Louis L'Amour (5 page)

His expression changed. “You have read them?”

“Bacon,” I said, “and much else. My father was a reader of books, and our teacher was a very great scholar. He was Sakim.”

“An infidel?”

“Some would call him so. I would not.”

“How can you hope to find them? Not even Max Bauer could, and he is our best in the woods.”

Slowly I got to my feet. I knew much that I had wished to know. If Pequots had the girls, they might be dead by now, but I did not believe it.

“Those others who disappeared? All were girls?”

“Yes, but that means nothing. A lad would have found his way back. But a girl?” He shrugged.

“Diana, they say, was very much at home in the woods.”

“She was different.”

I walked to the door. “I will find them, Macklin, but what of you? Should you stay on here? There is suspicion, and if what I hear of your people is true, she would be risking much to return.”

He looked at me, then shook his head. “How far can one go? And where can one stop? Is there no place in which to rest?”

“You've been through this before?”

He shrugged. “It is ever the same. And it is my
fault. She was reared by me. I could have made her another way, and she would have been like other girls.” He frowned suddenly. “But I was a fool. I did not want her like others. I wanted her to be like herself.”

“And like her mother?” I asked.

The eyes he turned toward me were the eyes of a man who had been through hell. There was pain there and fear, anger, resignation—I knew not what, only that he was a man suddenly without hope.

“So you know? I guess I always knew there would be a time. I knew someone would come who knew.”

He stared at me, then the floor. “My God, what will we do
now?
”

A
thunderous knocking on the door interrupted whatever might have been said. Macklin went to the door, and I stood back, expecting anything.

There were four men, and they brushed by Macklin to face me. “You are Sackett?”

“I am.”

“You are to leave—
now.
We do not need your godless kind in this place. You are to go, and you are not to return.”

“I have come only to help,” I said coolly.

“We do not need your help. You must go—or suffer the consequences.”

“It seems that help is needed whether you believe it or not. Two girls have disappeared. Perhaps they have been taken by Indians, and you do nothing to find them.”

“That is our affair. It is none of yours. One of you was here and ended in the stocks. Make sure that does not happen to you.”

I smiled at them. My musket was in my hand, and in my belt were two pistols. “I must ask your pardon,
gentle
men, but be sure I do not end there. If I should be put in your stocks for no more than coming to your town, I can promise it would cost you much.

“I have come only to do what you yourselves should have done. I shall not leave until I have accomplished what I have begun. You are, no doubt, good enough men in your ways, but those ways are not mine.

“Two girls are missing. I understand others have disappeared before this.”

“Others?” They looked startled. “But that was long ago. It was—”

“Last year,” I answered. “Are you so careless, then? Have you not asked yourself why it is girls who vanish?” I knew nothing myself. I was but giving them that on which to think. “The forests are wide and deep, but are they selective?”

“I do not know what you mean,” the speaker said. Yet he was disturbed. Had he, perhaps, thought of this, also? “It is true—”

“You have suggested I leave. Very well, I go. But I shall not leave until I know what has happened here. You no doubt think of yourselves as Christians, as God-fearing men, yet you call off a search and condemn those girls to death in the wilds, perhaps, just because of your foolish superstition.”

“Be careful!” The spokesman's face lost its look of indecision. “You do not speak of superstition here! What we have seen is the work of the devil!”

I shrugged. “I go now.” I stepped around them but did not put my back to them. “I shall do what I can do and what you did not do.”

“We could not.” One of the others spoke for the first time. “There were no tracks.”

“There were tracks, but badly trampled tracks, yet any Indian could have found the trail. Any tracker could find it.”

“We have one of the best. He could not!”

“Could not? Or did not?”

Stepping through the door, I closed it behind me. I was angry, and I knew the folly of that. Anger can blind one too easily, and thoughtlessly and foolishly I stepped away from the wall. There was a sudden
whoosh
in the night and a thud. A knife quivered in the log wall behind me.

I lay on the ground. I had dropped a moment too late, for I had been narrowly missed by a thrown knife but in time to avoid a second. I had not merely hit the
ground but had moved swiftly off to one side, then farther. I could see nothing.

The night was dark, but there was starlight, and already my eyes were growing accustomed to it. An attempt to kill me because I was here? Or had somebody listened to what was said inside?

Ghosting away, I reached the forest and slid into its dark accepting depths. In less than an hour I was near where our camp had been; it was there no longer.

Yance was there.

“Had trouble?” At my assent he added, “I figured so. There was some coming an' going in the woods about, but I moved my camp yonder.

“I found tracks,” he added, “far out where nobody took time to look.”

“Indians?”

“White men, wearin' moccasins, like you an' me.” We moved off into the darkness, traveling swiftly for some minutes. When we slowed down again to listen, he said, “You see that Pittingel again?”

“Others.”

“When I was in the stocks, there was a sailor man in them right beside me. He'd been drunk and roisterin' about, but he was sober enough in the night, and we talked some.

“I've been recallin' things he said, like this Pittingel now. He owns a couple of ships, sends timber to England, corn to the West Indies, and he brings back sugar, rum, and coffee, but that wasn't all.

“After everybody was asleep, we talked a good deal. It wasn't very nice, settin' in those stocks, unable to move more than a mite. He told me Pittingel was a trickster. He said Pittingel had some of his ships lay off the coast until they were all scrubbed down and aired out, but that wouldn't fool him. He knew a slaver when he smelled it.”

“Slaver?”

“Blackamoors. From Africa. They buy them from the Arabs. Most of the slave dealers are Arabs and some Portuguese. He sells them in the Indies.

“Folks here don't take to slaving, so Pittingel lets nobody hereabouts guess, but he's slaving, all right.”

We were quiet, each thinking his own thoughts. Yance said suddenly, “Macklin will miss her. According to what Temp had to say and from what I saw, Diana spent most of her time with her pa. She read from his books, and they talked about what they read.”

Anna Penney had put by a little food for us, and Yance ate, taking time out, here and there, for the cider. We talked a little in low voices about the country around, and then we moved off to a place he'd found, and there we bedded down for the night. Yance was soon asleep.

A long time after he slept, I lay awake, looking up at the stars through the leaves and listening to the horses tugging at the grass. The woods were quiet, and the town, if such it could be called, was far enough away that we heard nothing. Yet the settlement would be quiet after dark; anyone out after dark would be suspect.

It was but ten minutes' walk to the hollow from which the girls had vanished. It was plain enough that many men had been here, for the grass was trampled. It was no more than we expected.

It was a pleasant enough place, a small meadow surrounded by woods, and on the edge of the woods a small pond of an acre or more. Reeds grew about, and a few marsh marigolds grew here and there. On the pond floated lily pads. On the shore, back at the edge of the trees, there were violets. It must have been an idyllic spot before the searching parties trampled it out of shape.

The east side of the hollow I dismissed at once, for there was a dense thicket of blackberries there. No man in his right mind would have attempted to get through that mass of thorns when other ways remained.

We stood still, looking all around, trying to take in the complete scene, trying to picture what must have happened here. Yet as we stood looking and listening,
there was a sound of men coming along the path from the settlement. Yance vanished.

The first I saw was Max Bauer. “Miles away by now,” he was saying. “An army would be needed for the searching, and it is sad, for they were so young. Yet we can try an approach to the Pequots. I am sure that Joseph Pittingel …”

Deep within the forest, an owl hooted. My eyes were on Bauer, and I saw him pause, head turning slightly toward the sound. It was no owl, and I believed he guessed as much, although the difference was subtle.

Yance, telling me he had found something.

Penney left Bauer's side and crossed the meadow to me. “You will seek them, then?”

“I will. You go home now, and leave it to Yance and to me. Remember, Yance is wed to Temperance, and although we are not of one blood, their children will be. Kinship is a strong thing between us, Penney.”

“Sackett, we, Anna and I, we thank you. We—” He choked up, and I turned my eyes from his embarrassment.

My hand touched his shoulder. “Go, man, go home to your Anna, and trust in us. If she be alive, we will find her.”

He turned back to them. Macklin hesitated as if he would speak, then turned away with Penney. Bauer lingered. “if there is aught I can do, call upon me, but I fear you waste your time.”

“It is only a trail,” I said, looking straight at him, “and we have followed many such from boyhood. Where a hound can follow, or an Indian, there we can follow, too.”

There was a dark look upon him, and I liked it not, but the man nettled me with his assurance. Of Max Bauer I knew nothing but that he was employed by, or seemed to be employed by Pittingel, but I trusted him none at all. There was power in the man but evil, also. I knew a little of fear as I watched him go, and it angered me. Why should I fear? Or Yance? Who had ever defeated us?

Yet all men can fail, and each man must somewhere find his master, with whatever strength, whatever weapon. So we must be wary, we must use what guile we had, for it was upon my shoulders that nothing we had ever attempted or done was so fearsome a thing as this we now would try.

I knew not why I believed so, yet believe it I did.

Through the dappled light and shadow of the forest I walked on gentle feet, knowing only that Yance had come upon something.

Of course, it would be no great thing. If the ground is trampled, one has only to cast about in a great circle, an ever-widening circle, for when those who were here left this place, they did not make tracks only in the meadow but in the leaving of it.

Yance was sauatted at the foot of a huge old chestnut awaiting me. When I squatted beside him, he said, “Old tracks.” He paused. “Five or six men … two of them barefooted.”

“
Barefooted?
”

“Aye, an' they've gone barefooted a lot. Feet spread wide.” He paused again, throwing down the twig on which he was chewing. “Looked to be carrying heavy. Deep prints.”

We were silent together, each thinking it over. “It ain't likely,” Yance said, “that any folks native to this country would go barefoot. The Indians didn't, and certainly those Puritan folk or Separatists or whatever they are, they hold to boots.”

We straightened up, looked carefully about, and listened; then we moved off. He pointed the trail, and it was as he said. Five men, two of them barefoot.

The trail was not an easy one, but we hung to it. At times, rains had washed it away entirely, but we were helped by the fact that these folks did little hunting, and most were afeared to go into the woods alone, so after the meadow nobody had messed up what tracks there were.

We saw deer tracks, too. There was game here if a man were to hunt it down.

We lost the trail.

In the morning we found it again, just a few tracks where they had crossed a stream and one of the barefooted men had slipped. A few hours later we found what we both had been watching for. A camp.

We studied it carefully before we moved in, and then it was only I who went in, and Yance began hunting the tracks made when they left.

He came up to the edge of camp. “Still going north,” he said. “Find anything?”

“All three have muskets,” I said.

“
Three?
”

“Two of them, the barefooted ones, are not armed.”

“Slaves,” he said.

“Maybe … likely,” I added.

“That Pittingel now … that man I was in the stocks with … he thought Pittingel was a slaver.”

“He
thought.
We know nothing, Yance, and it doesn't pay to decide anything without we've evidence for it. The man may be a fine Christian gentleman.”

Yance snorted.

Then I said, “What else?”

“It's the girls, all right. I found their tracks, only a couple of them, for they weren't allowed to walk about. One set of smaller tracks, the others a shade larger. Then they were tied up and dumped on the ground. There was some cooking done.”

“Slave?”

“No, one of the others.” We sat together in the dappled shade of a tree, alert for sound. “It's an old camp, Yance. Been used two, three times before. Several times, I think.

“They had more than one fire, some old smoke-blackened stones, some fresh. Found where ashes had been beaten down by rain, then a fire laid atop that. Not so large a fire.”