Crockett of Tennessee Read online

  David pocketed the silver piece and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Time’s a healer, Ben Kel—I mean, Ben Moore.” He grinned. “Besides, there wasn’t no real harm done, I don’t reckon. It was right funny, putting that silver piece up that cow’s bung. I didn’t laugh at the time, but I can laugh now.”

  Moore said, “I was mean-spirited. I had a bad raising that rendered me sour.”

  “What’s past don’t matter,” David said. “I’m glad to see you again, after all these years.”

  Kelso’s worried expression melted into one of joy. David had never seen a man look so relieved. It made him wonder what mortal crime Kelso had committed, and where, to make him fear identification so tremendously. Maybe it was best not to know, he decided.

  Kelso’s voice wavered with emotion. “You’re a fine man, David Crockett. A fine man with the soul of a Christian. Ben Moore is glad to call you friend, if you’ll allow it.”

  David put out his hand and shook Kelso’s. “Friends, then.”

  “Friends. Yes sir, David Crockett. You are my friend, my friend to my dying day.”

  Chapter 35

  It surely seemed to David Crockett as if providence had it in mind to make him look very fine in the eyes of his fellow soldiers. Finding and sharing the killed deer had been winning enough, but the next day, as the army camped near a wide canebrake, fortune dealt an even better hand.

  Hunting in the cane, David encountered nearly a score of hogs rooting around amid the stalks. There was meat here to fill many a stomach, and so with great care he leveled his rifle, aimed, and fired, bringing down the fattest of them all.

  What happened next should have been no surprise to David, who had been around swine all his life. But it was a surprise, because he had been concentrating so hard on killing that one particular hog that he didn’t consider what the others would do when the shot sounded. They let out a loud, collective squeal and ran off as fast as stumpy legs would carry fat bodies. David was so startled he stepped back and tripped, falling on his rump as the herd ripped through the cane in the opposite direction—heading directly for the camp.

  A grin split David’s face when he heard the shouts of surprised men, followed by a great eruption of gunfire and, in tandem, terrified porcine squeals. Rising, David reloaded his rifle, shouldered up with difficulty the hog he had shot, and marched out of the canebrake and into the camp. He was met by a cheer.

  “I should have knowed it was you, Crockett!” a man yelled. “You’re one caution of a hunter, I do reckon! It ain’t many who can send meat a-running on the hoof right to where it’s needed!”

  There was pork in abundance, no question about it. David’s shot had sent the hogs barreling right into the camp, where many of them had been shot down as soon as the startled soldiers could react to the porcine invasion. There was even a fresh-killed cow; it too had been grazing in the cane, and had been driven out by the shot and stampede of swine.

  That night’s mess was the best the men had enjoyed since the campaign began, and all around the camp sated soldiers extolled Crockett of Tennessee. David Crockett was now a famous and admired man within that limited little world, and he liked the feeling very much. He basked in it, thinking that a man could surely get used to admiration. It was better, headier, than the finest spirits John Crockett had ever sold back at his tavern inn.

  The next day’s march brought them to a town of Cherokees; here, they discovered, were the owners of the hogs and cow that had been killed and consumed. The officers signed out a United States government payment warrant in compensation for the livestock, and continued the march. After another night’s camping, the volunteers met again with the regular army from which they had earlier divided. The combined force went to the farmstead of Radcliff. This was the white man, with the Creek wife, who had hosted and fed David’s team of scouts earlier … but here, under interrogation from the officers, new facts about Radcliff emerged, and when they made their way back to David, he was deeply angered.

  It was Radcliff, it seemed, who had sent the runner into the friendly Creek camp that night to warn David and his scouts of the Red Sticks crossing the river, ready to attack. This was the message David and his men had raced back to camp to give Coffee, only to have him ignore it. That remained a sore spot with David; it rubbed all the sorer when he discovered now that Radcliff’s story had been a fabrication in the first place. There had been no Red Sticks, no threat of immediate attack. Radcliff had made up the story simply to get David and his scouts out of the way. So in an ironic way, Coffee had been right to ignore his information—though when the same story had come via Major Gibson, he had certainly danced a different step.

  Radcliff’s place was searched and various provisions found; these had been hidden by Radcliff. Ire was hot against the man, and his two sons were forced into military service to make up for his deceptions.

  The army advanced to a new camp; there, Colonel Coffee was promoted to the rank of general, and a captain elevated to colonel in his place. Afterward the army went on to the Coosa River and established a fort at the Ten Islands, from which scouting companies sallied forth, scouring the countryside in search of Creeks. Several prisoners were taken.

  Word arrived of a force of Creeks some miles away in a town named Tallusahatchee, and plans were laid for attack. After many days of false alarms, false starts, fruitless reconnoiters, and small-scale forays, the first major fight was about to take place.

  Silently and in long, narrow lines, two bodies of soldiers snaked in along the sides of Tallusahatchee, then closed their lines together at both ends, surrounding the unsuspecting Creek village. With a dry throat and nervous fingers, David Crockett fidgeted and waited to hear the first gunfire. It would come at any time now.

  A ranger company under a Captain Hammond was even now advancing toward the town. They would deliberately expose themselves to the Indians in order to provoke a chase that would lead the Creeks out of the town and into the range of the rifles of the surrounding army. And then the squeeze would begin, soldiers moving in on all sides, driving the Creeks back into their town, crushing them as if in a great fist, forcing them to surrender or die fighting.

  David glanced to his left, then his right. Persius Tarr was beside him, eyes glaring and intense, tongue snaking out again and again to wet his lips. He looked fierce and eager. David turned away, looking straight ahead again; he did not want Persius to speak right now. He did not want to hear him again voice the hungry anticipation with which he claimed to regard the approaching slaughter.

  Yells, screeches, then shots … David crouched lower behind the log that hid him and peeked carefully over the top of it. It had begun.

  Moments later members of the ranger team came rushing into view. David lifted his rifle, laid it across the log, and clicked back the hammer. The rangers came on, then past, rushing through the lines of hidden riflemen. Tensely the seconds passed; war cries resounded in the trees—and then they saw them. For the first time in his life, David Crockett beheld the fearsome sight of onrushing Indians, warriors who in moments would learn they had been baited into an ambush.

  “Now!”

  As one, scores of rifles cracked. Indians spasmed and fell, some silently, others with deathly screams. Smoke rose through the treetops. For a moment there was near silence, broken only by the sound of men reloading, and then fully shattered by the crack of Indian rifles and the whiz of arrows sailing above, thunking into wood, smacking against rock.

  Now the Indians turned and raced back toward their town. With a yell the soldiers left their cover and advanced, closing their circle. Now that the first shots had been fired, the tension of anticipation broken, David felt very different than before. A sort of wild eagerness for battle came over him, and a thoroughly inexplicable sense of invulnerability. He had survived the first round of fire, so why not the second, the third, the tenth, or twelfth?

  They soon came into the very borders of the town itself. By now the Creeks had realized they
were surrounded and had nowhere to flee, and many made signs to indicate they wished to be made prisoner. Those who surrendered their weapons were captured and spared.

  But not all the Creeks were ready to give up. Moving through the town, David saw a large house; into it a steady stream of warriors was pouring. “See that?” he said to a man at his side. “There’s treachery in that, I’ll wager!”

  “You wager right, David,” Persius Tarr replied. David was surprised; he had not realized it was Persius with him. “I’ve counted upward of thirty going through that door already, and that’s shy a few I missed.”

  Other soldiers were about and also perceived the situation. A new string of warriors appeared, rounding another house and heading for the same larger one that held the others. Men gave chase, opened fire. Two Indians fell, but at least five made it in safety to the door.

  David and Persius and some thirty other soldiers had now focused their full attention on the house that hid the warriors. “I say burn it down!” Persius declared. “Roast ’em alive!”

  Only an hour earlier David would have found the suggestion repulsive. But now the fire of war was hot in him; no cruelty seemed unthinkable. “Fire would do it,” he said. “We can’t shoot them through the walls.”

  “Look there!” shouted a familiar voice. It was Kelso, alias Ben Moore. “There’s a granny woman come to protect them red coons! Ha!”

  An elderly squaw had come out of the big house and stood just outside the doorway, holding a bow and arrow in hand. She was withered and stoop-shouldered, with keen little eyes peering out of a shriveled, angular face. David found the sight of her unnerving, out of place here in a situation of war. “I wish she’d move,” he said. “Otherwise she’ll get herself killed.”

  “I’ll kill the old harlot!” Persius said, raising his rifle.

  But a form intervened between him and the woman, who had now seated herself cross-legged in the doorway, her face a mask of stoic, fearless disdain. It was Kelso, laughing loudly, advancing toward her.

  “C’mon, you old bag of bones, you old rutting she-dog, you!” he yelled. “Draw back that bow and shoot me, if you think you got the strength!”

  The old woman straightened her legs and laid the bow across her feet, so that the wood of it curved around the bottoms of her feet and the string was above them. As Kelso danced and taunted her, his scornfulness giving way to the obscenity that had been his mark when David knew him in boyhood, she nocked the arrow on the string, pursed her lips with determination, and lifted her legs so that the bow leveled. With both hands she pulled back the string, her scrawny body all in a strain, and let the arrow fly.

  Kelso stopped his taunting in mid-sentence, looked down at his chest, and whimpered loudly. “Oh, Lord, she’s shot me!” he said. He turned, pointing at the arrow piercing his chest. “She’s shot me, boys. Put an arrow right through me. This thing will kill me, sure as the world, and me so young.” He choked some, then spat up blood. “I ain’t ready to die, fellows. I’m going straight to hell … don’t want to go to hell … I want—oh, it’s hurting now—I’m—” Abruptly he quit his babble and fell over dead.

  The hag in the door cackled in glee, proud of her achievement. Something like a living, devilish spirit swept over the astounded soldiers, and more than a score of rifles rose and fired with ear-slamming concussion. Most of the shots hit their target, striking the old woman at the same moment, in the ugliest explosion of blood and flesh David Crockett had ever seen. It should have been sickening, revolting, but at this moment he was immune to such feelings. The fever was upon him, and on all the others. He looked into Persius Tarr’s face, saw in it the bitter fury and blood thirst that had gripped him. He didn’t know it, but had he been able to see his own face he would have seen that same fearsome expression.

  They reloaded as quickly as possible. A warrior appeared at the door above the shattered body of the old woman. A soldier raised his rifle and shot him dead. The others, finishing their reloading, advanced to the door. Crowding together, vying with each other for position and cursing when they were outjostled, they fired through it again and again, killing the Creek men inside so that the floor became thick with gore. David joined in without hesitation; at the moment it felt to him no different than as if this was a slaughter of mad dogs.

  Persius Tarr knelt by the dead woman and pulled a gorget from around her neck. He slipped it over his head as a trophy.

  They set the house ablaze with the forty-plus warriors still inside, all of them now dead or wounded. The fire raged hot and fierce. All around, the battle went on. David stepped back and watched Persius Tarr shoot a boy of about twelve who showed himself in the door of a nearby house, holding a rifle. The boy made not a sound as the ball broke his thigh. He fell, then got up, hobbling on his good leg toward shelter, but veering toward the burning house in his state of mounting shock. Another man fired at him. This time the ball passed through the boy’s arm, shattering it as well, making him drop his weapon. Still silent, the boy fell and lay unmoving.

  David moved away, circling around, hungry for more battle. He found no one to shoot at; all the Indians within his view were already dead. Coming close to the burning house again, he saw the twice-shot Indian boy was still alive and now was crawling, trying to get away from the nearby fire. The heat of it was so intense that his skin was blackened and blistered—and still he made no sound, did not even show the torment on his stoic face.

  Somewhere in the callus that had built itself around David’s mind, a tiny opening suddenly appeared. For a moment the true horror of what was happening here, and the revolting fact that he was part of it, broke through to his consciousness. He was sickened, but then the window closed again and he went on as before.

  The soldiers took prisoners in abundance, some eighty of them. Whenever they encountered resistance or the appearance of it, they killed. This was devastation beyond anything David had anticipated; surely the horror of Fort Mims itself, the tragedy they ostensibly were responding to, could have been no worse than this.

  When the battle was done, David stood alone beside the dead body of the boy he had observed earlier. The youth had made it perhaps thirty feet before his wounds got the best of him and ended his life. Scattered across the battlefield or burning inside the flaming houses were nearly two hundred other corpses. It had become a place of gore, of horror, the harvest field of the very reaper himself. He had enjoyed a rich gathering-in today.

  David thought of Ben Kelso, who had died declaring his dread of hell. Perhaps Kelso had come into hell in the end. David couldn’t know. But he did know this: without question, hell had come to Tallusahatchee, and he had helped bring it.

  A wrackingly painful process began inside him. His battle spirit began to fade, softening his heart and mind so that he could see this scene through his usual eyes again. What he saw horrified him; the fact of his participation made him feel like retching.

  He felt a sense of disgust at himself, his companions … and particularly Persius. Persius, who had seemed to derive such a vicious pleasure from the killing, even the killing of a brave little boy. Persius became a monstrous, murderous being in David’s mind, and he hated him for it, hated him—because it was easier to hate Persius than to hate himself.

  Chapter 36

  At that most inopportune moment, Persius Tarr walked up to David, grinning brightly. “Look at that Injun boy! Roasted like a chicken gizzard! The buzzards will be eating cooked meat today, eh, Davy?”

  Persius’s bright, cheerful voice and demeanor struck David like blasphemy would strike a priest. He wheeled on Persius, face reddening, emotions boiling. His momentary hatred of him surged and intensified.

  “You think there’s something to make jests over in all this? At least that little Creek boy didn’t hide himself beneath a pile of corpses while his own kind were massacred!”

  Persius stiffened as if stabbed between the shoulders. “What did you say to me, David Crockett? What do you mean, my own
kind?”

  “You heard me. You ain’t deaf. It ain’t suiting for a man who hid himself beneath corpses to save his own skin to be laughing over the death of a boy who at least had the manhood to fight for his own people instead of turning against them, and to die without a whimper! That boy you slaughtered was more a man than you’ll ever be! Persius Tarr, the coward of Fort Mims! The man who hides under corpses to save his self while women and children are slaughtered all around him!”

  “I didn’t hide myself under no corpses, damn it! It just happened! I was knocked senseless.”

  David’s turbulent emotions had found their focus now. All his fury, his rage, his sorrow were narrowing to a point and aimed straight for Persius Tarr. There was no controlling his words; the dam had broken and the waters gushed out. “Maybe you were, but you said yourself that you came to and witnessed the killing. Did you rise to try to save the life of a single child, Persius? Hell no! How many women did you watch having the life hacked out of them, while you lay there grateful for the dead who hid you? Tell me that, coward!”

  Persius balled his fists. “I don’t let no man call me coward, Crockett. No man. Not even you.”

  The confrontation was drawing attention. Other soldiers began gathering around the pair, some grinning, some very serious. David glanced at the encircling faces, and knew from what he saw that these men would take his part of this. His rifle had provided them meat. They had not forgotten. He heard mutterings pass from man to man: What was that Crockett had said? Something about Persius Campbell hiding himself while women and children were massacred at Fort Mims!