Long Hunt (9781101559208) (28 page)

Kirk's horse was strong and sure, and it soon became obvious they would not quickly overtake it. “But even the best horses tire,” pointed out the sheriff. “He will stop eventually, and we will catch up to him.”

 

Bart Clemons awakened slowly, which wasn't typical for a man who often slept on the ground, as Clemons had done throughout the prior night. Hard ground had a way of making a man want to rise, even if a part of him ached for more sleep.

He'd managed to make himself a particularly comfortable bed, lying in layers of moss and soft ferns until he had a surface more restful than many a straw tick he'd occupied in his life. So when morning had come he had barely noted it, rolled over, and snored again.

Now, though, it was time to rise. The sun was edging up steadily, the air was warming, and dew was almost completely dried off the vegetation. Clemons stretched and yawned and looked around the woodland clearing in which he'd passed the night. It struck him that a further reason he had slept better was that he had not dreamed of Gilly's bulging face as it had been when he was hanging in that noose. He'd managed to bury that image deeply enough in his mind that it simply hadn't emerged in sleep. Clemons was grateful.

“Sluggard, arise!” came a voice from behind him, playfully Falstaffian in tone.

Clemons sucked in his breath and bounded to his feet, turning at the same time. The effort tangled his feet and he sat down hard on his rump, facing the man who had entered the clearing unnoticed just as Clemons had been waking up.

“Did that hurt, whomping down on your arse like that?” Littleton asked Clemons, who was staring up in surprise combined with the stupor of lingering sleepiness.

“Littleton, where did you come from?”

Littleton was in a remarkably light mood for a man who had just driven a piece of broken wood through the heart of another. “Well, Clemons, that kind of thing begins when a man and a woman fall in love with each other. The two of them stand up before a preacher and say some vows, and then they commence to living in the same house and sleeping in the same bed. And then—”

“Littleton, shut up! Everything's got to be a big jest to you, don't it! Well, haw-haw-haw! Damn!”

“Ill-humored this morning, I see!” Littleton said. “I guess I better straighten up and fly right so as not to make you mad, reckon?”

“You better.”

Littleton knelt beside Clemons's cold campfire, his one knee popping loudly as he did.

Clemons said, “If there's any embers glowing in that, stir them up and feed some twigs and such to them. I need to get a fire going to cook some breakfast. Got a couple of squirrels skinned in my hunting bag yonder. You et yet?”

“I ain't hungry, but thank you for asking. But the fact is, I can't build up your fire, Bart. I probably got hunters on my trail right now. I'm talking manhunters. Law. Smoke of a fire would draw them here.”

“What did you do?”

“I killed Gilly. Over in Jonesborough.”

“Gilly? I'll be! They know it was you who done it?”

“They're bound to know. Though they believe my name is Lyle Kirk, which is the false name I've been using lately.”

“When did you shave off your whiskers, Jeremiah? Or Lyle, or whatever you want me to call you now?”

“Go with Lyle. I cut the whiskers off so I'd be harder for folks to recognize. See, there was this plan for me to become a defrauder for a traveling preacher, who was going to tell a big tale about me being rescued by angels from that pit Gilly pushed me into. To get folks riled up in their spirits and ready to give gifts and money and such, you know.”

“Haw!
You
were going to become a religion seller?”

“Yes, sir, it was the plan. Working with old Camp Meeting Abner hisself! Might have been some good money in it, too, though I got a feeling old Abner would have found a way to keep most of that for hisself.”

“Yeah, never trust nobody who lives declaring themselves righteous. Hey, you said you killed Gilly?”

“I did. Funny thing with Gilly—he'd been hanged alive. But he survived it. Somebody took him down from the noose before he had a chance to choke all the way to death, and hauled him in to Jonesborough in the dead of night, dumped him in front of a church house.”

“I—I found the empty noose. But I didn't know what had become of him. It was us who hanged him, Jeremiah. The other boys and me. We hanged him because of what he had did to you. But it wasn't us who took him down. Wasn't me, anyway. I can't speak for the others. We split up after the hanging and went our different ways.”

“Them boys was bad company for an upright citizen such as you, Clemons.”

“You ain't never serious, are you, Littleton?”

“I try not to be.”

“How did you come to kill Gilly?”

Littleton told the story in some detail, finishing by taking the iron band off his peg leg and showing Clemons the splintered point he had driven into Gilly's midriff. Clemons, weak-stomached as he was, grew pale hearing the description of the blood gushing up around the peg leg and spreading in a pool beneath Gilly's back.

“He didn't live but a moment or two,” Littleton said. “I'm right sure I drove that wood right through his heart.”

“Good God, Littleton. Good God!”

“That's what they say. Don't know he's ever done much for me, though. Unless that boy that pulled me out of the hole really
was
an angel.”

Clemons shook his head. “Ain't no angels, Littleton. Ain't no goodness or heaven or hell or nothing like that. There's nothing but us, and this dirt and rock and trees and the sky, and I reckon it just goes on forever with nobody living up there or looking down to bless us or curse us. Ah, Lord. I reckon that's surely the way it is.”

“I don't know, Clemons. Maybe you're right. Or maybe you ain't. All I know is, if there's blessings to be had, I sure ain't earned them. I ain't been nothing but a bad man all my days.”

Littleton immediately wished he hadn't said it, because Clemons's lip quivered and tears bolted from his eyes. He tilted his head upward, eyes closed, and wept.

Littleton had seen Clemons like this before. Odd fellow, Clemons, Littleton pondered. He'd seen the man so full of life and excitement that he could hardly sit still, full of plans and hope and brightness . . . then, virtually in an instant, he would become as he was now: gloomy, tearful, depressed, and empty. Utterly hopeless. How could a man transform that way, so completely, and so suddenly? Littleton had seen this phenomenon enough times with Clemons to know that there was a good chance the man would the next morning be as hopeful as he was hopeless now, as full of cheer and life as he was of sorrow and hollowness at the moment.

“Cheer up, Clemons,” Littleton said, though he knew from experience that such banalities did nothing to change Clemons when he was in this state of mind.

“I can't cheer up. Know why, Littleton? Know why?”

“I don't know.”

“Because of the kind of folk we are, that's why! Look at us, Littleton! What kind of men are we?”

“Bad ones, according to most. The way I see it, we're men who do what they have to do to survive. We're survivors.”

Clemons firmly shook his head. “No, no. Not us. It's good people who survive in the end. For the bad, wickedness turns around on them and bites them. It's going to bite us. It's time for it to bite us. Ain't no justice if it don't.”

“Well, maybe when it bites, it'll catch me on my wooden leg and I'll not even feel it!” Littleton laughed at his own wit, but Clemons was in no mood for humor.

“Don't laugh, Littleton. Think for a minute about what we've done. We've robbed, we've hurt people, we've even murdered. Gilly killed that man who was doing nothing more than keeping quiet and hoping we'd finally leave his home and let him be. Gilly shot him dead. And then there's Will Sikes, worst of us all. Hurting, raping little gals, just children. It's evil. We're evil. The lot of us. And it can't go on.
We
can't go on.”

“But we will go on. That's the way life is, Clemons. It goes on. If we need to change our ways, well, we can work on that.”

“Too late. Too late for us, Jeremiah. Hell's waiting.”

Clemons stood and walked over to where his pack lay up against a log. With his back toward Littleton and his body blocking view of what he was doing, he produced two small flintlock pistols and quietly checked them. He put the muzzle of one in his mouth and bit down on it, holding it in place, still hidden from Littleton. Then he turned, aimed the other pistol at a startled Littleton, and shot him in the chest.

Littleton rose, staggered weakly, and tilted on his wooden leg. He fell down hard, writhed, tried in vain to speak, then flopped facedown in the dirt.

Without hesitation, and filled with a sorrow that flowed through him with the liquidity of blood, Clemons took hold of the other pistol gripped by his mouth, tilted the muzzle up to the roof of his mouth, and fired. He collapsed, dead before he struck ground.

 

“I want to hear more about the family, Pap,” Titus Fain said to his father. They were riding slowly along the trail that would take them ultimately to the rugged country of the Doe River. Jonesborough was behind them now, the sun climbing.

“I don't remember all I got told to you before,” Fain said. “I told you my father was a criminal, a housebreaker and a highwayman.”

“You did. And you told me you took part in the housebreaking, but not the highway work.”

“That's right. I was protected from that by your grandfather, who feared I'd be more likely fodder for the noose if I was ever caught in highway robbery. So I never was permitted to do that.”

“I'm glad of it. Tell me how your father became a woodsman in Skellenwood.”

“In that tale, son, lies the key to our family being in this country today, and me being the man of the wilderness that I am.

“Your father wore a mask in all his highway robberies, just a kind of sack pulled down over his face and head. So his face went unseen. He never harmed a soul in all his robberies, beyond stealing from them. He brandished a pistol, but never used it, and I don't think ever would have used it. And because most of his robberies occurred on the Skellenwood Road, he was known as the Masked Bandit of Skellenwood. Quite a dramatic name, eh? And he was known for his cordiality to those he robbed, and the fact that he'd never harmed any one of them.”

“Bandit of Skellenwood. Worthy of poetry.”

Fain cleared his throat and continued. “There came a day when something went wrong—but which turned out to be the best thing that could have happened for my father. A new coachman was on the road, driving his team carelessly, far too fast, some rich passenger urging him on because he was late to a business appointment, and a little boy stepped from the edge of the road at the wrong moment and was hit. Your grandfather was preparing to stop and rob that very coach, his eye on the purse of that same man of business who was in such a hurry. But when he saw the boy being struck, the robbery was forgotten.

“The coachman drove on, abandoning the lad, but Father went to him and saw he needed the help of a physician. He carried that poor injured boy in his arms all the way to the nearest house, a great estate mansion. The boy, it turned out, had come from that very place. The estate was that of his uncle, and the boy was recently orphaned and had been taken in by that uncle, who was Lord Skellen, the landowner of most of Skellenwood Forest.”

“Let me take a guess,” Titus threw in. “The landholder was grateful for the rescue of his nephew, and gave your father the job of woodsman in Skellenwood.”

“You are exactly right, son. And not only was he given the task of woodsman, but he was allowed to do it in a secret manner. That was how the house of the Fain family came to be built within the very entrance chamber of Skellenwood Cavern. It allowed for secrecy. And Father was given safety from the consequences of his highway robberies. Influence and power . . . Lord Skellen possessed them, and used them to Father's benefit and protection.”

“But you told me that the housebreaking went on into your youthful years.”

“That is true. Lord Skellen knew only that my father was a highwayman, but nothing of the housebreaking. It was a failing of Father's that he could never put aside housebreaking. He started it as a means of survival in his most impoverished days, but eventually it became a kind of vengeance.”

“Against whom? Or what?”

“Against an injustice done his mother, my grandmother, by a Scotsman of wealth, rank, and power. That Scotsman's own home fell victim to my father's housebreaking, with my aid. A tremendous take of gold and silver, most of it in coin. The most successful effort of the sort we ever engaged. I still carry a silver piece taken in that robbery. It is my intent to have Houser place it as a decoration in the stock of this fine rifle he made for me. That way I can keep my two most prized physical possessions together.”

“That's an excellent notion, Pap.”

“I think so.”

“It was after all these things happened that Molly Reese came to be part of your family for a time.”

“That is correct. She lived within the cave house with the rest of us. And she was sensible and foresighted enough, when she and your grandmother were putting into words her famous narrative, to make no record of that portion of her life, her time in Skellenwood. She understood the need for secrecy, you see. For the sake of Father.”

“Pap, are you hungry? I could stand to stew up a bit of hardtack and jerky meat, myself.”