She saw me gathering breath to deny that, and shushed me with an upraised hand. “Don’t misunderstand me. Meek bragged plain as nothing why they hadn’t killed me. He also bragged of what he wanted from me every night until we sighted Fort Pitt. But I’m not one of his tavern sluts or Redskin dalliances. I’m a Ferrenden. He would’ve had to kill me to so much as spit on me. And he knew my paw wouldn’t pay ransom for me unless he saw me alive.” She smiled. “And my paw would’ve had him hung for the asking.”
Her pleasure was fleeting. She sighed and her shoulders slumped. “So one miserable month or less with Meek and his Injun watchdog would’ve seen me home safely.” Teeth bit her lower lip, another sigh. “But that’s water past the tiller. Now I’m stranded in the wilderness with a wounded man whose companion lies crippled half a day somewhere else. And our pemmican and chocolate and rum won’t last until you can stand on your own. Even if we patched the hole in the canoe, with that wound you’re no good for paddling but downstream, right back into the lap of the Shawnee. And what about your Lem? You wouldn’t leave him behind for me anyways, would you?”
She paused for the biggest sigh yet. Her chin trembled, and she quickly lifted her face toward the open sky mantling the creek. A streak of faint red marked her throat. “I’m sorry, Blaine Tyler. Don’t worry. I won’t start in crying an’ wailing like those powdered sillies who frequent my father’s bedchamber. Damned if I will!”
Her head swept down and moist eyes blazed above dry cheekbones. “Forgive me. I won’t become what I can’t tolerate. An’ I’m forgetting Tice Wentsell, aren’t I? If he’s chasing Sarah with Brother Blake, he has some scheme for escaping this godforsaken forest, doesn’t he?”
She sailed the proper tack. The closest settlement to our camp was Limestone, ninety rough miles southwest. And the one soul who could lead us there with the least risk of discovery by the Shawnee was Tice Wentsell. If we missed the rendezvous with him, Lem and I were on our own, two men hampered by bodily hurts who could no more protect the woman they were supposed to rescue than they could whistle up a boar bear with piss-elm clubs. Which made it shameful what I was about to ask of her. But her fate was at stake as much as ours.
“Lem an’ me was ta rendezvous with Wentsell tomorrow on the Scioto.”
Her eyes flew to the holed canoe. I was alert for the welling of tears, and jabbed a bent finger at her. Lord, she was close to breaking. “Don’t be hasty and toss your bones on the slop pile just yet, missy. I’m not the brute Meek was. Hear me out. I’ll not tease yuh with false promises or frighten yuh for mean purposes. My paw taught me better.”
She tightened the arms holding her knees. “All right,” she agreed, “but you lie to me, I’ll shoot you while you sleep.”
I overlooked the heated retort and told her, “Wentsell will wait three days past tomorrow. That’s what he said an’ that’s what we can count on. Yuh reckon it out. We can’t make the river afoot by then, but if’n we bring Lem here, I believe we can reach the Scioto in time.”
“How so?”
“Lem’s patched countless canoes. With him an’ me weightin’ the stern the stern an’ you in the bow, ridin’ the down stream current we’ll sight the Scioto in no more’n half a day once we push off. Meek an’ Stick Injun did it upstream in that time. An’ Lem’s totin enough meal ta last a week. Yuh just have ta go an’ fetch him. What yuh say?”
She glanced at the towering trees ringing the camp, and doubt wrinkled her brow. “I don’t believe I can find him.” There was no secret to what unsettled her. North and west of the River Ohio no beaten traces, fence rows or towns big and small mapped your line of travel. In the vast woodland where the Shawnee dwelled, for the unknowing and uninitiated every rock, tree and hillside had a sameness both frightening and overpowering. Away from the larger bodies of water, the inexperienced traveler sought guides who had traversed the country before. Other than rare birds like Wentsell, Boone and Simon Kenton, even experienced long hunters and rangers carried a compass or sun dial, prefening the compass since it could be read by firelight and outshone the sun dial when the forest’s unbroken leaf canopy darkened the ground for miles.
Without guide or compass, you relied on your wits and memory. Crossing from Chimney Rock to Salt Creek, I’d studied my back trail at every high point to acquaint myself with what I would see on the return trip. I could describe in detail what landmarks Hannah Ferrenden need look for —and thus walk straight to where Lem waited. That is, if I could convince the woman who’d braved Shawnee ball, arrow and tomahawk she need not fear being alone among the tall trees.
But now wasn’t the time to push such a foreboding challenge at her. “You can find him,” I assured her. “I’ll talk yuh through it ever’ step in the mornin’. It’s past noon, too late for you ta traipse there and back afore dark today gimpy as Lem be.”
Her whole body eased. “Good! I’m no friend of deep woods or the dark,” she confessed. “I been lost.”
“We’ll not let that happen again. An’ Lem’ll be much pleased ta see anyone who can get him on his feet.”
“How big’s Lem? He can’t be big as you. I like to never freed you of your breeches and leggins. There’s nothing small about you anywhere.”
She couldn’t miss the blush warming my ears. The mischievous gleam brightening her eyes prickled skin under my blanket. She was something entirely new for me to treat with. My total experience with women amounted to a night of Limestone wenching with Blake and the recent tryst with Loraleen at the Oldham place. My days were of plantation chores, stock tending, the family table and manly palaver in the sleeping cabin, not Lighthearted banter with young women of high breeding schooled enough they smelled the cow manure betwixt my toes. Before red covered my nose, I asked, “Where are my breeches and leggins?”
She wet her lips, teased me with a bold wink and hitched to her feet. “They’re drying on bushes in the sun. Guess I better hand them over. I wouldn’t want you to freeze on a summer night.”
Laughing merrily, she looped Meek’s horn and pouch over her shoulder, seized his musket and sauntered from the hackberries, turning downstream along the high bank. The practiced movements with which she armed herself and slanted the musket in the crook of her arm confirmed that, fear or no fear of Ohio’s unending forest, Hannah Ferrenden probably shot better than some, maybe most, men. I snorted aloud. She damn well shot good enough to hit a man asleep in his blankets every time.
She reappeared with my frock, leggins and breeches adorning her shoulders. In the hand not holding the musket, she clutched my moccasins. She leaned Meek’s weapon against the large hackberry, spread frock and leggins on the hull of the canoe within my reach and dropped the moccasins at my feet. Stepping backward, she held forth my breeches, separate halves in each fist. “Like I said, I couldn’t get them off, not until I sawed them in two with the Injun’s knife. Lucky I didn’t nick you, huh.”
Or geld me, I marveled silently. Those breeches had never fit me loose. I rolled my eyes at the thought of her sawing from front flap to rear waistband with that wide blade in the driving rain or, Lord forbid, in the dim light of the storm beneath the canoe.
Hannah Ferrenden’s thinking was in stride with mine. Her face were lively enough for three people. “It was right delicate cutting, but Paw credits me with a steady wrist,” she bragged. “An’ you’ll not paddle bare. I can thread the awl with your Sarah, just you watch.”
Not given to exaggeration or delay, she secured the awl from my shot pouch, along with stringy leather thongs, and sewed at the fire, the tip of her tongue caught in the corner of her mouth. Hunched over her sewing, she seemed with her freshly cropped hair more young boy than full-blown woman. She double-stitched from rear waistband to front flap, then doubled back with a single overlay. Tying the end knot twice, she folded the repaired breeches over a forearm, picked up her bathing pot and Stick Injun’s sheathed knife and knelt near my head on both knees.
The pot beside her hip, she unfolded t
he breeches for my approval. While the seam puckered tight as walnut bark everywhere, her hatching was uneven and stitching over done. Wearing them would be as mean as walking with a rope between my legs, but then a body couldn’t be genuinely fussy when he lacked pants in the middle of Shawnee country. Facing Lem, and eventually Blake and Wentsell, in a blanket breechclout and explaining how I’d lost my breeches overnight in the company of an attractive female out of the sight of everyone appealed to me not at all. And at that very moment the expectant uplift of Hannah Ferrenden’s brow argued against rendering any unkind opinions as to her sewing. For what purposes she’d come with knife and pot in tow, I knew not. It didn’t take a man wise beyond his measure to discern that, with her fiery temperament, a single wrong word might result in your being stabbed or drenched with frightful suddenness.
“Well?” she prodded.
“Couldn’t have done better my ownself,” I spouted, then hurriedly added, “Lem can help me into them tomorrow.”
Her eyes fairly danced. “Suits me,” she said, slinging the breeches atop my leggins. “I only pray for his sake the goin’ on is less tiresome than the coming off.”
Whatever relief I enjoyed from skirting that potentially touchy situation was tempered by her unsheathing of Stick Injun’s knife. She pulled a white stone from the pocket of her breeches and drew the edge of the blade across it, first in one direction, then the other, sharpening and honing. Knowing she would in her own sweet time tell me what she had in mind, I watched without comment as she tested the blade’s sharpness on the pad of her thumb.
Dunking the knife to the haft in her bathing pot, she clasped my chin and aligned my face with her own. “You’re not one to grow a beard, and I’ve shaved my father for years when the ague beset him. Just stay still so I don’t draw blood.”
I swallowed my budding protest. Sore cheeks weren’t too great an ordeal after being shot, not if such a simple chore pleased her and, more importantly, distracted her thinking a while longer from tomorrow’s search for Lem.
She tilted my head, positioned the knife below my cheekbone and scraped downward. Cleaning the blade with a flick of the wrist, she wet it before each stroke and shaved with sure, even passes, the knife following the angles of my face. The more stubble she removed, she more she chattered. “My, what have we uncovered, oh, fluttering heart. How the barnyard dollies must swoon when you come a-riding with square jaw and gray eyes warm and cold all at once. Sun melting ice, that’s you, ain’t it, Blaine Tyler?” she queried, flat of her blade tapping my chin.
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” I answered with all the conviction I could muster.
Her face sobered and she read mine with slow care. “No, you wouldn’t,” she decided. “I suspect your tree-the-devil brother might, but not you.”
She rubbed fingers where she’d shaved, then pressured my windpipe with the point of the knife. She had my undivided attention for her next words. “You might be different than the others, Blaine Tyler. I believe you might be best friends with the truth. I’ve never said that before about any man, not even Father.”
With a so-there nod, she withdrew the knife and went off to empty her pot. The woman had her own way, she did, of insuring her sentiments weren’t ignored when she voiced them, just like Wentsell with his cross-eyed stare and Blake with his steely look. And like them, with her passion for the straight of things, Hannah Ferrenden would always shirk the middle ground: She’d either be the finest of friends or the worst of enemies, and the Lord help those indifferent to her wishes.
I ran a palm over the places that burned, and turned no trace of bleeding. She indeed had a steady wrist, a notch or two up on how Blake and I usually fared with the strop razor at the plantation. Lem, of course, spurned shaving with the vehemence he shunned monthly washing.
I was tiring and lay with eyes closed, listening. In late afternoon with the sun far past the treetops west of the Salt, the air was cooling rapidly. The rain-swollen creek, running deep and brown instead of green, bumbled beyond the high bank. Claw-toed feet scratched leaves in the shade behind the canoe. High overhead, a hawk shrieked, perhaps at smaller birds tormenting him. During such peaceful interludes in the Ohio woods, the hunter had to constantly remind himself that the danger of two-legged and four-legged enemies sneaking down on him never excused itself. Unwariness was the deadliest sin of the woodsman. We had camped in broad daylight with an open fire on a stream traveled by Injuns, and had not bothered to stand watch. Except for surrendering to the Shawnee and asking for a scalping, hardly anything else imaginable could so shorten your life. And the threat of discovery did not diminish with the coming nightfall. Missy and I had to talk, now.
I heard her footfall before her voice. “I’II set fresh wood on the fire,” she suggested.
I pushed open sleepy eyes. “No, no fire till yuh fetch Lem tomorrow, an’ maybe not then.”
“Why the sudden worry?”
“Nothin’ sudden ’bout it. Wentsell hisself claims night fires has gotten as many Kentuckians killed as bad women, brawls an’ feuds. Sort of like given the hound the game ’thout botherin’ with the chase when yuh tell the Shawnee right where yuh be.”
She settled on her knees. “What else. I know there’s more.” “Redsticks’ll likely be out an’ about now that the weather’s faired up, an’ yuh learned first-hand with Three Feathers they travel at night whenever the whim strikes ’em. We’ll eat supper cold an’ sleep beneath the canoe again.”
“Shouldn’t we keep watch?”
“Naw, once it’s dark an’ we stay quiet an’ don’t show movement, they’d never spot the canoe back here under these trees. An’ I ain’t partial ta bein’ prime bait for the skeeters. ’Thout no rain, they’ll take ta the wing all night.” She thought on what I’d said, studying the high bank and overhanging hackberries, then nodded. “I’ll get our cooking gear an’ the muskets.”
By the time Hannah Ferrenden dug a hole with the Injun knife and buried her ashes to kill fire smell, and we finished a cold pemmican and rum-chocolate supper, night shadow blackened the surrounding woods and we were slapping skeeters. She plugged the bow hole with my wadded frock, laid both the muskets against the grounded gunwale, removed the limbs supporting the canoe and lowered it over us. Wherever feeble light bled through along the hull, she plugged those slight openings with my breeches and moccasins.
Satisfied we would suffer no more than necessary for the duration, she stretched out on the edge of the oilcloth underlaying my blankets, her head at my feet.
I was nearly asleep when her question drifted from past my ankles. “You never said. How big is your Lem?”
I smiled in the dark. “He’s half my size … everywhere.”
Chapter 17
Early Morning, September 17
I heard the Shawnee shortly after first light.
It was the slap of a carelessly stroked paddle on the creek that alerted me, a sound loud enough it carried above the low snoring of the judge’s daughter.
I closed my eyes to better the hearing. One of the water-bound travelers mouthed something short and terse in the Redstick tongue, then laughed in a harsh cackle. His statement drew answering laughter from two—no, three others, making four savages altogether in their unseen craft.
My fingers felt beside me for the stock of my Lancaster before calmer judgment stayed my hand. We couldn’t outfight them, and sure as hounds had tails, we couldn’t outrun them. Either the high bank and shielding hackberries were sufficient cover for our overturned canoe in the dawn of morning, or the Injun intruders—who would scout out any strange vessel sighted in their territory—were about to stumble onto two fresh scalps and an extra long gun for each of themselves.
Their laughter dwindled. A wordy intonation ripe with the iron tone of command rang forth, and my heart skipped. I strained my ears, wishing my female companion would roll over and quiet herself. I wished her no Injun fright. But I was godawful anxious to learn whether the Shawnee we
re continuing on their way or changing course for a landing.
A forcefully drawn paddle thumped a gunwale, then … silence. No scrape of bow at bank’s edge. No soft splash of moccasin in shallow water. No grunt of breath at the top of the bank. Nothing till that commanding voice spoke again, fainter than minutes before, most assuredly further downstream. My heart took up its regular beat. The savages were drawing away, the fast current aiding their brisk work with the paddles.
I stifled the sigh swelling in my throat for fear of rousing Hannah Ferrenden. Once awakened, she would immediately be out and about, perhaps before the Shawnee dropped from view round the creek bend below our camp. Much as I didn’t want them to spy us, I had no call for her to lay eye on them either. Convincing her she should trek after Lem would be easier if she believed she’d only her fear of the forest to reckon with. The known presence of Shawnee warriors anywhere nearabouts might prove the stone that lamed the horse.
When the morning light streaming through the canoe’s holed bow grew no brighter, I gripped her ankle hard. She came awake in a flash, head casting about, muffled explanation parting her full lips. She was something, all right. Though jolted suddenly from deep sleep, she resisted crying out. “What’s the matter?” she whispered.
“Time for us ta get yuh underway. You’ll want all the day there’s left ta fetch Lem afore dark tonight.”
With a slow nod, she twisted about and raised the creek side of the hull, thrusting upward with her shoulder as well as both hands. “Cold breakfast or hot, my man?” she inquired, propping first the bow, then the stem with her forked limbs.
“No fire,” I answered. “Take too long an’ we’ll save our wood for supper with Lem. That meal of his’ll feed us full.”
Laying the elk-skin bag of pemmican at my elbow, she sat the rum jug next to it and said, “Never was one to eat big early. You can help your ownself after I’m gone.” With that she seated herself, and those jeweled eyes pinned me to my blanket. “Now tell me where Lem be and how I get there from here. An’ you better tell it real fine. I’m not wanderin’ hither and yon like some mindless lackey in these damn woods for nobody, not even your best friend. Not even if it saves me from a scalping.”
The Winds of Autumn Page 17
