Savage Liberty

by Eliot Pattison

  They had wasted precious time looking for clues in the wheel shop by the light of the lantern. There had been little more than drops of blood, one trail of which led to a numeral 4 scrawled in the moist soil along the beaten path to the mill, reddened by the bloody finger that had made it. Ishmael had discovered a powder horn under the pillow on the ranger’s bed, with images etched into it in the style of frontiersmen. The images were of birds and deer, except for the outline of a lake that might have been Champlain, though without marks for the forts at Crown Point or Ticonderoga. There was a single notation, across the narrows where Crown Point should be. “Chev” was all it said.

  “Go back to the inn,” he had instructed the two Nipmucs. “Rouse everyone and get the wagons on the road. No breakfast. By dawn, this town will be in an uproar. Sarah and the others need to be gone.”

  “But you, Duncan—” Conawago had begun.

  “I can’t be with them, not with Horatio Beck so close. Go. I will find you on the road.”

  Conawago seemed about to argue when a woman pulling an early-morning milk cart began to scream. She had spied the body by the mill. “Murder! Murder most foul!” As the woman dropped her cart and frantically ran down the street, shrieking all the way, Ishmael whispered into his uncle’s ear, then slipped into the shadows.

  By the time Duncan had reached the stable behind the inn, the town had begun to stir. He was saddling the big black, the strongest-looking of the dragoon horses, when Ishmael appeared. The youth was stripping off his waistcoat and shirt. “Just cut the cinches of the other saddles,” Duncan said, “and turn the mounts loose into the street.” By the time he realized that Ishmael was ignoring his instructions, the young Nipmuc had saddled another horse and was putting bridles on the other two.

  “The road follows the ridges to the west for the next fifty miles,” Ismael explained as he surveyed the street. Men were stepping out of their houses in nightshirts, standing warily on their front steps, some with weapons in their hands. “There must be game trails above, on the ridges. Gallop along the road until the sun has fully risen, then take to the trails.”

  “This is not your fight,” Duncan protested.

  Ishmael tied his rolled shirt and waistcoat behind the saddle and began investigating crocks and tubs on a shelf along the aisle of the stable. With a grunt of satisfaction he reached into a tub and produced a finger covered with a white paste. He quickly applied two parallel stripes to each cheek. “This is Quinsigamond. Which makes it my fight. A Nipmuc warrior rides for the last time from here,” he declared. Louder voices were raised in alarm out on the street. “I will catch up. Don’t slow down for me.”

  Before Duncan could stop him, he had wrapped the reins of the two extra horses around his hand, mounted, and kicked his mount into an explosive leap out of the stable. As he reached the street, he gave a convincing impression of a bloodcurdling war cry and galloped onto the northern road toward the New Hampshire wilderness, the two remounts running at his side.

  A pistol had been fired in his direction. “Indians!” came a fearful cry. “God protect us! The savages are raiding!”

  Now Duncan ate a few bites of the dried sausage he had discovered in the dragoon saddlebag, contemplating the possible routes the killers might take to Canada, then remounted and continued at a more relaxed pace, letting his horse recover from the headlong ride from Worcester. When he halted in a patch of grass an hour later, he took the hobbles from the saddlebag and fastened them to the horse’s front legs, leaving it to graze as he followed the sound of running water to a narrow eight-foot waterfall. He stripped and bathed under the falling water. A stench of death and deception seemed to have clung to him since first encountering the grisly line of bodies on the beach back in Boston, and he scoured his skin with sand and rushes, then rubbed his arms with leaves of the wintergreen that grew at the base of a nearby hemlock. He badly needed purification but had no time for a more elaborate ceremony.

  At the edge of the clearing, he paused, admiring the tall, muscular thoroughbred, then bent and picked a handful of wild strawberries. “I mean no offense,” he said to the horse as he approached and extended the berries. “You’re a fine, handsome creature and I but took the loan of you from the king.” The black horse cocked its head, caught the sweet scent of the berries, and stepped forward to eat from Duncan’s hand.

  “Cabhlach aon,” Duncan said, fleet one, rubbing his hand over the thick muscles of its neck. “Goliath. I’ll call you Goliath. He was a great, strong beast too. It fits you,” he declared, then leaned to the ear of the gelding and whispered the Gaelic words of comfort used by his grandfather in gentling animals. The big horse listened for several breaths, then cocked its head as if in surprise and pressed its nose against Duncan’s chest.

  “Goliath it is, then,” Duncan declared, and he remounted and eased back onto the trail. Although cutthroat bountymen and soldiers were in pursuit of him, he was loath to outpace the slow-moving wagons. Late in the morning, he hobbled Goliath again in a broad patch of sunlight and stretched out on a bed of moss. It was midafternoon when the horse nuzzled him awake, and they got under way at a slow trot. He had been dreaming, but every dream ended with him looking down to see the number 4 etched in the ground at his feet, sometimes outlined in mud, other times chiseled in stone or drawn in blood. Knowing that he was dying, Chisholm had left only one simple answer. Duncan kept revisiting their conversation, eventually convinced that there had been only two questions the ranger left unanswered when asked about the secrets of the north. Where in the north, Duncan had asked, and did he know Ebenezer Brandt. Had Chisholm answered both with his enigmatic 4?

  When the sun was low over the Berkshires, he halted at a ledge from which the road could be seen for more than a mile in each direction, overlooking a flat with a stream that appeared to have often been used as a layover by travelers. He watched Goliath’s ears frequently as he scanned the eastern thoroughfare, knowing the horse would hear the little wagon convoy long before he could see it.

  Duncan was lost in thought once more, reviewing again the events in Boston and trying to understand how a numeral 4 could be the answer to anything, when Goliath’s ears twitched and his head snapped toward the east. It wasn’t the expected jingle of harness that Duncan heard a minute later, it was the laughter of a boy. Duncan grinned and pulled Goliath’s reins, angling down the side of the mountain toward the clearing.

  As the first wagon approached, Duncan watched from a clump of spruce and gave the call of a tanager, Conawago’s favorite bird. The old Nipmuc showed no reaction other than a momentary lifting of his head, but he called for the wagons to pull into the flat. Duncan dismounted and waited as the teams were unhitched and led to the stream at the edge of the campsite. He was watching Conawago move inconspicuously toward the spruces that hid him, when an acorn hit his chest. Sarah, the dust on her face showing the dried tracks of tears, emerged from behind an oak. As he stepped toward her, Conawago also appeared, taking the reins from his hand, and Sarah rushed forward into his embrace.

  No one spoke. There were no words, except Sarah’s futile halfhearted complaints that Duncan had not fled and Duncan’s own futile assurances for her not to worry. When Sarah finally moved away, she nodded toward the camp. “I have to go help,” she announced, and pushed back through the trees.

  “Ishmael?” Duncan asked, turning to Conawago.

  The old tribesman shook his head. “Nearly every able-bodied man in Worcester seemed to be in pursuit of him. And every soldier is looking for you.”

  “Horatio Beck?”

  “Those dragoons looked most comical mounted on conscripted farm horses. Caught up with us at midday. Brought half a dozen armed townsmen, local militia apparently, as if expecting a fight. They searched the wagons. Beck recognized Munro from that day in the harbor and shouted that he should arrest him for aiding in your interference with the navy. Munro clenched his hands together and said, ‘At yer service, Lieutenant Becky.’ Beck slapped him,
but nothing else. Then he rode back east, furious because his escort from the town said they had to go dig a grave for the wheelwright.”

  Duncan suddenly remembered the deserter. “Sergeant Mallory?”

  “The fools raised a cloud of dust you could see for half a mile. The sergeant was well hidden in the forest by the time they reached us.”

  “Did Beck wave the warrant in your face?”

  “Funny thing. No mention of a warrant. Just looking for the killers of that leading citizen, Mr. Chisholm the wheelwright. The townsmen were furious, saying that Beck had wasted their time, that everyone knew the killers and horse thieves had been savages who fled north. The rest of the townsmen had pressed on north.”

  “After Ishmael!” The frantic whisper came unbidden from Duncan’s lips. “I must go!”

  Conawago reached out to grab Duncan’s reins. “No. My nephew is a woodsrunner, as stealthy as a catamount. They will not find him. He will evade them, leaving them convinced it was a raiding party from the north, a vestige from older days. Their fears will fester and they will soon give thanks there was but one casualty. He will find us when the time comes.”

  “He took the king’s horses. A hanging offense in itself.”

  Conawago gave an ironic grin and gestured at Duncan’s horse. “A hanging offense.”

  “When Goliath chooses to return to the king, he is free to do so.”

  The old Nipmuc rolled his eyes. “You gave him a name,” he declared in exasperation.

  Duncan stroked the horse’s neck. “Aye, well. We enjoyed our ride today.” The horse softly nickered, as if agreeing.

  Conawago sighed. “Please, Duncan, do not make so light of your situation, of even your life. You are sought for treason. Beck will probably decide by tomorrow to spread the word more broadly, with a bounty that will tempt half the men in the colony. When you value your life less than your friends do, you dishonor them.”

  The words bit deep. Duncan had been outrunning the stress and fatigue of the past day for hours, but suddenly they bore down like a great weight on his back. “It all has the feel of theater,” he declared in a hollow voice. “As if I were an actor given a poorly written role.”

  “The obfuscation from Hancock and Adams feels like insincerity—deception even,” Conawago said. “I know that is what troubles you most. But you aren’t here evading bountymen and soldiers because of them.”

  “Aren’t we?” Duncan gazed through the branches at Sarah, who had settled Sergeant Mallory onto a log and was changing his bandage. He could hear the soldier’s loud Yorkshire voice, and Sarah’s laugh in response to it.

  “You may fool yourself, Duncan, but never me. I saw the way you looked at those bodies on the beach. Thirty-seven men lost. Brothers, husbands, fathers, uncles. You looked into every dead man’s face just as I did. You and I both pulled seaweed from their mouths and knocked crabs from their eyes. I wished I hadn’t. Now I see them in my nightmares. I tried to nap in the back of the wagon today, but even then I woke up gasping. One by one the dead were sitting up and pointing at you and me, as if blaming us. We are here because of them. Those thirty-seven. Thirty-eight now. You and I are going to avenge them.”

  Duncan hesitated, contemplating his friend. The old man had been so despondent the day before, surrendering the essential cause of his life, but today he was speaking more like a seasoned warrior.

  “The warrant just adds emphasis to finding the truth,” Conawago added.

  “I keep thinking of Hancock and Livingston. It was all too convenient for them.”

  “They didn’t know Beck had gone to the governor. If anyone bargained with the governor, it was Sam Adams, without their knowledge.”

  “But they probably could have stopped the warrant.”

  “Maybe they understood better than you.”

  “Understood what?”

  “Just as Hancock said, these crimes are not of their world. It will not be logic or warrants or starch-collared dandies who solve them. I haven’t entirely lost the instincts of the hunter,” the old Nipmuc said. “And those instincts tell me there are secrets in front of us we have yet to decipher. Secrets that will let us avenge that company of the dead. Secrets that we must find to protect the Sons, that will let us return to the harmony of Edentown.”

  Duncan followed his gaze toward the encampment, where the company was quickly getting settled for the night. “Which world must we seek them in? That of Reverend Occom’s vengeful God, who sent the Arcturus to the bottom? I forgot to bring my Bible. There was a verse about ships.”

  Conawago was watching Solomon Hayes now. “ ‘Look to the ships,’ it says in James 3,” he recited, “ ‘though they are so great and driven by strong winds, they are directed by a very small rudder.’ ” He turned to Duncan. “An invisible rudder, even.”

  “You’re speaking of correlations again, like a Parisian astronomer.”

  Conawago frowned, then nodded back toward the camp. “Look at them. An itinerant tinker. An army deserter. A middle-aged Highlander who left his steady job to revisit his nightmare of death. An evangelist tribesman who sees no irony in becoming another of the instruments that caused his own tribe’s destruction. Why are any of them with us? They were all in Hancock’s warehouse. They are with us because of Hancock. Is he steering an invisible rudder? Those Boston gentlemen live in a world very different from ours.”

  Duncan shot him a worried glance, knowing from hard experience that he should trust Conawago’s intuitions. He gazed back at Sarah, who was helping Sergeant Mallory out of his shirt so she could check the dressing Duncan had wrapped around his ribs. She paused over the long, narrow scars on the soldier’s exposed back and looked back toward the trees. She knew Duncan was watching. Duncan’s own back had once been shredded by the whip of a plantation overseer employed by her father. He was beginning to understand why Mallory had deserted.

  “In what world should I be seeking?” he asked Conawago again.

  “Perhaps,” the Nipmuc said after a few breaths, “it’s a new one, one we haven’t encountered before.” Then he dropped the subject, pointing toward a thick grove of spruce and hemlock up the slope that appeared to be the source of the creek the horses now drank from. They both knew Duncan could not risk staying with the others that night. Without another word Conawago started walking in a long arc up the slope that would take them, unseen, to the grove. As they reached the shadows of the evergreens, Duncan released Goliath, who eagerly stepped to a ten-foot-wide pool in the stream, and Conawago cut pine boughs for a makeshift bed. Then, with an apologetic shrug, he handed Duncan a pouch containing half a dozen ship biscuits, a handful of dried meat, and a small ball of cheese. As Duncan chewed on the meat and Goliath finished drinking, the old Nipmuc eyed the pool and produced a horsehair fishing line, which he dropped on a flat rock beside the water.

  “There are three pieces of the puzzle that I cannot get any grip on,” Conawago declared. “There was that attack at Mrs. Pope’s house. Sarah wants to pretend it was just coincidence, but we know otherwise. Why was that Abenaki there?”

  “The second?” Duncan asked.

  In answer, Conawago extracted a piece of cloth from his belt pouch and stretched it out on a boulder. It was the long strip they had taken from Oliver’s mouth, next to which he laid the very similar strip they had removed from the wheelwright’s mouth. The second one wasn’t merely the same size, with the same adornment of leaves and fish. The speckled trout ripped in half at the edge of the first matched the half trout at the leading edge of the second.

  “A hem,” Duncan suggested. “From the same dress.”

  “From the same woman,” Conawago rejoined. “The killer left his calling card. He wanted the world to know they had died at the hand of an Abenaki. If this was 1760,” he continued, “you know what we would think. The Abenaki were used for secret missions by the French, as the Mohawks and Oneidas were used by the British.”

  “The war’s over. The treaty was signed in Paris
five years ago.”

  “And for how many centuries have France and Britain been at each other’s throats? Five years is but the click of a gear in that great clock.”

  “Two scalps don’t make a new war.”

  “Nor even thirty-seven men lost on a single ship.”

  “Three. You said three things.”

  “The gold piece. Why does a retired ranger from the St. Francis raid suddenly get a French gold piece sent to him? I think if Chisholm had lived he would have showed us another this morning.”

  “And explained this,” Duncan said. He dipped his finger in the pool and wrote a number 4 on the flat piece of granite at its edge. They stared at it in silence until Goliath finished his drinking and turned to a patch of grass.

  Conawago uncoiled his horsehair line, tied a bit of bacon rind to its hook, and lowered it into the water before he spoke again, in a low voice so as not to frighten his quarry. “The last war was different from any fought before. It spanned continents. India, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, North America. The British pushed in India, the French responded in Quebec and Flanders. Many leaders in Paris were furious that their king gave up all of North America but two tiny islands off the Newfoundland. They say he didn’t understand this new game, the importance of keeping leverage on every continent. When the French act, they will be subtle. An Abenaki taking vengeance on old rangers seems most convenient just when these other events are taking place. Secrets within secrets. Like some great machine has been set into motion and all we can make out is one or two of its gears.”

  As his words hung in the air, Conawago’s line drew taut and the old man turned to the shimmering pool, watching his prey, then deftly snapping the line as the fish turned, setting the hook. In a moment the big trout was on the grass, and nearly as quickly the hook and bait were back in the water.