I was a stride from the roadhouse door, Lancaster in hand, hell-bent on vengeance, when Hannah Ferrenden blocked my path. She made a declaration of her own right then and there, an explicit warning that she wasn’t visiting any man of hers in jail. What damage Darns had done Blake’s name was undoable, and killing him would accomplish nothing except perhaps my lynching by his drunken friends. That said, she dispatched Abner Johnson with a message for Darns that the judge’s daughter was at Monet’s with Blaine Tyler and other armed men and would be ringing the gate bell within the hour. I could never fault the outcome of her quick-witted ploy. No one ever heard where or when Clell Darns stopped running, but the best guess was not before he was far south of Louisville.
With the Ferrenden Yard secured, we laid stores aboard the keelboat and ascended the Ohio to what proper residents and travelers called not Pitt’s Town but Pittsburgh. It was a sad landing for the woman I loved. We learned with the halt of our hired carriage at Ferrenden Hall that the judge had met his maker in late September. His daughter had her mourning cry alone upstairs while Lem, Adam and I adorned winged chairs in the parlor. On closer look, I discovered the oversized entryway door wasn’t lined with gold as I’d imagined: Under the hand polishing and brass furniture was solid oak planking.
The winter of 17 and 91 we spent in meetings with men of the bar as Judge Ferrenden’s sole heir obtained a thorough knowledge of her father’s vast shipping and land empire. In addition to the many decisions required of her, she made one freely, and we were married quietly without any great commotion other than Lem’s snuffling and Adam’s unrestrained joy. In the spring the old salt and I visited Limestone and the Tyler plantation, where we oversaw the planting of tobacco and corn. Then it was back to Pittsburgh for the late spring and summer, months in which Isaac Dawson and John Longtree taught me shipbuilding from bow to stern, mast to hull.
Except for the continued lack of any word about Blake or Sarah, it was a grand summer. We sweated from dawn to dusk, the chief distraction every day at the Redstone Yard being whether the lady owner would make her noon visit in a carriage wearing a skirt or on horseback in breeches. The buzz at Seventh Street and Cherry Alley was tantamount to that of Limestone after General Harmar’s defeat when a drayage wagon delivered to Ferrenden Hall a copper bathing tub large enough for two persons. Such were the unexpected twists of living with the Water Princess.
A fleet of the boats we built that summer hauled supplies and powder to General St. Clair at Fort Washington in August prior to the disastrous defeat inflicted on him by the same Ohio lnjuns who had whipped General Harmar the previous year. A solemn mood, extended from Louisville to Pittsburgh throughout the rugged winter, fine spring and warm summer of 17 and 92. The autumn of that year, with affairs twixt white men and red far from resolved, and still no word as yet about the whereabouts of Blake and Sarah, our son was born, named at my handsome wife’s insistence Blake Ferrenden Tyler.
The year 17 and 93 passed with the speed of a falling acorn, a bustling year in which we founded the Ferrenden and Tyler Line connecting Pittsburgh and Limestone by packet ships outfitted with sails, oars and cleated gunwales for poling crews. The packet ships convoyed other boats bound downriver, and conveyed mail and passengers twixt the two Ohio ports every other week. My wife’s judgment was on the mark. We dumped monies in the company’s coffers faster than we could count them.
The year 17 and 94 proved momentous, for we finally secured reliable evidence that both Blake and Sarah were indeed alive and seemingly well. But it was knowledge gained at a high price, what with our losing good and faithful Lem in the process. The Ferrenden and Tyler Line contracted in the spring to bear provisions and equipment through Fort Washington to the newly formed federal legion commanded by General Anthony Wayne. Not only did our ships convey the materials by water from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati, we agreed to cart them overland by wagon and pack train at General Wayne’s direction, stocking thereby the forts he was building as his forces advanced against the Shawnee and Wyandot.
In late June hundreds of lnjuns destroyed a large pack train and killed scores of legionnaires within a mile of Fort Recovery. The enemy then withdrew, and Lem and I traveled there shortly after their retreat to determine what if any actions on our part would help General Wayne recoup his losses. A short distance from the Fort, while we were riding Wayne’s roughhewn military road with an escort under Captain Farrell Davis, a ball from ambush caught Lem in the neck and spilled him from his horse. The unseen foe slithered away, and the old salt died in my arms as he lay among the low-cut stumps littering the roadway, but not before he extracted from me a tearful promise I would never cease our quest to bring Blake home.
We buried Lem that afternoon with the legionnaires killed the prior week by the Shawnee. During the ensuing evening Captain Davis tried his best to console me. We talked for hours, and I told him the whole story of that fateful autumn of 17 and 90 so he would appreciate as a fellow officer why Sergeant Lemuel Shakett had been steadfastly loyal to my brother to his last breath on this earth.
In August General Wayne’s Legion defeated the Shawnee and Wyandot, and company obligations fulfilled, I went home to wife and son. The pall cast upon our hearth by Lem’s passing burdened us greatly till Captain Farrell Davis appeared on the stoop of Ferrenden Hall one blustering December noon. The captain had remembered my story from our evening together and had come to tell one of his own, heard from a British emissary during the treaty talks twixt Wayne and the Shawnee. Blake Tyler, the British officer had claimed, resided in lower Canada opposite Fort Detroit near a major encampment of the Shawnee tribe. He was known among the Redcoat troops for the beauty of his quarter-breed woman, and rumors that his sister was a wife to the fierce war chieftain Three Feathers and had borne him children. Captain Davis knew no more, but his brief visit gave purpose to Lem’s death and instilled new hope in us for the future.
I will always believe I missed my most likely opportunity of ever seeing Blake in the flesh again that winter of 17 and 95. I laid plans for a journey to Fort Detroit with Abner Johnson, a winter trek the dangers of which did not please my wife, though she voiced no objections in my presence. Dame Fate intervened instead. A fever befell me and I was till spring recovering. Abner Johnson made the winter trek for me, and despite his earnest endeavors, he returned to report that while he located men on both sides of the border who knew of Blake and Sarah and confirmed their existence among the Shawnee, none could take him to them or provide information as to their current whereabouts.
The years fled before us, never a week passing that we didn’t remark on Blake or my sister. In the autumn of 17 and 96, our daughter graced our lives, named by the mistress of the house Sarah Ferrenden Tyler. We prospered in the river trade beyond our wildest dreams, and in the spring of 18 and 09, the Water Princess, always with one eye on the weather and the other on the source of the next gold coin to flow our way, decided our yards should be expanded to Louisville, the burgeoning port of the lower Ohio. That summer we deeded Ferrenden Hall to Adam Tyler, the newly married superintendent of our Redstone Yard, and built in our newly adopted port city a fine home with leaded glass windows and cherry-floored ballroom big enough to entertain a militia company, in which we announced the opening of the Louisville-to-St. Louis branch of Ferrenden and Tyler.
In the autumn of that same year Fate reared her head again. Abner Johnson loved to partake of a day-ending toddy in a different tavern each evening, spreading the spit and the wealth he called it. At our Louisville office early one morning, he repeated fresh news of Blake he’d heard the previous night. My brother was still alive but in desperate trouble with the law. Blake’s quarter-breed woman had been murdered by American infantrymen stationed at Detroit. Their drunkenness at the time of the incident had altered my brother’s sentiments not at all, for the three soldiers involved were subsequently discovered dead from knife and tomahawk wounds behind the outhouses serving a riverfront roadhouse. Hunted by American office
rs with warrant in hand, Blake had fled into the wilds of lower Canada. I pressed Abner for anything about Sarah, but he insisted no mention had been made of her. We searched Louisville together for a fortnight, but were unable to locate the buckskinned speaker Abner’d overheard. A week later the Louisville Gazette confirmed Abner’s story in each and every heartbreaking, lurid detail.
A void of silence promptly swallowed my brother once more. Every effort we exerted to acquire some additional tidbit of information about him and Sarah went for naught. Then a new lightning bolt struck in the summer of 18 and 13. Tales of Blake’s participation in the bloody massacre of Kentucky militiamen at the River Raisin filtered home to war-crazed Louisville, spilled from the lips of returning survivors. We were near to despair when the next thunderbolt in October heralded his death, and so thrilled the vengeful amongst our neighbors that I decided to take up the quill in his defense.
I have thought of little else except my brother during my long months of writing. For all those who know Blake Tyler only as the murderer of his country’s soldiers and traitor to its cause, he is easy to condemn without undue deliberation. And I readily concede few would change their opinions if they were told the whole truth about Blake Tyler beyond the newspaper stories and the rumors attending them. Every man is judged most strenuously for the public deeds of his life and remembered the longest for any that offend God or the flag.
In my forgiving heart, I will always consider Blake the finest of blood kin, a brother who sacrificed himself for the sister we both loved so dearly. I can only hope and pray that with the guns of war at last having stilled, in the quieter years ahead my heirs and descendants will read my lines and agree Blake Tyler is deserving of good memories at least from his family, if no one else.
Respectfully concluded this date,
Blaine Haskell Tyler
Keep reading for a special excerpt of
THUNDER IN THE VALLEY
from
Two-time Spur Award Winner
JIM R. WOOLARD
Western writer Jim R. Woolard’s classic award-winning debut still rides hard and fires point blank from all barrels …
Bitter experience has taught Matthan Hannar that to survive the harsh, untamed wilderness of the Ohio Valley in 1790, it’s best to avoid all contact with settlers (likely to hang you) and Indians (even more likely to slaughter you). Success on those fronts means he might not starve, drown, or freeze to death. But while he’s winding his way upriver as stealthily as he can, he stumbles across Zelda Shaw furiously fighting off a ferocious Shawnee brave. Breaking his own rules, Matthan Hannar has now got to keep Zelda alive, too, or face the wrath of her kinfolk.
But in order to keep them both alive, he’ll have to kill anyone and everyone standing in their way …
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Chapter 1
Morning—January 7, 1792
It has been some forty odd years since the Ballard brothers ambushed me on the seventh day of January, 17 and 92.
Even if I live another forty years, I’ll never forgive myself for letting them take such liberties with me. Before the day ended, my whole life turned upside down, never to be the same again.
I can remember everything about that cold clear morning. Before I met up with the Ballards, I was a mighty happy lad marching home along Wolf Creek, downright pleased with anything and everything. And why not? I was warmly garbed in moccasins, linsey-woolsey breeches, buckskin hunting frock, and pelt cap—nothing for courting the fair damsel in, I admit, but no better garments could be had for the hunting trail in crisp weather.
I toted a fine flintlock rifle that morning, a rifle that seldom failed me, and on my back I bore the quarters of the buck deer I’d slain with it just an hour before. And if warm bones, a fine rifle that smelt of burnt powder, and a heavy pack burdened with the meat of a fresh kill didn’t come close to heaven on earth, downstream at our home place my stepfather, John Hannar, back from a venture up the Muskingum, and Uncle Jeremiah eagerly awaited my return. I chuckled. No jerked beef or salt pork would grace the Hannar table this night. We’d eat prime buck, and nothing less would do.
It had been a grand morning, and it tickled me I owed the brindle cow for my success. Yesterday afternoon she’d drifted away from her shed. A quick quartering of the ground at the edge of our clearing confirmed she’d moseyed along the north bank of Wolf Creek. I’d suspected right off she could be found grazing in the meadow across the ford a few miles upstream. Even in winter, whenever left unpenned or untended, she sought the last of the good grasses there.
Despite my confidence I followed her path those few miles with sweeping eye and ready gun. Just a few weeks back General St. Clair’s army had suffered a horrendous defeat at the hands of the Ohio Indians, and the victors were free to kill and plunder throughout the territory. The cow needed bringing in, but not at the cost of my hair.
She was there in the far reaches of the upstream meadow all right, head down, feeding without a care for anything else. I stood firm in a copse of oak and eyed the woods about her. Satisfied she was alone, I loped across and slapped a lead rope round her neck. Just then I sighted the deer tracks. Four sets of hoofprints bordered the trees in each direction in an irregular, yet steady line. Each print seemed of the same size and depth. My heart quickened. They’d all been made by one animal.
Squatting, my probing finger found the freshest of the hoofprints firm-edged with only tiny leaf bits and little upturned dirt in the center. That made them no more than a half dozen hours old. The others, if aged by their content and how much frost and sun had blurred and flattened the edges of them, looked one, two, and possibly three days old. Their message sounded clear as the peal of thunder on a quiet summer afternoon. Coming first round the eastern hill in front of me, the solitary deer browsed northward every morning.
It was a perfect setting for the whitetail. The trees shielded the rising sun well past dawn, creating shadows through which he fed his way with a feeling of security for a morning drink at the creek. The animal, unless disturbed or spooked, would no doubt continue his sunrise ritual tomorrow. And I would be here awaiting. I led that poor brindle cow home at a pace just short of a gallop, shooting appetite thoroughly whetted.
Even the poorness of the evening didn’t dampen my spirits. Uncle Jeremiah, tortured by a lame ankle, acted cross and snappish as a she-bear guarding her cubs, and Stepfather, just that day back from his Muskingum venture, proved no better company. The cough he’d acquired in the Harmar Indian Campaign of 17 and 91 doubled him up on the rope bed opposite the hearth. I tended the stock and quietly sought the husk bed in the sleeping loft.
Uncle Jeremiah, bless him, recovered in time and wished me Godspeed next morning. Out and under way before first light, I waded the creek below where the shoulder of that eastern hill nudged the opposite bank and padded for a spot between two large elms from which the length of the meadow could be seen. Stones gathered from along the edge of the water and mounded between the trees provided a solid shooting rest for my flintlock. I settled in, wedging a shoulder against one of the elms, and removed the deerskin cover from the lock of the rifle. With the hammer pulled to half cock, the frizzen opened freely. I primed the firing pan with fine grain powder, closed the frizzen, and snugged the hammer all the way back.
A white oak down at the other end of the meadow stood out clearly in the graying dawn, a perfect sighting target. By candlelight at the cabin I’d loaded the rifle with a full seventy-two grain charge of powder. Though I’d hold fire till my prey reached the midpoint of the meadow for a sure shot, that first shot had to be hard and telling. There’d be no time for a second before the deer gained the trees close at hand.
I started my watch. Spotting deer required considerable skill and Uncle Jeremiah had schooled me well. First you looked at the whole meadow at the same time, not just some likely section of it. That way, any movement stood out and told you where to look in earnest. Otherwise you trusted your ears, which, i
n light of how quietly deer sometimes skulked about, greatly limited the likelihood of making a successful kill.
I caught the flicking of a pair of large ears above a screening of brush long before the white-tailed buck pranced into the meadow and commenced feeding. He nibbled at twigs and small branches along the forest fringe, pausing every once in a while to scan his surroundings. A wary devil and for good reason. An antler stub flopped loosely on the side of his head and a long scar zigzagged down his neck. Some scuffle had taken a pretty severe toll on him. He fed his way patiently toward me, and I just as patiently let him come on.
He got within fifty yards when all of a sudden his tail twitched, his head popped up, and he stared straight in my direction. I held my breath. I hadn’t moved. No wind stirred. He hadn’t scented me. Then his ears jiggled and I knew some far-off noise too faint for my hearing was bothering him.
He listened long and hard. Eventually, deciding nothing really threatened him, he turned his head and stretched for a high branch, ully exposing the base of his throat and the top of his shoulder. I drew a bead on that juncture of his body and squeezed off my shot.
The slam of the ball buckled his knees. His tail dropped and he lunged for the trees in a staggering death run.
The Winds of Autumn Page 30