Daniel looked at the Indians’ rifles. They were old and falling apart. His and Squire’s were new and clean, as pampered as a baby’s bottom. The Cherokees knew he wasn’t stupid. They would like the rifles, but they wanted a bigger prize.
Daniel kept his smile. “These rifles are precious to me, friend, or I’d give ’em to you sure. They’ve got my medicine on ’em. They wouldn’t be much use to you.”
The Indian stiffened. “We have good rifles,” he said evenly, shaking his head insistently at Boone. “You take these and give us yours. It would be better to do this, brother.”
Daniel caught the warning in his eyes as the other Indians drifted around the fire toward Squire. Squire jerked up, dove for his weapon. The Indians shouted and swarmed all over him. Daniel grabbed his own rifle and rammed the butt in the leader’s belly. The Indian gasped and folded. His friends grabbed Boone and dragged him to the ground. Daniel kicked and flailed against them, spitting the worst Cherokee curses he knew.
The leader rubbed his stomach and glared. “You will leave with your hair if you shut your mouth now!” he said darkly. “You have angered me, brother. Do not anger me more.”
Jerking his head at his companions, he pointed toward the forest. The Cherokees dragged the two Boones out of the clearing and brandished their tomahawks threateningly. Their message was clear—leave, or stay here and die. Daniel was black with rage. He yelled and cursed at the Indians and would have taken them on barehanded if Squire hadn’t held him back.
When Daniel quieted, he set his brother running to Martin’s Station while he trailed the thieves. Squire brought armed settlers to take up the chase, by noon the next day, it was plain that a whole war party was in the area. Giving chase would be suicidal.
Daniel was stunned in his defeat. Everything he had was gone: the furs, the horses, his rifles—everything. Two goddamn years in Kentucky had slipped from his hands in a few short minutes. The skins he had sent back earlier in the season had made him some profit, but that money had already been shelled out to creditors and put back in the pot for powder and lead. Hell, he didn’t even have a knife to slit his own throat.
Chapter Nineteen
Daniel stalked out of Dick Henderson’s office, then stormed past the stables and across the street. A rugged old wagoner had to pull his team up short to avoid running Boone down. The old man shook his fist and shouted. Daniel didn’t notice. He was trying hard to still the rage and frustration seething inside him.
Damnation but he felt like a fool! Why did he keep coming back? Dick wasn’t about to budge—not now and not ever! Talking to the man was like butting your head against a tree.
He was a damn fool, he decided, but the fault wasn’t all on his side, not by a long shot. What more did the man want? Daniel had brought the whole land of Kentucky back in his pocket and laid it out plain. Here’s the route we’ll take, right here’s where the settlement will be. He had given Henderson everything he needed, right down to a layout of the town.
That had been five months ago. He had gotten back in April, and here it was halfway through August. Still, Dick sat there calmly behind his desk. “Wait, Daniel. Have a little patience. It’s not the right time, Daniel.”
Time? Great God A’mighty, time was eating him up. He would be an old man in a rocker before Dick Henderson thought it was time!
James and Israel spotted him a block from the store and ran down to meet him. By God, the boys were growing like weeds! Israel twelve now, James fourteen, and both showing stubble on their chins. He saw their smiles fade and their steps slow as they neared him. They had already caught his mood. Daniel tried hard to force a grin. There were times when he didn’t even act civilly toward his family. They weren’t the cause of his anger, but they caught the brunt of it. And they deserved more than that.
“Where’s your ma?” he asked, lying his hands on their shoulders. “Still in the store?”
“Yes, sir,” Israel replied soberly. “Reckon she’s fair buyin’ up the place.”
“She ain’t either, Israel,” James disagreed shortly.
Daniel laughed. “I don’t imagine she is, boy, ’less she struck gold somewhere.” A lump swelled in his throat and a new surge of anger overwhelmed him. Salt and sugar, and maybe a little strip of ribbon for the girls. If Becky had more than that on her list, he would be mighty surprised.
It was late afternoon before he drove the team out of town and started north for the Yadkin. Becky rode beside him and the boys trotted out ahead on their horses. The air was thick and humid. The boughs of the trees met overhead to offer shade, but there was no cooling breeze. Only the locusts chattered loudly in the brush to break the heavy silence. Even the crows were stilled by the heat.
The minute he walked in the store, Rebecca knew, but she swallowed her comforting words and said nothing. Talk wouldn’t help. More likely, it would only anger him more.
She had never cared much for Dick Henderson’s fancy ways. Now, she was growing to hate him. Every time Daniel came back from one of their meetings, he looked like Israel running home after the Cully boy had licked him again.
Rebecca sighed and wiped her brow. It looked like God and the Devil had both been at work in Kentucky. The man who came back to her wasn’t the man who had left. He was a man both blessed and cursed. And it was difficult to say which force would have him in the end.
He said nothing to her until they were on their way home.
“You ain’t asked me ’bout Dick.”
Rebecca looked straight down the road. “Figured you’d say if there was anythin’ to tell.”
“Well, there ain’t,” he said shortly. “Not a damn thing, Becky.” When she didn’t reply, he continued mockingly. “Take your time, Daniel. It’ll happen, you’ll see.” Daniel snorted in disgust. “Time, my ass! It sure wasn’t like this before, I’ll tell you. Two years ago, he could fairly taste Kentucky, had it all plotted and parcelled out in his head.” Daniel turned and looked at her candidly. “He ain’t the same man, Becky.”
“Men change for better or worse.”
“Not like this. Not the way Dick has.”
“It appears they do, Daniel.”
“Humph!” Daniel snorted. He turned back to the team, letting the heavy silence hang between them.
Rebecca didn’t have to ask about Salisbury. She had heard the story before a dozen times. Dick Henderson was hedging, approaching a Kentucky land deal with a lawyer’s natural caution, a quality that tried Daniel’s patience to the limit. Henderson had said he would move with the strength of the law behind him. In his present position, that was anything but easy. He was an associate justice now, a post that put him squarely in the limelight. The Royal Governors of North Carolina and Virginia had little patience with the speculators and land companies straining to open the West. What would they say if a member of the colony’s highest court struck out openly across Indian lands? He was taking a big chance as it was, sending Daniel out to talk to the Cherokees.
“They’ll sell their claim,” Daniel reported earnestly. “Make the pot big enough, and you’ll see. You’ll get clear and legal title to Kentucky!”
“Let the chiefs know we mean business,” Henderson advised. “Talk to them.”
“They do,” Daniel said testily. “There ain’t anythin’ more to say. I’ve done all the talkin’ I can.”
“Then talk to them some more,” said Henderson. “What the hell for?”
“So they won’t forget what you said the first time.”
“Indians ain’t feeble-minded, Dick.”
“I know they’re not,” Henderson said patiently. “But they are greatly inclined to best remember only the last white man who talked to them.”
Daniel could have refuted that, but he didn’t. He journeyed again and again to the Cherokee encampments, hunting, talking and keeping a smile on his face. It was something to do, anyway, even if he had already done it a dozen times over.
Sometimes, when talking to the Indians
, he wondered if he was sitting down to supper with Blue Duck’s father, or maybe one of her brothers. Perhaps the tall, slender woman gathering wood, the one with the dark and somber eyes, was the girl’s mother. He longed to ask some of the braves he knew, but never did. In spite of what Henderson thought he knew about Indians—which in Boone’s opinion was about as much as Daniel knew about the law—they were as smart as anyone else. If you asked them a question, they would want to know why you asked it. Why did Wide Mouth wish to know about the daughter who had vanished from sight and brought sorrow to her parents? It was a question Daniel didn’t care to answer just yet.
“Daniel,” Rebecca said when they had nearly reached the Yadkin, “are you just goin’ to keep at it with Dick? You mind if I ask that?”
For a while he didn’t answer. “Becky, what else am I s’posed to do? I ain’t likely goin’ to open up Kentucky without him.”
“No, I s’pose not.”
“There’s hardly any s’posin’ to it,” he said bluntly. “Ridin’ and huntin’ alone is one thing. Takin’ families in to settle is somethin’ else. That takes money, which you might have noticed we don’t have much of.”
“Is it money, Daniel? Really? Is that what it takes to get there?”
He looked at her curiously. “Becky.…”
“No. Listen. You get mad as you like at me for sayin’ so, Daniel, but I’m bound to say it anyway. You’ve got used to thinkin’ Dick Henderson’s money gives him some special kind of magic. It doesn’t, Dan. It buys things, and that’s all. That’s no little thing, now, when you haven’t got it—but it doesn’t lay the hand of God on a man. And that’s flat where you’ve let your head get to.”
“Becky, you’re not makin’ a damn bit of sense,” he said flatly.
“Oh?” Rebecca’s dark eyes flashed. “And what kind of sense are you makin’, Dan Boone? S’pose Dick Henderson gave every family in North Carolina a sack of gold and a wagonload of goods? You think they’d all follow him into Kentucky? You been out there. You ever killa Shawnee by throwin’ coins in his face?”
Daniel’s puzzled look split into a grin, then he laughed like a man set free. Leaning over, he kissed his wife soundly. “Lord, God, what a woman you are, Rebecca Boone!”
Rebecca pushed him off and clamped her lips tight. “Don’t honey up to me,” she said stiffly. “You just listen to what I’m sayin’. There isn’t a family in this colony wouldn’t follow you stark naked clear to the Ohio if you asked ’em to, so don’t go shavin’ inches off yourself to make Mr. Richard Henderson look taller. The man needs you, Daniel, a hell of a lot more than you need him.”
Daniel stared at her. “Becky, there’s more to it than that. You can’t just decide to go, then up and do it.”
“If six or eight men can, then fifty families, or maybe a hundred, can too.”
Daniel grinned. “Not stark naked, they can’t.”
“I got a wagon and a team, Daniel, and a cow to tie on behind. I reckon there might be other folks who’ve got the same. And most all of ’em got clear to North Carolina without Dick Henderson.”
Daniel stared at her in disbelief. It was the most ridiculous bit of talking he had ever heard. Becky had no idea what it would take to make a toehold in Kentucky. Why, she made no sense at all. As if you just took off and … it was just plain silly.
Becky said nothing else about the matter for the rest of the summer. Instead she bit her tongue and watched him work out his anger in the only way he knew. His half-hearted tries at farming ended quickly, and he was soon roaming far from home again, hunting, exploring, or simply walking from one end of the land to the other.
Summer slid into fall, and he went after skins, sometimes taking James and Israel with him. Winter brought the trapping season again and he made a little money on beaver, though all the nearby streams were trapped clean. The land was worked out of game; Daniel had been saying it for years.
Rebecca knew his mind. She saw the hunger in his eyes again, as he spent the long grey days sniffing the air for spring. Only during the Christmas season did she, for a few happy days, see him revel in the joy of his family. Still, nothing had really changed. March was barely off the calendar before he was gone again.
With a neighbor he crossed back into Kentucky, roaming the mountains with bear-hunting dogs and returning home with a pack horse full of dark, heavy skins. On another trip, he journeyed farther down the Cumberland than he had ever before, going so far west that he met some Frenchmen from the Mississippi coming east.
Becky wasn’t surprised when he suggested they leave the Yadkin and move closer to Kentucky. She had seen it coming and had shut it out of her mind.
If they moved, he argued, he could travel more easily and still have more time with her and the children. There was a place they could live in Sapling Grove, deep in the Watauga Valley. It wouldn’t have all the conveniences they had grown used to, but they would at least have more time together. And of course, they could always come back if she really didn’t take to the place.
Rebecca hid her sorrow and said nothing. They would never come back, not ever, though Daniel didn’t even know that himself. When the wagons were loaded and they moved off down the hollow with nearly all they owned, she stared straight ahead and refused to look back at the home she was leaving.
It was September, the time of the year she loved most. It saddened her to know she would never enjoy that season again on the Yadkin. And only weeks before, she had learned she was carrying another child. The baby would be born in a place she had never seen before. That was a sadness, too.
Maybe this’ll teach you to keep your thoughts to yourself, she thought dandy. You told him he was man enough, that he didn’t have to wait for Dick Henderson. Well, he’s not waiting. He’s fair straining at the bit to get there.
PART TWO
1773-1775
Chapter Twenty
Ben Cutbirth urged his horse on down the ridge toward the settlement. Daniel hung back a moment, drinking in the vast expanse of land that lay at his feet. The mountains stretched away on either side, dark and somber peaks disappearing in a mist. These were the moments he relished. You could stand in a place like this and believe that you were the only man in the world, and that the land you saw would stay as it was forever.
It wouldn’t, though, he knew. It was changing faster every day. Lord God, how the time went by! It was March already, 1773—nearly four years since the first time he had left the Yadkin with Findley and the others and set out for Kentucky. It seemed like a century ago, and yet, like no time at all. John Stewart was back there somewhere, dead in the wilderness, and Blue Duck, as well. He had heard John Findley was gone too, dead just a year after his family had gotten slaughtered by Senecas on Buffalo Creek. Daniel wondered if it was true.
So many had died in the past few years. Still, nature replaced its own, bringing new crops of trees, deer and even people to replace the ones it took. He would have a new child in his family by May. Damnation, he thought, that would make eight. He and Becky were sure doing their part to keep things going.
Ben was waiting for him at the bottom of the ridge and they rode together into Castle’s Woods. It was a small settlement, perched in the valley between two high mountain ranges and the headwaters of the Clinch. Daniel already knew most of the people there; they had been his neighbors on the Yadkin before they fled to the West from debts they couldn’t pay and taxes they couldn’t meet. More and more now, the old-timers moved on to find breathing room, leaving the crowded land to newcomers, folks who seemed to relish living right in their neighbors’ laps.
Boone and Cutbirth cleaned up at the home of a friend, and Ben walked on to the tavern. By the time Daniel arrived, Ben had made a place for himself at a table full of strangers. Daniel spotted Ben’s freckled face and thatch of red hair halfway across the room. Ben waved him over with a grin and introduced him to the man beside him. “Daniel, here’s a fellow wants to meet you. I told him you two ought to get your
heads together. Cap’n Russell, this is Dan Boone.”
The man stuck out his hand and Daniel gripped it. “Will Russell? Well, by God, for once Ben’s right. I been hopin’ our trails would cross some day.”
Russell grinned. “I guess that day is here, Boone.”
Daniel liked the man immediately. William Russell was a tall, quiet-spoken man around Boone’s own age. His dark hair was worn long and loose over his shoulders, and his open, friendly eyes were sun-creased at the corners. His mouth was set in a firm line, and when he spoke, Daniel knew he could believe what he said. Russell’s life nearly mirrored Daniel’s. He had made a name for himself in the French and Indian War, then helped to lead the settling of the Clinch. Like Boone, he was a man thoroughly at home in the wilderness.
The pair wasted no time getting acquainted. Finding a table in a far corner of the tavern, they sat down over sipping whiskey and traded wilderness tales. Russell had already heard about Daniel’s treks to Kentucky and was eager to learn more.
“Me and Ben just got back,” Daniel explained. “We did some huntin’ and roamin’ ’round the old caves. There’s some big herds of shaggies, but they’re too far west right now, and there’s too many Shawnees ’round this time of year.” Daniel grinned. “I already learnt that.”
Russell nodded and filled his cup again. “You see any white men?”
“Yeah, a couple.” Daniel made a face and leaned toward the man earnestly. “And if we seen a couple in country that big, you know there’s more around. Hell, four years ago, there wasn’t hardly anyone but me. Now, they’re movin’ in fast.”
“It’s fair comin’,” Russell agreed. “And soon, too. A fellow was through here in the fall and said he run into surveyors comin’ down south from the Ohio. Whole party of ’em.”
Daniel Boone: Westward Trail Page 14