II
The Flying Horned One
I remembered that adventure, strangest moment of all my war-boyhood on a late night in the fall of 1876.
The wagon track I walked was frozen to rutted concrete. Wind as cold as fear rustled the tall dead grass and the naked twigs of roadside thickets. A round moon reminded me of a pancake, and I tried not to think of that or anything else to eat. It had been long since I had eaten.
The black beard prophesied me by a long-vanished Yankee captor hung thick on my jowls. I was gaunt, big-boned, seam-faced. My clothes were torn, dirty, inadequate—overall pants, a frayed jumper, a hickory shirt that was little more than the traditional “button and frill,” outworn cowhide brogans, no hat. I warmed my knuckly hands under my armpits, and blew out steamy breath.
A man, hungry and weary and unsheltered, might die tonight. I wondered, without much dread, if I were at the end of my sorry trail. Other Southern veterans had died, from sheer want, after surviving the heartbreak of war and defeat. In 1865, after becoming sergeant and finally lieutenant under Bedford Forrest, the general surrender on all hands had failed to include me. I had been detached somewhere, and had gone home. There was no home—Kilpatrick’s cavalry had burned the place in ’64, and I found only the graves of my mother and sister. They had died of sickness, as my father had died of a minie ball at Chattanooga. After that, the black “Reconstruction” period. I had been gambler, Ku Klux raider, jailbird, chicken thief, swamp trapper. And now a tramp.
Up ahead were lights, two houses fairly close together. I knew that I was near the Missouri-Arkansas border. A loosely joined community hereabouts was called Welcome Rock. Would those lights welcome me?
As I faced them, I saw the moon clear. Something winged slowly across it.
What I say seems unreal to you, as the sight then seemed unreal to me. That winged shape must have been larger than any creature that flies; I made certain of that later.
At the moment, I saw only how black it was, with a body and legs half-human, and great bat-wings through which the moon shone as through umbrella cloth.
I told myself sagely that hunger showed me a vision.
The thing flopped around and across the moon again. I saw its ball-shaped head, with curved horns. Then it swooped downward. Suddenly I heard the voices of men.
One laughed, another cursed. The third cried pitifully. From somewhere beyond me came strength, fury, decision. I ran heavily forward, my broken shoes heavy and clumsy. I saw the three at a distance. One was strung up by his hands to a tree’s bare branch, the other two were flogging him with sticks.
I passed under other trees to approach. Their crisscross of boughs shut away sight of whatever fluttered overhead. The captive’s face showed white as curd, and the floggers seemed black. Running, I stooped and grabbed up a stone the size of my fist. When I straightened, I made out horns on the black skulls, horns like those of the flying thing. Somebody jeered: “You told on us. Now you beg us. But we—”
The two floggers were aware of me, and dropped their sticks.
“Knife,” said one, and the other drew a blade from under his coat. I threw my stone, and it struck the knife-holder’s black horned brow with a sound like an axe on wood. The knife dropped, and its owner sprawled upon it. I charged in after my rock.
The other man stood absolutely still. His outline could stand for a symbol of frightened surprise. He was mumbling words in an unknown tongue:
“Mirathe saepy Satonich yetmye—but it won’t work!”
From the moonlit sky came a whickering, like a bad horse in terror. Then I was upon the mumbler.
We struggled and strove. His gabble of strange sounds had failed to do something or other. Now he saved his breath, and fought with more strength than mine. I found myself hugged and crushed in his long, hard arms, and remembered a country wrestling trick. I feigned limpness, and when he unconsciously slacked his grip, I slid down out of it. Catching him around the knees, I threw him heavily. Then I fell with all my weight upon him, clutching at his throat.
Overhead the whickering rose shrill and shaky, and grew faint. The man I fought thrust my hands from his windpipe. I now saw that the blackness of his face, and the horns to either side, were a mask. He was wheezing, “If I get away quick, will that suit you?”
I tried to gouge his eye through a slit in the mask, but with a sudden effort he tore clear from me. Rising, he seized and dragged away the man my rock had struck down.
My strength and fury were ebbing, and I waited on one knee, watching the two flee among the brush. I glanced up. The flier was also gone.
The man who hung in bonds began to babble brokenly:
“You’re free from cursing … free from cursing. …”
The knife dropped by one of the masked pair still lay on the frozen ground. I picked it up and went to the man. Cords were noosed over his thumbs, drawing him up to the branch so that his toes barely touched ground. The shirt was torn from his back, which showed a shocking mass of gore.
I cut him down, and he collapsed in my arms like a wet coat.
Then spoke a challenging voice I remembered from long ago, “What are you doing to him?”
I had breath left only to say: “Help!”
“I heard the noise of fighting, and came at once.” A thick body approached in the half-light. “Bring him to my cabin.”
I glanced upward, and the newcomer did likewise. “Oh, then you saw the Flying Horned One? He must have fled when I came.”
“He fled before that,” I said, for I had recovered a little wind. My words seemed to make the thick man start and stare, but he made no rejoinder. We got the poor flogged wretch between us and dragged him across a field to the nearest lighted house. The moon showed me a dwelling, small but well built of adzed logs, with the chinks plastered and whitewashed. On the threshold the man we helped was able to speak again:
“This is the preacher’s place. I want baptism.”
“I baptized you once before,” growled the burly man from the other side of him. “Once is enough, even when you backslide.”
“What he wants is doctoring, not baptizing,” I put in. “His back’s all cut to hash.”
It was all of that. But the answer was still: “Baptize me.”
We helped him in. “I don’t think it will hurt you,” said the burly one, and as we came into the light of a kerosene lamp I saw whose voice I remembered.
This was the Yankee Sergeant Jaeger, whom I had last seen nearly fifteen years before, spading dirt over a woman who had seemingly died twice. He wore rough country boots and pants, but a white shirt and a string tie. He set the poor fellow in a splint-bottomed chair, where I steadied him, then went to the kitchen and returned with his hand wet. He laid the wet hand on the rumpled hair.
“Peter, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, the Son—”
At his touch the tortured form relaxed, the eyes seemed to close softly in slumber. Jaeger looked across at me.
“You’re a stranger to the Welcome Rock country. Or are you?”
“A stranger here, but not to you,” I replied. “I’m Cole Wickett, formerly with General Forrest—at your service, Sergeant.”
His eyes fixed me. He tugged his beard, which I saw had begun to thread through with gray. He opened his hard mouth twice before speaking.
“It is the same,” he said then, more to himself than to me. “A strong weapon twice placed in the hands of the righteous.”
The man we had saved sank almost out of the chair, and I caught him. But he was dead, and no wonder, for the beating had been terrific.
Jaeger laid him out on a strip of carpet, and caught a blanket from a cot to cover him.
“Poor Peter Dole,” he muttered. “He backslid from one congregation without rebuke. When he tried backsliding from his new fellowship, it was his destruction.”
I told what had happened outside in full. Jaeger did not seem particularly surprised about the bat-winged monster or the men with masks. He only said, “God grant that the baptism Peter asked for will bring him peace in the grave.”
“What is this mystery, Sergeant Jaeger?” I demanded.
He waved the title away. “I am done with war. I am the Reverend Mr. Jaeger now, a poor man of God, striving with adversaries worse than any your rebel army marshalled against me—Wickett, you make a dark hour bright.”
“More mystery,” I reminded him. “I want explanations.”
He studied me, wisely and calculatingly. “If I’m not mistaken, you are hungrier now than when we met before. Wait.”
He left me alone with the blanketed corpse of Peter Dole, and I heard him busy in the kitchen. He came back with a tin plate on which were cold biscuits, sardines from a tin, and some sort of preserves.
He also brought a cup, old Union army issue, filled with hot black coffee.
“Eat,” he bade me, “while I enlighten you.”