volumes from this sign of prints. For a pure Mohawk war party would never have been so careless. The Indians who were along on the raid did indeed include Iroquois speakers, but they were a collection of individual and vastly different warriors under the direction of white men. This could have been read in the tracks themselves, from the shoe and moccasin markings. But it would have made small difference in any event.
The trail crossed a small brook and then opened up, becoming a highway in comparison to its start by the cabin; Jake galloped along for nearly three miles until a sixth sense told him to slow down. The sun was already sliding low toward the treetops; something tickled his nose and he flew off his horse, pistol in hand.
The scent was another fire, but this was fresher and more carefully planned — the raiding party must be making camp nearby. Jake proceeded up the trail a ways further, walking his horse slowly and as stealthily as possible.
He'd gone only a few hundred yards further along when he heard voices in heated exchange ahead. Quickly and as silently as possible he retreated, looking for a place where he could secure his horse. The nearest spot, a small copse thirty yards from the path, was back two twists along the trail; Jake tied the horse and took his guns from the saddle holsters. Each was primed and half-cocked, ready to be fired, as was the Segallas pocket pistol in his jacket.
The ground rose slightly, and Jake walked in a semi-circle toward the crown, realizing this would be a perfect vantage to post a guard.
He did not see the man until he was almost upon him. Fortunately for Jake, the guard's attention was directed wholly toward the trail below. The man crouched forward, one hand against a tree, a musket wedged in the fold between his stomach and thigh. His head was shaven Indian-style, with a shock of black hair feathered up in the middle of the scalp, but from twenty yards Jake could not quite tell if he were truly an Indian or a white man made up as one.
The problem was the same no matter his ancestry: the sentry must be taken down silently, before he could alert whomever he was protecting. Jake had a potion secreted in a pouch in his belt designed for just such a job — its main ingredient was distilled from scorpion poison, and it could silently paralyze a man with one breath.
But the guard knew his business. Dry leaves had been gathered in shallow piles to make a stealthy approach difficult. He couldn't count on sneaking close enough to use the powder, which would have to be clamped over the man's nose from behind.
Jake put two of his guns on the ground where they would be safe and drew his long knife and held it in his right hand. He kept his best flintlock pistol, the Styan, in his other hand, to be used if the man turned around before he was close enough for the knife.
Two steps, three; Jake sucked his breath into his chest, moving cautiously between the shrubs and leaf piles until a mere ten feet separated them. The brook he had crossed closer to the house flowed several hundred feet away, but it wasn't quite loud enough to cover a last dash. He stopped and stood like a statue, debating what to do.
Shoot and the whole company would descend. Remain stationary, and sooner or later the guard would turn around.
Providence weighed the odds and decided to nudge its brother Wind, which in turn rustled the leaves. Jake launched himself, hitting the lookout even as he started to turn. He held his knife extended in front of him like the prow of a Viking ship, battering an enemy vessel. They rolled together briefly, the Indian's gun flying aside as Jake drove the knife home. Surprise kept the man from yelling out, that and the barrel of Jake's gun, slammed severely and repeatedly against his chin. The knife finished the job with a quiet but deep slice upwards that dissected the sentry's heart.
He was truly an Indian, though he did not wear the typical Mohawk markings on his face. Jake pulled him down the hill some distance and wedged his body in a rocky crevice, covering it with leaves. He quickly wiped the blood from his hand as if it were poison, and went to look for the camp.
There were about a dozen Indians, including a few women. Two white men dressed in rough clothes were among them. These two seemed to be in charge, or at least thought they were; a rebellion was obviously afoot.
Stepping forward to listen, Jake's boot caught against something. At first he thought it was a log, but realized as he brought his leg back that though solid, it was soft, not hard. Looking down, he saw a dull yellow piece of cloth on the ground.
A child's rag doll.
He leaned down to pick it up, some vague hope of using it to calm the child on the ride to safety forming in a corner of his brain. In the next moment, that hope was shattered into revulsion and horror, and he felt a sharp spear of pain in his chest — he was holding not a doll but a dead child in his hand.
One of the white men, a tall-skinny man with a pockmarked face, had ordered it killed. That was what the argument was about, as Jake realized as he held the baby's still-warm body to his chest.
There was a certain quality his brain had, when nearly overwhelmed with danger, to proceed to some higher plane and make ready, preparing to strike with the calm detachment of a rattlesnake. His mind was there now, observing, mapping strategy. Not even his mentor General Greene could have sized up an enemy with such placid intelligence, while every muscle in his body boiled with anger.
The man directing the Indians yelled in resentment that they could all leave and go to hell as far as he was concerned. The other white stood silently and with bent shoulders. Jake guessed he was a British officer; had he cared to make further surmises, he might have hypothesized from his pallid manner that he was appalled by what he had just witnessed.
Such theories would have been correct, but they were irrelevant as far as Jake was concerned. More to the point was his theory, gathered from the different gestures and the Englishman's words, that the Indians had not wanted the baby killed. Indeed, though Jake's scant ability with the Iroquoian tongue prevented him from knowing this, the boy had been intended for one of the women now standing in dismay at the edge of the group. It was to have been a surrogate for one she had lost this past winter.
It seemed he stood there listening forever, the poor child's body growing cold. Finally, the argument ended and the group cleaved in two, Indians and whites, the latter joined by a single native.
Jake, figuring he would trail the whites until they were far enough from the others to strike, began to move silently back toward his horse. The patriot quickened his pace when he heard one of the Indians heading in the same direction, calling to the lookout he had earlier relieved of his duties on a permanent basis.
But when he arrived at his horse with the dead child, the animal wanted no part of it, rearing and whining as soon as he brought the dead body near. Jake had to leave either the child or the horse; the decision was unfortunate but obvious.
He ran a few feet into the woods, back toward the stream. With his boot he rolled a log to the side, then took a long, thick stick and dug quickly into the sandy dirt. Covering the poor child's body, he pulled the log back on top, marking a grave that even in his haste he realized would provide small comfort for the baby's soul. But there was little else he could do; the Indian was now shouting for the slain lookout and running directly toward him in the woods.
Jake slid down behind a tree and surprised the man as he ran past. The branch he had just used as a burial shovel was now changed to a death lance. Jake caught the Indian just below the waist. The man's momentum carried him nearly to Jake's fist, the stick plunging deep into his abdomen. In a quick, unconscious rage, he finished him off, crushing his skull savagely with the butt end of his pistol before the man could utter even a syllable of surprise.
He left the body where it fell and ran to his horse.
It is barely believable but Jake's fury increased with every yard covered. He mounted the horse, intending to circle around and head off the whites if possible. Urging the beast through the thick bramble, over fallen trees and past the shallow creek, he had no care for the noise he made. For a long while, Jake had no care for himself, only for revenge.
But they had too good a lead on him. When he finally reached the main trail again with no trace, his horse slowed practically to a walk; its deep pants warned Jake not to push it faster.
The trail soon took him across a main road. One way was west, quite probably the way the men had gone. The other was northeastward, most likely back toward the river.
