Long Hunt (9781101559208) (29 page)

“As could I, son. And that provides us a good point for me to close my mouth and rest my voice a spell.”

“I am the son of Edohi and the grandson of the Bandit of Skellenwood. Quite a heritage I have, eh, Pap?”

“You do indeed, son.”

“There's more you can tell me?”

“The main part of it all you've now heard. Any lesser details I'll present to you as they come to mind, and as circumstances allow.”

They made camp, built a fire, and prepared a hunter's stew of hardened bread simmered with jerked beef in a small travel kettle that Fain never journeyed far without. They ate and Fain told a few more tales, mostly of boyhood adventures in the wilds of England's Skellenwood Forest.

T
he inner fire had him again. It was like that . . . like a flame inside him.

When it struck, Nathan Sikes felt he had no control over what would happen after. The decision seemingly already had been made for him.

He had come to the town of Jonesborough to get out of the wilderness, where he had been spending most of his time for weeks now, and also to find a way to quench the inner fire.

When he was a boy, he'd perceived the life of a criminal as something likely to be fun and thrilling and full of romance of the most classic kind. Instead it was mostly a life of worry and hiding and wondering which of his last steps had been a misstep he just hadn't recognized yet.

Even so, criminality had its compensations. Oh yes, sometimes very good compensations indeed, the kind Sikes loved above all else life had to offer. Specifically, the compensation that came from giving in when the inner fire gripped him. It was so much easier to say yes than to resist. And much more gratifying.

He would be saying yes very soon. This very night, if he proved lucky. All it would take would be finding the right kind of target, then watching and following and looking for opportunity that he would seize the moment it came.

He looked up and down the street, walking lithely and without worries, grateful that he, unlike Littleton, was almost entirely unknown, not a criminal with a name or a face much anyone would be familiar with.

He saw his target. He identified her the moment she crossed his field of vision. Familiar thoughts, anticipations, and vile plans fell into place, and he began to follow her. Sikes knew how to do it in a way that would never catch her attention. And he knew how to look for the opportunity to get her alone, where she would become his possession.

He'd done it so many times before. It was dangerous, deviant, and—Sikes knew full well—deplorable, but he had trained himself not to care. He couldn't imagine living without the inner fire, or the fulfillment of it.

He wondered what her name was. Her age he could easily guess: twelve, probably, or maybe thirteen. Just what he was looking for.

He was glad he'd gotten away from Clemons and Jones. His partners, though criminals themselves, despised his practice of taking his pleasure with young girls. They considered him depraved and purely evil for it, and their glares and comments and palpable disgust interfered with his enjoyment of the process.

He was alone now. Following his latest target in a town where he was sure no one knew his face or name.

The girl would never know what was happening until it happened. She would not escape him. Nor would she identify him. He would make sure of that by letting her know what would happen to her family if she dared to speak of it to anyone. If it came to it, he would have his way with her and leave her corpse to the carrion.

The girl walked fast, and Sikes pushed hard to keep up without getting too close. He made sure to maintain the appearance of looking past her or nearby her, not directly at her. He'd grown adept at watching his targets from the corners of his vision. Should someone call to this girl, or some other distraction cause her to turn in his direction, she would see only a man looking elsewhere, minding his own affairs and merely chancing to be walking some distance behind her.

She'd never figure it out until it was too late to run, too late to stop him. He knew how to make it work.

He'd done it so many times before.

 

Maggie Harkin was not as unaware of the man following her as the man supposed her to be. A precocious girl who had been trained by a sensible mother to be aware of those around her at all times, Maggie also knew she was old enough, and physically mature enough, to draw the attention of men. Some of them, anyway. And she lived in a society in which many girls no more than three years older than she were married, and no one thought it odd or hurried.

She had managed to catch three quick glimpses of the man without alerting him that she had caught onto him. A part of her, the mature-beyond-her-years part, wanted to step into an alley or recessed door or dogtrot, then come out and confront him and demand to know why he was following her. The other part of her, the scared-little-girl part, and also the sensibly cautious part, knew such a move would not be prudent.

As the daughter of an innkeeping woman, Maggie had been trained to be cautious not to offend newcomers and visitors to town, because such were those from whom the ranks of inn guests were drawn. One was expected to avoid creating situations that could potentially insult or embarrass a guest.

Maggie took advantage of a barking dog behind her and down the street, and turned abruptly to pretend to look for whatever the dog was barking at. The man was much closer, which startled her, and this time she caught him looking straight at her. He averted his eyes quickly, but there was no question he had been watching her.

Her decision was made. She was nearly sure that her mother was at the moment in her spinning house, where the Harkin law office was located when her father was still alive. Maggie drifted across the street in the direction of the little shop, planning to duck in quickly.

The door was closed tight, and bolted on the inside. Maggie froze. Her mother was not here after all . . . and when she turned, the man was gone. For a moment there was relief, but then his absence made it seem that he might be around any corner or behind any wall.

Maggie suddenly wanted to be nowhere but in her own room at home, locked safely inside, away from strangers and followers and the kinds of fear that lived on the street, even in small, friendly frontier towns.

She ducked through the alley beside the spinning house and went to the back of the little cabin. Preparing to make an off-street run around to the Harkin Inn and her home, she trotted past the end of the next alley.

His arm seemed to materialize from nowhere, wrapping firmly around her neck and pulling her back. His face was at her ear, his breath hot and foul. She felt the sharp sting of a knife tip against her neck as he pulled her into a cluster of bushes growing at the rear of the near building.

“Not a sound from you, not a scream, not anything at all to cause me a problem. Do you understand me, girl?”

She nodded, terrified.

“Don't make me mad, girl. Whatever you do, don't make me mad. If you do, you and your family die. Do you understand
that
? Don't think I'm lying. I've done it before.”

She nodded again, tears starting now. She realized she had not breathed since he grabbed her, and gasped loudly for air. Apparently thinking she was about to scream, he held her tighter and pressed the knife hard enough to break the outer layer of her skin.

She did not scream. She would not dare anger or disobey him. There was no question in her mind that he would do exactly what he had threatened and end the lives of the entire Harkin family.

“Now, we're all going to be good, ain't we?” he said. “You and me are going to walk out of town together, off the street, and we ain't going to make a sound or raise a single peep. Are we friends now? Sure we are, girl. Me and you, we're friends, and we're going to be even better friends before long. You hear me? Good, good friends.”

She walked with him somehow, but her legs were numb and lifeless and moved as if they belonged to someone else.

If only her father were alive! He would stop this man and rescue her. If only . . . if only.

 

An old hunter named Braxton Card was the manhunter who first spotted the two unmoving forms lying in the camp clearing. It was Micah Tate who discovered that one of them was Lyle Kirk, weak and wounded but still breathing.

The other man was a stranger to them all, and not alive. The pistol that had fired a ball through the roof of his mouth into his brain lay at his side.

The sheriff knelt beside Littleton, who was declining fast, his face taking on that unique gray hue that signals approaching death. “Who did this to you, son?”

“Over . . . there. Him.”

“He's dead, you know. Seems he shot himself in the head. Through his mouth.”

“I never even heard . . . the shot. Too busy . . . dying myself.”

“You ain't dead. Not yet. You're Kirk, ain't you?”

“I am.”

“What's the dead man's name over there?”

“Bart Clemons.”

“Why did he shoot you? And himself?”

“Because we're . . . bad men. He was . . . bothered him that we were . . . what we are.”

The sheriff didn't know what to say to that, so he simply rose to his feet and walked away a few moments, staring down at the corpse of Clemons. The others of his party stood unmoving, watching.

The sheriff returned to Littleton's side. Littleton was struggling hard to breathe, and the effort was draining him. His eyes were closed until the sheriff leaned close and spoke to him.

“Was it you who killed the man in Stuart's jail in Jonesborough?”

Littleton nodded weakly. “It was. I . . . owed him.”

“Money? So you killed him not to have to pay it?”

“Not money . . . death. Owed him death.”

The sheriff looked Littleton over. “From the looks of you, it appears that same debt might be coming due to you very soon. Got any people who'll need telling after you've gone on to the other side?”

“My . . . mother. She's still living . . . Carter's Valley. Maude Littleton. Widow woman.”

“Littleton? I thought your name was Kirk.”

Littleton managed one weak shaking of his head. “Jeremiah . . . Littleton. Tell her . . . tell her her boy was fixing to go to work for a preacher, soul-saving . . . before he died. She'll be glad to hear . . . that. It will give her hope . . . for me.”

“We'll find her, son. We'll tell her. But tell me this: Are you the same Jeremiah Littleton who led a gang of thieves and bandits in these parts?”

Littleton was beyond answering. He had spoken his final words and drawn his last breath.

 

Maggie was numb. So far the man who had abducted her in town had done nothing to harm her beyond the superficial pinprick cut he had inflicted on her while threatening her family, but the girl knew far worse was intended for her. And because she could see him clearly and he'd made no effort to hide his face from her, a suspicion was arising that he had no intention for her to be around to identify him later.

He would hurt her, misuse her, and kill her. Maggie was sure of it.

As a well-raised, sheltered girl, Maggie had only a minimal grasp of this variety of evil. She knew only enough to comprehend that there were those in the world whose interests and passions were distorted, people who would hurt others for reasons Maggie could not wrap her mind around. People to be avoided, fled from, feared.

Too late to flee this man. She had tried, but he had her.

She remembered hearing something her father had said once, when she was much younger. The frontier country, he had said, drew two types of people: good ones fleeing to find a better situation and a better life for themselves, and bad ones fleeing from trouble in the East.

He'd said as well that the backcountry would never be fully settled until it had a strong and stable system of law, but Maggie had been too young to comprehend or retain much of that. What she was left with out of it all was simple: People, especially children, must be very, very careful of strangers in a place where there were not many sheriffs and constables and prosecutors and such around to make sure bad people behaved themselves.

“Bad people run from good ones,” she remembered her father saying to her. “They run away from law. That is why there are so many bad ones who go to the border country, the places where the law is weak or not there at all.”

Maggie suspected that this man who had taken her must be the kind who felt the need to run, because he was leading her far away from town, and pushing hard as if they had to hurry as quickly as they could. And he kept stopping and looking behind him, then around him, and telling her he had heard something or someone nearby, and she must be very quiet if she didn't want bad things to happen to her and her loved ones. He had repeated such threats over and over again, each repetition making her will become weaker and her fear greater. And Maggie was smart enough to know that was exactly what he was trying to do . . . to break her resistance, to make her so afraid she would not fight him when he did things to her she could not bear to think about.

“Where are we going?” she dared to ask.

“To visit an old friend,” he replied. “A friend who enjoys some of the same things I do.”

She lost track of time and distance, and soon was lost in hills, mountains, and hollows. They followed narrow, seldom-used trails and streams she did not recognize, and came at last to a place where a rotting cabin sat on a rocky ledge thrusting out from the side of a wooded hill like the lower lip of a pouting child.