to the Far Blue Mountains (1976)

by L'amour, Louis - Sackett's 02

  They will take the word of Lila's marriage to Anglesey. Tell them she has married a good friend and a good man."

  "I will that."

  "And John Tilly? What of him?"

  "Why, we're partners! I thought I had told you. He commands the fluyt when she's at sea. We trade in the Spanish Indies. It's risky, but we've some friends who like to profit a bit in the trade themselves, and although we have to avoid Spanish warships we make a good thing of it."

  "Slaving?"

  "Not us. The Arabs and the Portuguese have that business, and we wish for none of it. They intrigue with the warlike African tribes who sell them their prisoners ... the ones they themselves used to enslave or kill.

  "But I am a free man and would see all men free. John Tilly believes as I do, so we have no conflict. Slaves are not an easy cargo. I prefer sugar, rum, or timber ... fur if they can be had."

  He sat on a hummock of sand. "You have been to your mountains? And what lies beyond?"

  "More mountains, and then lowlands again, and lovely timbered valleys and meadows. These I have not seen, but the Catawba tell me they are there."

  "There is much fighting among the Indians?"

  "An Indian boy is not a man until he is a warrior. To be a warrior he must fight, take scalps, count coup. And they do not forget old enmities."

  At last he got up. "Now we must sail. This coast makes me nervous, too." He looked at me with keen, thoughtful eyes. "You will stay here? Raise your boys here?"

  "Now, at least. When they grow older we will see the bent of their minds."

  He took my hand, then started to leave. He had gone several steps when he stopped and turned.

  "Barnabas? Do you remember Delve? Jonathan Delve? He was with you awhile, I believe?"

  "What of him?"

  "Around a year ago he came down to the coast and was taken aboard a vessel as a castaway, he and several others. He told the ship's master of a valuable wreck of which he knew. When he got the captain ashore, some more of his men were there and they ambushed and killed the captain and several of his crew. Two escaped."

  "So?"

  "He took the ship, and since has become a pirate and a dangerous man. It is reported that when drinking he talks often of you. For some reason you are on his mind."

  "We will be careful."

  Pike walked away over the sand, and I stood and watched him go. He had ships at sea, a reputation as a successful man, no doubt. Would I trade that for what I had?

  I would not.

  Feeling better, I walked back to Abby. "We will go home now," I said.

  Chapter 30

  Where go the years? Down what tunnel of time are poured the precious days?

  We are young, and the fires within us burn bright.

  All the world lies before us and nothing is too great to be done, no challenge too awesome.

  Then suddenly the days are no more, the years are gone, and the time that remains is little, indeed.

  Kin has grown tall, as fine a woodsman as I know, and as good a man. Brian is the thoughtful one. Each book I have he has read and reread, and soon, I know, he will go from me to a wider world. Regret is in me that he would leave, yet happiness, too, for he has his own life before him in a bigger world if not a better one.

  Yance? What shall I say of Yance? His heart is pure, his strength the greatest of them all, I think. Yance is strong, he is rough, he is always wrestling, fighting, climbing, doing, changing.

  He is a good son, faithful to his mother and to me. To his brothers, he is loyal. Yet he acts before he thinks. He is a bundle of muscle and impulse, a swift runner, a dead shot with any weapon, and a dangerous man because of it.

  He listens when I speak, and he obeys. Yet sometimes he acts before I have a time to speak.

  And then there is Jublain ... named for my old friend but called Jubal.

  He is the truly quiet one. A ghost in the woods, he moves like a shadow, and lives much with the Indians. He is gone for weeks, then comes and squats against the wall and listens to the talk and is gone again.

  To me he gives love and respect, to his mother, adoration, and that is as I would have it.

  We none of us know how far he has gone or what he has seen, for he rarely speaks of it. Sometimes stories come to us ... an Indian from the west once came among us, looking for him. Jubal had been gone for weeks, and the Indian told us by sign language that Jubal had been far beyond the great river that divides the country in two ... we had not known that.

  Kin has no wife, nor has Brian or Jubal. Yance does, of course. He went far to the north last year and came upon a colony that had settled there several years before. For days he scouted about, watching the people go about their work. He had done the same at Jamestown when he grew old enough to go so far from home, for Raleigh had at last planted his colony and my boys used to go down to the place where they were and lie in the woods and watch them to see how they lived.

  Yance had done the same at the place in the north, the place they were calling "New England."

  That group landed in 1620 ... thirteen years after the Virginia colony was finally established at Jamestown. Yance had been curious, as were all the boys, for the tales they heard from their mother and me, as well as the others of our group, were not enough. Only Yance went so far north.

  He usually went alone or with a Catawba or two. He had gone several times with their war parties against the Iroquois or the Cherokee ... with whom, in fact, the Catawba were often friendly.

  Yance found the place called New England, already scattering out from the original settlement. He went into the village bringing meat. My boys always brought meat when they went anywhere, including their home.

  He made friends, for he was genial, agreeable, and a hard worker, but for them he was too filled with good spirits, too energetic, and not Godfearing enough in their way. So one day when he had offended they put him in the stocks. It took nine men to do it, but they did it.

  Only that night a girl stole her father's key and came down and set him free. He built a careful fire against the stocks and burned them down, but by the time the fire was discovered Yance was in the hills, and being Yance, he took the girl with him, and she, being the kind of a girl he would choose, came willingly.

  Oh, she was a lovely one! Gay, filled with good spirits, singing always ... and not always hymns, for she took readily to our wild English ballads of lost loves, highwaymen, and the fairs.

  For we sang much in our hills, the gypsy songs, the Scotch Highland songs, the Irish songs.

  There was always the fighting, for the Indians came against us, and no morning sun arose without its risk, no day in the field without its danger.

  The Catawbas were firmly our friends as they were to be the friends of the white man always. As warriors came from afar, hoping to kill a Catawba and have the scalp to boast of in the villages, so they came to fight us also as our name grew.

  We were fighters all. John Quill, who had made his great defense of the fort after the death of Slater, was remembered by our enemies, for they gloried in the strength of any fighting man, enemy or friend.

  But time has a way of stealing strength from a man, and even before that, his swiftness and agility. One day they came upon Glasco, working at his forge.

  The boys were off hunting. I with my wife and our new daughter was at the river ... only Tim Glasco was there. Usually an uncommonly wary man, that time he was not wary enough, and they came very close. He heard them, got off a quick shot and laid about him with his hammer and tongs.

  They got an arrow into him, but he did not drop. They rushed him, and he swept two of them, right and left, into the dust. One went down from the red-hot tongs, another from a freshly sharpened spit for roasting meat.

  Still they came, and they killed him.

  We heard the shot from afar-Wa-ga-su, Pim Burke, and I, leaving Kane O'Hara with the women.

  Too late. Glasco was down and his scalp taken. He was not quite dead, and somewher
e he had picked up some Indian thoughts. "Get them," he whispered hoarsely, "and my hair back. I'll have my own hair upon my head when I cross the divide."

  With Jeremy, Pim, and Kane O'Hara we set out after them, and we fled them down the nights and down the days, and across the rivers that men had given names, over the Broad and the Wateree, across Rocky River and Coldwater Creek to a skirmish on Long Creek, and then on to the Yadkin.

  Suddenly, on the Yadkin, they turned to fight, and outnumbered we were, but better shots. And two warriors died and lost their hair before we moved again.

  Through the woods and across the savannas, through blackberry patch and under the hickory trees, and suddenly before us we heard a burst of firing, and then another, and we closed in swiftly to see the Senecas trapped in a bend of Lick Fork of the Dan. We saw one man down in the water, another trying to crawl a bank in a trail of blood, and we closed in swiftly.

  From the bank beyond, a huge warrior suddenly stood up and shouted a challenge, and from the brush leaped Yance. He rushed forward, knife in hand, and the two met there in the open glade in a fierce and desperate fight. The big Indian threw his tomahawk. It caught Yance on the shoulder and the big Indian went in as Yance started to fall. But as the Indian charged, Yance kicked up both feet and boosted the Indian clear over his head. Then, swift as a striking snake, Yance turned on him and buried a knife in his chest.

  The Catawbas, who ran the war trail with us, took many a scalp that day, and evened the score for their own people slain. And when the scalps were taken, we turned our backs and started slowly home.

  My sons had been hunting the Blue Ridge, looking for caves of which we had heard, caves in which white men were said to be buried ... men from some long-ago time before the beginning of years.

  An Eno found them there and told of the war party of Senecas heading south upon a raid, and so they had come down from the high-up hills, too late to help defend our settlement, but in time to intercept the Senecas' return.

  From far away they had heard shooting, then saw the Senecas coming across a savanna, and moved to meet them on Lick Fork.

  Yet when we returned, Glasco was dead, only hours before.

  "I wish he could have known," I said. "We brought back his hair."

  "He knew," Lila said. "I told him. For I saw it as in a dream, saw Yance come charging with a knife in his hand, saw blood upon his shoulder, saw him go down, then come up and turn, and saw his shoulder move."

  She went to Yance and uncovered his shoulder. There was a deep gash there, the bleeding stopped with moss. "Come," she said, "we will make it clean." And he went with her, as he had when a child.

  Abby stood waiting, her face still, her eyes round and serious.

  "Barnabas," she said, "we must go down to the river. I would speak with you there."

  I knew it would be a serious talk, for long it had been since she'd called me aught but Barney.

  And when we sat together on the bank, she said, "We have a daughter, Barnabas, and she will be a beautiful girl."

  "She is your daughter," I said.

  "It is a wild land here. What will be her future?"

  Uneasiness stirred within me, and for the first time I truly felt fear. "I do not know," I said, "But by the time she is grown-"

  "It will be too late, Barnabas. Our daughter will not become a hunter or a fighter of Indians. She must have education, she must know another world than this."

  My fingers felt the grass. I pulled a blade and tasted it and waited, my heart beating slowly.

  "You have your sons, and they will grow your way. I want our daughter to have another choice. If she stays, who will she marry? One of your wild wilderness men? Would you have her curing buffalo hides, growing old before her time?"

  "What else can we do?" I asked, though in my heart I knew the answer.

  "In all things, Barnabas, I have done as you wished, for in all things they were what I wished as well. In this I do not know, and you must help me. I do not know, Barnabas, but I am filled with misgivings."

  "You would take her from me? Soon Brian will go to England to study law. Already Sakim has taught him mathematics and logic, government and philosophy. I have learned much from Sakim, for I, too, have listened when he taught Yet I am no scholar, and but a simple man."

  Abby put her hand over mine. "Not so simple, Barnabas, but so wise, so strong, and yet so gentle. You forget that I have known you for a long time. And a good time," she added quietly, "a very good time. And I do not want to leave you."

  It was there. The word had been said.

  "Where would you go?"

  "To London, at first. Perhaps to Paris. I would need time, Barnabas, for I have been long away. I would need to learn again how to behave as an English lady."

  "You have always been a lady."

  "You could come with us, Barnabas. You could come. Elizabeth the Queen is dead.

  A man sits now upon the throne. The old suspicions would be forgot."

  But even as she spoke, we knew I would not go. I would never leave again for so long the shadow of those mountains I had found at last.

  "After this?" I swept my hand at the mountains, fields, rivers. "No, Abby, our duties divide. Yours will take you to England with our daughter, mine will keep me here.

  "Perhaps the boys no longer need me, but they know I am here. I am an anchor, I am a single, positive thing. I am a focal point, if no more. A balance wheel, a hub about which they may revolve, and I will be here for them to come to if they are hurt. I would not have them without that.

  "They may never need me, but as long as I am here, they are not lost. If I can be no more to them, I will be their Pole Star."

  "The Senecas will come again, Barnabas, and the Shawnees."

  "Of course ... I know that. I would miss them if they failed to come, and they would miss me if I was not here to greet them."

  I stood up, slowly. "Abby, we will arrange it. We will go down to the sea once more, and we will find a ship, and you may go to England.

  "When she has seen the world, when she has learned what it holds, then bring her to me again and let me see what my daughter has become.

  "At least ... do not let her forget me."

  Chapter 31

  Yet suddenly there came news of such evil portent that new fears beset our colony. On the 22nd of March, the Indians had raised up and killed several hundreds of the colonists in the land called Virginia.

  That particular colony was some distance from us and we had but little knowledge.

  From time to time we had word of them from Indians passing, or the observations of Kin or Yance, and we knew of harsh times they had, with a shortage of food and much illness. The site of the town they had formed, called Jamestown, was not the best one and, as we had discovered to our cost, there was much fever on the coast close to the swamps.

  After some beginning trouble between Powhatan, of whom we often heard but knew little, and these colonists, troubles between them had simmered down, largely to the strong stand taken by a Captain John Smith, a man of Lincolnshire who had fought in wars upon the continent.

  The story as we heard it from the Catawbas was thus: A war captain called Nemattanow, who was called by the colonists "Jack of the Feather," because of his feather adornment, had persuaded a man named Morgan to go into the woods with him for trade or hunting or something of the kind. Nemattanow had often been in Morgan's house, and coveted many of the things he saw there. Later, in the woods, he murdered Morgan and returned to the cabin wearing Morgan's cap.

  Morgan's boys suspected what had happened and tried to entice the Indian to the presence of a Master Thorpe.

  An altercation developed and Nemattanow was shot and wounded. The boys put him in a boat to take before the governor. Feeling his death was near, Nemattanow, who the Indians believed could not be hurt by a bullet, pleaded with the boys not to tell how he was killed, and to bury his body in the white man's cemetery so his death would not become known.

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p; Oppecancanough, who was king of those Indians, was much angered when he heard of the death of Nemattanow, but made great signs of love and peace to the colonists so that no danger was felt, and due to the fact that no war had been entertained for some time, few of the colonists were armed, there being few swords, and fewer guns except for fowling pieces.

  Yet Oppecancanough informed his people of what was planned, sending presents of venison and fowl to various colonists with much evidence of good will, and sometimes sitting to breakfast with them. Then, suddenly, on the 22nd of March they arose and slaughtered three hundred and forty-seven men, women, and children, striking so quickly that few knew what happened, killing them often with their own tools, then hacking and defacing the bodies.

  One Nathaniel Causie, who had come with John Smith, seized upon an axe when attacked and clove the head of one of his attackers, whereby they fled, and he escaped, though injured, for they hurt none who did stand to fight or were upon their guard, killing only those they caught unawares and unarmed.

  By this time the colonists were established for one hundred and forty miles along the river, on both sides, and the Indians, because of their nature of living off the country, must themselves be in groups of thirty, forty, or sixty.

  Yet the whole plot had been so carefully arranged that each group of Indians was aware, and many more than the three hundred and forty-seven might have been killed had not one Indian, friendly to a man named Pace, informed him of the plot. Pace had informed the governor, after rowing in haste down the river.

  Six of the council were slain, George Thorpe, Nathaniel Powell, John Berkeley, Samuel Macock, Michael Lapworth, and John Rolfe, this Rolfe having married an Indian named Pocohontas.

  The unrest occasioned by this disaster was sure to put many Indians to flight, and there would be trouble along the paths.

  Yet the news included more than the story of massacre and that was that several ships had arrived, bringing more settlers. It was a chance that could not be missed.

  "We will go, Abby. Peter has two boats finished and a third well along in the building. If we all pitch in to help, that boat should be ready for the river in a few days. We will go down the river ... the Cape Fear, I believe they call it now ... and go up the coast to Jamestown.