Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

gut. Its cracked walnut stock was held together with a spare string from the dulcimer. Etched on the barrels were several demonic faces.

    The Yellow Boy was mounted with a slim telescopic tube, through which Ludi now scanned the frozen swamp below. The swamp stretched out for miles in the clear morning sunlight. Good light to shoot by, Ludi thought, though whenever possible he preferred to work with the sun at his back. Also he preferred to work alone. That's why he'd made the clubfoot remain behind in the cabin. Doctor Surgeon had wanted to come along, but Ludi had important work to do this morning, and he did not want the lame little medical man getting in his way. Why King George had brought the clubfoot with them during the escape, or the actor and the Prophet either, was a mystery to Ludi. He and George could easily have taken care of the business at hand themselves.

    Except for a black thread of open water winding through it, the swamp was snow-covered. Here and there islands of evergreen trees stood up. The largest one lay only about an eighth of a mile away and occupied no more space than a mule could plow from sunupto sundown. Just across the dark water from the island stood a dead pine tree, with a very large bird's nest at the top. Between the island and the lightning-snag pine, a beaver lodge of peeled sticks jutted out of the frozen swamp. Ludi couldn't tell for certain, but he believed that the tracks he'd been following approached the beaver lodge and stopped there. So much the better, he thought, as he jacked a shell into the chamber of the Yellow Boy.

    M ORGAN SPENT THE night in the woods at the foot of the mountain. Toward dawn his battle plan had come to him all of a piece. The haunting music from up the mountain was still quite faint, and as he walked across the frozen bog and along the edge of the open slang he knew that he had time. He approached the beaver lodge and ripped some dead sticks away from the side. Then he walked backward in his tracks to a stump beside the slang. He removed his felt boots and woolen stockings and rolled his wool pantaloons up above his knees. Without hesitation he stepped into the water. It was well over his knees and shockingly cold. He gasped, caught his breath, felt his way over the silty bottom to the lightning snag.

    He put his boots and stockings back on and began to climb up the dead stobs jutting out from the pine trunk. Up he went, hand over hand, marveling at the whorling wound gashed deep into the trunk of the great tree. He scooped the snow out of the osprey's nest and pulled himself into it. Carefully, he upended his gun, poured powder from his horn down the barrel, ramrodded it home, dropped in the wadded ball, ramrodded again, placed a brass cap under thegooseneck hammer. He drew back the hammer, then pawed more snow out of the nest to make a hollow for himself. To his astonishment he found a fish skeleton four feet long in the bottom of the nest. In the fish's skeletal jaw was the faded red-and-white homemade lure he'd lost years ago when he and Pilgrim were trolling in the big lake and he had hooked the great fish that had towed them and their canoe into Canada. The three hooks hanging from the bottom of the lure were rusted to points. What this curious reminder of the outing with Pilgrim might signify, Morgan had no idea. Nor could he imagine how the osprey had carried the fish, which must have weighed thirty pounds or more, to its nest. But now a man was coming out of the woods at the foot of the mountain. He was wearing a bearskin coat and playing a zitherlike instrument depending from his neck. Morgan wedged deeper into the nest.

    He waited until the musician drew near to the beaver lodge. Waited until he raised his rifle and cut loose with a thunderous volley. Waited until he had discharged both barrels of the scattershot into the lodge as well. Then Morgan fired, and the rifleman sat down in the snow, holding his side.

    "Y OU'VE KILT OLD LUDI