The Long Knife Read online

  Faces of the frontier

  CAM GALWAY

  “Flash-in-the-Sun” the Shawnees called him, for he was as cunning as one of them. He made the whole valley his home, until the coming of more white men—and their women—changed his way of life.

  LEW WETZEL

  Friend to Galway, but a wild, untamed frontiersman. He was feared by the Shawnees and white settlers alike—and with good reason.

  LT. THORNWOOD

  An Army gentleman, determined to mold the Valley into a replica of Virginia plantation life.

  MEG FARNEY

  A willful, tempestuous woman. Bride-to-be of the Lieutenant, but a challenge for any man she chose.

  LITTLE MOON

  The lovely Shawnee, who would fight to the death for her man, white or Indian.

  A lusty novel of an untamed land and the yellow-haired frontier giant who made it his own.

  the

  long

  Knife

  by

  LOUIS A. BRENNAN

  A Dell First Edition

  an original novel

  Published by

  DELL PUBLISHING CO., INC.

  750 Third Avenue New York 17, N.Y.

  © Copyright, 1960, by Louis A. Brennan

  Dell First Edition ® TM 641409, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.

  All rights reserved

  Designed and produced by

  Western Printing and Lithographing Company

  First printing—August, 1960

  Printed in U.S.A.

  The Long Knife

  chapter 1

  There were at least five Shawnees and two Mingoes in the scalp-party, as near as Cam could make out by their top-knots.

  Near an hour he’d been peering out from a bush-hung jut rock on the hillside behind them, and he figured maybe two-three more were hunched down at the foot of the river bank where it dropped steep to the sand beach. But he hadn’t dared to move in all that time to see better.

  A catbird, that the Shawnees sometimes called a fool-dog-bird because it let out a yip every time anything moved, had picked an old sycamore off to the left to go bugging from; she’d sit on a branch awhile and then dive off into a swarm of mote-flies, gulp up a couple, cut back to the branch and wait till they swarmed again.

  Oh, he figured to know these braves, leastwise the Shawnees. Not that they were showing him anything but the skin of their skulls, but there was one Cam could see well enough to know—the one sprawled out like a water snake on the trunk of a willow aslant out over the water; the one spying upriver at the big heavy-loaded flatboat drifting this way like a fat barnyard duck on the Ohio’s slow-poke summer current.

  That one was Catfishjaw, from the village of Chief Lynx on Middle Paint Creek that branched into the Scioto two days’ trail north, and there wasn’t a brave in that village Cam didn’t know. Unless maybe a pup born in the last year, year and a half.

  But it wasn’t on Catfishjaw that Cam held his rifle-gun’s bead sight. It was on the man that Catfishjaw turned every now and then to grunt to. He was a white man.

  He wasn’t treed or hid like the Indians, this broad-hatted, bearded, butternut-britched, booted whiteskin. Not a bit of it. Loose and no strings on him, he was jig-toeing about on a little patch of sandbar like a man that couldn’t wait for the meat to stew. Like a man that couldn’t wait for that flatboat to float down to him, and into this Indian ambush.

  There wasn’t the sign of hurt or damage on him, so for sure he wasn’t a farmer taken in a raid down in Kentuck and saved by the Shawnees to stand for bait in this ambush trap; not red enough in the face from field work; and not in that broadcloth coat and the green vest under it, and the ruffled white shirt of settlement linen, dirty as a kerchief, under that. A trader the whiteskin must be, and one that had been lately down to New Orleans, by the token of that vest that shone of Spanish silk; and going back east to Pennsylvany or Virginny to show off the money he’d made.

  No, the whiteskin wasn’t a captive. He didn’t have a gun by him, but he had a knife—and when did Shawnees ever leave a knife on a captive?—and he used it now, to go and cut him a willow switch; then he set to stripping the leaves off it.

  Anybody that had lived in the Ohio country from suck to britches and britches to buckskin would know why the whiteskin had cut that switch. He was going to put his hat on it and then, when the flatboat was in sight, he was going to rush out into shallow water and scream and yell for the boat captain to put in to shore and rescue him. And all the while he’d be giving the border signal for help—raising and lowering his hat on that willow stick.

  Once a flatboat turned out of the current and headed for shore and touched its bottom on the sand there wasn’t anything but a miracle of God, like old Tom Galway used to say, that would get it out into the current again before the Shawnees could jump it. As long as there had been flat-boats on the Ohio the Shawnees had been setting ambushes like this and nobody had ever heard of a flatboat skinning out of one.

  About four-five jumps short of a hundred yards it figured for a rifle shot to the nape of the whiteskin’s neck. Cam had spanned it off a dozen times with his eye, taking the measure from tree to tree, his finger tucked away from the trigger so’s he wouldn’t touch it off, just from being a stark hunter by nature, when he had the mark sighted in.

  What else was there to do but put a ball into the white-skin—when you had only one ball to your pouch and that in the barrel of your gun, and when you knew you’d get off only one shot and then the Shawnees would turn on you?

  Oh, they’d leave off the ambush, right enough, if the bait got killed in their trap. There couldn’t be any worse medicine than that for a Shawnee. There wasn’t a brave in the Ohio country that would touch a hair on the head of anybody on the flatboat after that.

  But the same wouldn’t go for the man that killed the bait. It was the same as a wizard putting a black curse of bad medicine on the band and they’d have to kill him to get it taken away. It would go easier with him if he killed Catfishjaw. But the pinch of it was he couldn’t think of a reason for killing Catfish jaw. Like the catbird, or a panther skulking after a deer, Catfishjaw was just doing according to his nature. It was the whiteskin that was going against his, betraying other whiteskins into a massacre.

  Still, what a man had to know before he shot the white-skin down was whether this trader-traitor tarnal-notioned to do what he was getting so ready to do. Was he dead set to wave his hat up and down and yell to the flatboat and call out, “Friend?”

  Take a man like Boone. He’d be doing, right now, just what this whiteskin was doing. He’d be doing like Catfish-jaw told him, easy-like and jollying along till the Indians would more than half forget he wasn’t an Indian. Sooner or later there’d come a tick when all their minds would be off him at once. Then old Dan’l would jump for it, a lickety-splitting out into the water, yelling the flatboard off and bellowing a warning like a hound dog. Oh, he’d give himself all the chance in the world to stay alive, Boone would, but never would he favor his own scalp over fifteen or twenty men, women and younguns.

  Maybe the whiteskin couldn’t see the boat too keen, but he could hear what was going on there, if he wasn’t deaf as a post. You could hear the women folk fussing at the younguns, and the younguns gay-larking amongst themselves and the cattle bawling against the gall of their yokes ever since the boat had rounded the bend three-four miles upstream. Clear as if the words were spoken to him Cam could hear the lookout man in the front of the boat call up to the tiller-man, “All clear ahead. ’Tain’t no rock. Jist a big old mud turtle.”

  It was the biggest broadhorn flatboat Cam had any recollection ever seeing. A third again as long as the run of what you’d watch, sometimes ten or fifteen a day passing any
given point on the Ohio. It was different, too, in being all square-sawed lumber. Not a slab showed anywhere, not even on the siding of the shack that must have two rooms to it. Whoever owned that boat, he was fixing to build himself right smart of a house when he got to where he was going and broke it up. A sight of plunder there must be in the hold that had the deck so close to the water level you wondered how the broadhorn ever scraped over some of the riffles. There’d be plenty whisky kegs and rum barrels in that hold, for sure.

  The foolishest thing these greenhorn westerers could be doing, they were doing now. Oh, it was noon and time to eat but this wasn’t the place to hold any picnic, unless you had somebody to stand by forking the food into your mouth while you kept ten fingers on your weapons.

  Maybe these greenhorns had missed it, but right here was just about a mile below where the Scioto came sluicing down from the north into the Ohio, and the current of it drove the Ohio’s main current clean over against the Kentucky shore. A flatboat that stayed right on the backbone of this main Ohio current was bound to come in to the Kentucky shore so near a Shawnee could reach it with a hatchet throw. Oh, it was the way to do it—stay with the run of the channel that was mostly clear of sawyers and shallows—but this stretch of the river was the worst for Shawnees. The Scioto brought them straight out of their country and took them back again near as quick, and not even a squatter had ever dared settle on the north bank of the Ohio where they had Shawnees in their back yards.

  No man with any ’cuteness to him whatsoever would let himself get shored in so close to ambush.

  Still, they were sending younguns out with trenchers of meat. One went to the forward lookout man, and when he took it he gave a scan to the water ahead and sat down to chaw away. And a youngun climbed a ladder up to the shack top where the tiller-man was working the sweep-oar and when she handed it over to the tiller-man he let her hold the sweep while he stoked his belly, her that wasn’t big enough to hold a broom handle tight.

  Oh, it was going to be a sad thing with these greenhorns in about the time it took an unschooled man to count to a hundred and twenty. The boat was going to run so close to where the trap was set that when the whiteskin yelled, if it didn’t do more than falter the tiller-man that would be time enough to bring him down with a musket shot. Oh, there’d be blood soon in these greenhorns’ gravy. Cam steadied his rifle-gun’s long damnation on the whiteskin’s ear.

  Then he laid her down.

  Out of the hind room of the shack where the kitchen chimney was smoking blue with frying hog-fat fumes there came, their hands full of “victuals—meat trenchers and corn bread—and not a musket in sight, three soldiers. Real Congress soldiers, in blue and buff, not any old rag-bag militiamen, half army but still mostly field hand. They hunkered down with their backs to the shack wall, spit out their tobacco cuds and laid to on their rations with their case-knives.

  Well, now, this turned the greenhorns on the broadhorn a different complexion. Greenhorns they might be, but no flock of sheep. It went without say that no borderman felt he had to help Congress soldiers against Indians, unless he just naturally hated Indians, like Lew Wetzel, and wanted to join in killing a few; soldiers didn’t even make out to try to get along with border folk. As much as said, some of the officers did, that a frontiersman wasn’t a tittle better than an Indian and usually was worse—meaning dirty, murdering and ignorant.

  He himself, Cam Galway, couldn’t say he was one way or another about soldiers, being as how he spent all his time in the woods and away from forts; there must be good ones the same as bad ones. But good or bad they were soldiers and that’s what made this ambush fight that was about to happen fair on both sides—Indian warriors against white warriors. Soldiers were always bragging they could never find Indians because the Indians were all scared away—well—

  There were five of them now along the wall. And then a sixth came out of the kitchen shack. But he wasn’t the kind of soldier who carried his own rations on a wood-chip trencher. Following at his heels and no taller than the sword the Shawnees called a long knife and that slapped his leg so’s you wondered why he didn’t trip, was a little blackamoor with a china plate balanced on each palm. They could have known this one was an officer clear to Limestone, and that forty miles down the river, by the gold all over his coat like spatters of clover butter. But leastwise he had the look of a fighter. Almost as big as me, Cam thought, must be six foot tall and stout enough in the shoulders, unless it’s all uniform stuffing.

  Then the officer took off his hat and it was like the sun glancing off a sumac bush in September, redder than blood on fire.

  Time for me to git out of here, Cam told himself, almost out loud; a redheaded Congress officer, he don’t need me.

  Anyway he’d been given a sign to go; the catbird had whisked off to some other game and wouldn’t be a-tattling on him in retreat. This was no kind of bully-rag for a stark hunter to be in. A stark hunter made his living in the woods just one way—bothering nothing he couldn’t eat or wear, and nobody for any reason. The less seen, the longer he lived. The longer he lived the less he wanted to be seen. Yes, it was best to get out with only a ball and a sniff of powder left till he got to Limestone to trade his ginseng root for more, and that was needed to kill fresh meat or he’d have to chaw his supper out of jerky.

  Let the Indians and the whites take it out on each other any way they had a mind to, and if they notioned to murder instead of marry or marry instead of murder it was no skin out of a stark hunter’s pack.

  Cam twitched himself all over two or three times to unkink his tight muscles, something a stark hunter always made sure to do, like making sure of the prime of his rifle. If he hadn’t done this, he wondered later, what all wouldn’t have happened.

  Down on the boat the officer had just rapped on the door post of the front room of the shack—the door was deer pelt—and then folded the pelt aside and out under his arm came what you wouldn’t expect to see on one of a hundred broadhorns—a girl that by the white gown with the long skirt big around at the bottom as a hogshead, looked like she hadn’t just stepped out of a boat shack, but out of some big-wig house back in the old colony, Virginny.

  The little black had set the plates down on a camp table under a canvas that stuck out for shade over the door like a stoop, and he’d set a wine bottle and glass goblets on it, and knives and, it must be, forks that some folks used for picking up victuals. When the officer said something and made a hand swing, he was asking the girl to sit to meat, Cam figured.

  It might be she smiled when she did it, but she stepped around the officer like a stump in the road, and floated—it looked like floating because you couldn’t see her feet—out to a cane chair near the boat edge and sat down there in the sun, and all she did was to look. You wouldn’t think there was much for a lady-kind of old-colony girl to look at on a hillside that was near as solid green-leaf as the river was solid water, but she kept looking and the next thing Cam knew she was looking straight at him.

  Oh, she couldn’t see him. He knew that. But you’d think, the way she looked, that she knew he was there and was trying to make her eyes peer him out. That couldn’t be; he’d come straight up from Tennessee and he’d only hit the Ohio half an hour ago, for the first time since last summer. But who could say what put it in a body’s mind to look for something or somebody he or she didn’t know the shape or size or sort of? Most likely she was looking at the cliff that rose behind him, with a sassafras sapling sprouted out of a cleft halfway up. But why that cliff, with cliffs all along? A man had to wonder if it wasn’t that her head had been turned that way for her. Little Moon was always asking Old Night Fly, Lynx’s medicine man, why some daft notion had come into her head, and when he answered at all he’d say, “You are one, daughter of a chief, who has within you that which sees what you cannot see and hears what you cannot hear; do what it says without question, for you cannot escape doing what it is meant for you to do.”

  All it meant, as fa
r as Cam could ever tell, was what any stark hunter knew—you had to go by what signs they gave you. Even if it wasn’t so much a sign that the girl kept staring up at his jut rock as though she expected him to be there—well, it stirred up things in the back of his head where he kept the things he couldn’t forget but that a stark hunter had no use for: Cathy Galway, dead these seven or eight years; and Little Moon of the Shawnees, and she wasn’t dead, unless she’d died since he’d walked away from her.

  He laid the Lancaster rifle that was his brother and his woman back on aim again. Almost too late, too. The white-skin had put his hat on the stick and made a jump-start out on the bar. Then he stopped, so’s he could yell, “Friend—”

  The next thing that flew out of his mouth was a lead rifle ball. At least that’s where Cam figured it to come out from where he’d put it in, in the back of the whiteskin’s head.

  But the tiller-man had already put the sweep-oar over, to come in.

  chapter 2

  Cam was long gone off his jut rock and down into the gully beside it by the time the powder smoke had raised up its flag into the air. And he was logged down in dead leaves by the time Catfishjaw’s yell flew over like a redtailed hawk.

  It wasn’t a long yell—but it told a long tale. All that Catfishjaw yelled was the one word that meant “bad medicine.” But put it together with the fact that this scalp-party’s trail had led in here from the south and you could speak a whole piece on it. They’d been on a raid for plunder and scalps down to the Kentucky settlements and hadn’t got much of either one. Most likely they’d got a brave killed in a brush with rangers. That would make it look like their medicine had gone bad on them. So they’d headed for home, come across the whiteskin’s trail back on the ridge a ways, figured that meantime their medicine had bettered, and so laid their trap. And now the bait had been killed in it before their eyes.