Where I stood I had a good field of fire and I was no more than thirty yards back into the trees.
“If they moved,” Horst said, “kill the white man. That black is worth money.”
Then he gestured. “Hans? You, Harry, an’ Joe, you scout around and find that girl. Bring her here to me.”
What to do? I could ease off through the brush, I could wait right there so we’d all be together, or … They were coming; one of them headed right at me, although I knew he couldn’t see me.
They’d stirred up the fire, put wood on, so the place was lit up. If I moved, that man was going to see me, and if I didn’t, maybe …
He came around the tree. “Ah!” he said. “I am the lucky one.”
The rifle was close by my side and he was not looking for a woman to be armed. Regal had taught me a thing or two, so when he loomed over me and stepped close, I just jerked up the muzzle of that rifle and caught him right where his chin backed into his throat. I jerked up with it, and hard.
It caught him right and he gagged, choking, and taking the rifle two-handed, I gave him what dear old Regal taught me, a butt stroke between the eyes.
He went down like a poleaxed steer, falling right at my feet, out cold as a stepmother’s embrace; then I just faded back into the brush.
The others were closing in on the spot where I’d been, and suddenly the one called Hans gave a yell. “Horst! For God’s sake!”
Horst came into the woods. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“It’s Joe! Look at him!”
Horst came through the trees, then stopped. He swore again. “Bring him into camp,” he said brusquely.
“What hit him?” somebody asked. “Look at his face! And his throat!”
“He’s still alive,” Oats said matter-of-factly, “but he surely ran into something.”
Felix Horst straightened up from the injured man. “Chantry? Who’s out there? Who did this?”
Before he could answer, there came a weird, quavering cry, an eerie cry that rose and fell, then rose again. It was like nothing they had ever heard, and nothing I had ever heard, either, but I knew what it was.
“What’s that?” Elmer gasped.
“A ghost,” Dorian said. “You’ve aroused the ghosts that haunt these mountains. You’re in trouble now.”
“Shut up!” Oats said viciously, anxiously looking around.
“The ghosts,” Dorian said, “Echo told me about them. They don’t like strangers.”
He had called me Echo. He had used my first name!
19
From where I was I could see into their camp. The fire was blazing now and the men were drawing toward it but keeping their guns on Dorian and Archie.
That cry had come from afar off-how far, a body couldn’t guess on a night like this and in those mountains. It came again, suddenly, wavering, weird, a distant sound in the night.
“A banshee!” Dorian said. “A warning of death to come.”
“Yours, more’n likely,” one of the men said.
I’d never heard that sound before, but I’d heard tell of it, although there was only one man left who used it. Long ago some of the Clinch Mountain Sacketts had used that cry to warn enemy Injuns they were about, and some Injuns thought it was a death spirit out there in the forest, haunting them, waiting to steal their souls away. The only one I’d heard of using that cry in my time was Mordecai.
He was a long hunter Sackett, not given to the life of today but clinging to the wild old life of mountains and hunting. Long hunters was what they called those men who went off into the mountains alone to be gone for months, sometimes even years. Dan’l Boone had been one of them, but there’d been a sight of others. Jubal Sackett was one of the first, he’d gone west a long time back, never seen since, although there’d been rumors, stories, and the like.
“Leave him lay,” Horst was saying of Joe. “He’s been knocked out but he’ll be all right.”
“But who knocked him out?”
“Maybe ‘what’ is a better word,” Dorian said.
Horst turned on him. He lifted a hand and slapped him across the face. “I told you to shut up!” he said.
If Dorian had struck back, they’d have killed him. He never moved, he just smiled, and that young man went up some notches in my estimation. Maybe he had something to him.
“I think she done it,” Elmer said.
“A woman? A slip of a girl? To Joe? You ain’t serious.”
“You don’t know her,” Elmer said.
Horst looked at Chantry. “Where’s that carpetbag? Where is she?”
Felix Horst was mad, I could see that, but worse than that, he didn’t know what to do. I could see that in him, too. His instinct was to kill, but he was afraid Dorian was his only clue.
He turned on Dorian. “That Sackett girl? Is she sweet on you?”
Well! There was an answer I strained my ears to hear. “Her? Of course not. She’s never thought of me that way.”
Little did he know!
“Travelin’ through the woods together?” Sardust scoffed. “Who’d believe that?”
“I would,” Archie said. “She’s a lady.”
Bless him!
Somebody added fuel to the fire and brought out a coffeepot. Some of this I could see; the rest I could surmise.
They moved suddenly and disarmed both men, then sat them down against a log.
At the foot of a stump, in a hollow under the roots, I cached my carpetbag, leaving the Doune pistol in it. I kept my rifle and the pistol with the sawed-off barrel. I worked around through the trees and listened, watching. If they made a move to harm either of those men, I was going to go to shooting, no matter what it cost me.
“When daylight comes,” Horst said, “we will find her tracks. No use to go off half-cocked. She can’t move fast in those skirts, and you can bet she’s not far away. No matter what they say, I think she’s sweet on Chantry here.”
“You had better think about him,” Elmer said suddenly. “If anything happens to him, old Finian Chantry will never let up. He’ll track down every one of us.”
“What I want to know,” one of the men said, “is what screamed?”
“Panther, more’n likely. I’ve heard they have a funny cry, like a woman’s.”
“That didn’t sound like no woman I ever heard,” Sardust said.
“There was a man roamed this country years back, an’ Injun hunter name of Lew Wetzel. He had a cry like that. Like a ghost in the woods, he was, and could run like a wolf.”
“That’s been years ago,” another man protested.
They drank coffee and munched on some hard biscuits and meat. My stomach growled, a most unladylike sound. I sat down where I could watch their camp and kept my rifle where it could be used. There was a little blood on the sight. I wiped it off.
Several of them stretched out to sleep, but not Patton Sardust. “When killin’ time comes around,” he said to Horst, “I want him.” He pointed a middle finger at Dorian.
“Who will help you?” Dorian said. “You couldn’t do it alone.”
Sardust grinned, showing some broken teeth. “We’ll see about that.” He drew his knife. “Right across the throat, ear to ear, with this.”
The mutter of their voices lowered as several men slept, and I could no longer hear. Felix Horst sat with his back against a tree, staring at Chantry, but he was listening, too, so I did not move.
Dead tired, I sat watching their camp, wondering what I could do to get them free, what I could do to fight back without endangering them, and me so tired I could scarcely lift a hand. With the coming of daylight they’d be fanning out in the woods, and I could not avoid them all. Daylight would be a killing time. I could see it coming.
Suppose that weird cry had been Mordecai? But how could he know about me? Maybe it was a painter, a panther, that is. Or maybe it was Mordecai just a-travelin’? I didn’t know those Clinch Mountain Sacketts, although we were surely in their part of the country.
Worst of it was, if anything happened to me, my folks would never get that money, and the Good Lord knew they needed it!
What could I do? What could I do?
It would be growing light soon and those men would be after me, yet I dared not run away into the woods for fear of what they might do to Dorian and Archie.
Maybe if I just went to shooting, those boys could make a break for it? But what would their chances be of gettin’ into the woods without being shot? Mighty slim.