Colter's Path (9781101604830) (35 page)

Life changed as well for others whose California sojourns were linked to Jedd Colter's.

When Ben Scarlett's luck in the gold fields ran out and he caught a ship around the Horn to return to Tennesee and Knoxville, the town of Scarlett's Luck began to be called, informally, simply Luck, and finally Lucktown. The Scarlett name lingered, however, in one of the secondary characters in Bellingham's Colter novels. Ben Scarlett, made-up version, was one of three deputies whose unsurpassed skill and keen wits helped their boss, Jedd Colter, deftly solve every crime that happened within the bounds of Crozier Bellingham's version of California. The fictional Ben Scarlett's fellow deputies were named Treemont Dalton and Tom Buckle.

While the fictional Jedd Colter and his three intrepid cohorts battled make-believe crimes on the pages of Bellingham's books, situations against which the real Jedd Colter had brushed up turned into authentic and important criminal cases. Working cooperatively, agents of the governments of the United States, England, France, China, Spain, and almost every other significant nation investigated and broke a human trafficking ring that enslaved and sold women all over the world, ruining life after life until at last the ring was shattered. The highly sanitized version of the “ring of slavers” presented in the pages of Bellingham's novel paled in comparison to the reality. The novel received a strong jolt of publicity, though, when Crozier Bellingham met and wed one of the young women involved in the real-life version of the “ring of slavers,” a half-Mexican girl named Rosita. They made their home in Los Angeles and raised a huge and happy family.

Former collegiate president Zebulon McSwain, who mended old fences that had been broken between him and his daughter, Emma, never was called to account for
the missing Finnegan ancestral diamonds. Nor was it ever learned what became of them.

It was meaningfully noted by many, however, that the home for abused and mistreated women, which was opened by Emma Colter in her oddly made former home in Bowater, had obviously received some sort of significant financial boost at the time of its founding. Few were brazen enough to speculate in the presence of Emma or her father as to what the source of that boost had been, but few doubted that they knew.

As for Emma herself, she was glad to leave her big Bowater house behind and move into humbler but far more pleasant quarters with her husband, Jedd. The family they raised was large, healthy, and happy, and the children were ever proud to tell any who would listen that their father was none other than the famous Jedd Colter, Gold Country Marshal.

W
e named her Deborah,” the old clergyman named Eben Bledsoe said to his visitor. The Reverend Professor Bledsoe puffed lightly on a long clay pipe of the same sort taverns kept atop mantelpieces for the shared use of patrons. “After the Old Testament prophetess and judge. It was our hope she would grow into a strong and God-fearing woman like the one she was named after.”

The clergyman's listener nodded. He was a lean, gray-haired frontiersman with a clean-shaven face of leathery countenance, a face long exposed to sun and wind. He, too, puffed a pipe, one made merely of a hollowed half length of corncob stemmed with a hollow reed. The frontiersman's name was Crawford Fain, though he was sometimes called by the Cherokee name of Edohi. He was a man of some fame, known across his own country as a great hunter and tracker, and in parts of Europe because of his mention in a fanciful, idealized, and highly popular epic poem about the American frontier. The poem was the product of a dandified baron who had scarcely set foot off his own English property, much less ever visited America's wilderness.

Wearing a long hunting shirt that was sashed about
his lean middle, Fain slumped casually under the flap of a tent pitched in the log station that was home to one James White—hence its name of White's Fort. It was the heart of a settlement that would be known to future generations as Knoxville.

“Yes, you told me her name in the letter you sent me,” Fain said, frowning at his pipe, which had gone out. “Fine name, Deborah. I've always favored it. If ever I'd fathered a daughter, I might have so named her.”

“You have but the one child, sir? A son, I believe?”

“That's right, Reverend. My boy, Titus. He's a fine young man. Proud of him. A chip off this old chopping block, as they say. Twenty-five years old now. I can't believe that sometimes. I wish his mother was living to see him.”

“Same woodcraft talents as his father?”

“The lad could trail a bug's track on polished granite. Good rifleman and trapper, too.”

“Perhaps he can help you with what I'm asking from you.” It was Bledsoe's first direct mention of the matter upon which he had summoned Fain to White's Fort. Fain himself lived in a smaller forted station of his own a few miles away on a stream called Edohi Creek.

The frontiersman looked out through the open stockade door. “Truth is, I ain't decided yet as to whether I can do what you're wanting from me.”

Bledsoe's countenance fell. “Those were not words I'd hoped to hear from you, sir.”

“And I hate to speak them. But I must look at matters as they are, and myself as I am. I'm not the young man who used to drift from fort to fort, station to station, Reverend. I waken each day with ankles and knees aching and a back that don't want to straighten up for a good hour after I've risen. I ain't the spry pup I was back when I hunted with Mansker those years back.”

“I do understand, sir. I feel Adam's curse in my own body and bones. But with such an increase in sightings of Deborah of late, it was my hope that the time was right to at last find her.”

Fain knocked the dead ashes from his pipe. “I don't want to promise what I can't fulfill. I'll have to think on this awhile.”

“I would expect nothing else. It's a daunting challenge I have laid before you. But at the very least there are now signs and trails to follow, something mostly lacking in past years.”

The frontiersman tucked his pipe into the deer-hide pouch that hung across his hunting shirt, slung on a rope strap across one shoulder. “Can I talk to you open and honest, Reverend? Ask you things that need asking without you taking offense to it?”

“Again, I would expect nothing other.”

“All right. You say there are ‘signs and trails' to follow, but from what you wrote in your letter, I have to consider that these stories you're hearing could be about any number of people. Your Deborah ain't the only child who has been took by Indians in this wilderness country of ours.”

Bledsoe nodded. “No, sir, she is not,” he admitted. “But the stories of late talk of a woman with hair yellow as the sun, and describe her as being of the age Deborah would be.”

“Has she any marks or scars or such of the sort that would linger from her earliest days on to her grown-up years?”

“One. A mark in the colored portion of her left eye. A gray streak in the brown of her eye, spanning from the pupil downward. There since birth, and I'm guessing a mark that would last for life.”

“And have you heard anyone say that this yellow-haired woman you're talking about has such a marked eye?”

Bledsoe stared off past Fain, unhappy. “No. No. The honest truth, sir, is that I can't know if the young woman I hear of is my own missing girl. All I know is that she
might
be. I must find the truth, but I am not equipped with the skill, the youth, or the knowledge necessary to engage such a quest myself. And thus I have summoned
you here. I wish to hire you to follow the track of these tales, find this yellow-haired maiden, and determine if she is my own Deborah.” He paused. “And if she is, I want you to see if she might be persuaded to let her old father see again the child of his loins, after so many years of separation. And of course I would pay you with liberality, and we can strike our agreement in writing, if it would please you.”

Fain thought deeply a few moments, silent. He sincerely pitied the old clergyman, but he was a man of the frontier and aware of hard realities Bledsoe might be inclined to overlook or push aside. He had to speak.

“Reverend, sir, you told me I could speak forthrightly, and I shall. The fact is, according to the facts you provided in the letter that brought me here, the woman you believe may be your Deborah appears to be moving about freely, traveling alone, not among the Indians at all. You say she's gone from station to station, settlement to settlement, seemingly unencumbered. So I must point out, sir, that this woman, if she is your daughter, could have sought you out on her own if she had a mind to do so. It is well-known that you are where you are, that you are creating churches across this wilderness and talking much of building an academy to bring schooling to the frontier. The fact that she has not sought you out of her own will might indicate either that she is not Deborah at all or that, if she is, she is content with her state of life and not prone to unsettle it by returning to her long-ago past.”

Bledsoe's lips moved slightly as if to reply, but no words came. He appeared to be on the verge of tears.

Fain went on, gently. “It happens, sir. I've seen it more than once. A child, even a child of some age, is taken by the Indians and adopted into their society, and over time becomes accustomed to such a life. Refuses to acknowledge the former life or return to it even if opportunity arises. It is a more common thing than you might guess.”

Bledsoe nodded sadly. “I've heard such stories, and acknowledge that such might apply. But keep in mind
another possible reason for this state of affairs, sir. If the yellow-haired woman is indeed my Deborah, and if indeed she is now free and moving about the wilderness at her own behest and whim, she might not have come to me simply because she does not know her own parentage, does not know who she is. Deborah was taken as a small child. I doubt any memory remains of her earliest days, or her capture. And those who took her would likely not have either the knowledge or the inclination to tell her of her past.”

Fain pondered and nodded. “I won't dispute a word of that, sir.”

“There is only one way to settle these mysteries and make peace in my own mind, Mr. Fain. I must locate this enigmatic young woman and learn for myself whether she might be the child wrested from me all those years ago. And there is no one within my reach better suited to undertake such a quest than the famous Crawford Fain, the great long hunter.”

“I have to say, sir, that if the woman does not wish to be found, this might be a long hunt indeed.”

The conversation went on, the depth of the clergyman's feelings becoming more and more evident. Fain was stirred with compassion for the sad man.

And before he knew it, he heard himself agreeing to Bledsoe's request. Yes, he would go on the trail of the young woman, determine if she was indeed the long-missing Deborah Bledsoe, and if she was, try his best to bring her back to his father.

Bledsoe tried to speak his gratitude but could only weep.

A hundred miles to the northeast, a much younger frontiersman than Crawford Fain rode slowly along the tree-lined bank of the Nolichucky River. The hour was early but the day was already warm, though overcast. His horse plodded lazily along.

A sound came from his left as he passed a sycamore undergrown with scrubby brush. He reflexively reached
for the butt of the flintlock pistol tucked into the belt encircling his long, loose hunting shirt. But before he drew it he realized the noise had been no more than a loud belch, its source an obviously drunken man seated heaplike on the ground at the base of the sycamore in a thicket of ivy, clutching a crockery jug.

The frontiersman halted his horse and looked down at the unkempt, slouching man, who grinned up at him, teeth glinting dull yellow through a rough mat of dark and dirty whiskers. It was hard to tell the man's age; the young rider had an impression that he might be younger than he appeared, having been aged, perhaps, by hard living.

“Good day, sir,” the mounted young man said. “You startled me.”

The other took a pull from his jug and belched again. “Always been explosive on the belch, like my fathers before me, Mr….”

“Potts. Most just call me Potts.”

The drunk stuck up his hand, though Potts was far out of handshake range. Still grinning, the man drank again, belched even louder, and shoved the jug toward Potts in a gesture of sharing that Potts was not about to accept. “Got a first name, too, Potts?” the drunk asked.

“Langdon. But just call me plain old Potts.”

“I'm John,” the man said. “Just plain John.”

“Well, just plain John, you often get drunk this early in the day?”

John tried to get up, but his legs seemed lifeless. “Only when I'm celebrating. Man's got a right to celebrate, don't he?” Another pull from the jug followed while John's bleary eyes glittered at the younger man over the grimy, fingerprinted surface of the vessel.

“What are you celebrating?”

“A new son,” John said. “Born yesterday. Healthy little fellow. Named him David, after my father.”

Potts grinned and congratulated John, commenting that this was a fine spot to be born at, with the quiet river flowing past and Limestone Creek gurgling its way into it just yards from where they were.

“It's a good place, I reckon. But I'm restless. Looking for something better all the time. I figure I'll move on once a better opportunity presents itself.” John's voice was quite slurred.

“A man has to follow his opportunities,” Potts said agreeably. “Even if they lead him here and there and here again.”

“You're wise beyond your years, young man!”

“I don't know about that. Just got my own touch of restlessness, I reckon.”