We had heard rumors of a few small diamonds being found in the lower foothills, but of this we had no positive knowledge.
At last the day came. Several times I had met with the master of the Eagle, a solid man, and by all accounts, a good seaman. I had twice been aboard his ship, and she was finely kept with a competent-appearing crew.
At dawn I was up and outside, looking at the weather. A fair day ... yet a gloomy one for me.
Abby came out shortly afterward and walked beside me. We stood at the river, saying nothing, my hand touching hers or hers mine. But no words came to us.
We talked of her returning, yet I think neither of us believed in it. There was still a chance the warrant for my arrest might lie dusty in some drawer to be taken out and used, and both of us knew that a frontier girl of ten does not become a great lady in three years or four.
At the end, we kissed lightly and she said, 'Be careful, Barnabas,' and little Noelle clung to my hand with tears in her eyes.
Brian stood tall, as I expected him to, and gripped hard my hand. 'I will make you proud of me, Father.'
'I am already proud,' I said quietly. 'Take care of your mother and sister.'
The other boys stood around, looking awkward and feeling worse. Lila kept saying over and over that she should be going with them.
'You've Jeremy to think of,' Abby said quietly, 'and your own children.'
'Come back, Abby,' I said. 'Come back.'
'Wait for me, Barney, for I love you. I do, I always shall, and I always have since that very first night when you came in from out of the storm.'
I stood on the bank then, and watched the Eagle sail down the river, and suddenly I knew in my heart with an awful desperation that I would not see any of them again.
Lila took my hand and gripped it hard. 'They will be all right. They will be all right. I see a safe voyage and a long life for them.'
She said nothing of me, or of my life.
Chapter 33
The place on Shooting Creek was not the same. Time and again I found myself turning suddenly to exclaim over a sunset, the dappled shadow of tree leaves upon the water or the flash of a bird's wing ... and Abby was not there.
The blue of the mountains seemed to draw closer, and more and more my eyes turned westward ...
Yet there lay the mountains, vast and mysterious, with unknown valleys and streams that flowed from out of dark, unbelievable distances, and always beyond, the further heights, the long plateaus, the sudden glimpses of far, far horizons.
Jubal slipped silently into the cabin as I sat over Maimonides, reading.
'Pa? There's talk in the villages. They're coming after you again.'
'You'd think they would tire of it.'
'You're a challenge, Pa. You don't realize how much, for their best warriors have tried, and they have been killed or suffered from wounds. You have become a legend, and some say you cannot die, that you will never die, but others believe they must kill you now, it is a matter of honor. They will come soon. Perhaps even tonight.'
Jubal nodded, then he spoke suddenly, as if with an effort. 'Pa? You don't mind it? That I am not like the rest?'
'Of course not. You're a good man, Jubal, one of the very best. I love you as I do them.'
'Folks crowd me, Pa. I like wild, lonesome country. I like the far-looking places. It ain't in me to live with folks. It's the trees, the rivers, the lake and wild animals I need. Maybe I'm one of them ... a wild animal myself.'
'I'm like that, too, Jubal. Almost as much as you. And now that your mother is gone, I could walk out that door and keep going forever.'
We were silent for a time. The fire crackled on the hearth and I closed my book.
The firelight flickered on Jubal's face, and moved the shadows around in the back of the room, and my eyes wandered restlessly over the stone-flagged floor, over the hide of the bear I had killed in the forest on the edge of the rhododendrons. I remember I had recharged my musket and then slid down the rugged slope, where flowering sand-myrtle cluug to the crevices, to stop beside the carcass of the bear.
My shot had gone true and the bear had dropped. They were never so difficult to kill if the shot was placed well, and a raven had flown over, looking with a wary eye at me and on a second flyby with a hopeful eye at the bear's huge size.
For that raven well knew I'd take the hide and some choice cuts, but I'd never carry that six hundred pounds over the ridges between myself and home.
'Pa? Aunt Lila told me once, you had the gift.'
'We are of the blood of Nial, Jubal.' I glanced at him. 'Do you have it, too?'
'The Indians believe I do.'
'Do you know about me?'
'I ... think so, Pa.'
'Do not speak of this, Jubal. It is enough for you and me and Lila. I am not distressed, for there is a time for each of us, and we are rarely ready.
'One thing I know. I am still too young to rust. When spring comes and my crop is in once more I shall make a pack and walk over to see some of your western lands before I die.'
'I've been beyond the mountains,' said Jubal, 'and have ridden the rivers down.
I've been to a far, far land where the greatest river of all flows south and away toward the sea, sometimes I think I'd like to get a horse and ride off across those plains forever, going on. and on just like that river goes.
'Beyond the bunch-grass levels where the buffalo graze, there are other mountains, or so the Indians say, mountains that tower their icy summits into the sky, and I've gone that way, but not yet so far.
'The Indians there live in tents of buffalo hide, and I've fought with them, hunted with them, slept in their lodges, and I could live their way and find happiness, I think. They've got horses, the southern Indians do, got them from the ranches down Mexico way.'
'They do not have horses further north?' I asked.
'Not yet, but they'll have them soon, and Pa, when an Indian gets a horse he becomes a different man. I've seen it. The Comanche and the Kiowa have the horses, but the Kiowa haven't been long upon the western plains, for they have just come from the mountains further west.
'The Indian in America is like the people you told us of in Europe and Asia, always at war with one another, always pushing into new lands and pushing off the people who were there, or killing them.'
'People are much the same the world around, Jubal. We are no better and no worse ... nor are they. The Picts were in England and the Celts came, and long after them, the Anglos, Saxons, and Danes. And when they settled nicely down, the Normans came, took all the land from the people of England, and handed it out in parcels to the men who came over with William the Conqueror. It is the old story. To the victor belong the spoils.
'For the Indian has done the same thing to other Indians. In Mexico the Aztecs were a savage people who conquered an older, more civilized people, and then marched out like the Romans and tried to conquer all about..
'Cortez found willing allies because many of the Indians of Mexico hated the Aztecs.
'It was the same in Peru. The people we call the Incas suddenly went on the march and welded together a vast empire of tribes and peoples, and it was done by conquest. Yet it is not only men who do this. Plants do it also. When conditions are right a new type of plant will move in and occupy the ground.'
'Pa? There's been white men out yonder. After I crossed the big south-flowing river I went by canoe up a river that flows down from the west, and in wandering the country north of there, I found some great stones with writing on them, writing just like on some of the old, old maps you have from Iceland.'
'Runes?'
'Yes. No two ways about it, Pa. They've been there.'
Long we talked while the fire burned down and the coffee turned cold in the cups. It was the most Jubal had ever talked, I think. The sound of his voice was warm in the room, and when at last he stood, he said, 'Sleep lightly,
