Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1966 by Battle at Bear Paw Gap (v1.1) Page A

constructed, pegged, and hung in place upon
leather hinges. Mark chopped hickory branches into proper lengths and whittled
them into bowed brackets. These he spiked within, two on the door and two more
at the jambs. Through these he fitted another length of hickory, to serve as a
bar. He gouged a loophole in the door, and another in the shutter which he
hinged to the window hole.
                 Finished,
the small addition stood against the wall of the house at the southern end,
flush with the front. The window looked to rearward. All sides of the Jarrett
home could be commanded by defending gunfire if necessary.
                 “Our
next task will be to cut a doorway into the house, and fix a floor within
here,” Mark said to Will.
                “But tonight it is already stout
enough for us to sleep well protected.”
                 “I’ll
sleep the better to know that you’re not outside,” said Celia, putting final
big chunks of wet clay between the logs.
                 “We
thank you for your help, Celia,” said Mark, fitting forked twigs inside to hold
his rifle and Will’s bow. “Come, it’s near supper time, as I judge.”
                 But
supper time at the Jarrett’s was a quiet meal. Everyone pondered what a new day
would bring. Later that night, Mark and Will lay down
in their new room upon beds of evergreen boughs, and Mark felt wakeful, as he
had the night before.
                 Resolutely
he drove worries from his mind. He set himself to thinking of how bountiful the
crops had been, how gratifying the first harvest at Bear Paw Gap.
                 Their
various corn patches had yielded famously. Three corn cribs were well filled
with ripe ears. Mark had heard that one might estimate the store of shelled
corn at a bushel for every two cubic feet of corn in the ear. He lay and
thought of a corn crib— six feet by four, he judged, and the corn within stacked
four feet high. That meant twenty-four by four—ninety-six cubic feet. Divided
by two worked out to nearly fifty bushels. At a bushel a week, the Jarretts had
enough in one crib for a year, and the other cribs would feed the horses Oscar
and Bolly , and the cow Meg. He and his father and Will
had reaped grass in the clearings to stack hay for their animals, too.
                 And
he thought of how his mother and Celia had strung the latest gatherings of
beans in their pods, made long ropes of them to hang and dry in the kitchen. In
mid-winter, those dried beans could be soaked and cooked with savory smoked
meat. Out in the yard, buried in a row of holes with pine needles raked above
them, were stores of potatoes.
                 Future
years would bring future harvests. He thought of young fruit trees, planted in
the spring. They had been no more than switches, but they had taken root, put
forth leaves. Soon they would bear cherries and apples.
                 He
slept, and he did not dream of Indians or fighting. He thought that Celia came to
him and gave him a red apple to eat, and that it was the sweetest, juiciest
apple he had ever tasted.
     

           CHAPTER VIII
     
                 The
Attack
     
                 Before
breakfast, Tsukala appeared at the riverside again and talked to Mark. “I go
into those woods,” Tsukala told him. “There, below the river.”
                 “My
father does not want us to go there,” Mark said. “He thinks we should make
ourselves ready and wait here, for whatever they may try to do.”
                 Tsukala
shook his head. “I will not wait,” he said slowly. “Your father is the chief of
these white people. But I was here before you came. I am my own chief. I go
now.”
                 “Go,
then,” Mark bade him, the Cherokee fashion of farewell, and Tsukala slipped
into the woods and out of sight.