd Colter awakened to the smell of frying bacon, sat up, and saw Crozier Bellingham kneeling over an iron skillet heated over a well-tended fire. The bacon was in the skillet, and given the way Bellingham was hovering in the smoke, Jedd figured he’d smell like bacon for days.
At the moment the smell of bacon was the finest scent Jedd could have asked for. He climbed out of his bedroll and made his way over to the young journalist-turned-cook. “Fine-smelling meat you got frying there, Crozier.”
“I was counting on the smell of it waking you up,” Bellingham said. “I wanted to be sure you had some of it.”
“Well! What provokes this burst of concern for my well-being?”
“I’m a good man, I guess.”
“Crozier, you ain’t a man at all. You’re a child. A mere child.”
“Bah!”
“Really, though, is there something you need from me?”
“I just wanted to tell you something. Something that happened to me and Ben Scarlett.”
“Ben Scarlett? You running about with him now?”
“I could do worse. He’s got a good soul in him.”
“I know what you mean. So, what happened to you and Ben that I’d need to know about?”
“Remember what you said once about that funnel idea of yours? The ‘narrowing of the funnel,’ I think you said?”
“I remember. Why?”
“I’m beginning to think there’s something to it.”
“I know there is. I’ve seen it happen too many times…people running into one another out here on these western trails and in these western towns. These places where the funnel is narrow. Folks you’d never think would have a chance of running into each other by accident. Funnel them all into one direction, onto one or two routes, and it’s going to happen, though. Can’t help happening. Have you run across somebody you know?”
“Well, not exactly. We did run across somebody, Ben and I, while we were out fishing yesterday—remember that little creek? But we didn’t know him and he didn’t know us. He knew you.”
“Me? Did he ask after me?”
“He did. He asked if we were part of the emigrant train that had come out of Knoxville. I didn’t trust this fellow and was inclined not to answer him, but Ben Scarlett is so kind and trusting toward folks that he just said yes, we were. This fellow, kind of a big, ugly, turtle-mouthed gent with brown hair all curly like it should have been growing down inside his trousers, know what I mean, ’stead of on his head, he grinned big and said he’d heard that an old friend of his, Jedd Colter, was piloting our group. Well, like the first time, I didn’t want to speak, but Ben bobbed his head up and down and said, ‘Yep, Jedd Colter is with us, sure ’nough!’ And it was like a cold wind blew across that man’s face, though he tried to hide it behind a big grin.”
“I’m feeling a bit of a cold wind myself,” Jedd said. “It hit me the moment you described him. Did he say what his name was?”
Bellingham nodded. “You ever heard of a man named Jake Carney?”
Jedd said nothing, just sat unmoving,
staring at the skillet of bacon that no longer held any appeal, and his silence said more than any words he might have spoken.
“I’m sorry, Jedd,” Bellingham said. “We should have kept our mouths shut, not knowing who this man was or what he wanted with you. Though I do want to point out it was Ben, and not I, who gave it all away. But he didn’t mean any harm…. Ben never does. And I still don’t know who this Jake Carney is, or what he wants with you. But I could tell that, whatever it is, it isn’t good.”
Jedd looked woefully at Bellingham. The previously bright morning around and above him suddenly seemed darker, brooding, oppressive. “No, Crozier, it isn’t good. But it didn’t seem to matter much before. I didn’t think I’d ever run across him again, or him me.”
Bellingham smiled bitterly and said, “The narrowing of the funnel, eh?”
Jedd nodded. “The damned funnel.”
A stranger with an odd, backwoods way of talking showed up in camp that night, asking after his old friend Jedd Colter. Jedd was quietly snoring in his blankets at the time, near his dying fire at the edge of camp. The newcomer had ridden close by him without seeing who he was.
Witherspoon Sadler happened to be the man who approached the stranger. What had attracted Witherspoon was the man’s hat, a common-variety flop hat that somehow had a cocky aspect to it that made Withers confident it would nicely set off his buckskin outfit, which he wore mostly when he knew he’d be close to Rachel McCall. He was quite sure she was impressed with the sight of him in his rustic garb—he’d seen her looking quickly away a few times when he’d glanced over at her, and had known she’d been eyeing him on the sneak. What he hadn’t seen was the half-hidden smile of mirth on her face when she turned away from him.
Rachel didn’t dislike Witherspoon; she considered him a kind and gentle man, different and better than many she had known who tried to impress her with their grit and ruggedness. Of course Witherspoon was, in his own mind, trying to appear gritty and rugged, too, but was unknowingly doing it so ineptly that she could only find it funny.
When she was a little girl, Rachel’s only real toy had been a straw-stuffed, furred creature she childishly called Aminal, something her mother had stitched together for her from a couple of old beaver pelts. Exactly what species of beast Aminal was intended to represent had not been evident from its appearance, but to Rachel’s mind it had been a fat, lovable woodchuck. Now Rachel was grown and Aminal was long gone, but when she took an amused glance at Witherspoon Sadler in his unflattering buckskin garb, it was as if her childhood companion had come back, full-sized and transformed into a man. In the privacy of her thoughts, Rachel thought of Witherspoon as Aminal, and prayed constantly that she would never slip up and call him by that name out loud.
“Good evening, sir,” Witherspoon said to the man who had entered their camp. “I’m told you’re asking after someone.”
“I’m looking for Jedd Colter. I hear he’s the guide and pilot for this group?”
“If he is, could I tell him who is calling?”
“An old friend. I’d rather surprise him than give him my name right off, though. He’ll know me when he sees me.”
Witherspoon was a trusting man by nature, but if his more worldly-wise brother had exerted any worthwhile influence upon him, it was in teaching him not to be so ready to assume the best regarding strangers. Witherspoon pondered that he didn’t know this man or what he wanted with Jedd Colter, and his inclination was not to immediately bring the two of them together. Especially in that he knew Jedd was sleeping in anticipation of an upcoming predawn guard shift for the camp. It wouldn’t be right to disturb his rest without at least knowing there was good reason. And that this stranger was not dangerous.
Witherspoon did not give an answer right away, and the stranger gave him an intimidating look…not hard to achieve with the timid Witherspoon.
“Tell you what,” Witherspoon said. “Jedd is sleeping right now because he has to be up for guard duty late in the night, but we’ll go sit nearby so we’ll know when he wakes up.”
“Guess that’ll have to be good enough,” the man said.
“What’s your name, sir?” Witherspoon asked.
“I’m Rand Blalock, from North Carolina. I knew Jedd when he was a boy and I was sheriff in the county he was born in, there in the mountain end of the state.”
“I’d guess he’ll be glad to see you.”
“He will. We go back a long way, Jedd and me.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Jedd dreamed, and in his mind he was back in North Carolina again, rifle in hand, knife in sheath, powder horn and “possibles” bag strapped across shoulder. At his side was his father, alive and strong and just as he had looked in Jedd’s youth. They strode together across a familiar ridge, hunting deer.
In the dream they were not alone. With them was Rand Blalock, the local sheriff, longtime family friend, and frequent hunting companion of the Colters. As usual, Blalock was talking too much and walking too heavily and loudly, annoying his companions. When Jedd’s father would ask him to be a little quieter, Blalock would take obvious offense and reduce his talk to a mumble that made him hard to understand yet still carried farther and more loudly than it should. He had one of those voices.
Then it seemed to Jedd he heard another voice besides Blalock’s, and it wasn’t Treemont’s. Yet it was familiar, but it didn’t belong in a dream of North Carolina.
At length Jedd awakened and sat up. The first thing he noticed was that Sheriff Blalock really, and amazingly, was present, seated on the ground near the smoldering fire that was now reduced to red-glowing coals. And he saw the origin of that second voice: Witherspoon Sadler, seated in a rotund heap nearby Blalock.
Blalock looked much older than the version of himself Jedd had tracked along with through the Carolina woods. Jedd realized that he’d been dreaming about Blalock because he had been hearing the real man’s voice through the veil of sleep. And he’d heard Witherspoon’s voice likewise.
The oddity of the situation hit and he frowned at Blalock. What was he doing here? When had he showed up?
“Howdy, Jedd,” Blalock said. “You’re looking fine. Last I seen you, you was yet a boy.”
Jedd lithely rose from his sleeping place and advanced to Blalock, hand outthrust. “And you’re looking fine, too, Sheriff! Where’d you come from?”
“First off, I’m sheriff no longer and ain’t been for a long time. And I came into your camp tonight because I’d heard you were part of this band of argonauts. I hoped I’d find you, and I have.”
Jedd, shaking off drowsiness very quickly, grinned widely. “Glad you did! You heading to California to get your share of the gold along with nigh every other man in the nation?”
“Not me. Too old for such foolishness.”
“Well, I sure hope California gold ain’t foolishness, for that’s where we’re heading, and gold’s what everybody’s after.”
“No foolishness in it for the young. But it’s not an old man’s venture. Only one thing could take me all the way to California, and it ain’t gold.”
Witherspoon rose, trying his best to spring up as easily and spryly as had Jedd. He staggered and wobbled and might have stepped right into the remnants of the fire had not Blalock grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back.
“Blast!” Witherspoon exclaimed, embarrassed. He looked around quickly and Jedd knew he was making sure Rachel McCall hadn’t been close by to see him playing the stumblebum.
“Just relax, friend,” said Blalock. “Nothing to be nervous about here. You’ll find me an easy kind of man.”
“You’ll find me a clumsy one,” Witherspoon muttered.
“Sheriff, what brought you here if you’re not going to California?” Jedd asked. He knew the “sheriff” designation was not now accurate, but he’d grown up knowing Blalock by his then title, and there would be no way to shake himself of it now.
“I’d come to Knoxville looking for you,” Blalock replied. “T
hat was how I learned you’d gone off with this here group. I followed even though I figured there was little point in it with the head start you folks had on me.”
“Well, us folks have had a lot of delays, too,” Jedd said. “We were under the leadership of General Gordon Lloyd, and he proved to be a very slow-moving, slow-acting fellow. He’s passed on now, sorry to say. But it will probably help us go faster.”
“I heard he’d died. Too bad, that.”
“He was a good man. Just slow. But why were you looking for me in Knoxville? I been gone from there for several years. For that matter, why were you looking for me at all, anywhere?”
“I went to Knoxville because it was the last place I knew you to be. I didn’t know you’d gone off west.”
“Well, I went back when the whole matter of piloting for the Sadler group came up. And I had a private reason to go back, too. But why did you need to find me?”
Blalock’s face, which always had possessed a sorrowful look, in Jedd’s judgment, because of Blalock’s drooping eyes, looked even more sad than usual all at once. Blalock sighed loudly and slowly. “Jedd, I come bearing some sad news.”
Jedd felt a cold dread crawl over him. “What is it, Sheriff?”
Blalock’s eyes shifted quickly. “Jedd, is Treemont Dalton still running with you?”
“He is. He’s part of this very same group.”
Blalock winced. “I’m right glad he ain’t right here with us at the moment, for there’s bad news about his people.”
Jedd swallowed. “Tell me.”
“You remember Tree’s cousin Carver?”
“Surely do. Why?”
“He’s dead, Jedd. Murdered. Flat-out butchered. And not just him, his family, too. Wife, children, all of them.”
“Good God! What happened?”
“It ain’t fully known just what happened because there was no one who saw it. No one left alive, anyway.”
Colter's Path (9781101604830) Page 11
