There was a dark look upon him, and I liked it not, but the man nettled me with his assurance. Of Max Bauer I knew nothing but that he was employed by, or seemed to be employed by Pittingel, but I trusted him none at all. There was power in the man but evil, also. I knew a little of fear as I watched him go, and it angered me. Why should I fear? Or Yance? Who had ever defeated us?
Yet all men can fail, and each man must somewhere find his master, with whatever strength, whatever weapon. So we must be wary, we must use what guile we had, for it was upon my shoulders that nothing we had ever attempted or done was so fearsome a thing as this we now would try.
I knew not why I believed so, yet believe it I did.
Through the dappled light and shadow of the forest I walked on gentle feet, knowing only that Yance had come upon something. Of course, it would be no great thing. If the ground is trampled, one has only to cast about in a great circle, an ever-widening circle, for when those who were here left this place, they did not make tracks only in the meadow but in the leaving of it.
Yance was squatted at the foot of a huge old chestnut awaiting me. When I squatted beside him, he said, “Old tracks.” He paused. “Five or six men … two of them barefooted.”
“Barefooted?”
“Aye, an’ they’ve gone barefooted a lot. Feet spread wide.” He paused again, throwing down the twig on which he was chewing. “Looked to be carrying heavy. Deep prints.”
We were silent together, each thinking it over. “It ain’t likely,” Yance said, “that any folks native to this country would go barefoot. The Indians didn’t, and certainly those Puritan folk or Separatists or whatever they are, they hold to boots.”
We straightened up, looked carefully about, and listened; then we moved off. He pointed the trail, and it was as he said. Five men, two of them barefoot.
The trail was not an easy one, but we hung to it. At times, rains had washed it away entirely, but we were helped by the fact that these folks did little hunting, and most were afeared to go into the woods alone, so after the meadow nobody had messed up what tracks there were.
We saw deer tracks, too. There was game here if a man were to hunt it down.
We lost the trail.
In the morning we found it again, just a few tracks where they had crossed a stream and one of the barefooted men had slipped. A few hours later we found what we both had been watching for. A camp.
We studied it carefully before we moved in, and then it was only I who went in, and Yance began hunting the tracks made when they left.
He came up to the edge of camp. “Still going north,” he said. “Find anything?”
“All three have muskets,” I said.
“Three?”
“Two of them, the barefooted ones, are not armed.”
“Slaves,” he said.
“Maybe … likely,” I added.
“That Pittingel now … that man I was in the stocks with … he thought Pittingel was a slaver.”
“He thought. We know nothing, Yance, and it doesn’t pay to decide anything without we’ve evidence for it. The man may be a fine Christian gentleman.”
Yance snorted. Then I said, “What else?”
“It’s the girls, all right. I found their tracks, only a couple of them, for they weren’t allowed to walk about. One set of smaller tracks, the others a shade larger. Then they were tied up and dumped on the ground. There was some cooking done.”
“Slave?”
“No, one of the others.” We sat together in the dappled shade of a tree, alert for sound. “It’s an old camp, Yance. Been used two, three times before. Several times, I think.
“They had more than one fire, some old smoke-blackened stones, some fresh. Found where ashes had been beaten down by rain, then a fire laid atop that. Not so large a fire.”
We rested, chewing on venison jerky. “No Indians made this trail, an’ those girls were carried in a litter, looks like. No Indian ever done that.”
Yance looked across his shoulder at me. “What do you make of it, Kin?”
“Same as you do. Somebody else has taken those girls and blamed it on Indians.”
“Slaves?”
“Why not? Read the Bible. There’d been whites held as slaves for several thousand years before the blacks were enslaved. The Egyptians had Hebrew slaves as well as others. The Romans had Greek slaves as well as slaves from England and Gaul.
“Jeremy told me about raids on the coast of England and Ireland by slavers from Africa. One whole village, Baltimore, on the Irish coast, was carried off in one raid.”
After a moment I said, “Young, pretty girls, they’d bring a price in Africa or to some planter in the West Indies.”
“They’d have to have a way, a ship. They’d need a ship.”
“And the ship would need a cove or a bay, somewhere to come in either to tie up or lie at anchor.”
Yance got to his feet suddenly. “Let’s get away from here!”
We had no need to talk of it, for each had the same realization. If the men who had taken the girls were slavers, then they must be careful not to be found, and we were searching for them. That meant they must find us, and that meant we must be killed.
Once within the woods, we moved swiftly, keeping a few yards apart to leave a less distinct trail. We found an open meadow and skirted it, running swiftly. We had left our horses, and we had to approach them now with care. We would have been better served had we left them with Penney, for in these woods and along the shore that lay not far off upon our right there was little need of them.
We found the horses alone and safe, and we moved, riding swiftly away and putting miles behind us, turning away from the shore and into the deepest forest. When we slept that night, I lay long awake, listening to Yance’s easy breathing.
I thought of my sister Noelle, far away now, in England, and I thought of her being a prisoner, as they were, hoping but scarcely daring to hope.
Frightened they would be, and Diana Macklin trying to give courage to little Carrie, and those strange men close by. As they lay bound, they could look into the future only with dark, trembling fear. They could not believe they would be found.
“Yance?” I whispered.
He was suddenly awake. “Aye?”
“We’ve got to find them, Yance.”
“We will.” He turned on his back. “You think of something, Kin? That Joseph Pittingel? He had a ship. It was overdue.”
CHAPTER V
Diana Macklin opened her eyes and looked up into the leafy pattern above. It was not yet day, but already she heard one of the slaves stirring about. They were the first black Africans she had seen, and at first she had not known how to think of them or speak to them. Indians she had known, but these were different.
So far there had been little opportunity, for the three white men were always about, always suspicious, trusting nobody, yet one of the slaves, she sensed, was at least sympathetic. The two slaves, although both were black, were utterly different in nature and appearance.
She had no illusions. Nobody at the Cove would try very hard to find her. Carrie was another question, for the Penneys would try. Her father would do what he could, but he knew less of the woods than she, and the people of the Cove would promise, but they would not carry out much of a search. If she and Carrie were to escape, they must do so themselves, and there was little time left.
Her captors were irritable and frightened. She had sensed that as the days went by they grew more and more worried. Obviously they were frightened at the prospect of holding two white girls prisoner on this shore. Although few of the Puritan folk of Plymouth, Cape Ann, or the scattering of small settlements in their vicinity were given to wandering in the forest, there were a few who were looking for new sites with commercial advantages, and that meant somewhere along the shore. And the ship that was to have picked up the girls and themselves was already overdue.
Lying quietly, Diana thought of what she must do. Her only hope was the slave they called Henry.
He was a tall, strongly built young man with regular features. That he had been a warrior was obvious both in the way he carried himself and in a few scars she had noticed. The other slave was shorter, stockier, more subservient, but she had gathered from talk among the others that he was an excellent fisherman and boatman.