“Good night, Hezekiah.”
Sometime later he had awakened, hearing that first roll of thunder come their way from across the ridge to the west, the same heights they had struggled up, over, then down to reach this ford on the Tennessee River. For the longest time he lay there in the dark, feeling the Negro snore with a rumble like dull thunder itself, listening to the other two boatmen snore.
He was just slipping back into sleep when he heard footsteps outside. Sensing immediate alarm, he laid a hand on one of his pistols as the small oak door creaked open on its own swollen wood hinges, grating across the pounded clay floor beneath it.
“Reuben!” Kingsbury’s voice whispered harshly like the rending of new canvas. “Heman! Ho, Titus! Pull yourselves up.”
Then a sudden flare of lightning backlit the river pilot, stoop-shouldered in the half-opened doorway. At the crack of thunder he vaulted into the hut, stumbling over a pair of feet before catching himself against the far wall.
“That you down there, Titus?”
“My feet, yes.”
“Get you and that Negra up,” Kingsbury ordered as he straightened. “We gotta be off now. Up, up—be quick about it now.”
“By the devil—it ain’t even light yet, Hames,” Root hissed as he sat up, rubbing grit from his eyes.
“Gonna be soon enough,” he replied with an urgent bite. “I wanna be long gone from that bunch afore dawn. Now, up with all of you and get down to the ferry. I’m off to fetch Colbert and his boys now to haul us away to the far shore afore this storm breaks.”
The first drops fell as they were nearing the north bank of the Tennessee, hauled across by the power of the Colbert muscle. The half-dozen wayfarers hurried off the rough planks of the unwieldy craft as rain slicked the wood and bare ground where they turned momentarily to watch the old man bark orders at his three boys. The sky chose that moment to open up as the ferry disappeared behind shifting sheets of rain. When they struggled up the slick bank to huddle beneath the first of that canopy of trees sheltering the well-worn groove of the Natchez Trace, another flare of that terrifying electrical storm lit up the whole of Colbert’s Landing.
In that daylike brightness it was plain to make out the main cabins, the wayfarer huts. The corral.
“Shit,” Kingsbury growled.
“Them horses ain’t there,” Titus said.
“Jesus God,” Ovatt added his own oath.
All six of them stood there, soaked and chilled, staring across the river as another flash of lightning starred the far settlement of crude buildings. The post corral was empty—not one of the eight horses the six slave hunters had brought with them still there.
“Where you figure they gone?” Root asked, something pinching his voice into a taut string.
As Bass hunched over, squinting in the sudden flares of the storm, searching the muddy ground for some clue, Kingsbury shouted against the roar of approaching thunder.
“Wherever they gone—it’s for no good.”
“W-why you say that?” Beulah asked.
The pilot turned on her, gripped her shoulders firmly. “They ain’t gone to bed—pulled out afore us. None of that’s no good.”
“What we do now?” Ovatt asked.
They looked at one another for a moment, then Beulah said, “There ain’t no ferry coming to fetch us, fellas. We just sit here, or get on down the way home like we ’tended.”
“Woman’s right,” Kingsbury said. “Maybeso the dark help us more’n them sonsabitches.”
Root grabbed hold of Kingsbury’s soppy coat. “How you so sure they ain’t just gone looking for runaways?”
“They’re coming after us, Reuben,” the pilot answered with a wag of his head. “Didn’t you see it plain as paint?. They want this here Negra.”
Root whirled on Hezekiah. “I say we get rid of the son of a bitch right here and now. Let ’em have him.”
“No!” Titus bellowed against a clap of thunder.
Root turned to Bass, snagging up a big handful of his oiled jerkin in both hands, shaking the youth. “That bunch hunts down men for money. Likely they kill’t their share.”
“So have we,” Ovatt replied.
“But they’re the paid killers,” Kingsbury argued. “And we mean nothing to ’em but money.”
Root flung Bass back from him. “Get rid of the Negra right now!”
“Maybe Reuben’s right.” Ovatt aligned himself with Root. “We give ’em the Negra—they’ll leave us be.”
The wind came up, strong in Titus’s face as if it were siding against him too. “You can’t—”
“It won’t help a damned thing,” the woman suddenly interrupted Bass. “Hames, you know damned good and well they ain’t after just the Negra here.”
Nodding with some reluctance, his skinny face glistening with rain as the next bolt of lightning lit up the countryside, Kingsbury said, “She’s right. It ain’t only the Negra. They’re coming after the money.”
Ovatt scoffed, “They don’t know we got no money.”
“They goddamn well do know!” the pilot replied. He seemed to square his narrow shoulders as he turned to Bass. “Best keep our guns under our coats—right, Titus?”
He swallowed hard, seeing the rest of those wet faces staring intently at his. “Yeah. Keeps your pan powder dry, out of the rain.”
“Not just that,” Kingsbury added morosely, gazing up the dark corridor of the Natchez Trace, “that bunch never did see for sure that we was armed, the hull lot of us. Maybeso they show up, that ignernce’ll count for something.”
“I pray it does count for something, Hames,” Beulah agreed. “When it comes down to the killin’.”
The horsemen had gone sometime in the night. It had to be after that gal had finished with Titus and he looked in to find everyone still celebrating—going off to bed himself. Had to be after Kingsbury, Ovatt, and Root had limped across the yard to their blankets. When the one called James had ordered his men into the saddle only then.
Bass wished he knew more about horses, to know how far and how fast an able man could travel on one. Then he would have some idea how far the boatmen had to go before counting on bumping into those slave trackers.
But then—he thought, with his teeth chattering like a box of ivory dominoes in an ox-horn cup—the how far didn’t really matter, did it? Because once a man was out ahead of you, he no longer had to travel any great distance. He could pick his place. A spot most favorable to acting on his plans. Just hunker down and wait for you to come along at your own pace.
They could be waiting up there no more than a hundred paces. Or as much as a hundred leagues. That was the thing about not knowing that scared him down to his roots. This wasn’t like any of the dangers he had faced before. Oh, he had been scared in having to face the Falls of the Ohio, just as scared of the prospect of running the Devil’s Raceground or the Devil’s Elbow on the Mississippi. Deep water had always frightened him.
Still, he had confronted his fear time and again—staring it in the eye, and not giving an inch. But this … Titus had never had to stew in his own juices over the very real possibility of staring down danger in the form of another man driven by deadly intent.
Not even when that Chickasaw hunting party had caught him alone in that timber. Not when that war party had slipped down the river to surprise Ebenezer Zane’s flatboat crew. Not when Titus had been so crazy drunk he couldn’t even get his pecker excited and that eye-gouging fight had broken out on Annie Christmas’s gunboat.
On every occasion Bass had suddenly found himself thrust into the vortex of events. With no time to fret, or worry, much less get himself scared until all of it was damned well over and done with. And—by God—there really was a tangible advantage to not having to put one soggy moccasin in front of the other, minute by minute, yard by yard, worrying all the while when and where in the rain-soaked darkness of this wilderness they were going to strike.
“I don’t like this,” Root grumbled after they had moved something more than a mile up the trail.
