around here when you got your man. When you ain’t, well...” She gave a heavy sigh. “Thomas Henry’s uncle—Halbert, his name is—he’s been plaguing her to death. If Thomas Henry knowed what that sorry uncle of his is been doing to Sayer and his little sisters, he’d kill him first thing he was home—blood kin or not. I know that for sure—but he’s dead, so what good is he?” She suddenly squeezed his shoulder. “I’m scared, Jeremiah. I’m scared we’re going to go in there and find them girls as dead as Thomas Henry.”
He didn’t say anything to that. He could hear her sniffing from time to time.
“No use worrying till we know,” he said, and he could feel the bonnet nod against his shoulder.
“You better hang on to that horse now,” she said.
“Why?”
“I smell a bear.”
“Maybe we ought to hurry, then.”
“Well, my stars, Jeremiah. You ain’t nearly as simple-headed as you look.”
With that, she gave the horse’s flank a dig with both her heels, not knowing that this particular piece of horseflesh would take such a gesture completely to heart and bolt to the top of the ridge, path or no path, whether they wanted it to or not. Unfortunately, the mount Ike had found for him was a seasoned warhorse whose war still continued at every turn—something Jack had discovered the hard way.
Rorie Conley was hanging on for dear life, but he didn’t try to slow the animal down. He already knew how useless that would be. A charge was a charge to this horse, at least until it ran out of room. They finally broke into the clearing around the Garth cabin, and he had to work hard to rein it in. “Next time, you let me give this animal his instructions,” he said as he helped her swing down.
He dismounted and looked toward the cabin. Someone had put a lot of work into building it. It was tall enough to have a good-size loft if the small window near the eaves was any indication. There were two more windows off the front porch—double-hung three-over-twos, the kind he would have thought would be too expensive and complex to build for a mountain farmer. Two straight chairs sat on the porch, and a glass jar with some kind of fading wildflowers in it had been placed in the middle of one of the windowsills. Apparently Sayer Garth liked the little touches.
Rorie was still trying to get her breath. Her bonnet had fallen off her head and was hanging down her back, but she still had a good grip on the basket.
“Did you hear what I said?” he asked.
“Yes, Jeremiah, I reckon I did. And I’ll remember it. Another ride like that one and I’ll be simple-headed, too.”
She untied her bonnet and put it on top of whatever she had in the basket, then stood for a moment, listening.
“You hear anything?” she asked, turning her head side to side.
“Nothing but the wind in the trees,” he said.
“Well, I reckon I got to go see.”
“I’ll go,” he said.
“No, you won’t. How many times a day do you want to come that close to getting yourself shot?”
“Used to be a pretty regular thing,” he said. “Of course, ‘wanting’ didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Well, now it does. Sayer might be in there with a musket sighted on the door. She’s got those girls with her, and you’ll scare her so bad she’ll shoot first and then worry about what you was wanting.”
She began walking toward the cabin, and he came with her. “Used to be she had a dog,” she said. “Good old dog. Wouldn’t let nobody come up on the cabin unless Sayer called him off. Something happened to him.”
“Thomas Henry’s uncle, you mean?”
She flashed him a look of what could have been appreciation for his powers of deduction or one that indicated she didn’t find him quite as “simple-headed” as she’d first thought.
“You hear that?” Rorie said suddenly. “I hear crying.” She moved forward quickly. “Sayer! It’s me! I’m coming in!” She stepped up on the porch. “You stay out here,” she said over her shoulder.
He watched as she disappeared inside. He could hear the crying clearly now, but he couldn’t be certain if there was one person in distress or two.
He kept looking around for anything that might be amiss outside the cabin. He’d heard enough now about Thomas Henry’s uncle to think that the dead Reb had been right to worry about his wife’s safety.
The horse began to prance nervously, something Jack took as a sign that this situation might not be safe for ex-soldiers. The crying coming from inside the cabin seemed to be tapering off, in any event. He pulled the horse’s reins forward and dropped them on the ground, because he had learned from an ex-cavalryman riding the stage to Jefferson that it would stay put as if it were tethered. Jack’s not knowing about the animal’s war training had seemed to satisfy the man’s mind regarding Jack himself and the all-too-obvious U.S. brand on the horse’s left shoulder. A man who hadn’t been a Union cavalryman and who had bought a warhorse cheap wasn’t going to know the fine points. The imaginary tethering and the fact that it would come whenever he whistled—unless it thought it was in the middle of another charge—thus far had proved at least somewhat useful.
“She ain’t in here and she ain’t in the privy,” Rorie called after a moment. “The girls don’t know where she got to. That path yonder leads down to the spring. You walk down that way, Jeremiah. See if you can see her. I’ll tend to these young-uns. They’re still fevering and they’re both scared might near to death. I’m going to leave the back door open. You holler if you find anything—you can holler, can’t you?”
She didn’t wait for him to say whether he could or not. “Watch out for snakes! We got some big rattlers and copperheads around here!” she yelled as she went back inside.
Jack stood for a moment. He had thought Mary was accomplished at having the last word, but Rorie Conley was a true artist.
He began walking through the tall and probably snake-filled grass to the path that led...somewhere. He kept looking for livestock. He would have expected chickens, at the very least, but what he took for a henhouse and a chicken lot were clearly unoccupied as was the pigpen and the barn. He could see a smokehouse and tobacco barn, and there was a planted field on a slope some distance away—hay that needed cutting and drying. There was another field lying fallow with the rotting stubble of a corn crop beyond that one.
But what was most apparent was that Sayer Garth had no animals to feed of any kind. Uncle Halbert didn’t seem to favor one species over the other. Chickens, cows or child’s pet, they were all the same to him.
The path grew very steep suddenly, and it was difficult to keep his balance because there was nothing but tall grass to grab on to along the way. It occurred to him that if the path led to anything of importance, the grass needed to be scythed. If he was going to run into any snakes, this would be a good place for it. The path needed to be terraced and braced with thick planks, something he supposed Thomas Henry might have done if he’d lived.
Once again he could hear water flowing, not the rushing of a stream in a rocky
