There was a place where the trail curved out from the woods to the bluffs above the river. We looked back and glimpsed them, five of them.
“They’re gainin’ on us,” Archie said. “We’ve got to make our fight.”
15
“Not yet,” I said, and they looked at me, surprised, I guess, that a girl would speak up at such a time. “We’ll make ourselves hard to catch,” I said. “Come on!”
My eyes had been busy and I’d seen a dim trail taking off through the trees. As I started, Dorian hung back. “Where’s that go?” he demanded.
“We’ll find out, won’t we?”
Muttering, he followed. The trail led down through the trees into a wooded hollow. There were deer tracks, but I saw no human tracks. Swiftly I led the way through the trees, past some craggy rocks, and across a small stream. Waiting there, I waved them past and then tried to make the signs of their passing less obvious. Oats was a city man, I was sure, and I suspected Elmer was. I knew nothing of Horst, but if I could confuse them a mite, it would save time.
They had walked on, as I meant them to do, and I stood listening. There was no sound but a faint stirring of wind, and then I heard a voice, somebody calling. They had already reached the place where we’d turned off, but had they noticed? I was hoping they would continue on along the Big Sandy.
Regal had hunted down this way a long time back, following an old trail left by Pa in his younger days, and I was hopeful of finding the trail that ran parallel to Blaine Creek, or sort of.
A moment more lent to obscuring tracks, and then I followed along after Dorian and Archie. It was quiet in the woods, but sound carried when a body was in the open. I must caution them about talking. From time to time the trail emerged on the banks of the creek or in a meadow, but we moved on, heading south. Every step was drawing us closer to Sackett country, but we still had a ways to go. If I only had my rifle-gun!
It was back yonder, waiting for me in a tavern where I’d left it, and far from here. Yet, I dearly wanted that rifle and I studied in my mind to find a way to get there and pick it up. The tavern was miles away to the west and south, but mostly south.
When I fetched up with Dorian and Archie, they were resting, waitin’ for me. “Where’s this taking us?” Dorian complained. “We’re getting nowhere very fast!”
“Talk soft,” I said. “Voices carry. They’ve passed by where we turned off, but they’ll realize something’s wrong and they’ll come a-lookin’.”
We had a chance to gain time, so I led off along the trail. This was wild country, and strange to them, and Dorian didn’t like it much, me leading off thataway. He wanted to go places that he knew, and that meant to towns or settlements.
This was lonesome country; until a few years back, Injun hunting country. We were on the Kentucky side now, but most of those West Virginia mountains had belonged to nobody. Here and there Indians lived in the low country but stayed out of the mountains except when in pursuit of game.
It was wild country, rough, cut by many small streams, heavily timbered, country but it was my kind of country, the kind where I’d grown up. Settlements were all right for most folks, but a body was too easily seen and followed where other folks abide.
There were folks along the river, however, and once in a while a place hidden back in the hollow. It came to me suddenly that somewhere ahead was the little town of Louisa and that while I’d been thinking poor, I needn’t do so longer. We could go into that town and I could buy me a new rifle-gun, biding the time I could recover my own. At least I wouldn’t feel so plumb undressed as I did now.
That meant takin’ a chance on being caught up with, but having a rifle-gun meant all the difference.
“Mr. Chantry,” I advised, “there’s a town yonder on the river. I think we’ll amble thataway. You better keep your shootin’ hand ready, because we’ll almost surely run into Felix Horst and some of his outfit.”
“At least we can buy a decent meal!” he said. “I am not worried about Horst.”
“That’s where you an’ me differ,” I said. “I worry considerable about him. All he’s got to do is kill us an’ he can take my money and be off with it.”
“I don’t kill very easy,” he commented.
“I hope you don’t,” I agreed. “You’re a right handsome young man and there’s not too many about, but that there Horst, he isn’t going to come up an’ give you a break. He doesn’t want to die and he knows he can, so he’ll be no damn fool. He’ll shoot you from the brush and take what he wants off your body.”
We came into the town with the sun hanging low in the sky, and I went first to a store to buy my gun. I’d taken coin from the carpetbag, and sure enough I found what I wanted. I bought me a brand-new rifle-gun like those made in Pennsylvania. Nor did I waste time charging it.
There was a tavern there, and we went to it and put our feet under their table for supper. “We’ll stay here through the night,” Dorian said.
Well, I looked at Archie and he shrugged his big shoulders. Both of us knew we’d better light out of there because this was right where Horst and them would come. I will say that meal tasted good and it would give us a chance to wash up.
There was a room with a bed for me, but they’d sleep in the outer room on the floor, wrapped in whatever they wore. There was one window to my room and the one door that opened into the main room of the tavern. The window was shuttered and locked from the inside. I taken my bag inside and put it down with the rifle-gun and peeked out through the shutter slats. Not far away was the river and a great big old stone house somebody said had just been completed.
The tavernkeeper fetched me a wooden tub filled with hot water, and when I’d bathed and cleaned my clothes some, I felt a whole lot better. I was even beginning to feel Dorian might be right, and then I heard a voice in the taproom and it was Timothy Oats. He was having a drink. Through a crack where the door didn’t fit that well, I could see him. He was settin’ with Elmer and a big swarthy man, and Dorian was across the room with Archie, a glass of beer on the table in front of him.
Well, I got dressed. By now they would know I was here, and they would have some kind of a plan worked out. Nothing to happen right here in town, maybe, but after we’d gotten out on the road.
This was where the Big Sandy River started, I guess you’d say, the Tug Fork and Levisa Fork joining here to make the Big Sandy. Sometimes, although I’d not have said it aloud, I almost wished I was alone and didn’t have those men to worry about. Archie, he was a swamp boy, a swamp and timber boy, and I could see it. If you wanted to call him a boy, that is. He wasn’t much older than Dorian but he’d grown up scratchin’ for a livin’ back in some swamp. I could see it.
He was a trouble-wary man. Part of that came from being black them days. A black man had to ease himself around the tight spots and learned how to keep himself from trouble. Dorian Chantry never had to worry about trouble. Everybody in his part of the country knew who he was and had respect. The trouble was, this wasn’t his country.
Sleep was what I was wishful for, but I couldn’t lay my head in comfort with him out there in the same room with Tim Oats. Peekin’ through the slats, I could see Archie was worried, too. He knew as I knew that Tim Oats probably felt if they could be rid of Chantry they could handle me.
The keeper of the tavern was no fool. When you run a place like that, you learn to sense trouble coming before it happens, and I caught him throwing a glance, one to the other.
If he was worried, he wasn’t the only one. What Tim Oats had in mind, I don’t know, but something was cookin’ and he had the mixture in mind. Tim Oats was between Dorian and the door, and so was that big swarthy man, to say nothing of Elmer.