Читать книгу By Dim and Flaring Lamps - Alan Le May - Страница 3

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During the afternoon the bone-chilling February rain let up, and the sky broke into drifting scud, with patches of clean blue showing through. For the first time since the morning melt the air cleared of its everlasting mizzle, and Missouri’s lowland wilderness took on the colours of different kinds of smoke. In the flooded swamp tangles, where bobcats and the last of the Missouri black bears usually found shelter, the baldy cypress, ash, tupelo, and thorny water locust were the shineless black of wet soot, close by, or the blue of blown smoke far off. And between the swamps, on the rich dirt of scattered clearings, last year’s unharvested cotton crop stood in shallow floodwater, ragged, rain-beaten, like dirty brown smoke unable to rise.

Often a lonely chimney stood among a small wreckage of charred timbers beside these fields; and sometimes, faintly seen above distant woods, real smoke rose lazily and floated for a while, where yet another farmstead smouldered. Abolitionist Jayhawkers from Bloody Kansas did that, secessionists said, on their murderous raids. No, rebel night riders did it, killing off Union sympathisers in the name of slavery, said the North. Neither view made sense. These remote plantings were inaccessible to Jayhawkers, for Kansas was far away; and there never had been enough Unionists among these pro-slavery farmers to serve as victims for all the burning and killing there had been.

In those early days of 1861 much had already happened. Seven Southern states had seceded; Missouri herself was about to elect delegates to a secession convention intended to take Missouri out of the Union and put her unequivocally on the side of slavery. Yet, in spite of all, nobody really believed that there was going to be anything like a full-out war. In Missouri, at least, they didn’t really need it, the way Missourians were tearing each other apart.

Shep Daniels, a long-boned young mule drover from Kentucky, kept turning in his saddle to look back. The wretched trace they were following wound and twisted through woods that shut off all view of what might be behind. Only the sky could have anything to tell him; and he was well satisfied to find even this empty of meaning for him, as he studied it now.

He was tailing a band of mixed draft stock, forty-odd head that he and his younger brother, Trapper Daniels, were trying to push to the shores of the Mississippi—out from among the deadly Missouri bushwhackers, out of a country where violence without restraint had made a shambles of the law. Far up ahead an eight-mule hitch pulled a work-sprained calf wagon, in which rode a bunch of mule foals too young to keep up. The harness mules, big but very tired, plodded steadily, heads swinging low, small hoofs finding no bottom in the muck, yet lifting half-bushels of gumbo with every step. The wagon was out of Shep’s sight most of the time, but he could hear Trapper’s characteristic mule-driving yell—“H-a-a-a! H-a-a-a!”—and the musket crash of his blacksnake whip, beyond the woods.

Behind the wagon, strung out for a winding furlong, trailed some twenty head of big brood mares, fine broad-backed stock of great power, but mostly heavy with foal. They would begin losing their foals pretty soon, now, as they neared total exhaustion. Behind the mares straggled a passel of yearling colts, big strapping youngsters, but untoughened; they were moving shakily, their long legs quivering. Some of these would not be able to follow much longer.

On chain-lead behind the wagon was one animal more—an enormous red-gold jack of fantastic height and bone, and not much substance else, so that he appeared to be built of pipe. This was the Jack of Diamonds, a young jack, but already proved as a sire of huge mules, and worth more, in the eyes of a muleman, then all the rest of the stuff here put together. He went stilting along, in strides of such great length they looked leisurely—the only brute in the whole cavalcade that was not in trouble.

At regular intervals, with a monotony of rhythm that was not his own, but controlled by the movement of the animals, Shep Daniels let his sixteen-foot blacksnake drift out, to close up the rearmost stragglers. It whispered, cracked, or popped like a pistol; sometimes the lash touched a stumbling yearling, with a stroke as gentle as the lick of a cat, but it never bit. Daniels was patiently, carefully trying to get the most out of their remaining strength, wasting no ounce of it by any needlessly quick move.

He had a hard time keeping his belly muscles from knotting up in an effort to lift them along by force of will. At the age of twenty-two Shep Daniels laid claim to fifteen years of experience in the handling of his father’s mules—sometimes he called it twenty years’ experience—and he had never seen heavier going in his life. No roads anywhere were more than barely passable, that rough, mean February of ’61, and the mired track they were following through these inundated jungles could not be called a road at all. Every day it rained, maintaining a hub-deep stickum that could drag the very guts out of a team in a matter of rods. Every night it froze, turning puddles to glass, and churned mud to broken glass; and this footing was even worse than the mud, because it could lame a shoulder, bow a tendon, or quarter-crack a hoof. In the five days since they had plunged into the trace through this morass they had travelled a meagre twenty-five miles of windings through the swamps—much less than that as a crow would fly. All their built-in skill with horse and mule flesh had gone into the careful pacing of their livestock, to come this little way; yet half their animals were favouring lame and almost all near the limit of endurance.

Had they chosen to fork off to the north they could have got on to the Cape Girardeau plank road. Its planking was slippery and splintered with neglect, yet still so much better than what they were on that they should have reached the river in a day. Or they could have turned south, by longer but easier ways, and tried for Belmont, which was just across the river from Kentucky soil. But they had chosen the swamp traces between the two, a way so difficult that even the tough predatory bushwhackers might be expected to avoid it—or so they had hoped.

They knew now they had been wrong. Since yesterday afternoon they had been aware that somebody was behind them on the trace, and closing upon them by the hour. They had supposed this was Pap Daniels, fetching along a string of horses he had split off from them to pick up. He had expected to overtake them on the trail, and should have been with them before now. But early to-day, before the frost-cleared distances fogged up with rain, Shep had lagged a long way back to see how Pap was coming along; and he had found out it was not Pap and his horses in the trail behind.

From the top of a pin oak he had managed to get a fair look at the riders following them, where they straggled past a gap in the trees at something like a quarter of a mile. Shep counted fourteen riders; more might have passed the gap before he climbed to his lookout in the oak. Even at the distance he could see that they were heavily but unevenly armed; some of their weapons were carried crosswise of the saddlebows, as though too long-barrelled for saddleboots. The horses were low-headed, and apparently labouring, pushed at the fastest plod they could be expected to maintain. That was almost all he could make out, but it was enough. Pretty plainly, what they had here was one of the many bands of marauders now ravaging the undefended land. They were the sort of people he had above all hoped to evade by taking to this flooded wilderness.

Yet, up to this point, a note of uncertainty remained. These freebooters liked to specialise in the easy pickoffs; the tenacity of this horse-killing swamp chase was not like them. Shep Daniels supposed they must have fooled themselves into expecting an easy capture, and now hung on out of stubbornness, having come so far on the way. For a moment Shep nursed a hope that they might still give up; they were gaining so slowly, inch by laboured inch, they might not be able to close the few remaining miles before nightfall ended the short February day.

Then one more rider appeared, keeping the disordered straggle closed up to the rear. He sat straight and trim on a fine well-conditioned horse; and Shep would have recognised him from a long away farther off than he was. He knew then that this pursuit would not give up, or turn back, or fail to close while daylight lasted. And, though he would never have admitted it in words, he knew, as well as he would ever know it, that he was licked.

This isn’t happening to me now, he told himself. It happened to me a long time ago.

The start of it had been in the summer of 1860. Could that have been only a year ago? It was even less than that. June of 1860 was only nine months back.