Nighthawk's Wing by Charles Fergus

Author:Charles Fergus
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781951627508
Publisher: Arcade Crimewise
Published: 2020-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Storm is gathering in the west

And you are so far from home

Chapter 19

JACK WALKED.

True felt like she was sitting on a broad stool that moved in a strange and unfamiliar way beneath her.

It took Jack a long time to carry her out of town. It seemed to True as if the gelding were an old man out for a stroll, pausing to lean on his cane and look at this, look at that. Pottering. Old Dick trotted along with them, making forays into the brush and coming back and rejoining them on the road.

Jack walked past thick-trunked sycamores with their parti-colored bark and ranks of smaller birches with their flaky coppery bark, the trees lining the banks of Spring Creek, whose flow, glimpsed between the trunks, coiled murkily and lazily in its bed. The road passed through deep woods, past hills scalped by the colliers, and over a stretch of flat streamside land known as Bald Eagle’s Nest, named for an Indian chief who had once kept his camp there. True’s brother Jesse had told her once that Bald Eagle was murdered by the settlers; they laid his body in his canoe, stuffed a piece of johnnycake in his mouth, and set the canoe adrift in the stream. Jesse said that Bald Eagle’s restless spirit flew back to his nest and haunted the place to this day, Jesse naming her a ’fraid baby and scaring her witless with this and many other such tales.

Jack stopped. He took the bit between his teeth and threw down his head, pulling the reins out of True’s hands. He grazed, his head moving from side to side, his teeth making little ripping sounds as he cropped the grass. True sat on Jack’s broad back as he ate. He lifted his head, looked around, lowered his head again, and tore off more grass.

When he had finished eating, he resumed walking.

True picked up the reins again.

They met an ox-drawn wagon filled with iron bars. Then a man striding along wearing a battered top hat, a bulky sack thrown over his shoulder. Jack stopped and regarded each in turn as they approached and passed.

The road and the stream cut through the gap in Muncy Mountain.

When the road emerged into Panther Valley, True looked east toward the ironworks. She heard the faint clang of the forge hammer and the thump of the blowing tubs; saw the yellowish gray soot smudging the air above the furnace. At the ironworks was the cabin where she had been born, where her parents still lived, in the shadow of the ironmaster’s mansion.

Jack walked across the covered bridge spanning Panther Creek, his hooves thumping the planks. They left the bridge’s shaded interior and came back into glare. The air was hot and the sun beat down. True hadn’t worn her bonnet; it had seemed like too much work to find it and put it on.

At the fork, she tugged on the left rein, and Jack turned away from the ironworks and headed west down the valley.

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