by Cameron Judd
Clardy’s worries about the Harpes returning after all the women had given birth had declined by now. He had the feeling that the Harpes were long gone, probably off in some remote corner of Kentucky, or maybe north of the Ohio River. They wouldn’t have lingered in the wilderness this long, just waiting for babes to be born. This time they had abandoned their women for good. If so, that indeed was good. The best thing that could happen to the women and children would be to lose all contact with the brothers.
A few days after the birth of Sally’s baby, Susanna “Roberts” went on trial for the murder of Langford. A jury of twelve found her guilty after a brief review of evidence from the initial hearing in Stanford, preserved in written affidavits. The next day a second jury heard precisely the same evidence given against Betsy “Walker,” yet found her innocent. On the same day, the judge ruled that no trial of Sally “Roberts” would be held and she was declared acquitted. Clardy was glad. He had come to pity the childlike Sally.
Susanna appealed her conviction at once, and the judge granted her a new trial. The district attorney, however, decided not to prosecute her a second time, and the clerk of the court entered, to the cheer of a soft-hearted public, a nolle prosequi entry under her name in the court record.
“Isaac Ford predicted this would happen,” Clardy told others in a tavern he had taken to frequenting. “Nobody wanted to see them women hurt for the crimes of their men, nor them babies left without mothers.”
The perception was correct. The people of Danville now rose in a swell of sympathy for these poor, fallen women and their helpless infants. Clothes were collected, food gathered, money scraped up and given them for a gift. Even an old mare was scrounged up to help convey the little ones and the various goods charitably given for their care. The women, as somber and listless as ever, accepted these gifts with as much gratitude as they were capable of showing. They told their benefactors that they were through with the company of the men who had victimized them, and would travel together back to Tennessee and resettle in Knoxville, using the kindness shown to them in Kentucky as a foundation upon which to build a new and better life. They would seek forgiveness for their sins and live good lives from here on out.
Clardy watched as the procession of women and babies, accompanied by Biegler and various others, moved in a line toward the edge of town. All along the way men tipped their hats and women swiped away tears of sympathy and goodwill. It seemed that not a soul for miles around was displeased to see these women cleared of their crimes and sent on the way to a brighter future. They were perceived as witnesses rather than doers of evil, their wills overwhelmed by the evil of the men who had dominated them. Just weak women, that’s all they were. Clardy saw it that way along with everyone else. He knew better than most how fierce and mesmeric a hold the glittering eyes of the Harpe brothers could take upon the will of those around them. He had very nearly fallen into that trap back on Beaver Creek. No longer could he be totally skeptical about the reality of the “evil eye” some people were purportedly able to cast upon others. If any man possessed a true evil eye, it was Micajah Harpe.
Emotional aspects aside, the departure of the women created an ambivalent situation for Clardy. With the Harpe men escaped and the women freed, there was no longer a need for guards at the jail. Clardy was out of a job. He returned to Isaac Ford’s house, proud of the time he had spent at an honest enterprise, but with hardly a shilling more in his pocket than he had begun with.
He knew the time was nearing when he would have to move on and find a means of supporting himself that was more permanent and lucrative. He knew as well that the best future he could find probably would involve returning to the past: to the farm at Beaver Creek and the life he had lived before. He had no way of knowing that the farm was no longer Tyler property, that the grandfather he had sparred with through the years was dead in his grave, and that his brother Thias was no longer there, either, but had come to Kentucky on his very heels, only to pass him by.
To return to Beaver Creek … Clardy mulled the possibility very seriously. It seemed sensible—yet he didn’t want to go back. He had tasted freedom and some measure of honest labor, and found he liked it. Beaver Creek seemed distant, part of a past he did not want to return to.
And there was a secret, nagging fear that also served to deter him from returning to the farm: The Harpe women had said they were going back to Knoxville. If so, the Harpes themselves might look for them there, and the Harpes were men Clardy could not afford to run across on his own.
So for days he lingered where he was, working for Isaac Ford and trying to decide what best to do.
CHAPTER 25
Sally Harpe, having given birth more recently than her two companions, was allowed to ride the already laden mare most of the time, while Susanna and Betsy walked, packs of donated goods on their backs and babies riding their broad hips.
Sometimes while she rode, Sally would hold her new baby in her arms and look into its face, feeling emotions she could not put a name to. But mostly she spent her time lost in her beloved fantasies of lost days of innocence. Riding with babe in arms or on her breast, her mind would be secretly immersed in phantom images of happy girlhood, seeing herself eating at the family table or listening to her father singing hymns as he worked the farm. She remembered the corn-shuck dolls she would hold as she held her living child now. Yet those corn-shuck dolls had seemed more real than this baby of flesh, blood, and bone. It was that way for her now: the shadow world of the past was more present and corporeal than the fleshly reality of a life that had turned too ugly to endure.
Though the three women were ostensibly traveling toward Knoxville, Sally knew they were not really bound there. It was just as well; she was sure she could never return to her old life and place. Her father was a good man, a holy man; she was far too fouled to go back to him. She was where she was and what she was. Nothing could be done for it now.
The women traveled toward Crab Orchard, then changed their route to follow the Green River. There, they encountered a man with a canoe and traded mare for craft. Piling into the canoe, babies stuck like weevils in cotton among the mounds of personal goods given to them by the kind people of Danville, they traveled down the Green River, heading for the community of Red Banks, where the Green spilled into the Ohio. From there it was only a short distance to the place they really had been bound for all along, in faithful obedience to the instruction given to them by Wiley and Micajah the night the young jailer named Malory had helped the men escape.
At their destination they expected to find their men awaiting them. If not, they would tarry there until they came. Whenever the reunion occurred, they would go together to a place the men had told them about, a big cave that overlooked the Ohio River, an awesome, infamous place called Cave-in-Rock.
After the departure of the Harpe women, a lull held in the regions of Danville, Stanford, Crab Orchard, and Hazel Patch. It did not linger.
Corpses were found, decayed and wolf-chewed but still identifiable. According to the word that reached Clardy Tyler near Stanford, two of the killed were Marylanders known to be traveling in the region approximately the same time as the unfortunate Stephen Langford. Their names had been Paca and Bates.
A third dead man, found at another area, was a well-known and much beloved Wilderness Road peddler named Peyton.
Clardy was deeply shaken to hear of Peyton’s death, and told Ford of his meeting with the peddler and how kind the man had been to him—a sort of foreshadowing of the even greater kindnesses given to him by Ford himself.
“I’ve met Peyton myself a time or two,” Ford replied. “A hard thing, a gentle man like that being murdered.”
“The Harpes done it. Had to be them.”
“All the signs point to it. The corpse was hid much the same way as Langford’s. God! That pair is Satan doubled! Men without souls, they are. Men without souls.” Ford’s dead eye took on a new egg-white luster, as it always did when he was angry.
Clardy said, “I want to see them caught. I want to see them hanged. And not just for the killing they’ve done here. There’s others, back in Tennessee, I believe they’ve murdered.”
“Them two will have their punishment in time, Clardy. But who will deliverate it, nobody can say. I know of no indication that they’re yet about this region. Most likely they’re far away, doing their devil work among other folk.”
But within a day other rumors reached Stanford. The Harpes had been seen by witnesses, moving through the forests in the region of the Rolling Fork, the very area where they were captured the first time.
When Joe Ballenger revived his regulators to being another search, Clardy Tyler and Isaac Ford were among their number. Had he seen his own face, Clardy would have been surprised at the iron fury it displayed and the coldness glinting in his eyes. He had never known so righteous an anger as this one. He was eager to sweep in the two murderers like a housemaid’s broom sweeping rubbish, to see them convicted, most of all to see them hang.
Clardy’s old dream of a criminal life was dead, murdered by the Harpes just like old Peyton had been. Clardy had seen pure, wicked criminality embodied in two human forms, and could no longer see anything of the romance, happiness, or wild pleasure he’d formerly associated with it. Ugliness, that’s all it was. Nothing but grotesque ugliness.
Ballenger’s regulators were a band of grim demeanor and blood anger. Ballenger, perhaps sensing a dangerous overeagerness in his men, warned them that the Harpes would not likely be captured so easily this round. He expected a difficult search, a prey hard to find and stubborn in resistance. They would have to be ready for dangerous surprises.
The regulators were deep into the search when they heard a whisper of noise in the forest near the Rolling Fork. Every man raised his rifle and readied himself, but the lean, sun-baked figure who emerged to face them was no Harpe. He was astride a horse that looked as lean and weathered as himself. With eyes the color of an old rifle barrel, the man swept a confident, experienced gaze across the cabal of manhunters.
Clardy lowered his rifle. “Who’s that?” His tone evidenced the kind of impression the newcomer had made.
Isaac Ford replied, “A good friend of mine and one of the finest of the old long hunters ever to tromp through Kentucky. His name is Henry Skaggs.”
Clardy had heard of Henry Skaggs. Hiram Tyler had known of the man through his reputation as a fine hunter and woodsman. Skaggs was among the first to penetrate the wilderness west of the mountains. With one Elisha Walden and more than a dozen other excellent woodsmen, he hunted all along the then-wild country of the Powell, Holston, and Clinch rivers back in the early 1760s, fresh on the heels of the great Cherokee uprising that accompanied the siege and surrender of Fort Loudoun in the Overhill towns. Hiram Tyler was never a long hunter, but always wished he had been, so men such as Skaggs were near idols to him. Clardy had heard the names of Skaggs, Walden, Newman, Blevins, Cox, and Colter extolled so many times in his home that he was now duly impressed to see one of that famed number.
“I know who you’re searching for,” Skaggs said to Ballenger. “I’ve come to lend my hand.”
“You’re welcome, Henry,” Ballenger replied. “Have you any wind or sign of them devils?”
“Nope. But I hear they’ve been seen. If so, we’ll meet them soon enough.”
The incidents that happened shortly after Skaggs joined the regulator party would be seldom discussed by the men who participated, but well remembered, and with shame. Clardy himself didn’t quite understand how or why matters fell out as they did, especially with such a hardened group of capable woodsmen as these.
They met the Harpes without warning, at the edge of a wide canebrake near the Rolling Fork headwaters. It was as if the Harpes had simply materialized there in the woods, facing the big band of regulators with rifles—stolen rifles, almost certainly—cocked and lifted. Clardy gaped at the two figures and seemed to lose control of his will and muscle. He could hardly feel the rifle in his own hands.
Micajah and Wiley Harpe stared at the men before them, and Clardy remembered the “evil eye” tales that had been spreading about these men since their escape. A deep, panicked fear grasped him by the throat. All outrage and thirst for Harpe blood drained away, to be replaced by a wild need to be away from this place. Clardy broke free of the torpor that had held him, jerked the reins of his horse and heeled its flanks, riding off into the woods. He hardly noticed that the others in the party, except for Skaggs, Ballenger, and Isaac Ford, were doing the same. Clardy was well away from the Harpes, almost out of sight of them in the trees, before he realized with deep shame that he and his companions had just bolted like cowards, all because of two men! He stopped, wheeled his horse.
He saw Skaggs, Ballenger, and Ford approaching now. With the Harpes having the drop on them, even they had been forced to break away once the others abandoned them. Clardy could hardly bear Ford’s furious gaze and dared not even glance at the others.
“They’ve got past us,” Ford said in disgust. “Rode right on through while six times their number in good hardy men scatter from them like quail!”
The others were gathering around now, regaining their composure after the unexpected burst of group cowardice. “My horse bolted with me,” one of them mumbled. “Couldn’t get him stopped …”
“I was riding off for cover, aiming to shoot at them from hiding,” another said.
“It was the evil eye that done it,” a third contributed. “I felt the burn of it on me, and next thing I knowed, here I was out in the woods.”
“That’s damned nonsense,” Skaggs said. That stentorian voice, exploding with authoritative finality from so respected a figure, put an immediate end to excuse-making. “What happened was fear, men, pure old weak-kneed, belly-burning fear. I’ve seen it strike many a man in Indian fights.” He paused, looking around at the group like a stern father evaluating sons who have let him down. “But I’ve never seen it strike so many, faced by so few.”
“I’m mighty sorry I ran,” Clardy heard himself mumble.
“’Least you admit it was running and put up no excuse,” Skaggs said, and even so faint a praise as that from a man such as he was enough to make Clardy lift his head and feel the beginnings of resurging pride.
“They can’t have gone far,” Ford said. “We can run them down yet.”
“They went into the canebrake,” Skaggs replied. “Seen ’em sliding in there myself.”
“The canebrake!” one of the party said. “We’ll never find them amidst all them stalks! They’ve give us the slip, men.”
“Hell’s bells, we handed them the slip, handed it right to them like a chicken leg at Sunday dinner!” Skaggs replied disdainfully. “I stand with Isaac. We can yet run them down.”
“In that cane? I got my doubts,” another replied, then wilted when Skaggs gave him back a burning stare.
Ballenger, his own face a chiseled image of displeasure, looked around at the group. “Let it be, Henry,” he said. “We’ll never catch them if there’s no heart give to the purpose. What we need is hounds.”
Skaggs sighed. “Very well, then. Hounds we’ll have.” He pointed northeast. “My cabin stands yonder way. I’ve got good hounds. We’ll fetch them and see what they can do.”
The men seemed glad to have something to do that didn’t involve direct pursuit of the Harpes. Clardy was ashamed of them all, but couldn’t chide them. He had been the first to turn tail. He was fiercely glad Grandpap and Thias hadn’t seen this. Grandpap would have cussed him as a coward from here to next Christmas, and Thias would have inflicted upon him that familiar look, the one that had reminded Clardy time and time again through the years who was the good brother and who was the bad.
They fetched Skaggs’s hounds and renewed their pursuit, regaining their courage and puzzling to the last man over why such a mortal fear should have gripped them. No good answer could be found. Like so much concerning the Harpes, there w
as mystery here and questions to distress the heart and chill the blood.
The dogs caught the trail at the cane and led the pursuers in among the thick stalks, but soon the brake became too thick to allow them to go farther at more than a snail’s pace. Most of the men grew discouraged, and despite the urging of Skaggs to continue, began to fall away. The Harpes had won this round, several declared. No point in continuing a chase when the fox has already found his hole.
In the end only Skaggs, Ford, Ballenger, Clardy, and a few others remained. Needing more manpower, they proceeded on to another cabin not far distant. Here a party was under way, a “log rolling” involving the gathering of wood for a new dwelling. Skaggs broke up the festive atmosphere only with difficulty, liquor having already been flowing free for a couple of hours prior, and announced that he was in need of brave men to help find the notorious Harpes, who were hidden, he believed, in the big canebrake not far from there.
“I’ve lost nary a Harpe today and feel no compunction to go looking for one,” one of the revelers said. “Besides, Henry, if they’re in that cane, you’ll never roust them. A man can hide in the cane till doomsday and not be found.”
“There’s enough of us here to do the task,” Skaggs said. “Have you not heard of the murders these men have done? You let them keep roaming free, and it will be one of your own who feels their blades next.”
“I agree with Henry,” said a man Clardy later learned was named James Blane. “We should pursue these men before the trail grows cold.”
All the pleading Skaggs could do had no effect on any man there except Blane, though, and at last the old long hunter and his handful of companions turned their horses and rode away from the party. Skaggs, sounding weary and discouraged, suggested that perhaps the best notion was for him to ride on the next morning to the home of Daniel Trabue, south of there, and discuss with that fine gentlemen the need to mount and maintain a serious search until the Harpes Were apprehended. Trabue was a worthy soul, highly respected. He would not dismiss such an important matter as a joke to be laughed over at a log rolling.