The Ballad of Frankie Silver - By Sharyn McCrumb Page 0,117

herself rode with eyes downcast, as oblivious to the stares of the crowd as she had been at her trial. Her hands were bound with rope, but her feet dangled at the horse’s side, not tied together beneath the belly of her mount, as were those of her accomplices. She was wearing men’s clothing: buckskin breeches and a homespun shirt beneath a man’s coat, and her blond hair tumbled out from beneath a wide-brimmed leather hat, although it must have been bound up when the searchers came upon them. She was small and sturdy enough to pass for a young boy. I thought the clothes must have belonged to Blackston Stewart, and I wondered if he had been left at home to tend the homestead, or if he had got away into the forest when the lawmen came.

An old man in the crowd called out: “How did ye take her, boys?”

One of the rear guard reined in his bay mare, and leaned back in the saddle with a grin of lazy triumph. Whatever happened,I thought, you had least to do with it.“Well,” he said, “it weren’t an easy hunt. It’s perilous country out there, and you could turn around twice and be lost, but we tracked them well enough, though the going was slow when they left the trail and took to the woods. We might not have caught them at all, but for the high water.”

Someone laughed and called out, “Come hell or high water, was it?”

“Some of both, I reckon,” said the rider. “We reckoned on them heading west into Buncombe County and then making for the Tennessee line, but that is not what they done. They was in Rutherford County when we caught up to them, trying to ford the river, which was so swollen from the spring rains that their horses could not manage the crossing.”

“Did you shoot it out with them?”

The sad little procession had moved on up the street now, and the rider looked after them as if he wanted to end the talk and catch up to the others, but after a moment he perceived that they were only a few yards from the jail, and there were townsmen aplenty surrounding them now, eager to have a tiny part in the recapture of a notorious outlaw so that they, too, might become tellers of tales. I watched the prisoners being dragged from their horses, and I wondered where it was they were headed. Rutherford County is due south of us, and not on the way to Tennessee. Perhaps the Stewarts originally came from down that way, and they were taking Frankie back to kinfolk there, or in South Carolina. Anywhere but here,I thought. For if ever they could have eluded the searchers and made them turn back with no more leads to follow, they would have got away. The sheriff had neither the means nor the heart to prolong the search for her. Another day would have seen her safe.

Seeing that he was no longer needed among the hunters, the straggling horseman mopped his brow with a muddy rag and turned his attention back to the little crowd that hung on his every word.

“Well, now, I can’t say that I heard tell of any shooting,” he said. “The fugitives were hoping to put so much distance between themselves and Burke County that they would never have to see us at all, and, failing that, they were thinking they could outsmart us. Old Frankie was dressed as a boy, and the other two were trying to get a loaded wagon over the river. So one of the trackers—a fellow name of Gouge, I think it was—went up to the wagon and says to the little lad, ‘You’re Frankie Silver, ain’t you?’ She ducks her head and says, ‘No, sir. My name is Tommy.’” The rider paused and grinned. “That big fellow yonder was a-driving the wagon, and he heard them talking. ‘That’s right!’ he hollers out. ‘ Hername is Tommy.’ ”

The listeners roared appreciatively, and several of them echoed, “ Hername is Tommy,” to impress it in their minds before they hurried away to regale their friends with the news.

I wondered if it had happened that way, or if the fellow had used the ride back to Morganton to come up with a rousing tale for the taverns. He would drink his fill tonight on the recital of that one, I thought. There would be revelry tonight in the inns of Morganton, I thought