Free Follow the River by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom Page A

exquisite pain, while the rest of her body ebbed into numbness and forgot its sufferings.
    What shall we name ’er, Will, m’ love? Mary thought as sleep began to overpower her and the stars she was watching through the treetop blurred. Elenor, after my mother? Or Bettie? Maybe Bettie Elenor Ingles. Now, that’s a fine sound, aye? How say y’ to that, my Will?
    Before dawn the horses were spooked by the scent of a starving lame wolf, which crept to the edge of the camp and stole the afterbirth.

CHAPTER
5
    William Ingles and Johnny Draper rode whip-and-spur down Sinking Creek, at the head of a column of thirty armed horsemen that Captain Buchanan had raised for them in the upriver settlements. Among them were Will Ingles’ younger brothers, John and Matthew.
    “Buzzards,” Johnny Draper shouted over the thunder of hooves.
    “At Phil Barger’s I’d say,” yelled Will.
    There was little left of the old man’s headless body: shreds of putrid flesh and the rags of clothing brown with old blood. They turned the skeleton over and disturbed a thousand busy maggots. They scraped out a shallow temporary grave and put in the stinking bundle of bones and covered it up and rode hell-bent on down the creek toward Lybrook’s with the stench still in their nostrils.
    Philip Lybrook and his wife and son unbolted their cabin door when they saw that the riders were white men. Lybrook had hurried back over the mountain after he and Prescott had discovered the burning settlement four days before. Mrs. Lybrook told the militiamen what she had seen: the number of Indians she guessed had been about twenty, though she had been too stunned to count them or really even look. Yes, they had had Mrs. Ingles and Mrs. Draper with them, and the little boys. And a man on a rope, Henry Lenard, she seemed to recall. Raccoons or something had carried away the bag with Mr. Barger’s head in it; one minute it had been lying there at the edge of the garden where she had thrown it, and later it was simply gone. Then she broke down and couldn’t tell them any more, but there really was nothing more to tell.
    “Down Sinking Creek to the New River, then, I’ll wager,” said Will Ingles. His eyes were crackling, his mouth was bitten white. “Let’s go. Lickety-cut.”
    Captain Buchanan’s scarlet coat blazed in the sunlight. “Sir,” he said to Philip Lybrook, “I reckon you know the place upriver called Dunkard’s Bottom?”
    “Aye.”
    “I recommend y’ take your family and go there, with all your goods and whatever harvest y’ have already. Folks are a-gatherin’ there. They’re a-buildin’ a fort.”
    “We’ll go, Cap’n. We’ve had enough for now.”
    The force rode on down Sinking Creek at as brisk a pace as the terrain would allow. William Ingles kept his eye on the sky for buzzards. At every turn in the river he expected to find the remains of Mary or Bettie, or one of the children.
    There was no sign of the Indians’ passage yet, as they apparently had stayed in the creek. One of Captain Buchanan’s men was an accomplished tracker, a Tuscarora half-breed named Gander Jack, and he scanned the creek banks with hungry eyes for any sign that the Indians might have left the creekbed. Such signs, if there were any, would be faint because of the passage of four days since the massacre. But there had been no rain in the region, so there was hope that a spoor might remain.
    Captain Buchanan rode up between Will and Johnny late in the afternoon. “We ought to ease off, gentlemen. We’ve rid hard two days. We’ll burn the horses out.”
    “The trail’s old enough, Cap’n. I don’t want it to fade altogether.”
    “Then, too,” the captain persisted, “I don’t intend to run my boys into an ambuscade. I share y’r urgency, Mr. Ingles, but I advise caution.”
    Will reined his horse back. He knew Captain Buchanan was right. And he knew too that he should abide by the militiaman’s wishes, not just for the sake of common