The trail narrowed as it climbed and they passed through a laurel thicket that crowded in on both sides. Beyond the laurel was a clearing and in it a small cabin. Smoke poured from the chimney and Rachel came to a halt, Littleton coming panting up beside her.
“Oh, I'd forgotten,” she said, watching the smoke curl up.
“What is it?” he asked.
“There's someone still here. I thought he'd be gone by now. I'd forgotten he was here at all.”
Littleton wondered if maybe Rachel was merely a sporting woman after all. Not many women would take a man into their home overnight and then simply forget about him.
“I reckon I should go,” Littleton said, annoyed that he'd been forced into an uphill trek, a difficult task for a man on a wooden leg, only to have it lead to nothing but having to turn around and retreat the way he'd come.
Rachel started to speak, but stopped when the cabin door opened and a sandy-haired man stepped out. He was average in every way, from height to size to appearance. On his nondescript face was a beaming smile.
“Good day to you, Rachel, and to you as well, sir!” He advanced at a fast clip, hand out.
Littleton, accustomed to a life of dodging almost everyone and of mistrusting strangers, reflexively wanted to draw back from this oncoming incarnation of friendliness and good humor. He wished for half a moment that he had kept his rifle with him, as he usually did, rather than having accepted Dixon's invitation to store the weapon with Dixon's own guns inside the tavern. But as the man reached him, grin intact and with nothing threatening visible in his demeanor, Dixon decided there was nothing to be concerned about. He put out his own broad hand and engulfed that of the stranger, who said, “James Corey, sir. I'm pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“Lyle Kirk,” said Littleton. “Pleased as well.”
Corey pumped vigorously at Littleton's hand. Littleton looked over at Rachel, thinking of what surely would have happened with her had this stranger not appeared, and wondering why all his luck seemed to inevitably turn bad.
Â
When Corey learned that his new companion, “Kirk,” had been traveling through the region, his interest in him intensified, and questions began.
“I've been on the move myself,” Corey said. “Trying to find my wife, who has gone missing. Her name is Deborah and her hair is yellow. Her real identifying mark, though, is her left eye, which has a streak of grayâhere.” Corey pulled down his lower eyelid and pointed at the bottom portion of his iris.
Littleton stared past Corey, his mind pushed back to the day he had lost his leg and the night he spent on a pallet in the home of Crawford Fain at Fort Edohi. Corey's words brought to mind things he had overheard Fain talking about in the darkness to the other, younger man who had been there that night.
“There's somebody else besides you looking for your wife,” he said. “Crawford Fain. The one they call Edohi.”
“Edohi?” Corey frowned. “How do you know that?”
“I heard Edohi himself talking about it to another man when I was at his fort. He's been hired by someone to find her. I don't know who hired him. If he said, I didn't hear it.”
Corey's expression darkened. “Who would hire the famous Edohi to find
my
woman? And why?”
“I don't know, sir. I heard what I heard, and no more. But I saw a yellow-haired woman with a marked eye myself, once. At Crockett Spring on the Holston.”
“She was well?”
“Seemed to be, as I recall.”
Corey was different after that, the light friendliness replaced by an intense, brooding manner. He paced incessantly and quizzed Littleton nearly to the point of rudeness in hope of figuring out more regarding why the famed woodsman Edohi would be seeking his woman.
When Corey left Rachel's cabin to resume his journeying, Littleton went with him. This partnering up was not planned or thoroughly talked out; it was just a natural progression of events and conversation. Littleton had lost interest in Rachel, who seemed more plain every time he glanced at her, and who was out of reach, anyway, with another man hovering about. Having a traveling companion actually become more appealing than the idea of a dalliance with a plain-faced, lame slattern.
They retrieved their horses from Dixon's horse pen, and Littleton's rifle from the tavern, and took an eastward route. They went east because Corey had heard a rumor of late that Deborah might have been seen in the vicinity of the town of Jonesborough.
They had traveled no more than two miles from Dixon's tavern when they met a man on the trail, walking back toward them. The man carried a small jug and had it tilted up to his lips when first they saw him.
“Thirsty gent,” said Corey as he and Littleton reined to a stop.
Littleton was looking intently at the man on the road. The uplifted jug partially blocked his view of the face, but when at last the man lowered the jug, Littleton made a little noise of surprise.
“What is it, Lyle?” asked Corey.
“Do you know who that is?” Littleton asked.
“Never seen him before that I know of.”
“I have. Last time I saw him was at Fort Edohi. He was outside it, up on a platform, preaching to the crowd.”
“That man's a preacher?”
“That man is
the
preacher! That's old Camp Meeting Abner! Abner Bledsoe himself! You know of him, don't you?”
“Course! Everybody knows about him. Your religious folk will travel miles just to hear him jabber. But that can't be him, not drinking like that. That wouldn't be his way. He preaches hard against drunkenness.”
“It's him. No doubt about it at all. That's Bledsoe.”
The man on the road hadn't noticed the two riders until he'd finished his long draw on the jug. Now he looked at them with an expression of worry and the manner of one who might turn and run at any moment. But he didn't run, and Littleton put his horse into motion and rode slowly up to the man.
“Good day, preacher,” he said.
The man gave a very nervous chuckle. “Preacher? Why do you call me that, sir? I am no preacher!”
“I know who you are, Bledsoe. I can tell it from your crossed eyes, and I've heard your voice before, too. Heard it while you was preaching.”
The man's lips moved without sound, a look of distress came onto his face, and he stepped back. The jug slipped from his fingers and struck a stone embedded in the ground at his feet. Shattering, the jug spilled its last dwindling contents into the dirt.
“Confound and blast!” the drunken man said. “I've lost the rest of my . . . water.”
Littleton wrinkled his nose. “Might be for the best, sir. From the smell of it, I think your water has had some corn get in it and go to whiskey.”
“Whiskey! No, sir, I think not. Why would a man such as myself, a man of God, partake in whiskey?”
“Oh, so despite what you said, you
are
a preacher!”
“I am . . . I . . . I mean to say . . .” He let the thought die. Then, to Littleton's surprise, the man's eyes grew livid and moist. He was beginning to quietly weep.
“Sir, it was just one small jug,” Littleton said, feeling uncharacteristically empathetic toward another person.
Corey drew nearer, “I'll go back and fetch you another from Dixon's, if you want me to.”
The older man shook his head and stared at the ground. “No. Best I just do without. A man in my position has no business drinking himself drunken, anyway. It'll ruin me if word of such got out.”
“You're Bledsoe, ain't you,” said Littleton, not as a question but a statement.
Bledsoe surrendered, and dodged no more. “I am. And I've backslidden bad, my friends. Turned away from the right to embrace the wrong. The very kind of thing I've condemned in others I've done myself.” He paused, frowning in thought. “And for the first time, I think I understand a little better those who fall prey to such things. I have maybe been too harsh a judge in my time.”
“Well, sir, one thing I can tell you: You'll face no judgment from the likes of me. Nor, I suspect, from my friend Mr. Corey there. Neither of us is a stranger to sin, nor prone to wag a finger at others.”
Bledsoe swabbed his face with the heel of his right hand. “I am grateful for such lack of condemnation, sir. You are a man of kind heart.”
Littleton chuckled. “That's me: one kind heart, ten good fingers, and five toes.”
Bledsoe, noting the wooden leg, laughed at Littleton's joke. “You are a big man, sir, to laugh so at yourself. I'm afraid I, for one, have lost much of the ability to laugh at all in the past several days.”
“May I ask you what's happened, Reverend?”
Bledsoe seemed to wilt. His voice was weak and trembling as he replied, “A woman, sir. A woman.”
“Somebody you met?”
Bledsoe shook his head. “If you mean recently, no. She traveled with me, helped me with a portion of my meeting presentations. . . .”
“The Reese woman.”
“You know of her?”
“I know she was generally part of your camp meetings. You'd tell her story and she'd sit there and loll her mouth open for folks to see where her old daddy carved out her tongue. Right?”
“Right indeed. But she's departed from me. Took my money and abandoned me. Just a common harlot and thief she turned out to be. Treated me easy indeed.”
“Well, at least she couldn't jabber at you like a lot of women do, talking your ear off.”
“You might have been surprised, sir. She was more capable of talk than most might have guessed.”
“Well, sir, I'm sorry you were ill used by her. Such is the way of too many women. It's a damned shame.”
“It is, sir. And ill used I was, and that after I had shared so much, so freely, with that woman. I had truly come to love her, and I thought she loved me. But she proved a common jilt.”
“Hell with her, Reverend. Go ahead and say it. Hell with her!”
Bledsoe set his jaw and stared up at a treetop. “Hell with her,” he slurred drunkenly. Then louder, “Hell with her!”
“That's the spirit, sir! You keep that spirit and you'll forget about her before you know it.” Littleton grinned. “And you keep on drinking of the kind of spirits you dropped on the ground there, you'll forget her faster yet.”
“I must say, I wish I hadn't spilled it,” Bledsoe said.
“There'll be more. We're traveling to Jonesborough. If you wish to join us, you are welcome. Have you got a horse, a wagon?”
“What she didn't take, I sold. I am afoot. Like the very Son of Man, I have no place even to lay my head.”
“Well, we'll find you a horse along the way somewhere. You see this horse of mine?” Littleton looked around as if the woods had ears. “Stole it. From Fort Edohi.”
“There was a time I might have railed at you for such a sin,” Bledsoe said. “But I find now the sermons have mostly gone out of me.”
“Let me ask you something, preacher. Was that woman really Molly Reese?”
“What do you think?”
“I think no.”
“You think correctly. She was a jilt in more ways than one.” They traveled, Bledsoe walking along in silence beside Littleton's horse. Finally he sighed loudly and said, “I was a duplicitous and fraudulent man in so many ways, Mr., uh . . .”
“Kirk. Lyle Kirk.”
“Mr. Kirk. Quite the bearer of false witness, to speak bluntly about myself. Yet I had persuaded myself I was doing the true work of God . . . most of the time, in any case. I suppose I was a deceiver of myself as well as of the congregation of believers.”
“You're just a sinner like all of us,” said Littleton.
“The chief of sinners, as Paul called himself. Do you know, sir, that I actually shot my own brother? Another man of the cloth?”
“No! Did you kill him?”
“He was alive when I left him. I don't know if he survived after.”
“You hear that, Corey? Camp Meeting Abner here shot his own brother!”
“I heard him say it.”
Littleton reached down and gave the preacher a slap on the shoulder. “Drinking, shooting folks, telling false tales to the righteousâhell, you're
my
kind of preacher, Abner! God bless you, sir! God bless you!”
“How did you lose your leg, Mr. Kirk?”
“Call me Lyle. I cut it off, preacher. Stuck down in a pit on a hillside while you were preaching over at Fort Edohi. The leg was wedged and ruined, so I cut it off just to be able to get out.”
“Well, brand my backside! What a story, Lyle! What a story!”
“I'm full of them, preacher. Every now and then I even tell a true one.”
“Like the one you just told?”
“Yes, sir. That one was as true as gospel.”
Bledsoe was staring at the wooden peg leg. “You cut off that leg even as I was preaching, you say?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell me how you managed to get out of that pit with one leg gone.”
“Well, sir, I had help. A young fellow appeared at the top of that pit and reached in to help me out. If he hadn't come when he did, I might be in that hole yet, rotting like a throwed-out tater. It was nigh as if he was an . . .”
“What were you going to say?”
“That it was nigh as if he was an angel sent to rescue me.” Littleton laughed. “So in some ways my story ain't too far removed from the tale of Molly Reese.”
Bledsoe stopped in his tracks and began rubbing his chin. “You are right, Lyle. Right indeed.”