Moxley did not sound sorry, and Mark felt new anger.
“I swear to you, Moxley, every drop of her blood you spilled you shall buy with a quart of your own!” Mark cried out bitterly, and Moxley actually laughed from above.
“What tempers we are in, youngster. Nay, I have changed my mind. If to hurt her in any way was to hurt you, then I’m glad. Hurting you, Mark Jarrett, is the chief joy I have left in life.”
Mark crouched low and crept to the base of another, thicker tree. Around its right side he aimed his rifle, up toward the crown of the rock.
“You’re trapped up there,” he said, more calmly. “Let that thought give you joy. You’re like a ’possum on a branch, with hungry dogs below you.” “And now you name yourself a dog,” was Mox- ley’s scoffing reply. “And well you do so, for a dog you are, and a yapping, yellow cur to boot. Howl up at me, dog, and see if it frightens me enough to make me lose my hold here and fall down to you.”
Of the two of them, Moxley seemed far the more contained, far more assured. Mark fought down an impulse to shout angry challenges and accusations.
“I hear you, ’possum, treed up there on high,” he decided to say. “Call me dog, if you will, but I have you cornered. Others will come. We’ll wait until you hunger and thirst, and at last come down to the fate you deserve.”
“The fate I deserve?” Moxley repeated the words drawlingly.
“You’re a red-handed outlaw and a traitor,” said Mark. “You’ve fetched murdering Indian thieves to raid peaceful settlers. Your life is forfeit, and every honest man will rejoice when you’re rightly punished. Even if it should take us days—”
“Oh, come,” Moxley broke in, banteringly. “It won’t be days, my poor dull lad. Not even hours. See, Mark, it wants but half an hour until the sun goes down.”
That was true. The sun had fallen away toward the western mountain tops, and the shadows in which Mark held his shelter had grown long and gloomy.
“Surely you know this lump of rock where I hold my fastness,” Moxley elaborated, in mock-helpful tones. “I know it, too, for often and often I climbed to it in the days before you and your people came to settle here. Only at this place where we talk back and forth can a man mount up with any success, and I say that you have my leave to mount, against what I might care to do with my pistols. But at other places all the way round, though nobody can well climb up, ’twould be an easy feat for me to climb down.”
“And you don’t dare climb down,” said Mark.
“In a short while, when night falls, I’ll take my chance. And I’ll get away, you young fool. After that, never a day will dawn but you’ll wonder if you’ll live to see the night. Never a step you’ll take but you’ll fear I lurk on your path in hiding, to shoot you down.”
But if he had meant that to dismay Mark, it did not do so. Mark himself was surprised that he was not dismayed. He felt, instead, a swelling of strength and determination.
“You think you have good cause to hate me,” Mark suggested.
“Do I not have good cause? Twice I tried my best to take for my own this land where you and your people choose to squat. I’d have made it a town, you young dolt, a town to be called with my name; a town to be rich and important in the land. But you would not let me do that. You drove me out. And so I came back with my Indian braves—”
“Indian braves!” Mark repeated scornfully. “Say rather, your Indian poltroons, every one of them hated and scorned and driven forth by his tribe. Aye, outlawed even by savages, fit company for a greater savage than any of them.”
“I promised them plunder,” said Moxley. “Food, guns, the spoil of your homes. For me, I wanted only revenge, I wanted only to be even with you.”
“We’ve beaten and driven away your savages, and you’re trapped,” Mark mocked him. The fierceness grew in Mark as he thought of Celia and her wound from Moxley’s bullet.
“I was after revenge,” Moxley said again, “and revenge I shall have.”
“Others are climbing to join me here,” Mark said confidently. “You’re hemmed in on your rock. Why don’t you try to climb down the other side, Moxley?”
Laughter again at that, from up there against the sky that grew a deeper, softer blue with the approach of evening.
“Maybe I will,” said Moxley. “Maybe I’ll be climbing down even now, while you roost there waiting for your friends, and think you have me safe.”
And he said no more.
At once Mark stole through the trees that bunched around and against Bear Paw. He gained the far side, and gazed at how it fell there, forty feet almost perpendicularly steep. Yet, as Moxley had said, an active climber could cling to veins and cracks and knobs in the rocky face, to lower himself foot by foot. He tried to see the top, but could not. He raised his voice in a shout.
“Ha, Moxley! Start down as you promised. We await you here.”
“Mark Jarrett’s braying voice,” Moxley called back from his unseen position up above. “How many others are with you, Mark? Let me hear their voices, too.”
“Nay, try to come down, and count them for yourself,” Mark challenged. “We are drawing a tight net around you. By light or by darkness, we’ll gather you in whenever you pluck up enough of your courage to try to come down.”
“I think you lie to me,” said Moxley. “I think you’re alone down there, young woods-runner.”
“You may think that, but you do not know,” said Mark. “Climb down, I say, and find out for sure.”
But the sunlight grew soft, took on a touch of redness, in preparation for its evening departure. Mark stole away among trees, keeping them ever between him and the summit of the rock, lest Moxley spy him and fire. He made a complete circuit of Bear Paw. Back he came to where he had been before, and from there he scowled up the slant to where the gnarled fir tree clung.
Something moved there, at the fir tree, moved stealthily, furtively.
Mark’s rifle rose as though at its own will. Mark’s thumb drew back the hammer. His finger hooked on the trigger. He took a step and shoved his body close behind the tree nearest to the rock, peering around it to the right, to see whatever was astir up there.
Hard to see that movement, but it had a grayness to it as he made it out partially, through the fleece of green needles on the crooked branches of the fir. He brought his rifle to his shoulder, but waited. He wanted a good shot, a certain one. At that close range, he could not miss if he could but see his target.
Moxley must be thinking that Mark remained on the far side of the rock. Perhaps he might be preparing to climb down here. The gray fabric stirred again behind the fir. Unmistakably it was that cloth Mark had torn in their grapple at the mill.
Now or never, Mark told himself grimly. He stepped into the open. He aimed upward, and the forward sight of his rifle showed black and sharp against the grayness. He fired.
As the shot rang out, Moxley yelled loudly, but not in pain. It was a ringing cry of harsh triumph. Up into Mark’s view, on the very lip of the crag beside the fir tree, Moxley sprang to his feet.
He was stripped to the waist. His red hair fluttered in a gust of wind. He was close enough so that Mark saw his wide, shining eyes, his grinning mouth. With his left hand he clutched the trunk of the fir, with his right he poised a pistol, ready to fire.
“Fooled you!” he fairly gibbered in exultant selfcongratulation. “Fooled you to the top of your stupid head—the same way you fooled us at the mill yonder, showing empty garments to draw our fire!”
Mark blamed himself bitterly, and fumbled for his powder horn.
“I’m coming down to you,” Moxley was laughing. “Your gun’s empty, and my pistols are loaded. Your life is in my hands—wait and meet me if you dare!”
He leaned forward, holding to the tree, extending his right arm, pointing the pistol.
“I’ll not hide from you,” Mark promised him. “If—”
A rending, ripping sound of broken wood echoed through the evening air.
<
br /> That tree, loosely rooted to its clutter of rocks, came loose as Moxley leaned his weight upon it. The pistol fell from Moxley’s hand, struck and went dancing down, discharging as it did so. And Moxley, too, lost balance, fell forward and struck the slope heavily.
Mark watched him hit the face of the steep, brushy rock, watched him bounce like a ball flung against a board. Moxley somersaulted as he fell, and drove with a great crash among the trees at the bottom.
Instantly Mark hurried forward to the spot, his rifle clubbed.
A dozen bounding strides carried him to where Moxley lay, arms and legs outflung, head against a round, sand-colored boulder.
“Mark!” drifted a voice from lower on the slope. It was the voice of his father.
“Mark, lad, where are you? Celia is not badly hurt, she is asking for you—”
Mark stooped over Moxley’s body. He did not need to touch it to know that his old enemy would never rise from where he had fallen, that his works of spite and mischief at Bear Paw Gap were done forever.
CHAPTER XV
Harvest
Two NIGHTS and two days had passed since the end of Quill Moxley and the crushing defeat of his raiders.
It was a mild, cloudless evening, with the sun’s last red rays still lighting the land. The Jarretts had fetched stools and benches out into the yard. Alice and Anthony scuttled about, playing. Celia sat on a bench, and Tsukala examined the wound in her upper arm, where Moxley’s misdirected bullet had ripped the flesh. Mark sat crosslegged on the ground nearby, watching as Tsukala carefully washed the place with hot water, then took up a tin bowl. In this bowl Tsukala had carefully pulped half a dozen green herbs, gathered in the woods, to make of them a salvelike mixture. This he spread over the gash as though forming a poultice, and Mrs. Jarrett tore up a clean napkin for fresh bandages. She helped Tsukala wrap these around Celia’s round, white arm.
“Does it pain you, child?” she asked.
“Only a little,” said Celia thankfully. “I say honestly, I feel as though I were already on the way to mending and healing.”
“Tsukala’s medicine is ever sovereign, I’ve had experience of it,” Mark’s father said from where he sat and mended a ripped moccasin with awl and sinew thread.
“This is Cherokee medicine,” Tsukala explained gravely as he drew the bandage snug. “My people have used it a long time, for many lives of many men. A wise old medicine man taught me.”
“I wish you would teach me, too,” Mrs. Jarrett requested.
“I will teach,” Tsukala promised her. “I will show you the plants. Tell you their names. Tell you what medicine they make. Show you how to use them for wounds, for fevers.”
Celia smiled at Mark, quite cheerfully. “You do not say anything,” she chided him.
“I’m only remembering all that’s happened,” he said, for his thoughts still dwelt on the late desperate adventure and its successful ending.
His mind harked back to the moment he came down the ridge with his father, leaving Moxley where he had fallen. The garrison of the tavern had made a sortie and was trying to pursue those Indians as they fled. But as the Jarretts, father and son, reached the road, their comrades prudently halted and did not charge recklessly among the trees. A last volley of shots sped the vanishing enemy out of sight. Then all retired within their defenses once more, to review the situation.
The holders of the tavern had never been as desperately assaulted as those at the mill. Coming among his neighbors, Mark heard what had happened—the arrival of Simon Durwell, the quick run of the Jarrett household into the tavern building. Ramsey had been there, and a priceless addition to the force. Inside the tavern, with shutters closed and doors barred, everyone had waited. And the shrieking, bounding onslaught of Indians on all sides, meant for a successful surprise, had come to nothing.
Sure enough, Esau told Mark exultantly, that openwork fence of poles had halted the rush, had kept it from striking to close quarters. Indians had fallen to shots at close range, had crumpled down against the stockade they could not scale, and their retreating friends had dragged them away to shelter among the trees. After that, the siege had never again mounted to another advance in big numbers. There had been only an occasional volley, the most troublesome shooting from up there on the ridge. But Tsukala and Mark and their band had come there to dislodge Moxley’s command, scare it into demoralization, start the whole rout. Only Jarrett and Hollon had suffered slight wounds during the defense of the tavern and, in the last moment, Moxley’s bullet had pierced Celia’s arm.
After the Indians were gone, there was a night of watchfulness, but watchfulness with confidence that there was no dire threat of another pitched battle. At noon the next day, help rode in, twenty riflemen on horseback, a hastily summoned half-company of militia. These had mustered to the alarm given by travelers who had heard of the Indian menace only on the morning of the fight.
That day and the next, these volunteers combed the woods around Bear Paw Gap and westward along the river, to beyond the cave home of the Stoke family. Mark and Tsukala and Esau served as their scouts. No sign, no hint, of a single enemy remaining in the woods could be found. They reported back. The militiamen refreshed themselves at the tavern, and their brisk lieutenant signed a voucher that would give Mace Hollon pay for food and drink and lodging. Then they rode off.
There was no way of telling how many of the outlaw horde had fallen in the two attacks. The survivors had borne their killed and wounded away with them. Some of the settlers guessed that Moxley must have led three dozen fierce, greedy warriors, and that nearly half of these had been struck down. But two were known to be finished forever—Jipi, the huge Cherokee banished by his own kinsmen, and Moxley himself.
Mark drew a deep breath as he thought of these things, and then managed a rather weary grin. “I’m done with wool gathering,” he said. “It’s over, the whole matter, and I but wish I could put it from my mind.”
“I’ll never forget it,” declared Celia earnestly. “All those savages, like walking spirits of evil, and the most evil among them Quill Moxley—”
She broke off, trembling. Her blue eyes studied her bandaged wound.
“Bad hearts,” commented Tsukala. “Yuh, bad. But the good hearts were stronger. Braver.” He gazed at Mark. “Young warrior, you fought, you planned, like an old warrior. Like a chief.”
Mark felt more nervous at that praise than he had felt during the hours of stark peril.
“Ha, friend Tsukala, you tell the plain truth,” spoke up Mark’s father heartily. “I rejoice in my son’s courage and sense. He played the man. I will grow old, but I know that he can flourish and be great here.”
“In the town we’ll build,” added Seth Ramsey, strolling into the yard. “We’ve been frontiersmen and farmers and fighters, but I look for us to be townsmen.”
“That will be long in future,” Mrs. Jarrett said.
“Just now, I am thinking of the present, and the days that will come upon us shortly. ’Tis autumn now, and after autumn comes our winter. ’Twill be cold here in this high country, with ice and snow.”
“But we’re provisioned for any winter’s rage,” said Ramsey. “Moxley’s Indians never got to our homes beyond the ridge, to plunder or to burn.”
“Nor had they time to destroy here,” said Jarrett. That was true, Mark pondered, and it was providential as well. The Indians had not set torch to cabin or crib or haystack. They had meant to destroy the settlers, and then enrich themselves with the captured spoil. After that might have come burnings. But it had never reached that point. Almost from the first, the attempted raid had been a failure.
“The last of our harvest can now be gathered in, and we’ll keep guard as we gather it,” Jarrett amplified. “But I’ll hazard that no single rascal among them dares prowl back here.”
“Ahi, they are scattered like leaves,” Tsukala said. “They will not stop running for many days. They think they have good luck to be alive, to get away from
you.”
“Sorry I am to hear that, Tsukala,” said Will. He had been perched on a stool, knife in hand, carefully shaving and tapering the two ends of a new bow stave, stronger and longer than his old one. “Would I’d had this bow when we were penned up there at the tavern,” he said. “I loosed several shafts with the other weak one, but alack, I fear none struck an enemy. I could wish they’d harden their craven hearts and come back within bowshot of me.”
“That is not my wish,” said Mark in blunt, big- brotherly fashion. “I wish rather that they’d never stop running, to the very ends of the earth. If they don’t come back to Bear Paw Gap for a hundred years, ’twill still be too soon for me.”
“Aye, but you had all the fun of that battle at the mill,” was Will’s envious rejoinder.
Mark grimaced at Will’s warlike manner. “Don’t think it was fun, Will,” he said. “True, it came off well, with none of us hurt. But again and again, it seemed to me that my hair was as loose upon my skull as mown grass, ready for a scalp-taker to lift away.”
“Hush, Mark, that is not funny,” Celia protested. Will began to whittle a notch at one end of the stave. “Did I not know you better,” he said to Mark, “I’d think you spoke with a faint heart.”
“And you’d think wrongly, Will,” Seth Ramsey said at once. “A brave man will fight if need be, and win the fight; but he never goes to battle like a happy boy to a pig-roasting. He learns better than that in the very first fight he sees and takes a share in.”
Mark made no comment. He gazed at the cribs and sheds, and at the field beyond where the last ripe ears of corn were ready for picking and storing. He remembered that his mother hoped to have a flock of chickens next year, that his father had spoken of a sty where they would fatten hogs. He let his eyes shift to the woodpile near the house. It had diminished of late. Perhaps tomorrow he’d whet the axe and go to where two trees had fallen beyond the cleared land, cut away their branches and cut them into proper lengths for the hearths. When that cold winter came, it would be well to have crackling fires to cheer the house.
Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1966 Page 12