The Kentucky Trace: A Novel of the American Revolution

5.

57 5 Sunlight was still aslant the higher western slopes, but the valley was thick with twilight by the time he reached his barnyard. He dismounted to let down the drawbars. He let an end of each pole down, but continued to stand. He would, he reckoned, look through the house again; he might yet find a letter. No, he wouldn’t. Ought he then to strike out for French Lick on the Cumberland? Sadie could have gone on a long visit to her mother away over in South Carolina. He shook his head. He’d thought of that before. Mr. Saufley had thought she might have gone off on a long visit. Sadie might do that, but she was too eager “to get ahead in the world” to take the help with her and leave the place go to rack and ruin. She’d leave Jethro and Angela to work. Could be she was a captive in some Indian town, maybe north, maybe south. Bad, but it wouldn’t be of her own doing like going off without a word to the Cumberland settlements with help and horsestock she’d stolen from him. He had to believe that or Indians. He wouldn’t believe she’d taken his goods and gone off with another man; the one who’d fathered her child might have come back. He’d trail them down and . . . Kate’s head was over his shoulder. Lacking a human neck, he’d twisted and pulled on her bridle rein until she was 58 almost on top of him. And why was he holding her anyhow? She would stand. He was letting Sadie drive him out of his mind. He patted Kate on the shoulder, and walked on to the barn. Unsaddling Cleo, he found the basket of food Jimmy had tied on her packsaddle. He hadn’t wanted the food; he didn’t want it now. They pitied him down there; he was to them what he was wherever he went—a stranger. No, he didn’t feel a stranger in the woods or among Marion’s men. He would like to forget Sadie and go back to the partisans. He’d planned to stay home only two or three weeks, then return with what Marion needed most—horses and gunpowder. He wouldn’t go back empty-handed. Right now he must get some corn to shell and parch for his trip; wherever he went he ought to have parched corn for traveling along even if he couldn’t mix it with maple sugar. There had been a good deal left from last spring’s making, but like everything else it was gone now. He had taken an armload of corn ears from the crib, and was coming back through the barn hall when his foot struck Miss Nancy’s forgotten basket. He stopped. Some woman or women had worked hard to cook the victuals in it. He could at least carry it to the house. Corn and gift of food on the kitchen floor, he found, in spite of the heavy twilight, firewood that when split would do for torches; and glory be, an ax was in its usual place by the house wall. Dry hickory wasn’t as good as fat pine, but it would have to do—provided he could get a light with no powder or dry tow. He did have a flint in his gunlock. He could strike that against the ax, and maybe get a light. He went into the black kitchen and rummaged in the woodbox until he found a few splinters of fat pine dropped from long-since-used kindling. Ax and flint worked together to make sparks; the split pine caught them and made a small flame, but big enough to light hickory splinters; more splinters lighted the small foresticks he laid in the fireplace, and when that fire was burning well he lit his torches. The room he hated most was “the front room.” He would go there first and be done with it. Standing in the center, his torch left the corners and walls in heavy shadow. He hesitated, then took a step toward the corner that held a bed. The golden scrolls of Holy Bible rolled toward him through the darkness. Nothing beside or below them. 59 Cursing, he went back to the kitchen, and the past.Three or four months after...