The Ballad of Frankie Silver (35 page)

I looked across the table at my wife’s expression of dismay. She had clapped one hand to her mouth, as if determined to keep from crying out in protest of my going. I had no intention of doing so, however. Surely Elizabeth did not imagine that a respectable country lawyer and clerk of court would abandon his day’s business to go haring through the mountain wilderness with a horde of vigilantes? After the spring rains, the roads would be indistinguishable from the creeks. And what would her father the squire say if the fine saddle horse he had given me as a wedding gift came back lame from such a fool’s errand?

“I leave the chase in your capable hands, Jack,” I told the constable. “As an officer of the court, I should stay in town. There may be warrants to be drawn up, or other legal matters that need tending to.”

He saw the sense in this—indeed, he saw more sense in this than there was, for I foresaw no legal business that would require my presence—but the excuse satisfied him, and presently Elizabeth and I were able to return to our breakfast in peace, though neither of us had much appetite for it anymore.

“She has escaped from jail!” said my wife in a tone of wonder. “I cannot believe it! How could she manage such a thing?”

“With help, no doubt.” It was not my place to speculate on such matters, and I keep my thoughts to myself. Elizabeth has too many sisters to confide in.

“But who could have helped her?”

I smiled, thinking again of John Sevier. “Perhaps it was Eliza Grace McDowell, my dear. Her family seems to make a practice of it.”

“Oh, Burgess, do be serious!” I don’t know whether Elizabeth took my meaning or not. I did not remind her of the incident. At last she said, “Do you think they will catch her?”

“I hope not,” I said, before I thought better of it. I realized that my reluctance to see the prisoner recaptured was the real reason that I had been unwilling to join the searchers—though I am sure that I would have been of little use to the seasoned hunters and woodsmen who were on her trail. I did not want her found. So much simpler to let the prisoner disappear into the wilderness of Tennessee, as John Sevier once did a generation ago. Then John Boone would not have to dread the grim duty of hanging a woman, and we could end all of the clamoring to young Governor Swain, whose concerns lie elsewhere. Besides, if they caught Frankie Silver, I felt sure that it would go hard on her father and brother, who surely took her away—but it might also cause harm to the person who let her go. Such a trial would divide Morganton into hostile opposing camps, and such a rift would profit nothing. So, guilty or innocent, I wished Mrs. Silver Godspeed in her flight across the mountains, and I prayed that I might never see her again.

*   *   *

Her escape was a nine days’ wonder in our little country town. People seemed to talk of nothing else, and they never tired of speculating on who might be responsible for the escape. I told no one of my conversation with John Boone, and he rode west with a search party, for it was his sworn duty to bring back an escaped prisoner, whatever his private feelings in the matter may have been.

I wonder if any of those searchers wanted to catch the prisoner because they thought she deserved to die, or if they were simply acting on impulse, like hounds who will chase anything that runs, simply because it runs. It was a game of hide-and-seek, with the trackers pitting their skills against the wiles of the elusive prey. I am sure that there was a great deal of shouting and boasting and drinking done by the posse, and that in the end it all seemed such a great sport to them that they forgot the deadly purpose of their chase.

She was not taken easily. Day after day went by with no word from the searchers, and news of the escape spread far beyond the borders of Burke County. Colonel Newland said that even the Raleigh newspaper carried an article about the missing prisoner, and we knew that other lawmen from the neighboring counties had joined in the search. Still, it had been a good many days since her escape, and it seemed likely that she was gone for good.

“Seven days,” Miss Mary announced at dinner one night. “Surely she is out of reach by now. The Tennessee border is four days’ ride at most, is it not?”

The squire gave his daughter a reproving glare. Such things are not talked of before white linen and crystal. “Are you referring to the escaped murderess, my dear?”

“Of course she is, Father,” said Elizabeth. “We can talk of nothing else! We are quite beside ourselves with worry.”

“I don’t think you need worry,” her father replied. “I do not believe that Mrs. Silver will break in to Belvidere and take an ax to us in our beds.”

The Erwin women all stared at him for a moment’s consternation before they burst into laughter. It is the squire’s way of joking to pretend to misunderstand his wife and children, and then to allow himself to be instructed in the true significance of their remarks.

“Oh, really, Daddy!” said Delia, who is the baby of the family, nearly twenty, and a great pet of her father. “We do not think Mrs. Silver presents any danger to anyone. We are all
so
in hopes that she will get away!”

“Really?” said the squire in mock amazement. “You wish her to escape justice? Delia, my dear, has anyone informed your Dr. Hardy of your feelings regarding husband killing?”

Delia squealed and blushed prettily at the mention of her most ardent admirer, and the others began to laugh and tease her, and so the subject was forgotten. Later, however, as we were leaving the table, Miss Mary turned to me and murmured, “I hope that Delia will be more fortunate in her choice of a husband than Mrs. Silver was.”

“There is no doubt of that,” I said. “And as for Mrs. Silver, at least it has ended well. She has made her escape, and we can only hope that she deserved this second chance at life that she has been given. Even now she is probably safe in Tennessee, making plans to go west and picking the wild blackberries she spoke of so fondly.”

“I hope that you are right,” said Miss Mary. “But I shall continue to pray for her deliverance. Indeed, I will not rest easy about it until the hunt is abandoned and the last of the searchers has come back from the mountains.”

“Do you not think that the governor would pardon her if she returns?”

My sister-in-law hesitated. “Very likely he would,” she said. “But I think it is best not to put too much faith in men—or governments.”

*   *   *

I heard the returning search party before I saw them. I had walked down to Newland’s to see if the stagecoach had arrived yet, and just as I was crossing the street to have a word with the colonel himself, a mighty whoop and a couple of piercing yells echoed down the street, accompanied by the drumming of hooves. A frail old man on a nearby porch jumped up and reached for his pistol before he remembered himself. The Indians had been gone for a generation or more. No one any younger than the old man would have even considered the possibility of a raid, for such Indians as there were nowadays lived farther to the west, or miles to the south in the Cherokee towns like Chota. These screaming warriors were savages of a different kind, and an instant after I heard their whooping I knew what it meant: the search party had come back, successful in their quest.

I clambered onto the safety of Newland’s porch, in case the revelers decided to take a victory gallop along the main street of Morganton. Colonel Newland was emerging from his office just as I reached my vantage point by his doorway.

“What is all this commotion?” he demanded, peering down the street in the direction of the noisemaking.

“I am afraid it is the posse,” I told him.

He glanced at me as if he wanted to dispute my theory, but curiosity got the better of both of us, and we jettisoned the argument in favor of leaning across the railings of the stage-office porch, straining for a glimpse of the returning riders. A moment later the procession came into view. Half a dozen mud-caked riders on sweat-soaked horses rounded the bend in the road. The three leaders were waving their hats and shouting to passersby, glorying in the impromptu parade. Three more solemn horsemen followed a short distance behind, each holding the reins of his own mount, each leading a second horse on a short rope. I did not immediately recognize any of the search-party members, but I knew at once the identity of the three ragged and weary persons tied to the saddles of the horses in tow.

Isaiah Stewart sat slumped forward, as if his weariness had overcome even his sorrow and his anger. His clothing was torn and muddy, and there were flecks of blood in his grizzled beard. He had not been taken easily, I thought. Beside him, Jackson Stewart sat up, defiantly glaring at the onlookers as though daring them to jeer at his plight. He is a great bear of a man, six feet in height and not lacking in girth, and all the welts and bruises upon him I imagined had been repaid with interest upon the persons of his captors. He wore iron shackles about his wrists, and over them a rope tying him to the saddle. Although Frankie Silver would have been regarded as the main prisoner, it was this accessory to her escape that the posse most feared. Mrs. Silver herself rode with eyes downcast, as oblivious to the stares of the crowd as she had been at her trial. Her hands were bound with rope, but her feet dangled at the horse’s side, not tied together beneath the belly of her mount, as were those of her accomplices. She was wearing men’s clothing: buckskin breeches and a homespun shirt beneath a man’s coat, and her blond hair tumbled out from beneath a wide-brimmed leather hat, although it must have been bound up when the searchers came upon them. She was small and sturdy enough to pass for a young boy. I thought the clothes must have belonged to Blackston Stewart, and I wondered if he had been left at home to tend the homestead, or if he had got away into the forest when the lawmen came.

An old man in the crowd called out: “How did ye take her, boys?”

One of the rear guard reined in his bay mare, and leaned back in the saddle with a grin of lazy triumph.
Whatever happened,
I thought,
you had least to do with it.
“Well,” he said, “it weren’t an easy hunt. It’s perilous country out there, and you could turn around twice and be lost, but we tracked them well enough, though the going was slow when they left the trail and took to the woods. We might not have caught them at all, but for the high water.”

Someone laughed and called out, “Come hell or high water, was it?”

“Some of both, I reckon,” said the rider. “We reckoned on them heading west into Buncombe County and then making for the Tennessee line, but that is not what they done. They was in Rutherford County when we caught up to them, trying to ford the river, which was so swollen from the spring rains that their horses could not manage the crossing.”

“Did you shoot it out with them?”

The sad little procession had moved on up the street now, and the rider looked after them as if he wanted to end the talk and catch up to the others, but after a moment he perceived that they were only a few yards from the jail, and there were townsmen aplenty surrounding them now, eager to have a tiny part in the recapture of a notorious outlaw so that they, too, might become tellers of tales. I watched the prisoners being dragged from their horses, and I wondered where it was they were headed. Rutherford County is due south of us, and not on the way to Tennessee. Perhaps the Stewarts originally came from down that way, and they were taking Frankie back to kinfolk there, or in South Carolina.
Anywhere but here
, I thought. For if ever they could have eluded the searchers and made them turn back with no more leads to follow, they would have got away. The sheriff had neither the means nor the heart to prolong the search for her. Another day would have seen her safe.

Seeing that he was no longer needed among the hunters, the straggling horseman mopped his brow with a muddy rag and turned his attention back to the little crowd that hung on his every word.

“Well, now, I can’t say that I heard tell of any shooting,” he said. “The fugitives were hoping to put so much distance between themselves and Burke County that they would never have to see us at all, and, failing that, they were thinking they could outsmart us. Old Frankie was dressed as a boy, and the other two were trying to get a loaded wagon over the river. So one of the trackers—a fellow name of Gouge, I think it was—went up to the wagon and says to the little lad, ‘You’re Frankie Silver, ain’t you?’ She ducks her head and says, ‘No, sir. My name is Tommy.’” The rider paused and grinned. “That big fellow yonder was a-driving the wagon, and he heard them talking. ‘That’s right!’ he hollers out. ‘
Her
name is Tommy.’”

The listeners roared appreciatively, and several of them echoed, “
Her
name is Tommy,” to impress it in their minds before they hurried away to regale their friends with the news.

I wondered if it had happened that way, or if the fellow had used the ride back to Morganton to come up with a rousing tale for the taverns. He would drink his fill tonight on the recital of that one, I thought. There would be revelry tonight in the inns of Morganton, I thought as I turned away. The hanging would take place after all.

BURGESS GAITHER

Confession

Frankie Silver’s eight days of freedom had ended in capture, and the arrest of her father and brother for aiding in her escape. I had thought that such an act of disregard for the laws might turn the community against her once more, but it did not. We are a frontier people, still. Our parents’ generation comprised their own army to defend themselves against the attacks of the Indians, and they enforced their own laws within the settlements, so we are not yet complacent about taking orders from a far-off government. People seemed to think Frankie Silver’s escape was a sensible reaction to an unjust sentence of death. Perhaps they, too, remembered John Sevier in similar circumstances. If anything, the clamor for the prisoner’s release was even more strident, and the list of names upon the circulating petition grew ever longer.

I still had not signed it, however. I told myself that whatever I might think of the case, I did not know the facts concerning Charlie Silver’s death. Until I was satisfied on that point, I could not in good conscience ask that his killer be reprieved. I said as much to the sheriff, and to a number of well-meaning people who thrust petitions under my nose.