The Cane Creek Regulators Read online

  Robert Gouedy rose from his seat. “Thank you, Breck.”

  Almost immediately, in the back of the tavern, a string bean of a man in buckskins with greasy hair stood up.

  “Aye, James Middleton, what say you?” said Gouedy.

  “I say it’s the damned Cherokees,” Middleton said in a loud lisp. “We should clean those red devils out.”

  Emily sucked in her breath, watching her father make a beeline out from behind the bar, but Robert Gouedy had seen this, too, and moved quickly to block Stewart from committing the day’s fourth killing.

  “James Middleton,” Robert Gouedy said, “you are wrong, sir. Wrong and blind.”

  “Because you trade with those thievin’ devils?” Middleton said, and lifted his wooden cup as if that made his point.

  “Aye, I do,” responded Gouedy. “We all do in some form or the other.”

  Although Breck Stewart stood still, his fists shook in tight balls at his sides.

  “But was not one of them vermin a Cherokee?” Everyone could detect the challenge in Middleton’s voice. He hated all Indians, and Cherokees in particular. His family had been killed during the Cherokee war back in 1760.

  Now Stewart pushed his way past Robert Gouedy. “Now see here, Middleton!” Stewart wagged his long finger at the greasy hunter. “If not for another Cherokee … that boy right over there … well, I’d hate to think …” He couldn’t finish, and Emily was thankful for that.

  She looked at young Go-la-nv Pinetree, who sat cross-legged on the floor near the open door to the tavern. Impassive. Maybe disinterested. For a moment, she even thought Go-la-nv might be asleep, but that would have been next to impossible with the shouts echoing through the tavern. Slowly the young Cherokee raised his head, looked from one face to another before he saw Emily. He gave a little shrug. Emily had to smile at that, which was a good thing. After this morning, she wasn’t sure if she could ever smile again. Go-la-nv Pinetree dropped his attention back to the floor and picked up a large onionskin marble, probably one her younger brother Alan had dropped.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Middleton was saying. “Everybody this side of Cane Creek knows how commodious young Emily is. But tell me this, Breck Stewart, what was your daughter doing so far out in the woods … alone?”

  This time it was Emily who leaped up, knocking the stool over onto Rachel Rowe’s knees. Blood rushed to her head, and she could feel her ears reddening with rage. Above the myriad shouts inside the tavern, Emily’s voice rose.

  “I am no doxy, Mister Middleton, and I resent your insinuations … but not as much as I despise your bigotry.” She pointed back toward the Go-la-nv Pinetree. “Yes, he is Cherokee, but he saved my life, sir. And two men among that nefarious trio … they were white men. Who looked a hell of a lot like you!”

  Behind her, Rachel Rowe gasped at the use of profanity. Even in the Cane Creek country, teenage girls did not swear, at least not in public, and not in front of their fathers. On the other hand, had she been sitting inside a tavern in Georgetown or Charlestown or even Pine Tree, she figured the local citizens would already have branded her a harlot and excommunicated her from the Presbyterian Church. Yet another thing that separated the backcountry from the rest of the colony.

  She had spoken her mind. Back along the Carolina coast, or across the Atlantic in England, women were encouraged to avoid engaging in conversation such as this. This was a man’s country. But the people who thought like that did not live in the backcountry. With an attitude like that, they wouldn’t survive in a place like this.

  “Box his ears, girl!” someone cried from the far corner.

  “Aren’t you the dog whipper.” Donnan had stopped cleaning his fingernails with his knife to whisper into her ear.

  She slapped at him, but saw James Middleton grinning, being nudged and goaded by the other men in buckskins beside him. He raised his hat, and bowed at Emily.

  “No offense, Miss Emily,” he said, and turned to her father. “All I mean, Mister Stewart, is that it is not safe for young women … or any women … to be alone that far from our settlement.”

  Many men and women voiced their agreement with that statement, and Emily knew she would be reprimanded later by her mother and father, and probably everyone in the district.

  “’Tis not safe, these days, I fear, for men to be alone, either,” Alroy O’Fionnagáin’s said, his voice soft, the brogue heavy, but everyone in the tavern had heard, and those thirteen words brought a momentary silence inside the cabin.

  “The problem,” Stewart bellowed, “is that there are no courts and no law here! The Crown even refuses to allow us to raise a militia!”

  Emily turned, picked up the stool, apologizing to Rachel Rowe, and sat down. She sighed. The arguments that followed she had heard countless times over the past year or two.

  One might find a magistrate down in the settlement south of here called Pine Tree, but his honor would wield almost no power, at least not enough power to thwart the blackhearts terrorizing the backcountry. The only criminal courts, and the only jails, could be found in Charlestown.

  “We are more than one hundred and twenty miles from Pine Tree,” someone said. “And then it almost one hundred more to Charlestown.”

  “Pray tell, what good is a court or jury in Charlestown?” Ferguson said. “To us, they are foreigners, and our affairs are foreign to them, as well.”

  A woman yelled, “They know not of our troubles in Charlestown!”

  A man sang out, “And the governor cares not a fig for what we must endure!”

  “Aye, but the merchants in Charlestown love the peltry we bring them.” Even James Middleton had joined the cause.

  “And the peace we have forged with the Cherokees,” a burly man said, pointing at Go-la-nv Pinetree.

  Even a few years before Emily’s grandparents had settled in Georgetown, the Assembly in Charlestown had created five precinct courts to ease the burden—and silence the complaints—of those who had chosen to settle deeper inside the colony, away from the coast. The problem, of course, was that no attorney, no solicitor, no judge agreed to attend these new courts—even to try small debt cases—and, by 1741, the Crown had ruled such courts, such precincts, illegal.

  Down along the confluence of the Peedee River and Lynches Creek, settlers had petitioned again for a county court back in 1752, and within two years other such requests had reached Governor James Glen.

  “The Assembly, the governor, the entire populace of the Low Country are deaf to our cries!” Her father was at it again, only this time he had climbed atop the bar. “Here we live with a conflux of the most undisciplined sort of mankind, ignorant evildoers who espouse the meanest principles. Horse stealers, murderers, fornicators, and other felons.” He was walking up and down the bar, and now even Go-la-nv Pinetree had forgotten the small marble and seemed captivated by Breck Stewart.

  “We have pleaded our case countless times with the Assembly. We have threatened those scalawags who torment us. This morning, three of those wretched individuals were slain. But our fight, our call for justice, has not ended. No, friends, neighbors, I daresay it has not even begun. To hell with Charlestown! That is what I say.”

  The room fell into silence. No one muttered agreement or dissent. Men and women sat or stood, staring, barely even breathing. Beside her, Emily’s big brother seemed struck dumb.

  “I say this, and to this I swear,” Stewart continued. “If I cannot answer these fiends by bullyrag, I will by dirk and blunderbuss.” He stopped, sucked in a deep breath, and slowly exhaled, looking at the faces of his neighbors.

  After a long pause, Robert Gouedy cleared his throat. “Be careful, Breck,” he said. “For what you suggest could be called treason.”

  “It is treason!” Joseph Robinson shot up from his seat, whipping off his cocked hat. “I will not listen to such talk.”

  Rob
inson was a newcomer to South Carolina, a Virginian by birth, and always loyal to King George. Emily was surprised even to see Robinson here. Most of the people in Ninety Six disliked Robinson almost as much as they disliked Birmingham Long, a farmer on the Long Canes. Long was not here, because he lived too far away to have been summoned on such short notice.

  “Treason,” Stewart said, his voice calm now, “is betraying one’s own government. Here in the Cane Creek region, we have no government.”

  “Except ourselves!” someone shouted.

  No echoes of affirmation joined that lone voice.

  Robinson remained standing, shaking with rage.

  “You suggest,” said Ferguson, the hog farmer, “that we form a militia?”

  “To fight the wastrels and killers, aye.” Breck Stewart nodded. “That is exactly what I suggest.”

  “It is treason, my friend!” a woman’s voice called out. “No matter how you say it, no matter how necessary and just, it remains treason.”

  “They might put you in stocks, Stewart, for such sentiments,” Robinson said, but at least he had stopped shaking. “Or brand you for sedition.”

  “We are men!” Stewart barked.

  A new fear gripped Emily. Her father was just stubborn enough to write a post to the governor or the Assembly, and she knew that would be enough to land him not in the stocks, but in the Charlestown jail for a long, long time.

  “How much longer must we watch our friends toil all year to build a home … only then to have it wiped out by vermin, by the scum of this great continent?” Slowly Breck Stewart climbed off the bar, assisted by Robert Gouedy and another man, but he continued to talk. “If this colony is to endure or even survive, we must have justice.” He swung his arm toward Emily, who now blushed with embarrassment. “If it were your daughter out there …” He could not finish.

  For the first time in her life, Emily heard her father’s voice crack with emotion, and she watched as tears welled in his hard eyes. He had to turn, find the mead, which he gulped down.

  Robert Gouedy put an arm around Stewart’s shoulders, and whispered something. His head bobbed, and Gouedy turned back to face the throng, while Stewart leaned against the bar, his body trembling.

  “There is a new governor in Charlestown,” Robert Gouedy said. “Perhaps he will listen to reason.”

  “’Tis true, ’tis true,” said Alroy O’Fionnagáin’s as he bobbed his head in agreement. “And Chief Justice Shinner has spoken on our behalf in the past.”

  “To deaf ears,” Ferguson put in.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Cochrane said. “Before I see my sons and my husband in balls and chains and condemned to the squalor of a Charlestown prison … or, God forbid … bound for the cord and the gallows for treason … I would rather send someone to talk to this new governor, and to speak to the Assembly.”

  “I agree with Missus Cochrane,” Robinson said. “Let us not do something rash that may land all of us before a Charlestown magistrate … or, worse yet, before bayonets of the King’s army.”

  Heads nodded in affirmation, but James Middleton snorted. “Would not cutting off the heads of the three rascals killed this morning by the young button of a Cherokee, and then sticking them on three pikes, and placing them on the Charlestown Road just a few rods outside our settlement … would not that deter the cowardly lot of killers?”

  A few women gasped. Emily frowned. Pinetree had killed only two of those louts. She had killed Blubber Cheeks.

  “We are not scoundrels,” Robert Gouedy said. “We are decent, God-fearing men and women, loyal to His Majesty. What you suggest …”

  “Would get the attention of those blackhearts,” Middleton interrupted.

  “Perhaps, but I would have a difficult time sleeping at night.”

  “I would not,” said Donnan Stewart.

  Emily turned, mouth agape, staring with incredulity at her brother. He wasn’t being flippant. He was dead serious.

  Donnan felt her eyes on him, and turned toward her. He did not blink, did not look away, did not back down. The frontier had hardened him. Well, what had happened this morning, what had almost happened to his sister—that had changed Donnan Stewart. Changed his sister, too.

  “Those unfortunate souls were brought back this afternoon,” Robert Gouedy said. “They were buried. As Christian as possible. If you would like to dig them up …”

  Disgusted, Middleton waved his hand and muttered an oath.

  “As Christian as possible,” Mrs. Cochrane offered, and pointed at Gouedy. “Which brings us to something else entirely. When you speak to the new governor, would it be possible … could we perhaps get a clergyman to Cane Creek and the Long Canes?”

  “Yeah!” a man in the back of the tavern called out. “That way me and Betsy could be legal in the eyes of God and the King. And that son of our’n would never know he was a bastard.”

  “Just like his old man,” another commented.

  The men laughed, but a blushing Mrs. Cochrane stormed through the open door.

  “I propose that we petition the governor,” Breck Stewart said, “and the Assembly.” His voice had softened, maybe from all the orating he had been doing, or maybe because he already knew what the result would be after another trip to Charlestown, another meeting with the colony’s leaders. “Again, we shall list our grievances …”

  “Our requests,” Joseph Robinson interjected.

  “Our requests,” Gouedy agreed, staring hard at Stewart, warning him with a hard glare to curb his tongue.

  “Let us take a vote,” Ferguson said.

  But Emily knew such formality was unnecessary. The settlers of Ninety Six would vote to send a delegation to Charlestown to see Chief Justice Shinner and the new governor, to ask for help. For justice. To get rid of the vermin terrorizing the backcountry. Robert Gouedy would go. So would her father, and Emily prayed that he’d let Gouedy do all of the talking.

  Chapter Three

  With Donnan Stewart and Go-la-nv Pinetree, Emily walked away from the settlement—if one could call Ninety Six a settlement—and Cormorant’s Rock Tavern down Charlestown Road. They passed the fields of tobacco and hemp where Gouedy’s slaves worked in the heat, and the rows of peach trees. They did not speak until they came to the intersection with the Cherokee Path.

  The Cherokee grunted and started off for Keowee, but Donnan called out his name. When Pinetree turned, Emily watched her brother shuffle his feet, and study the acorns littering the ground. She understood he couldn’t do it, so she spoke up herself.

  “Thank you, Go-la-nv. For what you did. We both thank you. My father thanks you.”

  The Cherokee nodded, but said nothing. Donnan kept staring at the acorns. He didn’t even look at Pinetree as he retreated down the trail.

  “Are you that proud?” she asked Donnan, shaking her head in disgust but feeling the heat rise in her face when Donnan had the audacity to laugh.

  “It is right you should thank him, Sister.” He spit to his side. “He saved your life, not mine.”

  She pointed a finger under her brother’s chin. “I paid my debt, Donnan. I cleaved the head of one of those blackhearts. I saved Go-la-nv’s life.”

  “Just do not tell Mum,” Donnan said. “She would never find a husband for you if word got out about what a savage you are.”

  As he started to chuckle, Emily whirled around and stormed down the Charlestown Road, walking away from Ninety Six.

  Her brother had to run to catch up. “Did not you hear that warning that you should not travel alone?”

  “I shall do as I please,” Emily declared.

  They had come to the stockade built during the Cherokee troubles of 1760. She stopped walking to study the wooden structure, now covered with weeds and ivy, many of the pine logs turning to rot. Immediately forgetting all about her feud with Donnan, she heard herself askin
g, “What was it like?”

  “Inside?” Again Donnan spit to his side. “Just be glad Da sent you back to Georgetown during the uprising.” Self-consciously he brought the fingers of his right hand to his face, which still bore the scars left by the pox. After a heavy sigh, he pointed to the graveyard next to the ruins of the small fort. “I forget their names,” he said, his voice distant. “I remember the water. How bad it smelled. I remember Mum crying, bathing my face with damp towels. Or maybe I just remember Mum telling me that’s what it was like.”

  “If and when she talks about it,” Emily said.

  “Aye. Machara Stewart is not one to resuscitate memories such as those,” Donnan agreed.

  Emily turned. “What do you think will happen? To the …” she tried to remember the word, “the … petition?”

  “’Tis not the first such petition we have sent to Charlestown,” he said.

  “Then … you think the Assembly …?”

  Donnan cut her off. “When was the last time you were in Charlestown?”

  It had been during the Cherokee uprising. Her grandparents had brought her from Georgetown to Charlestown to the slave market so that Grandmother Elizabeth could buy a servant for Emily. Emily couldn’t have been more relieved when her grandparents could not find chattel they deemed worthy of the price or worthy of their granddaughter. She shrugged.

  “I was there last fall with Da, remember?” Donnan said. “Da met with Governor Glen, with Lieutenant Governor Bull, with other members of Charlestown’s aristocracy. Do you know what I remember most about that trip?” He didn’t wait for a response. “It was what someone … whose name I have purged from my memory … said at a dinner. He told Da … to his face … and with me right there … ‘It is impossible to raise a gentleman away from the tidewater.’”

  She cocked her head, grinned, unable to resist the impulse to say, “Well, Brother, in your case I would say that man was correct.”

  He shook his head as he began to laugh, and Emily laughed with him. Their annoyances at one another forgotten, Donnan said, “Nothing will happen. Da will not be put in the stocks, nor flogged. Our committee will make their pleas, and return with rum and silk and trade beads for Go-la-nv and his people. And when the fiends burn another barn or steal another horse, Da will pass out more kill-devil and mead. And we shall listen to our friends and neighbors bandying words about what we need to do.”