Old Nathan turned and looked at the rich man. “I reckon,” the cunning man said, “hit may take a heap of money fer ye to get where ye desarve t’ be. I wouldn’t want ye to come up short.”
As Old Nathan walked toward his mule, he whistled the air of a grim old ballad between his smiling teeth.
THE BULLHEAD
“That don’t half stink,” grumbled the mule as Old Nathan came out of the shed with the saddle over his left arm and a bucket of bait in his right hand.
“Nobody asked you t’ like it,” the cunning man replied sharply. “Nor me neither, ifen it comes t’ thet. It brings catfish like it’s manna from hivven, and I do like a bit of smoked catfish fer supper.”
“Waal, then,” said the mule, “you go off t’ yer fish and I’ll mommick up some more oats while yer gone. Then we’re both hap—”
The beast’s big head turned toward the cabin and its ears cocked forward. “Whut’s thet coming?” it demanded.
Old Nathan set the bucket down and hung the saddle over a fence rail. He’d been raised in a time when the Tennessee Territory was wilderness and the few folk you met liable to be wilder yet—the Whites worse than the Indians.
But that was long decades ago. He’d gotten out of the habit of always keeping his rifle close by and loaded. But a time like this, when somebody crept up so you didn’t hear his horse on the trail—
Then you remembered that your rifle was in the cabin, fifty feet away, and that a man of seventy didn’t move so quick as the boy of eighteen who’d aimed that same rifle at King’s Mountain.
“Halloo the house?” called the visitor, and Old Nathan’s world slipped back to this time of settlement and civilization. The voice was a woman’s, not that of an ambusher who’d hitched his horse to a sapling back along the trail so as to shoot the cunning man unawares.
“We’re out the back!” Old Nathan called. “Come through the cabin, or I’ll come in t’ ye.”
It wasn’t that he had enemies, exactly; but there were plenty folks around afraid of what the cunning man did—or what they thought he did. Fear had pulled as many triggers as hatred over the years, he guessed.
“T’morry’s a good time t’ traipse down t’ the river,” the mule said complacently as it thrust its head over the snake-rail fence to chop a tuft of grass just within its stretch. “Or never a’tall, that’s better yet.”
“We’re goin’ t’ check my trot line t’day, sooner er later!” Old Nathan said over his shoulder. “Depend on it!”
Both doors of the one-room cabin were open. Old Nathan liked the ventilation, though the morning was cool. His visitor came out onto the back porch where the water barrel stood and said, “Oh, I didn’t mean t’ take ye away from business. You jest go ahead ‘n I’ll be on my way.”
Her name was Ellie. Ellie Ransden, he reckoned, since she’d been living these three years past with Bully Ransden, though it wasn’t certain they’d had a preacher marry them. Lot of folks figured these old half-lettered stump-hole preachers hereabouts, they weren’t much call to come between a couple of young people and God no-ways.
Though she still must lack a year of twenty, Ellie Ransden had a woman’s full breasts and hips. Her hair, black as thunder, was her glory. It was piled now on top of her head with pins and combs, but if she shook it out, it would be long enough to fall to the ground.
The combs were the only bit of fancy about the woman. She wore a gingham dress and went barefoot, with calluses to show that was usual for her till the snow fell. Bully Ransden wasn’t a lazy man, but he had a hard way about him that put folk off, and he’d started from less than nothing. . . .
If there was a prettier woman in the county than Ellie Ransden, Old Nathan hadn’t met her.
“Set yerse’f,” Old Nathan grunted, nodding her back into the cabin. “I’ll warm some grounds.”