The Long Knife by Louis A. Brennan

Author:Louis A. Brennan [Brennan, Louis A.]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: OCR-Editing, Western
Google: Fi7EpwAACAAJ
Amazon: B002ARRSYM
Publisher: Dell
Published: 1960-12-14T23:00:00+00:00

chapter 15

After two days more Little Moon brought him an ash staff with a fork in it for a crutch. She didn’t say anything but she looked like this was the day meant for seeing Night Fly. When he stood up she handed him his knife to belt on, a new one that had been given him, she said, by Lynx.

He couldn’t walk much better three-legged than a stool could. Four or five days it would be before he could carry his rifle instead of this leg-stick, and maybe ten before he could run a trail. Oh, and it was the greenest time of the year, the middle of July about, the way the whites figured days. In the cornfields it was dust-dry, but a summer drought was the pleasantest time of all in the woods; it never dried out too much in there. All the way from here to Muskingum it would be berrying time. Mostly the dewberries and strawberries would be gone, but the biggest and sweetest ones would be left in the shaded patches on the north slopes. Where the sun fell most the huckleberries and blackberries would be coming in to bear, and if you looked close you might find some wild-tater vines with little rifle-ball taters on them. Anywhere you’d want to look there’d be leeks and wild celery and lettuce greens. This was just the beginning of the fat half of the year…

His thinking soared out of his head to a buzzard’s height and went eastward, naming the creeks and the ridges and the swamps, seeing a buffalo here, an elk there, a bear.

… and then it stopped as though it had been hit by lead, and came down, cripple-winged, into the grove at Piney Bluff.

There was a clearing big enough for a cabin and Meg Farney had axmen limbing out the felled timber. She slipped away to him, lurking in the black woods.

“But you cannot come here, Flash-in-the-Sun. This is Richard’s land. He owns over twelve hundred acres. Do you know how much that is? And you cannot go into Limestone with your sang root. Richard has friends there. And others are coming to take up this land, and they are friends of Richard. It is no longer the Ohio country, Flash-in-the-Sun. It is acres. It is Richard’s; it is Richard’s friends’. What will you do now? One of us will get you, Flash-in-the-Sun; Little Moon or Wetzel, or Richard or I.”

“Why do you look to the south and Limestone Fort, Flash-in-the-Sun,” Little Moon said from behind him, and he hadn’t even hard her come up till the babe whimpered. “Are you seeing that woman?”

“I have no woman there.”

“Who patches a man’s hunting shirt, where there is a hole in it over his heart, but his woman?”

“It was her ball that put the hole in it. You saw the streak of it on my chest.”

“If she shot you why did she then put a scent-spell on you?”

“I know of no such scent-spell.”

“It was in your powder horn.

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