Read Online The Road to Reckoning by Robert Lautner - Free Book Online Page A

English more than not. It was for independence again. Make no error.’
    ‘What was your part?’
    ‘To be a privateer. I wanted to sail but a ship is for a young man. I wanted to kill those blue-light traitors. But I was not for sailing. Before that, Tipton, that’s John Shields Tipton, enlisted me in the rangers. I protected two forts with him and rode with Zachary Taylor, a Virginian like me, but that was in the Seventh Infantry. I believe they are both in Washington now. I was paid a dollar a day and had a smart leather hat and vest. We were militia and I believe we were smarter than those army buckskins. Could shoot at least. The shame of it came at Wildcat Creek. What them who were not there call the Spurs Defeat.’ He spat and swallowed the words back with more rum.
    ‘Thems who say the army turned and ran from the Indians with their spurs bleeding their mounts to gets away faster. Them scribblers call it the Spurs Defeat. That is true for some of the boys.’ He drank longer. ‘Not us.
    ‘There was a man called Benoît who was a trader with the tribes. It was believed that he had betrayed what we would be at. He was caught and set to be burned alive at a stake. I took up my wind-rifle that I had taken from an Austrian fighting for the British and shot him before the flame was lit. No-one really minded. I just didn’t see that any man should be killed like that. Just as long as he died was good enough.’
    ‘And after the war? You were still a ranger?’
    ‘We protected.’
    ‘Protected what?’
    ‘Settlers. Fought the Indians that had betrayed us in the wars. They started to move out anyways. I never killed one that did not go at me. Killed three Choctaw with my hands when they had pulled me from my horse. They were not much older than you. I have not now been a ranger for seventeen years.’ He drank to this.
    ‘What is your work now?’ The rum had loosed his tongue and I had the conversation that was as good as food to me for without it my mind hung too much on what had passed. And I needed the words of men.
    ‘Well, it may surprise that I was born in a brick house in Orange county, Virginia. My father had twenty slaves. I am an educated man and my father had served with Washington, and that’s a fact you can bank. I had seven brothers and sisters. My father’s name was Fear Stands—you may picture him from that. I know none of them now. I left when my mother died and took my inheritance before my father died on the agreement that I would not bother him again. I was a hell-raiser and dabbler in the flesh, which did not suit my rearing. In naught-eight I joined the Seventh and we went into Indiana and I met Tipton and he brought me into the rangers, who drank more and was looser, and that I liked.’
    I had asked about his living and perhaps he had not heard me or perhaps this was his way of explaining it. He took a drink and got to it.
    ‘I will sell tobacco and I will sell horses or anything I can. I do not want for much. You have caught me on my way to Cherry Hill, where they will have men who have escaped. Men like prison in the winter but the summer is not to their liking. You can live rough, you can find work, find a crew and stay the hangman, impregnate a woman and plead her belly. They will pay me fifty dollars to bring one back.’
    I jumped on his words. ‘Perhaps this Thomas Heywood is one who has escaped!’
    ‘That is as like. More he is a teamster on hard times. It is sorrowful for young men nowadays.’
    I did not like these words of sympathy for a murderer. But I was all in with Henry Stands so I let it ride. He might have still kicked me to the road. The night came in and our Indian meal was done. We had one wooden spoon so eating was slow, but as it was hot I did not mind. He pulled out a yellow pocket map while I ate my share.
    ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Let us see where to lose you.’ He leaned back and forward at the map, squinting all the while. ‘I have had this atlas yet two