Long Hunt (9781101559208)

by Judd, Cameron

  Titus weighed it in his mind. “That kind of question makes me glad I don’t sit a magistrate’s bench in a court of law,” he said. “I don’t know how to answer.”

  “Well, I’m thinking that the Mary who went in there and killed old Cecil wasn’t the same Mary as we know during the waking daylight. She was asleep. On her feet, but asleep. And you know how things can be in your dreams and such. . . . It’s all different. You can do and say things in your dreams that you’d never think of doing or saying in the light of day.”

  Titus shrugged. “All I know is that what’s done is done, and the best all of us can do is to never talk of this again, to anyone. She’s just a little girl. She’d never have done what she did if not for the things she’d gone through. Old Cecil’s corpse will likely never be found, so no Indian vengeance is likely to come from him being killed. Best to leave things where they are and move on down the trail. You agree?”

  “I agree.” Micah looked over to where Mary sat stiffly on the ground, rocking back and forth mechanically, staring into the woods around her like a scared animal. “The question is whether Mary herself will agree. In the state she’s in, she might just go and confess what she done to somebody, trying to lay the guilt burden off her shoulders.”

  “We’ve still got some travel time with her ahead of us. Maybe we can explain the situation to her and persuade her not to do that.”

  Micah nodded. “I sure wish I hadn’t let her see that I had that pistol in my saddlebag. If she hadn’t had that pistol, none of this would have happened.”

  “Let it go, Micah. It wasn’t your fault that a little girl’s mind got so overburdened with sorrow that she couldn’t stop herself from doing a bad act.”

  Micah nodded. “I’m ready to travel, Titus. Shall we?”

  “Let’s go.”

  Minutes later they were on the trail again, heading east toward Fort Edohi, still many miles distant.

  The three travelers found Fort Edohi in a jovial state when they arrived. The family of Dr. Peter Houser had returned unannounced from family business in the East, and Houser was so glad to see them that he hosted a celebration for one and all: food, drink, even a couple of Irish fiddlers who played reels. The site was the courtyard of the stockade, where Houser had made a pit to be dug and a hog now roasted aromatically in the ground.

  “I fear your father isn’t here at present,” Houser said to Titus. “He’s taken on a job, a hunting quest, and has gone up toward Crockett Springs in hopes of finding who he’s seeking.”

  “Did you say ‘who’?”

  “I did. He’s engaged to find the long-missing daughter of the Reverend Eben Bledsoe. She was taken as a child by Indians, but her father has reason to believe she is still living. He hired your father to find her. A different kind of long hunt for an old long hunter.”

  “Bledsoe . . . the camp meeting preacher?”

  “No, no. That one is this one’s brother. Very different kind of preachers, Eben being more an academic type. He’s the one founding a college over near White’s Fort.”

  “I’ve heard about that.”

  Houser looked across the stockade yard to where Mary was sitting on a bench beside Houser’s wife, Beth. The two were talking intently and cheerfully, Mary actually smiling, so Titus had no fear the child was revealing what had happened in the hunter’s shelter. There would be no smile if she were.

  Sitting at a roughly made table outdoors, in the shade of a big maple standing inside the stockade, Titus and Micah looked across the tabletop at Houser. The physician was wiping his mouth rather daintily on a linsey-woolsey rag after having finished a trencher full of steaming roast pork. Torchlight played across the scene, adding an unwelcome heat to the already sticky atmosphere of late August.

  Houser yawned and stretched, feeling the effects of a filling, fatty meal combined with the evening heat. “Ah, nothing better than good food and good company,” he said.

  “I’m glad you consider us so,” said Titus.

  “Oh, I do. Your surname alone is enough to recommend you to me, Titus. I have come to admire the name of Fain through my associations with your father.”

  “Tates are a good bunch, too,” Micah muttered, swatting at an insect buzzing his ear.

  “I’m sure of that,” Houser said. “I simply haven’t had the pleasure of knowing your people.”

  “I’ll vouch for them,” Titus said. “Good family. Only one disappointment among the whole bunch.” He lightly kicked Micah’s ankle under the table.

  Micah ignored it. He was looking past the doctor to the next table over, where Beth Houser was still keeping company with Mary Deveraux. Mary was looking quite cheerful, very different than she had on the long trail. Clearly Beth Houser was the kind of company the girl needed. Titus supposed that he and Micah had probably not been the most comfortable or natural companions for a ten-year-old girl freshly bereaved of her family and guilty of a murder she had done literally in her sleep. But they had done for her what they could.

  Peter Houser followed Titus’s gaze and looked over his shoulder. Turning back, he said, “Beth seems to have taken quite a liking to your little friend. And I think the sentiment might be mutual.”

  “That little girl bears a huge burden,” Titus said.

  “Yes . . . losing her family in a massacre . . . God, what a tragic thing for one so young to have to deal with!”

  “There’s more burden than that,” Micah muttered. Titus flashed him a look as if to shut him up, but Micah was not in a humor to follow direction. “It needs to be said, Titus,” Micah stated. “It’s a burden on me, too, just knowing it and having to keep my mouth shut.”

  Houser looked puzzled. “I seem to have failed to pick up on what we are talking of,” he said.

  Titus sighed. “I’d not figured we’d say anything of it,” he said. “But I think it is grinding on Micah to hold silence.” He looked the doctor squarely in the face. “And perhaps he is right. Can I trust you, Houser, to hold what we tell you in confidentiality?”

  “Well . . . certainly. But I’m still mystified by what we are even talking of here.”

  “There was a sad event along the way here, involving Mary. She stumbled across an old long hunter shelter, and inside was an old Indian who had been stricken with apoplexy and seemed likely to die. It didn’t seem Christian to just leave him, so we tended to his care. But Mary was still full of all the misery of what had happened to her, and she sleepwalks, and she got her hands on a small pistol, and in the night . . .”

  “I think I understand,” said Houser. “She killed the Indian.”

  Titus nodded.

  “She didn’t even know she’d done it until the sound of her own gunshot woke her up,” Micah said.

  “Good God!”

  “She was a misery to herself after that,” Titus said. “Not saying much, never looking us in the face, riding along like there was hell-smoke surrounding her—all the way here. Not a trace of joy in her until your wife took her under wing.”

  “Beth has a way with children.” The physician paused, deeply thinking. “She has no kin, you said?”

  “None. She’s alone in the world, and I promised her I’d find her a home to take her in.”

  Houser said, “You’ve found one.”

  “You mean . . .”

  “I mean exactly what it sounds like. I’ll agree here and now to take her in. And Beth will agree. I know my wife well enough to tell you that without any hesitation. The question is whether Mary will want it.”

  At that moment Mary laughed loudly at something Beth had said, and Beth laughed as well, putting her arm around the child with obvious affection.

  “I think we have our answer,” said Titus.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Edohi!”

  The voice came from somewhere behind them. Fain and Potts reined to a halt and twisted their heads. A ruddy-faced man with a shock of white hair was walking up behind them rapidly, face alight with health and a broad
grin, hand waving widely.

  “Edohi, I knew it was you as soon as I saw you ride by my window!” the man said. “How are you, you addle-headed old wanderer?”

  “Still wandering, Dill. How are you?”

  “Quite fine. Thank you. Not doing much wandering myself these days.”

  “Glad to hear it. You were the sorriest excuse for a hunter I ever knew.”

  “Ain’t it the truth!” the man said. He glanced over toward Potts. “Who’s your young friend here?”

  “Dill Talbott, meet Langdon Potts, a friend of my son’s. You knew I had a son, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t. It’s been that many years now since you and I have stood on the same piece of ground, Fain.”

  “Several more than twenty. Yeah, my son, Titus, was born about a year and a half past the time I saw you last, Dill. He’s about the age of Potts here. And like Potts, he’s a fine, strong young man who is as good a woodsman as I’ve ever been, or any I’ve rode and hunted with.”

  “Good to meet you, Mr. Talbott,” Potts said, leaning down to shake hands.

  “Call me Dill,” said the ruddy man. “And both of you, get down from those mounts and put them up in my stable over there. You can just see the side of it over there beyond the trees. The inn itself you can’t see at all from here.”

  “Did you say ‘inn’?” asked Fain. “You an innkeeper now, Dill?”

  “I am indeed. And you’ll be among my first guests. What think you of that, Fain?”

  Fain grinned. “Well, I think innkeeping is surely more what you’re cut out for than hunting. Potts, Dill here couldn’t hit the side of a mountain from twenty paces, much less a deer from thirty. He ran off a lot more deerskin than he ever collected. I’d be a rich man today if I had collected the hide of every deer this man here run off with the noise of a wild shot.”

  Dill Talbott was laughing. “I can’t deny it, Potts. I had no business trying my hand at that business, if you can make sense of that.”

  “I can.” Potts grinned. Dill was one of those men it was impossible not to like.

  “Yes, sir, the town life is the life for me,” Talbott said. “I’d rather have my fire blazing on the hearth of my own inn than in the middle of some freezing hollow like Edohi here always favored. Still that way, Edohi? Shunning the life of civilized men so you can live in the woods?”

  “Not so much these days, Dill. Rheumatiz has ’bout done in my ankles. All that walking in rain and snow.”

  “There’s a price to be paid for any life we choose, I reckon,” said Talbott, patting his rather round belly. “Here’s the price of the innkeeping life,” he said. “What Nelly cooks for the guests gets eat up by the host.”

  “Nelly. Your wife?”

  “She is. And she’s a real wife, too, married up all legal, papers and everything. Not like that pretty little Cherokee gal you wintered up with that year in that cabin up near Cumberland Gap.”

  Potts raised his brows. “I’m going to have to hear more about that.”

  “Well, Potts, she was a pretty little red gal, sweet one, too, and even though she and old Edohi here weren’t married in any white man’s sense of the word, they acted just as married as can be. You following me?”

  “I believe I am.”

  Fain dismounted and Potts did the same, glad for it, because it indicated they were going to take up Talbott on his invitation. The joviality and friendliness of Dill Talbott roused an expectation that he would be a fine host and innkeeper. And clearly, judging from Dill’s somewhat expansive girth, the food would be fine.

  “Dill, I can do without you rehashing all my past sins and failures to my young friend here. I want to influence him toward the good, not the bad.”

  “What you did, Edohi, was no different than what many others did. How many men did we know who had a white family east of the mountains, and an Indian family in the west? You recall Charles Floren? A wife and children back home, but also, on the sneak, a Negro ‘wife’ who bore him two sons, and in the west, a Creek girl who bore him three daughters?”

  “Charles was the worst I ever knew for that,” Fain said, nodding slowly.

  “When his white wife in Carolina finally figured out what he was doing, she left him.”

  “Can’t blame her.”

  “Then he up and married another woman to replace her, and took a mistress on the side as well. Charles is dead now, you know.”

  “Not surprised. It would take a young rabbit to keep up such a level of carnal activity,” Fain said. “The heart would fail most men.”

  “What killed him was some kind of an ailment he caught from a harlot in Virginia. One of them French pox afflictions, if you know what I’m talking of.”

  “Live by the sword, die by the sword,” Fain said with a shrug.

  Talbott’s inn was a significantly better building than Potts had expected. It was one of those frontier rarities of the time: a frame building. At least, the front portion was frame, though that part adjoined a large, square log building that held the guest rooms.

  At the dark oaken bar that Dill Talbott said he had built himself, the group imbibed in some rum and Talbott and Fain continued their reminiscences.

  “Just so young Potts here will have a full picture of the actions of my youth, I want it said that I had only that one time of taking up, husband-style, with an Indian woman. And them were odd circumstances. Her father was a war chief and for some reason thought highly of me. He said that if I would take his daughter to wife, he would keep peace with the white men. I had to agree.”

  “Of course, the fact that she was pretty as a sunrise made it a little easier to say yes,” Talbott threw in.

  “I can’t deny that . . . but I did what I had to do,” Fain said. “Same thing Indian agents have to do sometimes—join in with the people they’re dealing with in order to keep peace and order with them.”

  “Like Joe Martin,” said Talbott.

  “Exactly. And his white wife knew all about the Cherokee one. And didn’t mind it, they say,” Fain declared.

  “Like you already said, a man does what he has to do,” said Talbott.

  “What became of your Indian wife?” Potts asked Fain.

  “She never really was my wife. And the times and our situations forced us apart, eventually. She wound up marrying another man. Whether red or white, I don’t know.”

  “I can tell you,” said Talbott. “It was a white man who threw in with the Cherokee, got himself adopted into the tribe. His name, I think, is Cecil. Cecil Watson.”

  Fain’s eyes lighted with revived memory. “Oh yes! I remember him. Met him the same year I built that stout little hunting shelter that became such a favorite of mine.” Fain paused. “He was the first man ever to call me Edohi.” Fain’s look suddenly darkened a little. “I didn’t know he wound up with my woman, though.”

  “It was the times, Edohi. They was what they was, and we was what we was, too.”

  “I wonder what became of Cecil,” Fain said.

  “Last I knew, he was still living among the Cherokee,” Talbott replied.

  Fain looked at Potts. “I got a favor I must seek of you, Potts.”

  “Just ask it.”

  “Titus don’t know about that Indian gal I was with. I never talked of it to any of my kin. I’d as soon he never know about it. I’m not sure he’d understand his father doing such a thing, for it goes against the raising I gave him. Can you keep what you’ve heard today under your hat? Forever?”

  “I can, and I will.” Potts paused and made a show of poking a finger into his ear and twisting it. “Hearing’s getting bad these days, anyway. I don’t know that I’ve actually heard a single word today that I could be sure I heard aright. And you should know that I make a practice of never repeating nothing I’m not sure I heard aright.”

  Fain chuckled. “Thank you, lad.”

  “My pleasure, Crawford Fain.”

  Fain had brought with him the rifle he had been presented by Houser
back at the fort. As the day drew toward a close, he brought Talbott outside to let him take a look at the fine weapon. Talbott was suitably impressed. He held it to his shoulder and sighted down its long barrel.

  “Fine balance of weight, Fain,” Talbott said. “Not so front-heavy as some rifles tend to be.”

  “You’re right,” said Fain. “It’s something Houser has figured out how to do, balancing a rifle so well. I’m not sure what it is and he don’t tell. Calls it a ‘crafter’s secret.’ Makes it easy to shoot more accurate, that’s for certain. Hell’s bells, even you might be able to hit something besides the sky with that rifle, Dill!”

  Talbott laughed. “Hang it all, Edohi, you know as well as I do that I can already shoot a squirrel out of a tree as clean as any man!”

  Fain laughed, too, then said to Potts: “I’ll explain that to you, son. I told you how Dill here has run off more deer than he ever shot, firing off wild shots like he tends to do. Well, one time we were hunting out near the Fish Creek in the Cumberland country, and old dead-eye Dill here took aim at a buck that had more points on him than a Baltimore beggar man has lice. Well, he leveled in, pulled that butt plate up tight against his shoulder, squinched up that eye, and squeezed off a good clean shot. Only problem was he shot higher than a high-standing chimney top and sent them deer running, as usual. Except that over way beyond them, a squirrel come tumbling down out of a tree, shot cleaner than if Dill had been aiming at him from ten feet away. Which is how close he would have had to be to have made that shot on purpose. And in his case, even then he probably couldn’t have hit it.”

  Potts made a wry comment, but it went unheard, covered by the laughter of the two older men.

  That evening, smoking pipes outside Talbott’s inn, Fain brought up the matter that had drawn him to this settlement. “Dill, have you happened to see a yellow-haired woman around here who has a brown eye with a gray streak in it?”

  Talbott screwed up his brow in thought. “I don’t think I have, but I couldn’t say for sure. People pass through here a good deal these days.”