Passage to Natchez

by Cameron Judd

  Skaggs rode on, trailed by his followers. Leadership of this pursuit had shifted to him without ceremony or even discussion. Among frontiersmen, leadership was based less on rank and title than on natural ability and experience. Clardy was determined to stay with the search as long as Skaggs and Ford did, but he was weary and discouraged, hardly able to muster up the indignation that had stirred him so deeply earlier in the day.

  It had not been a good day’s work. There was little done in this effort that any man would be able to look back on in pride. They rode only a short way before making camp in the woods for the night. Few words were spoken.

  Clardy was surprised when he met Daniel Trabue. Ford had told him some about the man as the manhunter party rode toward his home. Trabue was about forty years of age and a longtime resident of the region, having been around in the days when the Shawnees attacked Boonesborough and life in the Kentucky country was a very uncertain affair day to day. Yet when Clardy saw Trabue, the man looked at least fifteen years older. He was standing in his yard, pacing about, as the party rode in.

  The reason for Trabue’s sudden look of age, Clardy discovered, was that at the moment he was deeply burdened with worry. He had sent his son to a grist mill some distance away early that morning to fetch flour and seed beans, and the boy hadn’t returned, even though there had been ample time for it and he’d been instructed to hurry.

  “I wish I could give you less reason for worry, Daniel, but I’m afraid I can give you only more,” Skaggs said. “There are dangerous men on the run in this region, name of Harpe. They’re murderers of the worst sort, two coarse-haired sons of whores who made their escape from the jail in Danville. We’re searching for them at the moment, and came here hoping you could lend us some aid, and give us news if you’ve heard or seen anything of this pair.”

  The news seemed to put yet another five years of age onto the weathered, troubled face. Trabue said he was willing to help, but until his son returned he felt compelled to stay where he was. No one faulted him, but Clardy did fault himself and his companions for their poor showing the prior day. He feared that Trabue’s son had probably become the most recent victim of the murderers. If only they had pursued the chase more vigorously, and not given in to panic when they had the pair in their very hands!

  At that moment a small dog limped whimpering into the yard and groveled at Trabue’s feet. It was cut badly and bleeding. Trabue’s face blanched. “God help me,” he said. “It’s John’s pup.”

  “Was that dog with the boy when you sent him to the mill?” Ford asked.

  “Aye. Oh, God!”

  “Calm yourself, Daniel,” Skaggs said. “Mount your horse and let’s be off to the mill ourselves, and see if we can find news of your son.”

  They rode in morose silence, and at the mill learned that John Trabue had arrived safely and set off home again long before. Trabue grew so distressed, he become sick at his stomach on the spot.

  The search changed from that point on. Led now by Trabue himself, the men searched for the missing boy. They found some meager sign of his earlier passing along a buffalo trail, but it was trampled by subsequent travelers and they could not track him far.

  The day passed slowly yet quickly, as days will that are full of worry. By the time night fell, the searchers were no better off than before, having found neither the Harpes nor any trace of John Trabue.

  Efforts to find the boy and the Harpes continued for days thereafter. About fifteen miles to the southwest of Trabue’s home, the first substantial evidence that the boy might have indeed become a Harpe victim was uncovered in the form of a dead calf and dead campfire. Tracks indicated that two men had been there and had hacked out moccasins from the fresh skin of the calf. Remnants lying about showed they had cooked and eaten a meal of meat and cakes made of flour. The flour John Trabue had been carrying? No one doubted it.

  They searched hard for footmarks that would indicate the boy himself had been here, but there were none. There had been only the two men. Hope that John Trabue was still alive faded fast.

  The worst was confirmed not long afterward. Another band of searchers found the corpse of John Trabue, disemboweled and literally hacked into pieces, and tossed into the bottom of a sinkhole. Lying amid the gore was a small sack, soaked in blood that had since dried. An examination of its contents showed it contained only seed beans.

  When Clardy Tyler heard the news, he cried like a child.

  The savage murder of the twelve-year-old boy became the fastest-spreading, most fury-inspiring piece of news that had come out of Kentucky for many years. Across the young state the name of the Harpes became known, and men searched for them with fierce determination.

  Twelve days after the murder, the governor at Frankfort issued a proclamation offering three hundred dollars for the capture of Micajah Harpe, and the same amount for his brother. With the proclamation was given the following descriptions:

  MICAJAH HARPE alias ROBERTS is about six feet high—of a robust make, and is about 30 or 32 years of age. He has an ill-looking, downcast countenance, and his hair is black and short, but comes very much down his forehead. He is built very straight and is full fleshed in the face. When he went away he had on a striped nankeen coat, dark blue woolen stockings, leggins of drab cloth, and trousers of the same as the coat.

  WILEY HARPE alias ROBERTS is very meagre in his face, has short black hair but not quite so curly as his brother’s; he looks older, though really younger, and has likewise a downcast countenance. He had on a coat of the same stuff as his brother’s, and had a drab surtout coat over the close-bodied one. His stockings were dark blue woolen ones, and his leggins of drab cloth.

  The proclamation, accurate in all physical descriptions except its presentation of red-haired Wiley Harpe as having black hair, was widely copied and circulated. All across Kentucky, men hunted for the murderers, mothers kept their young children close to home, and travelers lingered in the taverns and inns until large traveling parties could be formed for the sake of safety.

  But safety for some was in short supply, as passing days showed.

  Not twenty miles from the Daniel Trabue home, the Harpes murdered a man named Dooley. No one knew why; the death seemed as meaningless and unprovoked as the John Trabue slaying.

  The next victim was a man named Stump, an impoverished, idle hermit of a fellow who lived in a crude riverside cabin and kept himself alive by fishing, a meager bit of gardening, and hunting. Though an isolated man, he was friendly to those who passed by and was fond of entertaining people with his fiddle playing. As best could be ascertained by the evidence left behind, he had been fishing at the river when he saw the smoke of a camp on the far side of the stream. He had rowed over in a skiff with a big string of fish, a freshly killed wild turkey, and his fiddle, aiming to share a meal, conversation, and music with whoever was camped there. The Harpes killed him and disposed of him with their usual rock-and-river method. By the time his corpse washed up against a bar down the river, the Harpes, having sated their appetites on the food Stump had brought them, were long gone.

  As best could be told, they appeared to be heading for the Ohio River.

  CHAPTER 26

  Night, near the mouth of the Saline River

  Three men sat together in the circled light of a campfire, shooting openly amused glances and occasional outright guffaws at one another at the expense of a fourth fellow who sat on the other side of the fire, facing them. He was a stranger … and as one of them had privately quipped to the others moments before, was proving to be the “strangest stranger” they had run across since the beginning of this extended hunting trip. The man had wandered in from the woods, drawn by the smell of their stew, introduced himself and asked for food. They had shared the victuals and settled into a conversation that had become far more bizarrely entertaining than they could have anticipated.

  The stranger was a thickly built, hatless man with a tangle of dark hair and an open, simple look on his face. He
was seated on a log; beside him was a yellowed skull with a smoking pipe thrust into its mouth. The skull was what prompted the greatest astonishment and was the centerpiece of most of the fun being poked at the newcomer.

  “So, Mr. French, your pappy likes his pipe of an evening, does he?” one of the three hunters was saying to the tousle-haired fellow. “Does he cuss you when you forget to give him one?” The other two snickered loudly.

  “I never forget Daddy’s pipe,” the tousle-haired fellow said. “But even if I did, Daddy wouldn’t cuss me. He never cusses.”

  “I doubt he does. I reckon he never says much at all.” More laughter.

  “Please don’t laugh at my daddy. He don’t like that, and I don’t neither.”

  “Oh, I beg your pardon, Mr. French.” The man looked solemnly at the smoke-wreathed skull. “And you as well, Mr. French the elder.” The others could scarcely restrain their raillery at that one.

  “You travel alone, Mr. French?” one of the hunters asked.

  “I ain’t alone. Daddy is with me.”

  “Oh, why, of course.” They laughed some more. “What I mean is, do you and your daddy always travel alone?”

  “We do now. There was another man with us, named Jack Waller. But he got him some money and next thing we knew, he was gone.”

  “Took off and left you and your daddy without a shilling, eh?”

  “Yes.” The tousle-haired man sounded very sad.

  “Well, that was an unkindly thing to do.”

  “Yes it was. Jack was mean to do that. If I find him again, I’ll kill him dead.” The flat way he said it made the threat sound shocking. A brief silence followed, humor stilled for the moment.

  “Now you’re on your own—just you and your pa?”

  “Yes. But we’re going to find Jack. You wait and see.”

  “Don’t believe I’d want to be him when you find him.”

  “No sir. You wouldn’t want to be. He shouldn’t have took my part of the money. It was wrong for him to do that. Daddy’s mad over it. Me, too.”

  “Yes sir. It was mighty wrong to steal from you two. He should never have … Mr. French, why you looking at me that way?”

  But Billy French was not actually looking at the man, but past him, into the woods. “Who are them two men?” he asked.

  “What? Who?”

  The man was twisting to look behind him when a rifle fired from the woods behind him. He grunted and pitched forward. Billy French leaped up, screamed, and grabbed for his father’s skull. He had just picked it up when a second shot rang out; a second man fell, having just begun to rise, and pitched dead into the fire. French screeched again as he saw two wild-eyed, ragged men, one large as a bear and the other small and weasely, come breaking out of the woods and into the camp. They must have been in there, watching us for a long time. Turning, French ran blindly and hard into the woods, away from the oncoming pair, who were now sweeping down on the third hunter. From the corner of his eye French saw a tomahawk rise and fall with a terrible thud just as he vanished into the woods, branches and brambles tearing his clothing and skin.

  Oh, Daddy, oh Daddy, one of them’s chasing us!

  The realization put new speed into his moccasined feet. He ran like he hadn’t run since youth, pounding up and down wooded slopes until at last he was sure he’d given the slip to his pursuer.

  A name he had heard spoken often recently in taverns and camps whispered through his mind in the same fearful inflection in which he’d always heard it intoned: Harpe.

  French stopped, panting, and looked for a hiding place. There! He went to a nearby, leaning, great hollow sycamore, squeezed painfully inside, and hid there the whole night. He was scared through and through. For the first time in his life he felt what it was to be on the quarry side of violent crime; before, with Jack Waller, he had always been victimizer rather than victim. He had never known what it was to feel his insides wrench and twist inside him, cramping in pure terror, making him breathless and sick. Even hours after the event, the image of those men being murdered in the camp was stark before his mind’s eye. He hadn’t much liked those men because they laughed at him, but they were hospitable and generous with their fire and food. He wondered why they had been killed. Maybe for no reason. Folks said the Harpes killed for the same reason fish swam: it was their way.

  Only when the sun was near the middle of the sky did French dare squeeze out of the tree and make his way cautiously back to the camp. He had realized with distress that he lost his father’s skull sometime during his run, and that drove him from hiding even more than the terrible physical discomfort of his situation. He searched the ground as he went toward the camp but did not find the skull, whispering, “Daddy … Daddy …”

  When he reached the camp, he found the dead men lying in blackened blood where they had fallen, though it appeared they had been moved somewhat, as if to be searched. And in the midst of them he found his father’s skull. Crushed. Someone had stomped it until the face imploded back into the hollow where the brain had been.

  Billy French knelt in the camp of death, stroking the ruined bit of bone. Tears streamed down and he felt more utterly alone than he had ever felt in his life.

  Sally was on Diamond Island when the Harpe brothers found her. She greeted them with as much enthusiasm as she was capable of showing—virtually none—and presented her baby to them. In her husband’s eyes she saw what an unwelcome gift that child was, and drew it back to her own breast.

  On to the cave they went together, and there found Betsy and her child among an even larger assortment of human vermin than was usual at that criminal refuge.

  The Harpes themselves were indirectly responsible for the crowded situation, though it took them some time to realize it. All the regulators, lynch mobs, and deputized bands stirred up by their murders and robberies in Kentucky had, in the process of scouring for the Harpes, managed to drive out much of the criminal element of Kentucky. The quickest and safest refuge for such had been Cave-in-Rock and its vicinity. Being on the side of the Illinois territory, Kentucky militia and regulators were reluctant to follow because of the jurisdictional issue.

  Once ensconced at the cave, the Harpes sent across the river for Susanna and her child, who awaited them in a small settlement there, posing as a widow to gain the sympathy of the locals. The splitting up of the three women had been planned in advance. It made them less likely to be identified as the now-famous Harpe women, and also gave them a wider field of view, as it were, across which to watch for the arrival of their infamous menfolk.

  Reaching the imposing cave brought Sally out of her nearly perpetual fantasy state for a brief time, and she observed the situation with a keener eye than her mien and silence would have indicated. She observed that word of who the Harpe brothers were and what they had done had preceded them to the cave. Even the most hardened of the river pirates watched them with awe and treated them with respect.

  Sally knew that it was a novel experience for Wiley and Micajah Harpe to enjoy the respect of others, and wondered what effect it would have on their behavior. A good one, she prayed. God only knew she had already witnessed more evil and carnage than she could stand.

  Soon it became evident her hope was vain. She felt a fool for ever hoping for an improvement in such men as Wiley and Micajah, especially in the company of such foul people as those crowded into and around this cavern. They all seemed to be evil folk, every one of them, and before long Sally ascertained that her husband and brother-in-law were determined to show themselves the most evil of the lot. The way they went about it drove her back into her mental sanctuary of fantasy more deeply than ever.

  The first display of their wickedness came in the form of a flatboat that landed for repairs less than a mile above the cave, beneath a bluff about fifty feet high. The flatboat crew went to work on the boat, but a young couple who were among the passengers slipped off alone and found a trail that led up to the top of the bluff which overlooked the broad r
iver.

  The pair were sitting at the very edge of the bluff, arm in arm, the young woman’s head on the young man’s shoulder, when the Harpes detected them. Sally was with the brothers at the time, watching in silent dread as they crept up behind the couple on moccasined feet. Closer they drew—Sally wanted to scream a warning, but dared not for fear the Harpes would only do worse because of it—and then they yelled like Indians, ran forward and gave the couple a great shove from behind.

  Two voices screamed in unison as the couple were launched out into space, kicking, flailing, still locked arm in arm. The Harpes roared with laughter. Sally came forward, expecting to see the crumpled dead bodies of the couple below, but was pleased to see both of them up and running toward their boat, obviously terrified but seemingly unhurt. Her relief was so great that she laughed and clapped. Wiley turned to her with a bright grin, mistaking her relief for glee over his joke. “Ain’t that a funny one, Sally? What did you think of that, pretty lady?”

  She withdrew at once, blocking out the present and his face, giving no answer.

  Surprise waited when the Harpes returned to the cave and told the tale. Hardened and cruel as the Cave-in-Rock criminals were, they didn’t seem to find much to laugh at in what the Harpes had done. A tall, thin, very pale man named Felix Fine, who they would have supposed would be far too weak and timid to face the dreaded Harpe brothers, rose and spoke forthrightly to them in a strange, elegant manner: “We here are a hard people, but we do not look kindly upon such a jest as yours. To do such crimes shows the most evil of spirits, and threatens to bring retribution to all of us besides. You, sirs, are scoundrels beyond measure, and we will not abide such dangerous and cruel treacheries that will ultimately threaten us all. It is, after all, your own brutalities that have caused regulators to rise and sweep the country, threatening our way of life.”