Long Hunt (9781101559208)

by Judd, Cameron

  As part of North Carolina, the backcountry people believed themselves due protection from their mother state—but therein lay a problem. Distance and the mountain barrier made it impractical for North Carolina to respond to troubles in the outlying settlements or offer them significant protection, so the settlers were for the most part left on their own.

  The situation was diplomatically clumsy for North Carolina. At the close of the Revolutionary War a solution, or an attempt at a solution, was finally contrived. North Carolina opened its western lands to purchase and settlement, then made a gift of those lands to the government of the United States, effectively washing its hands of the responsibility to protect the far-flung settlements. But before it made the move, it first went through some legislative maneuvers that allowed Carolina leaders the chance to claim ownership for themselves of great tracts of backcountry lands. The move came to be known as the “Land Grab Act.” And in ceding the land to the federal government, the land grabbers set as one term of the cession that their North Carolina land grants would continue to be honored.

  Cut off by their mother state and with little ground to believe the federals would do any better protecting them than had the Carolinian government, the resentful backcountry leaders came up with their own idea: an independent, separate state, one that they hoped would be approved and taken in by the Continental Congress. They named their proposed new state Frankland, meaning “land of the free,” though they eventually got around to changing the name to Franklin, in honor of America’s most popular statesman.

  The affair took another twist when North Carolina changed its mind and rescinded its cession of lands to federal control. The settlers who had begun the process of state-making now were under a strange double banner, their allegiance being asked by both North Carolina and the fledgling entity of Franklin. There were, at some times and places, two simultaneously acting sets of government leaders, one with Franklinian authority, the other acting for North Carolina.

  Efforts to have Franklin recognized by the Continental Congress failed, the vote falling short of what was required by the Articles of Confederation. Those strongly in favor of the Franklin effort huffily proposed becoming an independent republic, while others favored the old North Carolinian association. Crawford Fain, for one, was persuaded that the heated feelings the issue stirred in some quarters would inevitably lead to flying rifle balls at some point, and prayed fervently for a resolution before matters took such a bad turn.

  Fain wondered if he would ever be able to stop grinning. He’d forced a muted but agreeable smile onto his face in order to politely make it through the conversation with the boring, monotone Cable, and now he’d held it so long he wasn’t sure he could relax his jaws. But he did, and found his will to be polite fading fast. He had to escape Cable and his unending Franklinite talk, even if it meant leaving poor Potts to sit there and endure it alone.

  How was it possible for a man to live his life thinking of nothing but politics? Fain, unlike Cable, just didn’t have it in him to do that. Fain loved to let his mind drift free, to think upon whatever it happened to find, like a man stumbling down an unexplored path. Fain knew from long experience that the unexplored paths often proved to be the ones that opened on the finest vistas.

  Fain had not had much interest in observing the camp meeting commencing outside the walls of his stockade. He’d planned to watch a few minutes of it from the vantage point of the blockhouse on the southeast corner of the fort, then quietly drift back to his own cabin to turn in early for a long night’s sleep.

  If the choice ended up being between listening to old cross-eyed Bledsoe and political blabber Cable, Fain was inclined to choose the former. Cable was showing no sign of reaching the end of his Franklinian discourse.

  Conveniently, singing voices arose from outside the stockade, distracting Cable from his talk and rendering him silent a few moments.

  Come, ye sinners, poor and needy,

  weak and wounded, sick and sore;

  Jesus ready stands to save you,

  full of pity, love and power.

  “Sounds like they’re getting started,” Fain said, grabbing the opportunity. “Mr. Cable, I’m supposing your family awaits you out there.”

  “Why . . . yes. They do. Perhaps I should go. Though there was more I wanted to say about—”

  “Yes, perhaps it is time to rejoin them. We’ll continue our conversation some other time. Now, I believe I’ll retire to the blockhouse and listen to the preaching from there.”

  For a moment Cable looked intrigued by that idea, and Fain wished he’d kept his last words to himself. If Cable climbed up into that blockhouse with him, Fain would remain his captive.

  “You are a fortunate man to have so fine a family to enjoy such an evening with,” Fain said. “Though I do thank you for taking a few minutes away from them to visit me.”

  Cable nodded and shook hands with Fain and Potts, and at last made his way out of the fort. Fain grinned at Potts. “Got your politics all figured out now, son?”

  “If I don’t I reckon I’ve got no excuse for it, having heard all that.”

  Fain chuckled, and the pair headed toward the ladder leading up into the blockhouse, which was a square log structure, built on poles, rising above the top of the stockade palisades, with a wide rifle slot in the blockhouse wall at shoulder level. From inside the blockhouse a few riflemen could lay down a wide field of fire in almost total safety, protected by thick log walls.

  Fain and Potts positioned themselves at the rifle slot, from where they had a panoramic view of the meadow and what was now a large crowd indeed, hundreds in number. Arbors, tents, parked wagons, and makeshift horse pens were scattered throughout the throng. Here and there a small clump of people were gathered around would-be preachers who stood on stumps or wagon beds, preaching their own unwanted sermons in a vain hope of winning over the crowd before Bledsoe could get rolling with his crafted British accent and crossed George Whitefield eyes. Bledsoe, at the moment seated on a bench at the back of the preaching platform, didn’t worry about such usurpers. They showed up at every camp meeting, and never drew more than a handful of listeners. The crowd belonged to Bledsoe, and he knew how to play it.

  At Bledsoe’s side sat a gray-haired woman, locks wrapped up in a kerchief, a placid expression on her face. This, Fain knew, was the woman who would become the focus of attention when the Molly Reese narrative portion of the presentation began. Fain opened his mouth to make a comment to Potts, but just then a figure clambered up the ladder through the entrance hole in the blockhouse floor.

  Fain frowned and started to say something to encourage Cable to go back where he’d come from; then he saw it was not Cable.

  “Hello, Doctor,” Fain said to the new arrival. “Fine-looking rifle you got there.”

  Peter Houser moved away from the entrance hole and approached Fain with arms outstretched, the rifle held horizontal in his upturned hands like a gift. For a moment Fain wondered if perhaps a gift was just what it was. He hoped so, for Houser was known as the finest gunsmith west of the mountains.

  “Is that the one you’ve been working on?” Fain asked.

  “It is,” Houser replied through his auburn whiskers. “Finished just yesterday. I spent the morning making bullets for it and polishing it so you would see it to greatest advantage.”

  Fain took the rifle and admired it with a knowing eye from butt plate to sight. “It’s a beauty, sir,” he said. “If you’re as fine a physician as you are a gun maker, those of us privileged to be your neighbors will surely live forever.”

  Houser smiled. “Even without Holy Bledsoe’s help?” He nodded in the direction of the camp meeting.

  “Even so,” Fain said.

  Houser chuckled. Houser, a man of multiple fields of expertise and a seemingly endless range of skills, was known to be no devotee of camp meetings, emotional displays, or other traits of new light religion. Even so, he sometimes described his choice to leave the
settled East and move to the frontier West to be the result of responding to a “calling.” His goals were to be an agent of better life on the frontier, using not only his medical skills (gained through years of apprenticeship with one of Philadelphia’s best physicians) but also as an innkeeper, real estate broker, gunsmith, and supporter of education. Rumor had it he had made a sizable monetary gift to Eben Bledsoe’s fledgling college, whose loftier and less emotive style of religion was more in keeping with Houser’s preferences.

  “I’m pleased you like the rifle,” Houser said. “It’s yours.”

  Fain gaped. “I beg your . . . Did you say . . . ?”

  The physician/gunsmith/innkeeper beamed. “I did say. I consider it an honor to be able to present a rifle to so fine a hunter and woodsman as Crawford ‘Edohi’ Fain.”

  “But I . . . I’ve done nothing to merit . . .”

  “You have done more for me than I can ever repay. You opened your station to me as soon as I and my family arrived. You provided us shelter, a cabin of our own within these very walls. You treated us as if we were your own kin. You provided land upon which we could build our permanent home, establish my medical office, and build our inn. This rifle is but a small and inadequate effort to show my appreciation.”

  “I’m—I’m grateful. More than grateful.”

  “That’s a beautiful piece of craft, sir,” said Potts.

  Fain said, “Doctor, I don’t know that you’ve met my friend Langdon Potts before. He came here to see Titus, only to find he’s away.”

  Another song had begun outside, and swelled up loudly, interrupting the conversation. Preaching had not yet begun on the main platform, though a few of the uninvited small-time competitors were still holding forth out among the throng.

  When the music lulled, a wild, screaming yell arose from the camp meeting. A man’s voice, harsh and high, as if someone had just hit him with a hot iron.

  “What the deuce?” Fain said.

  Potts was already looking out. “It’s Bledsoe,” he said. “I think the preaching is about to commence.”

  “That wasn’t preaching; that was a howl,” Fain said.

  “Little difference between the two in Bledsoe’s approach to religion,” said Houser. “Vent the emotions! Stir the passions! Disconnect yourself from the rational mind.” He shook his head. “How can a man suppose he can find truth when he disdains the very organ of reason? It’s more than Abner Bledsoe’s eyes that are crossed, in my opinion.”

  “Bledsoe’s brother, Eben, thinks the same, Doctor.”

  “I know. I know. And had he not disavowed his brother’s nonsense, his new academy would have received no support from me.”

  “What the devil?” said Potts, looking out the rifle port.

  “What is it, Potts?”

  “There—see? Coming through the crowd?”

  Dr. Houser, whose eyes were as keen as his mind, was already at Potts’s side. “Lord in heaven!” he said. “Come with me, young man. I think I may be needed out there, and I may benefit from your strong, young back.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Reuben McCart was only fourteen years old, but tall and big for his age, as muscled as his father and uncles. Partly because he looked so much like a man, he particularly resented the fact that his family still treated him as a child, sending him on trivial errands, leaving him to oversee his younger siblings when his parents were away, and speaking to him in a condescending manner.

  His latest resentment was that his mother had sent him to fetch his youngest sister’s lost dog, which had chased a rabbit away from the camp meeting grounds and back into the brush and trees around the base of the bluff overlooking the meadow. As far as Reuben was concerned, the dog could be left to its own devices and fate. The fact that his sister consistently failed to keep control of the animal was not his fault! And how was he expected to find a free-roaming dog at night, especially considering that this particular dog had never taken to him much and would probably hide if he got near? Despite making that point to his mother, she was unrelenting and sent him on his surely vain errand while his tearful sister smugly looked on. He might have appealed to his father, but his father was off somewhere else on the meeting ground, talking to other men. So Reuben simply went on, back toward the cliff looming behind them all.

  “Here, boy! Here, Tater! Show yourself, dog!”

  Nothing. He went on, past the back edge of assembled camp meeting worshipers. The meeting was beginning to really come to life, a few people showing the first signs of the “exercises” that often marked these events: spasmodic, violent jerking back and forth, so hard that men’s hats were flung fifteen feet away and women’s long hair flailed like cracking whips.

  It all seemed odd and unpleasant to Reuben, who decided that maybe looking for a lost dog was at least better than being stuck in the midst of such seeming madness.

  Half an hour later, as he trudged back to the meeting ground, he did not have the dog with him, but was unconcerned. He’d fetched back something much more important than a dog.

  He’d heard the sound shortly after penetrating the brush at the bottom of the escarpment: a low, mournful moaning that he thought might have been wind moving through the small cavern passages that penetrated the bluff. He’d seen the dog then, standing at the rim of a pit below the cliff, growling and barking down into the hole. As Reuben sneaked nearer, intent on grabbing the dog before it knew he was there, he realized two things: the moaning was coming up from the pit itself, and it was not caused by wind. It was a human voice, the voice of a man who was seemingly in great pain.

  At that moment Reuben hadn’t felt much like a grown man at all, but a scared boy. Someone was down in that hole, hurt, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to see the situation. But duty and curiosity drove him to the pit’s edge, and just as he looked over, the moan rose to a full scream.

  It was dark in the pit, and Reuben had no light except for the feeble illumination of the moon. He lay on his belly and looked down into the hole, hands resting on the rim of the pit, and listened as the screaming faded down until it was merely moaning again.

  “Who’s down there?” he finally dared ask. His voice trembled more than he liked.

  “I . . . need help. . . .”

  “Are you trapped down there?”

  “Need . . . help to get out . . .”

  As Reuben strained to see, his eyes adjusted somewhat and he thought he saw something white moving below in the murk. A moment of closer study revealed it to be a hand. Drawing in a deep breath, he braced himself as best he could and reached down.

  The man’s hand was thick and rough-skinned. It closed around Reuben’s hand with great force. “Pull now,” the man below said.

  Reuben pulled hard. The man’s hand held firm and Reuben could tell the fellow was pushing up from below with his legs, but as he did he moaned pitifully, like a victim of torture. The effort for both Reuben and the man in the pit became more difficult, but both persisted, and slowly the man rose until Reuben could just make out the dim image of a bearded face.

  Reuben was sure he was going to lose his grip, but it didn’t much matter because the man now found purchase with his other hand, gripping an out-thrusting rock on the side of the pit. Still groaning, he pulled up, then let go of Reuben’s hand and at the same moment took hold of the edge of the pit. Reuben could hear the scuff of the man’s feet on stone as he struggled to climb.

  The fellow was burly and strong, but something in his manner and look, as he became more clearly visible in the moonlight, did not seem right. Reuben had the impression that he was pallid, but it was too dark to really know. When the fellow suddenly slipped backward a little, as if stricken with weakness, Reuben grabbed his hands and pulled him forward. The man managed to writhe over the edge of the hole, where he collapsed onto his belly with great heaving breaths. He moaned again.

  Reuben stood erect and stepped back to look the fellow over, and saw at once that he’d been wrong when he’d thou
ght that the man was pushing himself up with his feet. He had used only one foot, for one was all he had. Where the other leg should be was only emptiness, with ragged dark meat visible about knee level.

  “Your leg, mister . . .”

  “Gone,” the man said, his voice raspy. “Left it in the pit, wedged tight in a hole.” Then he groaned again and said no more.

  “Mister?”

  No answer. Not even a moan now. Reuben thought for a moment the man had died, but then he saw movement between his shoulder blades, his lungs weakly inflating and deflating.

  “Can you hear me, mister? We got to get you out to the camp meeting. There’s people there and we can get you help. You’re hurt bad, sir. Hurt bad.”

  No reply. Reuben knelt beside the man and tried to see the fellow’s face, but the moon vanished behind a cloud and he could not.

  “I’m going to have to try to get you up,” Reuben said. “But you’re a big man, and I don’t know how well I can hoist you.”

  His hope was that the man would come around again, and have enough strength and balance to lean against him and stay upright. Together they could work their way out through the trees and brush and enter the campground, where surely others would come to their aid. Reuben was unsure whether he should position himself on the man’s right side, where he still had a leg and foot, or on the left, where there was nothing.

  He chose the right side because the ragged bloodiness of the other side made him queasy. He’d be no use to this man if he passed out in a faint and let him fall.

  Kneeling, he slid the man’s limp right arm over his shoulder and tried to stand him up. He got only part of the way before the fellow’s weight pulled him down again. Another try, another failure. And again, the same.

  Reuben changed positions and tried a fourth time, still to no avail. He’d managed to help the man out of the pit, but that might be as much success as he’d see. He decided he’d have to abandon the man and go bring back rescuers from the camp meeting. But just as he stood to do so, the man groaned loudly and rolled a little onto his right side.