Cold Mountain (1998) by Frazier Charles

Author:Frazier, Charles [Charles, Frazier,]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2010-12-19T00:41:47.468000+00:00

You listen, the yellow man said. A band of Federals broke out of Salisbury prison last week, and the roads are running thick with patrols riding day and night looking for them. You try to go through there, they'll sure catch you up, you're not careful. Probably catch you even if you are.

What would be best to do?

Where you headed?

West.

Cut north. Go toward Wilkes. Taking that heading, there's Moravians and Quakers all the way that will help. Hit the bottom of the Blue Ridge and then cut south again following the foothills. Or go on into the mountains and follow the ridges back down to your course. But, they say it's cold and rough back in there.

That's where I'm from, Inman said.

The yellow man gave him cornmeal twisted up in paper and tied with twine, a strip of salt pork, and some pieces of roast pork. Then he worked for some time scratching out a map in ink on a piece of paper, and when it was done it was a work of art. All detailed with little houses and odd-shaped barns and crooked trees with faces in their trunks and limbs like arms and hair. A fancy compass rose in one corner. And there were notes in a precise script to say who could be trusted and who could not. Gradually things got vague and far apart until in the west all was white but for interlinked arcs the man had drawn to suggest the shapes of mountains.

That's as far as I've been, he said. Just right there to the edge.

You can read and write? Inman said.

Got a crazy man for a master. That law don't mean a thing to him.

Inman reached in his pockets for money to give the man. He thought to draw out a generous amount, but he found his pockets empty and remembered that what money he had left was in the haversack hidden in Junior's woodpile.

I wish I had something to pay you with, Inman said.

I might not have took it anyway, the man said.

Several nights later Inman stood in front of the slanted house. It sat toadlike down in its swale, and the windows were all black. He softly called the three-legged dog from out its den and offered it a piece of pork bone that he had carried in his pocket wrapped in sycamore leaves. The dog came sniffing, soundless. It snatched the bone and then disappeared under the front porch. Inman followed the dog down to the house and circled around to the rear. The big fire was but a cold black pock on the ground. He went to the back porch. His knapsack still lay there in a pile. He looked through it, and everything was there but for Veasey's Colt pistol. He thrust his arm into the woodstack and seized the haversack and felt the butt of the LeMat's through the fabric. He drew it forth and it was like a tonic to feel the weight of the pistol in his hand, the balance and the sound when he pulled back the hammer.

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