The Winds of Autumn Page 6

  I was truly unschooled in treating with women. I was utterly fascinated with the whole of her, barely able to keep my hands from straying to those tiny freckles, desperate to spout something grand and not appear an addled dimwit … and came up empty as an overturned piggin.

  Loraleen knew her menfolk. She got a new hold on the kettle and showed white teeth in another heart-stopping smile. “Travelin’ late tonight, ain’t yuh.”

  “How’d yuh guess?” I squeaked out before my tongue died again. “Yuh never worn a hat the other times.”

  The girl had the gate open for me, she did. She had learned I disliked hats, winter and summer, and to learn that she had watched me close during past visits. She was interested enough to catch the slightest change in my habits. Of course my proving bright enough to step through the gate she held ajar was about as likely as me talking the thorns off a spiny bush. Backwardness locked my jaw.

  Loraleen ignored the awkward silence and took me in, heel to hat brim. “Some taller’n your brother, mite more heft. Got less of a rovin’ eye too.”

  Her frank appraisal set me looking anywhere but at her. I pawed dirt with a moccasin toe, biding for time. Loraleen had me all aswirl inside. Never before had any girl, Lord forbid such a beauty, matched me with Blake and considered me worth the bother. The thought thrilled me right at first. Deeper down it was unsettling, as if in besting Blake I was somehow disloyal to him.

  I might’ve pawed a hole in the ground big enough to crawl into if not for Joshua. He broke Loraleen’s spell over me. “Don’t pester Blaine thataway, girl. Go along and help your maw and sisters. We got us a passel of hungry men ta feed.”

  Though disappointment marred her fine features, Loraleen obeyed her paw. I stayed two steps behind her throughout our crossing of the Oldham dooryard. What she’d said stacking me against Blake lingered in my mind. I wasn’t completely wet back of the ears. Loraleen bad sought me out believing she stood a better chance of waylaying me with her charms as opposed to my more womanly-wise brother. The longer I dwelled on that, the more I saw the certain truth of it. Loraleen was no stunning lass burdened with a hollow bead. She was a clever, strong-willed, full-blown female determined to snare a man of her own. And God protect anyone who heedlessly succumbed to her beauty. Unless you reckoned with her every turn of the path, she’d make a heel hound of you.

  The Oldham dwelling was a two-story structure with the second story overhanging the first. Rifle ports drilled through the floor of the overhang gave defenders a clear field of fire along the base of the walls—the solitary reason, Joshua told us, the Shawnee had forgone any try at besieging the door or burning his family out. “After that, the windstorm pinned them down till they give it up altogether.”

  “Then they brung your horses along and laid into us,” Lem surmised. From that point forward no one bothered with the events of last night and early morning, for Joshua understood our desire to be away quick.

  In the Oldham home meals were served at a plank table before a fireplace whose opening was near ceiling-high and twice my arm span. Three women could cook at a time, none too many in light of the number of Oldhams swarming the table morning and night. Joshua put his sons to searching for the missing James and caring for our horses, his daughters to soap-making and washing. The eating room felt empty with only our party, Joshua, his child-heavy wife and Loraleen present for the early supper.

  We scooped boiled salt pork, greens and squash from shallow bark trays with wooden ladles. After the first serving, the kettle was placed on the table and we helped ourselves. Cold spring water in hollow gourds completed the fare. Lem frowned a little at sipping water with table vittles, and I knew he regretted Joshua’s spurning of the jug for the sake of peace with his overburdened wife.

  The salt pork had been cut into large squares for stewing, large enough so it was some work to wedge them past my swollen lip. Loraleen took it upon herself to slice a separate tray of meat in thin strips and slip it in front of me from behind my shoulder, much to the amusement of Blake and Lem. They’d undoubtedly seen everything that happened between us outside, and began smiling at each other between bites. Before the afternoon was too far along, I would get an earful from both of them about Loraleen and there was no way around it: She was clearly throwing her bonnet at my feet.

  The hurried meal lasted scant minutes from start to finish. As we rose from the table, the door cracked and Joshua was called away. True to her word, Loraleen poured the meal from my kettle in one side apron of the old double-treed packsaddle offered by her paw and snugged the cover flap shut. I carried the saddle outside and cinched it on our lead packhorse. While I stashed the smaller bags of supplies from the Tyler plantation in the other side apron, Loraleen tied the twin jugs of Kentucky whiskey ahead of the front trees. The skillet and boiling noggin we lashed behind the rear trees. We said nothing, but bumped together more than once during the loading and tying. For all her soft appearance, Loraleen was solid and steady on her feet. More importantly, Adam took to her like a fish to water. He followed her every move and she chattered with him low and easy. Loraleen treated him as she did her brothers; Adam would be left in good and kind hands.

  The missing Joshua returned, bleak and downcast. “They worried James somethin’ terrible ’fore he died. Can’t see as how he kept from screamin’ out ta us. You lads ever heard tell of Injuns markin’ a forehead with three smudges of blood?”

  The confirmation of James’s death hushed everyone for long moments. Loraleen pressed Adam tight against her and rested her chin atop his sandy hair. It was a comfort to hold onto the living when feeling the loss of a loved one. Did me some good to see Adam grip her back with both arms.

  Joshua’s question lingered unanswered till Blake swung astride his bay, signaling our departure was imminent. He gazed down at Joshua from a face cold and unforgiving as stone. “Yeh, we know them marks, same sign was left on our door. ’Fore it’s all said an’ done, we aim ta return the favor an’ have our Sarah back ta boot.”

  Blake leaned down and extended his hand to Joshua. “Thanks for the saddle an’ the eats an’ takin’ Adam in. I’m mighty sorry about James. You’ll miss him much as we’ll miss our dead.” He straightened and sought Lem and me.

  By then we were mounted and ready to move out. Loraleen stepped close to my off-leg and placed a hand on my thigh. I felt the warmth of her palm through the double thickness of breeches and leggins. Those dark eyes pooled as deep and inviting as before. The sun fired her red hair, and a slight blush gave her freckled skin a rosy glow. “Adam an’ me will be here … waitin’ fer yuh.”

  Blake was too anxious for long good-byes. “Let’s be about it, brother.”

  Not yet trusting my tongue with my heart pounding so hard and fast, I squeezed Loraleen’s fingers and reined the gelding after Blake’s bay. Lem passed me the reins of the packhorses, and for the second time that afternoon we rode from a dooryard bloodied by the very enemy we pursued. With the long ride ahead uppermost in our minds again, we didn’t look back.

  Chapter 6

  Evening till After Midnight, September 11

  The first leg of our ride for the Ohio passed in a hurry. Blake set the pace, and pushed ahead along a narrow game trail that wove a fairly straight course through lowland stands of beech, walnut and sycamore. As the afternoon waned, the gloom amongst the thick trunks deepened and the stir of breeze first noticed in the Oldham dooryard sighed in the vast canopy of leaves overhead. On the trail below, the air remained still and hot. The horses showed a trace of lather by the time Blake called a halt at the south base of Beauty Ridge. We dismounted there to rest them and switch our supplies to the second packhorse for the three-hundred-foot climb to the crest of the ridgeline. High country awaited us.

  With the Oldham cabin a goodly distance behind, Lem couldn’t resist temptation. He passed one of Paw’s jugs of Monongahela as soon as we finished recinching the pack saddle. Two long pulls and red dotted his rough cheeks. His gummy grin pucke
red the tattoo on his jaw. “How many of them Oldham young’uns did yuh count, Blaine?”

  “Sixteen, eleven of ’em females,” I answered, wiping water from the corner of my eye. Paw’s last batch of Kentucky corn had a real bite to it: Seemed to lighten the forest gloom a mite, it did.

  “How many yuh figure Loraleen’s possible for?’’ Blake asked.

  “’Bout as many as Blaine allows her,” Lem reckoned, and the funning was underway just like that. They were plumb good at it. They never forgot that any Tyler feeling unjustly wronged suffered from a short-fused temper, so they gave me plenty of room, Lem placing himself on the opposite flank of my gelding and Blake beyond the reach of a fist, rubbing his bay with swatches of bottom grass.

  “Them eyes an’ red hair an’ that chest a man would be proud ta lay a cheek on, Lord forbid, what a temptation all that be. Might could get yuh hog-tied for all time ’fore yuh knowed what happened ta yuh … ’fore yuh taken a wise look-see at what lurks down the path a ways,” Lem said. “Let me tell yuh, after the third or fourth young’un every last one of these here border gals gets fat, sassy an’ mean, an’ standoffish ta where yuh can’t hardly share a woods bed with ’em, let alone anythin’ ’neath a roof, what with all the racket and clutter underfoot mornin’ an’ night. Nosiree, ain’t nothin’ atall liken yuh dreamed it was gonna be. My pappy, he knowed the honest of it, the Lord rest his soul. Told me more’n oncet a hunter can’t trust fleas, Injuns an’ pretty women. If’n he does, it’s the early grave fer sure.”

  Lem having fired the first broadside, Blake chimed in with the second, turned toward his bay all the while. “Yep, chasin’ after a pretty face and slim waist can be bad as hittin’ your ownself in the head with a hatchet. The only good thing about it most times is it feels mighty good when yuh quit.”

  They fell silent, unsure how I’d come on to their razing. Truth was, I was near dying from holding back laughter. Their funning was common amongst desperate men headed into great danger. Ribbing each other and the sharing of a few belly laughs made the prospect of sudden death past the next bend in the trail more bearable, less foreboding. And when trailing men held whatever threatened them at arm’s length, their thinking and planning were always the better for it.

  The two rascals won out in the end. They stayed their tongues and studied me close and finally, before my belly split open, I let loose in a head-back, lung-emptying, rip-snorting hail of laughter. They joined me, and we hooted and chuckled and chided till our ribs hurt and tears ran.

  It was Blake, always prone to command, who sobered and straightened first. “One last short pull on the jug, then we need a quick jawbonin’. We don’t want ta slip up and sink what slim hope Sarah has left.” He held an arm overhead. The fringe on his sleeve rippled in a breeze now blowing at ground level. “Weather is goin’ ta sour liken I said earlier. We’ll get no favors this ride, me buckos, none atall.”

  Holding Lem to a short pull was something not even the most devout left to such a true drinker. Blake tipped the jug for him and tilted it aside the second his Adam’s apple twitched, which foretold a swallow had commenced. I declined, and Blake retied the jug on the packsaddle, double-knotted for safekeeping against the perils of the trail and Lem’ s constant thirst.

  The horses, rubbed dry, grazed and swished hindquarters with their tails while we gathered in a circle, Blake armed with a sharp stick for mapmaking. “Once we’re up yonder, we follow Beauty Ridge till we come ta the Hunt Branch of Schultz Creek. We wind back down along the Hunt ta the valley of the Schultz, turn west and scout through Sherman Hollow. Long about here, at the north opening of Sherman Hollow, we hit White Oak Creek less’n a mile from where it joins Tygart’s, two miles from the Ohio itself. With any luck, we’ll be there ahead of Three Feathers and his bunch. If’n not, maybe we can sneak in behind ’em and strike their camp ’fore dawn.”

  “What makes yuh believe he won’t cross the Ohio tonight if’n he beats us past White Oak Creek?” Lem wondered.

  “He can’t make the river ’fore full dark, no matter how fast he travels, even with good weather. An’ the rain what missed us last night will have the Ohio on the rise and afloat with snags. He’d best hang back an’ cross at first light, canoes or no canoes. He don’t have but two horses ta help them swim across, an’ lnjuns ain’t any more fond of high water in the dark ’n horses, as well we know.”

  He let Lem and me ponder a bit, and when we posed no further questions, he laid bare the nub of the next several hours. “We don’t dare waste any time less’n we want ta end up short and empty-handed. ’Tain’t a one of our horses as valuable and important as Sarah, an’ if’n we was ta break them down freein’ her, not even Paw was he alive would hold it against us. We ain’t gonna let nothin’ stand in our way, not these animals, not foul weather, nor any other hardship we run onto. Both of yuh remember that. That away, maybe someday you’ll forgive me for bein’ an overbearin’ bastard till we see this hunt done.” He threw his map stick into a patch of stalky goldenrod. “Let’s be about it!”

  Lem watched Blake swing astride and lead out, then spoke in a low voice meant for my ears. “Can’t never say we weren’t warned, huh, my friend. I don’t rnisdoubt a word he said. You Tylers be bull-headed as hungry cows an’ twice as stubborn. Makes yuh awfully tryin’ ta trail with.” He winked his one eye. “Get aboard. We don’t want him testy ’fore we even touch the ridgeline, do we now.”

  We mostly walked the horses to the crest of Beauty Ridge. Twice we switched directions to skirt large outcroppings of limestone blocking our path. Trees on the south slope were mostly shagbark hickory and red, black and white oak, spotted with lower-growth dogwood and sassafras. When the side of the ridge cupped and trapped water in shady places, islands of fern shown bright as green jewels. Near the completion of our climb, we huffed and puffed with the riderless horses.

  Pines scattered hither and yon were an encouraging sight for they flourished near high crests. We topped out in late afternoon, and the ever rising breeze dried sweat from men and animals. We chewed jerk and the horses enjoyed a brief blow; then we mounted and took out north along the spine of Beauty Ridge. Jammed in a nutshell, Blake was in one godalmighty rush to spoil Three Feathers’ day.

  Experienced horsemen covered the tall country south of the Ohio at a smart clip. Chestnut oak and white oak blanketed the summits, the majestic white six feet in girth and shy of leaves the bottom fifty feet. The highland oak canopy was looser than valley trees, and enough sunlight peeked through to keep the ridgeline in the main dry and brush-free year-round. Wherever unshaded sunlight touched bare earth, however, thickets of huckleberry, thorny green brier and mountain laurel sprouted. But if a rider stuck wide of these entanglements, he gained ground every hour on anyone traipsing the willow and cane-choked lower reaches of Tygart’s Creek, a stream marshy and downright crooked the last miles approaching the Ohio.

  The further we rode, the more concerned we became about the afternoon breeze, which steadily strengthened into a brisk wind under a clear, bright sky. Such a combination often presaged drastic changes in weather, and hemmed in by towering forest, we were anxious to get a handle on what might descend upon us once daylight was gone. We all wanted to gain Bald Knob before dark.

  The Knob was a well-known landmark on the western face of Beauty Ridge. Here the summit fell away in a sharp precipice a quarter mile long, exposing the whole of the western skyline. We emerged from the trees, and at first look Lem said it fast and true. “Welcome ta the pit of Hell, Tyler boys.”

  Towering black clouds extended left and right far off as the eye could see. Treetops swayed and whipped on the horizon, caught in the clutches of powerful gusts of wind blowing straight our way. Lightning flickered and struck the highest hills directly beneath the advancing storm. The storm promised early darkness, and the sheer power of it made your jaw slack in awe, like it might deny you breath to breathe unless you took great care and gave it proper respect.

  “Makes
you long for stout walls and a solid roof double-quick, don’t she now,” Lem observed wistfully.

  Blake dismounted and handed Lem his Lancaster. “Step back here, Blaine. We’ll want our supplies on our best pack animal.”

  We made the switch in short order. Blake reclaimed his rifle, then hesitated beside the bay, gaze fixed on the onrushing storm. “What’ll Three Feathers do, Lem?”

  I eased the gelding forward to hear over the wind.

  “Well, he ain’t faced with a boatload of choices. If’n he believes we went ta Turkey Neck, an’ he don’t need reach the river any particular time, he’ll hole up somewhere an’ wait out the weather, least the worst of it.” He paused and spat. “But if’n he’s got a burr in his breechclout an’ has reason ta cross the Ohio by a certain time, he’ll forge ahead just like us’uns, killin’ an’ leavin’ anything slowin’ him down, be it Sarah or his horses.”

  “But why kill Sarah after botherin’ ta take her?” I blurted out. “That don’t make a lick of sense.”

  Lem trained his good eye on me. ‘’I can’t understand why he took her atall. A one-arm white woman won’t fetch pelts nor horses in trade. An’ I ain’t never beard of any Injun wantin’ such a woman for his ownself.” Lem’s lips pursed in deep thought. “But remember, Tice Wentsell swore Three Feathers be a wily red bastard on the warpath. We may never find out exactly, but he’d a reason or she’d never left the dooryard alive. Maybe he’ll keep her so, big blow or no big blow.”

  Blake nodded in agreement and mounted. He reined in tighter to our horses. “Yuh know the country best, Lem. Where could he hole up?”

  Lem lowered his head against the wind and spoke in a near shout. “Two places. Sykes Cave and Hanging Rock. Ain’t none other worth the trouble.”

  “Good. We’ll scout ’em on the sly an’ see what’s what. Batten your gear ’fore we taken out again.”