Long Hunt (9781101559208)

by Judd, Cameron

  Determined to tough it out at the moment, Littleton rode on, but eventually each jolt of the horse’s motion made his pain unbearable. Littleton found himself actually crying from the pain. Like a child. It made him feel humiliated and angry and glad to be alone. Even when he’d been trapped in that pit with hellish pain radiating up through his body, he hadn’t wept. But this was a continuous lower-grade suffering that wore him down physically, mentally, emotionally.

  He determined to get control of himself, though, when he heard the sound of voices coming toward him through the woods. Though he was posing now as the fictional Lyle Kirk, he had spent too many years as Jeremiah Littleton, highwayman, to hide very effectively behind a mere false identity. Any group of people he met might include someone who would recognize him.

  Littleton rode a little farther, the voices coming clearer. He stopped as a fiercer burst of pain shot up through his thigh and all but paralyzed him. He climbed down from his horse. Odd as it seemed, he had found he could sometimes gain some minor ease from his phantom pains by standing on his false leg. Something about the angle of the pressure on the remnant of his leg, he supposed . . . he really couldn’t account for it. But in any case, he dismounted and led his horse on up the trail and around the edge of the stand of woods beside him.

  A cluster of people stood gathered around an open hole, tears staining several faces, even as they stained Littleton’s. Tears of physical pain in his case, emotional ones for these strangers. A woman was being buried, having died in the process of giving birth to a tiny boy, an infant now held in the trembling arms of the baby’s weeping father. The bereaved man looked from the face of the sleeping child, down to the wooden box that held all that physically remained of the woman he loved, then around at the faces of the other mourners. He gazed then at Littleton, seeking to recognize this limping newcomer but failing to do so. But he did see the tears on Littleton’s face and assumed them to be the marks of shared grief.

  “You knew her, stranger. That much I can see, just from your tears. Come say your farewells.”

  Littleton hadn’t progressed in his criminal career as far as he had without having learned to roll with life’s blows, to recognize and take opportunity. This group obviously assumed him to be someone who had known the deceased woman, even if they did not themselves know him in turn. As Littleton tied off his horse to a low-hanging branch, a woman came around the grave and extended her arms toward him, tears streaming and lip aquiver. Littleton stepped forward, held still, and let her embrace him.

  “Poor thing! I can see you loved her, too.”

  “I can’t . . . believe she’s gone . . . ,” Littleton croaked out in his best grieving voice.

  “How did you know her, sir?” asked an older man in the group.

  “I can’t talk . . . about it right now.”

  Nods of understanding all around, and more tears. It hit Littleton that later on, this bit of playacting would all seem quite funny.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Littleton realized that his leg hardly hurt at all now since he had gotten out of the saddle. The leather straps that attached to the wooden leg and, along with the cup that fit over the stump of remaining, held the prosthetic in attachment to his body, felt a little pinched and uncomfortable, however.

  The burial service was completed with a prayer and the advance of two grubby men who were obviously ready to fill the grave. Littleton drifted back toward his horse. One of the men in the group, a fellow with a piercing, knowing look that made Littleton nervous, came to him. “Paul Hasker,” he said. “Sarah was my cousin, but close enough she was more like a sister.”

  Littleton smiled through his whiskers and put out a hand. “Good to meet you, Paul. I’m Lyle Kirk. I heard Sarah speak of you.”

  “How did you know her?”

  Littleton was put on the spot by the question but didn’t show a trace of panic. He was a practiced liar.

  “From church,” he said. Churchgoing Lyle Kirk. That was him!

  “Is that right? Which church?”

  Still he wasn’t thrown askew. “The old one,” the liar said with a quick flash of a smile, hoping his words happened to fit some scenario of the dead woman’s life that would make sense.

  “From her Baptist days, then,” the other said.

  “Uh, yes.”

  “Was that before or after . . . Well, you know what I’m thinking of.”

  “Uh . . . after.” Littleton hoped desperately that this would lead to no further questions.

  Hasker put out his hand again. “Well, it’s good to meet you, Mr. Kirk, even though the circumstances are sad. I’m glad you could get here in time to see her laid to rest.”

  “I just wish there was something I could say to make everyone feel better.”

  “We all grieve together. But life goes on.” Hasker’s eyes flicked down to Littleton’s false leg. “Might I ask how you came to lose . . . ?”

  “Accident with a wagon,” Littleton said. He’d decided two days before to use that vaguery as his standard lie about the leg. One repeated lie would be easier to keep track of than different tales told to different people.

  “Recent or old?”

  “Recent.”

  Another man, poorly dressed and ugly and bald, joined the conversation. “You carve that peg yourself, that you’re standing on, friend?”

  “No. A carpenter made it.”

  The man bent over and looked at it closely. “Going to break right out from under you, it is.”

  Littleton put his hand out against a sapling and shifted his weight to his real leg, lifting the wooden leg off the ground and tilting it up so he could see it better. “Nah, nah. Nothing wrong with that leg,” he said. “No cracks or nothing. Ain’t going to break.”

  “Pshaw!” said the other. “I’ve did a lot of work with wood in my day, and I know that wood there has a flaw in it. Going to break with your weight going down on it all the time.”

  “I think this peg will hold up fine,” Littleton countered, growing annoyed with this fellow. To demonstrate his confidence, he put his weight back down on the wooden limb and shifted to stress the wood from various angles. “See there?” he said. “Holds up just—” Then, with an abrupt splintering noise, the wood cracked and the peg split almost completely apart, the separated portion bending to one side, leaving the remaining part of the leg with a splintered point that stabbed into the ground under Littleton’s weight.

  “I told you,” said the ugly man. “I could tell it.”

  Littleton gave a heave and managed to pull the splintered point out of the earth. The other, split remnant, not broken completely off, swung back down against the other portion.

  “I can repair that for you,” Hasker said. “I’m a blacksmith, and what that peg needs is a good iron band around it, holding it all back together again. A good strap of iron around it would have spared you the break ever happening to start with.”

  “Could you do that work, Mr. Hasker?”

  “I can. This very day. We’re not far from my smithy.”

  “I could see it was going to break,” affirmed the ugly man yet again.

  “How is it you have such a good eye for wood?” Littleton asked him, figuring friendliness to be his most prudent option.

  “Built a lot of cabins, mostly. Or half cabins. My name’s Ott Dixon. I’m a traveling seller of spirits. When I go to a new place, I put up a tavern, usually log on the bottom and tent cloth at the top. I’ve done it so much I’ve gotten where I can tell when wood is strong and when it’s got weakness in it. That carpenter who made that leg, he would have knowed that was a weak piece of wood, if he’d been worth his vinegar.”

  “Pleased to know you, Mr. Dixon,” Littleton said. “My name’s Kirk, and I’d covet the chance to turn up a tankard at your traveling tavern, if it is close by.”

  “It is, though it’s only been where it is for a short time now. I moved it west from where it had been before, up at Greeneville. I got the tent fa
bric on it just three days back. Follow me and I’ll guide you there, Mr. Kirk.”

  “I am your shadow, sir,” Littleton said, already anticipating the taste of rum.

  Littleton did not go immediately to Dixon’s newest tavern, though. First he took Hasker up on his offer of a repair for the broken wooden leg. Hasker, who unlike Dixon was clearly honestly upset by the death and burial of the woman named Sarah, was just as clearly glad to have a task to distract him from grief. He threw himself into his task, firing and hammering out a strong iron band of perfect proportion to slide up onto the split prosthesis and bind it together again.

  “Only one thing I ask of you in how you do that, sir,” Littleton said. “Please do not put the band so firmly in place that I can’t work it off again with a blade tip.”

  Hasker frowned. “Very well. But why would you want to do that? The leg can’t be walked on if the split-apart pieces are not bound together, so I wouldn’t advise that you—”

  “I have my reasons, sir, and I hope you will take no offense if I keep them private.”

  What Gilly remembered the most keenly was the strange, intensely prickling pain that had filled his entire skull after he was taken down from the rope and blood flow resumed. The feeling had been worse even than the pinching of his throat and straining of his neck while he was still hanging.

  He remembered also that first gasp of air, rushing through a raw throat, refilling lungs painfully yet giving him an immediate feeling of resuming life. He had a sense of being drawn back from the brink of a great darkness he had seen looming before him, ready to pull him in, irreversibly.

  Beyond those things, memory and understanding were murky.

  Only this much Gilly knew for a certainty: He had been hanged by his old companions, pulled up by the neck from the earth, his light weight becoming suddenly heavy and throat-crushing. The forest before him, and the faces of the former partners who were doing this to him, first had gone glaringly white, then faded swiftly to gray and finally darkness. His head, robbed of the nourishment of air and blood, had swum and spun. It seemed to him that a long time had passed this way.

  Then, when his executioners were gone, and just as the embrace of the blackness had been on the verge of becoming absolute, something very powerful had grasped him about the thighs and shoved him upward, relieving the worst of the pinched feeling in his neck and allowing those terrible, tingling prickles of renewed blood flow to begin their tormenting play. His eyes had opened and he had caught a flickering glimpse of his rescuer. That glimpse had persuaded him that what he was seeing was not real, just some imagined figment that comes to the mind at the moment of death.

  He had felt the loosened noose removed from his neck, and at that moment a spasm caused by the resurgence of blood through his brain caused him to break the grip of whoever held him, and he fell. A sharp, breaking pain went through his left ankle, and he had groaned as he passed out.

  Next thing he had known, he was bobbing along aboveground, head swinging downward and eyes staring at the back of whoever had rescued him. His left ankle throbbed miserably with every jolt as he was carried like a rolled-up bearskin over the shoulder of a very large man.

  He passed out again and knew nothing more for a long time.

  Ten-year-old Michael Harkin awakened from sleep to an awareness that it had happened again. Another night with drenched legs, a soaked bed, and a mother who would be angry but try not to show it. Then his sister would be wakened by the activity in the house, and he would face her contempt and mocking once again. And her whispered hints, spoken out of earshot of their mother, that the dreaded ogre Loafhead would appear and punish him for once again wetting the bed.

  Michael sat up, the straw tick rustling beneath him. He reached down to verify what he already knew, and to his shock found he was wrong. The bedding was completely dry. He had not wet the bed after all. Astonishing!

  Rising, he smiled into the darkness, relieved and pleased with himself. Maybe at last he was past his old problem. Maybe from now on his body would let him know when he needed to go relieve himself, and he could handle the situation like a normal person by getting up and heading out to the privy.

  Michael headed toward the door that led out to the dogtrot section between the conjoined log buildings that together composed the Harkin Inn and private family home. The door of his little room opened directly into the dogtrot, which was simply an open passageway, like an alley, between the house and the inn. Roofed timbers extended over the dogtrot so that the two log structures could be considered, superficially, as a single building.

  Michael put his hand to the wooden lift latch, realizing from the mounting feeling of desperation in his bladder just how narrowly he had missed another bed-wetting. But he was nearly sure he could make it to the nearer of the two outhouses in the back before nature’s call became self-answering. The smaller of the two privies served the Harkin family; the larger was intended for use of those in the inn. But the larger one was closer to Michael’s room, and it was there he intended to go. Closeness mattered.

  He looked forward to morning, when he could tell Maggie of his success. Let her mock him then! Let her barrage him with her silly tales of Loafhead, the Punisher of bed-wetting boys, and try to make him afraid.

  Michael’s hand froze on the half-lifted latch. Loafhead . The mere thought of the name chilled him into paralysis. The darkness outside his door became heavy and threatening, filled with danger . . . filled with Loafhead.

  Pressing a hand to his crotch to help himself restrain his need to urinate, Michael tried not to imagine what it would be like to step through that door into the dogtrot and feel the heavy hand of the Punisher suddenly descend upon his shoulder, grasping him, lifting him to carry him off over his back and find some private spot to eat his head like a loaf of bread. And of course, in trying not to imagine it, Michael forced himself to do exactly that. He remained frozen where he stood, wildly needing to relieve his bladder but too terrified to move.

  “There is no such thing as Loafhead,” he whispered to himself, repeating something his mother had told him time and again. He’d heard her say it to Maggie, too, scolding her for lying to her brother about such a frightening notion. “There is no such thing as Loafhead,” he said again, louder.

  Looking back into his dark room, he suddenly remembered that beneath his bed was a chamber pot. He disliked using it, normally, for it filled his room with the smell of urine and made him think of bed-wetting. But tonight the chamber pot provided a welcome option. He could use that and avoid the necessity of going out into the world of darkness and Loafhead. When morning came he could quietly go out and secretly empty the chamber pot, and declare to Maggie that, guess what, he’d gotten up in the night and used the outhouse without fear, not wetting his bed at all, not living in fear of her old English bogart story. She’d never know he was lying about the outhouse visit.

  So he went to his bed and from beneath it retrieved the crockery pot . . . but he suddenly gritted his teeth and said, aloud, “No.” He stared at the log wall, shook his head, and said it again. “No. Because there is no such thing as Loafhead, and I don’t need to be afraid.”

  It was a matter of pride now, his own pride in himself. He had made it through the night without wetting, gotten up as a normal person should when he felt the need to relieve himself, and he’d be hanged if he’d let some old, false folk tale told by a mere girl scare him now!

  He was going out that door, down that dogtrot, across the little expanse of yard to the outhouse, and then back again to his room and bed. The chamber pot would remain unused. And he, Michael Harkin, would be victorious. A winner in the war he had fought with himself and his own physical failing, and with his eternal fear of the bogeyman his mean sister would not let die. No fearful pissing into a chamber pot for Michael Harkin! No, he was going outside, to the outhouse. As his father would have. Like a man.

  Michael lifted his eyes upward in the dark, forced a smile onto his face, an
d whispered, “See, Papa? I’m not afraid anymore. I’m not afraid.”

  And while he still had the determination burning in him, he pushed the unused chamber pot back under the bed, marched to the door, opened it, and stepped out into the dark dogtrot.

  The south end of the dogtrot opened toward the street, and though Michael needed to go the opposite direction to reach the outhouse, something on the street drew his attention and he glanced that way.

  What he saw passing from right to left across the rectangle of dirt street visible to him caused him to suck in his breath as a cold fear gripped him. The side of the dogtrot blocked most of the street from his view, so almost immediately what he had seen was hidden by the intervening wall. Forgetting the outhouse for the moment, Michael moved toward the street and at the end of the dogtrot paused to look out down the street to see what had passed by.

  He clamped his hand to his mouth to keep himself from yelling, and his straining bladder gave way and streamed urine down his legs beneath his nightshirt. Whimpering and terrified, he backed into the darkness of the dogtrot, went back to his room, and spent the rest of the night cowering in his bed, afraid even to open his eyes.

  Loafhead was real. And he was here. Michael knew. He had just seen him, treading down the middle of the street in Jonesborough, carrying a man slung over his shoulder like a sack of dirt.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  It was often easy for Crawford Fain to forget that he was a famous man in his part of the world, and even in parts he had never set foot in. In his own mind he was simply one more frontiersman, one with particularly apt skills for playing out his role in life, perhaps, but in the end, merely another man.

  His arrival in Jonesborough had provided a quick reminder that others were not so casual in their assessment of him. He was more than a man; he was a symbol, of his time and his place and his frontier. Like Franklin leader John Sevier, who found himself thrust into leadership both political and military virtually everywhere he went, Fain could not live the life of an ordinary man. It simply wasn’t allowed by those around him.