We moved on, traveling more swiftly. My strength was returning, and Black Tom Watkins could walk once more, yet neither he nor Fitch were well men, and we had to move warily so as not to be surprised by the returning party.
Desperately, I wished to forge ahead, but dared not leave my family at such a time. We kept close, with Enos out ahead and behind.
The months had made me into a woodsman, more so than ever I have been, and Jeremy also. The gay young blade whom I had first met at the down-at-heel inn in London now wore buckskins. The hat with the plume had been put aside for another hat, and he wore moccasins instead of boots. Kane also, had become the complete woodsman, and the others to a degree.
Suddenly we broke out of the woods and the fort lay before us, charred by fire, but standing.
"Kane? Barry? Stay with my wife." Pim, Jeremy, Glasco, and I moved out in a wide skirmish line, our muskets ready.
Sakim and Peter brought up the rear, and the Indians scattered wide on our flanks.
There was no sound from the fort.
No hail from the walls, no welcoming smoke ... only silence and the wind.
The grass bent before it, the leaves stirred upon the trees. Each step I took brought me nearer ... to what?
The gate of the fort stood open, the bar lay on the ground inside. My eyes searched the battlements but nothing moved. We moved toward the gate.
"Sakim? Fitch? Stay outside. Watch the woods. I am going in.
"Pim, after a minute, come in ... and you, Tom."
Musket ready for a sudden shot, I stepped inside. All was still. No sound disturbed the fading afternoon, and then, at the door of our cabin, a body.
Scalped ... and dead. Several days dead, but the weather had been cool.
It was Matt Slater.
Matt Slater, who so loved the land, and who had, at last, wide acres of his own.
A square mile of forest, meadow and fields traded for a plot, six by three.
There was no sign of Quill.
"Scatter out," I said. "We've got to find Quill."
"He may be a prisoner."
"If he is," I said, "we'll go get him. No matter how far we go, or how long it takes."
Our cabin had been looted, our few possessions gone or broken. The same was true in every room until we mounted the ladder to the walk. We saw several patches of blood, dark stains now, some visible on the earth below, some upon the walk. The ladder to the blockhouse had been pushed over, and evidently whoever had made the stand within had fired along the walk on either side, keeping the Indians at a distance.
Pushing gently on the door, I found a timber wedged against it, but managed to get a hand through and moved it enough to open the door.
John Quill sat facing the doorway, his head on his chest, his musket across his knees. There were eight other muskets within the room, all placed in position near loopholes or the door.
Kneeling beside him I touched his hand. Turning sharply I said, "Get Sakim up here! He's alive!"
Chapter 29
We buried Matt Slater on the land he loved, and buried him deep in the earth. We planted a tree close by his head that its fruit might fall where he lay. His years had been given to raising crops, and seeing the yellow grain bright in the sun, so we put him down where the seasons pass, where his blood could feed the soil. We left him there with a marker, simple and plain.
HERE LIES MATTHEW SLATER, A FARMER
A FAITHFUL MAN WHO LOVED THE EARTH
1570-1602
John Quill recovered, though wounded sorely, and told us a little of what had transpired.
They had come suddenly in the dawn, killing a Catawba who had brought meat to the fort, and the gate had been closed against them before they could take his scalp.
Then began a desperate fight, two men against thirty, and they ran from wall to wall, firing here, firing there. The Catawba warriors were far from the village on a hunt, but the old men fought and the women fought, and John Quill and Matt Slater defended the fort.
It was after sundown before they came over the wall and Slater went down fighting four men, and John Quill retreated into the blockhouse where they had gathered food and powder for a stand. Alone, he fought them all through the night and another day. They tried to fire the blockhouse but the timbers were damp from recent rains and would not bum.
"Six men I know I killed," John Quill said, "and mayhap another went, and finally they gave up and one shouted at me in English and told me to come to them, that the tribe would welcome me. They told me I was a great warrior-" John Quill looked at me. "Captain, I am only a farmer. It was all I ever wished to be, like poor Matt, who had his land only to lose it."
"He will never lose it," I said. "He had it when he died, and he had the memory of it in his soul. Nothing can take that from him."
"He was a brave, fine man," Abby said gently, "as you are, John. Our country needs such men to build it and make it grow. God help us always to have them, men who believe in what they are doing, and who will fight for what they believe."
"Aye," I said, "no man ever raised a monument to a cynic or wrote a poem about a man without faith."
So we came back to the fort after our journeying, and with my own hands I carried on the farming of Slater's crops. He'd planted them well and cultivated them a mite before passing on, and it was no trouble to keep up the work he'd begun.
We were all of us growing into the land, finding our living from it, and learning where the berries grew thick upon the bushes and where the nuts fell and the pools where the trout loafed in the shadows.
Man is not long from the wilderness, and it takes him but a short time to go back to living with it, and we had the Catawbas to guide us. Peter Fitch took an Indian girl to wife, a tall well-made girl with four warrior brothers.
We went often to the far hills that spring, wandering deep into the mountains and living off the country, for there was always fresh meat for a man good with a gun, and there was no need to be belly-empty if you could shoot.
One day Kane O'Hara asked leave to be gone awhile. He took his musket and went over the mountains, and some said that would be the last of him, but I thought it would not and said so, but the womenfolk worried.
It was many weeks later when he came back, and when we saw him coming down the mountain, straight and tall as always, we saw he wasn't alone. Somebody walked beside him, and when he came closer we saw she was a Spanish girl from a Florida settlement.
"Kane," I asked, "did she come willing?"
"She did," he said, '"That you can ask her yourself. I took meat to her town, and I speak her tongue from a time when I was a prisoner there, and I broke some wild horses for them-"
"Horses?"
"Aye, they've horses; I made to fetch some, but hadn't nothing to trade for them and they are wary of letting them go. Toward the end they got suspicious of me and did not believe what I said. Only Margarita believed me and said so, and when I left she came with me."
He looked at Abby and smiled. "It is all right, Mistress Abby. We stopped at an Indian village where there was a priest, an Irish priest from the Spanish lands who was teaching the Indians the ways of God, and he married us, all fitting and proper."
"What of her folks?"
"We sent them word by the priest. He was stiff about a marriage without her father saying it was proper, him knowing the family and all, but a nudge with a pistol and a reminder that if he did not marry us we'd be wedded Indian fashion, and he came through shining with a proper ceremony."
When the year ended we went down the river again, all of us going this time, with Kin doing his own walking and Abby having her hands full with Brian ... named for her father ... whom she carried when Lila could bear to let go of him.
Kin walked along with us, and bawled when he was picked up to be carried and insisted he carry his own pack, so we made a small one for him.