The Long Knife Read online

  “Put down your weapons, I say for the last time. I certainly will not trade you powder and ball to go about your evil business again. And I will not negotiate with an armed and threatening man.” The lieutenant pointed his pistol.

  So, for the second time Cam threw the whiteskin’s knife at him, same way, hilt first, and it knocked the pistol loose from the lieutenant’s hand. A leap and a stoop was all it took to get to the pistol fallen into the sand before the lieutenant did. Looking up, Cam figured this time he’d stay close to the lieutenant; anybody firing at him from either the boat or the hill was just as likely to hit the lieutenant as him.

  “My God!” The screaming woman had a frog of fear in her throat now. “That monster man aims to kill us all.” Maybe she was afeared, but the lieutenant wasn’t. The freckles on his forehead were jumping like popcorn in a pan.

  “Richard,” the girl said, “it’s you who’s made everybody afraid by the way you’ve handled this man. Let him talk and say why he killed that man. Mayhap we won’t mind his coming aboard.”

  The lieutenant said nary a word; he wasn’t the kind that would ask the grass for a drop of morning dew. For the first time Cam took a good long scan of the greenhorns on the flatboat: five men of middling age, mostly, and the wives and younguns to go with them. Like most of these flatboaters they figured to be farming folk that couldn’t get a living any longer out of the gutted land they’d left across the mountains. Had a hunger to waste more land, kill more trees; just like a hunter killing game, so it wasn’t for a hunter to say whether they had a right to kill trees and land. They had to live any way they knew how. But why had they come, if they were so afeared? Oh, they were a fearing huddle out there on that flatboat, so’s a man could almost smell the sour sweat of their fear. Still, every man got afeared when he went into places he didn’t know about. Fear was something that got into you sometimes, like the phthisic, you didn’t know how; so all you could do was wait till you overed it, or it killed you. A stout man would over it, give him time; but the sickly ones went around with it on their faces like pock-marks the rest of their mortal lives. Now how would a man, and him not a talking man, tell these folks why he’d killed the whiteskin, so’s they wouldn’t be afeared of him and of their own kind?

  While Cam studied out what he would say, he laid the lieutenant’s pistol and his own rifle-gun and hatchet and knife on the ground halfway betwixt them. He had just a pinch of tobacco, more kinnikinnick than Virginny leaf, in the little eel-skin where he kept his most prideful possession next to his rifle-gun, a picture clay pipe. When he’d filled the pipe and fired it he passed it to the lieutenant, who held it like he’d never parlayed before and didn’t know what next. Let be. None of them knew what next.

  “Squat,” he said to the lieutenant, and squatted to show him how.

  “My folks came a westerin’ once, into the Kentuck land, just like you folks are a doin’ now into Ohio country. Wa’n’t any river to come by then. They had to come over the mountains by Boone’s trace that was called the Wilderness Trail, and it had plenty Injins back in the mountains, afore the war. A scalp-party of Mohawks aheadin’ south to raid in Caroliny jumped ’em and laid my mam and paw in the onliest graves they’ll ever know. I was three and tied in a basket on an old mule that bolted into the woods and it wa’n’t for two whole days that somebody came along and found me, and that was Tom Galway and his family and they took me in to raise.

  “When I was five-six he took me to the fields and he said from now on I was his bound boy and I’d be a workin’ out the debt I owed him for all my vittles and beddin’ up to then, and I’d be payin’ for ’em against I growed up. From then on he worked me and he whupped me and the more he whupped me and worked me the more I growed, and me and his younguns, we had to make all the crops because Tom said his brains was worth more tradin’ and swappin’ than they was followin’ a mule and it breakin’ wind in his face. Only he traded too sharp one day with four Mingoes. It was for this here six-foot Lancaster rifle I carry, and them Mingoes came to the cabin after it, all likkered up and mean and old Tom shot one and run into the cabin. They come after him and he couldn’t git the door barred fast because he never put nothin’ right and in order, and they knifed him through the crack. J was in the loft, sent to bed without any supper because old Tom had come down to the barn and here was his girl Cathy, that was older than me but not bigger, a-kissin’ me and a-teasin’ me to take my britches down to see if my hair was growed out like hern, but he put the blame of it to me and was gonna cut the blood outta me with a chain tug. Them Mingoes got in before I knowed it, and I thought it was a word-fuss twixt Tom and his woman till I heard the younguns scream. It so happened I had my ax by me in the bed because if the old man came up to whup me for what was no push of mine I was gonna fell him with it. Instead it was a Mingo head that was poked up and I split it like a straight-grain chestnut butt. Oh, I wouldn’t have come down, I reckon—I’d have just stayed there and chopped heads till they burned me out, but I seen the old woman had throwed scaldin’ water into the eyes of two Injins afore they mortal stabbed her and I figured to slip out past ’em. But it wa’n’t that easy. They cornered me agin the fireplace and so I jist swung and cleft one in the crotch and one in the leg and when they went down I lopped off both their heads. It was near hoot-owl time and I knowed everybody was mortal dyin’, the younguns had been kilt outside, and I was only eleven but I stayed to close all their eyes, and then I took that Pennsylvany rifle and went into the woods. From that day on I ain’t debted to no man for ary bite I’ve et, even when I was so piddlin’ starved I had to steal from the squirrels. And I done fer myself for all these years with my rifle-gun, and all I know I learned from that rifle-gun, that was my provider and my mam and paw and kinfolk and my woman and preacher man and schoolin’.”

  He picked up his rifle-gun and his weapons and stood up.

  “If the lieutenant says I should have only shot to skeer this whiteskin, that ain’t what my rifle-gun has learned me to do. It learned me that if there’s something I’ve studied out to shoot, shoot it dead. If it ain’t something that needs to be shot, then don’t shoot. The whiteskin was standin’ bait for a Shawnee ambush. The way it is in this country anybody’d shoot him for that. It’s again nature to lead your own into a trap, like a Judas. Reckon I kilt him so you wouldn’t be kilt. Ain’t that reason enough?”

  “So you’re a runaway bound boy,” the lieutenant said half to himself. “A criminal to begin with. A woodsrunner without home or property or family and a grudge against all authority—that’s the perfect description of an outlaw.” But the folks on the boat had stopped being afeared of him; Cam could see that. He’d got them to know that a man raised up in this country would know more about its ways than them that had just raised the latch to come in. The lieutenant saw it, too.

  “I’ll go with you now, free and equal, Lieutenant,” Cam said.

  “Free and equal?” The lieutenant curried him down with a look, then he turned to his people on the flatboat. “Did any of you see hide, hair or feather of an Indian?”

  Sure and they hadn’t.

  The lieutenant turned to his soldier men. “Did any of you see buttock or belly button of a Shawnee?”

  They hadn’t and louded it out that they hadn’t.

  “Well, Galway,” the lieutenant said, and picked up his pistol, “we’ve established that much. I suppose it makes no difference whether I lead you to Limestone on a halter or you follow at my heels, for your own reasons. I accept your parole.” And the lieutenant led away to the flatboat. Cam filed in behind him. He looked up, to take a look at the blue-headed girl. She had eyes as blue-black as her hair. But they weren’t looking at him. They were looking behind him.

  That was when the musket butt came down on his head, like the end of his life.

  chapter 3

  First he made out to hear a little, through ears that seemed wadded with moss; then he could feel, dull but enough to know that his hands were bei
ng lashed together behind him and his bound legs hitched to a stanchion. But nothing he could do with his eyelids would make them open.

  “He can’t be ailing much,” a voice said, like a far-off bird chirp. “Look at his chest bellow up and down. Let Mrs. Scully do whatever has to be done here—if anything has to be done. Did you hear me, Meg?”

  The hands that had been scrabbling at his jacket slid off. “Richard, don’t you dare manhandle me.”

  “Damn it, Meg,” the lieutenant said, “there’s a dead man’s blood on that shirt. This brute’ll come out of it.”

  “There’s more than a splash of his own blood there, if you’ll look. Don’t you understand, Richard? I shot him and no more was I thinking to do it than to shoot a tabby.”

  “You’re as full of whimsy as a March hare. And why? You’re light-headed from not eating for two days. You should be dining with me now. Besides, I want you by my side to drink a toast to the new Fairlea when we sight Piney Bluff.”

  “I’m not so hungry nor are we so close to our new acres that this boy’s wounds can’t be tended first.”

  The lieutenant sneered, “Oh, yes, they taught you how to mend a sick song finch in that Philadelphia school for harpsichord and embroidery, and now you’ve the healing art. Damn it, what’s fretting you, Meg Farney? You saw with your own eyes what General Harmar wrote, that the Indians themselves were gentlemen in comparison with the generality of these backwoodsmen.”

  “If you must know, Richard, I’m ashamed. What must he think of us, that he was struck down from behind almost the instant you accepted his parole; what must he think when he finds, as he will, that he was dragged across the deck on his face because your men refused to carry him and you would not order them to?”

  The hands were on him again. The lieutenant said, “It’s plain enough. You won’t let be because I ask it. Let’s have done with this. Scully, Barker, prop him up against the shack wall. What further service can we be to you, Mistress Meg?”

  “Water,” she said.

  “A simple favor, that. Barker,” the lieutenant said. After the time it must have taken to lean out and dip up a bucketful of the Ohio River, water not hot and not cold and not even wet squashed all over Cam’s face. “Is your petticoat sense of justice finally served, Mistress Meg? Kiefer’s been whipped before the company for that undisciplined blow. I have rendered this tatterdemalion bravo a washing he doesn’t deserve and probably won’t thank me for. Now will you come with me?”

  “No,” and this word seemed to Cam to enter by his nose, because she knelt down by him, bringing her close enough to be smelled and with his eyes blank and his ears like they were water filled, the woman-musk of her was all he had to know her by. It was no farm-hussy smell, either, like milk two days in the crock, but something like when you first wind a honey-locust in bloom around a hill.

  “That’s not an answer I care to hear repeated,” the lieutenant said.

  “No, no, no,” Meg cried out. “What injury I’ve done him I’ll help heal, and the injury you’ve done him in the bargain. Help me get his shirt off. I shot him in the chest, I think.”

  “You’re mad. You’ll not paw over him. That disgrace you will not do to me.” And he must have grabbed her again. But she would not let go of the shirt, and when the lieutenant pulled on her, she pulled on Cam and knocked the cap off his loose-hanging head. Then she let go.

  “Oh,” Meg Farney said.

  “I have no intent to hurt,” the lieutenant said, “but you won’t—”

  “Oh,” Meg said again, gasping, “that hair. Like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Coin gold.”

  “Hair?” the lieutenant said. “Oh.” No word was said then, or Cam didn’t hear it and thought he’d dozed. “So that’s why the Shawnees call him Flash-in-the-Sun.”

  “Flash-in-the-Sun,” Meg whispered. “Flash-in-the-Sun. It couldn’t be anything else. I’ve never seen anything so magnificent.”

  The lieutenant sneered. “Oh, I suppose scrub stock foal out a good enough colt once in a while.”

  Cam could see thin shadows now, no more than gray smoke wisping against the night. But it was night at morning, and a brightness was growing in it. The Meg smell neared him and the wetness of a rag was like a hound’s tongue on his face. All over him it went, and up under his shirt where the crease from her ball was. The lieutenant’s voice was like a gimlet in the ear. “Which does it please more in you, Mistress Farney, the lady or the horsewoman, to fondle this stallion?”

  “Richard.” The Meg shadow blurred. The crack of the slap was like a beaver tail sounding on gat water.

  The lieutenant did nothing for what seemed a long time. Suddenly he roared, “Barker, Scully, dismissed. What are you damned-to-Tophet sluggards doing off your posts? Do you need a kick in the arse to loosen your constipated brains?” They ran. “And now, Meg.”

  Did Virginians whup their womenfolk, Cam wondered, with the first thought his mind was able to make.

  “Oh, Richard,” Meg said. “Richard, I don’t know you when you’re like this. Would you, a soldier in uniform, strike me?”

  “Have you finally noticed that?” the lieutenant barked. “That it’s the army you’ve been flouting, and not only the promised husband whose nose you’ve been trying to put out of joint?”

  “I had not thought that being military prevented a man from being humane and honorable.”

  “Meg—” the lieutenant spurted at her, and then, reaching out, pulled her into him. The first Cam, eyeballs finally steadying on center, saw of Meg Farney, the lieutenant had her near inside his shirt with him, and he was a-bending over her and his face a-muzzling down on hers and a-kissing it and you would have thought, to watch it, that it satisfied the lieutenant as much to half break her back as to lap up, like a buck deer at a spring, the living breath out of her. For all that she was bent to a strain, like a basket withe, her arms hung back and loose, like a sleeper’s.

  The lieutenant let go of her of a sudden. “Give,” he said, the skin of his mouth red to bursting, like a ripe fox plum. “Give back what you’re getting.”

  By slacking her body the girl slumped out of the lieutenant’s hold. “Give?” She groped, panting, to the shack for a place to lean. “What have you left me to give?”

  “And who else is it all supposed to belong to?”

  “No one,” she said. “But is this the time for sweethearting, with a bloodied man at our feet and a dead one so close we could see his staring eyes but for the blanket covering them?”

  “It wasn’t I who put off settling the matters between us to this last minute. Nor did I arrange that final distraction of murder on the sandbar. I could almost think that it was you who did.” The lieutenant was wanting to do something with his hands. They kept opening and closing like gasping mouths. But there wasn’t a thing by him but his pistol. Suddenly he jerked it from his belt and with his back around to her aimed at a Kentuck hill. He thumbed the hammer back, but never did he pull off, only starting in to talk again, backward to her. “How do you think I’ve felt the three weeks of this voyage, with the women folk tittering among them that if it’s like this before we’re married what’ll it be afterward. I’ve seen the men looking their opinions to each other of the fool I am for crooking my knee to a woman who will have none of me, for all that you’re half partner in this venture of westering. The minute is on us, Meg, not the hour, but the minute, when we’ll first view Piney Bluff, site of our Ohio country home and seat for the next ten generations of Thorn woods. And when it is sighted, my dear, I will call our company together and we will drink toasts to the routing of the Shawnees and to our new Fairlea in the wilderness, and to ourselves, dear Meg. You must come close to me then, and kiss me with all your heart, my dear, so that our company will know I am not little in your eyes; and, with all your doting, you must pay me, in one lump sum, for these three weeks—three weeks, do I say—these six months of neglect. For wasn’t it New Year’s Day that this coldness came upon you?
Wasn’t it? Why?”

  Cam could see her face plain now and how just past being a youngun she was, eighteen at most, and the lieutenant thirty or more. “If you know when, then you know why.”

  The lieutenant whirled. “Not an inkling,” he said, too quickly. “But you do,” Meg said. “Then if I do, I must have forgotten, so remind me,” the lieutenant said. For a long time it looked like she wouldn’t answer, not till the lieutenant tipped back her head sharp by the chin. “Well?”

  “Where were you last Christmas Eve, the last Christmas Eve I was ever to hang the mistletoe in the doorways of Fairlea, and my trunks all packed for Pittsburg and I alone in the house except for little Noah?” She shivered as if she’d just stepped into icy waters.

  “You know well enough. At the Corby’s, with a sleet storm blowing over and my mare lamed.”

  “Yet no more than an hour’s ride away, for which you could have borrowed a mount, and the storm did not come on till after dark. Of a certainty you were at the Corby’s, tucked in warm and snug with Mistress Annalee.”

  The lieutenant snorted. “With her husband in the same bed?”

  “Lying drunk in his study, as you both meant him to be. It is no gentleman’s lie to protect a lady’s name when you deny this, Richard. The truth of it was told me by Mistress Annalee herself on New Year’s Day for no other purpose than to stop me from giving you my guineas to go westering with, and so keep you by her.”

  “Why, that clapper-tongue bawd—”

  “Richard, is it that all who act to your misliking are bawds if they are women, and outlaws if they are men? Almost four years of you she had, Mistress Annalee said to me, her face as grieved as a widow’s. She loved you to heartbreak, she said, and it was I who cried for her, because she daren’t cry for herself before the guests.”

  “What would you have had me do?” The lieutenant dandled his pistol, as though to belt it again. “It had been understood by all for years, as it was settled within myself, that I would marry you when you grew out of Miss Mowbray’s classes and into your womanly fullness. Men will wench, even the best, and I have heard many a rowdy tale of Benjie Franklin, the old Quaker himself.”