Eliot Pattison - Blood of the Oak

As he cradled the Scottish girl in his arms Duncan thought the blood on her dress was from Conawago’s wound. But the agony on the old man’s face was not for himself. A bullet had ripped into her heart. The joyful Jessica Ross was dead.

“Jess! Noooo!” Woolford reached a trembling hand toward the girl but the effort, and the shock, proved too much. He slumped forward, unconscious.

A tear rolled down Sarah’s cheek as she looked up at Duncan. “Go, damned you,” she cried. “Stop them. Stop this trail of death.”

A chill had risen, in the air and in Duncan’s heart. He was leaving his friends, his comforts, even the books that he usually carried to read at his campfires. He was chasing murder and mayhem and had to be as light and stealthy as possible. At the top of the high ridge overlooking Edentown he paused. Snowflakes tumbled among the spring violets at his feet. An owl, companion of death, hooted in the greyness ahead of him.

He should have left hours earlier, as soon as their search parties had confirmed that the shooters in the forest had fled, but Sarah would not let him set out in the night, and his friends had needed him. Conawago had been shaken deeply, not by the wound in his side but by the loss of young Jess. Despite his injury-a bullet had ripped along his rib cage and exited his back-the old Nipmuc had kept vigil beside her as she was cleaned for her burial shroud. He had proclaimed that she had to be laid to rest on the little knoll above the orchard where she could watch the birds she loved so much. Sarah had dressed the Scottish woman in one of her own best dresses and, to Duncan’s great surprise, Conawago had wrapped a worn wampum bead necklace around her folded hands. The necklace, he knew, had belonged to the old Nipmuc’s mother, and he had carried it for decades. Duncan could not fully fathom the bond that was apparent between Conawago and the Ross woman, but he was grateful at least that between his wound and his grief Conawago had no heart for arguing that he should join in Duncan’s race to the south.

Sarah had been stricken nearly beyond words, staring numbly as Crispin and Duncan led men into the forest in search of the killers. For a second dreadful night she had kept a vigil, sitting beside Jess and only murmuring short, choked syllables when spoken to. For the first time in memory she had not been there to see him off. But beside his rifle and pack there had been one of her kerchiefs, tied around a bundle of twice-cooked cornmeal balls and the venison jerky cured in maple syrup and salt that Duncan favored in his travels.

Three hours after his last glimpse of Edentown Duncan abruptly darted into an outcropping at the side of the trail, found a perch among its heavy boulders, and cocked his rifle. The instincts of the forest warrior, instilled after years with the natives, had begun to nag him.

The slight figure in brown homespun appeared minutes later, her drawstring pouch on her shoulder. Duncan slipped down the rocks, raised a stick, and tripped Analie as she hurried by. As she fell he pounced on her, pinning her none too gently with a foot on her shoulder.

“This is no trail for a sprout!” he snapped. “You are safe in Edentown and welcomed there. Go back and help Sarah. If you still want to leave in a few weeks Conawago can take you to one of the river landings to catch a trading convoy going south.”

“I go where I wish!” the French girl declared defiantly. Sometimes she seemed the innocent, vulnerable child but now she spoke like a very impatient older woman.

“Your business in the south can wait.”

“You do not own me, Duncan McCallum!”

Duncan pulled away his foot and the girl sat up, brushing dried leaves from her dirty blonde pigtails. “You’ve seen the work of the Blooddancer, Analie. I heard you singing that day. I will never go in the woods alone , you sang.”

The reminder of Red Jacob’s death took the fire from her eyes. “You don’t believe in such things as the Blooddancer.”

“I believe in the power that the masks hold for the Iroquois. I believe the tribes know aspects of the world that I can only glimpse. Someone tried to finish their work on Captain Woolford and tried to kill Conawago, and Jess Ross died for it. This is no longer about a wandering spirit. There is murder on this trail.” He extended a hand to help her up.

“I have no home,” the girl declared in her lost waif voice.

Duncan hardened his heart. “Edentown is made up of orphans and the dispossessed. There is no place better for you. Conawago has many friends among the French in Canada. It would be easier to pick up the trail of your relatives there. Speak with him and he can send letters asking about your people.”

The girl cocked her head at him and then nodded. “Letters would be good.”

“Go now. Hurry and you can be back before dinner.”

Analie gave an exaggerated shrug, then hoisted her flour-sack pouch onto her shoulder and nodded again, backing up a few steps. With an awkward wave, she turned and began skipping back up the trail, singing one of her songs.

Duncan shook his head in the direction of the confused girl, then tightened his pack and broke into long, loping strides. He drove himself hard, aware that if he did not meet up with one of the trading convoys on the Susquehanna he would lose precious days, and fewer convoys were plying the river. Even before the wars that had discouraged the traders, the furs that drove the trade had been harder and harder to come by. The wild was being driven out of the forests.

He stopped at dusk, knowing he risked a twisted ankle or worse if he continued in the darkness. Making a shelter of some fallen limbs and hemlock boughs braced against a low ledge, he lit a fire for tea, then opened his pack, setting aside the parcel he had promised to deliver to Jessica Ross’s family, and withdrew Red Jacob’s pouch. He heaped on dried branches and by the light of the fire examined the contents again, lifting the piece of quillwork for closer examination. It was not crafted with the delicate, skilled hand of Adanahoe, but was clearly done by a native hand. It held the image of a fat bird, probably a grouse. It was unusually thick, and he saw now how the back side had a double layer of doeskin, forming a pocket. From it he extracted a slip of paper, which he straightened in the flickering light.

It was a verse:

Childe Rowland to the dark tower came,

His word was still Fi, fo, and fum

I smell the blood of a British man.

ALTHOUGH THE IDEA OF THE STALKING GIANT WAS FROM ANCIENT legend, Duncan recognized this particular version as coming from King Lear . He doubted that Red Jacob could read, but the Oneida had been carrying a verse of Shakespeare. Not just carrying it but concealing it. Some natives considered that powerful words, when written, created powerful charms. He read the words out loud then bent closer to the light to examine the slip of paper. On the reverse, in pencil lead, was a large numeral 5 . It could signify Red Jacob’s squad number. It could just be a convenient chit for a gambling debt. But he recalled how the killer had searched Red Jacob’s belongings. Could this be the real secret Red Jacob had been hiding?

A vision of the awful moment at the front of Sarah’s house flashed through his mind. Woolford had been at the center, seated, solidly braced against movement due to the pain each motion brought, yet the shooters had missed him. The man who had killed Red Jacob had been an expert marksman, but the two shooters at Edentown had missed their mark, killing Jess and wounding Conawago. How many were in this conspiracy of murder?

He slept fitfully, grateful for his makeshift shelter when rain began to fall after midnight. A vision of men hanging on a long English gibbet haunted his sleep. At first he thought they were the bodies of his father and clansmen who so often inhabited his dreams but then he saw they were tribesmen. A raven was perched on the gibbet, watching him as he paced along, counting the rotting dead, passing before a rank of powdered British officers who took no notice of him. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, then two more, on a separate scaffold.