Chapter Twenty-Four

ASLEEP IN THE WOODS • CORN POE’S DECLARATION • A VISITOR

SOMETIME NEAR morning they stopped and slept in the crux of a large fallen tree and the base of a living one. Lionel slept soundly but was woken midday by a cardinal that fluttered from branch to branch to branch in the trees overhead.

It was dark when they stopped, so their surroundings seemed foreign to him, but he didn’t feel out of place. Lionel figured that they were somewhere in the heart of the Great wood, less than a half day’s ride or so from their lodge in the meadow.

He got up from his pine-needle bed and carefully crossed to scratch Ulysses’s long face. Corn Poe slept nestled up against Beatrice, snoring soundly.

Corn Poe looked dirty, the soot from the night before still smeared all over his face. Beatrice’s black ash mask, however, remained intact and looked as natural as if she had been born with it.

Lionel got a flask of water, the smoked meat, and the berries from the bundle they had tied around Ulysses’s withers. He sat in the pine needles eating the berries, surrounded by the giant trees, watching Corn Poe and his sister sleep. Beatrice’s buckskin shirt blended into the base of the tree and the pine needles that were strewn all around them. Lionel thought that if the soldiers were looking for them, it wouldn’t be hard for them to disappear.

The wind picked up, knocking a dead branch from high above, and the cracking sounds it made as it crashed onto the forest floor woke both Beatrice and Corn Poe. Beatrice’s eyes shot open; she coughed, then stared at Lionel, who sat cross-legged in the midst of the Great wood, watching her.

Corn Poe sat up and immediately grabbed ahold of his head with both hands, proclaiming, “If I had me a hatchet, I think I’d just do myself a favor and cut this sucker right off at the neck.”

“I know where we got one not too far from here,” Beatrice said, pushing Corn Poe off of her.

“Ah, it’s not funny,” Corn Poe moaned, rolling over in the pine needles. “My head hurts something awful.”

Lionel got up and brought him one of the water sacks. He handed Beatrice the bundle of berries and meat. She opened it and ate while they both watched Corn Poe flail on the ground and listened to his moaning proclamations denouncing liquor from this moment forward. Corn Poe swore that he would never touch the stuff again as long as he lived, a statement that Lionel and Beatrice doubted.

Beatrice told Corn Poe to drink the water and that if he wanted to eat he should. They would be leaving soon. Corn Poe got up and wandered a ways into the woods. He returned with a large pinecone that he gave to Beatrice and thanked her for allowing him to travel with them.

“It wasn’t my intention,” was Beatrice’s reply.

The children finished their breakfast and continued their journey back toward the lodge. They walked, leading the horse for the majority of the day, enjoying the cool shade of the Great wood. Sometime that afternoon they arrived at the tree-lined perimeter of their meadow, but froze when they saw a strange horse grazing in front of the lodge’s crooked door.