Long Hunt (9781101559208)

by Judd, Cameron

  “Hold a moment. That may be just a little girl, but she’s seen her people slaughtered, and if she has a gun within reach, she could shoot you dead as you approach.”

  “So she might. Life is risky, Micah. I’m going down there. It’s likely the poor little gal needs help.”

  “Then we’ll go together.”

  “Fine. Now’s the time.” He came to his feet and stepped down the slope, Micah joining him.

  “Hello the house!” Titus called. “Little miss, don’t be afraid. We are friends coming down to help you! We are not Indians, but white men!”

  They were halfway there when the girl appeared at the door, and true to the warning, she had in her hand a flintlock pistol, already cocked. The two men froze and then Titus made a slow display of laying his rifle on the ground, nodding to Micah to do the same. The two frontiersmen raised their hands and looked at the little girl, thinking how incongruous it was that a mere child had them at bay.

  They were near the corpse lying beside the woodpile, and Titus said, “Is this your father’s body lying here on the ground, miss?”

  “No,” said the girl in a voice more clear and strong than they would have expected. “That’s my uncle. His name was Tom Deveraux.”

  “And what is your name?”

  “I’m Mary. Mary Deveraux.”

  “Mary, my name is Titus Fain, and this is Micah Tate. Like I said before, we’re friends. You can count on that. Friends. We’ve come to find out what happened here and to help you and anybody else who may yet be living.”

  This time her voice wasn’t as strong, and quivered some as she spoke. “There ain’t no others living. They’re dead, all of them but me. Indians done it. Did . . . did they take Tom’s hair off him?”

  Titus said, “Yes, Mary, they did.”

  She nodded sadly as if she’d expected nothing else. “Poor Uncle Tom. He was always so proud of his hair. My papa’s pate was clean bald, but Tom’s had a lot of hair, and he used to laugh at my papa for not having any.”

  “Mary, could you lay down that pistol so we can feel safe as we approach you?”

  The little girl gently placed the pistol on the doorstep of the cabin. Then she stepped back inside a single step.

  “We’re going to pick up our rifles now, and come on in,” Titus said, keeping his voice gentle.

  The little girl nodded back in the interior shadows, shoulders slumping as the strength and courage seemed to drain from her. By the time they reached her, she was crying, her thin body shaking.

  Titus had little experience with children and felt frozen with helplessness. But Micah, himself an uncle to several little ones, knelt and put his hand out to touch Mary on the shoulder. He spoke softly. “We’re so sorry for what has happened here, Mary. I wish we could have been here to stop it.”

  The girl, who had rather stringy brown hair, quite dirty and limp-hanging, looked into his face and sobbed loudly. She threw her arms around Micah’s neck and hugged him strongly, seeking a protection that was now too late to make a difference. When Micah looked up at Titus with the girl’s frail arms encircling his neck, there were tears in his eyes, too.

  “You’re safe now, Mary,” Micah said, patting her shoulder. “Titus and me, we’ve been traveling all around here today, and there’s no Indians hereabouts now. We’d have seen them if they were still about.”

  She sobbed again and hugged him even tighter.

  The story was simple, sad, and typical of such tragedies. The Indians had simply appeared, almost ghostlike, at the front edge of the Deveraux cabin clearing. No words had been spoken. Mary’s uncle had been the first to die, tomahawked by a warrior who had rushed down upon him so swiftly he hadn’t even had time to cry out or reach for his nearby rifle. Mary had been at the door and saw her uncle fall, head ruptured. But apparently he hadn’t died at once, because the same Indian who had felled him picked up Deveraux’s rifle and crushed his head a second time with the butt of the stock. Then he knelt and took the scalp, which he waved tauntingly for the little girl to see.

  Mary had withdrawn into the cabin and hidden in the little loft, and all else that followed she had more heard than seen from her elevated hiding place. The sounds alone had been terrible: her father being shot and cursed at with English-American vulgarities the Indians had picked up from white men—cursed because he had no hair and therefore no scalp to take—and then the sounds of her mother and older brother falling victim to belt ax and scalping knife, her older brother fighting hard and screaming at his attackers before he died, her mother dying quietly with a prayer on her lips.

  Mary did not know why the raiders had not climbed to the loft to seek her, because they had seen her in the doorway and surely knew she was hidden somewhere. “I wish they had killed me, too,” she said to Titus and Micah. “My family is dead. I should be dead, too.”

  “That’s no way for you to speak, Mary. God has spared you,” said Titus. “He’s got something ahead for you, so he has saved you. Something good and happy, not bad and sorrowful like today.”

  She cried again, and went to the corpse of her father, which was clad only in trousers and moccasins. “They took his shirt,” she said. “Why did they take his shirt? I had decorated it for him. I stitched a red flower into it for his birthday. It was here.” She touched her chest. “He said it was the finest flower he’d ever seen. Why did they take his shirt?”

  “I suppose they thought it was a pretty flower, too,” said Micah. “But they shouldn’t have took it. And they shouldn’t have done this to your kin.”

  She was crying again now, and Titus wondered whether the child would ever grow past this and be free of the ghosts of this terrible day.

  “Mary, where is your mother’s body?” Titus asked. “And your brother’s?”

  “They dragged her out when they killed her,” Mary said weakly. “My brother they killed outside, in the back. I saw them cut off his scalp through a crack in the wall up in the loft.”

  “Put those visions out of your mind as best you can, Mary,” Titus said. “You are alive and now you must do your family’s living for them, since they can no longer do it themselves. Do you understand me?”

  She nodded, staring at her father’s dead face.

  “Mary, Micah and I are good men, friends, men who will help you and get you to a safe place. We can’t bring your family back, nor make you able to forget all that happened here, but we can be good to you and give you protection and friendship. But you must be willing to come with us, to go away from here.”

  Titus wasn’t at all sure the child would be willing to do that. He knew of many cases in which individuals inexplicably clung to the site of calamities and loss. But Mary was differently inclined. She seemed pleased to hear that she could leave this scene of horror.

  “I’ll go. I’ll go now.”

  “Titus,” Micah said, “what about the dead ones?”

  Titus pondered the matter, then felt Mary’s gaze upon him. He asked, “Mary, I’m going to leave this up to you. Me and Micah can bury your family here, and leave here later on, or we can leave now and send somebody else back to do the burying. But if it would make you sad to think of them left lying here for a time, we can bury them now.”

  Her chin shook and eyes welled. She shook her head. “I want to go now,” she said. “They aren’t really here. This ain’t them. . . . This is what used to be them, but ain’t anymore.”

  Titus hugged the little girl. “You are a wise young woman, Mary. Wiser than many who are a lot older than you. Have you got kin anywhere else, Mary?”

  “No, sir. No family at all now.”

  Titus said, “Don’t worry, Mary. We’ll take you with us, back to a safer place, and we’ll find you a home and a family. I promise you that.”

  She nodded and wept.

  The sound of approaching horses drew their attention. Riders came over the rise and down toward the house, armed frontiersmen, each with a bit of white cloth tied to his hat. The hats were of
many varieties: animal skins, French-styled woven caps, battered tricorns, and common slouch hats, those being the most numerous among the group of nineteen.

  Titus came out of the cabin as they drew near, eyes shifting between him and the corpse by the woodpile. The apparent leader of the group rode down near Titus and dismounted. Micah remained inside with the girl.

  “Andrew DeVault,” the man said in a deep, gruff voice. “These here men make up the Cumberland Scouts and we’ve come because we hear there’s been an Indian attack here.” DeVault glanced down at the dead man. “I can see we were told aright.”

  Titus nodded. “I’ve heard of the Cumberland Scouts, gentlemen. My name is Fain. Titus Fain.”

  DeVault froze a moment as a murmur swept through the rank of mounted riflemen. “Fain,” he repeated. “Titus Fain . . . son of Edohi hisself?”

  “I am.”

  DeVault handed his rifle to another man and dismounted. He approached Titus with an outstretched hand, and as they shook, examined Titus’s face. He nodded. “I can see it. I can see my friend Edohi in your looks, sir. It’s an honor to meet you. How’s your father?”

  “His ankle bones hurt him a lot these days. All the miles, all the years, you know.”

  “When you see him next, tell him Andy DeVault sent him greeting.”

  “I’ll see him soon, and do that. There’s a little girl in there who survived this, and my partner and me will take her with us to Fort Edohi and find a new situation for her.”

  Titus found himself the object of much attention from the scouts, who were quite familiar with the fame and reputation of his father. It was vaguely uncomfortable for Titus, who shunned attention when possible, but he realized that he provided distraction from the grim job that now fell to the Cumberland Scouts: burying the dead of what would thereafter be known as the Deveraux massacre.

  The best trackers from the group set out to follow the Indians responsible. Titus was inclined to join them, but Mary had attached herself to him and Micah, her emotions boiling at any hint her two saviors might leave her.

  Later, when Titus and Micah rode away from the Deveraux cabin in the late afternoon, a third horse accompanied them, Mary perched on its broad back and looking very small indeed.

  CHAPTEREIGHT

  The first night was spent in the home of a family named Colyer, seven miles from the site of the Deveraux slayings, a home surrounded by a small stockade. Little Mary was almost smothered with pity and gentleness by the mother of the family, a brood of five, all of the children older than Mary except for one boy of two, who toddled about the cabin providing some diversion from the general overcast of gloom and sorrow within the place.

  Oddly, Mary was the least depressed of the group. She seemed to crave the distraction of being among friendly strangers, and found the toddler to be quite entertaining. Titus took pleasure in seeing Mary laugh at the child’s babble and tendency to fall down. He himself could not so easily put behind him the horror of what he had seen at the Deveraux cabin. Nor could Micah, who excused himself regularly to go outside and pace about the cabin clearing, determined to make his body as active as his racing mind, which dwelled on thoughts of the massacre. Only when the hour grew late did he finally begin to settle, eager for sleep and the chance to put a difficult day behind him.

  Titus noticed that Ben Colyer, father of the hosting family, was intensely withdrawn, sitting most of the evening in the corner of the room, leaning forward, staring at the floor with his chin in his hands.

  When the others had headed off to their beds, Mary having been offered a place on the single large straw tick that was the sleeping place of the three girls in the family, Micah reentered the cabin and sat down near Colyer. Noting his host’s obvious depression, he reached over and gently slapped his shoulder.

  “Terrible thing to happen to a neighbor,” Micah said as an intended prelude to words of comfort that he hoped would come to him of their own accord. None did, and the thought hung alone in the room like a ghost.

  Colyer, to the surprise of the other two men, began to weep softly. “My fault,” he said in a cracking, nearly silent voice. “My fault.”

  “It was Indians who done it, Mr. Colyer. Not you. You can’t take blame for something done by others, especially red men.”

  “No, sir . . . but fault I can take for having seen early sign of those savages, yet saying nothing of it. I should have spoke up. Should have given warning.”

  “Why didn’t you?” asked Micah.

  “I was unsure of what I was seeing,” Colyer said, looking earnestly at the other two. “I am a man of the city by birth. I’m no woodsman as you two are. But now that I reflect on it, I know that what I saw was Indian sign. A full day before the poor Deverauxs were slaughtered. If I had spoke up we could have stopped it from happening.”

  “All lives have their regrets,” Titus said. “My father says that often.”

  “But you’re right,” Micah added. “You should have spoke up.”

  “And next time you will,” Titus added.

  Colyer stood and paced in a small circle for a few moments. “There will be no ‘next time,’ ” he said. “I am taking my family back to Fredericksburg. I came west only in hope of becoming a merchant when the country was settled and safe. I came too soon. This is a bloody land and I am not a man fit to stay here.”

  “There are dangers everywhere, Mr. Colyer. Even in the cities.”

  The man sighed deeply, slumped, and stared at his visitors. “It is hard for me to put in words the guilt I feel. If only I had been more quick and clever and sure of myself, I could have saved their lives. It all would have been different.”

  Titus shook his head. “My father has also said to me, many times, ‘There is no place named “Would Have Been” where a man’s foot can find ground to stand.’ There is only what is. And all you can do is look square at it, find your trail through it, and trudge on, whether it is good land or bad.”

  Colyer nodded. “Your father is a wise man as well as a famous one, then,” he said. “But there is no comfort in words for me now.”

  Titus said, “Just let your sorrow flow through you until it’s gone. Then move on.”

  “If only I could have saved them . . .”

  “The past is past. Leave it there.”

  Micah, seeking to shift the conversation onto less somber ground, pointed toward the base of the door, where sat a yellow-hued stone about the size of a large man’s foot. “Something about that stone there draws my eye,” he said. “Is it just a doorstop?”

  Colyer lost a little of his gloom, clearly glad to have something mundane to which he could shift his focus. “It is a doorstop, but it isn’t just a stone I happened to pick up for that purpose. It was given to me three years back by an uncle, who in turn had gotten it from a long hunter who’d come out of Carolina. He told me I should guard that stone because it is ‘something important.’ What that meant, he never said.”

  “But you’ve kept it anyway.”

  “There is something about it that draws the eye, as you just said,” Colyer said. “And if it is viewed in certain lights . . .”

  “May I take a better look at it?”

  “Certainly.”

  Micah rose and fetched the rock. Returning to his seat, he examined it by the flicker of candlelight, squinting hard. “I suppose this might be an ore of some kind,” he said. “A metal-bearing stone.”

  “There is a certain shine to parts of the stone when the light hits it,” Colyer said. “You’ll see it when the sun comes back round again.”

  “Have you had anyone look at it to see what it is?”

  “I don’t know anyone who has knowledge about such things.”

  “I think I’d want to carry it to a town somewhere and let a silversmith have a look,” Micah said. “A silversmith would know right off what it is—if it is anything.”

  “You’ve roused my curiosity about it all over again, Mr. Tate.”

  “If you’re thi
nking of asking me to take a piece of it with me and have a silversmith look at it, I’ll do it. We’re heading east, and there will be opportunity.”

  Colyer said, “If that stone proves to have any value to it, I know what I’ll do with it. It’ll go to help poor little Mary, since I failed to help her before.”

  “You’ll have to let that go, Mr. Colyer. You can’t carry around worry over something you can no longer change.”

  Colyer closed his mouth and said no more.

  Micah and Titus spent the night on blankets spread in Colyer’s log barn, and did not stir until morning.

  Mary slept inside the house on a pallet. Her sleep was restless. In the morning Ben Colyer’s wife, Gundred, reported quietly and out of Mary’s hearing that she heard the girl whimpering and softly calling out in her sleep, reliving the terror and loss she had just experienced, and had once found her roaming silently through the cabin, staring fearfully at the dark windows. Gundred had spoken to her and quickly ascertained that the girl was not awake. When morning came, there was nothing to indicate Mary had any awareness of having been sleepwalking.

  “What will become of her?” Gundred asked the men. “She has no kin to see her through such a hard time.”

  “I have promised her that I will find her a home,” Titus said. “I shall.” He paused, gathered his boldness, then asked, “Might you take her in here?”

  The Colyers looked at each other, wordless. Gundred spoke.

  “We cannot do it,” she said. “We simply cannot.” No reasons were given and none were demanded by Titus and Micah. Micah, in fact, seemed relieved at the woman’s words. Titus asked him about it later, in private.

  “Why did you look so pleased that they turned away from that idea?” Titus queried. “It would have solved the problem straightaway.”

  Micah shook his head. “It might have provided an answer, but it would not have been the right one. There’s a better place for that child, and we’ll take her to it.”

  “Where? What place?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Micah said with cheerfulness. “Our duty is to find it.”