CHAPTER NINETEEN
Micah Tate had the attention of Benjamin Crawley the moment he walked in the silversmithy carrying the stone he had been presented at the Colyer house where he and Titus had taken young Mary Deveraux after the massacre at her home in the Cumberland Settlements.
Crawley rose from his chair with his eyes locked on the stone. “Hello, sir,” Micah said. “My name is Micah Tate and I came to town with Crawford Fain. I have here—”
“Yes, I can see,” Crawley interrupted, reaching out and taking the stone from Micah’s hands. He hefted it, held it in a shaft of sunlight from the window, and put his eye so close to it that eyeball nearly touched stone.
“That stone belongs to a family named Colyer over in the Cumberland country, but the stone itself came from a man out of North Carolina, or so the Colyers told me. They don’t know what it is, nor do I, but I’m wondering if it might be an ore of some sort.”
“I believe, Mr. Tate, that there is gold in this stone.”
“Gold?”
“It will take more time and work to know, but that is what it appears to be to me.”
“If there is gold there, can you get it out?”
“I can. If there is sufficient quantity, I can create an ingot. I have only one question. If this stone is not yours, will there be objection from those who own it to me melting out the metal?”
“It was given to me for the purpose of finding what it is and what the value might be,” Micah replied. “The only way to do that, I am sure, is to give you freedom to do what you must.”
“That is sufficient for me, then.”
“How long do you need?”
“Come back in two, three days. Or if I finish sooner, I’ll look you up at Stuart’s. That is where Edohi’s band is lodging, is it not?”
“Indeed. Very good, sir. Gold . . . I’m blasted!”
Two days later, the silversmith would be holding in his hand a gleaming, four-inch ingot of gold, marveling at its beauty and trying his best to calculate its worth.
Micah said his good day to Crawley and left by the front door. Distracted by the thought of gold, he paid insufficient heed to his movement and plowed straight into a young woman walking past the smithy. She staggered under the impact out into the dirt street and went down hard, tripping over her own feet. Micah landed in the dirt beside her.
He was up again in a moment, bursting with apologies, and put out his hand to help the woman up. She ignored the hand and bounded to her feet on her own, spryly, and glared at him.
“What’s wrong with you, boy? Don’t you know how to watch where you’re going?”
Boy. He felt the sting of the word, especially coming from a young woman. “I’m mighty sorry, miss. It was my fault. Please pardon me.”
“Ma’am, is this man bothering you?”
The voice came from elsewhere on the street and caused both Micah and the young woman to turn. Titus Fain was striding in their direction, a reproving look on his face as he eyed Micah.
“Titus, I caused a problem here without meaning to. I came out of the smithy there and didn’t give sufficient heed to where I was going. Knocked this young woman down, and myself, too.”
Titus looked intently into the face of the woman, who was well featured and maybe twenty years old. “Are you hurt?” Titus asked.
She smiled. “I am well enough. Startled and a bit jolted is all. But your gentlemanly behavior restores my cheerful frame of mind.”
“I said I was sorry,” Micah protested feebly from the side. “I’m a gentleman!”
“A gentleman watches where his big canoe-sized feet carry him to begin with,” Titus said. “Miss, my name is Titus Fain, and I am a visitor to town. I’m forced to admit that this stumble-foot here is my friend, Micah Tate. I assure you that, despite all appearances, he isn’t as bad as he seems. Just not particularly smart, that’s all.”
“I see.” She smiled more broadly. “Fain, did you say? Are you the son of Crawford Fain, or Edohi?”
“I am.”
She put out her hand. “My name is Amy DeVault. I am pleased to know you, Mr. Fain. I had heard your father was in town with a band of travelers.”
“Pleased to know you, too, miss,” said Titus.
“And I’m also pleased to know you,” Micah threw in. “And I am sorry about what I done.”
She glanced at him without interest and gave a curt nod. Finished with him.
“It’s a notable event when my father arrives in any town or settlement,” said Titus. “When I arrive it’s not a matter worth much notice.”
“You have been noticed, I assure you,” Amy said boldly. “I have several friends here in Jonesborough, all of them young unmarried women as I am, and when you rode into our street here for the first time, you perhaps did not realize you possessed an audience watching from behind cabin window shutters.”
Titus, never much aware of his own looks and qualities, actually blushed. Micah grunted with annoyance and strode swiftly away, as unheeding as before, and nearly ran into another woman, this one a large matron of about sixty. He dodged her at the last moment, drawing from her a startled little cry. There was no collision, though Micah did trip on a mounting block and fell clumsily on his face. He rose looking like a man who knew full well he’d made a fool of himself, and continued down the street a little slower and more watchfully.
“How did you end up with a man like that as a friend?” Amy DeVault asked.
“Despite what you’ve seen, he’s a good man. Clearheaded and capable. I’d as soon have Micah Tate with me on a hunt or on the trail as any man I know. You mustn’t judge him from one accidental run-in on the street.”
“I’ll take your word for it, sir.”
“Let me ask you something, miss. Might you have a relative by the name of Andrew DeVault? Over on the Cumberland?”
“My brother, sir. Coming here to visit me with his new bride any day now. I am keeping a watch for his arrival.”
“I met him, with his Cumberland Scouts. Good man.”
“He is indeed.”
Abner Bledsoe was in a rage. “No printer in this town? Well, I’m confounded. How is a man to obtain what I need if there is no printer to do the work?”
Constance Harkin gave the complainer as sympathetic a look as she could muster, but her thought was that she wished he would follow the pattern of his peg-legged traveling companion and remain calm and quiet. It was certainly not her fault that Jonesborough had yet to attract a printer, not her fault that this new-arrival preacher could not have broadsides printed to advertise his upcoming camp meeting.
What did a preacher want with broadsides, anyway? It seemed to Constance that a preaching event shouldn’t be promoted in the same way as a traveling piece of playacting or music. Shouldn’t it be, well, above that sort of triviality? Especially given that this particular preacher had already made a name for himself and surely could draw a crowd merely by word of mouth.
Constance drew upon her own natural propensity for diplomacy and found a way to express those thoughts to Abner Bledsoe without sounding offensive or insulting.
Bledsoe sat down wearily on a nearby stool in the common room of the Harkin Inn. “You are a wise woman, ma’am,” he said. “But you misunderstand my needs. My desire to find a printer is not to print announcements, but to provide myself a text printed large for my aging eyes to read.”
“You read your sermons?”
“Only one portion of my presentation is read. In the past that portion—which I finally mostly learned by heart through sheer repetition—was the famous story of Molly Reese of London. Are you familiar with that oft-told tale?”
“I am, sir. A remarkable story, though I admit to a certain degree of doubt as to whether her rescue was the result of an actual angelic act, or something with a more earthly explanation.”
Bledsoe waved his hand dismissively. “It doesn’t matter now. Though for quite a long time I provided Molly Reese with a marvelous platform to share her story, she has chosen to abandon my holy work. But thanks to my new friend Mr. Kirk and his equally remarkable story, Miss Reese can safely be replaced and forgotten. Mr. Kirk also has seen the rescuing hand of God as administered through angelic visitation. In the very tragedy of being forced to lose a portion of his own leg, he attained the rescue of his life through the intervention of an angel drawn to his aid by the sound of my own nearby preaching.”
“That is . . . extraordinary.”
Littleton, who was nearby, cleared his throat and spoke, though the act drew a look of remonstrance from Bledsoe, who clearly was enjoying monopolizing the attention of the young widow innkeeper. Littleton, who had shaved off his whiskers, was beginning to lose weight, and looked very little like his former, infamous self, said, “I fell victim to a ruffian who caused me to fall bodily into a pit that was surely the mouth of hell, trapping and ruining my left leg and forcing me to take a knife to my own flesh to free myself. But even after that I remained trapped in the pit and certainly unable to climb. And though there was one of Reverend Bledsoe’s camp meetings taking place nearby, no one could hear my call for help.” Littleton paused and glanced at the preacher. “No one but God, who hears even the silent cry of a worm. And he sent to me a helper, an angel in the form of a young man, who drew me from that pit and carried me on his own back to where help could be found. My life was saved, just as Molly Reese’s was saved so many years before, by the power of one of God’s servant spirits.”
Bledsoe took advantage of the pause to jump in and take over again. “And it is that story, Mrs. Harkin, that I am most anxious to have printed in large letters, so that I may read it with ease in the pulpit. My eyes are not what they once were, you see, and like St. Paul, I need the benefit of large letters that can be clearly seen and read by dim eyes in the even dimmer light of torches.”
“Sir, if it is merely a legible and large text you require, we can provide that to you here, without need of a printer. My young daughter has a most excellent hand and can produce for you a piece of text to equal or exceed the quality and usefulness of anything you would obtain from the operator of a printing press.”
Bledsoe pondered it a moment, and nodded. “Ma’am, you yourself are surely an angel sent to help God’s servant in his time of need! I would be most happy to accept such assistance from your lass. Can she write it from my spoken dictation, or need I write it for her to copy?”
“You may speak it, if you can do so at a slow enough pace to allow her to keep up.”
“God’s blessings on you, ma’am. You will see rewards eternal for this aid you are giving an old servant of the Most High.”
“I am pleased to be such a help, sir, as I know my Maggie will be, too.”
The process started that night. Bledsoe paced back and forth in the front room, young Maggie seated at the table with quill, ink, and paper, scribing away steadily but at a pace not quite satisfactory to Bledsoe, who continually swept in and leaned over to examine the girl’s meticulous work. “Your letters are becoming progressively smaller,” he said more than once, inaccurately. “They must be a thumb-width tall if I am to see them, and you cannot use narrow lines. The aim is to produce a text I can read from some distance, in imperfect and flickering light.”
Maggie struggled with her patience, and with a vague sense of discomfort that the preacher roused in her, a feeling that something was just not right about the man.
At length she realized what it was, and asked her mother about it that night before retiring. “Mother, should a preacher have the smell of whiskey on his breath? Because the Reverend Abner Bledsoe does. He would leave the room from time to time, saying he was going off to pray, then come back in and his breath would smell stronger of it. Is that a bad thing?”
“I can only hope you were mistaken, dear, because yes, it is a bad thing. A man of God should not be given to much liquor. But preachers, I suppose, are nothing but men, just like other men. And men are often weak and prone to sin.”
“I think Reverend Bledsoe might be like that.”
“Perhaps so.”
Of the three outlaws who had hanged Gilly, Bart Clemons had been the most unsettled and repelled by the process. Yet he was drawn back to the scene days later, wondering whether Gilly might still be hanging there as a bird-pecked corpse. It was the strongest of unwanted compulsions. He simply had to know.
He had no reason to expect the body would not be there. The hanging had taken place in a remote area, away from common trails and roads, hidden by forest and undergrowth. Most likely Gilly was still dangling, weathered and decaying, a sight Clemons dreaded seeing and was sure he would never forget after he did. Still he was driven to go there, because however horrible Gilly’s remains might be up on that rope, they were there because of what Clemons and his partners had done, and he, for one, could not shy away from it. Clemons knew he would never rest as well again until he had faced the full, sickening results of their act.
As he clambered up a timbered hillside and began to recognize that he was indeed at the right spot and growing very near to where Gilly had to be, Clemons began to brace himself for the stench of death. By now Gilly would surely be growing quickly ripe, baked in the sun, infiltrated by maggots, and damaged by the carrion birds of the forest. As bad as the sight promised to be, the smell would probably be worse.
Yet as he neared the place, Clemons smelled nothing. The breeze was quite fresh and clean, though it blew from the direction of the place where Gilly had died. Clemons paused repeatedly, sniffing the air and wondering whether his sense of smell was failing him. Surely there would have to be a stench!
There was none, though, and when at last he reached the location and, after bracing himself, strode boldly into the clearing to face the results of what he and the others had done, there was nothing to be seen. Nothing but an empty noose, moving slightly in the wind. No corpse swinging, no corpse on the ground, and judging from the lack of smell, no corpse dragged into the woods nearby, either.
Gilly was gone. It was as simple as that. They’d left him hanging dead—for surely he’d been dead, with his eyes bulging and unblinking and his tongue thrust out between his swelling lips, an image Clemons could not shake from his mind—and yet he was gone. As if his body had simply turned to smoke and blown away.
Or been carried away by something or someone.
Fear overcame Clemons. If someone had found the hanging body, there might be interest out there in finding the responsible parties. He glanced around as if suddenly the forest around him might belch forth an entire posse of vengeful regulators, coming to get him and punish him for what he, Sikes, and Jones had done to their old partner in crime.
He fully grasped for the first time the fact that it didn’t really matter that Gilly had deserved the hanging they gave him. The hanging party had not been constables or sheriffs or officers of the court, carrying out a prescribed sentence of law. The hangmen had been common criminals themselves, acting on their own.
Clemons pondered this, froze where he was a few moments, then turned and ran into the woods as if hounds were upon him. In his mind was an image not of Gilly, but himself, hanging from a noose with his eyes bulging and tongue protruding.
He ran a long way before exhaustion brought him to the ground. As he had done before when they had hanged Gilly, he retched violently.
