Follow the River by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom Read Free Book Online

strong?
    But what matter if they choose to spare it or not, shethought. It could hardly survive a birthing in this wilderness anyway. On this trail. With all this riding. It’ll prob’ly die a-bornin’. She stopped a whimper of pain and despair in her throat.
    Suddenly Mary realized that the horses were climbing. They had left the creekbed. She glanced back to memorize, if she could, their point of departure. They were on some kind of an animal path along the north side of a mountain. Behind her and below she could see a patch of water, but straight below there was only the brushy bed of a ravine.
    We must have turned off where the creek goes underground, she thought.
    Surely we cannot travel much farther this evening, she thought. Although there was more light up here on the mountainside than down in the streambed, the day was fading. She tightened her muscles once more against the enormous, sagging, aching weariness in her middle. The pain was wracking, pulling her attention away from everything else again. And her bladder, full now and pressed by the weight of the womb, aggravated her discomfort.
    We must stop soon, she thought. I’m afraid they’re going to try to reach the river before night. But we must stop. I must get off this horse soon or I’m going to just up and die.
    They rode down into the river valley at twilight. Suddenly they were out of the dark woods and under an expanse of rose-tinged sky in a bottomland overgrown with grass and wild-pea vine, with a sharp bend of the glassy river before them. Bats were stitching silently back and forth across the sky, feeding on mosquitoes.
    Even in her misery, Mary Ingles was awed by the strange beauty of the place. The river flowed from left to right across their way, then turned so sharply away that it appeared it must meet itself somewhere beyond the other dark shore inside the bend. At its sharpest crook downstream it cut under the very base of a perpendicular wall of fluted gray stone cliffs and columns and spires of stone three hundred feet high. On the inside of the bend stood a natural stone arch, gray amid the dusky woods, with a free-standing shaftof stone eighty feet tall beside it. It looked like an experimental landscape chopped out of solid stone and forest by some god trying to make a channel for a confused river. She had never seen such a place, even in the harrowing crossing of the Blue Ridge.
    The Indians had grown cheerful, on reaching the river. They laughed and raised their arms and talked back and forth along the line. They brought the horses to a halt near a spring that gave off a strong mineral odor. This, Mary thought, must be what the men called the gunpowder spring. Adam Harmon’s cabin must be hereabouts. The Indians drank from the spring, then led the animals down to the river’s edge and let them drink there. Mary held Georgie tightly to keep him from pitching forward into the river as their horse stretched its neck down.
    About fifteen of the warriors stood gazing over the river, talking in low and melodic voices. Mary prayed that they would make camp here, that they would let her dismount and relieve herself, perhaps bathe and soothe her children and talk to the other captives. She looked back at Bettie. Her sister-in-law now sat so slumped, her face pasty with pain, that it appeared little Tommy was holding her up from behind. It’s a marvel she’s not fainted, Mary thought.
    “Mi … uhm, Mister,” she said to a passing warrior. He looked up at her and she cupped one hand and made a drinking motion, then pointed around to the other captives. The Indian called something to the chieftain, who answered from the riverbank in a few words. The warrior detached a pan from one of the pack horses and filled it at the river. He brought it to Mary and handed it up to her. She held Georgie’s head and put the edge of the vessel to his lips and was pleased that he was conscious enough to drink a little from it. Then Mary gave the pan