The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [182]
Waymon hired out one of Willis Ingledew’s best horses to ride to Harrison for the heart medicine. He hoped to leave early enough and ride hard enough to get back in the same day, and he was already gone when I was out in my garden patch before sunrise. I had my bath, and on my way back from my little waterfall I spotted a fat red squirrel sitting on a tree limb and hit it with the first shot from my .22, and Rouser retrieved it for me, and I promised him the bones from the stew pot that night. I noticed the mullein named Nail still bent down to the ground, and I stood and talked to it for a while, but it wouldn’t even twitch. Then as I was returning to the house, not yet close enough to the house to have a good view of the road, I saw Viridis and Rosabone go by; I could tell it was them by the mare’s gait. They were just trotting along, not running.
They were scarcely out of sight when here came another rider. I figured at first it was just one of those deputies. But I’d seen both of them, and their horses, often enough to know, even from a distance, that this wasn’t either one. The trouble was, I was close enough to the house, and running now, trying to get closer, to tell it wasn’t a deputy, but not close enough to recognize the man.
When I reached the house, I threw my squirrel into a pot and covered it, then kept on running after them with Rouser at my heels, and I had to shush him when he commenced barking because he sensed my excitement. It was uphill, and I couldn’t run fast enough to keep up with them. I realized I was still carrying the .22 in one hand, and I was tempted to leave it so I could run faster, but something made me hang on to it.
I didn’t come within sight of Viridis or the horseman until, much later, I reached Nail Chism’s sheep pastures and could just make out the figures of Viridis and Rosabone disappearing into the far corner where the upper pasture dissolved into the woodland trail. I knew that Viridis always waited there, as she had the first time we’d gone there together, to make sure that she wasn’t being followed. But now the man who was following her had disappeared, or was hiding, and I didn’t see him again until a few moments after Viridis disappeared into the woods; then he and his horse came crashing out of the trees at the south end of the sheep pasture and took out across the pasture at a gallop, headed toward that far corner where she had gone.
For a wonderful long moment, I thought it was Nail. I wondered where he had obtained such a big fine horse, but he could have stolen one somewhere along his travels from Little Rock to Stay More. And yet I knew that my mullein stalk wouldn’t have lied to me. It could not be Nail. I was reminded of that time, a June ago, over a year, when I had been at the playhouse with Rindy and had seen the man far down below in the field, the man who, everybody would try to get me to say, was Nail, but was not Nail, was the man who had actually assaulted Rindy: was Sull. Was this Sull too? He was too far away for me to tell, but I was determined to find out, and I paused breathless and heaving for just a minute before resuming my climb up through that weed-infested sheep pasture toward the obscure entrance to the woods where now the man and his horse had disappeared in pursuit of Viridis.
By the time Rouser and I reached the entrance to the woods ourselves, we were far behind them. If the man was following Viridis, he had surely caught up with her by now. If he was only trying to find out the location of the hideaway that she visited daily, he had found it by now. If he intended to do her some harm, to rape her, even to kill her, he was well on his way to doing it. Once I’d reached the woodland trail and it leveled off a bit and I could run faster, I began running again, and as I plunged deeper into the woods I ran until I thought my heart would burst or my lungs explode.
I tripped on a root and