“Evidence!” Macklin scoffed. “They have not a paltry bit of evidence. Diana is a good girl, and a God-fearing one.”
“She was seen gathering mandrake,” Penney reminded, “and she walks alone by night. How much do they need? Did not Brother Gardner’s cow go dry after he spoke angrily to Diana? Did not—?”
“Nonsense!” Macklin said. “Purely nonsense!”
“Nevertheless,” Penney said sharply, “that is why they will not look, Macklin, and you know it! They do not wish to find Diana, and my Carrie must suffer because of it! I was a fool to—!”
“Talk will not bring her back,” Anna Penney interrupted.
Pushing back my empty bowl, I got to my feet and drank off the last of the cider.
“If they can be found, Mistress Penney,” I said, “I shall bring them back, with Yance’s help.” I put down the mug. “One more thing. Do the Pequots have muskets?”
Penney looked around. “Muskets? I think not, although there was talk of some selling of arms to them. Why do you ask?”
“Tenaco,” I said, “the messenger Mistress Penney sent for us, was shot. He was shot only just after he left here, shot by someone who both had a musket and who did not want him bringing help.”
I lifted the latch. “Now who do you suppose would do that?”
I stepped out into the night and pulled the door shut quickly behind me. Instantly I rounded the edge of the house and stood quiet to let my eyes grow accustomed to the darkness.
A moment I listened. Someone, something was out there. Out there in the darkness, waiting or watching.
CHAPTER III
The night was a secret place, but the keys to the secrets were the senses. Edging a little along the cabin wall, feeling the rough stone at my back, I listened.
There was a pile of cut wood stacked in cords nearby; beyond it was a lean-to. Crossing swiftly to the stack of cordwood, I waited an instant, then moved to the lean-to and around it. Nothing.
In a moment I was at the edge of the woods, and there I waited, listening. Whoever was watching, and I was sure someone had been, was back along the path to the woods down which I’d come. Somebody had laid out in the woods, watching for me.
The night would be none too long, and I was wearied with travel, so I made out to pass through the woods, stepping light and easy. We boys had played so much in the woods and hunted with Indians back yonder that we’d become like ghosts when in the forest.
It had taken an hour, but I was back in the woods, and Yance came out from nowhere.
“Tenaco’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“I was rustling cooking wood, and next thing I knew he had disappeared.”
“He’d done his job. He found us, brought us here. It’s no fight of his.”
We moved off together to where the horses were. The moment Tenaco was gone, Yance had shifted camp. Not far, but far enough for safety, or whatever safety there was in a hostile land where even the white people would be against us.
We slept, trusting to our horses to warn us and to our own senses. At dawn we ate some of the meat I’d brought from the Penneys’ and drank some of their cider. Then we moved the horses to a hidden meadow, a small place cozied down among the oaks; then I went back to watch for Penney.
When they came, Penney and Macklin, there were two other men with them. I looked to my priming. One of them was a powerful big man, and it was not a thing that pleased me, for I’d expected them to come alone.
The night before there had been much talk while I was at table, and taking no part in it, I listened nonetheless, for a trail is followed not only upon the earth but in the minds of those one pursues or the minds of those whose thinking is similar.
It had been talk of local affairs and happenings, events or persons of which I had no knowledge. There was much talk of sermons, also, and I gathered from this, as well as what Yance had told me, that sermons had much to do with shaping of thinking. These were a stiff-necked, proud folk, not easily persuaded to any course not dictated by conscience, yet conscience could be a poor guide if accompanied by lack of knowledge.
Yet now I thought of what must be done. Lack of knowledge of the Pequots was my greatest problem, for little as I knew of Indians, I had learned from dealings with those I knew that there were great differences in them, and to speak of a redskin as being Indian was like speaking of a Frenchman or an Italian as a European.
If I knew little, I at least knew that I knew little. My experience had been largely with the Eno, Catawba, Occaneechi, Seneca, and Cherokee. There were differences, and the differences were important.
They came up the path together, Penney and Macklin in the lead.
The house Tom Penney built indicated much of his character: solid, built for security and comfort, not a hasty habitation thrown together for mere shelter. It had two rooms, the large kitchen-living room and a bedroom adjoining. There was a loft where the girls slept, warmer because of the rising heat. Everything in the house showed the hand of a man with a love for work and for his materials.
Diana Macklin, seventeen and unmarried, was obviously a maid of independent mind, accustomed to the woods and the search for herbs. Not likely that she would wander off with a child and become lost, although even woods-wise men occasionally did.
When they were near, I stepped into their path. “You can take me to where they were last seen?”
“I can.” Penney pointed. “It is ten minutes. No farther.”
Macklin said, “Diana would not become lost. She had played in the forest as a child.”
“This knowledge of herbs? She had it from Indians?”
He hesitated ever so slightly, and I wondered why, “She learned it in England, and more from a woman here, and some from the Indians, also.”
“She spoke their tongue?”
“She did. She had a gift for languages.”
Surely an unusual girl and one who, if she kept her wits about her, might make a place for herself even among Indians and could protect herself and Carrie.
The big man was Max Bauer, and he was both wide and thick. There was about him an air of command that surprised me. He did not appear to be a man who would be second to Joseph Pittingel, which had me wondering if I had not underestimated Pittingel himself.
“Ho!” Bauer thrust out a huge hand. “So this is the woodsman!”
The instant our hands met I knew he meant to crush mine to show me who was master, so I met him grip for grip and saw his confidence fade to irritation, then to anger.
“You have come far? From Virginia, mayhap?”
“Far,” I said.
“You will find nothing! The earth has been trampled so that no tracks are left!”
“Not even on the first day?”
He brushed off the suggestion. “I was not here the first day. When my boat came in, I went to study the ground. It was hopeless.”
The hollow where the girls had come to gather herbs was a pleasant little place, a meadow beside a small pool with reeds all about the pool’s edge and forest encircling the hollow itself. There was a wide variety of plant life and a well-chosen place in which to look for herbs.
The earth had been badly trampled, the grass pressed down, reeds parted where men had gone to the water’s edge. Any sign one might have found had long since been destroyed.
“There’s nothing here,” I said.
“Agreed!” Bauer spoke loudly. “It is a waste of time! In any event, by now the Pequots are far from here.”
“Pequots? You saw them?”
“I did not. But they were here. I have a feel for them. They were here.”
We had seen nothing of Yance, nor did I expect him, but I knew he was out there, watching and listening. We had been so much together that each knew the other and his thinking, and right now he was beginning to do what I would have done in his place. He was casting about in a wide circle to pick up sign farther out, where the grass had not been trampled.
Now we had to place ourselves in the minds of the maids or their captors and try to decide what they must have done. The search would not have progressed far on that first attempt, for undoubtedly few of them were armed; fewer still would know anything about tracking.