To the Far Blue Mountains (1976) s-2 Read online

  "There is fresh water ashore," I said, "and I'll gladly guide you to it, and help you with the watering. As you see," I swept an arm at the deck and the ship's crew, "we've had a spot of trouble here. I am a settler ashore, and came aboard this ship to trade six bales of furs. The master of the ship and his crew attempted to steal my furs and my wife."

  He looked around, his face grim. "Well, he didn't, did he?"

  "We had more men ashore than he reckoned with, Captain."

  "May I see the furs?"

  "You may. They are close to the spring where you will get water." I indicated a spot on the shore. "If you will go there, I'll join you."

  He hesitated. "You've come well out of this. I hope there is to be no more violence."

  Suddenly his head turned sharply, and I looked. Oldfast Wilson leaned against the jamb of the door, his face battered and bloody. His mouth gaped wide where I'd torn his cheek.

  "My God in heaven!" The captain of the ship turned to me.

  "We had a fight, Captain. The man is uncommonly strong."

  "He beat me, damn his soul. Beat me." Oldfast Wilson shook his big head in bewilderment. "I thought no man could do it."

  "We're going ashore now, Wilson, and we're taking some powder, shot, and about six hundred pounds of food. If you'll tell me how much I owe, I'll pay."

  "Take them and be damned! I'll not touch your money!" He turned his head. "He's Barnabas Sackett, Captain. Wanted by the Queen. I thought to take him back to England."

  The captain of the new ship shrugged. "I'm not a warship, only a peaceful trader bound for the Indies. I shall buy his furs if the price is right. I do not know that the Queen wants this man, nor have I been asked to search for him. Nor am I aware of his crimes, if any. He has approached me with courtesy, and I shall respond in the same way."

  Two weeks longer we waited, and saw no sign of the Abigail. There was no more time to be spent, so we took our boats and started up a stream that emptied into the sea somewhat to the south of our former route.

  And it was then that the fever took me, fever and chills. For days I was ill.

  Sometimes we lay up along shore, often we pushed on, but Abby was ever at my side and ever in command. She who knew much of men and ships, and in this my illness, took over. When there was doubt, she resolved it, when there was a decision to be made, she made it.

  With her father, aboard ship, Abby had learned much of such things, and understood the necessities of command. So it was fever and chills, chills and fever. And no sooner did I start to get better than Tom Watkins was down with it. Sakim understood it well enough, for it was an illness found in many tropical lands, he said.

  For several days we laid up, resting, at a place called Cross Creek. It was a meeting place of many trading paths, but no Indians came while we were there, or if they did, they avoided us.

  Lila made a loblolly that she had learned from the Catawba, a dish made with Indian corn and dried peaches. Kane O'Hara killed a buffalo and Jeremy a deer, one of the largest I have ever seen, with a noble rack of horns.

  Finally we could walk about, although very weak. Each day I tried a few more footsteps. I was constantly worried about our crops, about the fort, and the worry that must beset Slater and Quill, for we had long overstayed the expected time.

  Then there came a day when I determined to wait no longer, but to return to our boats and proceed up the river. We began loading, packing the carrierboat carefully, then the others.

  We were just pushing off when four Indians came from the forest and stood looking upon us, and something in the looks of one immediately drew my attention.

  "Potaka!" I called.

  He stepped into the water and waded toward me, hand outstretched. "Sackett! It is you!"

  The Eno laid hold of the gunwale with both hands. "Where is it you go, my friend?"

  "To the land of the Catawba," I replied. "We now live there, although we plan to go beyond the blue mountains."

  "Ah? It is ever beyond the mountains with you, Sackett. But we will come also.

  The Catawba are our friends."

  With four more rowers it was no time until we reached a point from which we could leave our boats. Once more we concealed them near the opening of a small creek where there was a reed-choked backwater, drawing them well back into the reeds and covering them with others to hide them well. Into each boat we put some water to keep the bottom boards from shrinking. Once more we shouldered our burdens and began the overland trek to the fort, a much shorter distance now due to the fact that the river we had used had taken us closer to Catawba country.

  On the first night out Potaka came to me, much disturbed. "Many warrior come this way," he said.

  "Who?"

  "Tuscarora ... maybe thirty mans ... no woman, no child."

  A war party then ... headed toward the Catawba, toward our fort.

  "When?"

  "Four days ... I think. Maybe three days." It was bad news. Traveling at the speed with which a war party could travel they must have arrived in the fort area as much as two days ago.

  The four Eno scattered out and went through the woods. They could fight and would fight, but they were no such warriors as either the Tuscarora or the Catawba. When they returned they reported no sign of Indians.

  We moved on, traveling more swiftly. My strength was returning, and Black Tom Watkins could walk once more, yet neither he nor Fitch were well men, and we had to move warily so as not to be surprised by the returning party.

  Desperately, I wished to forge ahead, but dared not leave my family at such a time. We kept close, with Enos out ahead and behind.

  The months had made me into a woodsman, more so than ever I have been, and Jeremy also. The gay young blade whom I had first met at the down-at-heel inn in London now wore buckskins. The hat with the plume had been put aside for another hat, and he wore moccasins instead of boots. Kane also, had become the complete woodsman, and the others to a degree.

  Suddenly we broke out of the woods and the fort lay before us, charred by fire, but standing.

  "Kane? Barry? Stay with my wife." Pim, Jeremy, Glasco, and I moved out in a wide skirmish line, our muskets ready.

  Sakim and Peter brought up the rear, and the Indians scattered wide on our flanks.

  There was no sound from the fort.

  No hail from the walls, no welcoming smoke ... only silence and the wind.

  The grass bent before it, the leaves stirred upon the trees. Each step I took brought me nearer ... to what?

  The gate of the fort stood open, the bar lay on the ground inside. My eyes searched the battlements but nothing moved. We moved toward the gate.

  "Sakim? Fitch? Stay outside. Watch the woods. I am going in.

  "Pim, after a minute, come in ... and you, Tom."

  Musket ready for a sudden shot, I stepped inside. All was still. No sound disturbed the fading afternoon, and then, at the door of our cabin, a body.

  Scalped ... and dead. Several days dead, but the weather had been cool.

  It was Matt Slater.

  Matt Slater, who so loved the land, and who had, at last, wide acres of his own.

  A square mile of forest, meadow and fields traded for a plot, six by three.

  There was no sign of Quill.

  "Scatter out," I said. "We've got to find Quill."

  "He may be a prisoner."

  "If he is," I said, "we'll go get him. No matter how far we go, or how long it takes."

  Our cabin had been looted, our few possessions gone or broken. The same was true in every room until we mounted the ladder to the walk. We saw several patches of blood, dark stains now, some visible on the earth below, some upon the walk. The ladder to the blockhouse had been pushed over, and evidently whoever had made the stand within had fired along the walk on either side, keeping the Indians at a distance.

  Pushing gently on the door, I found a timber wedged against it, but managed to get a hand through and moved it enough to open the door.
/>   John Quill sat facing the doorway, his head on his chest, his musket across his knees. There were eight other muskets within the room, all placed in position near loopholes or the door.

  Kneeling beside him I touched his hand. Turning sharply I said, "Get Sakim up here! He's alive!"

  Chapter 29

  We buried Matt Slater on the land he loved, and buried him deep in the earth. We planted a tree close by his head that its fruit might fall where he lay. His years had been given to raising crops, and seeing the yellow grain bright in the sun, so we put him down where the seasons pass, where his blood could feed the soil. We left him there with a marker, simple and plain.

  HERE LIES MATTHEW SLATER, A FARMER

  A FAITHFUL MAN WHO LOVED THE EARTH

  1570-1602

  John Quill recovered, though wounded sorely, and told us a little of what had transpired.

  They had come suddenly in the dawn, killing a Catawba who had brought meat to the fort, and the gate had been closed against them before they could take his scalp.

  Then began a desperate fight, two men against thirty, and they ran from wall to wall, firing here, firing there. The Catawba warriors were far from the village on a hunt, but the old men fought and the women fought, and John Quill and Matt Slater defended the fort.

  It was after sundown before they came over the wall and Slater went down fighting four men, and John Quill retreated into the blockhouse where they had gathered food and powder for a stand. Alone, he fought them all through the night and another day. They tried to fire the blockhouse but the timbers were damp from recent rains and would not bum.

  "Six men I know I killed," John Quill said, "and mayhap another went, and finally they gave up and one shouted at me in English and told me to come to them, that the tribe would welcome me. They told me I was a great warrior-" John Quill looked at me. "Captain, I am only a farmer. It was all I ever wished to be, like poor Matt, who had his land only to lose it."

  "He will never lose it," I said. "He had it when he died, and he had the memory of it in his soul. Nothing can take that from him."

  "He was a brave, fine man," Abby said gently, "as you are, John. Our country needs such men to build it and make it grow. God help us always to have them, men who believe in what they are doing, and who will fight for what they believe."

  "Aye," I said, "no man ever raised a monument to a cynic or wrote a poem about a man without faith."

  So we came back to the fort after our journeying, and with my own hands I carried on the farming of Slater's crops. He'd planted them well and cultivated them a mite before passing on, and it was no trouble to keep up the work he'd begun.

  We were all of us growing into the land, finding our living from it, and learning where the berries grew thick upon the bushes and where the nuts fell and the pools where the trout loafed in the shadows.

  Man is not long from the wilderness, and it takes him but a short time to go back to living with it, and we had the Catawbas to guide us. Peter Fitch took an Indian girl to wife, a tall well-made girl with four warrior brothers.

  We went often to the far hills that spring, wandering deep into the mountains and living off the country, for there was always fresh meat for a man good with a gun, and there was no need to be belly-empty if you could shoot.

  One day Kane O'Hara asked leave to be gone awhile. He took his musket and went over the mountains, and some said that would be the last of him, but I thought it would not and said so, but the womenfolk worried.

  It was many weeks later when he came back, and when we saw him coming down the mountain, straight and tall as always, we saw he wasn't alone. Somebody walked beside him, and when he came closer we saw she was a Spanish girl from a Florida settlement.

  "Kane," I asked, "did she come willing?"

  "She did," he said, '"That you can ask her yourself. I took meat to her town, and I speak her tongue from a time when I was a prisoner there, and I broke some wild horses for them-"

  "Horses?"

  "Aye, they've horses; I made to fetch some, but hadn't nothing to trade for them and they are wary of letting them go. Toward the end they got suspicious of me and did not believe what I said. Only Margarita believed me and said so, and when I left she came with me."

  He looked at Abby and smiled. "It is all right, Mistress Abby. We stopped at an Indian village where there was a priest, an Irish priest from the Spanish lands who was teaching the Indians the ways of God, and he married us, all fitting and proper."

  "What of her folks?"

  "We sent them word by the priest. He was stiff about a marriage without her father saying it was proper, him knowing the family and all, but a nudge with a pistol and a reminder that if he did not marry us we'd be wedded Indian fashion, and he came through shining with a proper ceremony."

  When the year ended we went down the river again, all of us going this time, with Kin doing his own walking and Abby having her hands full with Brian ... named for her father ... whom she carried when Lila could bear to let go of him.

  Kin walked along with us, and bawled when he was picked up to be carried and insisted he carry his own pack, so we made a small one for him.

  One of our boats was gone when we came to them, but we took the other two and went down the river after a few repairs. There were more of us now but we knew the country better and knew woodland travel.

  We built a raft to tow our load of furs, for it was large, and we'd more pearls, mostly gotten by trade with the Indians, and some by capture. There'd been fights with the Cherokees, the Creeks, and the Tuscarora, and one day a captured Shawnee told us there had long ago been a great bunch of white men who lived on a river across the mountains, but they had fought often with the Shawnee and the Cherokee, too, before the Cherokee came so far south. Finally, the white men had been killed, but some of their women had been kept by Indian men, and a few of the survivors had come to live with the Shawnee.

  It was a long story, but there were many such, and from time to time we heard stories of white men who had been in the country before us.

  We had come down all the way to the Outer Banks again when we saw a canoe coming toward us. It was Potaka again. He had a strange-looking creature with him, a long, thin man with a beard who kept saying over and over, "Barnabas, Barnabas."

  And it was Jago, who had sailed with us on the fluyt.

  The Indians had found him, months before, roaming in the woods, and had cared for him as they did all mad men, for so they thought him to be. And truly, he was wandering in his mind.

  "Jago," I said, "I am Barnabas."

  "You said to ask for you," he said simply, and was content.

  That he had been through some terrible ordeal was obvious, and his body bore the scars of torture, most likely by Indians. And from where he had been found and what he could recall it must have been the Tuscarora ... but there was no certainty of this.

  After he had rested with us, he slowly began to recover. Always a hard worker, he was no different now. Bit by bit we learned a little. He had been on a ship that somehow had been attacked by Indians when laying off shore. Some of the crew, including himself, had escaped. Some of the Indians had been carried out to sea on the ship, and when his own party ashore had somehow been separated, he had wandered in the forest, subsisting on nuts and roots until captured by the Indians. How he had gotten free of them, we could not learn.

  For three weeks we waited, and saw no sail. Yet once again we enjoyed our sojourn upon the beach, and the change of diet provided by the sea. It was a pleasant, easy time. There was game in the woods and the fish were running well and the only Indians we encountered were friendly and inclined to trade.

  Kin, I think, was the happiest of us all. He ran along the shore ... miles of almost straight beach, all open to sun and sky. He was brown as an Indian, tall for his age, and a quiet, serious child.

  On our fourteenth day we saw a sail, but it passed us by. Several days later we saw another. Warily, it came closer, and through our
glasses we could see a man studying us through his own spyglass. He took soundings, then anchored and put a boat over.

  Several men took to the boat and, when nearing shore, one of them suddenly stood up and waved.

  It was John Pike.

  When the boat came closer he leaped over the side and came splashing to us, his face lit with pleasure. "Barnabas! And Mistress Abigail! It is good to see you!"

  We welcomed him to our campfire and he sent the boat back for wine and ale.

  "I have done well," he said after awhile. "The fluyt is now part mine and I also own another ship now, which trades abroad."

  He held Brian on his lap as he talked. "Barnabas, if you'd like the boys to go to school in London, let me have them. I'd treat them like they were my own."

  That Pike had done well was obvious. He was a man of business, prosperous, yet still adventurous. But he should have known I would not thus part with my sons.

  Later, he took us aboard his ship. He lingered for several days, taking on fresh water, trading with Indians and with us, and catching a supply of fresh fish as well as some game from the forest.

  To Abby and Lila he gave some bales of assorted dress goods, and to me, canvas, tools, and seed for grain and vegetables. He had planned well, and what we might have thought of needing, he could supply.

  On the last day, Jeremy Ring said suddenly, "Captain Pike, I would be pleased if you'd fetch your Bible."

  Pike looked up, surprised, at Jeremy.

  "I want to get married," said Jeremy quietly, "to Lila."

  Astonished, I looked at her. She was blushing, her head hanging.

  "Lila!" Abby exclaimed. "Is this true? Why didn't you tell me?"

  Blushing furiously, Lila said, "I didn't know. He didn't ask me."

  "You knew how I felt," Ring said.

  "Yes, yes, I did." She glanced at him, suddenly shy. "I did."

  "Well, then?"

  "Yes ... I will. Of course, I will."

  The ceremony was brief, and we all stood on the shore with a light wind blowing, ruffling our hair and blowing the women's skirts, and Captain Pike read from the Bible.