Soul Catcher (14 page)

grew nearer. Finally, Cain reached for his holster lying on the ground beside him, drew his revolver, and fired.

In a moment there was a chaotic scrambling about him. The others appeared suddenly, weapons drawn.

"The hell you shooting at?" Strofe said.

Quickly regaining his senses, Cain mumbled, "I saw something. A wolf, I think."

"Which way, Mr. Cain?" asked Little Strofe, angling his big musket toward the dark.

"Awh, hell," Preacher scoffed. "Ain't no wolf come this close to camp."

"I saw something," Cain insisted. "I tell you I did."

Preacher smiled at him. "He just stewed is all."

Chapter 5.

The predawn morning found Cain awash in a dream of the mestiza girl. A sharp, sweet pain started just behind his breastbone and worked its way up into his mouth and pulsated there like a toothache. It was, though, a pain he was loath to relinquish. In the chilled darkness before sunrise, he lay on the ground, trying to hold on to the dream, clinging to it the way a freezing man might cling to a memory of fire. In it he wasn't wounded nor was she dead, yet at the periphery of his consciousness he sensed both facts as things irrevocable, lurking beyond the frail boundaries of the dream; in fact, such knowledge colored and deepened what he felt, made it all the more poignant, for he sensed the image was ephemeral and would not last. And so, for several moments he remained still, fighting to stay in her warm embrace. But even in the dream, he soon felt the pull of duty, the weight of worldly concerns. I have to go, he told her. Cain, she cried, pleading in her strange tongue, trying to dissuade him with kisses and the sweet lure of her body. In the next moment, he heard someone come clomping into camp, curse when he stubbed his foot in the semidarkness, and the dream of the girl slipped out of his mind and vanished like smoke on a windy day.

Cain got up and stumbled down to the river, relieved himself, then headed back up to get his straight razor. He washed his face in the dagger-cold water. With his razor he began to hack away at his beard, the first time in nearly three weeks. When his face was cleanshaven, he felt better for it, nearly human.

"See any more a them wolves, Cain?" Preacher taunted when he returned to camp.

After they ate breakfast, they saddled up and rode toward John Brown's farm. The day continued cold, but at least the skies were clear, the sun offering a faint warmth. For the first time they could see the tops of the mountains, which looked to them like arrows of ice piercing the heavens. They reached the place just as the sun was coming over a peak to the east shaped like the head of an elephant. As they had outside the Negro village, they took up a position in the woods where they could watch unseen. Cain took out his spyglass and scanned the place.

"Is that it?" Strofe asked Cain.

"I reckon."

Cain was surprised by Brown's farm, modest, even spartan--a small two-story main house with a barn and several smaller outbuildings, hog pen, chicken coop, corncrib. The other thing he noticed was that the place didn't look as if it had been tended to with more than a cursory hand. The barn roof was badly in need of being reshingled, and a couple of fence posts holding in the cattle were down. One of the hay fields hadn't been cut the previous season and it was rife with ragweed. And the pastureland was strewn with rocks and sapling trees and thistle, which could cut the bag of a milk cow. In front of the main house, some twenty yards away lay a huge boulder, something that looked altogether alien there, as if a part of the moon had broken off and fallen to Earth. Beside it rested a single weathered headstone, whose inscription Cain couldn't make out from this distance. He wondered what his own father would think of a man who ran such a shoddy enterprise. Then again, he supposed that someone hell-bent on a race war wouldn't have much time to concern himself with such mundane things.

For a while nobody stirred out of the house, and save for the frail line of smoke weaving its way from the top of the chimney, the place looked almost abandoned. Finally, though, a young, lanky, red-haired man emerged from the front door and went out to the barn, carrying a milk pail. He was clean-shaven, of medium build, and he walked hunched over, not with the plodding strides of a farmer but with the sullen, distracted steps of a jilted lover. He returned after finishing the milking and entered the house. For a long time after that, they saw no more movement.

"Dang, them Yankees k-keep banker's hours," Little Strofe kidded.

Finally, the door opened again and three men came shuffling out. They stood talking in the dirt path in front of the house, their breaths smoky in the cold air. With his spyglass, Cain inspected them more closely. Two were younger, one the red-haired man they'd seen earlier, the second a tall youth, broad shouldered, with a full beard and dark hair that came to his collar. Both were well made, handsome in an obdurate, uncompromising sort of way, and had enough similarity of feature to suggest they were siblings. They looked to the third as small schoolchildren might view a stern master from whom they expected either enlightenment or severe punishment at any moment. Though facing him, they kept their eyes downcast and waited upon his word. This man was older, in his fifties, of average height, stiff and erect as a gravestone, with a wild bush of gray beard that spilled down his frock coat. He was dressed all in black--hat, vest, coat, homespun wool trousers, though his clothing appeared well worn and a bit on the shabby side. In his hand he held a paper of some sort, which he tapped impatiently against his leg. His face was weathered as a cedar fence post, his deep-set eyes, even at this distance Cain could tell, sharp and forceful. He remained silent for a prolonged time, looking out over his property, as if lost in thought.

Brown's gaze was at once very much that of a man of this world, vigilant and cautious, filled with a crusty shrewdness, like a farmer surveying the lay of his land, taking note of the weather, weighing the chance for success of his crops, whether he should put more land under plow or use it for grazing. At the same time, there was in his stare a muted fierceness, something distant and hard and intractable, otherworldly, even demonic. Cain thought it the look of one who'd seen either paradise or hell, or perhaps both, and could not pry the competing visions from his thoughts. The image seemed seared on his countenance. It put Cain in mind of Satan's words to Beelzebub after their failed rebellion--But O how falVn! how changed. That's what Brown seemed like, a man who'd gone through some sweeping alteration. Perhaps, Cain thought, it was what Moses must have looked like when he'd returned from Mount Sinai.

"That him?" Strofe asked.

"I would say so," Cain replied. So here was the infamous abolitionist, the cold-blooded murderer of entire families out in Kansas. Cain had seen a single sketch of Brown in the Richmond paper after the massacres out in Kansas. It bore, he supposed, some slight resemblance to this man, but the sketch was more an artist's caricature, for in it he had appeared like some terrible beast, an animal gone berserk--a rifle in one hand, a bloody machete in the other, his fevered eyes burning with his fanatical mission. At his feet were the bloodied carcasses of women and children, whole families he'd slaughtered in his attempt to keep Kansas free. Just a newspaperman's hyperbole intended to sell papers. Still, Cain had seen such men in his travels north, dangerous men, fanatical abolitionists who would not stop at murder to free the Negro, who would sacrifice anything, all their material possessions, their very lives and those of their children, even the country, to set the black man free. He believed what others had said about Brown, how he was ready, even eager, to die for his ideals. Cain would rather fight ten men who preferred living for what they believed in rather than one like Brown, who didn't give a fig for his own neck. He knew him to be the most dangerous sort of adversary, as his own life was but a pawn in the service of his grand vision.

"Those his boys?" asked Strofe.

Cain shrugged.

From the scabbard on Little Strofe's horse, Preacher had taken out the Boyer and was now aiming it at the man, aligning him along the peep sight.

"What you d-doing with my gun?" Little Strofe asked.

"Could take the bastard out right now."

"Put that away," Strofe said.

"Deserves it for what he done."

"We don't want no truck with him," replied Strofe.

"He's the one brought trouble on his own self. Weren't for his kind, our niggers wouldn't get all these quare notions about running off."

"Let the devil take him," Strofe said. "Mr. Eberly's not paying for his hide."

But Preacher continued to aim the gun at Brown.

"You heard him," Cain said. "Put that damn thing away before it goes off."

Preacher turned so the barrel of the big gun was angled in Cain's direction. "Ain't nothin' gone go off till I wants it to," he said, and smiled. Nonetheless, he got up and went over and put the gun back in the scabbard.

After a few minutes, the three men they were watching stopped talking and headed into the barn. When they emerged finally, Brown's sons were astride a roan and a bay, while Brown himself was seated in a wagon hitched to a large dappled white draft horse. Before they pulled out, Brown called something back toward the barn, and a young Negro came sauntering out. He stood talking to Brown in the wagon.

"Well, I'll be," Strofe replied with a little laugh.

"That him?" Cain asked.

"That's Henry, all right."

"So the girl can't be far off," Cain added.

Brown pointed off toward a field to the south and seemed to be giving the Negro instructions of some kind. The black man nodded. Then Brown did an odd thing. He paused, turned, and looked beyond the Negro, toward the woods where Cain and the others waited. It appeared as if he were looking at them. Through the spyglass, Cain watched the man up close. His eyes were dark, a slate gray like winter rain, but, too, with a bright gleam to them of one who has been or should be in a lunatic asylum. For just a moment, Cain felt as if he'd spotted him, as if the man were looking eye to eye with him. But then he turned away and gave the reins a sharp crack, and the white draft horse started off along the road.

The Negro went back into the barn and came out leading a mule. He hitched the mule to a cart and then brought it around to the side of the barn, where he started to load the back of the cart with dung from a large pile. The four men in the woods watched him. When he was finished, he got in the seat of the cart and rode it out into the field some quarter mile distant from the main house. Cain told them to mount up, and they followed him, careful to stick to the cover of the woods. They watched as Henry swatted the mule with a switch, and the animal began plodding mechanically along the field; the Negro followed on foot with a pitchfork, spreading the manure. Cain and the others waited until he came close to the edge of the woods, and when he turned and started going the other way, they charged out of their hiding place on their horses. The Negro tried to run as did the boy they'd captured earlier, but this one was heavier and slow of foot, and the field was easy to ride over with the horses. They caught up with him before he'd gone twenty paces and pounced on him. Unlike the other one, this one offered little resistance. They shoved a rag in his mouth and threw a canvas hood over his head, then placed the shackles on his wrists. They draped him over the pommel of Little Strofe's mule and they all rode hard off into the woods, just in case anyone from up at the house had seen them.

They stopped finally in a clearing that had been ravaged by fire in the recent past. All of the tree trunks in the area were scorched and naked, sticking up out of the ground like blackened fingers. Half-burnt logs lay fallen at angles this way and that. They threw the Negro on the ground and yanked off his hood. He held his shackled hands over his eyes against the sunlight. Squinting, he stared up at Strofe as if he were viewing a specter.

"How'do, Henry," said the man, who squatted beside him.

"Mr. Strofe, dat you?"

The big man laughed. "Didn't figure to lay eyes on me again, did you? Not this side of hell anyway."

"No suh. I sholy didn't," he said, tittering nervously.

"When you gonna learn to stay where you belong? Instead of making me chase after you all over creation."