The Long Knife Read online

  Oh, they’d scatter now. For half an hour maybe they’d run any which way to get the bad medicine off their trail.

  As soon as the yell went over, and he knew what it meant, Cam peeked out of his gully and made out to count at least ten in the party skiting out of there as fast and as quiet as blue racer snakes. Ten Shawnee braves could have chopped down these Congress soldiers and greenhorns as easy as August corn, once they got their hearts set on shaving off the redheaded officer’s scalp, and the blue-black one of the girl’s, and grabbing the officer’s long knife and the wine.

  But now that it was over, what a fool thing it had been for Cam Galway to poke his head into. Nary a load for his gun had he now, and whether he wanted to or no, he had to go down to that flatboat and get himself taken down to Limestone. He couldn’t be prowling through these woods, with his rifle-gun no better than a club in his hands and ten Indians looking for him. Or maybe he could trade the soldiers for lead and powder and never have to go into Limestone at all.

  He heard the broadhorn grind its bottom on the sandbar as it beached, and all the while the officer was bellowing orders for his soldiers to get ashore for skirmish.

  As sure as he went dodging out into the woods where they could only half see him, the soldiers would pot-shot at him, just from being on edge and trigger tight, Cam figured. So he upped and shadowed down the gully to where it opened out on the shore behind a big poplar. Spying out what he could from there, he saw that the officer had his men in a spread-out line and they were jabbing behind logs and under bushes as though they were looking for a farrowing sow hiding out her pigs. There were no more Indians in these woods now than snow on a salt-lick. This redhead didn’t know how to fight Indians but he wasn’t afeared to.

  The flatboat had slid aground sidewise, and instead of barricading behind anything that would stop a ball, every man, woman and child aboard—it must have been twelve-fifteen in all—had ganged on the edge of the forward deck as if for a terrapin race, the men with their muskets aimed up in the trees as though they were going to shoot squirrels, and the women shielding the younguns behind their aprons, and the little black hugging the knees of the blue-headed girl who was holding a pistol as though to stir tea with it.

  They didn’t even glance in Cam’s direction. What a pigeon slaughter this would have been if the scalp-party, instead of scaring off, had laid low, the way they usually did, slipped through the skirmish line and then jumped the boat, with the soldiers ashore so’s they couldn’t even fire back for fear of hitting their own folks.

  Waiting till a breeze stirred the hedge of bank willows so that any shake he gave them wouldn’t cause notice, Cam slipped to the sand patch where the whiteskin lay on his face. The ball had gone in just where the skull rounded and—Cam turned the body over—had ranged down and come out the mouth, just the way he’d figured. It wasn’t so much that he’d wanted the man to chaw lead as that a stark hunter had to pick the littlest mark he could think of to shoot at; he couldn’t shoot at just any broadside.

  From six feet away his nose had told him not only that the whiteskin had been a trader, but a horse-trader. The short hairs all over his coat and britches said he hadn’t changed them since he’d handled horse flesh. Any man would know now that he was one of those traders who brought herds up from New Orleans into Louisville, where they sold for a hundred or a hundred and fifty dollars a head. A man could make a pokeful of gold out of a horse herd, once he got it through the Chicamaugas.

  The knife was still in the whiteskin’s hand. French knife, Cam saw, as he took it up.

  An old woman screamed from the flatboat.

  Cam proned himself behind the whiteskin’s body. Four musket balls plunked into the bank behind him. He got quickly to his feet before the greenhorns could reload.

  “You,” the blue-headed girl said, like she meant a passel more by it than she could say, and she pointed her pistol at him and fired. Better shot than the men. She’d have killed him too, if he hadn’t twisted his chest aside so that the ball skinned across it instead of heading straight into his heart. The way it stung she must have scoured off his left nipple.

  “I—” the girl said, and dropped the pistol.

  “White,” he called out, pointing to his face that was Indian-plucked of every hair on it. He raised his rifle-gun. “Empty.”

  “Lay your weapon on the ground, man.” Anybody would know who that skinning-blade tongue and Virginny speech belonged to without turning around. But when he did turn, the officer was charging at him with his sword out stiff as a spit-rod and the soldiers behind him.

  Cam butted his gun down. “No harm in it,” he said. “Empty.”

  The officer had by now got his first good look. “My God,” he said, “what are you? You could stand up to any horse I ever saw and look him straight in the eye.”

  “Stark hunter’s my way of livin’.”

  “He’s got a knife,” the screaming woman screamed again. “He was a makin’ to scalp that poor man.”

  “His knife,” Cam said and spun it at the officer, who stepped aside and let it drop. He touched his sheath. “Mine’s here.”

  “Who are you?” It was the voice of a man used to talking a mite bigger than he could back up. He wasn’t so big, maybe six feet, and slender in the shank, like a riding man. Some men you couldn’t dandy up with King Louie’s royal robes; this officer would have been a beau-dandy with no more than a breechclout on him. Whetstone gray in the eye, he was, and looked at you like he might buy you if he had any use for you. His thin lips fitted together like lid and crock, the kind of lips you’d see on a man that was always looking sharp for wrong to be done him and had it ciphered to a hair how much he was owed.

  “Well,” the officer said, like he was so much you had to answer him, “I asked who you are?”

  “The way we do it in the Ohio country,” Cam said, “you come visitin’, you tell me first who you are.”

  The freckles across the officer’s forehead turned green. “Lieutenant Richard Thornwood of the Federal Army, under orders to General Harmar at Fort Washington,” he said, as though he didn’t expect ever to answer that question again. “And, as you can see by my goods and chattels, a future citizen of the Ohio country.” He waved at the flat-boat.

  Cam held out his hand. “Cam Galway. Cam’s for Cameron. I’m a Cameron born, but the Injins killed my folks on the Wilderness Trail when I was three and old Tom Galway took me in as a bound boy. Reckon that makes me a Cameron and a Galway.”

  “And God knows what else,” the lieutenant said, shrugging away from the held-out hand that had nothing wrong with it except a smear of the whiteskin’s blood. “Did you kill this man?”

  “Reckon.”

  The lieutenant knelt down at the corpse. “Little good it would do to deny it. One shot, one dead man. One living man, one empty rifle.”

  “Nine-ten Injins.”

  “Indians?” The lieutenant looked up from turning out the whiteskin’s pockets. “What Indians?”

  “Shawnees. Mingoes. Shawnee yell.”

  “Yes, we heard a yell,” the lieutenant said. “But we haven’t seen anything yet to lead us to believe you weren’t the yeller.” He rubbed the end of his longish nose as though that might make it short enough to see past. “But you have raised a point. Why would you yell?” He rubbed some more. “By the Lord Harry’s breeks! To make us think there were Indians here so we wouldn’t come ashore and look into it.”

  “Likely they told you at Pittsburg about Shawnee ambushes around the Scioto.”

  “Yes,” the lieutenant said. “My army friends were kind enough to give me that information. The north bank of the Ohio was swarming with Shawnees, they told me. But on the southern bank I was as likely to find white ruffians and banditti as Indians. And this, Galway, is the southern bank.”

  “Well,” Cam said, “what’s this here whiteskin?”

  When he said whiteskin, scornful-like, the lieutenant’s head jerked like a fly-bit horse.
“We’ll know in a minute,” the lieutenant said, and went nuzzling’ around the white-skin’s vest with his hand. Then he said, “Ah,” and pulled at the man’s middle, rolling the body as he did it. Off came a belt, and when he held it up like a fat snake by the tail, all the plumpness slid to the down end and, out of a gap where the lacings had loosened, coins began to dribble. The lieutenant shook them out until there was a pile as big as a gray-moose dung. Cam had never seen so much metal that wasn’t lead or iron in all his born days.

  “Kiefer, Scully, Monan, Barker,” the lieutenant said, “bear me witness to this accounting.” Then he told off the coins to them, so many half-jos, so many doubloons, so many Spanish dollars, so many Queen Anne crowns and made them agree on the tally.

  If the lieutenant didn’t know about this whiteskin now he didn’t know shagbark from hickory, Cam thought.

  “Quite a hoard,” the lieutenant said and harked his head up at Cam. “So this is what you were after, Galway.”

  “How’d I know he had it, and it wrapped around his belly under his shirt all the time?”

  “That,” the lieutenant said, rising up, “is something for your magistrate at Limestone to find out. I suppose he’s the civil authority who has jurisdiction. And since I’m a soldier empowered to keep the law where the law doesn’t stretch, I now arrest you and order you taken aboard.”

  “Well, now,” Cam said, his tongue stiffening the way it always did just before he got mad. “I don’t mind to go with you to Limestone in your jauntin’ boat. I was a trailin’ there my own self, bein’ out of powder and ball, and carryin’ a pouchful of sang root to trade for some. But I ain’t jist satisfied with takin’ on this arrest. Wouldn’t it be more friendly to ask me what betook here?”

  “My eyes tell me well enough what betook here,” the lieutenant sneered. “You admit to an empty pouch and horn. What better to trade for lead and powder in this or any other country than hard money? And this victim of your rifle had money. It would seem that you hounded him through the woods to the water’s edge, and when he called to us for help you shot him and tried to scare us off with a Shawnee yell. When we didn’t scare off, you came down here and tried to rob him under our noses and, apparently, scalp him to make it look like a Shawnee trick.”

  Cam stared him over. Once an idea got into a man’s mind it just dug in deeper like an old groundhog. “Come on,” Cam said and started for the leaning willow that Catfishjaw had scouted from.

  “Hold him,” the lieutenant barked.

  These soldiers were good hands at their trade. Two of them grabbed an arm each at the same second so’s he had to drop his gun and couldn’t snatch out his knife or hatchet. But never did a bear need knife or hatchet to fight with and if there was anything that put bear spit in his throat it was being held and hampered. He humped and jumped back a step so as to get the strength into his two arms as he brought them forward, and so banged the two arm-holders into each other. Then he brought up his knee into the guts of the right arm-holder and that one let go, and with his free hand he smashed the other arm-holder and the blow slid off the cheek bone into the man’s Adam’s apple and made him choke like to drowning. With one hand free for a knife and one for a hatchet, Cam flashed out both. But even then that pawky voice that was always coolest in him when he was hottest said don’t kill one man to show off you didn’t cold-blood murder another one. With his hatchet arm he hooked the soldier Kiefer around the neck and needled the point of his knife into Kiefer’s backbone and whirled Kiefer face-to the charging lieutenant. The lieutenant shied off at the last inch.

  “Now you have dropped the eggs, Galway,” he said, grim. “And just how do you propose to escape us?”

  “Reckon if you couldn’t fetch wind of a party of Shawnees, you couldn’t make out to follow me very far. But it ain’t in my mind to go. It’s in my mind to prove this out.” He marched Kiefer, sweating grease, to the slanting willow. “A Shawnee name of Catfishjaw was a-spyin’ out your boat from up there.”

  “Catfishjaw?” The lieutenant laughed. “Pure poetry. But how do I know you’re not Catfishjaw?”

  “In Shawnee I’m named for my scalp, Flash-in-the-Sun.” There was a slick mark on the willow trunk where Catfishjaw’s moccasins had skidded; in three places old bark had been peeled off to show under-bark. It was all plain as a dug ditch. And the Shawnee stink was there when you nosed close to the wood.

  The lieutenant looked and he sniffed. And shook his head. “No, Galway, I won’t gull. All I smell is the river-mud stink and my nose has been full of it since Pittsburg. As for the scratches on the tree, I’ve seen trees like this that the coons have run up. Back in Virginia I’ve even seen a fox claw up a bent tree to foil the hounds.”

  From behind Kiefer Cam pointed here and there. Sign was everywhere—a rolled stone, some powder grains where a brave had lost some of his prime when he jumped, a loose root that had been kicked, the round of a sitter’s rump in some moss, a squashed bark-worm, a strand of sweet grass some brave had been nibbling while he waited, and no sweet grass within a mile.

  “Why shouldn’t the ground be all stomped over?” the lieutenant said. “My men stomped it over. Spilled that powder, too, I’ll warrant. As for the sweet grass”—he hawed—”that’s too much. Who could find a trifle like that but the man who dropped it there?” The lieutenant put up his sword. “The leak in this story of yours that you shot this man, this bait as you call him to save us, is this, Galway; it does not explain why you killed him. I’ll believe any shot is lucky except a dead-center hit as neat as that. You meant to kill that man, Galway, and that’s murder, and you’ll have to stand for it if there is any justice in Limestone. I want that hatchet and I want that knife and I expect you to submit to being bound without a struggle.” Now what, Cam thought, would make a man like the lieutenant water at the mouth and lick it off with his tongue when he thought of a man trussed and bound?

  “I don’t mind to go to Limestone and stand before Squire Cracken and Jim Waters, the smith. They don’t figure to make much of downing a turncoat bait for Shawnees. But trussed and bound I won’t go.”

  “I think you will,” the lieutenant said. “You’ll have to kill Kiefer or let him go and we’ll get to you over Kiefer’s dead body or past his live one. And I wouldn’t put too much faith in this Squire Cracken and Jim Waters. We’re army men, Galway, and we’ve been hearing from every army man on the river how the Limestoners acted in the case of that brute, Lew Wetzel, last summer. So we don’t propose to stand by and let another one of you lawless woodsrunners off scot-free. I’ve had a little learning in the law, and it’ll be trial by evidence, Galway, not camaraderie, and you don’t have any evidence.”

  “What’s that?” Cam pointed. It was just what he’d been hoping to find, just where he’d hoped to find it. Oh, he’d let his ears follow the lieutenant and his tongue go back at the lieutenant but he’d kept his eyes on the fly all around, and there it was, just a little behind the lieutenant, a rawhide thong loop caught in hip-high snag, snapped where some brave had pulled himself loose from it; you could see the Indian knot plain.

  The lieutenant looked and went to it; they all looked and circled the lieutenant. Kiefer looked, but didn’t move. That was the trick of it. When you jab a man in the small of the back near his backbone with something like a knife-tip he thinks he feels it for some little time after the knife-tip’s gone. So Kiefer stood still and Cam ducked and was gone four or five steps behind a crook-kneed old willow. Kiefer went on standing still, till the lieutenant turned. “Kiefer, you dolt. Why didn’t you—”

  That was when Cam tossed a pebble into a bush up the hillside.

  Five muskets smashed away in a volley at the quivering leaves. Kiefer got to his piece and, running in a crouch at the bush, fired at point-blank range, following in with a bayonet charge. While the squad went up the hill to see how dead he was, Cam slipped from behind the willow, down to the beach and back to the sandbar again. He was beside the corpse of the white
skin picking up his rifle-gun and the whiteskin’s knife before anybody saw him. It was the screaming woman, and she screamed again.

  The soldiers didn’t stop to reload; too mad, Cam figured. Fast as hoops they came downhill at him, Kiefer in the lead, and the rest of them not minding that Kiefer was ahead, it seemed like. A beef of a man with a bear’s round head and flat face with near as much prickle-hair on it, he was just the man to come first. He had an idea, Kiefer did, and he knew all about bayonet jabbing. Maybe so. He made one feint, just like Cam had seen the British regulars do at Detroit, and feinted smack into Cam’s foot that had kicked out into Kiefer’s belly. Kiefer spun away four or five steps, and knelt down, holding in his dinner.

  “Squad, halt,” the lieutenant bawled. “Load.”

  “Richard.” The way the blue-headed girl called it was like the sweet clear whistle of a quail calling bob-white.

  The lieutenant didn’t look at her, but he didn’t order, “Fire,” either. He came to within ten paces of where Cam leaned on his rifle.

  “Galway,” he said, “you’re under arrest and I warn you not to resist me further under pain of your life.”

  “I ain’t under arrest,” Cam said. “You ain’t even ketched me.

  “Richard, don’t you see? He could have disappeared entirely but he came back.” Cam would have liked to snatch a look at this girl but it was best to keep his eyes on the lieutenant’s pistol yet awhile. “Nine-ten Shawnees back on the hill somewhere and I can’t fight ’em with an empty rifle-gun,” he said. “Take my sang pouch and give me some powder and ball and I’ll go back to my huntin’. Else you can carry me into Limestone so’s I can trade for some. I’ll go, and no hard feelin’s, but I go my own man.” It was always a bother to come amongst people; took too many words to git by.

  “Don’t let him come aboard with all them hatchets and knives hanging on him, Lieutenant,” the screaming woman screeched. “He came back to scalp that poor man. I seen him.”