Passage to Natchez

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Passage to Natchez Page 23

by Cameron Judd


  One thing Farris told him confused Thias and caused him to worry that finding Clardy might grow complicated. Clardy had told Farris he was planning to meet relatives farther north—but no such relatives existed, Thias well knew. He could only conclude that Clardy was being covert and evasive about his movements, which meant he might go anywhere. He could double back, head toward the farther eastern settlements, or even go north to the Ohio and catch a boat for some distant riverside city. The longer Thias had to wait to heal, the more likely it was that Clardy was putting untrackable miles between them.

  Thias grew ever more frustrated. He had always been able to meet challenges by using his strength and taking firm action. This challenge was different. He had no strength to speak of, and for once in his life action was the one option not open to him.

  CHAPTER 22

  The cattle drovers pushed their herd past the inn, not noticing the tall, muscled young man who watched them from the window, his head wrapped in a bandage. They were weary, having driven this lowing, milling mass of bovine flesh all the way from Virginia, and many miles remained to be covered.

  A day later they noticed that the cattle were behaving oddly, acting unsettled and nervous. “There’s a killed beast about,” the oldest and most experienced drover said. “They act that way when they smell a dead thing.”

  The farther they went, the more restless grew the cattle, until at last almost half the herd bolted suddenly off the road and into the forest. The drovers pursued them, chasing them down in the brown wintry brush, until suddenly the forest rang with the kind of explosive bellow given out by cattle when blood is smelled, followed by the kind of shout peculiar to a man who has experienced a tremendous, quick shock.

  The other drovers gathered around their frightened companion, who pointed with a trembling finger at the terrible thing he had stumbled across. It was a corpse, cut up and battered, the brains literally knocked out of the head. It had been placed behind a log and covered with leaves, but those cursory efforts were insufficient to fully hide the terrible corpse, or to stifle the horrendous stench that rose from it.

  “There’s been murder done here,” the oldest drover said. “That poor man is the victim of highwaymen.”

  “What will we do? Bury him?”

  “Yes, but not here, and not yet. We passed an inn near the Rockcastle. We’ll take the corpse there. It may be that someone there can tell us who it is. Whoever this man’s family is, they should know what has become of him.”

  Farris’s eyes watered and his face was screwed up with a look of strong repulsion, but he advanced toward the Indian-style, drag-pole conveyance the drovers had lashed together and bravely looked at the gray face of the dead man strapped onto it. The face was so distorted by fast-advancing decay that Farris had to look closely to assure himself that this was, indeed, the body of Stephen Langford.

  “Yes, God help us, it’s him,” he said, hand across his nose and mouth in a vain attempt to filter the smell. “He was a guest here some days ago.” Farris turned. “Thias! The worst has happened. Stephen Langford has been killed. Come and see.”

  Thias was standing up in the inn yard, watching with the terrible fear that the corpse would turn out to be Clardy’s instead of Langford’s. Farris’s confirmation that it was Langford’s brought him relief he politely didn’t allow to show. “I’ve always been weak of stomach, Mr. Farris,” he called back with some embarrassment. But better that embarrassment than the loss of his last meal before all these watchers, he figured.

  “Then this sight is not for you.” Farris shuddered. “Nor for me, for that matter. I propose we bury this poor fellow at once.’

  The drovers did the job, and gladly, everyone being eager to put the foul corpse out of sight and smell.

  “Word of this must be spread,” Farris declared. “Every settlement should know of this as quickly as possible. There are murderers loose in this country, and their name is Harpe.”

  “I’ll help spread the word,” Thias said. “I probably can ride, if you have a horse to loan.”

  Farris looked him over and shook his head. “Not yet, though I thank you for your willingness. You stay here and heal, young man. And if it gives you any comfort, consider the fact that the scoundrels who tried to take your own life might be overtaken by the devils who killed poor Langford.”

  “And so might my brother Clardy,” Thias replied. “It’s him I think of—and the Harpes have hard feelings toward him already, because of something that happened in Tennessee. Until they’re caught, I consider him in danger.”

  “Until they’re caught, every traveler on this road is in danger,” Farris replied. “And they must be caught … and I know the man to do it, if anyone can.”

  “Who?” Thias asked.

  “Devil Joe Ballenger,” Farris replied, nodding resolutely. “If any man in Kentucky can bring in the Harpes, it’s Devil Joe.”

  “Who is he?”

  “The toughest old pine knot in the Kentucky Commonwealth,” Farris said. “The Harpes will have little hope of escape with Devil Joe on their heels.”

  “He’d better be a devil if he finds them,” Thias said. “God knows they’re devils enough themselves.”

  Despite his diabolical nickname, Captain Joe Ballenger was a highly respected man. A former Indian fighter turned merchant in Stanford, he was as tough and dogged a frontier citizen as could be found, and just as John Farris had anticipated, he proved to be the best choice of leader for the quickly formed band of “regulators” that went out in pursuit of the Harpes.

  “Devil Joe” Ballenger, it so happened, had already chanced to lay eyes on the Harpes. They had passed through Stanford shortly after the time that Langford had been killed. The motley bunch had drawn attention, but no one had known at that point of Langford’s murder, and they had passed through the town unimpeded.

  Now that the truth was out and the story of Stephen Langford’s murder was spreading all over the region, Ballenger had no difficulty in rounding up his regulators. The men of the Kentucky frontier, scarred and hardened from years of fighting Indians in the earlier days of settlement, were accustomed to taking law and order into their own hands, and with such a stalwart leader as Joe Ballenger to guide them, they readily answered the call. Murder could not be tolerated. Already stretches of the Wilderness Road of Kentucky, particularly between Cumberland Gap and Stanford, were fearsome places. Public safety and confidence demanded that demons such as the Harpes should be exorcized from the dark forests with the greatest of dispatch.

  The regulators rode out of Stanford fully expecting to face a difficult tracking job and likely resistance from the culprits. Typical murderers were prone to leave neither clear trails nor to take a cordial attitude toward capture. But the regulators learned quickly that the Harpes were not typical murderers.

  They had made no effort to hide their tracks. The regulators trailed them with ease, riding across Brush Creek, where a resident named John Blain reported seeing the pursued party earlier, and then over the Rolling Fork of the Salt River. Here the trail grew extremely fresh.

  “We must be very wary from here out,” Ballenger instructed his men. “They are armed, and I don’t anticipate they will be taken easily.”

  Ballenger didn’t let his men see how bewildered he was. He could see no logic in the obvious lack of caution being shown by these criminals. But he knew from hard experience that too-clear trails often led to traps. He led his regulators along the course of the ever-fresher Harpe trail with a sense of wariness that grew with every mile.

  They would find the Harpes, he was sure, within a day.

  Sally Rice Harpe saw it all playing out in her mind as clearly as the day it had happened. She was young, no more than ten or eleven, standing beside the outdoor oven her father had built at their old family home, attentively following her mother’s directions as she prepared, at her own request, a pigeon pie for her father in celebration of his birthday.

  On a stone slab beside
the oven lay a pile of plucked and washed passenger pigeons, a heap of vegetables, slab of beef, molded square of butter, and containers of seasonings. Sally’s immediate task was carefully spreading a puff-paste dough across the bottom of a pan and up the sides. Her fingers, greased with a dab of lard, smoothed the crust under the watchful eye of her mother, who at length gave a curt nod and said, “Good, Sally. Very good. Now we’ll begin laying in the makings.”

  Eyes closed in memory, Sally smiled to herself as she replayed each step of the process: seasoning the pigeons with salt and pepper, knifing off pieces of butter and working them inside the birds aiong with seasonings, carefully piling each pigeon into the pan and then laying the beef in the middle of them, and finally, that most aesthetically important step of laying on and molding the top crust. This pie was to be Sally’s gift to her father, so she desired that it be perfect. She wanted deeply to please him, to earn his praise. Her father was a beloved man; he made her happy, especially when he found something she had done or made to be praiseworthy. Those occasions didn’t come as often as Sally would have liked, but when they did, they were epitomical experiences that she treasured like keepsakes in her mind.

  She remembered the tension of waiting beside the oven for the pie to bake, her continual sniffing to make sure the crust wasn’t burning, and at last her careful removal of the finished pie. It looked as good as she hoped, and the smell of it was superb. When it was laid before her father, he had smiled, put out his hand, tousled her hair, and told her it was the finest pigeon pie ever set before a living man, kings and emperors included. She relived the pure joy that simple fatherly praise had given her, and thought again that the gift of it was far finer than the pie itself.

  “What you grinning at, Sally?”

  She opened her eyes to the sight of Wiley squatting before her, grinning curiously. All the happiness of her memory was jolted aside to make way for a wave of revulsion. Murderer. That word arose in her mind every time she looked at her husband now. Murderer! How could she have ever bound herself to this man? How could her own father have been so blind to the character of the human demon he had allowed to become his own son-in-law?

  “Just remembering,” Sally murmured, and looked away.

  Wiley shifted on his feet to enter her line of sight again. She knew better than to avert her eyes again; that would anger him. “Remembering what?”

  “Just things. Things I like to think on.”

  “Like our marrying night, eh?” He winked, reached out, stroked her leg through her dress, grinning devilishly.

  “No. Not that.”

  Wiley’s smile faded and Sally was afraid. He had never hit her, but since witnessing his capability for violence, she had realized it could happen. She wanted to curl up within herself, become small and invisible. She wanted to be free of this man, who had first stunned her moral senses by sharing her with his brother as if she were no more than a pipe of tobacco or a piece of dried beef, then stunned her all the more by killing innocent men before her eyes. The most recent was the handsome young man Langford, who had died at Wiley’s own hand without ever suspecting his own danger or seeing the coming blow that slew him.

  As Sally looked fearfully into Wiley’s stern face an odd thing happened. Before her eyes he seemed to visibly empty, to become blank and vacant and emotionless. Her impression was that even while looking at her he had ceased to really see her. She had seen this phenomenon before in both Wiley and Micajah. She could not explain it, but when the emptying occurred, it generally heralded a time of quiet. The brothers would grow somnolent and slow, sitting for hours and doing nothing, lost in whatever thoughts it was that stirred in minds such as theirs.

  The first time Sally had seen her husband that way, she asked him what he was doing. His answer puzzled her: “Listening to the voices,” he had said. “They’re singing sweet today. Sweet and pretty, like angels.”

  Wiley rose, stiffly walked away from Sally and joined his brother, who was seated on a log in the clearing where they had made this camp. Sally looked at Micajah. He is empty, too. Both of them, empty as spilled buckets. She was glad. They would be like this for hours, maybe days. There would be peace for her and the other women during that time, as much peace as ever was allowed them. I hope the voices sing for a long time.

  Sally turned back to her memories again. They were her only refuge; she had begun regularly escaping into them shortly after her marriage, that very first time Wiley turned her over to be used by his brother.

  She was deeply lost in her childhood when the riders came in. There were a dozen or more of them, all armed, all with stern expressions. She looked up at the apparent leader of the group and thought, I reckon they must have found one of the dead ones, and now they’ve come for us. I’m so glad. I don’t want to go on no more like this.

  The lead rider was looking oddly at the Harpe brothers, probably wondering why they did not react to this obviously hostile intrusion. Sally thought: He doesn’t know that they have been emptied.

  “I am Captain Joe Ballenger,” the lead rider said loudly, causing Micajah and Wiley to look directly at him for the first time. Their expressions remained as vacant as before. “We’ve come to place you under arrest for the murder of Stephen Langford of Virginia, and to take you to the jail in Stanford, to be held under the authority of Lincoln County, Kentucky.”

  Micajah stood, holding out his rifle toward Ballenger. “We’ll go with you,” he said calmly.

  Wiley turned his rifle over, too, while Captain Joe Ballenger and his men all looked thoroughly bewildered. Sally thought: They didn’t expect this to happen.

  One of the riders, a very young man with a nervous manner, dismounted and came to her. “Ma’am, I must ask you to come with us.”

  Sally rose. “Are you taking us to jail?” She sounded very childlike as she said it, which obviously surprised the nervous young man.

  “Yes, ma’am. We’re obliged to do that.” He was shy and deferential, clearly uncomfortable with arresting a female. He took off his hat and tensely crumpled it in his hand. “I’m sorry to have to do that, it being Christmas and all.”

  Sally’s eyes grew bright. “It’s Christmas?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Christmas Day.”

  “I’ve always loved Christmas,” Sally said, smiling for the first time in weeks, outside those times she smiled while lost in her memories. “Back when I was small, my folks always fed me sweetening on Christmas. I love Christmas Day. Jesus was born today, you know. Born in the stables while the angels, sang. The good angels, not the bad ones, like them that sing for Wiley. My pa, he’s a preacher, you know. He always told us the story about Jesus and the shepherds on Christmas Day. When my baby is borned, I’ll tell him, too.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The young man turned away. Sally wondered why he seemed so disturbed.

  1799

  CHAPTER 23

  Early in January, John and Jane Farris journeyed to Stanford to give testimony in the first hearing in the case of the Harpes. Farris asked Thias to consider coming along, in case the court was interested in his knowledge of the Harpes’ involvement in the Abel Van Zandt murder in Knoxville.

  Thias declined on the grounds that he still felt too weak and dizzy to travel all the way to Stanford, and that he really did not know that the Harpes had committed the Knoxville murder, or even if any charges had been brought against them related to it. All he really knew was that Van Zandt’s corpse had been brought in just as he was leaving Knoxville, and that the Harpes were generally suspected. He shruggingly told Farris he really had no firsthand information to give on the Knoxville matter—and here he realized with secret shame that he bordered on falsehood. He had the witness of his own eyes that the Harpes had dug in Selma Van Zandt’s grave the night that. Abel Van Zandt had vanished. Meager evidence that might be, but evidence worth sharing—the guilty fact was he simply didn’t want to share it. He wanted nothing to do with the Harpes, did not want so much as to lay eyes on them—or
have them lay eyes on him, especially as he gave evidence against them—in even the sterile and protected environment of a courtroom. The truth was, Thias Tyler was afraid of the Harpes. He didn’t dwell on it because it was shameful, but it was true.

  When Farris and his daughter-in-law returned from Stanford the day after the hearing in Lincoln Courthouse, Thias hungrily listened to Farris’s recounting of the events.

  The Harpes and their women, with the sole exception of Betsy, were claiming the name of Roberts, as they had when they stayed at his inn, and though the three judges presiding over the case knew the true name was Harpe, they allowed the aliases to stand in the record, which Farris admitted he could not understand. In any case, the case was entered against Micajah, Wiley, Susannah, and Sally Roberts, and Elizabeth, or Betsy, Walker, the charge being that they “feloniously and of their malice aforethought” murdered and robbed Langford in December of the just-passed year.

  The Harpes were denying their guilt despite the strong evidence against them. Among the most damning testimony, Farris said, was information given in the official affidavit of Captain Ballenger, who recounted how he learned that the murder had occurred, and how he and a body of regulators, informal in structure and nature but gathered with the blessing of the commonwealth’s attorney general, had pursued the suspects and found them beyond the Rolling Fork of the Salt River. In their possession at the time of their capture, Ballenger had stated, were items including a pocket book with Langford’s name inscribed upon it, three coats, including a greatcoat, a pair of trousers, a whip, a shaving glass, Freemason’s apron, and various other items appearing to have belonged to the murder victim.

 

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