Sitka Read Free Page B

and they listened, aware of a strangeness they had not known before. It gave them an eerie feeling as if some great dark thing lurked in the shadows ahead, peering out at them, waiting for them to draw nearer, watching for the moment to spring. A loon called, far off beside some lost pool, and the lonely sound made their flesh crawl.
    “Shouldn’t we go back?” Rob whispered.
    They should ... Jean knew they should. He had no business spying on this stranger, and less business bringing Rob Walker into it, yet he could not turn back now. “You can if you want to; I want to see what he does.” It was not bravado that drove Jean on so much as an innate sense of self-preservation. The swamp provided him with a home and a livelihood. The presence of an intruder could only mean trouble for him.   If the Carters had returned he would no longer be able to move freely along his trap lines, and the source of his income would certainly be curtailed and might disappear. Young though he was, the idea frightened him, for the swamp was all the home he had ever known. He found nothing to attract him in the life of the village boys. Lonely though he was, often wistful with longing for the mother he had lost and the father he had scarcely known, he nonetheless loved the woods and would not have abandoned his free, easy life for anything.   The boys pushed on for some minutes; then Rob stopped again. “Jean. Please, I think we should go back,” he insisted in a hushed tone. “We should tell somebody.”
    “We’ve nothing to tell. Anyway, Dan’l Boone wouldn’t go back, nor even Simon Girty.”
    It was an argument for which Rob had no answer. But sometimes he doubted that he would make another Boone. It was one thing to play at such things, but when the swamp grew dark Rob was no longer positive he wanted a life of adventure. Jean, on the other hand, seemed as much at home here as any young wolf or deer. He belonged to the forest and the forest belonged to him.   Both boys had listened for hours to talk of Mohawk, Huron and Iroquois, of Simon Girty and Dan Boone, stories of hunting, Indian fighting and travel. They heard tales of the mountain men, and of the far lands of Mr. Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, lands yet known to few. Many of the stories had originated with Jean’s own father, who like most mountain men loved to yarn away the hours when he found himself among the wide-eyed citizens of settled communities.   The stone house huddled against the wall of the ridge that hemmed the swamp at that place, hiding itself in the deepest shadows under the ancient hemlocks. The boys crawled under a bush where no grown man could have gone and stopped just behind a huge hemlock, only a few yards away from the house.   Jean tried to remember what it was like close along the wall. He did not want to step on anything that would cause even a whisper of sound. Rob moved up beside him and they crouched there, wide-eyed, listening and tense. From within came a murmur of voices and they could see a thread of light from a crack in the boarded-up window. A few inches below, a shaft of light streamed from a knothole.
    They moved forward from tree to tree until within a dozen yards of the house, then stopped again. Now they could distinguish the words of the men inside.   “You took long enough.”
    “Hutchins is there, and he’s travelin’ alone. Ridin’ one horse, leadin’ another.
    From the way he bulges at the waist he’s wearin’ a money belt.” “He’s packin’ two, three thousand in gold. Harry was there in the bank, seen him pick it up.”
    “Sam, I seen a kid out there. Settin’ by the bee tree.”
    “He see you?”
    “Nah ... but what’s a kid doin’ in the swamp?”
    “Well, what was he doin’?”
    “Settin’ ... like he was waitin’.”
    “All right, then. He was waitin’. What more do you want? Maybe his pappy was huntin’.”
    “Nobody hunts in this swamp. Nobody.”
    “Probably LaBarge’s kid.