Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1963

by The South Fork Rangers (v1. 1)

  13 Deevor Plum Talks

  SWIFTLY Zack and his lieutenants gathered around Dee- vor Plum. The little Tory’s round face looked strangely pinched and troubled, and he did not meet any of the glares fixed burningly upon him.

  “Pm a prisoner of war,” he said unhappily. “You’re obliged to treat me fairly.”

  “Prisoner of war?” repeated Enoch scornfully. “The only war you know of is plundering and pilfering. Well, comrades, turn about’s the very jewel of fair play. Let’s search him.”

  He caught Plum by the lapel of his red coat and thrust his other hand into the inner breast pocket. “Ah,” said Enoch, and drew out a thick silver watch on a long chain.

  “That belonged to Mr. Rubsie, often I’ve seen it,” announced Adam Reep. “Ha, Plum, you dare not look a living enemy in the face but you’ll rob the dead. Buzzards would turn sick from your company, you little thief.”

  “Keep it, Adam, and see it returned to the Widow Rubsie,” said Enoch, holding out the watch. Reep took it. Again Enoch dug his hand into Plum’s pocket.

  “Another watch,” he declared, and fetched out a gold one. “Gad’s my life, Plum, you should know well the time of day.”

  “The time of his day’s near gone,” put in Seth darkly, and Plum winced.

  “Let me see that gold watch,” said Zack, holding out his hand for it. “Friends, I know it well. ’Twas worn by Mr. Starrett whose house was robbed and burnt down last March, remember you?”

  “Let’s call Johnny Starrett to take his father’s watch, and to pronounce judgment on the fellow who thieved it,” suggested Godfrey.

  “Hold, hold, comrades,” said Seth. “Hark’ee all, long Pve wanted to take a hostile scalp, and long ye’ve denied me. Never trouble to fetch Johnny. Just let me deal with our little weasel here.”

  Plum shrank in terror from Seth’s huge hairy face with its smudges of red clay and black powder. “Captain Harper, protect me,” he begged.

  Another spatter of shots from beyond the trees, where Rangers and Tories snipped at each other through the thorny hedge around the blockhouse.

  “Protect you?” said Zack. “You’re a convicted scrambler after booty in the houses of our friends, and you’re a traitor to your native earth of the Catawba country, trying to kill your neighbors.”

  “I fired not one shot just now,” Plum insisted tremulously. “As soon as the first gun spoke I—I slipped away. I’ve no stomach for shooting and fighting.”

  “Nay, you’ve stomach only for other folks’ rightful gear,” accused Reep, weighing Rubsie’s watch in his hand. “Captain Harper, this fellow’s long overdue on the gallows tree.”

  “A moment,” said Zack. “Plum, you say you left the block house when the first shots were fired.”

  “Aye, so I did,” said Plum hurriedly. “I didn’t even fetch my musket along. Isn’t that proof I’m no fighter?”

  “But ere the shooting started we hemmed your blockhouse about with men,” elaborated Zack. “How then did you get past them and here into the open?”

  “Fact, by the blue thunder!” Seth exclaimed. “He couldn’t slip between our Rangers, not a snake could have passed.”

  Zack gazed into Plum’s shifty eyes. “What is this mystery?” he demanded. “You ask for mercy and protection. If you hope for it, tell us your method.”

  Plum shook his head, and said nothing.

  “Give him to me,” urged Seth. From his belt he drew his long hunting knife and stroked its keen edge against the leathery heel of his hand. “Give him to me, I tell ye. I’ve thirsted for a scalp this long weary while.”

  He took a stride toward Plum and slapped the rumpled hat from Plum’s head. At sight of Plum’s tousled shock of hair, Seth’s red beard opened in an ugly grin of relish.

  “Will ye see to that, lads?” he whooped. “Scalplock enough for a whole war party. I’ll skin his whole head and cut it up to give around to my platoon!”

  “Nay, nay,” babbled Plum, and shrank back as though to hide between the two men who guarded him. “Captain Harper, Captain Reep, you others who are true gentlemen, save me from this—”

  “Aha, ye say I’m no gentleman?” burst out Seth, and his knife twinkled on high.

  “I cry mercy, I ask pardon,” chattered Plum. “Nay, sir, you’re as good a gentleman as any here.”

  “Now he slanders me,” interrupted Enoch, falling in with Seth’s fearsome clowning. “Seth, you wild, half-savage mountain rogue, he calls you as good a gentleman as I. Faith, I’ve a notion to scalp him myself.”

  His hand went to his own knife, and Plum swayed and quivered as though he would collapse.

  “Have done for the moment,” Zack bade his friends. “Now, Plum, you’ve talked both too much and too little. You say you escaped through our lines, but you won’t say how.”

  “ ’Twas not through your lines I came,” said Plum, licking his dry lips.

  “Next ye’ll swear ye flew over us like a bird,” Seth blustered. “What say we clip his wings against another flight, friends?”

  “Not over you, sirs,” said Plum. “Under you, I went under you.”

  Enoch and Seth looked at each other, at Reep, then at Zack.

  “Captain,” said Enoch, in a voice of cold judicial doom, “this Tory captive has gone stark mad from fear of us. ’Twould be a kindly deed, I trow, to end his misery.”

  “Wait, wait,” offered Seth. “Don’t finish him yet. Pve heard it told how Cherokees cure their befuddled friends with torture. They begin by notching the ears—”

  “Help me, save me!” wailed Plum. “Captain Harper, Pm trying to tell you the true word.”

  “The true word is strange in your mouth, it has a stumbling way of coming forth,” said Zack harshly. “Plum, Pm at hard labor to keep these angry men from your throat. And I like hard labor no more than the next man. Out with your secret, and that swiftly.”

  Plum’s face writhed and his eyes blinked. “I came by the tunnel.”

  “Tunnel?” repeated Enoch. “Another falsehood.”

  “ ’Twill be his last,” vowed Seth. “That fur thatch has stayed too long on his skull.”

  “Stay, gentlemen all,” interposed Reep. “He may speak sooth, for once in his scoundrel life. It stands not to reason that Alspaye has but a gateway out of his strong place.” Another crackle of shots from the direction of the blockhouse.

  “Aye, Adam, you may be right,” agreed Enoch. “Plum, tell us of this tunnel.”

  “I’ll do so, an you let me live,” said Plum. “ ’Twas made when we built the blockhouse. A spring flows inside the house, to give the company water, and it ran off in a stream. Captain Alspaye caused that stream to be widened and deepened for a tunnel of escape.”

  “That would be a mighty work,” commented Zack.

  “Aye, he had all of us dig with spade and mattock, for days. The channel is as deep cut as a man’s height, and wide enough for a single file to pass, with the water flowing at the bottom. Logs were laid over and earth put on, and brush and pine needles and all manner of trash to hide it, and plants set to grow thereon.”

  “Where’s the open end?” Godfrey asked.

  “ ’Twas Captain Alspaye’s thought that a time like this would come,” Plum continued. “Your band would hem him ’round, and he would defend until nightfall. Then he would lead his men out by the tunnel, while all your eyes and minds were fixed on the blockhouse. He might strike a surprise blow upon you then, or if you were too many he would flee.”

  “Egad, again I hazard that he speaks truly,” said Reep.

  “Where would you flee?” Zack demanded of Plum.

  “Oh, we have other hidings here and there, with store of food and powder and shot. Two or three are within short minutes’ journey of here. Now I’ve told you all, you won’t scalp me?”

  “We’ve not said so yet,” Seth fairly sang deep in his hairy throat, and again whetted his knife upon his tough palm.

  “I asked you, where does this tunnel op
en?” said Godfrey again. “Come, show us.”

  Plum opened his mouth as if to argue, but Seth leaned close, snarling. With a shrug of defeat, Plum turned to lead them away, his guards at his elbow. Zack and the others followed.

  “No sound above a whisper,” warned Zack. “Plum, that order goes double for you. No noise to warn any mate of yours in the tunnel.”

  “Not a sound will I make,” Plum promised. “Yonder, gentlemen, in that press of bushes.”

  He led them toward the spattering noise of gunfire. A considerable thicket sprang up, in a dip of ground within a hundred paces of the Tory hedge, and some of the Rangers took cover in its far reaches. The trees of the thicket were crammed between with lush-leafed shrubbery, and vines laced to and fro. At the side farthest from the blockhouse a stream trickled out and away, little wider than the span’s reach of Zack’s big hand.

  To that stream Deevor Plum pointed, and opened his mouth to speak to Zack behind him. But Zack gestured him to silence, and the whole group came to a halt. Zack moved forward lightly to the very side of the water, squatted on his heels, and peered into the thicket.

  It looked almost as closely matted as the hedge that enclosed the blockhouse j but, just where the stream emerged, a darkness showed among the greenery, as of a shadowed open space inside a thin veiling of vines. Zack flung himself on his chest and wriggled his way forward. Now he could see into the thicket.

  Sure enough, two bushes grew a man’s width apart there, and the water came out between them. Closer Zack crept, as he had crept to survey the hedge. It was black in there. He could sense depth, a true gap like the mouth of a cave. Zack put out a hand and cautiously twitched aside the frill of vines. He looked long and carefully, then he backed away, rose, and came toward his comrades. He gestured them well away.

  “I saw it,” he told them. “There’s a bank of earth in there, and it’s pierced with a hole into which a man could walk if he bent double. That must be the mouth of the tunnel.”

  “Aye, aye, it is so,” Plum made haste to assure him.

  “It’s a considerable walk underground to where the blockhouse is,” went on Zack. “And ’twould be as dark as the inside of a black bear.”

  “We’ve got the Tories by the scalplock now,” said Seth happily. “We can set our best men here to watch, every man’s piece loaded and primed, and then wait for Alspaye’s rascals to come wallowing forth. Let him fetch them into the clear tonight, and ’twill be like cutting down a field of corn.”

  “Amen to that, sirs,” said Adam Reep. “Seth Mawks has the right of it.”

  “But Plum can tell us much more,” said Zack. “Speak up, Plum, from what place does that tunnel lead thither?”

  “ ’Tis a cellar of a sort,” said Plum. “The spring rises in a low pit, and above that the blockhouse was built. It has a floor above, and in the cellar we store our—our supplies and our valuables.”

  “What ye mean is, ye store plunder there,” snorted Seth.

  “Who bides in that cellar?” was Zack’s next question.

  “With fighting to be done, all men are above at the loopholes. Only one guard at the tunnel door.”

  “Door?” echoed Enoch. “There’s a door to the tunnel?” “Aye, at the inner end,” said Plum.

  “What manner of door, sir?” Zack asked him.

  “ ’Tis made of stout poles, like the outer gates,” said Plum. “The poles are set upright and apart, so that a shot may be fired through them if need be, and crosspieces are bound on with rawhide. The hinges are rawhide, too.” “How is it closed?” Zack asked next.

  “By a great heavy bar within, put into big wooden hooks.” “A barred door of stout poles, and a man there to guard it,” Zack summed up. “Only one man, you tell us?”

  “Aye. ’Twas I who was on guard there, and I slipped out with none to mark my going.”

  “That has the sound of truth,” granted Reep.

  “But if you were to go back, and find a new guard posted there,” said Zack, “how then would you enter?”

  “Enter, Captain Harper?” said Plum stupidly. “How do you mean, enter?”

  “Have you a password?”

  “Why—” said Plum, and then he broke off.

  “Tell us the word that will let you enter,” said Zack. “Seth, he seems suddenly to have lost his tongue.”

  Seth rumbled a laugh, deep in his thick chest. His right hand lifted his knife. His left shot out and closed on Plum’s tumble of hair.

  “Mercy, I cry you mercy!” Plum whimpered. “Captain Harper, I’ll tell you all you ask, but keep me from that murdering wild man! ”

  “Then tell us the word that will let us through the door,” insisted Zack.

  Again Plum licked his lips. “You say ‘George’ for the sign, and the guard answers ‘King’ for the countersign.” Zack looked around at his companions.

  “We’ll not wait for Alspaye to come out,” he announced. “We’ll go in yonder to find him.”

  “Truly?” said Enoch, half comprehending.

  “I mean it,” and Zack nodded his head vigorously. “See to where the sun stands, it draws on to evening. We have not more than an hour or so of light left to us, and we know not at what time he may try a sortie upon us.”

  “Zounds, you South Fork Rangers have a rash leader,” said Reep.

  “It’s better to attack than to be attacked,” said Zack firmly. “I may be rash, but I’ll go into that tunnel yonder, with a few good friends, to make sure of the way in. Then more will follow close behind. We’ll strike at Alspaye both within and without.”

  “Boldly spoken,” said Reep, still seemingly awed. “Who do you command to go with you?”

  “I command nobody, I do but ask,” Zack told him. “Very well, friends, who’s for the tunnel and that cellar of the blockhouse at its far end?”

  14 Underground

  ENOCH was the first to make reply. “You know what I’ll say to such asking, Zack. I’ll go with you, under the ground or over.”

  “And ye needn’t ask me at all,” said Seth quickly. “Do ye think ye could keep me back if ye go yonder to drag Alspaye out of his hidey-hole?”

  “I’m with you in this,” said Godfrey.

  “And I,” said Adam Reep.

  “Captain Harper,” spoke up Laban Rutledge, standing guard over Deevor Plum, “if you’ll let my mate and me speak, we want to go with you, too.”

  “Stop a moment,” said Zack. “Not all the officers can go. Lieutenant Prothero, and you, Captain Reep, must bide with our men outside.” He paused, thinking fast, while a shot or two cracked from where the blockhouse was besieged. Then: “Spread the men around the whole way, Captain Reep, and keep the Tories diverted with shooting. Godfrey, fetch back half the rest of the Rangers to where we are now. By the time you come, we others will be gone inside.”

  “Aye,” agreed Godfrey. “Then?”

  “Give us a quarter of an hour, and then lead the company in after us. We’ll have taken some sort of hold, or be past taking hold.”

  “And I?” asked Reep.

  “Hark at the sound of our blow from within, then rush the blockhouse from without.”

  “It shall be done,” promised Reep, and was gone. Godfrey waited only to shake hands with Zack, then with Enoch and Seth, he, too, hurried away.

  “Tie Plum’s hands behind him,” ordered Zack, and Rutledge produced a bit of buckskin whang and obeyed. “Now, he will go with us. If he has lied to us about aught that waits for us in the tunnel, then his lie will destroy him as well as us.”

  “I tell the pure truth,” swore Plum.

  “You’d best hope so,” Zack assured him, and handed his rifle to Rutledge. “I’ll enter first. Seth, do you follow behind me, and fetch Plum with you. Then Enoch, then the two others. Is it understood?”

  “Aye,” said Enoch, and the others nodded assent.

  “As for what we do beyond, I cannot say,” Zack told them frankly, “nor can I give more orders until I know ’t
is safe to speak. Follow me, then, and be silent of foot and stout of heart.”

  He turned from them and again approached the thicket. Dropping to hands and knees, he crept under the vines and into the yawning black mouth within.

  A few feet of scrambling, and he was able to rise to his feet, bowing a trifle beneath a roof of logs in the blackness.

  He quested with his moccasin toes. The water flowed at the right of the tunnel, and Zack moved along at the left, his hand upon the rough dirt of the wall. He glanced back and saw the light obscured—his comrades were entering. Forward he moved, with a skilled hunter’s careful silence, his left hand guiding himself by a touch of the wall, his right hand drawing the tomahawk from his belt.

  Almost at once the sound of gunfire outside was muffled to a murmur. In the darkness of the tunnel was no hint of motion or noise. Zack knew that the others were behind but they, too, made no sound in the corridor. The little stream trickled stealthily beside them. Zack advanced, his feet ever questing ahead for a possible obstacle, his hand keeping the wall, and he counted to himself. Forty careful paces. Fifty. Had he estimated correctly, a hundred yards or so to the blockhouse? Fifty-five paces, fifty-six—

  He could see light ahead, a dim pale patch of it. He stopped, and Seth pulled up at his very shoulder, breathing slowly and softly. Zack nudged Seth with his elbow, and then dragged at his arm to make him look forward. Seth’s head came alongside, as if peering. Again Zack advanced, more slowly.

  The blackness became diluted ever so little. Dimly Zack could make out the tunnel’s earthern walls to left and right, with barely a yard between them. Below was the damp floor and the bed of the runlet, overhead the roofing of logs. And there ahead, coming closer with each gingerly step they made, was the patch of light.

  It looked yellow now, and it was rectangular, like a door.

  Closer still they came. It had bars, threadlike streaks in the yellow glow from top to bottom, the open-work fabric of poles Deevor Plum had described.

  Zack heard new muffled booms and rattles of shooting from the blockhouse to which they drew near. Then a voice, yelling from the direction of that open-work door: