As he ground to a halt, fully spent within her, the girl slowly, softly stroked those bare mounds she had been pulling tight against her.
The next thing he grew conscious of was her voice in his ear.
“We cain’t sleep here all night.”
“No … no, we can’t.” His mouth tasted pasty, as if he’d been sucking on a trencher filled with lye ash.
Groggily Titus raised his head. The air was cold, damp too of a sudden, on the bare flesh of his buttocks. He was surprised to find that she and he lay just as they had finished—fallen asleep locked in that final embrace of afterglow.
But then she was pushing him to the side, rolling the other way herself. The cold shocked him all the more as his limp flesh flopped against his belly, shrinking quickly.
Scrambling to her feet, the girl tugged down her skirt, shuffled that loose blouse back into place, and smoothed it over those young breasts he had wanted to taste so badly while they had been dancing. He realized he wanted her again. When he reached up for her, the girl pushed his hands down.
“Get your britches pulled up,” she ordered in a harsh whisper.
“C’mere. I wanna—”
“No,” she answered harshly. “Maybe ’nother time. My father come out looking for me if I’m gone too long.”
“Just go let him see you, then come back.”
“Maybe you go on to your bed. Your cabin yonder,” she countered coyly. “Maybe I’ll come find you later. You was good, boy. Better’n a lotta the men I had me.”
That raised his ire. “I’m every bit a man like them.”
Behind her hand she giggled, turning away. “Like I said, better’n most every one I had.”
The shadows absorbed her so quickly, he never got another plea out. It took a few moments more before the cold breeze brushing his bare flesh seeped back into his consciousness. Hobbling to his knees, Titus heaved himself from there to his feet, hopping about while yanking up the britches.
With them buttoned he slipped around the side of the cabin, stole a long last look in the open door. There he found everyone still in full revel. Kingsbury turned, saw him, and motioned Bass back in.
Titus shook his head, pointing to the hut. After the pilot nodded, Bass moved out of the splash of flickering torchlight as the wind picked up. The night air smelled rank with rain as he reached the second of the two huts where the boatmen had stowed what blankets and belongings they were packing north to the Ohio. Inside the shanty, out of the wind, his nose pricked with the smell of another. Eyes were slow growing accustomed to the dark as he searched the walls, while dancing torchlight from across the yard spilled in through the hut’s single, small window.
“Hezekiah?”
“Yes. Me.”
“You’re awake.”
“Not sleep. The noise. Guns.”
“Yeah,” he said, searching the floor with his hands. “You got both our blankets?”
“Right here.”
Titus settled in beside the big slave as Hezekiah held up both blankets. “Cold night.”
“Sure is,” the slave agreed. “Warm now.”
He let out a sigh and closed his eyes, sensing the body heat from the big man’s back beginning to warm him.
“Ask you question, Titus?”
“What’s that?”
“You with woman tonight?”
“How you mean?”
For the longest time there was no reply. Then Hezekiah said, “With woman: like you was with Nina back to Miss Annie’s boat.”
“Yepper,” he answered, remembering Ebenezer Zane always answering in the affirmative just that way.
“Thought me so. Goo’night, Titus.”
For a moment he wanted to ask the slave how he knew, then decided he wouldn’t. Eventually Bass said, “Good night, Hezekiah.”
Sometime later he had awakened, hearing that first roll of thunder come their way from across the ridge to the west, the same heights they had struggled up, over, then down to reach this ford on the Tennessee River. For the longest time he lay there in the dark, feeling the Negro snore with a rumble like dull thunder itself, listening to the other two boatmen snore.
He was just slipping back into sleep when he heard footsteps outside. Sensing immediate alarm, he laid a hand on one of his pistols as the small oak door creaked open on its own swollen wood hinges, grating across the pounded clay floor beneath it.
“Reuben!” Kingsbury’s voice whispered harshly like the rending of new canvas. “Heman! Ho, Titus! Pull yourselves up.”
Then a sudden flare of lightning backlit the river pilot, stoop-shouldered in the half-opened doorway. At the crack of thunder he vaulted into the hut, stumbling over a pair of feet before catching himself against the far wall.
“That you down there, Titus?”
“My feet, yes.”
“Get you and that Negra up,” Kingsbury ordered as he straightened. “We gotta be off now. Up, up—be quick about it now.”
“By the devil—it ain’t even light yet, Hames,” Root hissed as he sat up, rubbing grit from his eyes.
“Gonna be soon enough,” he replied with an urgent bite. “I wanna be long gone from that bunch afore dawn. Now, up with all of you and get down to the ferry. I’m off to fetch Colbert and his boys now to haul us away to the far shore afore this storm breaks.”
The first drops fell as they were nearing the north bank of the Tennessee, hauled across by the power of the Colbert muscle. The half-dozen wayfarers hurried off the rough planks of the unwieldy craft as rain slicked the wood and bare ground where they turned momentarily to watch the old man bark orders at his three boys. The sky chose that moment to open up as the ferry disappeared behind shifting sheets of rain. When they struggled up the slick bank to huddle beneath the first of that canopy of trees sheltering the well-worn groove of the Natchez Trace, another flare of that terrifying electrical storm lit up the whole of Colbert’s Landing.
In that daylike brightness it was plain to make out the main cabins, the wayfarer huts. The corral.
“Shit,” Kingsbury growled.
“Them horses ain’t there,” Titus said.
“Jesus God,” Ovatt added his own oath.
All six of them stood there, soaked and chilled, staring across the river as another flash of lightning starred the far settlement of crude buildings. The post corral was empty—not one of the eight horses the six slave hunters had brought with them still there.
“Where you figure they gone?” Root asked, something pinching his voice into a taut string.
As Bass hunched over, squinting in the sudden flares of the storm, searching the muddy ground for some clue, Kingsbury shouted against the roar of approaching thunder.
“Wherever they gone—it’s for no good.”
“W-why you say that?” Beulah asked.
The pilot turned on her, gripped her shoulders firmly. “They ain’t gone to bed—pulled out afore us. None of that’s no good.”
“What we do now?” Ovatt asked.
They looked at one another for a moment, then Beulah said, “There ain’t no ferry coming to fetch us, fellas. We just sit here, or get on down the way home like we ’tended.”
“Woman’s right,” Kingsbury said. “Maybeso the dark help us more’n them sonsabitches.”
Root grabbed hold of Kingsbury’s soppy coat. “How you so sure they ain’t just gone looking for runaways?”
“They’re coming after us, Reuben,” the pilot answered with a wag of his head. “Didn’t you see it plain as paint?. They want this here Negra.”
Root whirled on Hezekiah. “I say we get rid of the son of a bitch right here and now. Let ’em have him.”
“No!” Titus bellowed against a clap of thunder.
Root turned to Bass, snagging up a big handful of his oiled jerkin in both hands, shaking the youth. “That bunch hunts down men for money. Likely they kill’t their share.”
“So have we,” Ovatt replied.
“But they’re
the paid killers,” Kingsbury argued. “And we mean nothing to ’em but money.”
Root flung Bass back from him. “Get rid of the Negra right now!”
“Maybe Reuben’s right.” Ovatt aligned himself with Root. “We give ’em the Negra—they’ll leave us be.”
The wind came up, strong in Titus’s face as if it were siding against him too. “You can’t—”
“It won’t help a damned thing,” the woman suddenly interrupted Bass. “Hames, you know damned good and well they ain’t after just the Negra here.”
Nodding with some reluctance, his skinny face glistening with rain as the next bolt of lightning lit up the countryside, Kingsbury said, “She’s right. It ain’t only the Negra. They’re coming after the money.”
Ovatt scoffed, “They don’t know we got no money.”
“They goddamn well do know!” the pilot replied. He seemed to square his narrow shoulders as he turned to Bass. “Best keep our guns under our coats—right, Titus?”
He swallowed hard, seeing the rest of those wet faces staring intently at his. “Yeah. Keeps your pan powder dry, out of the rain.”
“Not just that,” Kingsbury added morosely, gazing up the dark corridor of the Natchez Trace, “that bunch never did see for sure that we was armed, the hull lot of us. Maybeso they show up, that ignernce’ll count for something.”
“I pray it does count for something, Hames,” Beulah agreed. “When it comes down to the killin’.”
The horsemen had gone sometime in the night. It had to be after that gal had finished with Titus and he looked in to find everyone still celebrating—going off to bed himself. Had to be after Kingsbury, Ovatt, and Root had limped across the yard to their blankets. When the one called James had ordered his men into the saddle only then.
Bass wished he knew more about horses, to know how far and how fast an able man could travel on one. Then he would have some idea how far the boatmen had to go before counting on bumping into those slave trackers.
But then—he thought, with his teeth chattering like a box of ivory dominoes in an ox-horn cup—the how far didn’t really matter, did it? Because once a man was out ahead of you, he no longer had to travel any great distance. He could pick his place. A spot most favorable to acting on his plans. Just hunker down and wait for you to come along at your own pace.
They could be waiting up there no more than a hundred paces. Or as much as a hundred leagues. That was the thing about not knowing that scared him down to his roots. This wasn’t like any of the dangers he had faced before. Oh, he had been scared in having to face the Falls of the Ohio, just as scared of the prospect of running the Devil’s Raceground or the Devil’s Elbow on the Mississippi. Deep water had always frightened him.
Still, he had confronted his fear time and again—staring it in the eye, and not giving an inch. But this … Titus had never had to stew in his own juices over the very real possibility of staring down danger in the form of another man driven by deadly intent.
Not even when that Chickasaw hunting party had caught him alone in that timber. Not when that war party had slipped down the river to surprise Ebenezer Zane’s flatboat crew. Not when Titus had been so crazy drunk he couldn’t even get his pecker excited and that eye-gouging fight had broken out on Annie Christmas’s gunboat.
On every occasion Bass had suddenly found himself thrust into the vortex of events. With no time to fret, or worry, much less get himself scared until all of it was damned well over and done with. And—by God—there really was a tangible advantage to not having to put one soggy moccasin in front of the other, minute by minute, yard by yard, worrying all the while when and where in the rain-soaked darkness of this wilderness they were going to strike.
“I don’t like this,” Root grumbled after they had moved something more than a mile up the trail.
“Reuben’s right,” Ovatt said when Kingsbury halted and turned around. He glanced back at Titus and Hezekiah before continuing, “I say we make fine targets, all of us bunched up the way we is.”
For a brief moment the bony pilot appeared to heft that around as he stared at the wet leaves and dead grass beneath his feet. “Awright. Maybeso you’re right. Beulah, you wanna stay on with me?”
“Told you I was,” she replied with a sharp edge, her tone a bit haughty in her confusion.
“Then you and me’ll go on down the road first,” he said, then turned to Root and Ovatt. “Give us a short bit—just when you see us get to the far shadows, then you two move out. Titus, you wait and do the same after these fellas go, then bring that Negra with you.”
Bass glanced quickly at Hezekiah, fear pricking the small of his back. “We’re breaking up?”
“Maybe they won’t do no good in catching us all if’n we ain’t all together,” Root explained.
No longer was it fear. Now his anger rose in him like a case of hives: sudden, and hot. “I know what this is,” Bass snapped. “You’re just getting rid of me an’ him ’cause I won’t let you get rid of him.”
Kingsbury took a step forward, offering his hand in the misty rain. “We ain’t leaving you behin’t.”
Swinging an arm, he pushed the pilot’s hand aside. “G’won, then—if it’s gonna be this way. Git. All of you.”
Beulah moved up beside Bass. The lightning filled the sky overhead with a yellowish phosphorescence. “You’ll be right behind us.”
A clap of thunder raised the hair on the back of Titus’s neck. He felt the small hairs on his arms rise as the odor of riven ozone burst through the canopy of trees while the rumble died off in the distance.
“We can’t run off from you,” Ovatt declared.
“I know you can’t,” Titus snarled. “You might try, but I can still catch up—”
“No,” Ovatt interrupted. “We can’t run off from you, ’cause you’re one of us, Titus.”
Kingsbury came closer to the angry youth. “You proved you was one of us ever since you said you’d ride through the chutes with us back to Louisville. You didn’t have to, young’un—but you did. Right then and there Ebenezer figured you was part of his crew. And now … well—you been a part of us through it all. You say so, we’ll all stay close together. Just to prove we ain’t running out on you.”
In the teeth of that raging storm he looked from one face to another, all three of those boatmen. Of a moment he felt ashamed. With no call to judge these men who had watched over him like uncles, protected him like older brothers, and scolded him like fathers. But even more, he again experienced that deep regret he had swallowed down ever since losing Ebenezer Zane, that shame that told him he was to blame for the riverman’s death.
Skin prickling, Bass waited for the next peal of thunder to rock the ground where they stood, causing all of them to shudder with its nearness, knowing he owed these Kentucky men more than he could ever repay—simply because it was his fault Ebenezer was taken from them.
“The rest of you, g’won now,” Titus said quietly. “Me an’ Hezekiah, we’ll bring up the rear.”
Bass watched Kingsbury and Beulah, then Root and Ovatt slip from view up the footpath, really nothing more than a game trail beneath the skeletal overhang of beech-nut and pin oak, black ash and chinkapin. When the next muzzle flash of lightning came, Titus could no longer see them. He nudged the slave into motion. It seemed colder now. The rain falling somehow harder, more insistently. Perhaps it only seemed that way because he felt all the more lonely. Down to just him and a big, black Negra who Annie Christmas paid for down at the slave pens in New Orleans and brought north, teaching him to speak a little of the white folks’ tongue so he could serve liquor and throw any unruly customers off her gunboat.
But at that moment Titus put one moccasin in front of the other, listening to the rain hammer the forest around them, the thunder voice coming in a mighty roar before it slipped off in a whimper, only then able to hear the slog of the Negra’s old, worn boots on last autumn’s dead leaves lying in a black mat of decay on that ancient buf
falo trail.
But the buffalo were no more. How well he had learned that from his grandpap. Big critters like the buffalo were all but gone when the first settlers had moved over the mountains from Virginia into the canebrakes of the land they would one day call Kentucky. Farmers—driving the Indian, like the buffalo, before them.
Anymore, most all that was left for a man to hunt in Kentucky were a few deer, and the smaller game: turkey, squirrels, rabbits, coon, and the like. Not like the olden times his grandpap used to talk on and on about. Time was when a man had nothing more to feed his family but wild game.
In that rainy forest, where it seemed the sun refused to rise of a dark and deadly purpose, Titus remembered how his grandpap seemed caught between what had been and what was. The old man used to say that now it was a good thing the settlers could provide for their families with all that they could grow, along with raising those domesticated farm animals a man could slaughter when times grew lean and desperate—simply because the big animals had all moved on.
This hunger to see what lay beyond the Mississippi was like a nettle poked into the seam of his moccasin—working its tiny barb into his flesh so that he was always shy of being comfortable when he set that foot down. Too, it was a remembrance that again released a great remorse in him, just like an oozy boil festering around that nettle worked down into his flesh. How dearly he missed that old man who had seemed to understand his grandson far, far better than did Thaddeus.
Titus did not have long to dwell on his loss.
Hezekiah clamped Bass’s arm in one of his great hands, pressing a finger to his lips. The rain poured mercilessly from the black man’s smooth head as he blinked. Then he motioned Titus to follow. They left the footpath, twisting through the broom pine and dogwood trees as the lightning flared, igniting the whole of the sky above them like midday every few moments. Then the slave stopped him and pointed.
Out there in the sodden darkness left behind by a retreating peal of thunder, a familiar voice growled, “Where’s that boy?”
He could not remember ever feeling cold like that: the sudden chill splash down his backbone like January snow-melt spilling off the cabin roof.
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