The mule grunted, but it said nothing more.
Old Nathan set the empty flintlock in a corner beside the door, away from the smoke and sparks of the fire. There weren’t any pegs to hang a rifle up properly, though he didn’t guess a man as rich and fearful as Bynum Hardy had done his business without a gun to hand.
He set the cloth-wrapped paste of corn meal on the hearth and raked coals over it to cook the batter into ash cakes. It wasn’t so very late, but it felt late.
The Devil himse’f knew it felt late.
***
The sauce pan was full of leather-britches beans boiled with hot peppers. Old Nathan set the container on the table, then stepped back to the fireplace to fetch the ash cakes.
“Hey!” the mule snorted. “Ye’ve comp’ny comin’, old man!”
Old Nathan poised for a moment, hunched over the hearth with his eyes closed. Well, he hadn’t come all this way not t’ meet Bynum Hardy. He straightened and walked to the door, opening it wide.
Something—somebody—was climbing out of the well. The figure was almost over the curb, but Old Nathan had time Gray Jack and the witchwoman didn’t have. Time to run . . . except there was never a good time to run.
The mule snorted restively. The beast was a warm presence, but Old Nathan could see nothing of it beyond the glint of starlight on one wide, staring eyeball.
Bynum Hardy wore a suit of rusty black with a collarless shirt. The soles of his ankle boots were patched with patterned cowhide. He and his garments were as clear as though a living man stood in broad daylight, but whatever illuminated the figure cast no glow on the solid objects around it.
“I’m not so durned a fool thet I’ll wait here!” the mule muttered as it moved off at a shambling trot. The animal’s course was marked by occasional sparks from its shoes on quartz and the crash of undergrowth at the edge of the clearing.
Bynum Hardy began walking up the short trail to the cabin.
Old Nathan went back inside. He left the door open. His fire had burned down, but its orange flames had a cheerful character that he hadn’t imagined in them until after he saw the cold gray light dripping onto the surface of the figure from the well.
He recollected how much afraid he’d been at King’s Mountain—after the bullet hit him. His buckskin breeches wet with hot blood, and him unwilling to look down to see what the bullet had done. Though he knew where the bullet passed—and what it passed through on its way.
Old Nathan spilled the layers of ash and burned-out coals from the cloth over his cakes. Before he placed the ash cakes on the table, however, he added a fresh log to the fire.
When he turned with the cakes, Bynum Hardy was at the door.
“Howdy do,” Old Nathan said in a voice as gruff and clear as that with which he’d greet any benighted traveller. He put the hot corn cakes down on a slab of bark and peeled the cloth off the top of them. “How ye gettin’ on?”
“All right, I guess,” said Bynum Hardy. He sounded as though he were still calling up out of the well, but it might be he always sounded that way—alive as well as now that he was dead.
He looked at the cunning man and added, “I hope you’re well?”
“About like common,” Old Nathan said. He flicked his bearded chin to indicate the food on the table. “Set ‘n eat with me, won’t ye? Hain’t much, but it’s hot.”
“No thankee,” said the cabin’s dead owner. He walked around the table to the hearth. His feet did not sound on the puncheon floor. “Reckon I’ll jist warm myse’f at yer fire, ifen ye don’t mind.”
Old Nathan stared at the dead man’s back. “Suit yerse’f,” he said; and sat on the sawn round of treebole; and began to eat.
The food had no taste in his mouth, for all the pepper in the beans and a touch of onion in the ash-cake batter.