By the campfire Ginral Jerry sat with his head thrown back against the bole of pine, snoring, though the whites of his eyes showed a little. Willie lay near him, feigning sleep. Forrest squinted at him for a second, judged the boy would be asleep for real in another two or three minutes or so.
He stretched on the blanket Jerry had unrolled for him, shifting hip and shoulders to loosen the sand underneath. Was there something to think about? No, it would keep.
Forrest twitched and smiled in his sleep. His hard hand thumped the dirt beyond the blanket’s edge. Sitting with his knees drawn up, Willie studied him cautiously until he had stilled. A cloud of mosquitoes hovered over Forrest’s head, looking for a way in through wild hair and beard. Willie got up and crept barefoot toward the horses, his boots clamped under one elbow and his pistol belt in the other hand.
The panther slipped from tree to tree through Forrest’s dream. On some other ridge the dogs were singing, but Forrest was nearer to his prey than the dogs were, and he could see plain as day despite the dark. That was because he was dreaming, of course. While his aunt inspected the dressing of the wounds on his mother’s back, Bedford set his mouth in a pale line, lifted the octagon-barreled rifle and the powder horn down from the pegs, and went on the big cat’s trail without a word, though his aunt called for him not to go. Sister Fanny knew better than to say anything, and the least ones were busy playing with the chicks on the puncheon floor. His mother said nothing. She was lying facedown with her chin hanging over the edge of the pallet, her eyes big and dark, biting her lower lip against the sting of the turpentine on the red furrows the panther had plowed down her back.
Outside the dogs found sign at once and raced after it bugling, but Bedford scarcely attended to their racket. It seemed to him that there was a clear lucid filament passing through the woods to join his mind to the mind of the panther so that he already knew when and where the animal would be brought to bay and had only to keep walking steadily toward that time and place, his eyes as wide and round as the moon would have been. But it was a moonless night.
· · ·
“HELL AND I wasn’t shore it was you!” Willie said when he found Henri and Matthew in a clearing. “It’s loose niggers running all over these woods.”
Henri picked out Matthew’s profile against a patch of starlit sky. The boy’s lower jaw stuck out a little from the strain of clenching his teeth.
“Well, it’s true,” Willie said to their backs.
They rode on through a silence that slowly surrendered its edge. Thirty minutes on, Henri’s horse raised its head and flared its nostrils.
“We’re not far from the river,” Willie said quietly, and Henri guessed he could smell the water too.
It was Willie too who picked up the first flicker of movement by the boulder on the bank, or maybe he heard something, smelled something—of a sudden his whole body lined up behind the barrel of his pistol like a bird dog throws its whole self into its pointing nose. A man stood up slowly from the rock with his empty hands upraised and his head lowered. Against the dim quicksilver sheen of the Chattooga they could all see his body shaking.
“Massa!” The voice trembling too. “We ain’t go to do it. It was deh Yankees …”
There was the softer speech of the deepest Deep South, somewhat unaccustomed to Henri’s ear still. He strained his eyes against the shadow of the rock. There was something else there and Matthew had trained his pistol on it. Henri got down from his horse and struck a light. A woman sat in the shelter of the boulder, cradling a baby in a cloth sling against her breast. She was very young, and the child not three weeks old.
“Put up those pistols,” he told the boys, and cupped the flame to shine on his own face. “Stop acting like a slave,” he said. “I’m no man’s master but my own.”
“I is a slave,” the man said. But he straightened his back and stopped shaking.
Henri nodded to the woman by the rock, and snuffed his light. “Have you been with Colonel Streight?”