Soul Catcher (15 page)

"I didn't mean you no trouble, Mr. Strofe. I swear I didn't."

"But you did. You caused me a whole heap a trouble. When you get back, Mr. Eberly's gonna have you whupped but good, Henry."

"Oh, please no," the Negro pleaded, folding his manacled hands together in supplication. "I won't run no more. I promise."

"Bet you get a hunnerd this time. Enough so you get the flyblows."

Cain had heard the expression before. It was when a slave was flogged so hard that the flesh on his back started to rot and draw flies.

"Lordy, Mr. Strofe. You knows I bleeds real easy."

"Should a thought of that before you up and run again."

"You put in a good word for me, won't ya, Mr. Strofe. Tell massa I didn't put up no fuss comin' back with y'all."

"Too late for that, Henry. How did you manage to escape the dogs?"

This brought a smile of pride to the Negro's lips. "I found me a new grave in the cemetery and took some a dat dead folks dirt and put it in my shoes."

Curious, Cain asked, "What good would that do you?"

"Why, ever'body know dogs can't set on no trail if'n they's grave dirt on the feets."

Cain guessed him to be in his early twenties. He was stout, tending to softness, with a pudgy face and a round plump body. He didn't look much like a field hand, didn't have that lean, muscular frame of one used to working hard. Cain did notice, however, the stained fingernails and palms, and he guessed he'd worked in the tannery. And then, of course, there was the missing right ear, a sign that he'd run before. Cain stood by his horse and glanced out over the burnt section of forest. Not far away he saw on the ground the white skull of some animal. It was long and narrow, broad between the empty eye sockets. Deer, he thought. He wondered if the animal had been dead before the fire started. Or if it had been trapped here and waited in a panic as the fire came surging through.

"What were you doing for Brown?" Cain asked.

"Workin' fo' him."

"Stupid darkie. Run all this way to be somebody else's nigger," Preacher tossed in with a laugh.

"No suh. Massa Brown he doan b'lieve in slavery. He pays me freeman's wages."

"Then he'll just have to get hisself another, won't he now?" Preacher said.

"So where is she, Henry?" Strofe asked.

"Who?"

"Don't play dumb with me. Rosetta."

"Oh, her."

"Yeah, her. Mr. Eberly's mighty interested in her whereabouts."

"I don't know where she at, Mr. Strofe. I truly don't."

"We know you two ran off together."

"Didn't do no such a thing."

"You saying Rosetta didn't run with you?"

"No suh. We run off at the same time. But not together."

"You 'spect me to believe that?" said Strofe as he struck the Negro with the back of his hand. Though the blow couldn't have hurt that much, Henry nonetheless cried out as if in mortal pain.

"Hit's true, massa," cried the Negro. "I swear. I come acrost her out in the woods. She jumped me and near 'bouts cut my throat, she did. She said, 'Whatchu you doin' followin' me, nigger?' Told her I wasn't followin' nobody. Jess runnin' off by my lonesome. You know how Miss Rosetta can be. Plain ornery. But after a while she quiet down and said we could throw in together for a spell."

"You'd better not be lying, Henry," Strofe said, wagging a thick finger in the Negro's face.

"Ain't lying, massa."

"You touch her?"

"Me? No suh. I ain't crazy."

"For your sake, I hope not. Mr. Eberly's already considerable mad at you," the big man repeated. "So where is she, Henry?"

"I done tole you, I don't know."

"You lie to me, it's just gonna make things worse for you."

"Ain't lyin'. Me and Rosetta we split up."

"Where?"

The Negro paused, frowning. "Be a while back. Don't rec'lect too clearly."

Strofe struck the boy again, this time with a fist to the side of his head.

"Where?" the big man repeated.

When the Negro continued to deny knowing where the girl was, Strofe hit him again, harder, this time in the mouth, which brought a trickle of blood.

"Please, Mr. Strofe," he said, holding his hands up in front of his face. "Don't know where she at."

Strofe then instructed his brother and Preacher to come over and give him a hand holding him down.

"This feller here," explained Strofe, indicating Preacher with a nod of his head, "he gets paid two dollars an ear for runaways. So if'n you don't want to part with the other one, you'd best start talking."

Preacher grabbed hold of the remaining ear and yanked it hard so that Henry hollered out.

"Stop your damn caterwauling, nigger," Preacher cried. He then removed his knife from the sheath he kept tied to his leg and brought it up in front of the Negro, twirling it this way and that, for the Negro to have a good look at it. Preacher smiled then, like a child with a new toy. He glanced over at Cain and winked.

"Last chance, Henry," Strofe said. "Where is she?"

"I told you, Mr. Strofe, I don't know."

He nodded to Preacher. But before Preacher had a chance to slice the ear off, the Negro cried, "All right, all right. Back in New York we done split up."

"Where did she go?"

"I don't know 'zactly."

Strofe looked to Preacher again.

"No, wait!" Henry pleaded. "Heard tell she gone to Boston."

"Now why would she go to Boston? You're lying, Henry."

"Ain't lyin', massa."

"Was she fixin' to meet somebody there?"

"Yessum. Some of dem ab'litionist folks, I think."

"What was their name?"

"I don't rightly know."

"Their name, Henry?" demanded Strofe. "Tell us their name, or you're goin' to lose that damn ear."

He lifted his shoulders, and Preacher yanked hard on his ear. The Negro howled again. "Wait, wait. It comin' back to me now."

"I thought it would."

"Name Miss Rosetta said was Howard."

"Howard? You sure?"

"Bes' I can rec'lect."

"Was that the first or last name?" Cain asked.

"Doan know. All's I know she said she gone meet some feller name of Howard."

Strofe glanced over at Cain. "You believe him?" he asked.

Cain looked down at the Negro. "Boston is at least a five-day ride. If we go all the way there and it turns out you're lying, we won't take it kindly, Henry. In fact, we will be downright angry. This Rosetta is going to be there?"

"She say she gone meet up with some folks in Boston. Dat's all I know."

"You're speaking the truth?"

"Yessum, massa, I swear."

"So what do we do now?" Strofe said to Cain. "We could split up. Two of us could bring Henry back while the other two continued on to Boston for the girl."

"But if he's lying, we ought to have him there," Cain said. "Besides, there's Brown to consider."

"What do you mean?" Strofe asked.

"When he finds out the boy's missing, he'll come after him. We oughtn't be split up."

"The hell you talkin' about. Brown don't even own him," Preacher said. "What's in it for him to come after this here nigger?"

"He come after me," Henry piped up. "You watch."

"You just shut your yap, nigger," Strofe cautioned.

Cain looked down at the Negro, then over at the blond-haired man. "He's right. Brown will come after us."

"How the hell do you know what he'll do?" countered Preacher.

"When he finds the boy missing, he'll come looking for him."

"What's he gonna risk his neck for some damn runaway that's nothin' to him?"

"I know the cut of man he is," Cain said. "He sees himself as God's scourge and he won't stop until he finds him. And us."

Several times in his years of slave catching, Cain had found himself the hunted instead of the hunter. Abolitionists or kin of the fugitive or sometimes even the law would form a posse and come after him. All of the skills that had made him good at finding a runaway would then be called upon to keep him from being found. One time he'd tracked a fugitive all the way to Chicago, before catching him and heading back to Kentucky, from where he'd escaped. But some men from the vigilance committee there gathered a posse and chased him as far as the Ohio River before giving up and heading home.

Strofe picked at his beard. "I agree with Cain. We stay together."

"Well, we'd better pull foot then," Cain said.

They mounted up and rode off at a gallop. The runaway, hands manacled, sat on the pack mule behind Little Strofe, who held the reins. They headed back up the long mountain pass they'd crossed two days earlier, and made Keene by noon. Cain purposely stopped at the inn and talked to the nosey innkeeper and let it be known that they were heading due south, for Virginia. He knew that Brown would stop there and inquire if they'd passed through. They left the village and rode south along the valley for a mile, then doubled back before cutting across the river and striking a course for the east.

"What in the Sam Hill we doing, Cain?" Strofe asked.

"Brown will figure we're headed south. At least until he loses our trail."

Chapter 6.

The next morning, Cain opened his eyes as something hit his face.

Then another. And another after that.

"You fixin' to sleep all day, Cain?" a voice came to him. Squinting at the light, Cain opened his eyes to see Preacher squatting a few feet away. He was picking up pebbles and tossing them one at a time at Cain. He threw another, but Cain caught it.

"We s'posed to set on our asses and wait for your majesty? Maybe you'd like me to fetch you some tea and biscuits."

Cain threw off his blanket and sat up. He shivered in the damp cold of morning, stretched. His head wobbled like a worn wagon wheel.

"You w-want I should fix you something to eat, Mr. Cain?" Little Strofe asked.

"Just coffee, please, Mr. Strofe."

He bolted down the cup of coffee, and they quickly saddled up and continued on their way.

Mornings mostly went like that. Each day broke gray and cold over the mountains, with a damp rawness in the air seeping into the men as they slept and tainting their dreams and turning them surly and short-tempered as they went about the business of making fires and cooking breakfast and feeding and saddling the horses. Strofe, who continued to have bowel problems, would rush off into the woods, where they could hear him grunting and groaning as he relieved himself. As they rode along, the runaway, Henry, chatted almost as incessantly as Little Strofe, and it seemed at times as if he wasn't a prisoner so much as one among them out for a pleasant ride. By midday, it usually turned sunny and mild, and the riding became something almost agreeable in its mindlessness. Cain liked the afternoons best, the warm sun lulling on the back of his neck, the sweet smell of pine and horse leather and new earth coming awake after the long sleep of winter, the pleasing palette of colors of birch and tamarack and spruce, the quavering call of mourning doves and the sharp bleat of jays. The two hounds catching scent of something and commencing to howl as they took off after it. An eagle gliding a foot over the river, one talon poised to grab a fish. A fox forming a splash of red as it slipped through the green forest. A moose loping awkwardly across a clearing. Such times as these released his head from the lock of the past, freed him from the ache in his leg, and it felt good to be in the saddle, riding a fine horse, good to be alive and breathing and moving about over the earth instead of silent and still and rotting beneath it. The farther they got from North Elba without any sign of Brown, the more Cain relaxed and felt that perhaps he'd been wrong about the man after all.