Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

the pale starlight a black bear stood upright in the doorway and pissed in the snow. No, not a bear. A huge man in a bearskin coat with the head of the bear still attached and pulled up over his head. The animal's front legs were tied loosely over the massive chest of the man in the shaggy coat, each bear paw as big around as the bottom of a milk pail. The bear-man saluted Jesse Moses hanging in the rowanberry tree, and as he did so, snapping off the salute neat and brisk as you please, Morgan raised Hunter and fired. The man gave a surprised howl and reeled backward into the cabin, gripping his left shoulder. In his haste Morgan had aimed high.

    "What is it?" a voice inside the camp cried out. "Did you spot the nigger wench? For God's sake don't kill her."

    The cabin door slammed shut. Morgan started running back down the mountainside toward the cedar bog.

    A T DAWN Ludi Too eased downslope in Morgan's tracks. The entire eastern sky was suffused with alternating bands of gold and crimson and turquoise. Ludi, wrapped in his reeking bearskin, elided into "Marching to Georgia" on his hammered dulcimer. He'd created the instrument from a washboard nailed over a rectangular ammunition box. The strings had belonged to a piano in a darky church that he'd fired. Chestnut-wood pegs, a black cherry soundboard. Inside the cut-down ammo box was a loose rattlesnake rattle to give the instrument vibrato and resonance. The dulcimerhung around his neck on a thick strap made from mule reins stained dark with sweat. He beat the strings with two mallets of yellow poplar, for of all the trees in the forest the tulip tree made the most melodious music in a windstorm. And oh, the dulcimer sounded like a whole marching band going off to war. Out of it Ludi could coax the wail of a fiddle, the ringing notes of a banjo, the feeling sentiment of a Spanish guitar, the percussive beat of a kettledrum, even the brassy blare of a bugle, cornet, or trombone. How he conjured such concerts from his homemade mountain instrument no one knew, least of all the musician himself. Even with an injured left shoulder where Morgan's musket ball had torn through flesh and grazed bone, Ludi was a wonder musician. It was said in the coves and hollows of Ludi's mountains that he could lure a wild rabbit out of a laurel thicket, the heart out of a pretty maid. The troubador could charm fish from a brook right into his fry pan, quail to his horsehair quail trap, could still a storm like the Lord on Gennesaret. Ludi Too could play the venom out of a moccasin, money from a miser, silence from a preacher, the fight from the fightingest enemy. If A.D.'s wench was laying low nearby, he had no doubt he could conjure her out of her hidey-hole with the magical dulcimer.

    Ludi was as uncanny a shot with his breech-loading Yellow Boy carbine as he was a musician. With the Yellow Boy, both south and north of Mason and Dixon's Line, he had dispatched more than three hundred Union and Secesh soldiers. This morning, all-merciful Jesus willing, he'd dispatch the bushwhacker who had winged him the night before at the cabin on the mountain. And, if not before then afterward, he'd run down the gal into the bargain. He might have her himself before turning her over to A.D., aye, he might. But he would have to keep the mad doctor off her. It hadbeen all Ludi could do to prevent the vivisectionist from ripping out the old nigger's live beating heart with his dreadful gleaming instruments before they hung him up in the tree to bait the gal in. Ludi made up his mind to put a bullet in Doctor Surgeon's brain the moment they captured the wench.

    Ludi carried a second weapon, which resembled a long horse pistol such as cavalrymen sometimes wore. But instead of one barrel, it had two snugged up side by side, with two hammers and two triggers. One barrel threw buckshot, the other a four-ounce ball capable of penetrating an oaken door. Ludi wore this weapon around his neck on a lanyard of human