Louis L'Amour (7 page)

Vern lay down to sleep. The fat man went away to watch by the shore.

Wind and wave being what they were, ships were often overdue, sometimes for weeks. And sometimes they never appeared.

Lashan had settled down. He had lit his pipe and was smoking. Henry got two bowls, filled them with the stew, and brought them over. As he handed one first to Carrie, then to her, he whispered without looking at her, “Ship's coming. I saw the tops'ls.”

The ship was coming! It was here! Then—

“Tonight,” he whispered, rising from his knees to return to the fire.

Lashan was staring at them. He could not have heard, but had he guessed?

Tonight? How?

T
he silver of moonlight lay upon the leaves; overhead a few fluffs of cloud drifted behind an etching of treetops. We lay among the maples, listening to the night.

“We're nigh the sea,” Yance whispered. “There's a taste of salt on the air.”

“Aye, and a ship offshore.”

“I hope we be not too late.”

“She's not up to anchor yet.”

“I see that. Do we fight the whole crew of them, then?” Yance inquired irritably.

“She's your kin,” I replied coolly, “but if we must fight them, we will. She has no more than twelve guns, and we have two.”

Yance snorted his disgust. He was about to speak when we heard an angry shout, then another and a deal of cursing. “Gone!” Somebody shouted the word. “Gone, you fools! Who was on watch?”

There was a murmur of talk. “Get after them, then!” The voice was strident and angry. “They cannot have gone far! Get them, or by the Lord Harry, I'll-!”

“They've gotten away,” Yance said complacently. “Ah, she's a broth of a lass, that one! She'll be backing up for no man.”

“How far will they get? A lass and a child, and in skirts, yet? In the forest?”

“They'll get far enough, I'm thinking, and there will be us to help.”

“To help, I'm willing,” I said, “but
how?
They will be off into the woods, and those men will go tramping
after, breaking down the brush, trampling the tracks. Ah, they be a pack of fools, then, and they'll see what they have done when morning comes. Far better they'd be to sit tight by the fire until day breaks. How far can two girls go?”

Standing up, I listened for small sounds, for the great oafs down there were crashing about like so many cows drunk from corn squeezings.

A soft wind stirred the leaves, and I tried to set myself in her shoes to figure what she might do, but nothing came to me. She was a canny one, they said, and that might help, but she'd not travel so far with a youngster to hand.

Away from the sea. That was as much as I could guess. Along the shore they'd be seen from the ship and would be out in the open too much. Inland there were Indians to fear, and these girls had been raised up with Indians always a threat.

We moved back, deeper into the woods, holding to a fairly straight line away from the sea.

For an hour or two we heard them threshing about in the woods, frightening the game, causing the birds to fly up, and never a thing did they find. We kept our weapons convenient lest they come upon us, but somehow they did not, and with morning we had a problem.

Where would they go now? The girls had fled, but to where?

We moved away from our camp at first light, and keeping a short distance apart, we began hunting sign. Nobody needed to tell us we were in trouble, for there was no telling where those girls would go.

“Look,” Yance said, squatting nigh a tree, “we got to give them credit for brains. They ain't simply going to run wild in the woods. That Macklin girl is smart, real smart. She'll head inland.”

“It's closer to help if they go south,” I suggested, but I agreed with Yance.

“Closer to help but surely the way they'll be expected to go. The way I see it, they'll head north, hoping
not to meet Indians, and when they are well back from shore, they'll circle around.”

“So what do we do?”

Yance shrugged. “We can try to pick up their trail, but that way we might lead those who are following right to them. I say we strike inland. We go due west, and after the first day we start working north.”

It was what I had been thinking, and it offered our best chance. I had no wish to get into a shooting fight if I could avoid it even though the people who had been holding those girls supposedly knew nothing about us.

We started fast, hitting a dim trail and taking it at a dog trot. We'd been hunting the woods our lives long; like the Indians, we could run all day if need be and often had.

As we ran, I was doing some thinking. The girls must have escaped some time after midnight. Say one or two in the morning. That meant they had been gone anywhere from a few minutes to an hour when their escape was discovered.

They would have fled straightaway, then hidden until the immediate search was over. Then they would have taken off again. Traveling in the woods by night would not be easy, but having much at stake, they'd try to keep going.

Give them, to use a figure, two miles before discovery of their escape, maybe four since then. I slowed down.

“Yance? We better listen. They should be turning south soon.”

He drew up. “How do you figure?”

“I've been remembering that big river we heard tell of. Remember? He told us that river came down from the north, took a big bend, and flowed kind of east-northeast to the sea? That river mouth was a natural harbor, kind of protected from the sea by sandy islands just like the sounds back in Carolina.

“The way I see it, those girls are headed west, and they are going to come to that river or sight it, and then they'll have to turn south.

“Remember that sailor man we talked to in Jamestown? He drew us a diagram in the dust about that river, said it was a natural trade route to the Indians up country without being bothered by those folks around the settlements.”

We ran no more. The forest was of oak and maple, with hillsides here and there covered with the graceful white trunks of the birch. It was very still. A woodpecker tapped busily somewhere not far off, and we saw a small flight of birds holding close to the ground, flying into the brush around a small meadow.

On moccasined feet we moved with no sound, and at brief intervals we paused to listen. Sound carries for some distance, and our ears were now attuned to the natural sounds of the wilderness, so we would quickly detect any sound foreign to the forest.

We came up the side of a knoll, moving among the trees. Leading the way, I topped out between some oaks alongside a clear space. We were high enough to have a view all around, and my eyes caught the movement just as Yance's did.

“Kin?”

“I see 'em.”

Merging our bodies with the trunks of trees beside which we stood, we watched six men coming along a trail behind us. There was no mistaking the man in the lead, for surely there could be no two men of that size who moved as he did. It was Max Bauer.

“Well, what d' you know?” Yance whispered. “Would you guess they was coming to help?”

“Not much.”

“Trailin' us,” Yance said. “I got a notion—”

“No,” I said, “but we can make it hard for them. Not all at once or they'll know we've seen them. Let's just let our trail kind of fade out.”

Several miles ahead we could see another such knoll. “See that? We'll meet there.”

Yance was gone into the brush like a ghost. I swear, that brother of mine could move soft as a cougar, and he was just as mean to tangle with.

I let him go, then slipped off on the other side of the hill, leaving plain enough prints. Then I saw a hard old deadfall lying across some others like it. The bark had peeled off this one leaving the surface bare and smooth as a naked limb. I stepped up on it and walked its length, switched to another, then to a couple of rocks. From there I went into a stream and walked for a quarter of a mile in the water, which was murky from rain runoff higher up.

Coming out on a shelf of rock, I stood still to let most of the water run off me, then followed the rock along the shore. Coming up on several deer, I threw a stick at them, and they ran across a small meadow into the trees, leaving a trail for each. Chuckling, I circled one side of the clearing. They would have to check out each deer's trail to be sure it had not been made by or followed by a man. It would not hold them long, but it would slow them down.

Reaching the knoll almost an hour later, I scrooched down close to a tree and gave study to the country about. Far off to the west and north I could see there was a sort of gap in the trees, which must have been that river that came into the sea up the coast from Cape Ann. That it curved around some, I already knew.

By now, if the maids were still moving, they would be somewhere only a few miles to the north or west of us if we'd been guessing right. Yet the men who were following our trail were tracking
us
, not the girls. Yance joined me.

“Wonder if they know about that river?”

“Doubt it. They wouldn't meet up with many hunters or the like. Wouldn't be fit company. Of course, that Macklin girl was a listener. What I mean is, she paid attention to folks when they talked, and when I was tellin' Temperance about our country, she asked a passel of questions, all of them right canny. Still, not many of those folks get far from the settlements, and she might not.”

It was a worrisome thing, for in the thickness of
the forest we might pass them within a few yards and know naught of it, for knowing nothing of our presence, they would be still if they heard us, suspecting we were enemies.

Near as we could figure it was about fifteen miles from the shore of the sea to the river at the point where we now were. Yet the maids seemed to have headed west and then would turn south, and the area in which they now could do that could be less than five miles, probably less than three.

We gave study to the country, trying to figure how they might travel. Yance gestured toward it. “Hard to believe, with folks needing land that all this lies empty and still.”

“I like it wild,” I said, knowing he did, too. “But think of all the poor back in the old country who would like to have even a small bit of it.”

“Aye.” Yance swept his eyes across the country, alert for any sign of movement, any suggestion of travel. “And I am thinking they will come, Kin. They will come. It is a vast and lonely land now, but it will not be so long.”

We came to our feet and moved away. “You work slowly across to the westward,” I suggested. “I shall go swiftly west and scout the country toward the great river.”

We parted. It was our way to do so when hunting, and we had bird calls or sounds we could use to signal one another; we often worked apart, but we worked as a team.

We must work swiftly now, for those coming behind us would soon know their slaves had escaped and would be coming for them, seeking them out, and us.

What happened within these woods no man would know, and many had died here, unmourned and unknown, and so would it be with us if we erred even slightly.

I had gone scarcely a mile and had paused to listen when I heard the faintest sound; turning my head, I looked into the eyes of a girl, and she into mine.

For a moment neither moved or spoke. She stood slim and graceful as a tall young birch tree, and she looked straight at me, and then she smiled. Others came up behind her, a smaller, younger girl and a tall young black man. He carried a spear and, at his belt, a knife.

“It is all right, Henry,” she said. “He is a Sackett.”

“What,” the black man asked, “is a Sackett?”

She smiled with sudden humor. “Who knows, Henry? It is some strange sort of beast that comes up from the south and brings fresh meat and steals young girls from their homes.”

“I can see,” I said quietly, “why one might steal a girl, although the idea had never occurred to me before.”

“All girls are not easily stolen,” she replied. “But we have been, and now we try to return again home. You will help us, sir?”

“Your mother sent for my brother,” I said. “We both came. But we had best move. Others are behind us who would keep us from helping you.”

“There are those behind us, also,” she said. “You are alone?”

“Yance is here. He will join us soon, I think.”

My eyes went to Henry. “I was also a prisoner,” he said.

“He helped us,” Diana said. “Without him we might not have been able.”

Turning southward then, I led the way into the forest, but first I paused and sent into the sky the call of a lone wolf hunting. There would be no answer, but Yance would know, and he would come.

The black man, and Diana as well, looked lean and fit. Carrie Penney looked a little drawn, a little pale, but there was no time now to think of that. Nor was I worried about Yance. By now Yance would be moving south to join us.

I led off swiftly, moving like a ghost through the close-standing trees and thick brush. Behind me, Diana was astonished by the way I found openings in the
brush where there seemed to be none and how I automatically chose those routes calculated to leave the fewest tracks.

During our frequent pauses she studied Kin Sackett, for this was the man who suddenly had all their lives in the hollow of his palm, up to a point. Diana looked upon him with some skepticism despite the confidence she felt, for she was not one to trust easily. She had liked Yance when she first met him, and her sympathies had been completely with Temperance when she fled the community with him. This new Sackett was taller, quieter, and an altogether more thoughtful man, one, she suspected, of cooler judgment. Despite that, she was wary. Diana Macklin was not one to give herself completely into the hands of anyone.

At the same time she knew her danger and, moreover, the danger the Sacketts entailed by helping. If captured, they would be killed. She and Carrie would be enslaved, but the Sacketts would be killed, and they had nothing to gain.