Thunder in the Valley

by Jim R. Woolard

  I led off and in hissing snow with enough wind to ripple my hat brim, we gave off little noise. The fire-lighted cave entryway slipped away behind us. It was as black as night as I ever remembered. I found the trail more by feel than sight.

  I reckoned it a little past the midnight hour. We covered considerable ground before Zelda tugged at my coat shoulder. “Tie me aboard, Matthan. I’m slippin’ down.”

  I was glad I couldn’t see her in the darkness. Her wearied tone sparked a heap of guilt. She was offering everything she had to save my life, something one expected only of blood kin. When she cared, her feelings ran deep and true forever.

  She thumped the horse’s side with her foot and jerked me back to the business at hand. “Let’s not tarry,” she said quietly.

  We wound across the Wallace Ridge trail unchallenged. Wherever the Ballards had their fire, in the darkness and heavy snow, neither of us saw or heard the other. Much later, beyond the roaring waters of Big Rock and strung out along the shortcut from Big Rock to Wolf Creek, I was elated over our good fortune. We’d somehow wriggled off the Ballards’ hook and made a clean getaway. Leastways till they discovered the cave was empty.

  A faint smudge showed on the eastern horizon, heralding a cold, wet, gray, downright miserable dawn. The snowfall began to taper off. Zelda’s appearance in the first light of day was worse than at any time since Abel’s attack. She burned with fever, her nose ran, and her breath rasped deep in her chest. She’d ridden all night without rest or ever stepping down. She was too tired to shake clinging snow from her scarf and coat. Her head lifted and she asked through clenched teeth, “How close be I to home, Matthan?”

  “Not far, not far,” I assured her.

  “Don’t stop,” she mumbled. “I’ll never get aboard again.”

  The horses needed prodding even though the snow halted altogether. The animals bearing the furs and larder had suffered the most. Zelda and the silver cache were less of a burden and those two horses plodded along with heads steady.

  I halted when the ridge line petered out and the trail made a sharp descent to the bank of Wolf Creek. A mile or so downstream on the opposite bank sat the Shaw cabin. I untied Zelda’s hands and feet. She tilted her head and looked with one eye. “Hang tight, girl. This horse is plumb tuckered, and if he falls, he’ll roll on you for sure. I’m not losing you within shouting distance of your stoop.”

  She had enough presence of mind to lean down twixt the saddle trees and grab the horse’s mane with both hands. She wagged her head and I coaxed the lead horse forward. The pack train followed in short, careful steps.

  At the bottom of the ridge the trail dipped into a clearing and ran along the creek, then rose upward onto a bench of higher ground. Zelda’s horse lunged up the incline and stumbled on loose stone at the edge of the bench, tugging backward on the reins. I spun to see if the untied Zelda was still astride, and a voice behind me with the ring of iron in it said, “Freeze right thar!”

  I jerked the lead horse onto flat ground and turned about slowly, Abel’s rifle held high, barrel pointing at the sky. Timothy Ballard blocked the trail, rifle stock lodged against his cheek, muzzle centered on my chest.

  The packhorse stopped hard against my right arm. A second voice, on the left, said with unguarded glee, “Taken him just liken you planned we would, didn’t we, Brother Timothy?”

  I ignored Joseph Ballard and fixed my gaze on Timothy. The older brother was in charge here and Joseph would follow his orders.

  We stared at each other. Timothy took a long chew on a mouthful of tobacco and said, “Been a fearsome night but well worth it, Matthan. The colonel’ll be right happy to see ya.”

  He dipped his head to spit and I felt Zelda’s foot thump the packhorse’s ribs. The horse blew in surprise and stepped forward, bumping me aside.

  “Watch out!” Joseph yelled in alarm.

  Zelda rose in the saddle, her hand emerged from the front of her coat, I heard the double click of a cocking pistol, and the pistol fired a split-second before Timothy’s rifle boomed. Zelda jerked and fell toward me. I ducked down to catch her and Joseph fired. The ball buzzed past my ear and struck the packhorse in the neck. My rifle hit the snow as I caught Zelda and reared clear of the reeling, bleeding horse.

  A quick glance confirmed Timothy was down, hit hard. I laid Zelda on the ground. The wounded horse neighed in pain and veered twixt Joseph and me.

  The animal collapsed on his knees and Joseph saw me across the horse’s back, upright and unhurt. He panicked, threw his rifle down, and reached for a pistol stuck behind his belt, drawing backhanded. I swept up Abel’s rifle and charged, howling like mad. Joseph did get the hammer drawn back as he drew, but before he could level the pistol and fire, I bashed him with my rifle barrel alongside his bandaged jawbone. His head snapped sideways, the pistol slipped from his hand, and he sagged against my chest. I pushed him away and he flopped into the snow, both hands clutching his rebroken face.

  I was frantic with worry about Zelda but didn’t rush to her. I cocked my rifle and approached Timothy carefully. He lay on his back. His chest pumped and knew he was alive. I tossed his gun into the bushes and knelt beside him. A bloody furrow wide as my thumb ran clean down the side of his head. He’d be down and out a goodly while, then sick and dizzy for days.

  I rushed to Zelda, who sprawled facedown. Blood spotted her coat sleeve above the elbow. I turned her over gently and cradled her slight body in my arms. Her eyes slowly opened. “Did I hit him?”

  “Yeah, you hit him. He’s not dead, but he won’t fight any more this day. Joseph’s not fit for anything more either.”

  The packhorse flattened and a final breath rattled in his throat. “My arm hurts,” Zelda said.

  I slid her coat open. The ball had passed through the fleshy part of the upper arm, missing the bone. The bleeding had stopped already.

  “It’ll pain you some but not kill you,” I told her, pulling her coat in place.

  She coughed hard and deep. There was a rumbly sound in her chest that scared me.

  I rose, set her on wobbly legs, and knelt in front of her. Favoring her wounded arm, she settled on my back and wound her good arm round my neck. “Just like old times, eh, tall man?”

  She hung tight while I cut the rope tying the dead horse to the rest of the pack train and plucked Abel’s rifle from the snow.

  “Take me home, please,” Zelda whispered in my ear, and we headed downstream.

  I left the Ballard brothers where they lay.

  Chapter 19

  Noon—January 28

  The ford short of the Shaw cabin flowed knee-deep. I guided the pack train across its gravelly bottom. Ice-cold water filled my moccasins and soaked the legs of my breeches, nearly taking my breath away. I slipped on the frozen bank and jerked Zelda. She moaned and tightened her hold on me. The rearmost packhorse scrambled out of the water and we approached her home at last.

  “Yell for Paw so the dogs don’t attack you,” Zelda cautioned.

  The Shaw hounds began barking and growling as they spotted us. I halted the horses. Smoke billowed from the cabin chimney. Her paw was to home.

  “Call off the dogs or I’ll shoot your daughter,” I yelled.

  In no time atall a rifle barrel slid between door and jamb. A bearded face could be seen in the narrow opening.

  “Who be there?”

  “Matthan Hannar,” I answered. “I’ve brought your daughter home. She’s hurt and poorly. Call off those dogs,” I commanded.

  Zebulon Shaw stepped through the doorway onto the stone stoop.

  Zelda squirmed about and got her head above my shoulder. “Call ’em off, Paw. I be home at last,” she called and fainted dead away.

  Zeb cursed and flailed with his rifle barrel and drove the hounds into submission at the side of the cabin. He leaned his gun against the doorjamb and came toward me in a lurching run.

  We said nothing more. He lifted Zelda from my back, then carried her into the cabin
without a backward glance. I watched the door swing shut.

  The lead horse tossed his head and I led the three remaining pack animals round the cabin opposite the growling, panting hounds to Zebulon’s horse shed. A fine chestnut gelding thrust a blazed face over a gated enclosure next to the open-sided shed and whinnied a welcome. I’d heard tales of Zelda’s personal mount but never before laid eyes on him. Little wonder she rode astride; he was too powerful to handle from a sidesaddle.

  I unloaded the pack train, removed their saddles, and watered them at the stone trough. They tanked up and drifted into the shed to feed on cut cane and meadow hay. I patted and chatted quietly with the gelding. He was well muscled and deep in the chest, clean-limbed everywhere. He’d run a far distance without tiring.

  Suddenly, I was bone-tired everywhere, nigh onto dropping flat in my own tracks. But sleep was a long ways off yet for Matthan Hannar.

  I left the fur bales and larder piled before the shed and toted the two pouches of silver and Abel’s rifle across the dooryard. I entered without knocking.

  A fire blazed in the hearth. Stew, the most delicious smell under the sun, bubbled and steamed in a hanging kettle. Bread browned in a baking niche. I almost expected Mother to speak to me.

  “You’re supposedly dead or long gone down the Ohio,” Zebulon said from a dim corner. He’d placed Zelda on a rope bed and covered her.

  I laid the silver pouches on the squat table centering the room and moved before the fire, aching for warmth on my wet feet.

  “How is she?”

  “Asleep and her arm’s not bleeding. She swallowed a little whiskey.” He spun on his stool and faced me squarely.

  “Who shot her?”

  “Timothy Ballard.”

  A frown knitted his brow. “He cut her bad too?”

  “No, Abel Stillwagon, just before I killed him. But that’s a long story and she’ll tell it sometime. I’m too damn tired for yarning.”

  Zebulon brought me the whiskey jug. “Shed them moccasins and take a chair. You look more tucked up than an overrode horse,” he said, leaning to stir the contents of the hanging kettle.

  He set a trencher heaped with stew and a thick wedge of fresh bread on the table. I ate in gulps, washing it all down with dollops of whiskey. Warmed the soul right smartly, his vittles did. I swiped my mouth clean with a coat sleeve and took a final slurp of Monongahela.

  “Mr. Shaw, we need to palaver. But first let me show you something.”

  I opened and spread wide the mouth of a silver pouch and beckoned him from Zelda’s dim corner. With one look his eyes widened and his mouth pursed. A man didn’t have opportunity to often see anything that valuable in a whole lifetime. Then his face darkened and he started to speak, “If you—”

  “Let me talk before you fly off the handle,” I snapped.

  It took a whale of an effort, but he bit his lip and fixed me with a ferocious glare. Zebulon wasn’t used to an affront of any kind or orders from others in his own cabin. Only Zelda escaped his wrath when he had a fire in his stack.

  “Somehow Stillwagon traded the Injuns for these silver pieces or he stole them. That doesn’t matter. He had them with him when we rendezvoused, along with two bales of prime pelts. The pelts I piled by the horse shed.... Now, we had a set-to with the Ballard brothers not over an hour ago and Zelda shot Timothy and I broke Joseph’s jaw again.”

  With that Zebulon plunked down in a chair opposite me and hung on my every word.

  “Sooner or later, those brothers will stumble over to Fort Frye and rouse the whole countryside or follow us here, hell-bent on revenge. Either way you might have to buy them off and shut them up about Zelda siding with me. The pelt bundles should button their lips. You talk real well, Mr. Shaw. You can refuse ill-gotten gains and let them brothers bustle off happy as foxes in a henhouse. You follow me?”

  Zebulon nodded and helped himself to a long pull on the jug while I went on speechifying.

  “I’m not long for this part of the country. I’m not about to stretch a rope for something I didn’t do, and I’ve no means of proving my innocence. Jeremiah, Step-paw, and Abel are all dead. So who’s to believe Matthan Hannar’s story?”

  “No one, most likely,” Zebulon agreed.

  “All right, here’s my proposition. You keep that pouch for you and your daughter. In return, you give me that chestnut gelding. I need to make some fast tracks before dawn tomorrow. After that, they’ll never lay hold of me.”

  Zebulon stared silently for a good long while. From the dim corner Zelda called his name from her sickbed.

  He went over there, sat on his stool, and a heated exchange of words took place. Finally, he cast a long sigh and returned to the table.

  “My daughter says you’re to have the chestnut. She’s accepting your proposition. She claims she’d not be alive if you hadn’t fought those Injuns and killed Abel and his partner and brung her home, Ballards or no Ballards.”

  Zebulon had a sick cast on his face.

  “And Zed and Zeb?” I asked.

  He nodded sadly. “She told me ’bout them too.”

  “Mr. Shaw, they died fighting. They’ll never know they helped save Zelda as much as I did. I couldn’t whip that many Injuns alone. They drew them off and gave me my chance. They were true brothers to the end.”

  “That’s better’n nothing, I guess,” Zebulon admitted begrudgingly.

  I slipped into damp but warm moccasins and checked rifle and hand weapons. Zelda’s father remained at the table with the whisky jug, shocked by the stunning news he had his precious daughter home once more, but at the cost of his two sons, a mean bargain at best.

  I crossed to the rope bed. Zelda was buried beneath a heavy quilt. She extended a slim bare arm and I grasped her fingers. “It was a hell of a venture, girl, one I’ll never forget. I owe you my life.”

  Green eyes homed in on me. “I only follow my heart, Matthan. . . . Maybe sometimes it’s too big for me and everyone else.”

  “Not hardly, not hardly,” I stammered. I leaned over and kissed her forehead.

  “Good-bye, Zelda, my love,” I squeezed past the lump in my throat.

  “See, Matthan,” she said softly, “just like I been tellin’ you, it not be a hard name atall.”

  I straightened with a long, last look at her bronze features, fine mouth, and man-taming eyes, turned, nodded a silent good-bye to Zebulon, and walked from the cabin with the unopened silver pouch and Abel’s rifle, never looking back.

  They were the hardest steps I ever took . But I shed no tears. I’d learned crying didn’t help. The pain and loss still burned inside a man when he finished. Only the Lord and the passage of time did any real healing.

  The snowy pathway we’d covered on our arrival was deserted. Timothy and Joseph had forsworn more fighting for the moment. They’d headed for Fort Frye, and given their wounds and hurts, they’d be a while getting there.

  No barking or growling came from the creek side of the cabin. Fear of another beating held the Shaw hounds at bay.

  I bridled and saddled the gelding, tied the silver pouch behind the seat, led him clear of the gated enclosure, and mounted. From the gelding’s back I spied Zelda’s infernal cooking pot atop the bundled larder I’d unloaded earlier. I kneed the gelding close and snatched up the kettle.

  I lingered, rubbing the smooth metal, and remembering. But the chestnut had no interest in past events and pranced sideways, impatient to run. I reined him over in front of the cabin, reached down and placed Zelda’s precious pot on the stone stoop where Zebulon couldn’t help but find it.

  Then I rode westward for the Ohio.

  Epilogue

  Marietta, Ohio

  February 26, 1836

  My dearest son,

  Matthan Hannar, Jr.,

  The pages bearing your name in my safe at the boatyard tell the story of what truly happened in the winter of 17 and 92 as best an old man in his final days can remember it.

  Perhaps if I
last the final weeks of this damnably cold winter besetting us, I might write down for you all that happened after I rode out of the Shaw yard some forty odd years ago.

  Perhaps I should tell how I traded part of the Injun silver and the gelding for a flatboat over in Indiana territory, lured aboard a motley crew I captained at rifle point, and slipped on south down the Ohio and Mississippi to that great port of dreams—New Orleans.

  You might enjoy reading about the thundering lightning storm that sank the flatboat and fetched me ashore on the banks of the De Montaine plantation, soaked to the gills and clutching my precious pouch of silver, a wild night that changed my life and what came to be yours forever, for the brave soul who rescued me was none other than Monsieur De Montaine himself.

  My, what a wise and generous benefactor the Monsieur came to be. He first took me into his home and made me a shipbuilder, then a company partner. He saw to the schooling I desperately needed and later introduced me to a dark and lustrous beauty, Ravanna, whom I eventually married and with whom I sired you, may she forever rest in peace.

  I must set forth too my chance encounter with the great border fighter Tice Wentsell on the battlefield at New Orleans during the tussle of 18 and 15 when I lost a foot to wound and rot.

  You should know it was Tice Wentsell who wrote it all down, how he found the remains of Stillwagon and Hasper in the ashes of the rendezvous tree and trailed us south, arriving at the Shaw cabin two days after I rode off, there to get the rest of the particulars from Zebulon Shaw as Zelda had told them. And once the redoubtable Wentsell finished his report, he delivered it to General Putnam at Marietta and cleared my name, at least in the eyes of the law.

  I’ll go to my grave owing Tice Wentsell. His report, the statement of a ranger whose word went unchallenged the whole of the Ohio backcountry, declared me blameless of trading with the Injuns and sundry other crimes. Without such a public declaration of my innocence, I’d never have dared return with you and your mother in 18 and 19 and build the Marietta yards of HANNAR AND DE MONTAINE, SHIPBUILDERS AND FREIGHT AGENTS, EXTRAORDINAIRE. Tidy profits, after all, seldom shorten the long arm of the gendarmes.