The Bold Frontier (34 page)

Late that night, in the large house of the landgrave Pierce Cottloe, Nick stood before a tall oil painting of a statuesque young woman with a fall of yellow hair and a cornflower gown that complemented her dark blue eyes. The exquisite portrait, by Ruthven of London, had been done on Barbara’s grand tour, a year after she and Nick met and fell in love. The painting was her father’s pride. It occupied a place of honor in the main hall. Nick ran the tip of his tongue back and forth over his upper lip; back and forth. His face drained of color as he stared at the picture.

“Nicholas.”

He turned to the reedy voice. Sir Pierce Cottloe, owner of substantial estates in the Carolina colony, was a man who physically did not quite fit his status. He was short, bony, with a chin which fell back weakly from his mouth. His frailness was counterbalanced by large, round eyes that seldom blinked; by blinking a man might miss a penny he was owed.

“Sir Pierce.”

“I thought you might not come into this house.”

“Curiosity lured me.”

“How is your father? I’ve not seen him lately.”

“I don’t call on him when I come to Charles Town. He cares for me about as much as you do.”

Sir Pierce blinked once, to acknowledge the barb. Gesturing politely, he stood aside. Nick went through the door into a comfortable, well-furnished room lit by several sconces of tapers. He didn’t miss the fierce, angry gleam in his host’s eyes when he passed him.

But the landgrave observed the courtesies. A servant brought mugs of toddy. Out on the stoop, Worthless could be heard snarling at some nocturnal disturbance.

“You still keep that beastly animal?” Sir Pierce asked.

Nick tossed off his toddy. “A man without a wife must have some sort of companionship.” Again their eyes locked, without friendship or even civility now.

“Please be seated. You’ll sleep here the night, of course. I’ve prepared a room—”

“I’ll sleep at the Ram’s Gate. What is this about?”

“The Yamassee and Creeks are sending around the red stick of war.”

“That I know.”

“Two nights past, in the small hours, a red stick was thrown on the piazza of the royal governor’s house.”

“That I didn’t know,” Nick said, with a new and grave air.

The Carolina colony had a long and bloody history of difficulty with the local tribes, especially the Yamassee. Nick and some of like mind blamed the avarice of the English colonists as much as or more than they blamed the Indians. White traders sold rum in the Indian towns despite laws against it. They abducted Indian men for slaves, and Indian women for concubines. They rustled cattle, and the cleverest of them forced trade goods on the Indians, thus creating a “legal debt” which the baffled Indians were forced to settle by ceding their land.

In the year 1715 all of this had come to a head. A delegation of white Indian commissioners went to a powwow with the Yamassee at Pocataligo, there to discuss and redress grievances. On Good Friday morning, after a night of convivial feasting, the Yamassee suddenly appeared with faces painted red and black. The horrified commissioners understood instantly. The color red signified war. Black meant death. The paint meant, “Expect both.”

The Yamassee massacred every member of the white delegation. Thus began the Yamassee War, drawing in at its height as many as fifteen thousand Indians of various tribes from Alabama to the sea. It was in this war that Nick Bray had been blooded.

The northern Cheraws ran a brisk trade supplying weapons to the Yamassee. Only when the Cherokee threw in with the colonists, helping them to choke off the trade, did considerable numbers of Yamassee give up the fight and retreat southward. The Lower Creeks negotiated peace with the Carolinians in 1717, but it was an unstable peace; ever since, the Creeks had from time to time attacked the southernmost parishes of the colony. The hand of England’s enemy, Spain, reached out from St. Augustine to incite them, it was said. Similarly incited, the Yamassee returned at intervals to burn and kill.

The official policies of the colony hadn’t helped matters. The Carolinians had pursued a dangerous and, in Nick’s view, wrongful scheme of pretending to be a friend of both the Creeks and the Cherokees, while doing some inciting of their own: pitting each tribe against the other to keep them busy and preserve the white man’s precarious minority position. Now, if the evidence of a red stick on Governor Charles Craven’s porch could be believed, the sham had ended, and guerrilla war had erupted once again.

Sir Pierce resumed, “The Conjurer says this time he’ll drive every white man into the sea to drown.” The Conjurer of the Talaboosa was a combination religious and war leader of a tribe that held large pieces of land between the coast and the sand hills up-country. There were similar small tribes throughout the colony, some consisting of no more than one or two towns. Almost all were allied with the Yamassee, overtly or otherwise.

“I always take him seriously,” Nick replied. “For a leader of a small tribe, the Conjurer has a large influence.”

He put one boot on the landgrave’s fine polished writing desk. The insolence visibly excited the older man’s anger.

“This goes back such a long way, Sir Pierce. The Indians have never understood how other men, by reason of their white skins and royal patents, can graze their cattle on Indian lands at will, and kill any red man who objects. I am never surprised when the red stick’s passed. It will pass until the tribes are gone, or we are. Now I repeat. What is this about?”

Sir Pierce made a phlegmy sound in his throat. He scraped his buckled shoes on the pegged floor.

“My good wife lies upstairs, most grievously ill.”

“I wondered why I hadn’t seen her tonight.”

“As for Barbara—she is gone too.” His cheeks showed spots of color. “To Wyndham’s Barony. She has been visiting Jelks Wyndham and his mother the past fortnight.”

Nick sat very stiffly now. He was pale again. The barony of Jelks Wyndham, who was betrothed to Barbara Cottloe, lay up-country. To reach it required a journey of two days. It was in the heart of the sparsely populated region freely roamed by the hostile Indians. There, Nick knew very well, Jelks Wyndham had pursued his own selfish policy, which resembled that of the colony itself: setting Indian against Indian whenever possible, to preserve his domain and keep it free of molestation.

“I will pay you twenty pounds, sterling, to ride to Wyndham’s and bring my daughter safely back to Charles Town so that she can attend her mother. I need a capable man, because it’s dangerous up-country just now.”

Nick’s lip twisted. “I was not good enough to wed Barbara, but I’m good enough to shed blood for her, is that it?”

“I want the best man, Nicholas.”

“Wouldn’t that be her intended? Wyndham?”

“Wyndham’s a gentleman—no disrespect meant to you, please understand. What I mean to say is, Wyndham’s smart, but he’s also soft. He came to Carolina from Bristol but five years ago. He doesn’t know the country as you do. He doesn’t know the red men, nor woodcraft, nor how to defend himself well in the open.” Nick began to shake his head. “If twenty pounds isn’t enough—”

“Goddamn you, Cottloe”—Nick sounded like his own dog growling—“you wouldn’t have me for your son-in-law, you shipped Barbara away to separate us, and now you have the effrontery to ask me to rescue her.” His cheeks were even redder than Cottloe’s had been a while before. “And you know I’ll do it. That’s the galling part.”

The landgrave unconsciously pursed his lips; a smug touch. Nick stood up so hastily he knocked over his toddy mug, spilling a few drops on the elegant floor.

“Fifty pounds,” he said.

“That’s a fortune.”

“Your daughter is worth a fortune. Isn’t she?”

There was a long, heavy, vicious silence. At last Sir Pierce said, “Done. You are as much a bastard as you always were.”

Nick laughed at him and walked out. Over his shoulder he gave one swift look at the Ruthven portrait, wishing the beautiful girl would release him. She never would.

At Jacksonborough, Noggins fairly danced when he heard of the planned journey. “Go up-country? The Conjurer is killing and burning there!”

“That’s why the landgrave wants his daughter safely back on the seacoast.”

“But we could die up there, Nick.”

“We could die right here, any day, any moment, of any of a thousand causes. I’ve made my way in Carolina without capturing any Yamassee for the slave pens, or running cattle over their land as that fool Wyndham’s been doing. When you and I talk to the tribes, it’s straightforward. Our iron goods for their deerskins, even and fair. We have that much to protect us. If we go quickly it may be enough.”

Noggins popped his tongue between his lips to express his lack of confidence. And indeed, Nick wasn’t feeling as confident as he sounded.

… With considerable justification, he discovered the next day as they jogged upriver on a dusty path: the old Indian path to the Cherokee villages. It ran from Charles Town to Mondes Corner and up the west side of the Santee to the Eutaws and the country beyond. Nick and Noggins had ridden the path many times.

The two men traveled with four horses. Worthless panted and barked in his constant struggle to keep pace on his stubby legs. About an hour after their departure from Charles Town, a rattling disturbed the palmettos to one side of the trail. Riding in the lead, Nick reined up, left hand in the air, right hand dropping to one of his saddle holsters. Each held an eighteen-inch horse pistol. Nick drew the pistol. From the brush stepped a strapping warrior with a lance raised over his head in both hands, a sign of nonhostility. Blue dragons with red eyes coiled on the muscles of his upper arms.

Nick lowered the flintlock pistol, recognizing him. He was the chief of a small tribe with ties to the Yamassee. “What brings King Coweto back from the Floridas after many years?” He spoke fluently; he’d learned most of the tribal dialects in boyhood.

King Coweto answered, “There is much to be done.”

“At whose insistence? Spain’s royal governor at St. Augustine?”

King Coweto didn’t answer.

“All right, another question. What are you doing this close to Charles Town?”

“I search for you,” said the Indian. “I am the one who knows you best.” That was true. Five years before, Nick had conducted the chief to a Charles Town tattoo artist because Coweto wanted dragons on his arms. At that time the Creeks were signing their peace treaty, and Indians could venture freely into Charles Town.

“We heard you would be traveling to our country,” King Coweto went on. “I believed you would take this path as always.”

Long steamy bars of sunlight fell between the great live and water oaks. Looks flashed between Nick and his partner; that of Noggins was anxious. Nick swatted an insect deviling his damp neck. He was constantly amazed at the way the tribes knew of developments on the coast almost as they happened. But then, in the slave pens and slave quarters, black and red men were allies against the whites who gave them their shackles.

“The Conjurer sends you this message,” Coweto said to Nick. “You have never treated the people badly. But your skin is white, and the Conjurer swears to banish all white skins from the people’s land forever. Do not continue this journey. We say it to you in friendship.”

Nick scraped the muzzle of his pistol over his darkly stubbled chin. “I mean no harm to the people, Coweto. But I ride where I please. It’s always been so. Tell the Conjurer I am only taking this journey to return a young woman to her father. There is no other purpose—nothing that will endanger the people.”

“Even so, you are warned not to go. In the up-country there will be much blood flowing. Much carnage.”

With an almost insolent expression Nick said, “I could reduce the carnage if I killed you on the spot, couldn’t I? The men of your town who must have come up from Florida wouldn’t follow the warpath with their chief fallen.”

“Do not make evil jokes. You would not do what you say. You are an honorable man. We are not enemies.” Nick’s smile faded. “I tell you once again. If you go up this path your life is at risk.”

Nick straightened on his horse. “Then so be it. I haven’t any choice but to go on.”

King Coweto looked at him steadily for a moment, large, dark eyes full of sadness, pity. He shook his lance, turned, and faded away into the forest.

As they rode they saw portents. In a small river tributary, half a dozen poles planted at intervals to mark the channel had been broken off near the water. Whitened cattle skulls that once crowned the poles were gone.

By a gleaming marsh they came upon the cabin of a French trader foolish enough to live away from the settlements. Fire had razed the cabin. Two bodies, broiled black, hung from the crooked bough of a live oak. This curtailed conversation between the two men, and left them weighted with melancholy.

A little after dawn on the second full day, they observed a party of Indians striding from south to north through tall savanna grass. The shoulders and headdresses of the Indians stood out above the waving stalks. Behind the marchers the rising line of the sand hills showed as gray blurs.

“Bad luck,” Noggins said. “I count forty.”

Nick had his hand clamped around the bulldog’s muzzle. Worthless growled and struggled, wanting to bark. With his free hand Nick pointed to the warrior with the tallest headdress. “And the Conjurer himself, I think.”

They remained crouched until the war party passed out of sight and hearing. Then Noggins said, “Nick, what help can we expect? How many bondsmen?”

“Wyndham has not exactly treated me as an invited guest, you know. I’ve never set foot on his place, only passed by. So it’s all supposition. He may have six, possibly eight. Probably not a white man among them.”

The little man spat between his teeth. “So they might run away in hopes the Indians would let them go, not enslave them a second time.”

Slowly Nick rose out of his crouch. He released the grumbling bulldog and dusted his hands. The stillness, the flat hot glare of the hazy sun, the immensity and loneliness of the country did not inspire good feelings.