The Highwayman

by F. M. Parker

  Each time he looked at the dancers, he noted the woman’s expression had softened ever more. She was caught up in the music, moving easily within the highwayman’s hands, in perfect unison with his steps, spinning gracefully to his lead, and always with the long sweeping tail of her dress making a fluttering sound like a bird’s wings in flight.

  She no longer looked away from Thorne, but into his black eyes showing above the neckerchief hiding the remainder of his face. Her lips were parted in a smile of pleasure in the music and the physical movements of the dance. Was it just the dance? Or was the woman falling captive to the strong maleness of Thorne? Patrick believed that Thorne could kiss the woman at this moment and she would not draw away.

  Patrick checked the husband. The man was observing the same thing about his wife as Patrick did, and clearly didn’t like it.

  The metal drum within the music box ceased to spin and the last strain of music sounded and died in the nearby woods. Silence fell upon the road. The dancers stopped. A handful of seconds passed with the woman remaining within Thorne’s arms, one hand upon his shoulder and one clasped within one of his. Then she jerked as if awakening from a trance and her eyes flashed around at her surroundings. She pulled free of Thorne and hastened to stand beside her husband.

  “So very short,” Thorne said sadly to nobody. Yet everybody heard the words.

  He pulled his pistols and spoke to Patrick. “Give her back the money for she has kept her part of the bargain.”

  Patrick handed the money to the woman. He didn’t feel badly that part of the money could have been his for he had learned another characteristic of what made a woman a woman. That was important for the future. He again drew his weapons and watched the passengers.

  “Move the log out of the road,” Thorne ordered the guard and driver.

  With this task quickly accomplished, Thorne directed the passengers back into the coach and the driver and guard up into the front box.

  The driver took up the reins of the horses and looked down at Thorne for instructions. Thorne nodded. The driver called to his teams and tapped their rumps with the reins. The coach began to move.

  Patrick lowered his pistols. The robbery was finished and he felt immense relief. He turned to Thorne.

  His comrade’s interest was on the window of the coach where the woman was visible. Thorne and the woman’s eyes met and locked. Patrick noted again that much could be said between a man and a woman with just a look.

  He saw Thorne abruptly spin toward the coach and look up at the guard in the driver’s box. The guard had brought a musket up from the depths of the box and was settling it on his shoulder. Thorne jerked up his pistols and fired into the center of the guard’s forehead. The bullet shattered the skull and plowed through the soft gray brain matter and burst out the back of the head.

  At the strike of Thorne’s bullet, the guard’s fingers convulsed on the trigger of the musket and it fired. A .50 caliber lead ball erupted from the barrel and slashed through the side of Thorne’s neck. The powerful blow drove him down flat on his back on the dirt of the road.

  The stagecoach horses, frightened by the crash of gunshots, bolted away. The driver lashed the animals with his whip and added speed to their flying hooves.

  Patrick leapt to Thorne and knelt by his side. “Oh hell! No! No!” he cried out at the sight of the horrible gaping wound in the side of Thorne’s neck. From the center of the wound, a slender geyser of bright red blood spurting out some half a foot with each beat of Thorne’s heart.

  “How bad is it?” Thorne asked and looking up with pain filled eyes at Patrick.

  Without waiting for an answer, Thorne raised his hand and ran his fingers across the wound. The hand became motionless when it was struck by the jet of pulsing blood.

  “The bullet has nicked my jugular. I’ll be dead in a couple of minutes for there’s no way to stop the bleeding.” His voice was calm.

  His bloody hand caught the front of Patrick’s coat. “Lad, don’t let the law have my body for they’ll lay it out for people to gawk at. That must not happen. There has to be dignity in death for that is the ultimate point of life. Bury me in some secret place deep in the woods. Give me your word.”

  “You have my word.” Patrick’s throat was so constricted with anguish that he could hardly speak.

  “Help me up for I don’t want to die lying in the dirt. Take me over there by that boulder.”

  Patrick took hold of Thorne with a firm grip and hoisted him to his feet. With Patrick’s strong arms assisting, Thorne, trembling from the shock of his injury, shuffled off the road. Reaching the boulder where he had sat and warmed himself in the sun, he sank down to sit on the leaf covered ground. He leaned weakly back against the boulder. The plumes of spurting blood from his jugular now fell upon the shoulder of his coat and was rapidly turning the cloth bright red.

  “We have only a little time left and there’s something I must do. Bring me paper and pencil. Hurry.”

  Patrick hastened to his horse and opened one of the saddle bags. The only paper he had was the map. He drew it out together with a stub of a pencil that he used to record the observations of things he saw along the roads that could be useful to use as guides.

  Thorne wiped his bloody hand on his trouser and accepted the map. He rested the paper on his knee and began to write with a shaking hand.

  Patrick squatted beside Thorne and read as he wrote.

  Dear Evangeline

  I’ve been shot this day and am dying. I can’t be buried as Thorne in a regular cemetery for I fear that would put you and Patrick in danger from the law. So Patrick will bury me as Claude Duvall, my true name. He will choose my burial place, a secret place. All I own is yours except for the two horses which I give to Patrick. He will deliver this together with additional money that we have acquired this day.

  Love, Jason.

  “Give Evangeline my share of what we took today,” Thorne said as he handed the map to Patrick. “Keep an extra five hundred pounds that I spent of yours for the dance.” The faint trace of a smile came and fled.

  “I promise.” Patrick’s throat was so constricted with his sorrow that he could barely speak. At this moment, he hated the whole goddamned world for now he was losing Thorne, after losing Alice and Ben.

  “The farm fits your occupation so continue to live there until the lease expires in about four years. However I advise you to stop riding the highways and buy a ship and go to sea as soon as possible. Now find a hidden place for my burial.”

  “I’ll surely do that.”

  Thorne’s voice came as a whisper. “Then I’m ready to leave this dream and enter the final one. Now prop me up so I can see the sky. And so death can find me for it likes a shining mark.”

  Patrick straightened the man’s sagging body. Thorne leaned his head back against the stone and looked up at the clear, blue sky where a pair of gray hawks soared.

  Thorne’s powerful heart continued to beat with the plumes of blood from the torn jugular growing ever weaker. The plumes subsided to but a bubbling deep in the bottom of the wound. Then that too ceased.

  CHAPTER 17

  Patrick rose from Thorne’s body and hastily checked the road for travelers or a horse patrol. Seeing neither, he collected the weapons and strongbox from the ground and carried all into the forest to the tethered horses. He returned with Thorne’s mount and hoisted the man’s limp body up and laid it across the saddle and tied it there for the coming journey. He led the horse back to his own.

  The contents of the strongbox and the pistols went into the saddlebags. The empty strongbox and the shotgun were hid under a covering of leaves.

  Patrick swung astride and leading Thorne’s horse struck off into the forest. He would find a proper burial place for his friend.

  He rode ever deeper into the clean, silent forest, passing among the large oaks, poplar, and hickory with their spreading limbs holding everything beneath in shadow. After a time, he heard the ripple of runn
ing water, and cresting a brow of a hill, saw a stream winding through the forest. He reined his horse upstream along the creek toward higher, rougher country.

  Minutes later, he came upon an area where the wind had uprooted an acre or so of the big trees and they lay side by side like fallen soldiers. During life, the trees had sent massive roots burrowing into the earth, and then upon being toppled, the tangled spread of roots of each tree had wrested free large amounts of dirt, and so had left behind a crater in the ground. Patrick had found the perfect burial place for his friend.

  He selected the largest of the craters, one nearly as deep as he was tall, and gently laid Thorne’s body in the bottom. He couldn’t bring himself to throw dirt upon his friend, so he first covered the body with newly fallen leaves. He paid special attention to the familiar face, carefully shrouding it with the large leaves from a young poplar growing close by. Using a stout, sharp stick and kicking with his boots, he removed a sufficient amount of dirt from the roots to deeply cover the body. To insure no animal would burrow down and desecrate the grave, he carried slabs of rock and clad it with stone. He hid this obvious work of man by covering the rocks with dirt. Patrick surveyed the small, young trees that had sprung to life in the forest opening since the blow-down. The closer ones would thread their roots through Thorne’s bones and take nourishment from them. Patrick believed Thorne would approve of that.

  Patrick knelt beside the grave. He repeated out loud one of Thorne’s poems. “We are a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Our lives are as dreams. That is the only truth on earth.” Patrick thought about Thorne’s words. “My friend, I hope there is more to life than a short dream.”

  The gray horse nickered and Patrick came out of his sad reverie. It was time to be traveling. “Goodbye, Thorne, my friend. I’ll miss you.”

  As he rode through the still forest toward the farm, a vast clarity came to him. He didn’t want to be dead for no one would mourn him. No, it was a grand thing to be alive and he would treasure that to the fullest.

  He emerged from the forest onto a well traveled road. Hoping not to meet a horse patrol that might question his possession of an extra horse and check his stuffed saddlebags, he increased the pace to a fast gallop.

  *

  Evangeline clutched Patrick to her as she sobbed. He held her gently in his arms, and they stood thus and sharing their loss and comforting each other.

  They were in Evangeline’s home not far from the theatre. Upon reaching London, Patrick had ridden to the theatre to deliver Thorne’s message. Not finding her there, he had sought out the stage manager who had directed him to her home.

  After a time, he withdrew his embrace and stepped away from the weeping woman. He was tired of sorrow and feared Evangeline would go on talking about Thorne and cry some more and he wouldn’t know what to do to lessen her grief. He needed to be doing something to get his mind off the death of Thorne. He knew what that should be.

  At Patrick’s move away from Evangeline, she put teary eyes questioningly on him. She recognized his desire to leave.

  “Stay, dear Patrick, for I don’t want to be alone.”

  “There’s something I have to do in Derbyshire,” he said.

  “In Derbyshire? What’s there?”

  “A man I have to see.”

  “Can’t it wait for a little while?”

  “No.”

  “Well at least promise that you’ll come see me when you return.”

  “All right. That should be in a week or so.”

  “That’s a very long time.”

  “Not as long as the time I’ve been waiting to do this.”

  “Then I’ll say goodbye and not delay you any longer.”

  “Goodbye.” He left Evangeline crying again, but seven thousand pounds richer.

  *

  In front of the house, Patrick swung astride the gray horse and set it on the road west toward Derbyshire. This journey had been planned many times and now it had begun. He hurried with the sun falling into its nighttime hiding place behind the rim of the earth, and the stars rising up the black eastern sky behind him. His mood was black, savage. The dogs of the houses along the road sensed the violence in the passing rider, and did not come out to harass the passing traveler as they usually did, but were hushed and remained in their yards.

  At midnight, he dismounted and sat on the side of the road and allowed the horse to rest. Steam rose up in silver tendrils from the animal’s sweating body. Before the horse cooled too much and too fast in the chilly November night, he remounted and rode with the stars falling down the black sky ahead of him.

  *

  Patrick arrived in Derbyshire in the late afternoon. The journey that had taken him five days of walking, always hungry and sleeping on the ground beside the road at night, took him but two days. He continued directly across town to the weaving mill where he had labored as a boy before escaping.

  He rapped on the door. There was no response. He tried the latch and found the door locked on the inside. He kicked the door, making it jump and rattle noisily on its hinges.

  The door swung open, and the foreman, the same ugly bastard Patrick knew so well, stood in the opening. His hand held the door ready to slam shut.

  The foreman glared angrily at Patrick. “What do you want?” he growled.

  Patrick looked past the man and into the mill. Nothing had changed from his days there. The same long rows of clattering, clanking machines were present. A small slave boy of another generation crouched sagging with weariness on a low stool at the base of each machine. The lads’ arms were swinging, always swinging as they fed thread to the hungry mouths of the Billy-bobbins.

  The air was hazy with a fog of cotton dust. Patrick felt the dust particles in his nostrils, smelled them as of old times. His sight went upward and found the long wooden beams bridging the machines. He knew the exact beam upon which the foreman had hung him naked by the wrists. Bile rose into his throat as memory of that time, and the wrenching pain he had endured welled up fresh and terrible. His anger surged and he let it burn brightly, awakening the devil half of him to do what must be done to make things right.

  “What in the hell do you want,” demanded the foreman harshly.

  Patrick focused on the man, the cruel eyes, the long ape-like arms, the boney hands that had struck him. One hand held a leather strap that could be the very same strap that had cut Patrick’s flesh.

  “I wanted to see the inside of one of these mills where boys are used as slaves.”

  “Get the hell out,” the foreman commanded belligerently. He reached to shove Patrick backward.

  Patrick slapped the hand aside. “Don’t touch me for I’ll knock your Goddamn head off.” Patrick had absolutely no fear of the man. He wasn’t a six year old boy anymore. Life had hardened him, toughened him during these last ten years. He rejoiced in his strength.

  The foreman’s face reddened with anger. He drew back a fist.

  Patrick moved a step closer and laughed at the man, daring him to strike. Wanting him to strike so that he could break is face, hammer out his teeth, and gouge out his eyes. Oh God, please try to hit me, you bastard.

  The foreman saw Patrick’s hate barely contained from erupting into violence. He seemed to shrink into himself with his fierce expression crumpling and his hand falling to his side.

  “What’s the matter, you sonofabitch? You’re only brave enough to hit small boys?”

  The foreman said nothing. Patrick wheeled about and went onto the street.

  *

  Patrick stabled his horse at a blacksmith shop with a livery stable attached and located not far from the weaving mill. He then walked to a hardware store and made a purchase which he brought back and stowed in his saddle bags.

  He ate leisurely at a restaurant and watched the people and vehicles pass by on the street. Finishing the meal, he wiled away the rest of the day wandering the streets that he knew so well. At dusk he returned to the mill and waited i
n the shadows across the street from it.

  The work at the mill ended and the foreman came out of the building. He glanced nervously both ways along the street and then moved off with a hurried step toward the center of town.

  Patrick crossed the street and fell in behind the foreman. With long strides, and looking forward to what was to come, he swiftly overtook the man.

  “Keep walking,” Patrick ordered as he jammed a pistol against the man’s spine.

  The foreman jerked with sudden alarm. He twisted his head and looked over his shoulder. “It’s you.” The man’s voice held fear.

  “Yeah. Me. If you make a sound of try to run, I’ll sure as hell blow your backbone apart.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Just a private little talk with you.”

  They came to the blacksmith shop and livery. Patrick shoved the foreman into the dark interior. The man caught his balance and whirled and swung a fist at Patrick.

  The blow missed Patrick for he had held back a ways expecting the action. He stepped forward and whacked the foreman across the side of the head with the iron barrel of his pistol. The foreman groaned and fell heavily.

  Patrick lit the lantern that he had spotted earlier when stabling his horse. Grabbing the man by the feet, he dragged him deeper into the shop and under a rope with a set of pulleys secured to an overhead beam. The rope and pulley combination was used by the smith to hoist up the end of a wagon or buggy to repair or replace a wheel.

  Patrick bound the foreman’s wrists with the rope and hoisted him into the air until his feet cleared the ground. He removed from his saddlebags the two five pound weights with screw clamps that he had purchased. One of the weights was fastened onto each ear of the foreman. Patrick stripped the man naked. Searching the smithy, he found a piece of paper and wrote, “This man has been punished for beating the slave boys in the weaving mill.” He tied the note to one of the man’s ankles.