It was very still.
She was good in the woods. She could move quietly, and she had endurance beyond most of the men she knew, but none of them were woodsmen. She could escape, but what of Carrie? Could the little girl run fast enough, keep quiet enough, endure enough? Yet there was no choice. They must try. With or without the help of Henry.
He was quiet, respectful, and well-mannered. He carried himself with dignity and with some assurance. Moreover, she had noticed him in the woods, and he moved like a woodsman.
Slowly the afternoon waned away. Vern came in, sat by the fire, and dished up food for himself from the pot Feebro had prepared; it was some kind of stew of wild plants and wild meat. She had seen turtle meat, some pieces of rabbit, and some bits of fish go into it. It was good, very good.
They would soon be fed, and then they would be tied up for the night. She had already seen the sharp points of a broken stump where the tree had blown down, breaking off to leave the ragged stump. It was close by. If she could get close to it, she could use those sharp points to pick at the ropes that bound her wrists; she could pick the strands apart, given time. And it would take time.
She had chosen her route out of camp, between two close-growing trees—no brush there, no leaves, no small twigs that might break.
Vern lay down to sleep. The fat man went away to watch by the shore. Wind and wave being what they were, ships were often overdue, sometimes for weeks. And sometimes they never appeared.
Lashan had settled down. He had lit his pipe and was smoking. Henry got two bowls, filled them with the stew, and brought them over. As he handed one first to Carrie, then to her, he whispered without looking at her, “Ship’s coming. I saw the tops’ls.”
The ship was coming! It was here! Then—
“Tonight,” he whispered, rising from his knees to return to the fire.
Lashan was staring at them. He could not have heard, but had he guessed?
Tonight? How?
CHAPTER VI
The silver of moonlight lay upon the leaves; overhead a few fluffs of cloud drifted behind an etching of treetops. We lay among the maples, listening to the night.
“We’re nigh the sea,” Yance whispered. “There’s a taste of salt on the air.”
“Aye, and a ship offshore. I hope we be not too late.”
“She’s not up to anchor yet.”
“I see that. Do we fight the whole crew of them, then?” Yance inquired irritably.
“She’s your kin,” I replied coolly, “but if we must fight them, we will. She has no more than twelve guns, and we have two.”
Yance snorted his disgust. He was about to speak when we heard an angry shout, then another and a deal of cursing. “Gone!” Somebody shouted the word. “Gone, you fools! Who was on watch?”
There was a murmur of talk. “Get after them, then!” The voice was strident and angry. “They cannot have gone far! Get them, or by the Lord Harry, I’ll—!”
“They’ve gotten away,” Yance said complacently. “Ah, she’s a broth of a lass, that one! She’ll be backing up for no man.”
“How far will they get? A lass and a child, and in skirts, yet? In the forest?”
“They’ll get far enough, I’m thinking, and there will be us to help.”
“To help, I’m willing,” I said, “but how? They will be off into the woods, and those men will go tramping after, breaking down the brush, trampling the tracks. Ah, they be a pack of fools, then, and they’ll see what they have done when morning comes. Far better they’d be to sit tight by the fire until day breaks. How far can two girls go?”
Standing up, I listened for small sounds, for the great oafs down there were crashing about like so many cows drunk from corn squeezings.
A soft wind stirred the leaves, and I tried to set myself in her shoes to figure what she might do, but nothing came to me. She was a canny one, they said, and that might help, but she’d not travel so far with a youngster to hand.
Away from the sea. That was as much as I could guess. Along the shore they’d be seen from the ship and would be out in the open too much. Inland there were Indians to fear, and these girls had been raised up with Indians always a threat. We moved back, deeper into the woods, holding to a fairly straight line away from the sea.
For an hour or two we heard them threshing about in the woods, frightening the game, causing the birds to fly up, and never a thing did they find. We kept our weapons convenient lest they come upon us, but somehow they did not, and with morning we had a problem.
Where would they go now? The girls had fled, but to where?
We moved away from our camp at first light, and keeping a short distance apart, we began hunting sign. Nobody needed to tell us we were in trouble, for there was no telling where those girls would go.
“Look,” Yance said, squatting nigh a tree, “we got to give them credit for brains. They ain’t simply going to run wild in the woods. That Macklin girl is smart, real smart. She’ll head inland.”
“It’s closer to help if they go south,” I suggested, but I agreed with Yance.
“Closer to help but surely the way they’ll be expected to go. The way I see it, they’ll head north, hoping not to meet Indians, and when they are well back from shore, they’ll circle around.”
“So what do we do?”
Yance shrugged. “We can try to pick up their trail, but that way we might lead those who are following right to them. I say we strike inland. We go due west, and after the first day we start working north.”
It was what I had been thinking, and it offered our best chance. I had no wish to get into a shooting fight if I could avoid it even though the people who had been holding those girls supposedly knew nothing about us.
We started fast, hitting a dim trail and taking it at a dog trot. We’d been hunting the woods our lives long; like the Indians, we could run all day if need be and often had.
As we ran, I was doing some thinking. The girls must have escaped some time after midnight. Say one or two in the morning. That meant they had been gone anywhere from a few minutes to an hour when their escape was discovered.
They would have fled straightaway, then hidden until the immediate search was over. Then they would have taken off again. Traveling in the woods by night would not be easy, but having much at stake, they’d try to keep going.
Give them, to use a figure, two miles before discovery of their escape, maybe four since then. I slowed down.
“Yance? We better listen. They should be turning south soon.”
He drew up. “How do you figure?”
“I’ve been remembering that big river we heard tell of. Remember? He told us that river came down from the north, took a big bend, and flowed kind of east-northeast to the sea? That river mouth was a natural harbor, kind of protected from the sea by sandy islands just like the sounds back in Carolina. The way I see it, those girls are headed west, and they are going to come to that river or sight it, and then they’ll have to turn south.
“Remember that sailor man we talked to in Jamestown? He drew us a diagram in the dust about that river, said it was a natural trade route to the Indians up country without being bothered by those folks around the settlements.”
We ran no more. The forest was of oak and maple, with hillsides here and there covered with the graceful white trunks of the birch. It was very still. A woodpecker tapped busily somewhere not far off, and we saw a small flight of birds holding close to the ground, flying into the brush around a small meadow.
On moccasined feet we moved with no sound, and at brief intervals we paused to listen. Sound carries for some distance, and our ears were now attuned to the natural sounds of the wilderness, so we would quickly detect any sound foreign to the forest.
We came up the side of a knoll, moving among the trees. Leading the way, I topped out between some oaks alongside a clear space. We were high enough to have a view all around, and my eyes caught the movement just as Yance’s did.
“Kin?”
“I see ’em.”
Merging our bodies with the trunks of trees beside which we stood, we watched six men coming along a trail behind us. There was no mistaking the man in the lead, for surely there could be no two men of that size who moved as he did. It was Max Bauer.