Louis L'Amour (26 page)

After a while I went below to my own place, and Diana was there. The table was set, and she was standing before the fireplace, a long spoon in her hand.

“I wonder,” I said, putting my hands on her shoulders, “how I was so lucky.”

“You married a witch,” she said, smiling.

“Why not? We did not have a witch. Every community should have one. I wish you would put a spell on Max Bauer and make him disappear.”

She dished up a bowl of stew and put it before me. “Eat,” she said. “I do not think he will wait until the storm is over.”

“His powder will be wet.”

“His blades will not, and if they are, it will not matter. Do not take him lightly, Kin.”

She sat down across from me. “I worry about father.”

“We will know soon. When this is over”—I gestured
toward the outside where Bauer was—“we will go north and bring him down to join us.”

We talked long while I waited for sounds from outside that did not come. At last I went again to the wall to allow Yance to eat.

The clouds were lowering, and there were occasional drizzles of rain. There was no sign of movement from the forest, and I expected none. He would wait. Perhaps Max Bauer had decided upon his course of action, but if he was the woodsman he seemed to be, he could live, at least for a while, on the forest around him. He would know that we had crops. We had much work to do outside, and we would weaken ourselves in scattering out to attend to it. Or so he hoped.

Yet the game would lie quiet while it rained, and to come upon anything worth hunting, he would have to startle it into movement. Nor would the immediate forest offer much. We knew that, for we now hunted far afield despite the fact that we had tried not to disturb the game close by, wanting to allow the deer to range freely until some emergency. Buffalo had become scarcer with each year in the areas east of the mountains.

Kane O'Hara came along the walk to me as soon as I returned. “I don't like it,” he said irritably. “We've work to do. We're losing time.”

“There's no help for it,” I said. “He knows our situation, and he will use it. He wants us to become careless.”

“We've fought too many Senecas for that.”

“That worries me, too.” I watched the woods as I spoke, my eyes straying along the tree front. “Suppose he manages to meet them and set up a joint attack?”

“What kind of a man is he?”

“Big, very strong, very tough, a good woodsman, and a shrewd, dangerous man. He wants me and he wants Diana, but he wants all we have here that is portable. By this time he knows our strength, and he knows we've done a lot of trapping. He will know we have bales of furs here, and we have women.”

Kane stared gloomily over the wall. “This looks like our best crop,” he commented. “It should not be neglected now.”

After a pause, he asked, “How's that country out west? Where you and Yance have located?”

“Beautiful, but the soil is average. We could do better down in the bottoms, but you know how it is with Yance an' me. We like to be high up and where there's game. In the bottoms along the creeks there are meadows where the grass grows knee-high to a man on horseback.”

“I'd like to see that,” Kane said enviously. “How far does it go, Kin? Is there no end to it?”

“There's always an end. At the Pacific sea, more'n likely.”

It was very still. The rumbling of thunder was occasional but distant. The rain had become a fine, soft rain, and the air smelled fresh and cool. In the forest no leaf moved, nor was there a sound or any sign of smoke unless a faint blueness in the air to the eastward might be smoke.

A stealthy attack by night was likely when some of my men must sleep. No more than two could be on the walls at once and must not follow prescribed patrols but must be careful to set no pattern Bauer might recognize. Yet there was no way we could, with only two men, keep a proper watch. Fortresses and walls have forever distressed me. I am not inclined to defense, for it is better to be the attacker. We had women, children, and goods to defend, so we had no choice, yet I would have preferred being out there in the forest.

The thought held my attention. What was it father had advised? “Attack, always attack. Whether you have one man or fifty, there is always a way of attacking. No matter how many his men, the enemy must be attacked.”

Of course. But how?

“Tonight,” I said, “I may go into the forest.”

“Aye,” O'Hara agreed. “It has been on my mind, but we can ill afford to lose a man, and especially you.”

The crops could not wait, nor could my letters to Peter Tallis and Brian, for the more I considered our situation, the more it disturbed me. Our approximate location was known to some in Jamestown, although none of them had been so far inland. They also knew we were shipping bales of furs; occasionally gems were sold by us, and we were self-sufficient. It could be no more than a matter of a short time until settlers came around us, and some one of them might have the power to get a grant from the queen, even of our lands. We had no legal right to them, only that of first settlement and occupation.

It was the experience of William Claiborne that came to haunt me, too. He held lands, traded in furs, and was doing very well until Lord Baltimore's grant took in even the island on which he resided.

Kane walked on around the wall, and Diana came from the house bringing fresh coffee. It tasted good, and we stood together under the eaves.

“I have brought trouble upon you,” she said. “Were it not for me—”

“I will not have it,” I said. “You have no reason for blame. What happened has happened. Now we must do what we can.”

We walked along the wall together and from time to time stopped to study the forest out there. Since I was a small boy, I had watched that forest for enemies or for game, and I knew its every mood and shading, how the sunlight fell through the leaves and where the shadows gathered. It held no mysteries for me but much of memory. I had played there as a child with Yance, Jubal, and Brian, later with Noelle. We had climbed its trees, picked berries there, and played hide-and-seek under its branches.

My father had ever been a pillar of security. He was always
there
, ever kind, ever considerate, always strong. He had a temper, and I had seen it from time to time, but we all relied on him, not only we children but the adults as well.

Now it must be I who was strong. I must be the
one to hold our little community together, to provide reassurance. That was why I could no longer wait for an attack, for Bauer was too shrewd a man. He would contrive some ruse, some stratagem, some trick.

“Never let an enemy get set,” my father had said. “Attack, worry, keep him off balance. Never let him move from a secure position or give him time to move his pieces on the chessboard.”

It was never a part of my thinking to shelter women from the truth. I had learned from my father to trust their judgment. “Tonight,” I told Diana, “I am going out there.”

“But what can you
do?
”

“I won't know until I see, but I must do something.”

“What about Yance?”

“Yes.” I knew what she meant. “Yance might be better than I. He is very wily. But the responsibility is mine. For whatever reason they are here, it was I whom they followed. Although he is attacking all of us, he is my enemy, and it must be up to me to do something about it.”

“But what can one man do?”

“I don't know,” I admitted. “I must just go out there and see.”

Oddly enough, I wanted to go. Lurking behind walls was uncomfortable for me, for I was a man of the forest and the mountains. To let an enemy have the time to choose when and how he would attack had never been my way, and now that I had resolved to go out there, I was enormously relieved.

“You'd better rest, then,” she said. “I'll get Yance.”

She went down the ladder, and I waited while the rain softly fell; under the low clouds the forest was a darker, deeper green, a richer green.

There was no way to plan for what lay before me; only when I was out there and found their camp could I decide what would be best to do. Out there in the forest at night, yet it was a forest I knew well from the slopes of Chunky Gal and the Nantahalas to Piney Top and
the Tusquitees, from Compass Creek to the Gap and Muskrat Branch. And even far beyond from the Chilowees to the Blue Ridge I had roamed and hunted, fished the streams, and lived off the fruit of the land.

I had fought the Senecas there, too, the warriors of the northern lands, the snakelike, wily, crafty, and very brave Senecas.

Tonight I would go.

Tonight.

T
hen the rain fell no longer, but the forest dripped. Heavy were the leaves with rain, soft the grass beneath the moccasins. The narrow door opened; wraithlike, I slipped through and stood against the wall. Silent in the darkness, listening.

Black and still was the night. Water dripped from the branches, and I crossed the open acres about the fort and went into the trees. Among them, my body close along a slim dark tree, I waited again and listened. I did not know where lay their camp, but this night I thought they would have a fire, burning low now.

Only slightly blew the wind, a baby's breath of wind, but I moved across it, my nostrils ready for the slightest smell of smoke.

Nothing.

How many watched the fort? Or had they all withdrawn to rest? My hand felt for a leaf, which was wet, and I put the wet fingers to my nose, for a wet nose smells better. A smell of rotting vegetation, for I was near the bank of a creek where there was a bit of marshy ground.

The tree beside which I stood was a chestnut. My touch upon the bark told me that, but this mountainside, as all through the hills, was covered with a variety of trees: chestnut, oaks of several kinds, tulip trees, red maple, sourwood, and many others. Some I knew by the smell, all by the touch. Careful to make no sound, I worked my way into the forest, working my way deeper
and swinging in a rough half circle, always alert for that telltale whiff of smoke.

It did not come.

Before me the forest thinned. Only a few yards farther was the trail that led along the west side of Piney Top to Tusquitee Creek. Pausing, I listened. My ears heard nothing; my nostrils found no smell of smoke, only the faint sweetish smell of crushed magnolia, not unusual, for there were many about, and their leaves often fell and were crushed underfoot. None of our people had been out, however.

It was probably nothing. I waited, and then I heard faint stirrings. How far off? Carefully I worked my way through the forest. The sounds had ceased. Ahead of me was thick brush. Wary, I avoided it.

With the rain, wild animals and most birds had taken shelter, so I could rely upon none of them to give me warning of a foreign presence. Yet as boys we had been taught by the Catawba to develop our sixth sense and to be always aware. We would take turns at staring at one of us until he turned suddenly, becoming aware of our attention. By continual practice we had become as sensitive to this as any wild animal.

Often our father, when in the woods with us, would suddenly stop and ask that we describe some area just passed or the tracks of animals or insects we had just glimpsed in the dust of the track. With time our awareness had grown until we missed very little.

In the wilderness attention to detail was the price of survival.

Abruptly I paused. A faint smell of wet buckskins and wood smoke. I held perfectly still, then turned my head this way and that to hear the better and to catch any vague smells. Primitive man, I suspected, used his nostrils quite as much as his eye or ear, but civilization, with its multitude of odors, soon distracts the attention until the brain no longer registers them on the awareness. It was different living in the wilds.

Careful to permit no leaves to brush my shoulders, I worked my way through the brush and trees, pausing
often to listen. It was a murmur of voices I heard and then the stronger smell of wood smoke; a moment later, the glimpse of fire.

At that moment I stood very still, alert to every sound. Now I was close. I had found them, but what was to be my next move, I did not know. At least one of them, Max Bauer himself, was a skilled woodsman, not to be trifled with. I wanted to see, to hear, to estimate their numbers, but not to be heard myself.

After a moment I edged closer, not over a few feet, and could see into their camp. I took care not to look directly at Bauer, although I could see him, or at Lashan, who was lying at one side.

“Not at daybreak,” Bauer was saying. “Indians often attack then, but after daybreak when they have decided there will be no attack and they have relaxed. Some will be eating, some will be beginning their day's work. Not more than one, probably, on the walls. Lashan, you are good with a lance. Can you get that guard for me? Kill him instantly?”

“I can. At thirty feet, which is the closest I can get, it will be easy.”

“Then kill him. I want him
dead.
If we cannot strike when the gate is open, we will go over the walls. Toss loops over the tops of the poles, and up you go, but I want at least a dozen men going up at once. The surprise will be complete. No looting and no women until every man is dead, you understand? Any man who does otherwise answers to me.”

Lashan suddenly got to his feet. “Max? There's somebody out there!”

Turning swiftly, I slid through the brush and hit a path on the run. So far I thought I had made no sound, but behind me I heard a shout.

“All of you! Out there! Get him! Alive, if you can, but
get him!
”

Down the path I fled, knowing not where it led except that the general direction was toward Compass Creek. Turning from the path, I slid through a gap in the trees and ran desperately. Pulling up sharply, I
heard a rustling in the brush before me. Turning, I ran on, but slower, not knowing where to next expect an enemy.