The Rifle (3 page)

Cornish squinted, then saw it—it had to be eighty paces. Even from a rest he couldn't hit it and he doubted this Byam could. “Shoot closer—”

Before he could finish, the rifle cracked and Cornish saw the limb jerk and fall to the ground.

“Sweet,” Byam said, nodding. “Like honey from a tree after a long, dead winter. “I'll buy it.”

“We haven't discussed worth,” Cornish said. “Now the way I view it . . .”

“On my packhorse I have all my cured hides from last season. A year's work. The pack is yours for the rifle. And I'll give you my old one.”

Cornish thought a moment. That was easily twice what the rifle would bring from anybody else, and Byam took the hesitation wrong, took it as a negative answer and added, “I'll throw in the packhorse as well. The rifle must be mine.”

Cornish sighed. “It isn't the price, it's the rifle. I'm fond of it.”

“You can make another.”

“Not like this one. No, I cannot.”

And Byam grew quiet because they both knew it was true. If he lived to be a hundred, Cornish would never again come close to the sweetness of this rifle. Still, he was to marry Clara and he needed a start. “Done. You keep the horse.”

“No, I said it and I meant it.”

“That would not be fair. You keep the horse and I'll take the pack, as you said first. That will be enough and more than enough.”

And the business was done. Byam unloaded the packhorse and took the rifle and ball mold, a small keg of powder, and twenty pieces of black flint, and left; and not once during the transaction did Cornish take his eyes off the rifle and even when Byam left, rode off into the woods leading the packhorse with the rifle across his lap, even then Cornish watched it, watched the rifle until the trees closed in and he could not see it any longer. Nor was it done yet. He missed the rifle and over the next days found himself looking up where it had hung,
expecting to see it and disappointed, almost grieving when he didn't. At last he said to himself, half aloud, “Enough. He's gone in the woods and probably dropped the rifle off a cliff by now.”

He was wrong. Nothing happens in a vacuum. While he worked on the rifle Cornish was in fact destined to meet Clara and fall in love, and while he worked on the rifle, England—riddled in fear that the colonies in America would grow to dominate and outproduce and take over the world, which in fact is exactly what happened—began to add taxes to Colonial produce and products to try to hold them down. With this they forbade the Americans to sell anywhere but to certain markets in England where the prices were kept viciously low, and compounding the problem they threw an added tax on tea that was little more than coupling insult to injury.

While Cornish worked on the rifle some men in the American colonies rioted, some died, shot down by British soldiers; some men met in a hot, muggy meeting hall in Philadelphia and discussed a declaration one of them, a man named Jefferson, had penned proclaiming independence from England or any form of tyranny.

All of this led to a war. The Americans called it a War of Independence, a Revolutionary War, but to England it was simply a revolt.

Had John Byam continued moving back into the woods, none of this would have affected him, nor the rifle. But as he left Cornish, knowing almost nothing of what had been transpiring for the past two years, having lived in the wilderness as he had, he came to a fork in the trail that led to the right, and even this may not have mattered except that it was on this same day that the British soldiers found stored powder and lead on the Bainbridge farm.

Byam's trail led to the Bainbridge farm and he knew the Bainbridges slightly as a quiet couple who spoke little and worked hard. He had stopped there and been given a hot meal on the way in—as, indeed, the Bainbridges provided for all travelers who passed by. Bainbridge was a nice man, and in fact it was this niceness that led him to trouble. Men had come in the night, men with tired horses and a wagon with shrunken and loosened spokes, and asked to bury their cargo—several hundredweight of lead and coarse-ground cannon powder—at the Bainbridge farm until they could come back for it. Bainbridge could have guessed the powder was for cannon, could have known it was to be used to fight the British, but he ignored it and simply nodded. He after all, American before he British—why shouldn't he help?

But somebody talked and a contingent of British soldiers came just an hour before Byam and found the store of munitions.

Their laws were strict and plain: anybody caught helping the rebels with food, horses, shelter, and especially arms was subject to summary justice without trial and immediate execution by hanging.

As Byam started into the clearing, roughly two hundred yards from the house, he saw two soldiers setting Bainbridge on top of a horse with a rope around his neck and his arms tied to the rear. His wife was standing to the side, her hands clasped in front of her mouth in a double fist, two soldiers in red coats holding her.

Byam did not think about what he was doing except to know that somehow he could not let Bainbridge be hanged. The rifle snapped up, almost by itself; the tiny blade of the front sight settled on the officer sitting on his horse nearby, the sight raised slightly to compensate for distance, and the rifle cracked—one clean, smacking slap of sound across the clearing.

The ball took the officer in the throat, just below the Adam's apple, cutting through at a transverse angle to snap the spine and whip the man from his horse as if hit by a giant hand. He was dead before he hit the ground.

The action did not save Bainbridge. The sound of the rifle startled the horse he was sitting on and it jumped forward, out from beneath Bainbridge, who pitched at an angle and broke his neck and hung there dying while for a stunned second a half-dozen British soldiers looked from Bainbridge kicking and dying to their officer, who was already dead and broken on the ground, and then up to the cloud of smoke that hung where the rifle had fired.

But the surprise was only for an instant. They were, after all, soldiers and used to reacting to danger, and quickly the sergeant assumed command and pointed at the smoke. Byam was hopelessly out of range for the smoothbore weapons of the soldiers to have any accuracy, but they raised and fired on command and he heard the balls whistling as they went past him, over him, two skipping in the dirt well out in front of him, and he also heard a grunt as one of the balls hit his horse high in the chest.

The wound was mortal. Byam could feel the horse sagging and he jumped free of the saddle as the animal hit the ground and then things began to happen very fast. The soldiers all had horses and they mounted, headed out across the field toward Byam.

He could reload, he knew, and perhaps get two of them before they closed on him but that would leave four and they would get him. He pulled a long-bladed knife from his belt and slashed the empty packsaddle from the packhorse, grabbed the mane with one hand, and swung up bareback. There was no time to change the saddle from the dying horse to the packhorse. No time now for anything but running. He threw one quick look at the farmstead where Bainbridge's wife—now a widow—was trying to untie the rope holding her husband, then to the six mounted soldiers galloping at him across the field and he wheeled the packhorse, steering with his knees, and tore off directly into the woods off the trails.

As it was they nearly took him. Byam hadn't time to reload, nor do anything but run, holding the rifle with one hand and the horse's mane with the other, slamming the horse's ribs with his heels, wishing he had spurs.

The English soldiers did have spurs and raked their horses to more speed and would have caught Byam except that he suddenly felt the horse drop out from beneath him into a ten-foot-deep ravine. The packhorse was surefooted after all the mountain work he had done trapping and he landed cleanly, pivoted, and ran off down the floor of the ravine as if he'd been doing it all his life.

The English horses were not so good and the ravine proved a disaster for three of them, breaking their legs on impact. One other horse was badly sprained and most of the riders were knocked senseless. Two of them were all right, the sergeant and one private, but the sergeant shook his head and killed the chase. It was just as well, for the private remembered the shot Byam had taken across the field and had absolutely no desire to tear off after him with only one man.

Byam went free.

And once more fate took over. Had he simply melted back into the woods he would have been fine. The soldiers were never close enough to identify him, were from another sector and on temporary duty. Byam would have vanished into obscurity.

But when he'd ridden hard for an hour—he thought six or eight miles—he burst into a smaller clearing, perhaps eighty yards across, and found himself the center of attention for nearly a hundred well-armed men all dressed in green with fringed coats, who all seemed to be aiming rifles at Byam.

He wheeled the horse to a stop and slid off. Whoever they were, they weren't British, and when one of them stepped forward Byam faced him openly.

“Do you have a name?” the green-coated man asked.

“Do you?” Byam said by way of an answer. He reloaded while he spoke, seating the ball. He was not yet certain the British soldiers weren't coming and he wanted to be ready if they should suddenly burst upon the scene.

“I am John,” the man said and Byam grinned.

“I am as well.”

“Are you a loyalist?”

Byam shrugged. “I don't know. I've been in the forest and don't know the names.”

“Do you favor the British or the fight for independence?”

“I know nothing of this independence you speak of, but I do not favor the British.” Byam looked back the direction he'd come. “There are some after me.”

This caused a stir in the men. They quickly led their horses out of the clearing into the brush at the sides except for the leader, who stayed with Byam and asked many questions about the British—how many, how they were armed, how mounted, why they were after Byam. And here Byam decided it was all right to tell the truth.

“I shot an officer, that's why they chase me.” He quickly told the story of Bainbndge being hanged and how he had fired.

“How far?” the leader asked. “I know—knew Bainbridge well. He was a good friend who fed me often and I know his place. Where were you and where was the officer when you fired?”

Byam told him.

“That's two hundred paces if it's a foot,” the leader said. “Are you certain?”

“I have had the rifle but one day and do not know it well yet, but I can tell you that I have never seen or heard of a sweeter one.”

“May I see it?”

Byam held for a beat and then nodded. He was completely surrounded by men with rifles and guns. If they chose to take him it would be over in a second. He handed the rifle over.

The man nodded, held the rifle for a moment, and then handed it back without looking at it. He hadn't cared about the rifle so much as the fact that Byam would hand it to him—a kind of test.

“Who are you?” Byam asked, taking the rifle back into his hands. “And why do you fight the British?”

“We are volunteers—McNary's Rangers. I am McNary. And we fight the British for independence—for a free America.”

Byam was surprised. “How did this come about? America without England? How can that be?”

“How long were you in the western forests?”

Byam frowned, thinking. “Two years and a bit more. I came out once to go to a trader, but there was no talk of fighting the British.”

“Well there is now. And like it or not you're in the thick of it—killing a British officer. They'll be hunting you hard.”

Byam looked back the way he had come. “I'm not an easy man to catch.”

“Still, they'll come for you. Why not ride with us?”

“You?”

“What's against it? We eat when we can, fight when we can—and there's safety in numbers. We're a hard-moving, hard-fighting set of volunteers.”

“Where are you bound for?”

“South. General Washington is down by New York and we thought to join him there and help the cause. We could use another rifle, especially if you can shoot the way you say you can.”

“Is there a saddle for me? I had to leave mine when they shot my horse.”

“A saddle, cup, spoon, and bowl—and all the dry powder and pure lead you'll need.”

“Well then, done and done,” Byam said. “It sounds right.”

And so it proved to be, at least for a time. Byam took the saddle they gave him—and the spoon, cup, and bowl—and joined them on the ride to New York.

Had they ridden straight through and the roads been good they might have done it in ten days to two weeks.

But it rained and the roads were little more than mud trails and they constantly ran into British patrols. Usually the patrols were small and they brushed them aside after brief fighting—little more than hit-and-run skirmishes—and always the rifle of Byam spoke and always one or two British officers went down, taken cleanly and often at long ranges.

Once they encountered a full company of British regulars who gave them a stiff fight and would have done more damage—the rangers lost three men killed and six more wounded—but the British were on foot and the rangers escaped on their horses before they could be pinned down.

As it was, the trip to New York took close to six weeks—rain, mud, and fighting all the way—and when they arrived they found Washington locked in a stalemate that was little more than trench fighting.

Sitting in mud trenches to fight a long-suffering war where an enemy you couldn't see lobbed mortar and cannon shot into you at odd intervals did not suit the free-roving spirit of the volunteers and they chafed at the bit to be loosed to fight their own way.

All, that is, but Byam. The situation was almost perfect for his abilities. The British and Colonial lines were three hundred yards apart, give or take a bit of wobble in trenches, and the static fighting meant that men grew careless. The English simply couldn't believe it possible to shoot a rifle—or what they called a gun—more than eighty or ninety yards and they viewed the distance between the trenches as being three times as far as a gun could shoot. Consequently, they often stood and exposed themselves to possible fire, believing they were safe.