Cordelia Underwood, or the Marvelous Beginnings of the Moosepath League

by Van Reid

  “It is my fault,” said James, his face grim as his eyes looked into the darkness beyond the guide. Priscilla was crying now, and he reached down to touch her shoulder. “I am so sorry, my dear. Forgive me.” But he gazed out at the night, and might have been speaking to his daughter.

  “And where were you?” asked John Benning of Dresden Scott.

  The night was cool and Mercia had stirred the coals, raising flames, the light from which revealed anger on Mr. Scott’s face. “I might ask the same of you, sir,” he said, the address more authoritative than deferential. “I nudged you when I first heard sounds in camp, but you sleep deeply, it seems.”

  “You nudge lightly, it seems,” said John Benning, his tone flat with suppressed hostility.

  “I was struck from behind, outside the ladies’ tent,” said Mr. Scott, indicating the place on the back of his head with another rub.

  “That is easy enough to say,” continued Benning.

  James stepped up to the guide and felt for himself; there was no intimacy in the gesture, only the privilege of command. “He has a lump the size of an egg back there,” said the retired naval officer.

  “Easy enough to take a lump for the sake of appearance,” said Benning.

  “I haven’t been told what this is all about,” said Scott, ignoring him.

  “It’s that rock, isn’t it,” said Mercia. She held Priscilla’s quieting form, rocking the young woman gently. “It’s Minmaneth Rock.”

  “What about it?” asked Mr. Scott.

  James spoke up. “We have reason to believe that there is more to my daughter’s inheritance than simply this land. Perhaps something buried. Perhaps beneath that rock. And we have had reason to believe, these past few days, that someone else knew something about this as well.”

  “And you brought these people here with you?” There was the look of disdain growing in Mr. Scott’s eyes.

  “I never imagined anything like this,” said James, with such a note of self-recrimination and bitterness in his voice that Mercia let out a single sob before stopping herself from breaking down entirely.

  “Well, your daughter is gone, and we must get her,” said Mr. Scott simply.

  “Ethan has gone to look for the horses,” said James. “Perhaps we should help him. I will follow them. If you would loan me your rifle . . .”

  “I think you should stay with your family,” said Mr. Scott.

  “Perhaps you should tend to your own affairs,” said John Benning.

  “She is my daughter, Mr. Scott.”

  “And your ability to track . . . in the moonlight?”

  “I think I can follow several horses,” said James.

  “I’m sure that I could navigate a ship, Mr. Underwood,” said the guide.

  “Your point is taken,” said James, after a moment’s thought.

  “Are you suggesting that we let you follow these people?” asked John Benning of Mr. Scott.

  “I am suggesting nothing. I am telling you that you have little choice.” Scott never took his eyes from James’s face. “You can wait till morning, but I think you should be able to follow the road back to Millinocket in this moonlight. There you can raise the alarm, and soon the woods will be thick with searchers. Send a telegram to Old Town for the nearest law. You will want to ask for help down at the Indian settlement as well.”

  “And what are you doing?” asked John Benning.

  Dresden Scott was already gathering food and water, a bedroll, his rifle, and binoculars as he spoke.

  “I will at least find out where they are going with the young lady, and meet the rescue party on my way back.”

  “If you come back.”

  Mr. Scott stopped to regard John Benning carefully. Motives and emotion were not easy to read in the moonlight and the wavering glow of the reawakened flames. “I don’t understand this sudden suspicion—after all, I was the one struck over the head—but if we can catch a second horse quickly, Mr. Benning, you are welcome to come with me.”

  “You couldn’t stop me, Mr. Scott.”

  “I think you would do well to stay with these people, in case they are threatened again, but it is your decision.”

  Benning looked to James, who nodded. “You go with him.”

  “Let’s find the horses,” said the guide.

  Dresden Scott pulled up at the edge of the lake and dismounted quickly to cast about, crouching in the wild grass.

  “What’s the delay?” said John Benning. “I thought you could track in the moonlight.”

  “There have been deer down to the water, and the trail is lost a bit, but I suspect they’re skirting the shore here.” Leading his horse, he hurried along the edge of the water till the sign of the riders once more rose out of the confusion of prints. Then he was mounted and off in one easy motion.

  The tracks became difficult to follow on the forest road, in the shadows of the trees and along the harder surface of a worn trail. Several times Mr. Scott doubled back to discover a short cut taken through the brush to avoid a switchback in the tote road. “Someone has thought this out very carefully,” said the guide at one point.

  “Someone,” said John Benning. Whenever they turned from the road, he insisted on being shown the tracks they were following, as if fearing that the guide might lead them purposely astray.

  It was long since light when they came to the fork in the road. Mr. Scott was familiar enough with the way that he slowed his pace in anticipation of it. He rode several yards to the left, turned his horse around, and followed the right-hand path a similar distance.

  “They’ve taken her that way,” said the guide, pointing down the left-hand road.

  “How can you say?”

  “There is one horse making more of a mark than the others.” He dismounted and led the way to one of the prints in question. “I suspect that the deeper prints tell two people on one animal.”

  “Perhaps it is a larger horse.”

  “She’s gone this way,” said Mr. Scott quietly. “They stopped here to talk about something. See the prints shifting about. The horses are shuffling. This fellow over here is a nervous rider. Then they split up for some reason.” He looked up at John Benning. “These two heading toward the right may have doubled around to catch anyone following them.”

  “I’m not worried,” said John Benning. “I’m armed.”

  “I know.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  Mr. Scott stood up from his demonstration. “She is a very pretty young woman, Mr. Benning.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “I am guessing that you came with the Underwoods for something other than business purposes.”

  “Tread lightly,” warned Benning.

  “You are furious with yourself for allowing such a thing to happen to Miss Underwood, and you’re looking for anyone to take the blame.”

  “I don’t trust you.”

  “At this juncture, you have little choice.”

  “Little choice again, eh? That’s where you are mistaken, Mr. Scott. I am going that way.” John Benning pointed down the right-hand road.

  “And what is your reasoning there?”

  “Simply this: if you are trustworthy, then you’re following the proper trail and you will locate Miss Underwood. If you are not trustworthy, and you are trying to send me down the wrong path, then I will find her in that direction.”

  “Very elegant,” said the guide, obviously impressed. “And you think that you can follow a trail by yourself?”

  “You forget, I am a surveyor by trade. I am used to reading the land, and following old signs.”

  “And you are armed.”

  John Benning had his hand in his jacket, gripping the pistol there. “Why don’t you start down your road, Mr. Scott, so that I can take mine. I don’t like turning my back on you just now.”

  There was more than idle threat in Benning’s gesture, and the guide lifted himself into the saddle with cautious ease. “I am reminded,�
�� he said, “of something my mother used to say.”

  “Your mother from Dresden.”

  “Suspicious is what suspicious does.”

  “If you are trustworthy, Mr. Scott, then you will find her, and I will be in error. In that event, I will tender my apologies.’ ”

  The guide half-smiled, turned his horse down the left-hand track—and there they parted, with caution on both sides.

  59 Below Minmaneth

  ANCIENT, CRACKED, AND MOSS-COVERED, MINMANETH ROCK STOOD OUT from the hillside, a great gray heap on the northern end of the lake. Centuries had passed since human imagination first made of it a petrified behemoth—ossified and earthbound, the forgotten creature of God risen from the dark forest to be pounded by rain and touched by the sun. In the moonlight, it seemed to shift unnaturally, phosphorescent tendrils of quartz swimming within the granite face, and flakes of mica sparkling like shards of polished glass.

  Since the last glacier put its finishing touches upon this place, wild creatures had rested beneath it for shade and shelter, and the first men had watched it as they passed near, certain that some sentience, however slow and geological in its processes, lived within that hard brow. The Indian people identified it with the wandering dog of Pamola, the stormy god of Mount Katahdin, till a displaced Scotsman entered the history of the tribe and (because of some long-forgotten event) the granite mound was given the name of Minmaneth.

  Nothing within sight of Minmaneth Rock was as primeval as the rock itself—not the trees, not the lake, certainly not the man crouching atop it.

  The man himself was hardly visible to those waiting anxiously below; only the occasional blink of the moon, reflected off binocular lenses, expressed his presence and occasional movement. Once in a great while, a low muttering reached the ears of those upon the ground. Then a stone the size of a thumbnail banged against someone’s cheek and the resultant outrage, though whispered, sounded like a shout over the lake.

  Several voices hissed for quiet, but the man atop Minmaneth Rock chuckled heartily. “Pardon me. Must have knocked it loose with my shoe.” The stricken man rubbed his cheek and growled invective. The voices hissed again.

  “They’re gone,” said the man atop the rock. He raised the field glasses to his eyes for another look, the lenses magnifying light as well as distance. The entrance into the forest, where he had last seen the remainder of the Under-wood party, was empty—they were gone. “I thought for a while,” he said, scanning the hill across the lake, “that the boys had done their job too well. It took them almost an hour to catch the rest of their horses.”

  He chuckled again, then got to his feet and walked and dropped in stages down the granite side. On his way he stopped to pull at a length of coarse twine, which he had hung by a thick knot from a burr of rock. Years past, human hands had neatly chiseled a thin vertical wedge in the face of the stone brow, and the twine had been let down through this. The climber wrapped this twine around his palm as he reeled it in and was rewarded finally by a brass plumb-bob. Then he continued his descent, jumping the last few feet to the shore, where his companions were already bending to their spades and picks.

  Some digging had been accomplished, since the “Morse” flash of a mirror told them they were in the right place, and it was careful work timed with the height of the wind in the trees and illuminated by the rising moon; now lanterns were lit and the work begun in earnest. The hollow beneath the rock and the surface of the lake formed something of a natural amplifier, and the racket of spades crunching through soil and screeching against stone stung the nerves, after such a long self-imposed silence.

  The lantern glow threw back the limitless night, but also formed fantastic and distracting silhouettes against the rock, so that the men themselves were dwarfed by their own shadows. Seen from a distance, they might have been gnomes or troll folk come aboveground to labor upon the earth.

  The man from the top of the rock took his turn, falling in beside his comrades with fierce glee. “How deep do you suppose Captain Underwood dug?” asked the man who passed his shovel on.

  “Deep enough,” came the short answer.

  “If you want anything to stay buried,” said another, “you put it six feet under.”

  “How do you mean?” asked one fellow, pausing at his work.

  “Things’ll get up and walk around if you don’t bury them proper,” said the sage, a white-bearded fellow with a pipe clutched between his molars.

  “I buried men in a lot less, in the war,” said a man with a pick.

  “Aye,” agreed the man with the pipe. He took the stem from his mouth and blew a column of smoke. “And those are fields I wouldn’t care to visit on a night like this.”

  “You’re giving me the shivers,” said a narrow fellow on the other side of the deepening hole.

  “You’re turning up more air than dirt,” said the lookout.

  There was a pause, each man waiting the length of time that would allow him to continue without the others imagining he had been bullied into it.

  “So six feet it is,” said the man with the pick, returning to his work. “We’ll have her out before daybreak.”

  “If I knowed old Captain Basil, he dug her down twenty feet,” growled one rugged fellow as he drove his spade down with a heel. “And all by hisself.”

  “Six feet,” said the older man. He clamped the pipe between his teeth again and spoke from the other side of his mouth. “A smart man digs six feet down. Any further and things move about down there like moles.”

  “Now you’re talking nonsense.”

  “Am I? How do you think this was so hard to find the first time we dug it up? Captain Kidd buried it to one place, and Captain Basil and us—a hundred and more years later—found it thirty feet inland.”

  “I imagine,” came the voice of one who couldn’t.

  “How’d they know to find it, if it weren’t where it was put?’ ” asked a skeptical fellow outside the circle of diggers.

  The man with the pipe paused then, and leaned on his spade. “Well, I’ll tell you, since I was there. We dug where the map told us, and it was hard going. And we dug six feet, and we dug ten feet, and we widened the trench and we dug fourteen feet, and we found something like a pocket in the ground and a run of loose dirt heading inland, directly north by the compass. ‘It has moved,’ says the captain, and doesn’t waste another minute but sends the Dutchman—Pete was his name—to find the nearest apple tree. And Pete was a water witch in his time and he doused her like a well. And we hit it, too.”

  “But what’s it doing here, after all these years? Why didn’t it get divvied up?” wondered the thin man, his shadow like a stick behind him on the wall of rock.

  “If you’re not going to work that spade, pass it over,” said the lookout to the bearded fellow. “But let’s hear it from you, how it happened.”

  The older man passed the implement on with unstated philosophy. A small breeze had picked up from the east, and he moved beneath the shelter of the rock where he could rest a shoulder. He snapped a lucifer into flame with a thumbnail and put the lit match to his pipe. “Well [puff] we were all expecting [puff] shares, of course. [Puff] Ah! But we felt the need to hurry back into American waters, which we did. And we came up the Penobscot to the home of a family named Verrill, on the shore of Bald Hill Cove. And there we were taken in, and a celebration was ready for us.”

  “I know the place,” said a man just outside the circle of light. “I don’t know the people. Bald Hill Cove—that’s in Orrington, or nearabouts.”

  “Yes, though the family is gone from there now. They had a daughter, you see—pale blue eyes and dark, dark hair. A very fine young woman. She’d look you straight on, honest enough to shame you. Her name was Elizabeth, and Captain Basil called her Beth, if you take my meaning.

  “Now the captain and the boss’s father—we called him the colonel—were like this.” The man raised two crossed fingers and turned them about for all to see, like evidence
at a trial.

  “Till a woman came between them,” said one of the diggers.

  “Not at all. There was never a more honorable soul than she, unless it was the captain—or the boss’s father. Why, there was a bride and groom and a best man to be had in that dining hall that night—and lifelong friendship. We were all feeling pretty kind to one another, I can tell you. It isn’t often that men do what we had done—dodging the British Navy, playing at smuggling to mask our real purposes . . .

  “It was in the midst of our celebration, between the soup and the fish, that news arrived by way of the Verrills’ son. It was April the 13th of ‘61.”

  One young digger paused and contemplated this date without success. “The day after the 12th,” said one of the older men.

  Another reached over to cuff the back of the youngster’s head. “Fort Sumter, you divot.”

  “Oh,” said the confused fellow, returning to his labor. The men were up to their knees in the hole and the dirt continued to fly.

  “The boss’s family were South Carolinians, of course. Everyone aboard ship knew about the secession—we’d heard it from a passing merchantman out of Boston—but there was talk of some sort of agreement to keep it all together, and the captain and the colonel went on with their plans, ever hopeful, you see . . .

  “But Sumter was fired on and the war begun, and the colonel, who had his own bottle of wine at his elbow, says the South will need real funds to carry on a war, and he knows where his share of the treasure is going.”

  The old man looked past the overhang of rock, past the lake to the east, and saw the first hint of dawn lining the tops of trees with a gray light. The spade work slowed, then stopped. Several men there knew about such moments of which the old man spoke, and even the hardest among them had a respect for the decisions made when that news came.

  “It was a good deal quieter after that,” said the old fellow, “and no one was any quieter than Captain Underwood. Miss Verrill held his hand in plain sight, but he looked like the good stuff had just been taken out of him; hardly a bone left to keep him upright. And his face was pale, and he kept blinking, and finally he rose from the table and said good night.