'What will the council say, though, Allan?' Dale demanded.
'They will not take kindly to a guardsman baring off at wild adventure.'
'Then damnation take them,' Cooper replied. 'Am I not a free Englishman, able to do as I will rather than harken to carping fools? Every subject's duty is to the king's; but every subject's soul is his own.'
'Wel spoken! Imitate the action of the tiger!' cried Caleb Lucas, giving back one quote from Shakespeare for another.
The other three men were careful y studying him. Wingfield said, 'You will correct me if I am wrong, Caleb, but is't not so your only forays into the forest have been as a lumberer?'
The young man gave a reluctant nod. He opened his mouth to speak, but Dale forestalled him: 'Then you must stay behind. Edward has reason in judging this a task for none but the woodswise.'
Wingfield set a hand on Lucas's shoulder. 'No sense in anger or disappointment, Caleb. I know the offer came in al sincerity.'
'And I,' Anne echoed softly. Lucas jerked his head in acknowledgment and left.
'Let's be at it, then,' Cooper said. 'To our weapons, then meet here and away.' Wingfield knew the guard had no hope of finding Joanna alive when he heard Cooper warn Henry Dale, 'Fetch plenty of powder and bullets.' Dale's brusque nod said the same.
Before noon, the three men reached the spot where the dogs had lost the sims' scent. As Wingfield had known it would, the trail led through the marshes that made up so much of the peninsula on which Jamestown lay. By unspoken consent, he and his companions paused to rest and to scrape at the mud clinging to their boots.
His crossbow at the ready, Wingfield looked back the way he had come, then to either side. For some time now, he had had a prickly feeling of being watched, though he told himself a sim would have to be mad to go so near the English settlement after the outrage of the night before.
But Cooper and Dale also seemed uneasy. The guard rubbed his chin, saying, 'I like this not. I’m all ajitter, as I've not felt since the poxy Spaniards snuck a patrol round our flank in Holland.'
'We'd best push on,' Henry Dale said. 'We'll cast about upstream and down, in hopes of picking up tracks again.
Were things otherwise, I'd urge us separaTe, one going one way and two the other, to speed the search. Now', he bared his teeth in frustration, ''twere better we stayed in a group. The bushes quivered, about fifteen paces away. Three weapons swung up as one. But instead of a sim bursting from the undergrowth, out came Caleb Lucas. 'You young idiot! We might have shot you!' Cooper snarled. His finger was tight on the trigger of his pistol; as a veteran soldier, he always favored firearms.
Lucas was even filthier than the men he faced. His grin flashed in his mud-spattered face. 'Send me back now if you dare, my good sirs.
These past two hours I've dogged your steps, betimes close enough to spit, and never did you tumble to it. Have I not, then, sufficient of the woodsman's art to accompany you farther?'
Wingfield removed the bolt from his bow, released the string. 'I own myself beaten, Caleb, for how should we say you nay? The damsels back in town, though, will take your leaving hard.'
'They'll have plenty to company them whilst I'm gone, and shall be there on my return,' Lucas said cheerfully.
'And in sooth, Edward, are we not off to rescue a fair young damsel of our own?'
'Not wondrous fair, perhaps, since the little lass favors me, but I take your meaning.' Wingfield considered. 'We'll do as Henry proposed before your eruption, and divide at the streambank.
Caleb, you'll come with me this way Henry and Allan shal take the other. Half a mile either way, then back here to meet. A pistol-shot to signal a find; otherwise we go on as best we can.
Agreed?'
Everyone nodded. A sergeant to the core, Cooper mutted, 'As well I don't have Caleb with me I want a man to do as he's told.' Unabashed, Lucas came to such a rigid parody of attention that the others could not help laugh.
Caleb and Wingfield hurried along the edge of the creek, their heads down.
Herons and white-plumed egrets flapped away; frogs and turtles splashed into the turbid water. 'There!' Lucas said.
His finger stabbed forth. The print of a bare foot was pressed deeply into the mud.
'Good on yout' Wingfield clapped him on the back drew out one pistol, and fired it into the air. He reloaded in the few minutes before Dale and Cooper came trotting up.
Dale, who was red as a tile, grunted when he spied the footprint.
'The brutes did not slip far enough aside, eh, my hearties? Well, after them!'
The trail ran northwest, almost paral eling the James River but moving slowly away. It became harder to follow as the ground grew drier. And the effort of sticking to it meant the four trackers had to go more slowly than the sims they pursued.
By evening, the Englishmen were beyond the territory they knew well.
Explorers had penetrated much farther into the interior of America, of course, but not all of them had come back, and with the colony's survival hanging by so slender a thread, exploration for its own sake won scant encouragement.
At last the thickening twilight made Wingfield stop 'We'll soon lose the trace,' he said, smacking fist into palm, yet I misdoubt the sims push on stil . What to do. Again Caleb Lucas came to the rescue. 'Look there between the two pines. Is't not a pil ar of smoke, mayhap marking one of the sims' nests?'
'Marry, it will' Wingfield turned to Allan Cooper, the most experienced of them at such estimations. 'How far
