A Different Flesh Read Online Free PDF Page B

steps, betimes close enough to spit, and never did you tumble to it. Have I not, then, sufficient of the woodsman’s art to accompany you farther?”
    Wingfield removed the bolt from his bow, released the string. “I own myself beaten, Caleb, for how should we say you nay? The damsels back in town, though, will take your leaving hard.”
    â€œThey’ll have plenty to company them whilst I’m gone, and shall be there on my return,” Lucas said cheerfully. “And in sooth, Edward, are we not off to rescue a fair young damsel of our own?”
    â€œNot wondrous fair, perhaps, since the little lass favors me, but I take your meaning.” Wingfield considered. “We’ll do as Henry proposed before your eruption, and divide to examine the streambank. Caleb, you’ll come with me this way; Henry and Allan shall take the other. Half a mile either way, then back here to meet. A pistol-shot to signal a find; otherwise we go on as best we can. Agreed?”
    Everyone nodded. A sergeant to the core, Cooper muttered, “As well I don’t have Caleb with me—I want a man I know’ll do as he’s told.” Unabashed, Lucas came to such a rigid parody of attention that the others could not help laughing.
    He and Wingfield hurried along the edge of the creek, their heads down. Herons and white-plumed egrets flapped away; frogs and turtles splashed into the turbid water. “There!” Lucas said. His finger stabbed forth. The print of a bare foot was pressed deeply into the mud.
    â€œGood on you!” Wingfield clapped him on the back, drew out one pistol, and fired it into the air. He reloaded in the few minutes before Dale and Cooper came trotting up.
    Dale, who was red as a tile, grunted when he spied the footprint. “The brutes did not slip far enough aside, eh, my hearties? Well, after them!”
    The trail ran northwest, almost paralleling the James River but moving slowly away. It became harder to follow as the ground grew drier. And the effort of sticking to it meant the four trackers had to go more slowly than the sims they pursued.
    By evening, the Englishmen were beyond the territory they knew well. Explorers had penetrated much farther into the interior of America, of course, but not all of them had come back—and with the colony’s survival hanging by so slender a thread, exploration for its own sake won scant encouragement.
    At last the thickening twilight made Wingfield stop. “We’ll soon lose the trace,” he said, smacking fist into palm, “yet I misdoubt the sims push on still. What to do, what to do?”
    Again Caleb Lucas came to the rescue. “Look there, between the two pines. Is’t not a pillar of smoke, mayhap marking one of the sims’ nests?”
    â€œMarry, it is!” Wingfield turned to Allan Cooper, the most experienced of them at such estimations. “How far away do you make it?”
    The guard’s eyes narrowed as he thought. “The sims favor large blazes, as being less likely to go out Hmm, perhaps two, two-and-a-half miles—too far to reach before full dark.”
    â€œAll the better,” Dale said. “I’d liefer come on the accursed creatures with them unawares.” No one cared to disagree.
    Cooper took the lead as they grew closer. “Reminds me of a scouting party I commanded outside Haarlem,” he remarked, and reminisced in quiet tones until they drew within a few hundred yards of the fire.
    He stopped then, and waved the others to a halt behind him. “Let me go on alone a bit,” he whispered. “If they’re smart as Spaniards (which says not much), they’re apt to have a sentry out, and I’ll need to scout a way past it.”
    He slipped away before Henry Dale could voice the protest he was plainly forming. Whether a poacher or not, Cooper had told the truth: he could move silently in the woods. It was too dark to see his face when