War Drums (Sass)/Chapter 2
IT WAS three months later and winter had given I place to spring when Lachlan McDonald returned to Charles Town from the little settlement of Willtown, some thirty miles distant, where for a time he had been idling.
A message had reached him there; and now he had come back to Charles Town, which had been his home for seven years, to bid certain friends good-bye before setting out on a long journey.
The thought of those farewells displeased him. His old life was ending, a new life was about to begin. Eager and yet depressed, he postponed the business; and on the second day after his arrival, having nothing better to do, he rode out alone along the main road leading northward, and was an hour's ride beyond the northern boundary when sounds ahead of him roused him from his reverie.
A pack train was coming—a trader's caravan from the inner country, from some remote trading post in the vast wilderness that stretched to the Blue Mountains and beyond. At the bend of the road the head of the column was in sight, two bearded buckskin-clad hunters riding in front, their long rifles held aloft like lances. Other riders followed, eagle feathers tossing on their heads; Indian braves tricked out in full panoply of plumes and paint for their entry into the white man's town. Behind these straggled a long line of laden ponies, urged on by a dozen drivers who rode beside the train, cracking long whips, shouting short, harsh commands.
The caravan filled the road, a road closely walled in by dense thickets of myrtle and the trunks of great oaks, whose branches, curtained with Spanish moss, met and mingled overhead. Lachlan McDonald touched the flank of his chestnut mare with his heel. A little ahead of him the road widened somewhat. He let the mare canter till he had reached this wider space, then pulled her up and wheeled her to the right against a hedge of holly.
There he awaited the pack train's coming; and while he waited, lounging easily in his saddle—a lean, black-haired, slightly aquiline young man, almost as swarthy as an Indian—he threw a curious glance behind him.
From that quarter three horsemen were approaching. Lachlan smiled as he watched them; smiled at their sprawling booted legs, their flapping elbows, their loose-hung cutlasses which belaboured their horses' ribs.
"Seamen out for a holiday," he muttered. "Men from Lance Falcon's ship." In a moment he had forgotten them, for now the pack train was abreast of him.
The two hunters riding in the van nodded but passed on without a word—thin, leathery men, bushy-bearded, wearing raccoon caps, high leggins of deerskin, and long, fringed hunting shirts of the same material held in at the waist by broad leather belts. Their weapons were the long rifle, the tomahawk and the hunting knife; and their horses were of the Chicasaw breed, one a claybank and the other a piebald, small and wiry, but still revealing in their shapely heads and clean limbs their blooded Andalusian ancestry. Next came a squat, powerfully built Indian on a fine iron-gray stallion; a Choctaw war captain, Lachlan judged him from his paint and his silver ornaments, his mantle decked with fox-tails and the strange flatness of his forehead. He looked neither to right nor left; and Lachlan, too, gazed past him with a face grown suddenly stern, for he had no love for the Choctaws. Behind this stone-faced chief rode three other Indians of the same tribe, all well mounted, all painted and feathered, two armed with stout, polished bows and quivers of spotted fawn-skin, the third carrying a musket of French make. Followed, then, the first of the pack ponies, plodding onward under their great bundles of skins—deer skins, bear skins, even a few shaggy skins of buffalo; and riding beside the burden-bearers came the packhorse drivers, some of them Indians of the meaner sort hired with rum for this arduous service, most of them white men who seemed more Indian than white because of their fantastic Indian finery.
Dust and the shouts of the pack-horse tenders filled the air. Close behind Lachlan a driver's whip cracked like a pistol shot, and at once the chestnut mare stood on her hind legs, capering madly. For an instant it seemed that she must bolt straight into the midst of the pack train; but the thin-lipped, slender young man on her back whirled her sideways, curbed her, gentled her, kept her dancing in the small open space between the road and the holly hedge, and after a minute she was calm again.
"Middlin' good, boy!" a mud-stained pack driver shouted. "Ye're a rider! How far to Charles Town?"
"Fight miles," Lachlan answered, and said no more. He knew these traders' caravans of old. The trader himself, if he rode with his train, was often decent enough, and the hunters, who supplied meat and took charge in case of trouble on the road, were generally steady men. But the drivers were a hard lot, perhaps the worst in the New World. With them it was best to have no dealing, no talk; and especially was this true when a pack train drew near to civilization once more after a journey of perhaps four hundred miles over the lonely wilderness trails.
Lachlan knew this and held his tongue, regardless of considerable rough bantering, meanwhile keeping a tight rein on his mare. There were others who knew it not so well. Suddenly from the head of the column burst forth a tumult of oaths, while at the same moment the caravan stopped, thrown into confusion by the unexpected halt.
The last of the pack ponies had just passed Lachlan. He wheeled his mare into the middle of the road and, standing in his stirrups, grinned at what he saw.
"Sailors and packhorse men," he said softly. "Lucifer and Beelzebub."
The three seamen from Lance Falcon's ship sat their horses squarely in the middle of the road, completely blocking it. Whether they were drunk and therefore rashly belligerent, or whether they were unable to control their mounts, confused by the shouts and the cracking whips, mattered little. In an instant they were beset by a mob of pack drivers, cursing, flourishing long whips, ugly knives and tomahawks; and in another instant the three had their cutlasses out, swinging them like flails.
Sober or drunk, they handled themselves well. Their horses—nags hired in Charles Town—reared and pawed the air; but, bad horsemen though they were, they hung on somehow, as sailors will, and not only kept their seats but plied their weapons so vigorously that the pack drivers fell back before the flashing arcs of steel.
The lull gave the two hunters in charge of the caravan their opportunity. They jumped their horses between the combatants, and while one of them faced the seamen, the other wheeled his mount, held his rifle high over his head, and shouted, "Clear the road!"
There were mutterings, curses, but, as the hunter rode forward, a path opened through the throng of the pack train drivers, and along this path behind the man in buckskin rode the three seamen, scowling and defiant, the other hunter bringing up the rear. Oaths were flung at them a-plenty, but no driver struck at them with his whip or hurled tomahawk or knife. In two minutes they were past the last of the pack ponies, and the two hunters, wheeling their horses without a word, set themselves to the task of getting the pack train in motion again.
The thing had been neatly done. In a twinkling, by quick, cool work, a riot which threatened bloodshed had been nipped in the bud. Lachlan's black eyes followed curiously the two quiet men who had dealt with the emergency. They interested him, however, as individuals, not as types. If there was romance in these fringed and beaded hunters with their long rifles, in the half-naked plumed and painted Indian warriors who rode with them, in the train of pack ponies that had come with their burden of skins perhaps a hundred leagues out of the heart of the wilderness, he was not aware of it. These were the common things of life, the things that he had known all his life long. It was not of them that he dreamed when the hours lagged in Charles Town, and he beguiled them with idle imaginings.
The pack train was moving off, with a mighty cracking of whips. Lachlan spoke to his mare and rode on slowly in the opposite direction. Ahead of him at a brisker pace jogged the three seamen, bare elbows flapping awkwardly, earrings flashing, the gaudy red scarves on their heads glowing in the sun. He held his mare to a slow walk so that they might draw well ahead, but his eyes followed them until they disappeared around a bend of the road. They were rather ridiculous figures on their trotting nags, these equestrian mariners, but to Lachlan they brought visions of far seas, golden cities of the Indies, the glittering lights of London. From them his thoughts roamed to their leader, that Lance Falcon, half soldier of fortune, half sea captain, of whose exploits on many seas and in many lands strange tales were told in the waterfront taverns. And from Lance Falcon they passed to another figure scarcely less glamorous—a slim, dandified exquisite from London, befrilled and periwigged, dressed in the extreme of the English fashion, whom he had seen that morning mincing along the street towards the Governor's Mansion.
His thoughts played with these men. Here was Romance! Here were mind-pictures of far-off wonderful seaports of the fabulous East; of fleets and armies and treasure ships and Old-World castles and tall towers; of courts and kings and high-born silken ladies whose eyes outshone their jewels.
It was April, the flood tide of spring, the season of dreams. For a while Lachlan McDonald dreamed. He turned his mare presently and rode slowly back to his lodging in town. That evening he dined alone. Having paid his score, he sat for a time in Marshall's inn, turning over in his mind the matters to be dealt with during his last two days in Charles Town, for he had fixed his departure now for the third day.
These matters were chiefly personal. He must say good-bye to James Almayne, the hunter, his father's old friend; to Mr. Francis O'Sullivan, his former teacher; to several influential gentlemen of the Colony to whom he was indebted for courtesies and favours; to three or four young ladies and to certain young men. These farewells spoken, there would be little else to engage him.
He rose presently and, with a nod to Jem Marshall, went out into the street. From the wide thoroughfare along the waterfront, thronged with seamen from the ships in harbour, he turned into a dark cross-street and thence into a narrow lane under a garden wall; and suddenly, as he walked briskly along this deserted lane, he was aware of two songs floating over the wall on the soft, sweet-scented April air—the song of a bird and the song of a woman.
Something in the sound stopped him. Head back, lips parted, he stood listening; and for as much as a minute the song of the woman went unheeded, and he heard only the song of the bird.
It was the first sanguilla of the spring, and in an instant its music caught him up and whirled him far. For a little while his thoughts lingered in a green country where he had first heard the sanguillas sing. Then the woman's voice, richer and sweeter even than that of the black and russet bird, brought him reluctantly back to the dim lane where he stood beside a high-walled garden.
Slowly that voice won its way into his consciousness. He had listened to the Muskogee girls, daughters of the Wind and of the White Deer, singing in the moonlight beside the clear rippling waters of Tallasee, but they had not sung as this woman was singing. He was aware suddenly that there was a kinship between the woman's song and that of the sanguilla, that somehow this singing woman had caught the very spirit of the singing bird; yet he was aware, too, that while the bird's song was wholly joyous, in the woman's there was a note of yearning and of sadness.
The rich tones stirred him strangely. He stood entranced, enthralled, scarcely breathing, his lips parted, his black eyes aglow. It was dim dusk now, and the air was heavy with the breath of wild blossoms. There must have been some strange prophetic magic in that moment. Somehow Lachlan McDonald knew that he stood at the threshold of a rare adventure.
This knowledge came to him suddenly, mysteriously as he listened bemused and fascinated; and it cleared his brain instantly, so that at once he grew alert and eager and fiercely joyful, all his senses keyed to the utmost. His eyes shone with an intenser light; his lean, dark face relaxed in a smile.
"Lady of the divine voice," he murmured, "the Lady Sanguilla, till I know your name: I think"
A new sound startled him into silence. The song ceased in a little frightened cry. Lachlan heard a man's voice spit forth an oath, then in a moment heard the rasp of swords. Almost at once a deeper voice flung out an exclamation of triumph. There came another cry from the woman, a short, loud cry of terror; and Lachlan, crouching an instant like a poised panther, leaped upward with outstretched hands, and, putting all his wiry strength into the effort, drew his spare, supple body to the top of the wall.
What he saw sent the blood leaping in his veins. It seemed to him that this shadowy garden was a stage set for the fulfilment of his dreams. Before him were the two men about whom his dreams had lately centred—the slim, periwigged exquisite from London whom he had seen that morning mincing towards the Governor's Mansion; and the tall, mysterious sea-wanderer, Captain Lance Falcon, whose brig, the Good Fortune, lay in the lower harbour and who, if the tavern gossips were to be believed, had cruised in the Red Sea and plundered the treasure ships of the Great Mogul. There was one other also,—a woman, slim, graceful, richly dressed in filmy white.
At a glance, while he crouched on the top of the wall behind a magnolia bough that screened him from view, Lachlan's black eyes took in these three figures in the garden, and at a glance he knew the essentials of what had happened. The gallant from London lay upon his face in the grass, and near him, its hilt almost touching his outstretched hand, lay his slender sword. Ten paces from him, erect, aloof, insolent even in its stillness and silence, loomed Falcon's powerful form. The dandy's light dress sword had been no match for his opponent's long, straight rapier. Plainly the foppish Londoner had gone down at the first onset; yet Lachlan could detect no trace of blood on Falcon's blade.
For a fraction of a second Lachlan's eyes scanned the steel for a tell-tale sign; then the slight figure of the girl, moving forward slowly as though in a daze, fixed his attention. He saw her stoop beside the prostrate man and bend low above him; and as she bowed her head, Lachlan dropped lightly to the ground within the garden.
A low hedge of evergreen cassena skirted the wall, forming an admirable screen. His footfalls made no sound as he ran swiftly parallel with the wall, bending forward to keep his head below the level of the young cassenas. Only a man trained in the woods could have stolen so silently through the dense clump of stiff-leafed canes close behind Captain Lance Falcon. When Lachlan leaped from the cover of the canes, he leaped upon an antagonist to whose ears no faintest warning had come.
Yet almost at once Lachlan knew that all the skill of his approach had not assured him the victory. His onset all but hurled Falcon to the ground; his long, sinewy arms pinioned those of his opponent. But the surge and heave of that wide-shouldered, longmuscled frame brought instant revelation of such strength as Lachlan had never before encountered.
Lachlan was strong as the catamount is strong, but the tall man with whom he grappled—older, bulkier, heavier—seemed as strong as a mountain bear. The struggle was short. Presently Lachlan was reeling backward towards the cane thicket, hurled thither by a mighty heave of his foeman's arms as Falcon tore himself free.
Panting, dishevelled, bleeding from a scratch on his forehead, Lachlan steadied himself at the thicket's edge and stood there half-dazed, awaiting the onslaught that must come. Falcon, his sun-tanned face a flaming red, his white teeth gleaming under his thick moustache, ran to the spot where his sword had fallen. Snatching up the weapon, he started furiously forward. But the woman, rising quickly from beside the fallen man, gripped his arm.
He halted and stood breathing hard, while she spoke rapidly, pleadingly, peremptorily, in tones so low that Lachlan could distinguish only a few disconnected words. At last Falcon nodded and answered her briefly in a deep voice that had in it the rumble of thunder or the surf. Deliberately he raised her hand to his lips and kissed it, despite her effort to draw it away. Then, without another glance at Lachlan, he strode off along a winding pathway of the garden.
Lachlan watched him go, then turned to face a worse ordeal than his struggle with Lance Falcon. He knew that, acting upon a sudden inexplicable impulse, he had done an amazingly foolish thing. He had hoped—he did not know why—to play the hero before this girl; but now he stood before her, beaten, outdone, humbled. He saw, or thought he saw, scorn and anger in her eyes as she began to speak. Yet chance gave him a brief respite. The man lying on the grass behind her moaned, stirred, and almost instantly sat upright, looking about him with blinking, uncomprehending eyes. She paused to address him.
"You are not hurt, Richard," she said, and it seemed to Lachlan that her tone was not only faintly contemptuous but that there was in it also a strange despairing bitterness. "You have a bruised eyebrow, that is all, but it will spoil your beauty for some days."
She turned to Lachlan where he stood against the canebrake, still panting a little but clear brained now and ready for what would come. It came—without delay.
"And you, sir," she said coldly, her head high, her large eyes narrowed, "perhaps you will be so good as to make known to me who you are, and why you take it upon yourself to assault my—my friend (she hesitated a little at the word) here in my garden."
Mr. Francis O'Sullivan, the expatriate Irishman, who had schooled Lachlan McDonald in manners and in fencing (both verbal and with the rapier), to say nothing of history and the arts, would have been proud of his pupil at that moment. There was a deep purpose in Lachlan's answer, and that purpose his answer was most skilfully designed to achieve.
He bowed courteously, yet with a certain stiffness.
"Mam'selle," he said, "with pleasure I do your bidding. My name is Lachlan McDonald, and I am a Scotsman, a Frenchman, and an Indian, a Prince of the Muskogee Nation, a Chief of the Family of the Wind. I entered your garden thinking to be of service, because I heard a clash of swords and saw you bending over a fallen man. I regret that my interference was untimely, and I bid you good evening."
He bowed again and, stepping swiftly backward, was lost in the gloom of the canes.