Journey Home Chapter Two
Kentucky 1820
“You keep away! I will shoot if I have too!”
Mingo frowned. How had he managed to end up in this situation? He wanted to glance behind and make certain his son, Danny, was not about to make a sudden appearance. Still, he hesitated as he was afraid any abrupt movement might startle the woman in front of him into shooting. He was not about to take any chances.
He knew all too well the fierce nature of a mother who felt her children threatened.
“Madame, I assure you,” Mingo began, “I pose no threat.”
The woman gathered one of the children close in her free arm and attempted to comfort her while keeping the pistol level. Though the brown-haired girl looked to be twelve or thirteen, she wailed with the ferocity of a frightened child barely out of the nursery.
“That was not what you said before,” the woman remarked, her voice hard as steel.
“You have mistaken me for someone else. I have not been here before. Please, Madame, you must believe me,” Mingo pleaded. At first the idea that she believed that he, or any other white-haired man of seventy-plus years, could pose a threat had amused him. Then he had remembered some of the formidable chiefs of his people – White Cloud, Menewa – and the idea had not seemed so absurd.
Of course, it did not help that he was dressed as an Indian; his long gray hair braided and his shirt made of soft brushed suede. Or that he wore an approximation of his old blue and crimson striped pants. Most white women of this era had only seen Indians in books. The natives were usually portrayed burning settlers at the stake and dancing around fires naked while brandishing the scalps of those they had killed. Red savages, they were called.
Filthy Red savages.
The woman did not relent. The gun did not waver. “You will remain where you are until my husband returns. John should be back soon. He will know if what you say is true.”
Mingo was weary. He and the two Daniels – his son and his oldest friend – had been traveling for days, moving fast and with little rest. It had not proved easy on him, or on Daniel Boone who was now well into his eighties. Mingo sighed and indicated a tumble of rocks nearby. “May I sit down, Madame? I am afraid these bones of mine have walked the earth for many years – the last several decades in fine leather boots – and now, I find moccasins cannot compare. They give little support.”
The woman frowned as if wondering what a savage would have been doing wearing leather boots. Then she waved the gun toward the rocks. “Sit, then. But do nothing sudden.” A wail drew her attention to the child nestled under her arm. It was obvious now that the girl was someone his people would have called ‘special’ or blessed by the gods. Whites would have labeled her ‘simple’. “Rosanna, hush!” the woman scolded gently. “Pa will be here soon. You need have nothing to fear.”
“Doing something ‘sudden’ is another occurrence that lessens with age,” Mingo remarked as he turned and started for the rocky seat. He sat on it and then added quietly, “My son, however, I cannot vouch for. He is still young and may come through those trees at any moment.”
A look of panic entered the woman’s eyes; panic that spoke of the fear of being a woman alone with her children in the woods – with two strange men. “Your…son?”
A little dark-haired boy, five or six at most, who stood behind the woman moved in front of her. “Pa left me in charge. I will protect you, Ma,” he declared.
The woman couldn’t help but smile as she laid her hand on his head. “Robinson, you must not worry about me. You need to look after the girls.” She turned to the oldest of the children who had been watching the interchange between them from the shadow of a broken-down wagon. “Elizabeth! Come get your brother and Mary. Put them in the wagon with Rebecca and then come back for Rosanna.”
“Ma, no! Pa said – ” Robinson protested.
“Pa said you should listen to your mother. Now, didn’t he?” the woman asked softly.
The boy’s dark head hung. “Yes….” His eyes shot to his sister Elizabeth and beyond her to the wagon. “But do I have to sit with the girls?”
Mingo laughed, thinking how much Robinson sounded like Israel.
~
“Your son has not come,” she said.
He nodded as he glanced at the budding trees that surrounded them, at the freshly sprung crocus pushing up through the tender grass. It was spring. A time for hope. Not despair. And yet….
“No, he has not. And I am worried.”
She studied him intently for a moment. “You were right. I should have had you step out of the shadows of the trees earlier. You are not the man who came before. He had an evil look. Like a hungry wolf.”
“I am glad you have realized that.” Mingo shifted so he faced her. She was beautiful. Her cheek bones were wide, reminiscent of a woman of his mother’s race, though her skin was pale as freshly churned butter indicating it was more likely the English, rather than his native heritage they shared. Her eyes were large as a child’s and the deep brown of freshly tilled earth.
“And he was Wyandot,” she stated. “You are not.”
Mingo was stunned. At first he could not find words. “How would you know that?” he asked, his puzzlement plain on his face.
The smile that answered him was wry and tinged with something else he could not place. Amusement? Resignation?
Perhaps both.
“I have had much experience with the Wyandot. More than I would have cared to, had I had a choice. Which I have not,” she added bluntly. At that, her smile changed into one of loving tolerance. “This is the life I chose when I married John.”
At mention of her husband’s name, the smile vanished.
“You are worried too,” Mingo declared.
She nodded as she glanced toward the shifting trees that were afire with the rays of the dying sun. “John should have returned by now. We dropped our son, Stephen, off in a nearby town to visit a friend, and were on the road to the Macintoshes to purchase cattle when the axle broke and we lost a wheel. John took Captain, our horse, and rode back to the village to find a blacksmith to repair the damage.” She shuddered and hugged her arms close about her chest. “I hope he did not run into that man.”
Mingo thought he knew who she was talking about. It was the reason he was here. “Can you describe him? This man?”
“Tall. Thin, but powerful.” Her eyes flicked to him and then away quickly, almost as if she were embarrassed by what she had to say. “Handsome for his age. Long hair once black, now silvered until almost white. Braided, as yours is. Beads. Feathers. Most definitely Indian.”
The description could have fit many men, of many tribes. “You said you have experience with Indians?”
She must have heard the skepticism in his tone. Her smile was delightful, if unexpected. “I have lived among them for nearly twenty years now. Shawnee, Delaware, Pottawatomie, Seneca, and Wyandot. More I can’t remember. I have fed and clothed them, bandaged their wounds, and shared my floor and my table with them more times than I can remember.” Her smile turned into a frown as she gazed again at the vast forest surrounding them. “My husband is an Indian Agent.”
“I see.”
She pivoted back sharply. “You do not approve? You think if a man is an agent of the government in the affairs of Indians, then he must necessarily be evil, and in it for his own gain?”
“I said nothing, Madame – ”
Her tone was resigned. “You did not need to. I can see it in your eyes. John is an honest man. As honest as any you will meet.” She turned away. “If anything he has suffered for that honesty.”
“Madame….” Mingo rose to his feet. As she turned back, he held out his hand in greeting. “You did not tell me your name.”
“No. I did not. I have been remiss.” She took his hand and shook it. “Rachel. Rachel Johnston.”
~
“Kentucky is not my usual base of operations,” John Johnston answered. Just the slightest lilt hinted at an Irish background. “I came here to visit a friend and buy cattle. I need to get back to my wife and other children.”
The concern in his voice seemed real enough. “How many you got?” Dan asked. “Besides this one.”
Johnston glanced at his son and frowned, as if taken off guard. Then he laughed. “So far? Nine. With one on the way.”
Dan’s thick eyebrows winged toward his snow-white hair. “You must be a mite older than I thought, Mr. Johnston.”
“Probably not. Forty-five.”
“Any twins or triplets in that number?”
“No.”
“Same wife?”
Johnston’s frown deepened. “Yes. What has this to do with – ”
Dan lowered Ticklicker. He placed the rifle’s wooden butt on the ground and leaned on its barrel. “Just gettin’ a feel of the situation, and what kind of a man you might be.”
“And I take it I – we passed?” As Dan nodded, Johnston continued, “May we lower our hands then?”
Dan nodded again.
“If you like, I will tell you what kind of a man I am. I am weary and worried. My wife is in the woods with five more of my children – four are female and the other, a very young boy. I am overdue by hours. I had to retrieve Stephen. He insisted on returning with me. Then, together, we had to find the blacksmith who was away from his shop. And after spending hours tracking him down, he refused to do anything until morning.” John Johnston glanced at the retreating sun and the long shadows it cast. “Please let us go. Allow me to return to my family.”
“I’ll do better than that.” Dan said as he shouldered Ticklicker. “You’re travelin’ my way. I’ll go with you.”
Dan had been standing in the shadows of the trees, using their foliage to his advantage. Now he stepped into the open and the rays of the dying sun struck his long, lean figure. He moved more slowly now. Much more slowly. Still, he walked with an easy, open gait. That gait, and his long legs got him where he had to go fast enough.
He approached the pair and held out his hand. “My name is – ”
John Johnston’s face lit with a smile – and recognition. “Daniel Boone. I don’t believe it!”
It was Dan’s turn to be surprised. “You know me?”
John Johnston nodded. “We have met. I was Stephen’s age, perhaps a little older. Do you remember a lively conversation about Braddock’s defeat, undertaken in Bourbon, Kentucky in the establishment of a certain John Johnston in the late ‘90’s? And a rather brash young man of the same name with whom you shared the floor as a bed? You were wearing tow-cloth then, sir, and not buckskins as you do now.”
“John Johnston?” Dan scratched his chin and thought about it. Then he nodded. “It was your uncle’s place, and you were headin’ up the Ohio to Pittsburgh to set up a store.”
John looked chagrinned. “That venture failed. I ended up taking a position under Jefferson at Fort Wayne in the Indian Territory as a Factor to the Indians. We were there eleven years and then moved to Washington City. I have my own agency now at Upper Piqua.”
“Upper Piqua? Ain’t that the Shawnee town?”
“It is my home. And the Shawano, my brothers.”
Dan clapped his hand on John’s shoulder and said with a smile, “Mr. Johnston, you are a braver man than I thought. First nine children and now, a friend of the Shawnee!”