The old Seneca was still standing over the dead brave wistfully gazing at the prime scalp lock. Shad cocked his head slightly, watching his old friend with amused understanding.
“All right, Chief?” he asked. “Ready to get on?”
The three men came together again and moved quickly off into the white silence.
Moving hurriedly through the gray pall of winter, through the frost-crackling woods, across half-frozen bogs, ice- and refuse-clogged streams, up-down serrated hills, Matt, bringing up the rear, watched his two friends with a warm sense of thankfulness. He couldn’t ask for better companions in the woods. He smiled, seeing old Chief’s head bob down, spying out the track across a stretch of glassy marsh.
No one, not even Chief himself, seemed to know his correct age. Shad figured the old warrior was nearing seventy, but, from Chief’s endless endurance and agility, Matt doubted that he was really that old. They saw very little of Chief during the spring and summer; yet each fall when Shad and Matt set out for a winter of trapping they were sure to find the old Seneca waiting for them somewhere along the banks of the Susquehanna.
Shad said that when he first went into the woods as a boy he had met Chief and had saved his life. Chief, it seemed, had lost his musket in a running battle with a bear, and when Shad came upon them Chief was trying to stand up to the bear with only his hunting knife. So Shad had dropped the bear with one shot.
Chief had made a great to-do over the incident, had exchanged blood with Shad—each pricking his index finger and placing a drop of blood on the other’s tongue, making them blood brothers for life.
Matt grinned to himself, picturing a young, fat Shad and old tattered Chief standing alone in a great forest over the body of a dead bear, solemnly performing the sacred ceremony of brotherhood.
Shad was a curious enigma of frontier life; a great footloose carefree Hercules caught between armed civilization and savage wilderness. He had no idea, and not much interest, in who his parents had been. He had been brought up by a frontier trader who claimed that he had found Shad as a little child in the hands of two Senecas. No one knew whether the story was true or not. Shad had always claimed that the trader merely wanted a boy bound to him to help in his business, because from the day that he was big enough to be useful the trader had worked him ruthlessly and had beaten him at the slightest sign of rebellion.
When Shad turned twelve (and already as big as a horse), he had slapped the trader over the head with one of his own skillets and had run off on his own. Since that time he had lived his life between the forests and the fringes of the frontier towns. Trapping, hunting, doing odd jobs, he had prospered in size and wit.
Wherever Matt traveled he discovered that white and red men alike knew and accepted Shad; though it was true that the Indians seemed to hold Shad in higher regard than did his own white brothers. Matt always believed that this was due to the fact that white men refused to try to understand an enigma, and not because Shad was naturally savage.
It was also true that he had heard slurring remarks made about Shad’s character regarding a certain knack of his for wandering off with anything that wasn’t nailed down, and a few things that were. But Matt had never found this to be true. Shad was just naturally lucky at finding odd things. Shad admitted it himself.
Now, watching Shad scramble over a litter of storm-felled timber, huffing along in Chief’s nimble wake, Matt smiled and thought that regardless of what others thought of him, he would rather trust himself in the woods with Shad than any other man he knew.
Up ahead Chief had paused in the center of a small meadow bedded down in a white blanket of snow. He cocked his head quizzically, then chased himself in a tight circle, peering at the snow at every step. Finally he raised an arm and waved his two friends on.
Shad and Matt hurried up and followed the line of Chief’s pointed finger. A set of moccasin tracks crossed the meadow and joined the double file of boot prints.
Shad lowered his great frame on one knee and inspected the tracks carefully. “Seneca,” he announced shortly. He looked at Chief.
“Friend of yours, Chief?”
Chief grunted and spoke stiffly. “Half King.”
Shad spoke over his shoulder to Matt. “I know this Half King. He’s chief of a small tribe near Chestnut Ridge. He’s a wily old hand—got more savvy than any Injun should naturally have. He sees he’s caught in a squeeze between French and English and he’s tryin’ to play both ends to the middle, hoping to save his land somehow. I ain’t never trusted him much. Too stand-offish.”
Matt saw where the Seneca’s tracks had met with the two strange white men’s, where the three of them had stood talking for a moment, and then where they had all continued on together.
“Well, it appears they didn’t have any trouble,” he said. “Maybe he’s decided to throw in with the English.”
Shad stood up heavily and looked off at the blank wall of white and black forest. “That’s the whole trouble with that Injun . . . you just can’t tell what he’s decided to do. But, Matty, something’s happening out here—something big. Maybe you was right. Maybe we better shag after these fellas and see what’s going on.”
The three friends moved on again, spearheading the lonely wilderness, jogging easier now over a wide belt of smooth rolling hills, coming ever closer to the old Indian village called Murthering Town.
Shad, glancing at the boot prints with concern, said:
“I hope them two idjuts have enough sense to steer clear of Murder Town. Them Mingoes is well named.”
Matt said nothing, though he hoped so too. Vaguely he felt a strange kinship for the two men whose tracks marked the face of the wilderness. He sensed that they were in danger and needed help—even though the help was nothing more than a warning.
Chief guided them skillfully around a long chain of icy ponds whose scummy fingers reached out like the spokes from the hub of a wheel, and once again Matt felt grateful that Chief and Shad were with him. He knew that a man without the knowledge of the land contours could spend a week trying to work his way out of the pond maze—going from the hub out to the tip of a finger creek, back down to the hub, or pond, again, then out to the next tip, and on and on until he either ended going in a circle or blundered onto the next pond.
Evidently the Seneca, Half King, was leading the two white men correctly.
They had entered a frozen wood and were padding along at a regulated pace, when Chief suddenly threw up his arm and stopped. Shad and Matt crowded against his back as the old Indian lifted his head and sniffed the air.
“What is it, Chief?”
“Wood smoke.”
They proceeded on again, only slackening their pace for the sake of caution. All at once a sharp cry cracked at them like a pistol shot and they lurched to a halt in the snow.
“Stop right there! Who are you?”
A small, heavily bundled, booted man stepped from behind a tree and leveled a musket at them. His eyes were perfectly round and steel blue. He was bearded and, somehow, Matt thought, ferocious-looking.
“It’s all right,” Matt called. “We’re friends—Americans.”
“Who’s that Mingo?” the man wanted to know. “He looks like a Laurel Ridger to me.”
“Who gives a hoot what he looks like to you?” Shad shouted peevishly. “ ’Course if he ain’t good enough for you, why then we’ll just take him away with us. I guess you don’t want to hear about the Abenaki that’s been skulkin’ your trail. No, you wouldn’t care to hear nothing about that. Come on, Matt. We’ll go mind our own business.” And, turning, he pretended to take off in a huff.
“Hold on!” the small man cried. “There’s no call to take offense. This