The Glory River by Cameron Judd

Author:Cameron Judd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

It was easy now for Bush to understand what had overtaken Jim Lusk in the last days of his life.

Lusk had lost a wife, a greater loss, Bush knew, than that of a friend and partner, but the grief was similar. And with the passing of Cephas went his sole source of encouragement to keep up the seemingly vain search for Marie Underhill, Bush felt a double bereavement.

As he watched himself over passing weeks, he began to wonder if the soul of Jim Lusk had mystically replaced his own.

Bush found he simply wasn’t the man he was. He began making mistakes, losing the edge of perfection that always marked his woodcraft. His mind wandered; at times he became lost in areas he’d traveled a score of times with Cephas Frank.

It was just like Lusk had done.

One new thing entered Bush’s life that hadn’t entered Lusk’s in his last days. Bush began to drink, much more than he ever had. He’d never really had much fondness for liquor, drinking it minimally, never getting drunk, and many times taking a simple glass of cold water in honest preference over stronger drinks others clamored for. It was different now. He left the woods behind, began haunting the dives of riverside communities, drinking, brawling, acting and even looking so different from his prior self that he sometimes went initially unrecognized by men he’d met on the river years before.

Bush forgot much of himself as days passed, even stopped thinking about Marie, who’d occupied at least some back corner of his attention almost constantly since that day at Nickajack when he’d pledged to find her, no matter what. But he never forgot what happened to Cephas Frank, and his vow to find and punish his killers.

Bush got it in mind to go to Natchez. There, in the hellholes and dens of infamous Natchez-under-the-hill, he would have a better chance of finding the sort of river trash who would murder a man such as Cephas.

He continued working his way southward, living on what he could kill, and twice, to his astonishment, on what he could steal. These thefts were not large, just a loaf of bread in one case and half a pie in another, but they were atypical of Bushrod Underhill, who’d had honesty drilled into his soul by Jean-Yves Freneau in his earliest days, and reinforced by Jim Lusk and others since.

Bush was half-drunk one late afternoon on a saloon barge that had pulled to shore about halfway between the Chickasaw Bluffs and Natchez, when he found what he was looking for. He’d been seated on a keg at the edge of the barge, looking out across the water and drinking from a dirty pewter cup, when a flatboat came into view up the river. He watched it idly as it drifted along at the speed of the current.

A friendly young boy, son of the owner of the saloon barge, came over to Bush and sat down crosslegged beside him. “Look yonder at them clouds sweeping up,” the boy said.

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