The Ardath Mayhar MEGAPACK®

by John Maclay

  “I took Grampa Lightwood’s pistol out of the drawer, and I shot him dead.”

  Anderson sat up straight, his face slack with shock. “Callie...but how...is the law...?”

  She shook her head. “The people in the hotel heard him, what he threatened to do. The sheriff asked me if he could help me get home, but I’d already bought a horse and wagon and hid it out, knowing that I might have to head home alone.”

  She unbraided her long auburn hair and began to comb out the curling strands. It crackled in the firelight, clinging to her fingers as the comb moved.

  She looked up again at her father. “I wanted Jason to be proud of his papa. Looked as if the only way to do that was if Will was dead. All the land’s gone. Only thing left was Grandpa Lightwood’s pistol and my own place here.”

  She smiled then, her face suddenly radiant in the firelight. “But Jason will be proud of his papa. No matter what, Jason will be proud.”

  NIGHT OF THE COUGAR

  My maternal ancestors came to Texas when it was true wilderness. My grandmother would have taken a whip to a cougar in a minute, and the cougar would have been the one to run. The women in my family have never been wimps, and I have no patience with anyone who is one.

  She watched Jody as long as she could see the glint of his red shirt through the leaves along the brushy trail. The dim thuds of old Sam’s hooves came to her ears for a little while longer. Then they were both gone, and the bird calls in the woods around the cabin didn’t seem to interrupt the silence at all.

  Julie sighed as she turned toward her garden plot. With little Jody and the baby both napping, her house was quiet too. She had always liked the woodsy spot they’d picked to homestead—East Texas was much like her southern Mississippi birthplace—but when Jody went off to work with the loggers it got mighty lonesome.

  Her sunbonnet was hot against her neck, and its curving brim cut off her view of anything around her when she stooped over the rows, her hoe busy among the tender sprouts of cabbage and turnip greens and onions. She didn’t really like sunbonnets—never had. It had taken the full weight of her father’s authority to make her toe the line and wear one to keep the sun from browning her fair skin.

  “’Tain’t ladylike!” had been his most devastating indictment of any female. But she had never liked the girls he pointed out as ideals of femininity. It was just as well that Jody had come along and carried her away from Laurel and its cadre of ladylike prototypes.

  There was motion—she turned her head to watch a coachwhip snake go slipping along the fence line by the cowshed. No danger there, she knew. But she kept a wary eye on any serpent about the house. Little Jody was at an age when anything new got chased and usually caught. She had no intention of letting him get bit by a copperhead or a moccasin.

  The late spring sun was warm on her back. Sweat began sliding down her beneath her wool serge clothing. It was time to get out the summer-weight stuff, to cut Jody out of his winter underwear. She’d shed her own three weeks ago, amid her husband’s dire warnings about late cold snaps and pneumonia.

  Then the sweat all but congealed on her skin. A long wail cut across the morning woods-noises. A cougar, hunting late maybe. She hated the sound of them, the long lonesome cry like a woman in pain. And once she’d been warned about the beast, she had hated it even more. A critter that craved human babies was something downright evil.

  There were tales among the old women she saw occasionally at camp meetings of the church in the summertime; they could tell you tales that would curl your hair and kink your bones. One of those women had lost her own babe some forty years gone, when a cougar had come right into the yard and taken it out of the basket where it was sleeping while she washed. Julie shivered, remembering.

  Though she knew better, she put away her hoe and went into the house to check on the children. Little Jody slept in total relaxation, boneless, his small mouth open, his eyes partway open too. Lissa was beginning to squirm in her hickory splint basket the way she always did when she was getting ready to wake up. It was just as well she’d quit in the garden. The baby would be ready to nurse any minute now. And Jody would wake up hungry. He always did.

  The infant whimpered. Julie bent over the crib, felt the dampish forehead. Lissa hadn’t been feeling too pert for some time now. Likely some spring ailment—she’d make up some herb tea and spoon it down the child. Everybody needed a tonic in the spring, seemed like.

  She lifted the plump baby and sat in the small rocker she’d brought from Mississippi in the wagon with the rest of their few bits of furniture and Jody’s plow tools.

  Unbuttoning her bodice let in a grateful bit of cool air as the baby suckled. Before they were done, Jody began to grunt and thrash, the way he did sometimes. Seemed as if a body needed to be twins, when you had so much to do.

  She didn’t put the children in the little pen their daddy had built in the front yard, when both were fed. She’d heard that cougar, and she was no fool. She kept them in sight all afternoon, though it meant taking off her ladylike sunbonnet and putting on her husband’s old stray hat while she finished up in the garden.

  Jody was fine, just playing with pine cones and marking in the dust with sticks and watching Coaly, the fiery black horse, pace ’round and ’round the lot where he was penned. But Lissa wasn’t herself. She whimpered a lot, gave little bubbling cries from time to time. Julie began to feel uneasy about her. Something was amiss, and Jody had always been so healthy that she hadn’t learned much about baby sickness in dealing with him.

  There was a quiver of uneasiness inside her at the thought. With her husband gone and the nearest neighbor twelve miles east, through woods so thick you couldn’t see ten feet in any direction, it was scary to contemplate what she’d do if one of the children got really badly sick. She had tackled a lot of hard things since leaving home and her mother. She shook herself, took a deep breath.

  Nobody had ever promised it’d be easy, Jody least of all. In fact he’d stressed everything he could think of that might have made her change her mind. He’d wanted her to marry him, no doubt of that, but he’d had no intention of taking her off to something that wasn’t what she thought it’d be. She couldn’t fault him for the fact that there’d been things that neither of them had been able to guess at.

  Like the lack of doctors. There wasn’t one nearer than Nicholson, twenty-five miles to the west. It was pure luck that had put them as near as they were to Gramma Dooley, though twelve miles was a long way and took a half day to cover, with the road nothing more than a rough track through the woods. On horseback it was quicker, but if she were forced to make it there on her own she’d have to take the buckboard. You just couldn’t manage a baby and a three-year-old on horseback. Particularly when the horse was Coaly.

  She finished in the garden and took the children inside. It was mid-afternoon, already hot and steamy, though it was only April. She took the cotton clothing out of the long chest and shook it out, then hung it on the clothes line to air. The heavier woolens they’d worn all winter had already been washed or aired and gone into storage. By the time she finished it was twilight.

  When she was fixing Jody’s supper, nibbling as she did it, as she usually did for her own meals, she heard a sound from the sleeping room where she’d put Lissa back into her basket. A choking sound.

  Her heart thumping in her throat, Julie ran across the dog-run hall and caught up the baby. The child’s face was scarlet, and she was struggling for breath. As she lifted her, Lissa began coughing harshly, wheezing for breath between spasms. A dose of honey and vinegar didn’t relieve the baby’s coughing. The struggles to breathe made the baby try to cry, and that made everything even worse. The herb tea didn’t seem to help at all, nor did goose grease rubbed onto her chest. By full dark, Julie knew that she needed help.

  She hitched Coaly by lantern light. Crickets were chittering all around in the grass. Fr
ogs of all sizes were chorusing down at the creek. A screech owl’s shivering cry punctuated the rest, making her shiver. But she didn’t hear the cougar. That was something she was thankful for.

  She put blankets in the wagon bed for Little Jody. He was almost asleep when she laid him on them, and by the time she came back with Lissa in her basket, he was sound asleep. The baby was still making those strange barking sounds. She seemed to have a fever too, though Julie was so hot with haste and work that it was hard to tell.

  She hung the lantern on the hook let into the pole at the front of the wagon, led Coaly out into the track that went roughly eastward past their front porch, and climbed into the buckboard.

  “Hup! Coaly, giddap!” she said, and the horse snorted, tried to dance sideways between the shafts, then reluctantly moved forward. The night air was so much cooler than the afternoon had been that it felt almost cold to her hands. She tugged the spare quilt she’d brought for Jody about her shoulders and smacked the horse’s rump with the end of a rein.

  The forest was in darkness—deeper than the moonless sky. Leaves shone fitfully as the lantern passed, but the feeble gleam couldn’t penetrate far into the dense wood on either side of the track. And the track itself took much of her attention. Coaly’s neat hooves could pass easily over ruts and roots that jounced the wagon so hard it endangered its wheels.

  Her eyes soon ached with the effort to see ahead, to guide the horse around the worst of the bad spots in the road. She was tired to the bone too, for her day had been work from beginning to end. But she wasn’t sleepy, no matter how her eyes protested or her body ached. She heard every effortful breath her baby drew, flinched at every wheeze or coughing spasm.

  The night seemed to pass as slowly as the miles. She had no clock, but the stars moved in a narrow ribbon above the cut where the track ran, and she could tell, when she looked, that the constellations were progressing westward. But so slowly!

  She figured that she was somewhere about halfway to her destination when she heard the cry again. Like a woman screaming. The cougar! Had the beast been following her all that distance? Silently, creeping behind the slow-paced wagon, drawn by the scent of her child?

  Coaly was tired now, though she had stopped twice to let him drink at creeks they’d crossed, and once to let him rest a bit. But she sat straighter and flicked him with the reins. He snorted with irritation, but he picked up his hooves a bit faster.

  Julie felt beneath the rough plank-board seat and found the handle of the bullwhip Jody kept for running the stock out of her garden. Coaly had never in his life felt the weight of that four-ply lash—but she knew that the time might well be coming when he would.

  Behind them there was another sound—not the scream now, but a rough, coughing growl. As if in answer, the baby went into a fit of coughing that seemed as if it would tear out her tender lungs. She found no relief until Julie reached down, one-handed, and lifted Lissa into her lap. Lying on her stomach, head down, the child gave a last choking wheeze and got a lung full of air.

  Having to secure Lissa on her knees added one more burden to Julie’s load. Coaly was moving faster, bouncing the wagon over obstacles she hadn’t the time to pick out and steer around. Behind her in the wagon bed Jody was whimpering, still half asleep but disturbed by the rough jostling of the wagon.

  “Go back to sleep, baby,” she said over her shoulder. “We’ll be there soon.”

  The little boy reached up to catch a handful of her shirt that hung over the back of the seat board. “I don’t like it, Mama,” he said. “Don’t like to sleep in the wagon. Don’t like goin’ in the dark. Less go home. Please?”

  “We’ll be at Gramma Dooley’s in a little while. You like Gramma—remember when we went to the revival and she gave you the horehound candy? She’ll likely have some more for you. And sugar cookies. You know how you like her cookies!”

  The wagon lurched over part of a stump left in the track, and Jody forgot about cookies and began to howl in earnest. As Julie speared a glance back, she thought she saw something in the track. It was too dark to tell what, and it was a long way back, but there was a deeper darkness there. Moving.

  “Jody!” she grated, her voice harsher than he had ever heard it. “Shut your mouth! Lie down and roll up in the blanket! And be still. There’s a cougar back there, I’m pretty sure. We’ve got to move fast, and it’s going to be mighty rough. Now you do like I tell you!”

  When he had rolled into a dark lump, she reached down and lifted the lantern from its hook. Then, holding the baby against her with both knees, keeping the reins in her left hand, she turned, holding the light high, and looked fully backward.

  Two reddish sparks glinted with reflected light. Then they blinked once and were gone. So was the shadow, but she knew that the animal had taken to the trees. It could travel as quickly through the tangle as Coaly could along the roadway. There was no way a horse could outrun a cougar while pulling a buckboard, even if it had a good surface to run on. But she had to try to make Coaly do the impossible.

  She put the lantern back in its place. One-handed, jouncing and bumping as she worked, she put the baby into the basket on the seat beside her and tied that securely to the braces holding the seat in place. Then she swung the bull-whip in a long arc overhead and cracked its wicked tip just above the black horse’s nervous ears.

  “Go, Coaly! Whup!”

  Coaly went. Faster than she’d have thought he could, burdened as he was. The wagon seemed to leap into the air as it cleared a big bump, and it hit with a tooth-rattling jar. Jody cried out, and she heard him scrambling for a handhold.

  Around blind curves, through masses of foliage that had leaned forward into the track the horse flew, and the wagon bounced along behind as best it could. Julie had her feet hooked into the seat-brace beneath her, reins clenched uselessly in her left hand, while her right steadied the basket and the baby.

  When the scream sounded again it was entirely too close. Behind the wagon—but not by much. She risked a glimpse back, and a shadow was flowing along with the wild shapes cast by the swinging lantern. When the wagon-shade bounced and jumped, that other moved smoothly and steadily. Not ten feet from the tailboard!

  Julie was thinking faster than ever before. The creature wanted Lissa. That was what all the folktales suggested—unless it wanted Coaly. They liked horsemeat too. But she felt sure it would prefer something tender...and human. What if she could distract it? Throw something out that it could smell baby-scent on?

  She took the reins in her teeth and dug into the basket, pulled out a soiled diaper, and flung it over the side of the careening buckboard. Then she cracked the whip again.

  But by now Coaly had caught scent of the big cat, and the horse’s instinct told him what words could not. The stocky black had leaned his chest into his work and was making his former pace look slow. It was all Julie could do to keep from being flung out into the darkness, and nothing but the basket straps had kept Lissa from being dislodged from her place. Jody was rolling around in the wagon bed, too frightened to whimper.

  They flew along the track for a half-mile before Julie pulled Coaly down a bit—enough so that she could risk another look to their rear. The other shadow was gone. She had no illusion that the cat would waste much time on the diaper, once it was sure it was empty.

  With the horse under some control, she tore through the woods. And now she was able to see some landmarks that told her she was getting nearer her goal. The immense oak tree that leaned over the track—that was less than three miles from the Dooleys’ house. With any luck at all, they just might make it. She cracked the whip again, but not quite so close to Coaly’s sensitive ears. He kept moving, but he wasn’t bolting now.

  “Jody—how are you making it?” she asked.

  “M...M...Mama, there was a great big something back there!”

  She made her voice matter-of-fact. “Yes.
That was the cougar. Remember—I told you before we went so fast.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know they were so big. It was like Aunt Tilly’s tomcat, but lots and lots bigger. It was scary, Mama.”

  “Well, it didn’t get us...yet. And it won’t, I think. I believe I’ve figured out the combination, Jody. You just get a good grip on the seat-braces, and you watch for it for me. Its eyes will shine in the light that gets back there from the lantern. You sing out if you see it coming after us again.”

  “Yes’m.” His voice sounded as frightened as Julie felt. The wagon went swaying and jangling and creaking around more bends in the track, and Julie had begun to hope they’d left the beast far behind when Jody’s warning came.

  “It’s there, Mama!” he shouted.

  Once more the thing neared the tailboard, its shadow mingling with those of the wagon and its passengers. Again she picked a bit of cloth from the basket and pitched it into the road. And they gained another half-mile or so.

  There was the skillet nailed to the ash tree, set there as a marker of the trail by some long-dead explorer of the region. It gleamed rust-red in the lantern light for an instant. Only a mile left to go. And then the wagon hit something with an ominous c-r-a-ack! The right front wheel went, and the bed pitched forward at an angle.

  Even as Julie went over the side, she was trying to see behind to see if the cougar was there again. She was up almost before she hit the ground, rescuing the lantern from its hook, unhooking Coaly from the harness.

  “Jody! Climb down, son. That’s right—come here to me. You’re going to ride Coaly, you know that? Do you think you can ride him?”

  “But Daddy said he’s too uppity for me!”

  “Ordinarily, that’s true. But this is something out of the ordinary. You’re not only going to ride him, you’re going to see to Lissa too. See? I’m tying her basket right into here—that’s right. Whoa, Coaly. Easy, boy.” She settled the two children into her makeshift rig of hamstrings and bits of harness, checked it out for security, then stepped back.