The mill was ready, and again I ground my meal, the noise allowing for no talk, but when I'd emptied the hopper I said, "If it is enemies I have, it is the Caffreys. I know of no others."
He shot me a curious glance, which puzzled me with its content. "Not three tall, mustached men with dark hair and long faces? Three tall men as alike as peas in a pod ... named Kurbishaw?"
"It was my mother's name."
"They are riding to kill you."
"You saw them where?"
"In the Cherokee towns. They asked questions there."
"The Indians are my friends. They will tell them nothing."
"When last I saw them they had old Midah Wolf and were buying him drink."
Midah was an old man with a love for the bottle and a memory of youth that only drink could bring back. When drunk, he was enemy to no man and would surely talk. He would be sorry after, but that would be of no help.
"The Kurbishaws are my mother's folk. They will surely be coming for other reasons."
"I have heard them say, "We have killed the wolf, now we shall kill the whelp."'"
They had killed the wolf? If by that they meant my father, I did not believe them. My father might have many faults, but lack of shrewdness was not one of them. As I grew older I had remembered his actions around our mountain cabin, and now I knew that he had been aware of danger, that he had lived no moment without that awareness.
Yet he had not returned ... had they killed him, indeed?
"I have only my father's worn-out rifle," I said, "and a dislike for shooting men I do not know, nor have I any appetite for violence."
The Tinker glanced at me shrewdly, and I wondered what went on behind those yellow eyes. Was he my friend, in truth? Had I learned this doubt of people? Was it acquired by brief but hard experience?
"If they find their way to the Crossing, Caffrey will be quick to tell them where you are." The Tinker turned his yellow eyes straight at me.
"Did you never wonder why your pa came to this lonely place with his bride? There's a story told in the lowland towns."
"There was trouble when he married ma. Her family objected to him."
"Objected is a mild ^w. They objected so much they hired a man to kill him when his brothers-in-law decided against trying it. Your pa killed the man and then lit out for the hills so he would not have to kill her brothers and have their blood between them.
"Or so the story is told. Yet there is a whisper of something else, of something beyond pride of family. There is a tale that they hated your father for a reason before he even met your mother."
We Sacketts had come early to the mountains.
Welsh folk we were, Welsh and Irish, and my family had come to America one hundred and fifty years before the Colonies fought for their independence. A relative of mine had been killed in the fierce fighting in North Carolina in the revolt that failed.
We settled on the frontier, as it then was, along the flanks of the Blue Ridge and Smoky mountains, and there we made ourselves part of the rocky hills and the forests. Pa was the first of our family to run off to the lowlands and return with a bride.
The Kurbishaws made much of themselves and cut a wide swath among the lowland folk, looking down their long noses at us who lived in the hills.
We Sacketts set store by kinfolk, but we never held up our family with pride. A mill grinds no corn with water that is past. Come trouble, we Sacketts stand shoulder to shoulder as long as need be, but we made no talk of ancestors, nor how high they stood in the community.
Yet it was no wonder that pa took the eye of the lowland girls, for he was a fine, upstanding man with a colorful way about him, and he cut quite a dash in the lowland towns.
He rode a fine black gelding, his pockets filled with gold washed from a creek the Cherokees showed him, and he dressed with an elegance and a taste for fine tailoring. There was gold from another source, too, and as a child I saw those hoarded coins a time or two.
My father showed me one of them and I loved the dull reflection of the nighttime firelight upon it.
"There is more where that came from, laddie, more indeed.
One day we shall gather it, you and I."
"Let it lie," ma said. "The earth is a fit place for it."
Such times pa would flash her that bright, quick smile of his and show her that hard light in his black eyes. "I might have told them where it was, had they acted differently about us," he would say; "but if they have it now it shall cost them blood."
How long since I had thought of that story? How long since I had even seen that gold until pa brought it out to turn over to Caffrey for my education and keep?
Her brothers had planned for ma to marry wealth and power, and when she ran off with pa they were furious, and challenged him. He refused them, and as he refused them he held two finely wrought pistols in his hands.
"You do not wish to fight me," he said, and tossed a bottle into the air. With one pistol he smashed the bottle, andwiththe second he hit a falling fragment. It was after that they hired a man to kill him.
Pa and ma would have lived their lives among the lowland folk had the Kurbishaws let them be, but they used their wealth and power to hound them out of Virginia and the Carolinas, until finally they took refuge in the mountain cabin among the peaks, which pa built with his own hands.
The cabin was a fair, kind place among the rocks and trees, with a cold spring at the back and a good fishing stream not a hundred yards off. And happily they lived there until ma died.
"If you stay here," the Tinker went on, "they will kill you. You have but the one barrel of your old rifle and they are three armed men, and skilled at killing."
"They are my uncles, after all."
"They are your enemies, and you are not your father.
These men are fighters, and you are not."
My head came up angrily, for he spoke against my pride. "I can fight!"
Impatience was in his voice and attitude when he answered. "You have fought against boys or clumsy men. That is not fighting. Fighting is a skill to be learned. I saw you whip the three Lindsay boys, but any man with skill could have whipped you easily."
"There were three of them."
The Tinker knocked the ash from his pipe. his'Lando, you are strong, one of the strongest men I know, and surprising quick, but neither of these things makes you a fighter. Fighting is a craft, and it must be learned and practiced. Until you know how to fight with your head as well as with heart and muscle, you are no fighting man."
"And I suppose you know this craft?"
I spoke contemptuously, for the idea of the Tinker as a fighting man seemed to me laughable.
He was long and thin, with nothing much to him.
"I know a dozen kinds. How to fight with the fists, the open hand, and Japanese- as well as Cornish-style wrestling. If we travel together, I will teach you."
Teach me? I bit my tongue on angry ^ws, for my pride was sore hurt that he took me so lightly. Had I not, when only a boy, whipped Duncan Caffrey, and him two years older and twenty pounds heavier? And since then I'd whipped eight or nine more, men and boys; and at Clinch's Creek was I not cock of the walk?
And he spoke of teaching me!
Opening his pack, the Tinker brought out a packet of coffee, for he carried real coffee and not the dried beans and chicory we mountain folk used. Without moving from where he was, he reached out and brought together chips, bark, and bits of twigs left from my wood-cutting andof them he made a fire.
He was a man who disliked the inside of places, craving the freeness of the open air about him. Some said it was because he must have been locked up once upon a time, but I paid no mind to gossip.
While he started the fire and put water on to boil, I went to a haunch of venison hanging in the shed and cut a healthy bait of it into thick slices for roasting at the fire. Then I returned to grind more meal.