“Don’t eat meat,” the cunning man corrected. “Thet don’t mean I choose t’ find a bear in my own patch and hev nothin’ to go on but a bear’s good natur.”
The mockingbird trilled merrily at the ridiculous notion of a bear having a good nature. “Tain’t no bears hereabouts,” the bird sang. “There’s a couple folk up t’ your cabin though, waitin’ you. People’s worse nor bears, most times.”
Old Nathan glanced north reflexively, in the direction of his cabin. There was nothing to be seen through the heads of his grain and the swell of the ground. Even if he’d been in a treetop like the bird, he didn’t guess he’d have been able to tell much. His old eyes were sharp enough still, at a distance; but he wasn’t a mockingbird for vision, no more than he was a bull for strength.
“Reckon I better go see ’em, thin,” the cunning man muttered. “Reckon they’ve come t’ consult me, not t’ raise trouble.”
But he checked the priming of his long rifle first; because what the mockingbird had said about humans and bears was pretty much Old Nathan’s opinion too.
* * *
When the cunning man came up to the back door of his cabin, past the greetings of his two cows and the mule, the visitors were standing, but they hadn’t been on their feet long. The cane-bottom rocker still tapped back and forth, and the straight chair had been moved to a corner where a man sitting in it could face out with solid logs behind him.
The man who’d gotten up from the rocker was Bascom Hardy. Hardy might not be the richest man in the county as he claimed, but he was right enough the richest man who’d made his money here.
“Earned his money” was another matter. Hardy dealt in loans and land—and in the law, to enforce those dealings.
Old Nathan couldn’t put a name to the other man, but the type was frequent enough. The fellow had smallpox scars on the left side of his face and a knife-track trailing from below his right ear across his nose. From his hair and features, he was a half-breed.
No sin in that. White women had been mighty thin on the ground when Europeans settled the Tennessee Territory. Old Nathan himself had Cherokee blood. There was good and bad in any race, though, and the scarred man standing in the corner didn’t appear to have been fortunate in the mixture he’d gotten from his parents.
The half-breed wouldn’t meet Old Nathan’s eyes, but his fingers played with the stock of his short-barreled caplock musket while he looked sidelong at the cunning man. Old Nathan figured the weapon was loaded with buck and ball, several heavy shot wadded down on top of a ball the size of the barrel’s diameter. A wasteful load for hunting.
Unless you were hunting men.
Another time, the cunning man would have pulled the charge from his flintlock as soon as he came in the door. This time he did not, and he leaned the long rifle against the wall instead of hanging it over the chimney board where it would be closer to the half-breed than to its owner across the room.
Not that he figured there’d be that sort of trouble.
“Hope you don’t mind me waiting for you here,” said Bascom Hardy, saying and not asking, and talking as if the half-breed didn’t exist at all. “I reckon you know who I am.”
Old Nathan dipped a gourd of water from the barrel on the back porch. He drank some and splashed the rest over his face and neck. The cool liquid soaked the front of his shirt and dripped onto the puncheon floor with the irritated sound of frying grease.
“You’re a man needs my he’p,” the cunning man said. “Thet’s why you’re here.”
He kneaded his face with strong, sinewy fingers. Another time he’d have gotten a dipper of buttermilk from the jug cooling in the creek; but that would mean offering some to his visitors, and just now he didn’t care t’ do so.
Bascom Hardy’s face stiffened. “I don’t need no man,” he said sharply. “You’d best remember thet.”