Joseph bolted out of the shelter after the animal, while Judith crawled to Cassie’s side and felt for her hand in the dim light. The girl’s skin was damp with sweat, and her face was twisted with pain.
“Something isn’t right here,” Judith called to David.
He moved in the dimness, and kindled his lantern to light the task ahead. “We need to see what we’re doing,” he said, kneeling on the other side of the girl. “I’ve been thinking she doesn’t look good at all. Now that things are ready to happen, I hope luck’s with us.”
“Jody!” Cassie screamed suddenly, her voice blending with a peal of thunder.
“He’ll be back. You just hang on and push, and we’ll get this young one into the world without him.” Judith’s voice was firm, though she felt some sympathy for this very young woman, having her first child in a storm without her husband beside her.
The tarpaulin flapped like a captured eagle, trying to break free of its tethers. Even the chimney of the lantern didn’t entirely shield its flame from the gusting wind, and sometimes spatters of rain swept under the shelter to sizzle on the hot glass. But in the yellow glow of its light, Judith found herself oblivious to the weather.
This was a breech birth, and Judith remembered all too clearly the small brother she had helped usher into the world, all bent and squashed after coming feet first. He had died before he breathed, and she had been young enough then, tenderhearted enough, to cry for him. Afterward, of course, she considered him lucky to escape the hard hands of his Pa and the unending labor of the farm from which he would receive no benefit other than the food he ate.
David looked up at her, a deep crease between his brows showing his worry. “Judith, your hands are smaller than mine. I helped Sudie’s girl Jinks last spring with a breech. The secret lies in getting your hands right inside with it and turning it so the face isn’t pushed so tight against the wall of the canal that it smothers.
“You can hold the legs as they come out, so the back doesn’t kink and the neck doesn’t break. I wouldn’t ask you to do this, if my hands weren’t so damn huge. Cassie’s built smaller than Jinks is.”
She frowned with concentration as she set her hands as he directed, working her fingers inside the hot, pulsing birth canal. Sure enough, once she had them in place she found she could put her fingers on either side of the tiny nose, keeping it free of the wall, while the infant slid down, held by her wrists and arms, to slip free at last.
It was a girl, limp and blue at first, but David caught her into those big hands and smacked her bottom. With a sort of gurgling whoop, the lungs expanded, pushed out the debris of birth, and the baby began to cry. It was only a small mew of sound, but Judith felt a huge smile growing within her.
Judith took the cotton cloth she had ready and wiped the infant clean, oiling her with tallow from their cooking supply. When she looked at David, her smile was reflected on his face.
They had done it! Under the most difficult of circumstances, they had saved both mother and baby. Now David cleaned his hands and bent to take up his musket. “Better go and help Joseph,” he said. “We can’t risk losing him in all this dark and wind.”
Sitting in the flimsy shelter, in darkness now they had quenched the lantern, Judith waited beside the sleeping woman and her baby. The whip of the wind, the snap of the canvas. the swish of surrounding branches concealed any other noise, though she strained her ears, trying to hear any sound of the returning men.
At last she pushed together a heap of debris, twigs and leaves, and a few chunks of rotted wood, and kindled a small blaze, using flint and steel to start the fire. The darkness was too total, the noise too great to endure. By that small light she watched flickers of branches and leaves whipping in the wind, dead leaves skittering past, hints of motion she could not identify.
And then she was looking directly into the amber eyes of a panther, which appeared as if by magic and stood with its head just beneath the shelter. Ignoring her, it stared at the mother and child, and Judith recalled with horror the tales she had heard about the creatures’ attraction to the infants of humankind.
She had been sitting with her flintlock pistol in her lap, primed and ready, for in this wild place there was no safety. Now she raised it stealthily, a fraction of an inch at a time, as the panther skirted the tiny fire as if disdaining it and moved into the rude tent.
The flash and roar of the firearm blinded and deafened her, and she scrabbled for her knife. If she hadn’t killed it, the thing would have to be dealt with somehow, and the blade was all there was left. She had a fleeting sadness; David and Joseph would return to find themselves widowers, she was almost sure.
Then she could see through the cloud of black smoke that the wind was clearing away. The beast lay stretched across the skimpy floor, its head almost upon Cassie’s pallet. The girl was awake, her eyes wide and terrified, her face even paler than before, as she hugged the baby to her and scrunched as far back as possible from the dead animal.
“It’s dead, Cassie,” Judith said, finding that her voice was barely a whisper. “I shot it. You can stretch out. We don’t want to start that bad bleeding again.” This time she managed to sound a bit more normal, and she helped the girl to ease her position and returned the infant to the pallet beside her.
“I’ll see if I can drag him out of here. He smells like all the tomcats in tarnation, all rolled into one.” But the long, tawny body was incredibly heavy in death, and strain as she might, she could move the beast only a short distance. At least he was out of the shelter, where the wind could carry away the stink of cat and blood and death.
Then she leaned against a bundle of supplies, reloading her flintlock, and resumed waiting. Though she was shaking inside, her hands were steady, and Judith felt that she had done fairly well, considering her adversary. Tomorrow, she was determined, they would skin the panther and scrub the hide with ashes.
It would make a fine blanket for the baby.
* * * * * * *
When David and Joseph returned, leading Jess, both of them were soaked and shivering. All was in order. The rain had slacked to a steady drizzle, and the small shelter no longer stank of blood. However, when the men stumbled over the carcass of the panther outside, their reaction was surprising.
“You’d think I was going to sit here and let that beast eat the baby,” she said at last, when they were done exclaiming and measuring and checking the darkness for any other predator that might stalk the camp.
David had the grace to blush in the light of the re-kindled lantern, and Joseph turned his attention to his new child. Cassie, weak but able to grin at her husband, held the little one in the crook of her arm.
Judith knew it was worth everything to see Joseph’s dark face crease into a smile as he stared down at his daughter.
“We’ll rest here for a bit,” David told him. “We want to skin out that cat, and Cassie needs the sleep; to be honest, so do I. It isn’t every day we face this sort of thing.
“Besides, the storm has to have softened up the ground, and the last farmer I talked to said that up ahead it’s all low country. Best let the water go down before we cross it.”
Judith breathed a sigh of relief. She was weary all the way down to her bones, it seemed as if; even her hair was tired feeling, when she let down the thick coil that had tangled around the edges until it was almost impossible to run her brush through it.
They had built a fire outside the shelter as soon as the rain stopped. It was shedding its own red light to join that of the lantern, and as she let down her hair, the auburn coils caught the light and sparked with red.
David crawled around behind her and touched it gently, “I never saw anything like that!” he murmured. “I’ve known you all my life, but I never saw you with your hair down. Could I...could I brush it for you?”
“Oh, David, would you?” she asked. “I’m so tired, and it’s so heavy and hard to manage. When I sit down it trails off on the ground, and if I stand u
p I’ll have to get out in the rain and bend double to get to the ends.”
As he carefully untangled the knots and smoothed the long strands, she closed her eyes and sighed. Not even her mother had ever helped her with such a task. A husband who cared enough to do this for her was something she had never dreamed of having. Medlar would certainly never have thought of it, and if he had she wouldn’t have wanted him doing it.
As David brushed out the long locks and spoke softly, she drifted off to sleep, and for some reason she did not dream of the bright eyes of the panther or of the faceless tracker who might be on their trail. Instead, she dreamed of bright things, shapeless but beckoning, that lay in the future they would share in a new country.
CHAPTER SIX
The Natchez Trace—Judith McCarran
The third morning dawned clear and bright enough to promise that the damp country ahead must have dried out to some extent. The panther skin Judith had scraped and rubbed with ashes was rolled and tied behind Joseph’s saddle, waiting for a time when they could cure it properly.
As soon as they ate a bite and drank scalding cups of coffee, Judith found herself on the trail once more, her back aching. Her stomach felt queasy, but that might, she hoped, be blamed on the stress of the past days.
Cassie and the baby seemed strong, and the infant suckled well. Judith, remembering her Mama’s needs, made sure they carried plenty of water, for the baby would pull a lot of liquid from her mother and it had to be replenished. On the move, without livestock at hand, there was no way to supplement the child’s food supply, so they must take care to safeguard the mother.
David had been right about the low country ahead. Water stood in every low spot, and even the pine flats had their feet in deep mud. The many creeks they had to cross were bank-full, and logs, bushes, and any rock thrust above the surrounding water tended to be full of angry water moccasins and turtles.
By the time they found what they were sure must be the Natchez Trace, Judith was all but exhausted. In addition, she had begun to feel even more queasy in the mornings. She was almost sure, by now, that she might be pregnant, although there had not been time to become completely certain.
She said nothing to David. He had enough to worry about, she felt, for they came upon more and more indications that other travelers followed the Trace. Everyone knew that those who became entangled with the law or with feuds back in the east often took this route to the wild Texas country, and unfortunately they didn’t leave their criminal habits behind.
Though she kept her ears trained on all the sounds in the forest around them, Judith now knew that unexpected dangers could come out of those tangled thickets and towering trees. David rode behind with his musket ready and his knife at hand, while Joseph, leading the way, kept turning his head from side to side, watching for any sign of trouble.
Night was the worst time of all, for though the days on the tunnel-like trail were tense, darkness hid even more dangers than did the shadows of the ancient trees. Whippoorwills wailed, owls hooted or quivered wavering cries overhead, and far-off howls spoke of red wolves hunting for prey. In that medley of noises, the approach of stealthy feet could easily be missed by even the most alert ear.
They were moving along a crooked stretch, one afternoon, with Joseph already out of sight beyond a bend ahead and David hidden by the thick trunks of overarching trees behind. Judith saw sudden movement before she heard the yipping cry of the marauders who came out of the forest on foot.
“David!” she cried, pulling her horse around beside Cassie’s and priming her flintlock. The first man reached her just as she had the weapon ready, and she blew a hole into his head through the top of his hat. He dropped instantly, but another was upon her.
She was flailing with her knife, and Cassie was holding the baby in one arm, the skinning knife in her other hand, doing her best to fight off their attackers. Then David was there, riding into the huddle of men and knocking them like skittles into the trees.
Joseph arrived almost as quickly, and between them the two beat back the six men who had thought to find this an easy mark. Two broke for the deeper forest, but David’s musket brought one down and Joseph’s knife flew with unerring accuracy to skewer the other.
That left them with two dead or dying men, one of them the man Judith had shot and the other one whom Cassie had cut so deeply that he would soon bleed to death. The remaining pair seemed to have lost any will to fight. Running seemed to be their goal, though the fate of the first two runners had damped their enthusiasm.
“We ought to hang them right here,” David said. Judith knew he was right, but she also knew her husband. He had not been reared to kill men needlessly, and he would not do it now.
“Why don’t we disarm them, take their boots, and tie them to a tree, though not so tightly that they cannot free themselves if they work hard and long?” she asked. “It will, if nothing else, give them time to think about their erring ways.”
David’s expression lightened. He had been prepared to string them up to one of the Spanish moss-laden oak branches, and she knew he would have struggled with his conscience for days and weeks afterward. She had, after all, known him since they were children.
If it had been left to her, she would have shot the raiders where they stood and left them for the crows, but she said nothing about that. It was too soon to let her husband see the cold steel at the core of the woman he had married. He still thought of her as gentle and loving; though she was growing very fond of him, that feeling did not extend to would-be murderers.
With great caution, her small troop traveled the winding tunnel under even more tremendous oak trees. It took days of riding and walking through the sodden countryside to reach the high bluff beside the great Mississippi.
There a huddle of houses and a few shops marked the site of Natchez, where one could find a ferry across the wide river. It was not a very large town, despite being the capital of Mississippi, but Judith had grown up beyond reach of any town at all. To her it seemed vast, and she looked about her with awe as they rode down the muddy street.
They passed the old fort, built by the French, a man told David when they asked for directions. It commanded the river below, and Judith thought that anyone trying to attack the town from the west would be in very bad trouble. You could just about stop an army by rolling rocks down on its troops.
The place stunk of pigs, river, and privies, but as they approached the bluff overlooking the stream she could see the shops and shanties far below, built along the shelf of land that served as a beach at river level. The crude log ferry was tied up to a deep-set post, its stern downstream, its roughly pointed nose bobbing with every wave of the passing current.
The river was high from the recent heavy rains, and its brown waters lapped at the levee protecting the lower town. Even as she looked, the drowned carcass of a horse came down the current.
She turned to David, feeling a surge of joy. “Once we get over there...”—she pointed to the other side of the brown water—“...we might be safe, don’t you think? Surely nobody will follow us so far.”
David looked down at her, with worry lines between his eyes. “Joseph still feels something coming,” he said. “And I do too. But maybe once we’re over in the Louisiana country that will change.”
Judith sighed. She had hoped, by now, to feel secure, beyond the reach of Oscar Medlar or any henchman he might send. Yet tomorrow they might cross the river on that frail-looking ferry, and then...oh surely no one would still pursue them.
* * * * * * *
They camped for the night beyond the town, in the edge of the forest. She and David and Joseph took turns standing guard through the hours of darkness, for riffraff of every stripe found a haven here.
Even at a distance of a mile, they could hear shouts and raucous laughter from the shanties under the bluff. Judith wondered if those who were to work the ferry across the river tomorrow were among the drunken revelers. All they possessed rode with t
hem on their horses. Anything lost would be hard to replace, even if they spent some of their small store of gold.
Once, while Joseph watched, there was a sharp crack among the trees, as if someone had stepped on a fallen branch. All the adults were awake at once, hands on their weapons, but after half an hour there was no further disturbance, and Joseph motioned for them to go back to sleep.
Cassie’s baby did not cry. She had tried to, once or twice at tense moments, and the young woman had held the infant’s nose until she stopped heaving with effort. When Judith protested, the girl shook her head.
“It’s no good if she gets us all kilt,” she said. “My grampa tell me that back in the old place over the sea there’s lots of dangerous animals and tribes that makes war. Babies don’t be let to cry. It’s too dangerous.”
“But she might smother!” Judith said, peering down at the small face that no longer was showing signs of tears.
“She got her mouth. When she breathe through that, she sho’ can’t cry out loud,” the child’s mother said, and Judith had to admit that was true.
* * * * * * *
When a mockingbird tuned up in the big oaks over the camp, Judith was already awake, packing up the small items used the night before. David and Joseph had the horses saddled, the pack animal loaded. It was time to cross the Big River, and the thought made her shiver with anticipation.
Flimsy as the ferry looked, the thought that some agent of Oscar Medlar might be dogging her footsteps made the risk of crossing the river seem far preferable to standing still and facing someone sent by her would-be bridegroom. And if, as Joseph thought, that agent might be Jonas Bluth...she shuddered, this time with revulsion.
A nasty animal, that one. She had seen the results of his work when he brought back runaway slaves; those she saw had been bleeding from multiple whip marks and raw with contusions from beatings with the big man’s fists. Man or woman or child, he all but killed them, stopping just short of losing his fee for catching them.
Born Rebel and The Guns of Livingston Frost - Two Short Novels Page 4