First off, I swapped some dress goods Ma had in her trunk for a buckskin hunting
shirt and leggings; and after I had trapped, I traded my muskrat and red-fox
skins with the Cherokees for things I needed. The cornmill was there, and after
my first harvest I always had corn.
My fourteenth birthday came along and Ma wasn’t there to bake me a cake like
she’d done, so I fried myself up a batch of turkey eggs. And that was a big day,
because just shy of noon when I was fixing to set up to table, the Tinker came
along the trail.
It was the first time I’d seen him, although I’d heard tell of him. He sat up to
table with me and told me the news of the Settlements. After that he always
stopped by. The Tinker hadn’t very much to say that first time, but he did a
sight of looking and seeing. So I showed him around, proud of the cabin Pa had
built and the way he’d used water from the creek to irrigate the fields when
they needed water—although rain usually took care of that.
The Tinker noticed everything, but it wasn’t until a long time after, that some
of his questions started coming back to mind to puzzle me. Especially, about the
gold. Once he asked me if I had any gold money … said he could get a lot for
gold.
So I told him about all our gold going to Will Caffirey, and he got me to draw
him a picture of what those gold pieces looked like.
“Your Pa,” he said, “must have been a traveled man.”
“Sacketts haven’t taken much to travel,” I said, “although we hear tell that a
long time ago, before they came over to the Colonies, some of them were
sailors.”
“Like your Pa,” he said.
“Pa? If he was a sailor he never said anything about it to me. Nor did Ma ever
speak of it.”
He looked at a knot I had made in a piece of rope. “Good tight knot. Your Pa
teach you that?”
“Sure—that’s a bowline. He taught me to tie knots before he taught me letters.
Two half-hitches, bowline, bowline-on-a-right, sheep’s bend—all manner of
knots.”
“Sailor knots,” the Tinker said.
“I wouldn’t know. I expect a good knot is useful to a lot of folks beside
sailors.”
Aside from the cornmill and Ma’s trunk filed with fixings, there wasn’t much
left at the cabin beside Pa’s wornout Ballard rifle and the garden tools. In the
trunk was Ma’s keepsake box. It was four inches deep, four inches wide and eight
inches long, and was made of teakwood. Inside she kept family papers and a few
odds and ends of value to her.
The Ballard was old, and no gun to be taking to the western lands, so I figured
to swap it off when I did the mill, or at the first good chance. If I was going
to meet up with Bald Knobbers or wild Indians I would need a new, reliable gun.
Now the Tinker, he sat there smoking, and finally as the fire died down he said,
“Daylight be all right for you?”
It was all right, so come daylight we taken off down the mountain for the last
time.
One time, there on the trail, I stopped and looked back. There was a mist around
the peaks, and the one that marked the cabin was hidden. The cabin was up there
in those trees. I reckoned never to see it again, or Ma’s grave, out where Pa
dug it under the big pine.
A lot of me was staying behind, but I guess Pa left a lot up there, too.
And then we rounded the last bend in the trail and my mountain was hidden from
sight. Before us lay the Crossing, and I had seen the last of the place where I
was born.
Chapter Two
We fetched up to the Crossing in a light spatter of rain, and I made a dicker
with the storekeeper, swapping my cornmill for a one-eyed, spavined mare. It was
in my mind to become rich in the western lands, but a body does not become rich
tomorrow without starting today, so I taken my mare to a meadow and staked her
out on good grass. A man who wants to become rich had better start thinking of
increase, and that mare could have a colt.
The Tinker was disgusted with me. “You bragged you’d a mind for swapping, but
what can a man do with a one-eyed, spavined mare?”
Me, I just grinned at him. Two years now I’d had it in my mind to own that
little mare. “Did you ever hear of the Highland Bay?”
“She was the talk of the mountains before she broke a leg and they had to shoot
her.”
“Seven or eight years ago the Highland Bay ran the legs off everything in these
parts, and won many a race in the lowlands, too.”
“I recall.”
“Well, when I was working in the fields for Caffrey, the Highland Bay was
running loose in the next pasture. A little scrub stallion tore down the fence
and got to her.”
“And you think this no ‘count little mare is their get?”
“I know it Fact is, I lent a hand at her birthing. Old Heywood, he who owned the
Highland Bay, he was so mad he gave the colt to a field hand.”
There was a thoughtful look in the Tinker’s eyes. “So you have a one-eyed,
spavined mare out of the Highland Bay by a scrub stallion. Now where are you?”
“I hear tell those Mexicans and Indians out west hold strong to racing. I figure
to get me a mule that will outrun any horse they’ve got.”
“Out of that mare?” he scoffed.
“Her get,” I said. “She can have a colt, and sired by the right jack stud I
reckon to turn up a fast mule.”
We sat there on the bank watching that little mare feed on green meadow grass,
and after a bit, I said to the Tinker, “When a man owes me, one way or another I
figure to collect. Do you know where Caffrey keeps his prize jack?”
He didn’t answer, but after a bit he said, “Nobody ever races a mule.”
“Tinker, where there’s something will run, there’s somebody will bet on it. Why,
right in these mountains you could get a bet on a fast cow, and many a mule is
faster than a horse, although mighty few people believe it. The way I see it,
the fewer folk who believe a mule can run, the better.”
Caffrey’s jackass could kill a man or a stallion, and had sired some of the best
mules ever set foot. Before dark we were hidden in a clump of dogwood and willow
right up against the Caffrey pasture fence.
The wind was across the pasture and from time to time the jack could catch scent
of my mare, and while he couldn’t quite locate her, he was stomping around in
there, tossing his head and looking.
‘Two things,” I said, “had to work right for me to leave this here country—the
timing had to be right: You had to come up the trail, and that mare of mine had
to be ready. And this here jack will work the charm.”
“You’re smarter than I thought,” he said, and then we sat quiet, slapping
mosquitoes and waiting until it was full dark. Crickets sang in the brush, and
there was a pleasant smell of fresh-mown hay. Watching the lights of that big
white house Caffrey had built just two years ago, I got to thinking how elegant
it must be behind those curtains. Would I ever live in a house like that? And
have folks about who loved me? Or would I always be a-setting out in the dark,
looking on?
Caffrey had done well with Pa’s money. He had it at a time when gold had great
value, and he’d bought with a shrewd eye there at the war’s last years. He was
one of the richest men around.
When I called on him at Meeting to return the money I had no hope I would get
it, but I wanted to put it square before the community that he had wrongfully
used money with which he had been trusted. I’d no money nor witnesses to open an
action for recovery … but almost everybody around had wondered where he got
that gold money.
He had talked large of running for office, but I felt a man who would be
dishonest with a boy was no man to trust with government. It always seemed to me
that a man who would betray the trust of his fellow citizens is the lowest of
all, and I wanted no such man as Will Caffrey to have that chance. When I called