From the cabin’s back door, a path wound down along a moss-bound creek. From somewhere down that way came a clang of metal on stone.
Quietly, she slipped down toward the sound and watched Dearg from behind a stand of mountain laurel. Making adjustments, he bent over the spiraled copper tubing, spigots, and barrels.
When she stepped into view, he glanced up. Gave the jerk upward of the head that was the mountain man’s greeting.
“I need to know,” she said. Because there was no point in not addressing this thing directly. “What’s going on with you? Rumors all over about your brawling. Things you’ve said. None of it like the man I remember.”
Jaw working side to side, he said nothing.
She could see in his face she’d been right: a flicker of fear passing over what he always was—the laconic mountain man. And now also a fair piece of defiant. She felt like she was being sighted down a gun barrel. Maybe not the only target of whatever it was he was feeling, but the one standing there.
She braced her feet wider apart. “You don’t scare me, you know.”
He let several beats pass as he glowered, then looked away. “Sure way to get yourself hurt, if you ask me: acting like there’s nothing can hurt you.”
They stared at each other. A threat, it might be. Or a warning.
Suddenly, voices sounded from up the path, and the clomping of hooves.
Dearg glared at her—a look of betrayal. “You brung people with you?”
Kerry shook her head. “Only the twins knew where I was headed.”
A scattershot of voices she could make out over the rush and babble of stream: women and men both.
Snatching up his Winchester propped against a stump, Dearg jerked his head back toward the spirals and vats and barrels. Kerry nodded. These strangers, rich and Northern and from the outside, didn’t need to see the still. Without speaking, Kerry and Dearg climbed together halfway up the path where they could hear more clearly, but still not be seen.
Now the squeak of leather as the group dismounted near the cabin.
Kerry peered through a feathering of hemlock. There stood horses whose coats glowed in the gold slant of late-afternoon sun. Biltmore horses, they had to be. And its people: George Vanderbilt and his four guests.
Here, of all places.
“Why is it again,” the niece asked, “we’re disturbing these people?”
The niece’s friend swept a gloved hand at the cabin. “Perhaps they’ll want to join us for the ride back down to admire the Rembrandts and Sargents.”
John Cabot frowned. Maybe at that bit of snobbery. Or maybe at the smell of smoke and burnt sugar. Either way, his scowl deepened as Grant rapped at the cabin door.
“Whose cabin,” the niece’s friend asked, “did you say this was? Or do we know?”
But Vanderbilt, looking uneasy, didn’t answer. Only a faint whistle of the wind through the pines, and the distant tumble of waterfalls.
Grant rapped again, this time using the end of his crop.
The cabin door creaked open. A crack of only a couple of inches, through which a gun’s muzzle appeared.
A shot ripped just over Grant’s head, zinging through the white oak just behind him.
“Good God!” Grant cried, staggering back. He looked as if he might faint.
Kerry could taste the sulfur of gunfire that hung in the air. An eerie, hollowed-out silence followed, as if the mountains were absorbing the blast.
“As I mentioned before,” Vanderbilt said from behind him, “the mountain people need to be approached slowly. With consideration.”
Grant turned back to the door. “For God’s sake, hold your fire.”
From behind the crack, one eye peered out, along with half a forehead.
Dearg watched, looking half-tense, half-amused. His right hand spun the Winchester up so that his finger rested on the trigger. He’d always been quick as a cougar, Kerry knew. The youngest but one of twelve, for years he’d probably felt he had to be something other than the biggest and strongest and best.
Shaking her head at Dearg, Kerry reached to point the Winchester’s barrel down toward the ground.
“You’uns a government man?” came from behind the door.
“Most assuredly I can answer that in the negative, my good man.”
“That mean hell no?”
“Yes. That is, no, I am decidedly not a government man.”
The boy poked his entire head out now, the rest of his body still blocked by the rough pine door. “You talk funny as hell.”
As Dearg gave a low, warbling whistle that drifted through the trees, the boy’s head swung around. “Hold up, now.”
Pulling what looked like a thick cigar case from his coat pocket, Cabot unlatched an accordion-pleated bellows with a lens on one end and snapped in a cylindrical cartridge Kerry assumed held film. Only tourists from up North owned portable Kodaks like this, and Kerry resented his using it here.
Emily shot a smile, winsome and sweet, his direction. “Goodness. Loading in daylight.”
Cabot nodded but did not look up from threading black paper onto a reel with a brass fitting. Raising the Kodak to eye level, he aimed the lens at the raccoon pelts, advanced the film, then aimed at the other outbuildings.
Kerry drew a deep breath and held it to keep from speaking.
The boy put up a hand. “Let me check down yonder first, if you’uns can just hold on to your britches. Make sure it’s all right.”
“Britches,” John Cabot murmured. To Vanderbilt, he said in a low voice, “It’s fascinating—the connections of their speech with Elizabethan England, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as Africa, significantly. Their speech, the construction of their homes, their methods of farming, their musical instruments, all of it hardly evolved from earlier eras across oceans. Like a time capsule here in the hollows of the Blue Ridge.”
Hardly evolved.
As if she and her people were only a newly discovered set of Charles Darwin’s apes who’d not yet mastered the art of two-legged upright ambulation.
Kerry wanted to smack him—all of them—across their seven-course-meal faces.
The boy flung open the door and grinned. “Come to cogitate on it, Dearg told me to sit tight or he’d skin me alive. Let’s just hope he don’t think you’d be government folks come to smash up his work. Him being a hell of a shot.”
“Indeed. Let us hope.”
Kerry cringed at the strangers exchanging glances. What right did they have to assume they understood her world after only a few days in it? And even those they’d spent sequestered away in a fancy hotel and a castle.
“On the contrary, young Tate,” Grant pronounced, “we have come here with the offer of help.”
The door, which had been inching closed, now flew back open again. “We ain’t lookin’ for no help from outsiders.”
“That ferocious independence you mentioned.” Cabot lowered his voice again to address Vanderbilt. But Kerry could hear every word. “The Industrial Revolution has exploded all around them, yet even for those who understand there are places now where one can turn a tap for hot water or flick a switch for light, none of this is appealing. It’s intriguing: that drive to remain separate from the civilized world.”
Kerry bit down on her lip. The arrogance of the man to think he understood.