The Cane Creek Regulators

by Johnny D. Boggs

  “Kilduff,” Stewart muttered.

  Emily edged closer so she could hear her father. He was sweating, so she took the damp towel, and placed it on his forehead, which he grabbed, rolled into a ball, and flung toward the bar. “Kilduff. The Irishman?”

  “Aye.”

  “The one branded a traitor for dealing with the Cherokees?”

  “The same.”

  Stewart tried to lift himself up, but sank onto the pillow. “Well, I always thought him to be an honorable man. He came here?”

  “Whilst you were gone.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He returned to Charlestown.”

  Stewart snorted, shook his head. “He shan’t return. They never do. It remains up to the settlers of the backcountry to make their own law.”

  “And you have made it, Breck Stewart.”

  * * * * *

  Before Owen Devonald left with the Peedee Regulators two days later, he sat by Stewart’s bedside, swapping jokes and insults, and telling lies.

  “When shall you be going to Charlestown this year, Breck?”

  “I do not think I shall make it this year, you old Welshman. I have no need. But next fall, I shall come for sure, to trade with you for some Cheraw bacon.”

  “Fine. And perhaps you can bring that wayfaring Anglican preacher with you.”

  “Aye. He preaches a fine sermon for a traitor to Scottish Presbyterians. I hope he will preach at my funeral.”

  Which ended the conversation and left Owen Devonald at a loss for words.

  * * * * *

  On the sixth day since the return of the regulators, he called Emily to his bedside.

  “Daughter,” he said in a faint whisper, “I must ask you to bring someone to me.”

  “Who?”

  “Go-la-nv Pinetree.”

  Emily’s response was to bury her face in her father’s chest. As the tears came, she cried, “Da, he cannot come. He is …” She sniffed as the Cherokee’s face flashed through her mind, and she remembered asking him what he was doing on that awful summer day. Hunting, he had said, but she had known he was lying. He had been following her, protecting her. Slowly she pulled herself up, and wiped away the tears. She had to be strong. For her father. For her ancestors. She was a Stewart of Appin. “Da, Go-la-nv is in Keowee. I cannot fetch him.”

  “Damnation,” he said. “Then fetch me one of Gouedy’s slaves.” Tears now filled his eyes. “Daughter … oh, God … I have wet myself. I have pissed my pants like a damned baby.”

  She leaned over and hugged him, no longer afraid of hurting his bones as she realized that it was his spirit that was broken.

  “Please … please … Emily!” he cried. “Do not let your mother … Do not let anyone … especially Donnan … see me like this.”

  * * * * *

  That dreadful morning when the Cane Creek Regulators had returned to Ninety Six from the South Mountains, Dr. Bayard had told Machara, Donnan, and Emily that Breck Stewart would live no more than five days.

  The tenth day came, and he was sitting up, Alan on his knee, telling him lies about fighting pirates and alligators on Winyah Bay as a boy. It was that afternoon that the Reverend Douglas Monteith returned to Ninety Six.

  He looked older now, Emily thought as she pulled back the curtain they had hung in the downstairs to give her father some privacy, Stewart having lacked the strength to go up the steps, nor his pride allowing him to be carried up.

  “Besides, I shan’t have Virgil Hickox whining about carrying my fat carcass down when I am dead.” He had laughed, but no one else had. He had lost much weight since coming home.

  With the ease of a young man, Stewart swung Alan off the table and onto the floor, lifted himself into a semi-sitting position, and bellowed at the Anglican. “Parson Monteith, it is grand to see you, sir! Come for the death watch, I warrant?”

  Monteith cleared his throat. “Breck Stewart,” he said as he strode across the room, “you shall bury us all.”

  “’Tis my wish, Parson. ’Tis truly my wish.”

  Emily pulled up a chair for the preacher.

  “And what rude, ignorant, and amoral scoundrels with a propensity for vice and idleness have you found mocking your sermons in hamlets across the backcountry, sir?” Stewart asked as leaned forward, fluffed his pillow, and leaned back, his hands clasped behind his head.

  “I married three couples on Lynches Creek,” Monteith replied, “and baptized several on the Waccamaw.”

  “And has any marsh tacky kicked you in the balls?”

  Emily smiled, and returned to the kitchen to fetch the preacher tea and bread. Yesterday her father in an hour of delirium had babbled on about mad dogs, screamed for his mother, and asked to see his brother, dead these last fifteen years. And now look at him. When she returned, the conversation had changed.

  “A pardon?” Her father’s voice was raspy. “What nonsense.”

  “It is from your friend, William Bull,” the preacher said. “In Governor Montagu’s absence, he has issued two proclamations. One is an order that all regulators must be suppressed, of their own volition, of course, but the other grants a general pardon for all regulators, providing they keep the peace.”

  Stewart leaned forward, grimaced, then swore. “By Jehovah, keeping the peace is what we have done, sir. Tell that to that ape-faced baboon.” He dropped back against the pillow, then sat up again, grabbed the pillow, and flung it at the curtain.

  “I did not mean to cause him such distress,” Monteith whispered to Emily as she led him out of the area, pulling the curtain closed behind her.

  “’Tis all right, Preacher,” she said. “He gets this way. I think it is good.” She smiled. “It is the Breck Stewart that I remember.”

  * * * * *

  Two days later, Breck Stewart was swearing that his tavern felt hotter than Charlestown in August. Donnan kept applying a cold towel to his forehead, and his father kept cursing.

  That is when Emily knew that Dr. Bayard was right, and that her father would not recover. She pulled on her coat, and went outside, her breath white as she crossed the frost-covered ground to gather more wood.

  On that Sunday, Reverend Monteith held service in Cormorant’s Rock, the curtain drawn back so Stewart could participate. Emily had not seen the place so crowded since that day the residents had gathered after those three butchers had tried to kill her in the woods, all of which seemed a lifetime ago. Tears ran down her cheeks as the sermon was preached, even though she really didn’t hear anything the reverend said.

  She was remembering Go-la-nv Pinetree sitting there that afternoon, playing with one of Alan’s marbles, and the way his eyes had caught hers. She could see his smile. She wished that he had been as comfortable around her as he had seemed around men or children, like Alan and Elizabeth.

  Her mind came back to the present when her father tried to play the bagpipes, even though he lacked the breath and stamina. Those present applauded, despite the fact that this was supposed to be church, and the music spiritual, not secular.

  After the service, ignoring Reverend Monteith, the men and women of the district—even Birmingham Long—walked past to shake hands with Captain Breck Stewart, tavern owner, captain of the Cane Creek Regulators.

  That day Stewart was lucid, coherent, jovial, happy, snapping jokes, kissing the ladies’ hands, telling lies, and sipping his own bumbo.

  * * * * *

  Two days later, on Tuesday, October 4, 1767, William Breck Stewart died. He was forty-six years old. No fanfare, no last words. He had gone to sleep that evening never to awaken.

  She found it strange that of all the members of her family, Donnan took it the hardest. At first, he wouldn’t even believe it, and kept pulling at his father, screaming at him to wake up, wake up, until Machara, stone-faced, her hair now more gray than
auburn, pulled him away, and led him, bawling like a newborn, into the cold outside.

  Emily lifted Alan and Elizabeth up to kiss their father farewell, then handed them over to Mrs. Cochrane, who had come by as any good neighbor would do under the circumstances. Emily sat at her father’s bedside. She felt no tears. No pain. No regrets. Not even relief now that it was all over.

  She put her hand on Breck Stewart’s shoulder, squeezed it, and whispered, “I shan’t forget you, Father. Ever. No one in Ninety Six shall ever forget you, sir.”

  Emily even smiled. Her father appeared to be smiling as well.

  1768

  Chapter Nineteen

  Emily slid the healthy pour of rum in front of Jonathan Conley, and, not wanting to see the poor man drink alone, splashed a couple of fingers into her own mug of tea.

  “Would you like something to eat, Jonathan?” she asked.

  It was awkward, speaking with such formality to a married man with one son and an infant daughter back on his farm, but Emily felt that she was getting better at it. Running a tavern, her father’s tavern, kept proving to be a much harder job than she had ever imagined, but if the ladies of Charlestown could pay the price of a license and operate an “ordinary” in that city, then she most certainly could do it in Ninety Six. She was, after all, Breck Stewart’s elder daughter, and she did not have an artisan handy—only an uncouth brother willing to drink all her profits.

  Conley did not touch the rum, just stood with the bar rag he had asked for, wiping his hands so roughly, Emily feared he’d rub his skin raw.

  In the five months since her father’s death, Emily had learned how to deal with the infrequent arguments that broke out among patrons, and how to handle the more frequent drunkards. She learned not to tear off a drunken man’s head when he pinched her hindquarters, and how to laugh at their foolish jokes, and how to bash one upside his head with the bung starter when he deserved it. Yet something troubled Jonathan Conley, and that something she had not yet learned how to manage.

  Two weeks earlier, Machara Stewart had departed for Georgetown, taking Alan and Elizabeth with her to see Breck’s parents. Unable to write a letter during the fall and winter to send word of their son’s death, Machara had determined that bringing the news in person would be easier and kinder, and taking their two youngest grandchildren with her might help ease the pain of loss. They would return before the summer and the threats of the myriad summer diseases so prevalent along the coast.

  Donnan still commanded the regulators, of which Jonathan Conley was one, but the number had decreased to no more than twenty, sometimes as few as five or six. Someone had made off with eggs from Pierre Maupin’s chicken coop, and a filly had been stolen during a horse race on the Long Canes, but such petty crimes seemed trivial compared with the lawlessness of the past two or three years.

  Breck Stewart, she thought, could be proud. He had brought law and order to at least this part of the backcountry, for which he had paid the ultimate price.

  As had Go-la-nv Pinetree.

  She sipped the rum and tea, and cleared her throat, leaning against the bar, trying to find words, something to comfort Jonathan Conley, something to make him stop scrubbing his hands with that rag.

  “You have not touched your drink,” she said.

  Without looking up, Conley said, “I cannot seem to get the soot off my hands.”

  Like Pontius Pilate, Emily thought. Reverend Douglas Monteith had preached a good sermon about the Roman prefect and Jesus Christ before he had left in early February to bring the gospel to the Cowpens and then Charlotte Town and down to Cheraw and Lynches Creek and the Welsh Neck and over to the newly christened Camden, formerly Pine Tree, with plans maybe to return to Ninety Six before fall.

  “I give up.” Conley brought up his hands, red and raw, and tossed the towel beside his stein. “They shall never be clean.”

  Emily picked up the rag, and dropped it behind the bar. She clinked her mug against Conley’s pewter stein, and painted that bartender’s smile on her face. She saw not a trace of dirt or soot or anything on Conley’s hands.

  When the stein reached the farmer’s lips, Emily smiled with relief. Conley’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he drank. He shook his head when he put down the stein, wiping his mouth with a sleeve. The muslin cloth, Emily noticed, did appear to be stained with charcoal and ash.

  “It is early in the day,” Emily said, “and early in the week for you to be at Cormorant’s Rock, Jonathan Conley.”

  With a shrug, he drank again.

  “And how are Betsy and the children?”

  Another shrug. Another drink.

  “I baked a Sally Lunn yesterday, and tried my hand at scones. Might I interest you in trying them?”

  “Betsy makes a good Sally Lunn,” he said. “It’s the brown sugar.”

  “Aye. I thank you for sharing her secret. I shall remember that.” Releasing his grip on the stein, he turned his hands over, and stared at the palms. “All that soot,” he said softly.

  Emily gently put her hands on his, and waited for him to look up. When he did, she could see the tears welling in his eyes, and she whispered, “There is no soot, Jon Conley. Your hands are as clean as a baby’s bottom. Now what ails you so?”

  “You … you’d make a man a good … wife,” he said.

  Suddenly uncertain, she withdrew her hands, put them behind her back, even stepped back from the bar. Emily would turn eighteen in April, and since she had taken over running the tavern, despite Donnan’s and her mother’s strong objections, she figured she had condemned herself to being a spinster, which was all right with her. Even had Go-la-nv Pinetree not been shot dead at Jacob’s Fork, she had always figured she would never marry.

  “You should go home to Betsy,” she told him. “And tend to your children.”

  “We burned down the Robinson place,” he said.

  She blinked, then moved forward, and picked up her mug. “Joseph Robison’s place?” He did not respond. “On Cane Creek?”

  He drank down the last of the rum, which did not seem to affect him in the least, and slammed the heavy stein on the table, then, elbows on the bar, he put out his hands buried his head in them.

  “Aye. Burned it to the ground,” he confirmed after several moments.

  “Who?”

  “The … Cane … Creek … Regulators.”

  A chill raced up her spine. She shook her head in disbelief. “And what on earth for?”

  He did not reply, just stood there, head in his hands, snuffling.

  “Joseph Robinson has not been in the district since the regulators ran him off to Charlestown,” she said hotly. “And good riddance to a man like him, I say. But to burn down his home. Did you know that he sold his home? It did not belong to him any more. It belonged to the deputy provost marshal.”

  “We knew.”

  “Then why burn it? Even Finnian … even the deputy provost marshal has not been here since late last year.”

  Conley lowered his hands and bit his lip, before he answered. “Travelers were using it. Sleeping in it.”

  “I would think so. Along with rats and mice and raccoons and snakes and anything in need of shelter in that country.” When Conley said nothing, Emily continued. “And what of it? If a man traveling through this district finds an empty house, he is free to use it. That has always been our way. If he does not wish to pay the rent I charge for a bed upstairs, I do not begrudge him. Besides, the Robinson place is miles from Ninety Six.”

  “The captain said it might be used by bandits.”

  Emily swore, and splashed more rum into her mug. “My brother ordered you to burn that home?”

  “Yes. And the barn. And the coop. And we tore down the pigpen.”

  “And did you salt his well while you were at it?”

  She had meant it as a joke, but when Conley look
ed up and began to answer, she flung the mug against the wall.

  He said, “James Middleton had killed three wild dogs, and those we dropped into the well.”

  As Emily stood there, heat and anger rushed to her head with such force she felt dizzy. Her heart was pounding hard as the tavern’s front door opened. Donnan Stewart and James Middleton blocked the entry, standing there, faces blank. When the door to the kitchen opened, and two other men stepped inside, Emily tried to collect her wits. The two men at the kitchen door she had seen before, but did not know their names. The one with the barrel chest and bulging arms she thought owned a farm on Ninety Six Creek just east of the settlement. The other, a lean man with a mauled left ear, she had heard made his living as a long hunter and was usually gone from the cabin he had built on the Long Canes for months on end. Both had ridden with the Cane Creek Regulators when her father was alive.

  “Jonathan Conley,” Donnan said, stepping forward and putting his right hand on the butt of a pistol in his sash. “Turn around.”

  Slowly Conley did as ordered, keeping his hands far from his sides, even though he was unarmed. He had left his long rifle leaning against the wall by the door.

  “In the name of the Cane Creek Regulators, I arrest you, sir.”

  The poor farmer merely nodded his head, as Emily cried out, “And why do you arrest this man?” She felt her brother’s icy stare, but did not back down. “A poor farmer who rode with my father. A regulator himself, who was at the South Mountains.”

  “And a poor provider for his wife and children,” Donnan said, as James Middleton moved toward the bar, pulling a thick leather thong from his possibles bag.

  “Since when is that a crime, Donnan?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer, and Emily felt her mouth turn dry as the two brutes who had entered through the back roughly shoved Jonathan Conley against the bar and held his hands behind his back, allowing James Middleton to lash them securely.

  Only then did Donnan step forward, putting his hands behind his back, staring into Conley’s tear-stained face. “Your breath reeks of kill-devil, Conley.”