“Since when did looting and rape become a duty?”
Hallett’s features stiffened. “Obviously, Lieutenant, you are a stranger to Georgia. It is our business to root these people out, and that’s what we’ll do. I will be obliged if you would not interfere.”
Tolan’s expression did not change. “I have interfered.” He sat straight in the saddle. “I am sure you can do what must be done without murder and rape. Now call off your men and get out of here.”
For an instant Tolan believed Hallett intended to strike him with the whip. All the planes of Hallett’s face seemed to flatten out and the skin around his eyes tightened. “I take no orders from you,” he said, “nor from nobody else but my boss and the state of Georgia.”
“You will take these orders.” Tolan’s tone was crisp. “I have been directed to report here by General Winfield Scott, and my orders are to see the Cherokees are moved with every care to their comfort and security. My orders do not condone rape.”
Hallett hesitated. It was obvious to Tolan, and the fact surprised him, that the big man cared not a whit for Tolan’s orders; but Hallett apparently was not sure exactly how far he might go in such a case. Miles Tolan, who had estimated many a man’s potential before this, knew now that Hallett was not only a dangerous man but a capable, intelligent one as well.
“Very well, Lieutenant,” Hallett said finally, “we will move along, as you suggest. This is a matter that can wait, and we can always return when we see fit. We will simply have to see that you are put right by your superiors.”
“I have my orders.”
“Ah? From General Scott, I believe you said? General Scott is not in Georgia, sir, and your orders here will be very different. You are to report to Colonel Loren White, I presume?”
“I am.”
“You will learn, Lieutenant, that Colonel White is in command here, and your future orders will be from him. And one of those will be to refrain from molesting or interfering with citizens in pursuit of their business.”
Miles Tolan was suddenly angry. He did not relish being told off by a civilian, nor did he like the implication that rape and murder would be tolerated by the American Army. “Be that as it may,” he repeated coolly, “you will now get your men together and move along. The Indians will be brought in by the Army, and all in good time.”
Hallett’s smile was equally cold. “And if I choose to ignore that order, Lieutenant? What then?”
“I should be obliged to enforce it, sir.”
Hallett made a great show of looking around and behind Tolan. “You are alone, I see. Doesn’t it strike you that enforcing such an order might be difficult?”
“I should require no assistance, nor should I request it.”
“You’re very sure of yourself, Lieutenant. Too sure for an officer in a bright new uniform. One day I may decide to find out what is behind those shining buttons…if anything.”
“I shall look forward to the moment, Mr. Hallett. And just so you will not be deceived by this bright new uniform, I might say it replaces a number of them worn out in service during and since the Black Hawk War.”
He sat his horse as if on parade, watching Hallett get his men together. They came grudgingly, and one of them started to drive the small herd of gathered stock.
“Leave them,” Tolan ordered.
When the drover hesitated, Hallett spoke to him in a low voice. Reluctantly, they mounted their horses. The man whom Tolan had interrupted had a rifle across his saddle. “Got a notion to bury me a sojer,” he said.
Tolan was looking at Hallett, although every man in the group was under his gaze. “Mr. Hallett, if that man moves that rifle muzzle I am going to kill you.”
Hallett’s shock was evident. Tolan’s holster flap was unbuttoned and the pistol butt was near his hand. Hallett’s eyes lifted from the gun to Tolan’s eyes and he knew that Tolan would do just as he warned.
Hallett’s rage was evident. “Turn around and get out of here, you fool!”
Watching them ride reluctantly from the clearing, Miles Tolan was profoundly irritated with himself. Why had he made such a point of letting Hallett know that he was no desk soldier? Explanation to such a man was a weakness. Still, it might have averted a fight. When the riders had disappeared from sight, Tolan looked slowly around.
He was alone but for the aged woman and the dead man. For he was dead; no man could lose so much blood and live. Dismounting, Miles Tolan crossed to the dead man and turned him over. It was the face of a middle-aged man, careworn and tired, yet a face possessing that innate dignity he had seen in many an Indian before this. The dead man’s clothing was clean; his hair had been neatly combed.
His pockets had been turned out and everything of value stolen.
Tolan drove the small herd of stock into the corral and put up the bars. During all this time the old woman had neither moved nor spoken, and the girl he had rescued seemed nowhere about.
The house was burning and nothing could be done about that. Tolan walked toward it, disturbed by something here that he could not quite fathom. The swept yard, the carefully constructed buildings…This was evidently the farm of an Indian of some consequence. Too many Indians he had known previously, those who had taken to the white man’s ways, had often been lazy, drunken, or indifferent.
Not so the warriors he had met in battle. Tall, splendidly built men, many of them, and they could fight like so many cougars.
Sudden hoofbeats sounded on the trail down which he had lately come, and from the trees rode a small cavalcade of Indians. Several of them were young men, stripped to the waist and in buckskin leggings, but the two men who rode at the head of the group were dressed as prosperous planters might dress. The oldest of them, a short, powerfully built man obviously their leader, wore a black hat, and although his clothing showed wear, it was also neatly brushed. The young man beside him wore a cabin-spun shirt, open to the belt. He had a ragged scar across his cheek.
This man glanced from the dead man to the old woman, and then to Miles Tolan. “Does the white man’s army now make war upon old women? What would he do if he faced warriors?”
“I have faced warriors,” Tolan replied brusquely. “I have faced the fighting men of the Sac and Fox, Sioux, and Kiowa. What warriors have you faced?”
“My people are at peace.” The young man spoke haughtily, but Tolan realized he had touched a sensitive spot.
“It is of no importance whom we have faced,” Tolan replied quickly. “We are not at war here, and what has been done was not of my doing. I am sorry for it.”
“He speaks true.” The girl he had saved from being raped slipped from behind the saddle of one of the riders.
She had repaired the tear in her dress, and now she came up to the older man and spoke rapidly in what Tolan believed to be Cherokee. When she had completed what was obviously an explanation the older Cherokee said, “We thank you, Lieutenant, for what you have done, but we must warn you also. The man Hallett is a dangerous enemy, and he will not quickly forget. We have come to know him well.”
“Won’t the law protect you?”
“The law!” The young Cherokee’s fury exploded into words. “There is a law for the white man, but there is no law for the Indian! The law here is a club to beat us down and rob us of all we possess!”
“It has been arranged for you to migrate,” Tolan suggested mildly. “If you are dissatisfied, why don’t you go?”
“A man does not willingly leave his home, Lieutenant,” the older man said. “This is the land of our fathers, and of their fathers before them. The dust of Cherokee bodies has helped to build high the mountains, his blood flows in the sap of the trees, and his stories have grown into these rocks. This is our home.”
“It is a good land in the West.”
“So we have heard. But the Cherokee have lived here since the memory of our oldest men. These hills have been our hunting ground, and these valleys have known our crops.
“Now we are ask
ed to go…to live among alien spirits and the ghosts of strange peoples. We are asked to abandon the graves of our fathers, the fields we cut from the forest, the homes we built with our hands. I ask you: How can we?”
He gestured toward a huge oak beside the clearing. “Beneath that oak my grandfather died fighting the Creeks, and my mother is buried beside him. Here I played as a child, and by this stream I killed my first deer.
“The Cherokee, White Man, is born of these hills. He was not a homeless people. Here he was born, here he has lived, and here, God willing, he shall die.”
Miles Tolan was profoundly moved. What reply had he to such a statement?
“You have been kind,” the old man added, “and because of us you have made an enemy. Moreover, the man who employs him will become your enemy as he is ours.”
“Who is this man?”
“His name is Rounce…Wilson Rounce.”
Miles Tolan was shocked. “Rounce? Did you say…Rounce?”
“The name is familiar to you?”
They stared at him as he absorbed the information…and remembering Will Rounce he felt, for the first time, something of apprehension.
“We were children together,” Tolan replied. “Yes…yes, I know him.”
CHAPTER 2
“He is the worst of our enemies.”
“I shall speak to him.”
“Tell him,” the old man said proudly, “that it is I, Tsali, who call him enemy. If he will come among us I will repeat it, and stand before him when I do so.”
Miles Tolan sat very still, watching them go to the old woman and help her from the ground, but he was remembering Wilson Rounce.
Seventeen years had gone by since they had parted. Had they ever been friends? Had Will, beneath his friendly exterior, ever been anything but an enemy? As boys they had hunted and fished together, and they had fought side by side against other boys. Everyone else had considered them friends. Everyone, Miles remembered, but old Elias Rounce, Will’s grandfather. But then, nobody ever outwitted old Elias. Not even Will.
And now Will Rounce was here….What could have happened to Rounceville, the town old Elias had founded, and which should have been Will’s?
Why would any sane man leave those broad planted and forested acres? Why would someone give up ownership of the mills, plants, and factories that Elias Rounce had broken from the wilderness? With such an inheritance a man of Will’s intelligence and training could have built a great financial empire.
The sense of apprehension returned to him. Will Rounce was the only man who had ever beaten him…and he was the only one who had ever beaten Will.
Suddenly, he thought of the girl who had dived into the pool. He swung the black horse over to the old Indian. “Tsali, back up the road I thought I saw a woman dive into a pool. It was west of the road.”
Tsali’s face was expressionless. “I know of no one in that area.”
Tolan had a feeling the Indian was lying. “Is there a pool up there? Or a lake of some kind?”
“I know of none.”
“Thank you.” Miles Tolan turned his horse into the trail and cantered away. Now he knew he had been lied to…and if Tsali would lie about the pool he might also lie about the girl. But why should he lie? What was the secret there?
Tolan shrugged. It was unlikely that he would ever know, and even more unlikely that he would ever come into these mountains again. His way led westward, guiding the Cherokee to the new lands beyond the Mississippi, and there would be no time for searching the mountains. Anyway, he reflected philosophically, she was probably unattractive, married, or both.
—
It was very still. The clouds hung dark and low and secretive sounds stirred in the forest. The trail widened now, and occasionally smaller trails turned off into the green, mist-shrouded hills. Here and there great crags jutted from the forest, thrusting their serrated edges against the sky. It was a lovely land. There were running streams and small meadows, parklike stretches of forest and occasionally now fenced fields where corn grew.
His thoughts reverted to the woman on the rock. It was an unexpected place for anyone to be at such a time. The Cherokee Removal was far advanced and many had already taken the westward route. With their going the land was, as he had just witnessed, filling with renegades ready to profit by what the Indians had been forced to leave behind.
Miles Tolan had no feeling one way or the other about the Removal. In a vague sort of way he had been aware of the discussion for some time, and aware of the violent animosities that had arisen from it. He knew that Clay, Calhoun, and Webster had all spoken against it, but that Jackson himself was for it, all the more surprising because he had heard many of his brother officers speak of the excellent service rendered by the Cherokees in the Creek War…and they had been led by Jackson during that war.
Knowing nothing of the arguments pro or con, Tolan recalled only that Davy Crockett had made excellent speeches in the halls of Congress for the Cherokees. For an Indian fighter this was unexpected, but Davy had the reputation of being a fair man, and he had fought both against and beside the Cherokees. He had, in fact, sacrificed his political future by taking a course in opposition to that of the Jackson party with which he was affiliated.
Politics was not a soldier’s business. Miles Tolan had been given a task to perform and he would carry it out to the best of his ability and leave the arguments to the civilians.
Of one thing he was certain. Indians could not hope to survive by their old way of life. They represented a hunting and food-gathering society in conflict with an agricultural and industrial society, and when two such diverse cultures opposed each other the less productive was sure to fall by the way. Right and wrong might be debated, but the outcome was certain.
Yet the farms he had lately seen, including the one where the trouble had taken place, had been well-tilled farms, with compact buildings and an atmosphere of productivity and well-being about them. If these farms were examples of Cherokee industry, then the picture had to be far from one-sided. But of course they must be the exceptions. They had to be.
The presence here of Will Rounce was a disturbing fact. Since the day when Elias Rounce had called Miles Tolan into his office and told him he must leave Rounceville, he had known a sort of freedom such as he had only dreamed of before. Only the fact that he owed a debt to the old man, who had taken him in and educated him, had kept him in Rounceville so long. What the others saw as ignominious dismissal he saw only as a door being opened.
Before him the trail dipped into a wide, shallow valley and in the bottom of the valley lay the post road. Further along he could see a stage station. Slow smoke rose from the chimney and a private carriage had only just drawn up at the entrance.
Two women, one young, one elderly, were getting down from the carriage. As the younger turned to wait for her companion, their eyes met.
They were wide, lovely eyes, either blue or gray, and nothing in his training as an officer hinted that he should be laggard. “How do you do?” He swept off his hat and bowed. “I am Lieutenant Miles Tolan.”
“And I,” she replied sweetly, “am not interested.” With that she was through the door and into the station.
From behind him he heard an unpleasant laugh. “You sure didn’t make no hit, Sojer! An’ just as well, too. Will Rounce wouldn’t stand for nobody sparkin’ around his woman…even if she ain’t nothin’ but a ’nother Cherokee!”
It was Hallett’s man, the one who had attempted the rape. He was loafing near the corner of the building, and now he grinned broadly in appreciation of Tolan’s discomfiture.
Ignoring him, Tolan turned his horse over to the Negro stable boy.
Will Rounce’s woman.
Was it to be Will Rounce wherever he turned? How would it be between them after seventeen years? What had Will become? And if it came to a struggle between them, who now would win when old Elias was no longer in the background? Slapping his hat against his thigh, Miles knocked
dust from it and from his clothing. Then he opened the door and stepped within.
The long room served the functions of office, waiting room, dining room, and saloon. Its floors were of hand-hewn plank, the furniture of rough homemade construction, including four tables with four chairs at each. When Miles entered the room the girl and her companion were already seated. Only one other table was occupied…by a group of card players, and there were several rough-looking men at the bar.
As he seated himself at a table not far from the girl and the elderly woman who was her companion, a young man, clad as befitted a gentleman of fashion, entered from the rear door and joined them. Rounce’s man had called her a Cherokee, which was obviously a mistake. He had also called her Rounce’s woman….Was that another mistake?
He thought she glanced toward him, but when he looked toward her she was busily in conversation with her friends. She was, he decided, even more attractive than he had at first believed. Almost, in fact, uncomfortably beautiful.
There are women, he reflected, so beautiful that men are awed by them, and many a man who might otherwise be interested is inclined to stand off, doubting that such a girl would be interested. He grinned at his hands, reflecting that no such inhibition had ever held him back.
A man had come from behind the bar wiping his big hands on his apron. From the deference in his manner, Tolan decided he both knew and respected the newcomers.
“Sam,” the young man was saying, “we’d like some of that home-cured ham of yours. Whatever else you have…we’ll trust your judgment.”
“Leave it to me, Mr. McCrae.”
Sam crossed to Tolan’s table and hit the boards a swipe with his cloth. “I’ll have the same as the people at the next table,” Tolan said. “They seem to know your food.”
Volume 1: Unfinished Manuscripts, Mysterious Stories, and Lost Notes from One of the World's Most Popular Novelists Page 7