The Rebels: The Kent Family Chronicles Read Online Free PDF Page A

edible. How to look to the horizon and identify objects and details of terrain at twenty miles—or spot a nighthawk at dusk just on the other side of a meadow. Far sight, was George’s name for it. He developed it with practice. He would need it where he was going, he always said.
    They’d traveled to fairs in Richmond, too. Spoken with rough, buckskin-clad men who carried long squirrel guns and claimed to have tramped the wild country west of the shimmering barrier of the Blue Ridge Mountains—the Blue Wall, Virginians called it. Out there, the long hunters remarked while spitting tobacco in a delightfully ill-mannered way, was a sea of forest and grass, sky and cloud. Enough animals to last a man a lifetime, whether he trapped and sold their pelts, or ate their flesh to survive, or both.
    Three years ago, in 1772, Judson’s friend and mentor had disappeared out that way; crossed the Blue Wall. He seemed to have a courage Judson lacked.
    Also, George Clark was not in love with a woman he couldn’t possibly win.
    Twice in the intervening time, George had reappeared for brief visits at his parents’ home. On those occasions, Judson had been invited to share an evening meal—and George’s wondrous tales.
    He described how he’d reached a raw frontier settlement that had grown up near Fort Pitt at the fork where two rivers flowed into one much larger one—the beautiful water, the red Indians called it. O-hi-o. La Belle Riviere, according to the French fur trappers.
    George Clark had gone down this immense river. Taken to the poplar, as the companions with whom he traveled termed it. He’d journeyed a long way down the Ohio, through a vast, hushed wilderness, paddling in that sixty-foot hollowed poplar log marked with bloodstains and the grease of pelts.
    On his second trip he’d traveled the river again. And wintered with a tribe of Indians called Mingos. He’d learned their tongue. He spoke glowingly of the gentle wisdom and forest skills of their old tribal leader, Logan.
    It was difficult for Judson to absorb all the amazing detail of these narratives. But it wasn’t hard at all to be entranced; to have his imagination lifted, until his mind’s eye built an immense wooded kingdom where dark-skinned savages slipped silently along the game trails. A kingdom where a man could claim land if he wished it. Or simply find room to do as he pleased. To be what he was, not what someone else expected him to be.
    The western forest was the only part of the continent for him, George Clark averred on those all-too-brief evenings before he vanished again, sterner-looking than he’d been in youth. Toughened now. Lean. He came and went across the Blue Wall like some red-haired ghost, and each short visit somehow freed Judson of the confinements of his own life—if only for a few hours.
    The visits saddened him, too. Perhaps he belonged in the western forest. A great many bold, enterprising fellows were drifting that way, George said. Some families as well. More and more land companies were being formed to explore—and exploit—the vast wilderness. On occasion Judson thought that maybe he was a fool not to pack and follow his friend—
    There was just one problem. Judson had inadvertently brought it up tonight, when he should have been murmuring Lottie Shaw’s name instead.
    Judson saw George Clark’s face in his mind as he thundered the Virginia roads under soughing trees. The eyes of his friend never seemed at rest. They always seemed to be searching past a man’s shoulder—
    For what? he wondered. Freedom? The constantly retreating horizon—?
    “It’s that goddamned red hair,” Judson exclaimed thickly, just before a branch nearly took his head off. He straightened up again, reflecting that red hair was one painless way he rationalized George’s boldness. In the Clark family, it was said that red hair marked a man. Set him apart. Destined him for remarkable deeds. Of John Clark’s six sons, two had red hair.