Old Nathan, Second Edition, page 18
Silver radiance flooded across Bully Ransden as he lifted the lid of the puzzle box. It was gone in an instant.
Ellie screamed and tossed a knot of lightwood onto the hearth. The pitchy wood crackled into an honest yellow glare.
The box lay open on the table. It was empty. But when the man turned to look at her, Ellie saw a glint of cold light in his eyes.
* * *
Old Nathan woke up when his roan heifer bawled, but he didn’t catch the words. A moment later the cat yowled at the cabin’s front door, “Hey old man! Ye got somebody messin’ round yer shed with a gun!”
Old Nathan swung out of bed. He was wearing his breeches and a shirt. The quilt on his bed with its gorgeous Tree of Life pattern was down-filled and thick, but on a cold night a thin old man didn’t generate enough heat to adequately warm the cavity his body tented within the cover.
His breath hung in the air. He stepped silently to the flintlock rifle on pegs above the fireboard.
“I don’t think thet feller oughter be here,” the black-patterned heifer called, speaking to her roan-patterned partner but in a voice loud enough for all the world to hear.
Spanish King was in the far pasture. The great bull bellowed a question that was almost lost in the wind.
There was a full moon this night, but it rode above the overcast. The sash windows were gray rectangles which scarcely illuminated the dusting of snow that had slipped in beneath the cabin doors.
“Come on, old man!” the tomcat demanded. “He’s markin’ yer patch!”
The hearth was cold, though the coals banked beneath sloped ashes would bring the fire to life in the morning . . . if there were need for a fire.
Old Nathan loaded his rifle with controlled care. He poured the main charge of powder into the bore and followed it with a ball wrapped in a linen patch to take the shallow rifling. Cold had stiffened the lubricant of beeswax and butter, so the cunning man eased the hickory ramrod home so as not to snap it in his haste to have a weapon in his hands.
He replaced the ramrod in its tubular brackets beneath the barrel instead of dropping the lathe-turned stick on the floor to save time. He might need to reload. . . .
Old Nathan’s final act of the operation was to measure the smaller priming charge into the pan. Now it was ready to flash from the sparks the flint struck from the steel frizzen whenever the cunning man pulled the trigger.
When the task was complete, Old Nathan began to shiver with the cold.
He pulled on his boots one-handed. The cold leather scraped his heel and ankles, but the cunning man was scarcely aware of the contact. He would need the boots if he had to run any distance through the snow, hunting or hunted.
If there was only the one man his animals had warned of, Old Nathan expected to be the hunter.
With the rifle in his hands, cocked, and the bullet pouch and powder horn slung over his left shoulder, the old man slipped out by the cabin’s front door to avoid warning the intruder in back. Snow swirled in crystals too tiny to have obvious shape. The cat had gone off into the night, though the marks of his paws remained on the drifted porch.
The night was gray rather than black, but trees were indistinct blurs from only a few feet away. Old Nathan moved away from the cabin so that the prowler would have no clue to the cunning man’s whereabouts should terror cause him to shoot in desperation—
As Old Nathan intended that he should.
The gusting wind drowned any sounds the intruder might make in the creak of branches and moaning air. The heifers continued to complain but in lowered voices, and the mule chose to be silent for reasons of its own.
Old Nathan knelt, murmuring words under his breath. He picked up a pinch of snow between his left thumb and forefinger, spinning it into the air before it could melt. The tiny vortex grew into a loose, twisting funnel of snow. It glowed with the moonlight which would have fallen on it had the night not been overcast.
The ragged cone slid off among the trees. It moved in a pattern of arcs and reverse arcs, like a hound following a scent trail.
Grinning at the proof of his art, the cunning man sent two more snowy will-o’-the-wisps to follow the first. They were man height but as soundless as the transferred light that illuminated them.
Old Nathan squatted among the roots of a century-old oak whose shade had cleared a considerable circle in surrounding woods. Winter had stripped the undergrowth to blackened stems which would not interfere with the cunning man’s shot when his prey came in view. . . .
The intruder’s bawl of fear was as high-pitched as the scream of a rabbit with its hind legs snared. A gun banged an instant later, the sharp crash of a rifle rather than the snap of a pistol’s smaller charge. Even so, the night muted the sound to merely another forest noise.
Wind-whipped snow crystals melted before they reached Old Nathan’s flushing cheeks. Anger and the powers he had summoned warmed the cunning man’s flesh, though he knew there would be a price to pay when the struggle was over. He trembled with anticipation.
There was a flicker through the treetrunks. A whorl of moonlit snow reappeared, drifting like a ghost toward its creator. Another funnel glimmered thirty feet to the side, while the third was still hidden deeper in the woods where it prevented the intruder from breaking back.
The will-o’-the-wisps were only patterns of snow and cold light, but the purposeful way they moved regardless of the wind gave them an ambiance still more chilling than the night. They drove their quarry like hounds after a raccoon; and, as with coon hounds, a human gunman waited to finish the job the pack began.
Twenty feet away the prowler crashed through the brittle undergrowth like a panicked doe. His breath wheezed in and out. Old Nathan could still not see him for the gloom.
The cunning man muttered a command. A will-o’-the-wisp drifted directly toward the intruder. The third twist of frozen moonlight was now visible through the trees beyond.
The prowler screamed again and swung his empty rifle like a club. The butt slashed through the snow funnel with no more effect than it would have had in a running stream. On the other side of the target, the rifle stock hit a pine and shattered.
The swirl of snow and moonlight quivered closer yet, illuminating its quarry.
Old Nathan sighted across the silver bead of his front sight.
He did not fire. The face of the prowler was that of Bully Ransden, but its bestial expression was not that of anything human.
Ransden hurled away the remains of his rifle. His eyes were too fear-glazed to take in his surroundings, neither the cunning man nor even the will-o’-the-wisps which had driven him to what a finger’s pressure would have made his last instant of life. The barrel clanged on a tree.
The funnels of snow settled because the cunning man no longer had the will to maintain them. Bully Ransden blundered off in the darkness, bleating with fear every time he collided with a tree trunk.
Old Nathan shivered with cold and reaction. There was something badly wrong. The prowler wore the flesh of Bully Ransden, but Bully wasn’t the man to skulk and flee. . . .
Old Nathan searched until he found the intruder’s rifle. The barrel was kinked, and the stock had broken off at the small. Farther back along the prowler’s trail in the fresh snow lay a saddle which the cunning man had hung out of the weather in his shed. The mule saddle was not quite valueless, but it would bring a thief little more than a couple drams of popskull from a crooked buyer.
Old Nathan stared at the saddle and the broken rifle. The yellow tomcat drew himself across the back of the cunning man’s boots. “I’m not the one t’ tell ye not t’ play with things afore ye kill thim,” the cat said. “But they hadn’t ought t’ git plumb clear. ’Specially—”
The cat twisted to look off in the direction Bully Ransden had fled. “—whin they’re the size ’n meanness t’ tear yer throat clean out the nixt time, old man.”
“Whin I want yer advice,” the cunning man growled, “I’ll ask fer it.”
When Old Nathan returned to his cabin, he didn’t pull the load from his rifle as he usually would have done. Instead, he emptied the priming pan and refilled it with fresh powder, just in case snow had dampened the original charge.
* * *
When they came in sight of the Ransden cabin, the mule snorted, “Hmph!” and blew an explosive puff of breath into the chill, dry air. “Whutiver happened t’ the horse whut used t’ live here?”
Old Nathan frowned at the dwelling a furlong down the road ahead. Ransden’s cabin seemed abnormally quiet, but a line of gray smoke trembled up from the chimney. “I reckon Bully Ransden rid off already this mornin’,” he said. “Mebbe he figgered we’d come a-callin’.”
Or the Shuriff would.
The mule snorted again. “Hain’t no horse lived here these months gone,” it said. “Don’t smell sign uv airy stock a’tall, neither, though thar used t’ be a yoke uv oxen.”
The mule’s forehoof rang against a lump of quartz beneath the inch of powdery snow. The cabin door quivered open a crack wide enough for a man to peer out and down the road.
There was a cry and a blow from within the cabin.
The cunning man’s face hardened. “Git up, mule,” he said and tapped back with both heels to show that he was serious.
Bully Ransden bolted from the cabin. His galluses dangled behind him and he had to hop twice on his own porch before his foot seated in his right boot. He ran across the road, into the unbroken forest which faced his tract of cleared land.
The mule had obeyed—for a wonder! The beast’s racking trot precluded the slightest chance of hitting anything but air from a hundred and fifty yards. Even so, Old Nathan rose momentarily in his stirrups and sighted down the long, black-finished barrel of his rifle, obedient to the predator’s instinct that always urged chase when something ran.
He settled again into the jouncing saddle. The muscles of his upper thighs were already reminding him that he wasn’t as young as he once had been.
“Waal?” the mule demanded as it clopped heavily along the frozen ruts. “What naow, durn ye?”
“Pull up, thin,” the cunning man muttered. He drew back on the reins with his left hand, though he continued to hold his rifle with the butt against his hipbone and the barrel slanted forward at an angle. “I don’t figger we need t’ go messin’ through the breshwood lookin’ fer sompin I don’t choose t’ shoot nohow.”
“I don’t figger we needed t’ go harin’ over the ice fit t’ break a leg, neither,” the mule grumbled as it slowed to a halt in front of Ransden’s cabin. “Might hev thunk on thet afore ye roweled me all bloody, mightn’t ye?”
* * *
“Mule . . .” Old Nathan said as he rose again in his stirrups to peer into the woods. The Bully was gone past the use of mere eyesight to follow. . . . “Ifen ye keep grindin’ thet mill, I’ll sell ye t’ some fella who’ll treat ye jest as you say I do.”
The beast’s complaint and the old man’s threat were both empty rhetoric: the litany and response of folk who’d worn into one anothers’ crotchets over the course of years.
The cabin door creaked. Old Nathan turned, swinging the rifle reflexively. Ellie Ransden stood in the doorway with her left hand to her cheek and a shocked expression on her face. She wore only a shift, and her fine black hair was tied back with a twist of tow.
Old Nathan swung his leg over the saddle, pretending that his threatening reflex was merely the first stage in dismounting. “Howdy, Miz Ransden,” he called. “Thought I might hev a word with yer man, but I reckon I just missed him.”
After a moment he added, “I could come back later ifen this time don’t suit.”
Ellie straightened. “Oh, law,” she said, “I hain’t got a thing t’ offer ye, sir, but do—”
She looked down at the threadbare cotton shift that was her only garment. “Oh law!” she repeated.
She stepped back and pushed the door to. “Shan’t be two flicks uv a cat’s tail,” she called through the closed panel.
“If I leave you be,” the cunning man said to his mule, “you kin find a sunny patch in the lee of a wall ’n mebbe grub up some grass. But ifen ye wander off on me, I’ll blister ye good er it’s a pity. D’ye hear me, mule?”
“Hmph,” said the mule. “I reckon with you runnin’ the shoes offen me, up ’n down the high road, I got better things t’ do than go gallivantin’ somewhar er other on my own.”
The barrel and splintered stock of Bully Ransden’s rifle were strapped to the mule’s saddle. By the time Old Nathan had them loose, Ellie threw the door open again. She wore a check-printed dress; an ornate ivory comb set off the supple black curves of her hair.
The girl’s usual complement of additional tortoise shell combs was missing. The red patch on her left cheek would become a serious bruise before the day was out.
“Come in, Mister Nathan,” she said making a pass at a formal curtsey. “I’m all sixes ’n sivins, b-but—”
Her control broke. She didn’t blink or avert her eyes, but tears started from the corners of them. “—the good Lord knows thet I’m glad t’ see ye!”
Old Nathan mounted the porch steps with his own rifle in one hand and the remains of Bully Ransden’s in the other. He paused in the doorway and eyed the trees again. No doubt the Bully was watching from concealment like a fox circling to eye the hounds on his scent, but if he’d been willing to meet the cunning man he could have done so from the protection of his own walls.
Had the thing that looked like Ransden been Bully Ransden in fact, he would have died on his porch before he ran from any hundred men.
Old Nathan shut the door behind him.
The cabin was a wreck. All the furnishings had been damaged to some degree. The chairs’ slatted backs were punched in, a boot had smashed the face panels of the storage chests, and the bed frame was missing so that the straw tick and blankets lay on the floor in a pile that Ellie had just attempted to arrange.
Someone had with systematic brutality broken the sturdy legs of the table. It stood upright due to repairs made with twine and splints of leather.
Bully Ransden was a better-than-fair journeyman carpenter. Repairs to the table were Ellie’s work.
“Where’s yer cattle, Miz Ransden?” the cunning man asked with calculated brutality. He set the broken weapon down on the table carefully, but the splints were firmer than he had feared.
Ellie faced him. “Drunk up er gambled away,” she said bluntly. There warn’t no point tryin’ t’ put a fine face on the bus’ness, not ifen ye wanted a cure fer hit. . . .
“Hain’t like Bully,” Old Nathan said aloud.
“Hit’s like Cull these three months past,” Ellie replied. Her face twisted into an expression Old Nathan had not seen on it before when she talked about her man. “Hit’s like the Bully.“
The porcelain plate that had held the place of honor on the Ransden’s fireboard was gone. The only ornament there above the hearth was a nondescript wooden box with no evident hinges or keyhole.
For the first time, Ellie took in the shattered rifle which the cunning man had returned to its owner’s cabin. “Oh,” she whispered. “Oh, Mister Nathan, did he . . . ?”
The cunning man frowned in concern. When Ellie saw the gun, her mind had turned to ambush and murder.
“Naow,” he said, “nothin’ so turrible ez what yer thinkin’ on. I heerd some noise in my shed last night, and the feller makin’ it dropped this behind him. I thought yer man might know sommat about hit.”
“I reckon he might,” Ellie Ransden agreed coldly. She daubed unconsciously at the fist print on her cheek, trying it the way one might try a scab. In the same controlled voice she continued, “Last month, whin thet feller from Saint Louie was clubbed down on the Columbia road. . . . ?”
Old Nathan nodded. A traveller had stopped to relieve himself while the other men in his party rode on. One of his friends had gone back when he decided the night was too dark to leave a man alone on an unfamiliar trail. The sound of the companion’s hoofbeats drove away a figure crouching with a knife raised to finish what a blow from behind had begun.
“Cull war out thet night,” the girl continued. “Like he is most times now. Nixt day he come in ’n he hed a watch ’n chain. He—”
Her voice began to break. “He saw me look at it,” she said, speaking faster and louder to finish the story before she lost control completely. “He a’mos’ hit me thin, an’ he told me not t’ tell a soul what it was he had—” tumbling, word over word “—but I’ve tolt you now, Mister Nathan!”
Ellie turned so that her back was to her visitor. She was sobbing. In a small voice she continued, “Wax Talbot, he took a shot at Cull when his wife screamed out t’ the barn whin Cull war s’posed t’ be he’pin’ butcher some hogs.”
The cunning man still held his rifle. He was uneasy about many things. The only one to which he could put a name was the possibility that the cabin’s owner would burst through the doorway with an axe raised, so the rifle’s familiar touch was that of a raft to a drowning man.
He wanted to put a hand on Ellie’s shoulder to comfort her, but he wasn’t sure that wouldn’t be a worse idea than any he’d had before.
“This been goin’ on three months, Miz Ransden?” Old Nathan asked. “Why hain’t ye been t’ see me? Might be I could he’p.”
Ellie wiped her face on her sleeve. When the cuff, decorated with home-style embroidery, slid up, Old Nathan saw that her wrists were bruised also. His face didn’t change, but it was already set in the lumpy gray lines of a thundercloud.
“I don’t guess no woman magicked my Cull this time, Mister Nathan,” the girl said wearily. Her expression hardened momentarily. “Though I hear tell some uv the sluts hereabouts, they hain’t so perticular as Adele Talbot was.”
She shook herself. “He’s changed, right enough. He ain’t my Cull no more. He’s jest comin’ out like his pappy, the way folks allus warned me he’d do and I paid thim no nivermind.”
