The Whiskey Rebel

I’d made arrangements with Ruth, and the front door was left unlocked. It was no great matter to make my way across the grounds, enter the house, and proceed to Tindall’s bedroom, the location of which Ruth had also explained to me. I told her I only wished to frighten him and rob him, make him feel as helpless as I had been made to feel, but I had not told her the truth. I pitied her, for she feared being sold if Tindall died, but Tindall was not a young man, and he must die sometime.

It was not that I wished him dead so much as I wished to kill him. Or, more precisely, I wished to see that I could kill him. I had killed Hendry, but that had been in the heat of violence, and it had been the instantaneous decision of a moment. For what would happen in the months and years ahead, I wished to know that I could kill, and that if I were called upon to do so I would be ready. I hoped all could be effected without more bloodshed, but I knew that if I pursued my plan, the time might well come when I would have to make that decision, and I believed it would be easier if I had made it already. I could think of no better subject for the experiment than a man who deserved to die-and deserved death at my hand.

I climbed the stairs, delicately pressing my moccasins to the wood so it did not squeak. At the top of the stairs I turned right and went to the second door, as I’d been instructed. Inside it was light, but I heard no noise, not breathing or the turning of pages or rustling of sheets. I pushed open the door a little farther to gain a better view.

The room was roughly furnished, as though the delicacy of Tindall’s receiving rooms was but posturing and here was the true man. A large oaken wardrobe, an inelegant side table, a plain bed, a bearskin rug upon the floor. Across the ceilings, rafters were exposed, built at an arc, almost as though we were in the hold of a ship. The walls were adorned with a few paintings of hunters upon landscapes. At the far wall, a dying fire burned in the fireplace.

From the rafters, near the center of the room, hung the body of Colonel Tindall, motionless, not even swinging, upon a monstrous thickness of rope. His dead face was near black, his tongue protruded, his eyes were strangely both bulging and closed tight. He was dead and had been dead for a few hours at least.

I stared, feeling astonishment, disappointment, and relief all at once. How had it happened that the very night I was to confront him, possibly kill him, he had taken his own life? I did not believe he was the sort of man to be so racked by conscience that he must choose oblivion over guilt. Yet here was the evidence before me.

I had been robbed of the chance to test my mettle, but I had nothing to gain by standing and staring, so I decided to search the house for anything of value I might take.

I took two steps into the room when I heard the boyish voice.

“I followed you.” It was Phineas. He sat in a high-backed chair that faced the fire and so had been invisible to me at the door. Now he rose and turned to face me, rifle in his hand. He did not raise it, but it was only a matter of time until he did. I had a pair of primed pistols in the pockets of my skirts, but I thought it too soon to reach for them.

“Why?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.

“I seen you coming through the woods, and I knew you was coming here, and I guessed why. When I saw you hiding out with the niggers, I knowed it for sure. So I come here first and I hit Tindall in the head with the back of my gun, and then strung him up like the pig he is.”

“Why?” I asked again.

“So you wouldn’t,” he said. “You come to kill him. I knowed it, and I didn’t think you should.” He laughed.

I had the strangest feeling of not being there, as though I watched these events unfolding from some distant place. Relief and disgust and terror swirled through me. “What is so fu

“I remember you when you first joined up with the party heading west. You was just a green gal from the East. Now look at you, killer of men, housebreaker, thief, who knows what else? I told you the truth, missus. The West changes you, I said, and by God it changed you good. But I ain’t go

He wasn’t going to kill me. I began to feel it, and my muscles loosened. I took a deep breath. “What do you mean?”

“You killed Hendry ’cause you had no choice, so now you think you can kill when you choose. You think it’s not so different. I did too, once. I’d killed some Indians when I was with a scouting party ’cause they ambushed us, and it felt good. I thought of my family when I fired my rifle right into those redskins’ chests. I didn’t mind at all. Then, a year later, I was coming through the woods at night and I come across a single Indian who’d made camp, asleep by his dying fire. I figure, I killed one Indian, why not another? I didn’t know if there was more nearby, so I didn’t use my gun. Instead I snuck up on him real quiet and tomahawked him right in the face. I done his mouth first, so he couldn’t scream none, and then his whole face until he was dead, and then I took his scalp. I was covered with blood at the end, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that when I was done, I knew killing ’cause you could was a different thing from killing ’cause you was made to.”

“You didn’t like it,” I said.

“Nah, I loved it. I love to kill Indians. Killing Tindall was pretty good too. But I don’t love myself no more, missus. That’s the thing.”

“Why would you do this to save me? I thought you hated me.”

“I hate me, missus, not you. I just get it confused sometimes.”

I looked at Tindall, and I could now see the back of his head. The hair was matted with blood. “They’ll figure out he didn’t hang himself of his own choosing.”

“Don’t matter,” he said. “I already wrote up a note, which I aim to bring to that lawyer, Brackenridge, in town. Then I’ll go.”

“But they’ll hunt you.”

“They’ll hunt me, but they won’t find me. I’ll be an outlaw, which I reckon I’d like.” He gestured with the rifle to the side table near the door. “There’s some notes there, a pretty good amount. Three or four thousand dollars. I don’t know what to do with paper, so you can have it. I’ll take the coins, probably six or seven dollars’ worth; they’ll think I took it all. But you best get gone.”

“Thank you, Phineas.”

He shrugged. “I’m sorry I said those things to you, missus. I never had no choice in it. I had to say them, you understand, but I’m sorry all the same.”

“I understand,” I said, though I did not. Perhaps I did not want to.

“None of it meant nothing, and that’s the truth. Now, you get gone. Then it’ll be my turn. I need to get to Pittsburgh, deliver my message, and then get to killing Indians.” He waved his gun at me. “You best go. I cain’t always help what I do.”

I gathered up the notes he’d assembled and hurried down the stairs, considering how best to frame these events to Dalton and Skye. I had not been quite the woman of action I’d wanted to be, but I did not see why they had to know that.