Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1966 (15 page)

 
          
Something
moved there, at the fir tree, moved stealthily, furtively.

 
          
Mark’s
rifle rose as though at its own will. Mark’s thumb drew back the hammer. His
finger hooked on the trigger. He took a step and shoved his body close behind
the tree nearest to the rock, peering around it to the right, to see whatever
was astir up there.

 
          
Hard
to see that movement, but it had
a grayness
to it as
he made it out partially, through the fleece of green needles on the crooked
branches of the fir. He brought his rifle to his shoulder, but waited. He wanted
a good shot, a certain one. At that close range, he could not miss if he could
but see his target.

 
          
Moxley
must be thinking that Mark remained on the far side of the rock. Perhaps he
might be preparing to climb down here. The gray fabric stirred again behind the
fir. Unmistakably it was that cloth Mark had torn in their grapple at the mill.

 
          
Now
or never, Mark told himself grimly. He stepped into the open. He aimed upward,
and the forward sight of his rifle showed black and sharp against the grayness.
He fired.

 
          
As the shot rang out, Moxley yelled loudly, but not in pain.
It was a ringing cry of harsh triumph. Up into Mark’s view, on the very lip of
the crag beside the fir tree, Moxley sprang to his feet.

 
          
He
was stripped to the waist. His red hair fluttered in a gust of wind. He was
close enough so that Mark saw his wide, shining eyes, his grinning mouth. With
his left hand he clutched the trunk of the fir, with his right he poised a
pistol, ready to fire.

 
          
“Fooled
you!” he fairly gibbered in exultant selfcongratulation. “Fooled you to the top
of your stupid head—the same way you fooled us at the mill yonder, showing
empty garments to draw our fire!”

 
          
Mark
blamed himself bitterly, and fumbled for his powder horn.

 
          
“I’m
coming down to you,” Moxley was laughing. “Your gun’s empty, and my pistols are
loaded. Your
life is in my hands—wait
and meet me if
you dare!”

           
He leaned forward, holding to the
tree, extending his right arm, pointing the pistol.

 
          
“I’ll
not hide from you,” Mark promised him. “If—”

 
          
A
rending, ripping sound of broken wood echoed through the evening air.

 
          
That
tree, loosely rooted to its clutter of rocks, came loose as Moxley leaned his
weight upon it. The pistol fell from Moxley’s hand, struck and went dancing
down, discharging as it did so. And Moxley, too, lost balance, fell forward and
struck the slope heavily.

 
          
Mark
watched him hit the face of the steep, brushy rock, watched him bounce like a
ball flung against a board. Moxley somersaulted as he fell, and drove with a
great crash among the trees at the bottom.

 
          
Instantly
Mark hurried forward to the spot, his rifle clubbed.

 
          
A
dozen bounding strides carried him to where Moxley lay, arms and legs outflung,
head against a round, sand-colored boulder.

 
          
“Mark!”
drifted a voice from lower on the slope. It was the voice of his father.

 
          
“Mark,
lad, where are you? Celia is not badly hurt, she is asking for you—”

 
          
Mark
stooped over Moxley’s body. He did not need to touch it to know that his old
enemy would never rise from where he had fallen, that his works of spite and
mischief at Bear Paw Gap were done forever.

 
          
Harvest

 
          
Two
NIGHTS and two days had passed since the end of Quill Moxley and the crushing
defeat of his raiders.

 
          
It
was a mild, cloudless evening, with the sun’s last red rays still lighting the
land. The Jarretts had fetched stools and benches out into the yard. Alice and
Anthony scuttled about, playing. Celia sat on a bench, and Tsukala examined the
wound in her upper arm, where Moxley’s misdirected bullet had ripped the flesh.
Mark sat crosslegged on the ground nearby, watching as Tsukala carefully washed
the place with hot water,
then
took up a tin bowl. In
this bowl Tsukala had carefully pulped half a dozen green herbs, gathered in
the woods, to make of them a salvelike mixture. This he spread over the gash as
though forming a
poultice,
and Mrs. Jarrett tore up a
clean napkin for fresh bandages. She helped Tsukala wrap these around Celia’s
round, white arm.

 
          
“Does
it pain you, child?” she asked.

 
          
“Only
a little,” said Celia thankfully. “I say honestly, I feel as though I were
already on the way to mending and healing.”

 
          
“Tsukala’s
medicine is ever sovereign, I’ve had experience of it,” Mark’s father said from
where he sat and mended a ripped moccasin with awl and sinew thread.

 
          
“This
is Cherokee medicine,” Tsukala explained gravely as he drew the bandage snug.
“My people have used it a long time, for many lives of many men. A wise old
medicine man taught me.”

 
          
“I
wish you would teach me, too,” Mrs. Jarrett requested.

 
          
“I
will teach,” Tsukala promised her. “I will show you the plants. Tell you their
names. Tell you what medicine they make. Show you how to use them for wounds,
for fevers.”

 
          
Celia
smiled at Mark, quite cheerfully. “You do not say anything,” she chided him.

 
          
“I’m
only remembering all that’s happened,” he said, for his thoughts still dwelt on
the late desperate adventure and its successful ending.

 
          
His
mind harked back to the moment he came down the ridge with his father, leaving
Moxley where he had fallen. The garrison of the tavern had made a sortie and
was trying to pursue those Indians as they fled. But as the Jarretts, father
and son, reached the road, their comrades prudently halted and did not charge
recklessly among the trees. A last volley of shots sped the vanishing enemy out
of sight. Then all retired within their defenses once more, to review the
situation.

 
          
The
holders of the tavern had never been as desperately assaulted as those at the
mill. Coming among his neighbors, Mark heard what had happened—the arrival of
Simon Durwell, the quick run of the Jarrett household into the tavern building.
Ramsey had been there, and a priceless addition to the force. Inside the
tavern, with shutters closed and doors barred, everyone had waited. And the
shrieking, bounding onslaught of Indians on all sides, meant for a successful
surprise, had come to nothing.

 
          
Sure
enough, Esau told Mark exultantly, that openwork fence of poles had halted the
rush, had kept it from striking to close quarters. Indians had fallen to shots
at close range, had crumpled down against the stockade they could not scale,
and their retreating friends had dragged them away to shelter among the trees.
After that, the siege had never again mounted to another advance in big
numbers. There had been only an occasional volley, the most troublesome
shooting from up there on the ridge. But Tsukala and Mark and their band had
come there to dislodge Moxley’s command, scare it into demoralization,
start
the whole rout. Only Jarrett and Hollon had suffered
slight wounds during the defense of the tavern and, in the last moment,
Moxley’s bullet had pierced Celia’s arm.

 
          
After
the Indians were gone, there was a night of watchfulness, but watchfulness with
confidence that there was no dire threat of another pitched battle. At
noon
the next day, help rode in, twenty riflemen
on horseback, a hastily summoned half-company of militia. These had mustered to
the alarm given by travelers who had heard of the Indian menace only on the
morning of the fight.

 
          
That
day and the next, these volunteers combed the woods around Bear Paw Gap and
westward along the river, to beyond the cave home of the Stoke family. Mark and
Tsukala and Esau served as their scouts. No sign, no hint, of a single enemy
remaining in the woods could be found. They reported back. The militiamen
refreshed themselves at the tavern, and their brisk lieutenant signed a voucher
that would give Mace Hollon pay for food and drink and lodging. Then they rode
off.

 
          
There
was no way of telling how many of the outlaw horde had fallen in the two
attacks. The survivors had borne their killed and wounded away with them. Some
of the settlers guessed that Moxley must have led three dozen fierce, greedy
warriors, and that nearly half of these had been struck down. But two were known
to be finished forever—Jipi, the huge Cherokee banished by his own kinsmen, and
Moxley himself.

 
          
Mark
drew a deep breath as he thought of these things, and then managed a rather
weary grin. “I’m done with wool gathering,” he said. “It’s over, the whole
matter, and I but wish I could put it from my mind.”

 
          
“I’ll
never forget it,” declared Celia earnestly. “All those savages, like walking
spirits of evil, and the most evil among them Quill Moxley—”

 
          
She
broke off, trembling. Her blue eyes studied her bandaged wound.

 
          
“Bad
hearts,” commented Tsukala.
“Yuh,
bad.
But the good hearts were stronger. Braver.” He
gazed at Mark. “Young warrior, you fought, you planned, like an old warrior.
Like a chief.”

 
          
Mark
felt more nervous at that praise than he had felt during the hours of stark
peril.

 
          
“Ha,
friend Tsukala, you tell the plain truth,” spoke up Mark’s father heartily. “I
rejoice in my son’s courage and sense. He played the man. I will grow old, but
I know that he can flourish and be great here.”

 
          
“In
the town we’ll build,” added Seth Ramsey, strolling into the yard. “We’ve been
frontiersmen and farmers and fighters, but I look for us to be townsmen.”

 
          
“That
will be long in future,” Mrs. Jarrett said.

           
“Just now, I am thinking of the
present, and the days that will come upon us shortly. ’Tis autumn now, and
after autumn comes our winter. ’Twill be cold here in this high country, with
ice and snow.”

 
          
“But
we’re provisioned for any winter’s rage,” said Ramsey. “Moxley’s Indians never
got to our homes beyond the ridge, to plunder or to burn.”

 
          
“Nor
had they time to destroy here,” said Jarrett. That was true, Mark pondered, and
it was providential as well. The Indians had not set torch to cabin or crib or
haystack. They had meant to destroy the settlers, and then enrich themselves
with the captured spoil. After that might have
come
burnings. But it had never reached that point. Almost from the first, the
attempted raid had been a failure.

 
          
“The
last of our harvest can now be gathered in, and we’ll keep guard as we gather
it,” Jarrett amplified. “But I’ll hazard that no single rascal among them dares
prowl back here.”

 
          
“Ahi,
they are scattered like leaves,”
Tsukala said. “They will not stop running for many days. They think they have
good luck to be alive, to get away from you.”

 
          
“Sorry
I am to hear that, Tsukala,” said Will. He had been perched on a stool, knife
in hand, carefully shaving and tapering the two ends of a new bow stave,
stronger and longer than his old one. “Would
I’d
had
this bow when we were penned up there at the tavern,” he said. “I loosed
several shafts with the other weak one, but alack, I fear none struck an enemy.
I could wish they’d harden their craven hearts and come back within bowshot of
me.”

 
          
“That
is not my wish,” said Mark in blunt, big- brotherly fashion. “I wish rather
that they’d never stop running, to the very ends of the earth. If they don’t
come back to Bear Paw Gap for a hundred years, ’twill still be too soon for
me.”

 
          
“Aye,
but you had all the fun of that battle at the mill,” was Will’s envious
rejoinder.

 
          
Mark
grimaced at Will’s warlike manner. “Don’t think it was fun, Will,” he said.
“True, it came off well, with none of us hurt. But again and again, it seemed
to me that my hair was as loose upon my skull as mown grass, ready for a
scalp-taker to lift away.”

 
          
“Hush,
Mark, that is not funny,” Celia protested. Will began to whittle a notch at one
end of the stave. “Did I not know you better,” he said to Mark, “I’d think you
spoke with a faint heart.”

 
          
“And
you’d think wrongly, Will,” Seth Ramsey said at once. “A brave man will fight
if need be, and win the fight; but he never goes to battle like a happy boy to
a pig-roasting. He learns better than that in the very first fight he sees and
takes a share in.”

 
          
Mark
made no comment. He gazed at the cribs and sheds, and at the field beyond where
the last ripe ears of corn were ready for picking and storing. He remembered
that his mother hoped to have a flock of chickens next year, that his father
had spoken of a sty where they would fatten hogs. He let his eyes shift to the
woodpile near the house. It had diminished of late. Perhaps tomorrow he’d whet
the axe and go to where two trees had fallen beyond the cleared land, cut away
their branches and cut them into proper lengths for the hearths. When that cold
winter came, it would be well to have crackling fires to cheer the house.

 
          
Someone
else was coming to join the group. Mark recognized his uncle Mace, and with him
a plump, swift-stepping man in a green riding coat and stout, shiny boots.
Beneath his smartly cocked hat, his hair showed neatly queued and powdered.

 
          
“Hugh,”
Hollon said as he came close, “I bring you Mr. James Tisford, just ridden in
from Pine Fort to speak with you.”

 
          
James
Tisford tramped across the dooryard and offered his plump red hand to Hugh
Jarrett. “Your servant, Squire, and happy I am to see you sound and safe after
all this fighting,” he said, like one coming at once to the point. “You’re a
justice of the peace, as I know from records at our court house back to
eastward.”

 
          
“Aye,
the governor so honored me a few months back,” said Jarrett, rising to shake
hands. “We’re such a distance away from Pine Fort that we keep only haphazard
acquaintance there, I grieve to say.”
“ ’Tis
a goodly
distance, even with the road so well improved,” agreed James Tisford heavily.
“I had a two-day ride of it, on my bay horse Valiant who can travel as far in a
day as any nag in these parts. ’Tis this very distance that makes it my errand,
to come and talk here.”

 
          
“And
how can we serve you, Mr. Tisford?” Jarrett asked him.

 
          
“You
can serve the whole State of
North Carolina
passing well, as I hope,” Tisford said,
with every word impressively weighted. “Again I say, distances are far, and
homesteaders more numerous with each passing week. I am head of the Court of
Pleas and Quarter Sessions, and I am empowered to tell you that a move is afoot
for a vote to cut our vast county into smaller counties. And here,” Tisford let
his voice ring out, “in the place where your homes are at the center of the
area, a new county will be voted and formed if so be you approve.”