“Hold on, hold on!” Royce had gotten a torch from another man, and now he added its glaring light to the scene. “Matthew, we all want to do the right thing. We know Abram killed Sarah. Gunn caught him with the knife, standin’ over the body just after he’d stabbed her. Now…Mr. Kincannon has been laid low by this, and Mrs. Kincannon is near out of her mind. We want to take the skins back for a proper hangin’…but an awful lot can happen before we get ’em there. That’s just how it is.”
“I want ’em taken back alive too.” Magnus had taken a position at Matthew’s side, with Quinn behind him. “Mrs. Kincannon’s got some questions she needs to ask Abram.”
Matthew wished Magnus had not said this, but the cat had jumped from its bag. “She wants to know why Abram killed Sarah,” Matthew clarified. “She can’t rest until she knows.”
Royce stared forcefully into Matthew’s eyes. “Well…maybe we can find out for her, if it comes to that. But you rest easy, sir. We know these animals and you don’t. We know what they would do to us, if they could. So…we’ll do our best to obey the lady’s biddin’, but the reality of it is…we’re out here in these thorns, and she’s there in that big house. A long way off. And sometimes even the rich folks in the big house can’t always get what they want.” He dismissed Matthew with a shrug of his shoulders. “You leadin’ the way, Stamper? Let’s get movin’, then.”
They pushed on through the thorns, following the crushed track of the runaways. Several of the men gave Matthew and Magnus jeering looks as they passed, as if daring them to step between a musket, a sword, and a slave.
“We ought to go back,” Quinn said, clutching at Matthew’s good arm. “Let them go on, find those slaves and do whatever they’re gonna do. You can’t stop ’em.”
Matthew thought that by now he couldn’t find his way back, even if he wanted to. “I have to try,” he told her quietly, though what he truly desired was a bed of moss and another two hours of sleep. His vision kept blurring in and out and his legs felt near collapse. But he had to keep going, and that was that. The Great One would be proud of him…or else be telling him to get the hell out of this situation because he was an addle-pated fool.
He followed the others, and Quinn followed her Daniel, and Magnus snorted flying insects from his nostrils and also pressed onward.
Fifteen
Not ten minutes after passing through the last of the thorns, Matthew heard the crack of a gunshot.
It was over on the left, in the storm-darkened woods. “Who fired that?” Stamper hollered in the echo of the shot. Beside him stood Royce and Gunn, both with their torches and secrets.
“Seth Lott!” came the shouted answer, from maybe sixty feet away. The voice was raw and tremulous, had lost its smooth Christian sheen. “Come over here, quick!”
“You get a skin?”
“Just come over here! Now, for the love of God!” A note of panic flared.
“Got his codpiece on too tight,” Stamper muttered, and then he headed in the direction of Lott’s voice. Royce and Gunn followed, and behind them Matthew, Magnus and Quinn. Other men emerged from the woods to see if Lott had earned his ten pounds. But when the group reached Lott, where the smell of gunpowder was thick in the air and wisps of blue smoke still roiled, the black-garbed and sweating preacher was standing with Caleb Bovie, who shone a torch upon something lying in the green underbrush.
“What is that?” Stamper asked.
It was a body, Matthew saw. The boots were muddy and the soles nearly worn through.
“Who is it?” Royce stepped forward for a closer look with his own torch, and then when he got it he immediately stopped in his tracks, his mouth hanging half-open.
“It’s Fitzy,” Bovie rasped. Matthew recalled the thin young man who’d obediently sliced a piece of snakemeat for Stamper. Except now the lower part of his face had been ripped away, and most of his throat. The eyes were open in a frozen stare above the mass of bloodied flesh. Quinn saw what Matthew had seen, and pulled back. “Christ Jesus…somethin’ tore him up!” Bovie looked at Lott and then to Stamper. “He was between me and Seth! I didn’t hear nothin’, ’til that shot went off!”
“He was walking ahead of me and to the side. Maybe twenty feet away.” Lott’s voice was shaking. “Had his pistol in his hand, but…it happened so quick.”
“What happened?” Stamper demanded. “What’d you see?”
“I don’t know. Just…something was all of a sudden there, where the dark is. I couldn’t make it out, but it jumped on Fitzy. I heard…” The preacher had to pause a moment, with a trembling hand to his mouth. “I heard the bones break. It shook him…hard…like a ragdoll. I shot at it…all that smoke, and it was gone. Fitzy…he gave a shudder and a…a strangling noise…and that was all.”
“Well what in hell was it?” Royce asked. “A panther?”
Lott’s eyes were watery and dazed, and he struggled to speak. “Maybe. I don’t know. It was big. And…it did not move right, to be a panther.”
“What does that mean?” Stamper’s voice was harsh. “How did it move?”
“I…can’t say. Like…a jerking motion. Unnatural.” Lott stared at Quinn before he returned his attention to Stamper. “It was…brown and black. Streaked…blotched. Its head…also unnatural. And…Stamper, whatever it was…Soul Cryer or—”
“Stop that!” Stamper said. “Hear me? Stop it! There’s no such beast!”
“Whatever it was,” the preacher went on, “it came at Fitzy on two legs…like a man.”
“You don’t know that for sure!” Royce’s face had reddened, and he was nearly shouting it. “You didn’t see enough to know that! Now stop your ghost stories, preacherman! A panther got Fitzgerald, is what I say! That’s all!”
“Ain’t that enough as it is?” asked Morgan, with a quick, flinching glance at the body. “I told you me, Whetters and Carr heard somethin’ stalkin’ us! I say we were lucky to get past that damn Indian village with our heads…but a panther out here…and maybe somethin’ that’s more than a panther?” He shook his head, as distant thunder rumbled from a sky that seemed to Matthew to be as dark as a coal mine. “More than I want to handle, no matter the money.”
“Then don’t handle it!” Royce shot back. “Get on your way! Course, a man alone tryin’ to get back to his boat…that’s a long walk, Morgan! But go on, we don’t need you!”
Morgan looked to another man, standing beside Bovie. “Carr, you with me?” His gaze moved. “Whetters? Halleck, how about you? Not enough liquor in the world’s worth your life.”
The men Morgan had spoken to shifted in their tracks, their faces downcast.
“I shall go with you, Morgan,” Lott suddenly said, his face glistening with sweat beneath the black tricorn. He managed another look at the body. “Yes. I’ll go.”
“Me, too,” said a second citizen of Jubilee, who Matthew thought was the man named Whetters.
“I’m for it,” said a third man—Carr, most likely—and the muddied Coleman, who carried a torch, announced, “Ain’t worth dyin’ for thirty pounds of gold. I’ll go, too.”
“Then get!” Royce snarled. “All you fools…and you’re the biggest fool, preacherman! Yes, you go lead this flock of cowards home, and good riddance to you!” He swung his fevered gaze upon Matthew, Magnus and the girl. “Aren’t you goin’ with ’em? Now’s your chance!”
“I’ll stay,” said Magnus. He regarded Matthew with his iron-gray eyes. “You ought to head on back. Both of you. I’ll do what I can.”