Then the rain fell no longer, but the forest dripped. Heavy were the leaves with rain, soft the grass beneath the moccasins. The narrow door opened; wraithlike, I slipped through and stood against the wall. Silent in the darkness, listening.
Black and still was the night. Water dripped from the branches, and I crossed the open acres about the fort and went into the trees. Among them, my body close along a slim dark tree, I waited again and listened. I did not know where lay their camp, but this night I thought they would have a fire, burning low now.
Only slightly blew the wind, a baby’s breath of wind, but I moved across it, my nostrils ready for the slightest smell of smoke.
Nothing.
How many watched the fort? Or had they all withdrawn to rest? My hand felt for a leaf, which was wet, and I put the wet fingers to my nose, for a wet nose smells better. A smell of rotting vegetation, for I was near the bank of a creek where there was a bit of marshy ground.
The tree beside which I stood was a chestnut. My touch upon the bark told me that, but this mountainside, as all through the hills, was covered with a variety of trees: chestnut, oaks of several kinds, tulip trees, red maple, sourwood, and many others. Some I knew by the smell, all by the touch. Careful to make no sound, I worked my way into the forest, working my way deeper and swinging in a rough half circle, always alert for that telltale whiff of smoke.
It did not come.
Before me the forest thinned. Only a few yards farther was the trail that led along the west side of Piney Top to Tusquitee Creek. Pausing, I listened. My ears heard nothing; my nostrils found no smell of smoke, only the faint sweetish smell of crushed magnolia, not unusual, for there were many about, and their leaves often fell and were crushed underfoot. None of our people had been out, however.
It was probably nothing. I waited, and then I heard faint stirrings. How far off? Carefully I worked my way through the forest. The sounds had ceased. Ahead of me was thick brush. Wary, I avoided it.
With the rain, wild animals and most birds had taken shelter, so I could rely upon none of them to give me warning of a foreign presence. Yet as boys we had been taught by the Catawba to develop our sixth sense and to be always aware. We would take turns at staring at one of us until he turned suddenly, becoming aware of our attention. By continual practice we had become as sensitive to this as any wild animal.
Often our father, when in the woods with us, would suddenly stop and ask that we describe some area just passed or the tracks of animals or insects we had just glimpsed in the dust of the track. With time our awareness had grown until we missed very little.
In the wilderness attention to detail was the price of survival.
Abruptly I paused. A faint smell of wet buckskins and wood smoke. I held perfectly still, then turned my head this way and that to hear the better and to catch any vague smells. Primitive man, I suspected, used his nostrils quite as much as his eye or ear, but civilization, with its multitude of odors, soon distracts the attention until the brain no longer registers them on the awareness. It was different living in the wilds.
Careful to permit no leaves to brush my shoulders, I worked my way through the brush and trees, pausing often to listen. It was a murmur of voices I heard and then the stronger smell of wood smoke; a moment later, the glimpse of fire.
At that moment I stood very still, alert to every sound. Now I was close. I had found them, but what was to be my next move, I did not know. At least one of them, Max Bauer himself, was a skilled woodsman, not to be trifled with. I wanted to see, to hear, to estimate their numbers, but not to be heard myself.
After a moment I edged closer, not over a few feet, and could see into their camp. I took care not to look directly at Bauer, although I could see him, or at Lashan, who was lying at one side.
“Not at daybreak,” Bauer was saying. “Indians often attack then, but after daybreak when they have decided there will be no attack and they have relaxed. Some will be eating, some will be beginning their day’s work. Not more than one, probably, on the walls. Lashan, you are good with a lance. Can you get that guard for me? Kill him instantly?”
“I can. At thirty feet, which is the closest I can get, it will be easy.”
“Then kill him. I want him dead. If we cannot strike when the gate is open, we will go over the walls. Toss loops over the tops of the poles, and up you go, but I want at least a dozen men going up at once. The surprise will be complete. No looting and no women until every man is dead, you understand? Any man who does otherwise answers to me.”
Lashan suddenly got to his feet. “Max? There’s somebody out there!”
Turning swiftly, I slid through the brush and hit a path on the run. So far I thought I had made no sound, but behind me I heard a shout.
“All of you! Out there! Get him! Alive, if you can, but get him!”
Down the path I fled, knowing not where it led except that the general direction was toward Compass Creek. Turning from the path, I slid through a gap in the trees and ran desperately. Pulling up sharply, I heard a rustling in the brush before me. Turning, I ran on, but slower, not knowing where to next expect an enemy.
A narrow, natural avenue through the trees opened. The clouds had broken, and there was a faint light. Dimly I could see, and I plunged on. If they took me now, it meant not only death but that they would use me, somehow, to force an opening of the gates.
Turning sharply right, I ran up a track that ran along a creek bed. The Tusquitee, I thought. The sky had clouded over again. Turning again, I started up a steep, rocky slope. I was hurrying, wanting to get back, to warn them of the impending attack. I saw an opening and plunged into it. Suddenly there was a sickening feeling of collapsing earth; a bank gave way, and I fell.
A sickening sense of failure and fear. I brought up with a terrific jolt, my skull rapped a rock, and that was all.
A groan, and a groan stifled. A feeling of chill, a sense of being wet, and a dull throbbing in my skull. My eyes opened on a gray world, low gray clouds, a grayish-black bank of mud rising above me and the crumbled edge over which I had fallen. It was not much of a fall, and I had landed in soft earth and water at the creek’s edge. If only my skull had not rapped against that rock.
Heaving myself to a sitting position, I sat there while my head buzzed. It was daylight. What hour I knew not. Our enemies had not found me, or I should be either dead or a prisoner.
Shakily I got to my feet. The trail where I had been running was obviously long unused and had been undercut by the creek at high water. My head ached frightfully, and my neck was stiff. One knee had been bruised, also.
Looking around, I judged that the creek beside which I had fallen lay somewhere on the north slope of Piney Top, and to get back to the fort by the quickest route would be over the top of the ridge, roughly a climb of some two thousand feet, the last thousand feet very steep indeed.
Carefully I looked all around. The place where I had fallen was a small creek bed littered with stones and logs and scattered debris from the mountains above. The creek was only a couple of feet wide, a few inches deep. It was thickly walled with timber and brush right to the edge of the bank, and the mountain rose abruptly just beyond a curve in the stream bed.
There was no sound but that of a mockingbird singing in a tree a short distance off. I turned and started toward the mountain and almost fell. My knee was hurt worse than I had believed. My eyes swept the ground for a stick to be used for help in walking. Seeing nothing of the right sort, I staggered on, rounding the bend to find a broken branch about six feet long and an inch to two inches thick lying at the stream’s edge. Taking it, I started on.
It was slow going. My head throbbed at every step, and my knee was stiff. It hurt when I walked, but there was no help for it.
Was I too late? Had Bauer made his attack? In an agony of fear, I pushed on, working my way through the laurel and up the slope. It was slow, painful work, with my leg so stiff it was awkward to walk. Yet at last I came to a low saddle with Piney Top on my right.
Grasping a branch for support, I stared through the leaves at the valley of Shooting Creek.
The fort was still there. Slow smoke rose from its chimneys, and all was still. From where I stood, no scene could have seemed more peaceful with the slow smoke rising and the sound of the creek stilled by distance. The fields lay easy under the sun, an island of cultivation in the vastness of the wilderness around.
Nothing yet. Or had it all been done? Had the fort been taken, our people slain? I could not believe it. Surely there would be some sign, some evidence of it, and there was none. But I was still far away, at least two miles in crow-flight distance but more than three miles on the ground and the way I must go. Not less than an hour, perhaps more.
Painfully I hobbled on, seeking the best route down the mountain. My knee had swollen, binding my pant leg as it stretched the buckskin.
To return was all I now thought. My venture had been for nothing. I had hoped to find some way, some means for creating havoc among them. I had done nothing but get myself hurt, and the news that they meant to attack would come too late to be of help now.
The mountainside was steep and the forest thick. It was at least two thousand feet of descent, but carefully I eased through the laurel and stopped under a huge old maple, lightning struck in some bygone time. Listening, I heard nothing. Soon the noise of the creek would make it doubly hard, for they did not call it Shooting Creek for nothing.
There was much fallen wood here, dead branches from the tree, and some great slabs of bark. A signal fire? It would only serve to let Bauer and his crew know where I was, and my own people might misread the signal and think me in trouble. They might try to reach me and so expose more of our strength to disaster.
What I did I had to do alone. And I had to trust to Yance and Jeremy, to Kane O’Hara and the others, to keep the fort. My task now was somehow to get down the mountain and into the fort.
Ferns grew waist high about me, and there was a tangle underfoot that I managed badly with my game leg. The continued silence from below worried me. There was no sound, no shot. Nothing.
What could have happened? When I stopped again, it was in a clump of yellow birches growing around an outcropping of rock. Sitting down on a rock, I took my knife and cut a thin slit in my legging to ease the swelling and constriction. It helped.
Wary, I studied the mountainside below me and tried to see into the trees beyond the creek, but I saw nothing. A wood thrush skimmed past me and lighted on a branch almost over my head, regarding me with curiosity.
The clouds seemed to have broken, and here and there sunlight streamed through. Rising, I started again to limp my way through the forest. My move to somehow attack Bauer and his men had come to nothing, and I would be lucky to get back alive, all because of that fall into the gully.
Already the day was fading, and with darkness my chances of getting to the fort were greater, my chances of getting in much less. My fears grew. What had happened?
So far as I could see, and my vantage point permitted me to see into the enclosure, I saw no movement either in the yard or on the walls. Yet at the distance it was unlikely I could make out the figure of a man unless he was moving, and then only the movement would be visible.
Taking up my staff, I worked my way down the slope, traveling diagonally along it through the timber and brush. By the time I neared the bottom, shadows were long in the narrow valley.
Our fort lay no more than three hundred yards away now and scarcely half that distance from the edge of the trees, yet that was where Bauer’s men would be if they had not begun their attack.
My leg throbbed, as did my head, although that ache had dulled as the day went by. Yet even my leg had loosened up some due to the constant movement and the release of constriction by slitting my legging.
Longingly I looked toward the fort. There were no lights. I told myself it was too early, yet it would be dark in the cabins, and there should be lights if anyone were alive to light them.
The valley around the fort was empty. Nothing stirred, nor was there any suggestion of movement.
Now was a time when I could use the help of the Nunnehi, the immortals that dwell beneath the mountains and rivers of this strange, wild land. The Cherokees spoke of them, whispered of them rather, with many a glance over the shoulder and into the shadows, for none knew when they might be about.
Suppose the fort had been deserted? That Yance had led the others into the forest? Yet that made no sense, as we had too much at stake in that small fort, all our families; our stored grain, jerked meat, whatever we had gained by our hard years on the frontier, were there or in the scattered cabins.
Yance was a shrewd one. Deliberately he might be playing possum, watching for a chance to make a strike that would destroy Bauer and all that he stood for.
Aware that I had been in one place too long, I moved, easing my way through the tangle of brush and trees near the clearing.
A faint whisper of movement alerted me. Knife in hand, I looked all about. Something was moving nearby. Some crawling sound. Drawing back, I put my back against the trunk of a huge old maple and waited.
Waited, knife in hand.