Tiff's Game (Perry County Frontier Series)

by Roy F. Chandler

  "I remember one time, John hid some of his treasures. He told Tiff he had hidden them so only he could play with them. Tiff thought about a minute, then went out and dug the stuff up. John howled for an hour."

  "I remember; that was on our visit out there."

  Carter kept the floor. "That was alright back then, but what about now? I'm telling you, Chip, this stuff is spooky."

  "Then let it be spooky. If it gets Tiny off Haycock's hook, who cares?"

  "Lily's the one making it scary. Well, not Lily really. She's likable as can be. It's the two of them together. Lily is some kind of witch alright, and Tiff is worse. He's the main one, Lily just jacks him up somehow."

  "She surely does. I'm half afraid to think about anything when they're together."

  "We ought to cage 'em and ship 'em up to State College for examining."

  Chip mused. "They burned witches up in Salem, Carter. Maybe you'd be for that."

  "Oh, shut up, Chip. I'm just trying to tell you that I'm nervous about strange doings."

  Carter drove his knife into his work and let it stand. "Hell, Chip, suppose something goes wrong? Suppose Haycock has his own spell or some sort of curse, and Tiff and Lily's magic doesn't work? We could lose everything."

  Chip said, "It will work." He stabbed his long and razor sharp hunting blade beside Carter's. "And if it doesn't, Tiff will just bear down and out-gamble Haycock. Quit worrying, you're making me uncomfortable."

  "Well, what do you think of what they're doing now? Just answer that, Shatto."

  Chip scrubbed along his nose with finger and thumb. "Surely a waste of time, but Tinker wanted them to try it. Can't hurt anything."

  "Damnedest thing I ever heard of, trying to find what happened to a man who's been dead for twenty or so years."

  Chip said nothing, so Carter ranted on. "When Tinker's Pap disappeared you hunted that woods top to bottom. What did you find? Nothing."

  "Tad Shuler was a woodsman of the old school, Carter. Frontiersmen like Tad and old Rob could walk across dry stone in wet moccasins and not leave a track. Tad was old and sick and tired. He might have gone over to Cocolamus Creek and dropped in, but if he did, he never surfaced. He also never left a trail, so I've always figured he disappeared on purpose."

  Chip cleared his throat. "It would be a comfort to Tinker to discover what happened to her father." Chip recovered his knife. "I'd like to know, too. I covered that woods like a hungry fox, but I couldn't trace him."

  Carter snorted. "How do Tiff and Lily expect to find anything after this long? We're all idiots to even be thinking about it."

  "They don't expect to find anything, Roth. They said just that didn't they? They're trying because Tinker asked them to."

  "God, suppose they find Tad's bones in some hollow over there?" Carter practically shivered.

  Chip spoke confidently. "They won't. I looked under every bush. I covered every inch of ground. I watched the buzzards and even the crows for weeks. Nothing turned up. As hard as it is to accept, old Tad must have gotten to the creek."

  "Yep, I remember. You had me checking to see if he might have hitched a wagon ride to somewhere, but not a soul had passed that whole morning. We checked all the wells, too. He wasn't in any of 'em. Sure was mysterious."

  "Well, Tad was a long hunter. If he decided to disappear, he could do it."

  "Why would he though? I never could see that part of it."

  Chip shrugged. "Tad was proud. He had dignity and spirit. I guess maybe he just wasn't willing to run down and be a burden. Likely he wanted us to remember him as something more than a drooling old body, lacking the strength to get to the outhouse or even sit on a pot."

  "That makes more sense as my own years run on." Carter sounded morose.

  "Does, doesn't it."

  Carter said, "Look, Chip, we've been friends for quite a while. So when you get old and dumb as a slug, just let me know, and I'll be quick to hold your head under water, or maybe shove you into the mill gears, or whatever way I choose. Anyway, you can depend on . . .

  Chip nodded as if considering. "I'd accept that, Carter, but it's plain that I'll live a lot longer than you. Why it already takes you four steps to get up straight after sitting. When you sleep your jaw falls open and you make hog noises. That's a sure sign of a failing man. Not only that, but . . ."

  Roth folded his knife. "To hell with you, Shatto. Let's walk some more."

  He got up and started. Chip counted, "One, two, three, four. Yep, four steps till you got straight. You're old, Carter, really old."

  Tiff and Lily stood on the woods trail a hundred yards from the old Shuler cabin. Tiff said, "I don't have any idea how to go about this, do you, Lily?"

  Lily Carver shook her head thinking about it. "I guess we just go along, letting our thoughts fly, trying to sense something."

  "Sense what? Where a man walked about the time you were born?"

  "It's all we can do, Tiff. We open our minds, trying to feel how it might have been."

  "You ever try anything like this before?"

  "No, but a lady over at Donnelly Mills finds things for people, and I've seen her do it. She just walks around, looking at nothing special. Finally she will point. If there is nothing there, she tries again."

  "She ever find anything?"

  "Often enough for folks to keep calling for her."

  "Well, I don't feel anything."

  "Oh, Tiff, we haven't even tried." Lily took his hand. "Now this is where your aunt last saw her father. He was walking slowly, leaning on his cane, and he did not have his gun with him." Lily moved ahead, and Tiff went along, letting his mind float on her words. Lily continued.

  "He surely went on into the woods like we are, but then he stopped to make sure he couldn't be seen."

  Startled, Tiff asked, "How do you know that?"

  "Because your Uncle Chip said his tracks just disappeared. That means he stopped using his cane. He couldn't have covered those marks."

  Lily mused on, just letting her feet find their way. "Old Tad knew where he was going or he would not have hidden his tracks."

  They wandered on, and Tiff could sense her thoughts sliding across his. He visualized the old frontiersman easing himself along, his cane held out of the way, careful not to turn leaves or press down on soft spots.

  Tiff's voice was hazy, as though half dozing when he said, "Tad wouldn't have gone too far without using his cane."

  The thought jerked them both from their musings. Lily said in surprise, "Why that's right, Tiff. He couldn't have gone far. Tinker said his legs were pretty bad. But, your Uncle Chip would have picked up the trail if he had started using his cane again. Tinker said Chip Shatto could track anything, and he had hunted like a wild man for days."

  "Uncle Chip said that Tad's trail quit just beyond where Aunt Tinker saw him last. So, where did he go?" Tiff leaned against a rocky outcrop to think about it.

  Lily said, "He can't be here. Chip would have found him." She shivered slightly. "They would have smelled him after a few days."

  Tiff let his eyes roam. The woods was a mature forest with little undergrowth. Some smaller trees forced themselves toward the life-giving sun, but the forest floor was mostly clear. No bodies could lie about unnoticed. Could there be a hole or hidden crack? Tiff tried to "see" such a thing. He took Lily's hand and realized her mind was searching like his own, but no miraculous visions appeared. If there were ground fissures or a hidden grave, he did not sense it.

  Lily asked, "Could he have met someone who carried him off and hid their trail?" The speculation seemed bizarre, but so did old Tad's disappearance.

  Tiff started all over. "An old man wishing to just disappear, unwilling to be a burden, unafraid of dying alone—and ready for it." Nothing came. Lily sighed in equal failure.

  Tiff started. Something tugged at his senses. He heard Lily's quick intake and felt her fingers tighten. What? He saw nothing, but a tingle of awareness just beyond recognition hung on. Tiff struggled to
identify and felt clarity slipping, so he eased his concentration and let his mind roam.

  Lily's hand tightened more and her attention focused. Tiff's eyes followed hers, but he again saw nothing. Lily said, "Tiff," and her free hand waved broadly in front of them. Still there was nothing— except a stronger sense of imminent discovery. Tiff could almost smell it, nearly taste it, but, there was only the empty forest, a twittery bird or two, and the sigh of wind through the leaf canopy high above.

  Lily said, "I thought for an instant . . ." Tiff's voice was stronger, "I still feel something." He could sense Lily's mind returning to the struggle, but his own wandered, as if seeking relief from exceptional strain.

  How strange it was to share the mind of another, how powerful the emotion. How empty it would be to let it go. The unexpected revelation slugged Tiff's consciousness. Lily asked, "What is it?"

  Tiff said, "Just an idea. Nothing to do with old Tad." He was not even surprised that Lily Carver felt what he felt.

  Old Tad, bent, weary, his pain unending, tired of the battle, perhaps relying on his bottle of laudanum for a swift end, had come this way. He could be sure that Chip Shatto, a woodsman who could track, would soon be put on his trail. Even closed with the powerful opium from his bottle, dying would take time. Tad would fear that Chip might somehow revive him. Tiff could almost feel the old man planning.

  Yet, he would wish to die as he had lived, with the sun strong on him, perhaps gazing across the valley and forest of his best years. Tad would not have wanted a dank slit in the earth or clumsy sinking in the Cocolamus, if he could have gotten that far.

  Where then? Tiff felt his eyes drawn skyward to the speckled brightness of sunlight splashing through breeze tossed foliage. He experienced a sudden surge of expectation, and Lily asked, "Tiff, do you suppose?" He glanced across, and Lily's eyes were also on the high leaf cover.

  Tiff straightened because it could be. He was not sure of old Tad's remaining strength, but without hurry, resting often, could Tad have climbed high to some solitary, unsuspected lookout? Could he have lashed himself in place, perhaps opening his clothing to allow the elements to do their part?

  With heightened excitement, Tiff studied the trees around them. Twenty years past, the giants would have been impractical for even an athletic man to climb. The climb appeared impossible, but their canopied branches were huge, and if somehow old Tad had reached them, he could have had a secret place high up and beyond discovering. He found he was squeezing Lily's hand in a death grip and quickly eased his fingers.

  Lily appeared not to have noticed. Her voice was drifty, as if from a distance, and Tiff felt goose bumps rise. "Over there, Tiff. Somewhere in there." She again waved vaguely toward woods in front of them.

  Tiff rose and tugged Lily along with him. He stepped a little way forward, walking softly, as if footfalls might disturb their mood. "I think he went up a tree, Lily. Up to a lookout of some kind, maybe logs he lashed into a platform way back when he was young. Maybe even when the Indians were warring back here. Tad went back that far, you know."

  "Yes, I know." Lily's voice was still dreamy, and she drifted aside as though tempted by a different direction.

  Tiff believed they were close, but there seemed no way to tell. Tree trunks two and three feet across were limbless for thirty feet. The Shatto's uncut forest remained as it had before the white man's axes and saws destroyed most that had stood around it.

  Ancient fire scarred trunks and dead snags hung among the healthy giants. The ground was deep with the humus of a millennium of natural decay. It was a place to live or die in, Tiff could feel that. Born and raised in the valley, Tad Shuler would have been comfortable breathing his last looking across the land he had known so well. But how?

  Tiff was looking at the answer for minutes before he recognized it. His eyes had passed and repassed. Of course it had changed over twenty years, but once you knew, Tad Shuler's ladder was as clear as the sunlight he had sought.

  Tiff sat down again, this time on a mossy log, and Lily came beside him. She did not yet see the answer, so he explained, thrilled by his certainty and awed that they had found in a pair of hours what others had sought for two decades.

  A monster of an oak, lightning struck and as dead as a rock, thrust its limbless trunk into and probably through the high leaf canopy. Tiff could not see the top from below. Beside the giant another oak, probably a century younger but still a forest master, wrapped two-foot-thick branches around the monster snag. And, close enough to intermingle, a warped and twisted maple had somehow found the light and forced its many limbed way upward. Once, perhaps more often, the maple had died back and resprouted itself along its original trunk. The maple's lowest limb, although now dead and broken away, had been barely waist high. Thereafter, limbs had grown at odd angles creating convenient crotches and handholds. Many of the lower branches had died and fallen, but twenty years earlier, some would have been there.

  Tad Shuler had gone up the maple's branches, across the living oak, and then onto or perhaps into the great snag. Up there somewhere, they would find Tad's remains. Tiff was sure of it.

  "Uncle Chip never saw buzzards because Tad wasn't lying outside. I'll bet he had some kind of cover over him." Tiff was gazing up into the high branches.

  Lily said, "I'm not that certain he's up there, Tiff. How could a man as old and as weak as he was supposed to be climb clear out of sight?"

  Tiff had no doubts. He could not only feel it in the new and exciting way, the idea also made sense. Tad Shuler was up there.

  "Well, I suppose he went real slow. He rested on every limb and just worked his way along. It's the kind of thing a man might do one last time, no matter how much it hurt."

  "He had to take his cane up with him, Tiff. Chip never found it, and that would make climbing really difficult."

  Tiff had no ready answer. "Well, there is only one way to find out." He started for the gnarled maple.

  Lily exclaimed, "You be careful, Tiff."

  "If old Tad could climb it, I shouldn't have much trouble." Tiff started up.

  The first twenty feet were difficult. Limbs had died and fallen. The few remaining stubs were treacherous foot or handholds. Most broke away when he gripped them. Once into living growth, however, the climb was simple. Tiff stepped branch to branch, working swiftly upward. His stop was sudden, and Lily felt his excitement.

  Tiff said, "So that's how he did it."

  "What is it, Tiff?" Lily could still see him only part way up the maple.

  "It's Tad's cane. It's tied to a limb up here. Lookout below!" The cane thumped the ground well off to the side.

  Lily went to pick it up, and Tiff hollered down. "See what he did? See the fishing line still wrapped around it? He knotted the line to the cane and just hauled it up after him. Then he tied it up here out of sight. He's up here, Lilly. No longer any doubt."

  Tiff went up, taking what seemed to be the natural ways. Crossing to the living oak was only a slide along a maple branch before transferring to an oak limb.

  Pulling himself almost straight across, Tiff saw ahead a huge limb brushing the old snag, and he could see a large hole in the ancient monster's trunk.

  He slid carefully because it was a long way down, but he judged the route actually quite easy. Into the living oak's trunk a pair of iron spikes had been driven. Clearly old Tad had been here before. The blacksmith-wrought iron appeared as strong as ever. By using them, the massive trunk could be stepped around. Ahead lay only a short hunching across a horizontal limb as thick as a man's body, to the gaping hole in the old snag.

  Tiff crossed, pretty well guessing what he would discover. He took a good breath and peered into the belly of the giant snag.

  Fire, perhaps from lightning strikes, had gutted the ancient oak. A few feet below Tiff's opening a platform spanned the oak's hollow core. On it, piled in crumbling disorder, were the skeletal remains of old Tad Shuler.

  From below, Lily's voice carried strongly. There
was already awareness in her question. "You found him, Tiff?"

  Forcing his voice to be loud enough, Tiff answered. "He's here, Lily. I'll be down in a minute."

  Tad's platform faced a huge hole similar to Tiff's on the opposite side of the tree. It looked over ordinary forest and onto the southerly ridge across the valley. The sun shown in warmly, and Tiff could imagine how in his earlier years Tad had come often to his secret lookout to dream away the hours.

  Tiff thought some about it, deciding that Tad's really wasn't a bad way to go.

  Only a few rotted clothing bits and chewed scraps of leather boots remained, but Tad's laudanum bottle lay open amid the crow and rodent scattered bones. It was a half pint bottle. Tiff smiled in satisfied awareness. Old Tad had just drifted off to his maker as relaxed and pain free as could be. Had he heard his daughter, Tinker, and Chip calling to him? Had he opened his shirt so the chill of night would make sure he never wakened? Tiff could not know, but for old Tad it had worked. He had remained undiscovered and undisturbed for twenty years, and only very strange and unusual circumstances had revealed his final resting. Tiff was almost sorry they had succeeded.

  Chip came down last, Carter having swung among the branches with a seaman's long familiarity with heights. Chip joined the others, sitting on logs or against mossy banks. Tiny Doyle had not gone up to see Tad Shuler's remains. A barn loft tested Doyle's height tolerance. The climb was deemed too much for the ladies, although Lily laughed at such foolishness. Tinker did not wish to see anyway. She chose to remember her father as she had last seen him.

  Chip said softly to his wife, "No doubt about it being Tad, Tinker."

  He examined Tiff and Lily with undisguised amazement. "I'll never understand how you figured it out. I've worked at this since Tad disappeared and never got a hint of how he did it."

  Tiff was genuinely humble. "We don't know either, Uncle Chip." He shrugged, unable to explain. "It feels just like anything else you discover. Some things go together, and there it is. Only, only you don't know how or why you know what you know."

  Carter growled, "Well, it's too spooky for me. I'd just as soon not know."