Maybe Titus would lend a hand. And a pair of strong, young ankles that could still go when his father's aching and aging ones would not.
Fain pulled himself out of his reverie and turned his attention forward, onto the trail ahead, the path to Fort Edohi.
CHAPTER THREE
S
tanding a few days later on a wood-fringed crag overlooking a broad valley nearly devoid of trees, a husky, thick-bearded man peered at the lone rider moving toward Fort Edohi on the edge of the big meadow. Though the distance was too far to let him be sure, the watcher was persuaded that the rider was none other than the famed Edohi himself, Crawford Fain. Jeremiah Littleton had seen the man often and could easily recognize the particular slump of his shoulders and tilt of his broad-brimmed slouch hat. Fain had traveled in and out of the fort several times over past few days while Littleton had been camped nearby, watching and awaiting an associate he'd summoned to meet him.
“Damn your eyes, Edohi!” he muttered softly toward the distant rider. “Your time will come, old fool!”
Movement on the side of the meadow where the stockade stood diverted Littleton's attention. A wagon was rolling around the side of the fort, bearing timbers, atop which sat a few men. The wagon jolted along a little faster than it should, hit a bump, and one of the men perched on the cargo was knocked off and hit the ground hard. The others laughed, but were too far away for Littleton to hear them.
The fallen man got up fast to make sure he avoided the rear wheels of the wagon. One of his companions extended his hand down to help him back onto the wagon, but the man shook his head, opting to walk. The wagon hit another bump, the man with the extended hand almost fell off, and this time it was the walking man's turn to laugh.
Littleton looked back toward Crawford Fain and saw that Fain, like him, was watching the moving wagon. Fain lifted his arm and waved at the men, a couple of whom waved back.
“Know what they're doing, don't you?” said a voice behind Littleton. The big man wheeled, startled, moving his hand toward the big butcher knife he carried sheathed in rawhide at his belt.
The man who had spoken was emerging from a stand of scrubby trees, a big grin on his lean face. He was a small fellow, clad like Littleton in woodsman's garb, and carrying a loaded and primed flintlock pistol that he held at his side, pointed downward, but ready to raise in only a moment.
Littleton sucked in a deep breath and made tense sounds deep in his throat, which he then cleared. “Hello, Gilly,” he said. “You surprised me.”
The other laughed, a strange cackle. “Surprised? Why? By jingo, it was you who told me to meet you here, Jeremiah.”
“I know. I mean, you startled me by appearing so fast.”
Gilly chuckled. He looked past Littleton and across the valley. “See that rider yonder? That's old Fain himself! The mighty Edohi!”
“I know. I recognized him, too. From the way he sits his saddle.”
“You see them others? With the wagon? Know who they are?”
“Can't see faces from this distance and don't know that I'd know them if I could.”
“Hell, I mean, you know what they're up to?”
“Getting ready for the glory to fall, I reckon. Building a platform for the preaching going to happen down there. Big camp meeting, famous preacher. Old Bledsoe hisself!”
“That's right. Place will be filled up with every kind of saint and sinner, and old Bledsoe will collect himself an offering, sure as anything, and leave all the good Christian converts skint out of whatever coin is in their pockets.”
“Yep. I know about the camp meeting.”
An awkward pause followed, during which Littleton kept his eye on the pistol in Gilly's hand. Gilly noticed but did not put the weapon away.
“What'd you want to meet me up here for?” Gilly asked.
“I believe you know.”
“B'jingo, I did what had to be done, Jeremiah. There was reason.”
Littleton shook his head. “No. Not for that. Our purpose was robbing, Gilly. Robbing. Not murder. You killed a man who didn't lift a finger against us. We robbed him and his folk, he made no resistance, and you shot him dead. With that very pistol you hold in your hand right now.”
“There was reason.”
“That kind of thing is what gets men hanged, Gilly. You know when we agreed to band up that we settled on me being the captain, me making the rules. My rule was, and is, no killing except to protect your own life or the lives of your fellow members of the band. You broke that rule. Killed a man for no cause.”
“I said it before: There was reason.”
“He was on his knees, Gilly! Hands clasped behind his back. Even had his eyes closed. He was no danger to you or me or anybody else. And you shot him through the head, right before the eyes of his family. There was no reason.”
“There was. An old one.”
“What was it, then?”
“Because he deserved it, for something he'd done years ago.”
“What?”
“What business is this of yours, Jeremiah?”
“Because we're partners, Gilly. Or I thought we was! You and me and the other boys, we teamed up together to get what we could off all these folks traveling to the Cumberland Settlements. We partnered up to be thieves and highwaymen, to work together and to keep one another safe . . . and when you start killing folks for no reason anybody else can see, well, you put us all in danger. Of the hanging rope.”
Gilly gave a snort of exasperation. “Hell, Jeremiah, they can hang us just as quick for being highwaymen as for murder! I didn't put us in no danger we weren't already in anyway.”
Littleton shook his head. “Murder's a worse crime, Gilly. Murder will get a man hanged faster than anything else. We're thieves, but by God, murderers we can't afford to be.”
“It wasn't murder, not really. The man I killed earned that pistol ball, b'jingo.”
“How? He was giving no resistance.”
Gilly's face reddened. “That man killed my father, Jeremiah. Years ago. Shot him dead.”
Littleton frowned. “Your father was a second-story man in Baltimore. If he was shot it was probably in the midst of robbing a house or a shop.”
“He was shot. I was just a boy and I saw it happen with my own eyes.” Gilly's eyes grew moist. “I vowed I'd find that man and make him settle his debt. And I did.”
Littleton pondered his partner a few moments. “Your father was a murderous scoundrel, Gilly. Worse even than you. Any other such debts still lingering out there you're going to demand payment for?”
Gilly glared at him in silence. Littleton shook his head. “Can't continue, Gilly. Not like this.”
“You're cutting me out, Jeremiah?”
Littleton was, and the truth was he'd probably have done so even without the provocation of Gilly's indiscreet shooting of their recent robbery victim. Littleton had begun to detect instability in his partner sometime back, and had been expecting to have to take such action even before Gilly's last exhibition of poor judgment.
“I'm cutting you out,” Littleton replied.
Gilly's face reddened even more, and his body gave a hard tremble. Then, from somewhere in his throat, a grumbling, strange sound rose, soft but fast-building, until it erupted in a violent screech of pure anger that made Littleton step back involuntarily.
“Gilly, calm yourself. No reason forâ”
He never finished the sentence. The lithe Gilly burst forward toward Littleton like a startled hare coming out of trailside brush. Littleton sucked in his breath and stepped back again.
The heels of Gilly's hands caught him in the center of his broad chest and threw him off balance. He stumbled backward and over the brink of the bluff, plunging backward over the fifty-foot drop, his big body doing a full flip in the air as he fell. When he dropped into the yawning mouth of a pitlike cave near the base of the escarpment, where it bulged outward, he went in feetfirst, down into blackness.
Only Gilly's light weight and natural athleticism enabled him to heel back his momentum and avoid pitching over the cliff right after Littleton. His feet scuffed up grit and gravel that rained over the edge, but Gilly himself kept his footing and did not fall. Looking over the bluff, he saw the black hole that had swallowed Littleton. But in the shadows of its mouth he could detect no details, no movement. Nor did any sound emerge, any cries of pain or pleas for rescue.
“Done in, I reckon,” Gilly Cobble muttered to the wind. “Good-bye, Jeremiah. Shouldn't have behaved like you did to me. It might have saved your life. Ah well.”
He thrust the flintlock pistol back under the rope belt that bound his hunting shirt tight around his scrawny middle, and looked back out across the big meadow below. The men were off the wagon now, and removing the puncheon lumber from the wagon bed. A couple were already driving heavy stakes that would provide the bracing for the preaching platform.
Gilly shook his head, pondering the foolishness of the kind of folk who would fill a meadow just to hear a man give them a religious harangue while holding his eyes crossed. Gilly couldn't fathom it. He was not educated or literate or trained in any kind of faith himself, but he was sure he was right to ignore all things religious. Liquor, money, women, and good tobaccoâthese were his objects of worship and veneration. Good enough for Gilly.
“So long, Jeremiah,” he said quietly. “Sorry I had to kill you like that.”
He turned and walked away. Out in the big meadow, work continued on the preaching platform. One of the sharper-eyed workmen happened to glance up at the right moment to see Gilly Cobble disappearing into the tree line back behind the cliff. The workman wondered for a moment who that distant man was, then forgot about it and went back to his task.
Â
Jeremiah Littleton's senses returned slowly at first, like the light from a slow-spreading flame, then faster, until the final leap into awareness left the man convinced he was dead and gone to hell.
Pain was everything and everywhere, filling him body and soul. He could see only darkness, though it seemed that above him was a faint vestige of light. He was far too bathed in pain to care, and for a time his consciousness flickered in and out, on and off. Then it set in to stay, and he suffered.
Though his pain was all through him, it was centered most intensely in his left leg. This was pain like he'd never known, the pain of a leg that had been broken on a wheel or shattered by cudgeling on a St. Andrew's cross. And it would not subside, and in fact merely worsened if he tried to shift his position to gain relief.
Littleton was upright, his arms free to move within the pinching confines of whatever place this was that held him. He could not put together how he had come to be here or even where “here” was. All he knew was that it was as if he was in the base of a funnel, his weight pulling him downward into the tightest part of it, his left leg already hopelessly wedged into the funnel's hole, and pulverized. Miserable throbs of torment came up from that leg in waves, filling him again and again, building upon itself.
He heard himself scream and his voice seemed louder than it should have been. He opened his eyes just as a pale wash of light came down upon him. Looking up, Littleton saw an irregular circle of sky. It was night and the moon had just moved past the black edge surrounding the circle, and it was that light he had just seen.
It came back to him then: the memory of being on the bluff, of his tense words with Gilly Cobble, and Gilly's treachery in pushing him over the bluff. This “funnel” around him was the lower portion of a pit into which he had plunged feetfirst, and the hole of the funnel was simply a crevice in the rock that was too small to accommodate his hips and upper body, but which had received his left foot and leg easily, though destroying both flesh and bone from the knee down. Littleton's right leg, amazingly, had found a resting place in a smooth recess in the stone wall, and seemed uninjured, though the pain radiating from his destroyed left limb was so intense he could hardly tell what was hurting and what was not.
How long had he been down here? It was afternoon when Gilly had pushed him over, but now it was dark. He might have been here for hours, bleeding from that shattered leg. God above, it hurt! How it hurt! He was quite sure that his shinbone was broken clean through with the broken end protruding through his flesh. Torn and bleeding flesh was all that kept his ankle and foot connected to his body.
But his arms were free, and maybe, if he could find purchase to push himself up, he could pull out of the terrible pinch. Then maybe it would hurt less . . . but he would still be trapped in this pit. And Gilly, he was sure, was gone by now, probably hoping and assuming Littleton was dead.
It was that thought that gave Littleton the will to place his hands on the rock and give his body a heave upward. The only result was a horrible intensifying of his pain, a throb of agony pulsing up from the ruined leg. Littleton screamed and fainted, and when he came around again, he knew he could not be freed from this place. He would die here simply because it hurt too terribly to try to pull his leg free.
His right hand flopped limply and touched something . . . the grip of the butcher knife he always carried. Another throb of pain came and he knew this could not go on. If he was to die here, he would rather do it fast, to ease the suffering. And he would rather die by a hand other than that of Gilly. That betraying killer did not merit the achievement of causing his death. Littleton would do the job himself.
With effort he worked the knife from its sheath . . . and dropped it. Reflexively reaching after it, he inflicted another jolt of suffering upon himself, and groaned loudly in his constricting prison of rock.