Читать книгу Tomahawk Rights - Hal G. Evarts - Страница 3

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Rodney Buckner's first struggle toward wakefulness was occasioned by the harsh voice of the woman bidding him rise and go after the cow. Then the lingering remnants of sleep were dispelled by a deafening explosion as a flintlock was discharged through the half-open door and the spreading dawn was rent by the fiendish war whoop of savages.

Ensuing events were but a vivid nightmare of horrors. The cabin swarmed with painted warriors. There was the sound of a blow, a shriek of mortal hurt or terror. The bedding which sheltered him was plucked from his trembling form, an iron hand seized his wrist and he was rudely dragged from his bunk. His captor, brandishing before his horrified eyes a menacing tomahawk, expelled the few English words, "Boy no talk!" in such a fierce tone as to freeze unuttered the anguished wail that trembled on his lips.

On the floor lay the forms of an older girl and the young man of the household. He was dragged out through the door by his captor, almost stumbling over the still shape of Johnny Aiken, the youngest son of the woman, a boy two years older than himself. He was propelled towards the spot where the woman, a tall, gaunt person, her hands pinioned behind her, stood in the custody of two towering savages. Then he was entering the forest while the faint light of dawn was amplified by the glare of the blazing cabin.

A briar thorn pricked his foot and he halted to seize the injured member with his hands. The savage just behind him thrust him forward with a sharp grunt of impatience. Rodney could see that a half dozen warriors led the way in single file. Next came the woman, another warrior, then himself. Five more savages brought up the rear. The sinuous progress of this procession along the winding path through the gloomy forest recalled to his childish mind the gliding movement of a huge blacksnake that had swallowed two young chickens in their garden a few days before. His throat constricted with terror—also with thirst; and he was fiercely hungry before they had been on the trail an hour. His feet and legs burned from occasional briar pricks.

The tall figure of the woman strode on and on as if she could never tire or falter. Always she had impressed him that way—indestructible, driving, relentless. From the first he had felt little about her that was lovable. Of his own mother, he had but a vague recollection of a gracious, loving presence. After her premature death his bereaved father had drifted westward with Rodney, eventually to leave him with this pioneer woman while he accompanied her husband, Aiken, in search of a fabled mine still deeper in the wilderness. Neither had been heard of again and the boy had been left an unwelcome burden upon the hands of this woman. A stern, rather harsh creature, and no doubt harassed by the cares and anxieties of carrying on alone, she had found little time for gentleness. But now the boy drew a measure of comfort from that very harsh efficiency that was hers. Her presence seemed a tower of strength to him.

His legs grew weary and each foot seemed a leaden weight. But whenever he lagged, the fierce Wyandotte who could speak a few words of English hissed the command, "Boy hurry!" Presently he stubbed his toe painfully.

"I am too tired to go on!" he cried out.

The woman, wise in the ways of the Indians, knew that captives usually were treated well until such time as a council was held in some Indian town to decide their fate. But those that were too frail or ailing to keep up the pace on the trail were dispatched without hesitation.

"You'll have to keep up, Rod," she said without turning her head. "If you lag, one of 'em will fetch you a clip with a hatchet."

The boy had never disobeyed that voice with impunity and he responded to it now, trotting along manfully to close the gap. Fatigue dragged at him but terror spurred him on to fresh exertions.

The distant sound of occasional gunshots and the faint gobbling yelps of the war whoop reached their ears from ahead and to the right, and Rodney knew that the savages were making an attack on the cabins of three settlers at a spot known as Jamieson's Farm. The intermittent nature of the sounds had conveyed to the ears of the warriors that the whites at Jamieson's were making a stubborn resistance. They commented upon it in their own tongue.

Presently they stopped at a spring and refreshed themselves. Another and longer string of savages came through the forest and joined them. Two men prisoners accompanied the new arrivals. The captives were heavily burdened with various plunder that had been captured by the savages.

They were two bondmen, having sold themselves into bondage for a period of years to work out the price of their passage to this new land. They had gone outside at dawn, only to be captured by the first rush of the savages. The others of the Jamieson settlement had succeeded in barricading themselves in the three cabins and beating off the assailants.

"Them as took us is Wyandottes, with a few Ottawas throwed in," said the woman. "The ones that got you is Senecas. All the tribes must have gone out again."

The weaker of the two captives, too frail to support his burden, stumbled frequently. At last an exasperated savage swung a tomahawk upon his skull, stooped to encircle his head with a knife and wrenched off the scalp.

"God ha' mercy on his soul," the other man mumbled.

The woman made no comment. When the slain man's burden was transferred to her shoulders she moved off with it without so much as a murmur of protest.

Rod, at the point of exhaustion, stumbled occasionally and fell, but remembering that bloody example of the fate that awaited laggards he recovered his footing and spurted ahead with such manifest terror that the savages were moved to mirth.

"You pooty good boy," the big Wyandotte said presently, and Rod found himself riding astride a powerful back.

The party halted at nightfall on the banks of a creek. Rod was handed a small piece of dried meat and a few grains of parched corn. The savages fashioned small hoops out of green dogwood upon which they stretched the reeking scalps taken in the recent raids and hung them in the smoke of the camp fire.

When one is aged eight, it is not given to him fully to gauge the grief of others. He did not miss Johnny Aiken, who had bullied him shamelessly. Therefore, he could not divine what raged in the breast of this border woman when those grisly trophies were suspended there to be smoke-cured.

Grim and silent, apparently as emotionless and unyielding as the rock against which she leaned, the woman sat among her captors until the latter staked both herself and the man captive upon their backs for the night. Rod watched them tie her ankles to stakes, tie a thong about her neck and fasten it to a tree. A six-foot pole was placed across her breast and to this her extended arms were securely lashed. Thus spread-eagled on her back, she could scarcely so much as shift her position to ease the strain.

At dawn the procession resumed its way. In the evening a great river, the Ohio, was crossed by means of bark canoes. All west of the Ohio was Indian country. The party floundered through swamps and waded creeks, heading ever deeper into the unknown wilderness of the West.

On the fourth day they came to a clearing that was planted in corn. The log-and-bark lodges on the edge of the forest beyond indicated a fair-sized Indian town. The woman knew that they had reached some tributary of the Upper Muskingum. An excited throng surged around the victorious war party. A halt was made at the edge of town and a heated discussion took place between the townspeople and the returning warriors. All seemed to agree upon some common plan and the man prisoner was divested of his burden and stood staring stupidly about him.

Two lines of savages were forming to fashion a lane that led to the big log-and-bark council house two hundred yards away. From his perch on the Wyandotte's shoulders Rod watched these sinister preparations. A burly, bearded white man clad in buckskins stood among the savages and Rod wondered why he did not do something to help the captive. But his thick-lipped mouth grinned approval. Evidently he enjoyed this scene.

The man prisoner was propelled suddenly forward between the two lines and he spurted desperately for the council house. He was slashed with knife and tomahawk, struck with whip and clubs. All such blows, which he believed were efforts to kill him, actually were carefully calculated to avoid that end. He was to be reserved for a far more ghastly fate. He reached the council house and fell exhausted.

Rod and the woman were secured in a hut under guard. The male prisoner was brought in, stripped, his body painted black with a mixture of soot and bear grease. He was a stupid ox of a man, new to the frontier and unaware of the dreadful significance of this blackening process. But the woman knew.

"God help him to endure!" Rod heard her mutter.

The white man came in. The woman knew that the French traders and American borderers who roved the Indian country sought to purchase the lives of captives who had been condemned to the stake.

"Kin you buy his life?" she asked the trader.

"Me? Pay my own goods for his worthless hulk?" the man demanded, turning upon her fiercely. "What have they done for me except drive the French out? Hah! I have help roast many the one! And will have a hot ramrod for this fat sheep."

The woman did not answer. Well, there were men like this one too.

At nightfall, the man prisoner was led out. Presently the drowsing boy was roused by dreadful animal screams of agony that froze the blood in his veins. All through the night he woke in horror, as some particularly piercing shriek assailed his ears. His exhausted body forced blessed if intermittent sleep upon him. But the fear and horror of it had fixed the face of the Frenchman indelibly in his mind as that of some dreadful monster. He waked in the gray light of dawn. The sounds outside were dying down and presently there was silence save for the thin whine of mosquitoes in the lodge. The woman spoke from the gloom.

"Our trails fork from here, Rod. 'Tain't likely we'll meet ag'in. I got nothing left to live for. But you're a Virginny Buckner—proud stock. You'll have kin somewheres and maybe they'll buy you back. I'm to be took to the Wyandotte towns and you have been sold to the Shawnees. They'll treat you well. G'bye, Rod."

It was the same sort of parting endured by untold thousands of captives as a land-hungry people pushed the savages foot by foot back through the wilderness—parting thus, never to hear of one another again.