A Wilderness of Tigers

Kenneth Tucker

Description

With the cessation of the Indian Wars, Silas Magby believed that Western Kentucky would be safe for his wife and children. But then the Harpes came—two mysterious brothers, Micajah and Wiley, with three devoted women followers, leaving a wake of ghoulish and seemingly motiveless murders—men, women, children, infants, bludgeoned, stabbed, shot, or set on fire. Earlier Magby had participated in a fruitless attempt to capture the brothers, but word comes that they are seeking him to enact retaliation. Now Magby must somehow stop the brothers before they can kill his wife and children.
Although fiction, A Wilderness of Tigers based upon one of the earliest recorded serial killer rampages. In the 1790’s roughly 35 persons were murdered by the Harpe brothers.
Kenneth Tucker has woven a haunting story whose characters linger beyond a final page of history or text."- Katherine C. Kurk, Kentucky Philological Review
"Tucker tells a fascinating story of these evil doers... It's an interesting part of our history..."- Jesse Stuart Foundation.
"Tucker effectively uses dialogue and and clear, graphic details to bring to light a sad chapter in Kentucky's history." - Steve Flairty, Kentucky Monthly

Sujets

• Action
• Fiction
• Suspense
• Adventure
• Suspenso
• Adventure (Guyana)
• Thrillers

Informations

• Publié par: AuthorHouse
• Date de parution: 14 février 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781463458690
• Langue: English

Extrait

A WILDERNESS OF TIGERS
 
A NOVEL OF THE HARPE BROTHERS AND FRONTIER VIOLENCE
 
Revised Edition
 
BY
 
KENNETH TUCKER
 
 

 
 
AuthorHouse™
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.authorhouse.com
Phone: [phone]
 
 
 
 
© 2005 KENNETH TUCKER. All rights reserved.
 
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.
 
Published by AuthorHouse  03/04/2021
 
ISBN: 978-1-4184-8238-1 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4184-8239-8 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-4634-5869-0 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2004099752
 
 
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Afterword
Acknowledgements
For Jerry Herndon, who first told me of the Harpes.
Me seems I hear, when I do hear sweet music,
The dreadful cries of murdered men in forests.
Sir Philip Sidney, “Double Sestine” from The Arc adia
Chapter One
Magby stood gazing at the rubble—the piles of glowing coals, the scattered darkened shingles, the fallen joists, and charred logs—the remains of what until sometime during the long night before had been the two-room cabin of Moses and Mary Stegall. The odor of wood smoke was still sharp, and old Tompkins and Will Grissom were moving cautiously amid the smoldering wreckage, using shovels to push aside smoking logs and scrape away small mounds of ashes in search for further bodies. As Magby dug the bowl of his corncob pipe into the battered leather pouch at his side, he strove to suppress a visceral shudder.
Why does a day like this one have to be so bright? he thought almost unwittingly. The sky should be leaden, overcast, forebo ding.
Unexpectedly, from somewhere in the summer forest behind him, a bird began to trill. Magby paused in raising the pipe. The notes fleetingly lulled him. He could not recall the kind of bird that made that song, but for a strange and piercing moment, he felt as though he stood amid a dream and as though the smoking rubble were unreal. All that mattered, seemingly, was the bird’s self-pleasing notes.
Then Tompkins called something to Grissom about there being no need to search further. Grissom nodded. And as Magby lighted the pipe, the shudder—sharp, deep—quivered down his spine.
Tompkins and then Grissom stepped from amid the ashes and tossed shovels to the earth. As they walked slowly toward him, Magby tugged at the edge of his broad-brimmed hat, then stooped and picked up his long rifle from the tall, gently waving grass at his moccasined feet. He sensed that he needed to grasp it just then. Amid the whirl of his thoughts, he did not know why, only that somehow it seemed like an epaulet. He did not speak as they approached but watched them, noting their features as though they were strangers: Old Tompkins, short, turkey-neck lean, and grizzle-bearded, wearing a soiled buckskin shirt and a frayed coonskin cap; and Will Grissom, young, erect, block-shouldered, his shirt stripped off, his face round, serious, weighty, yet retaining a hint of the softness of boyhood. Magby had known them both for several years and felt especially close to Grissom, but now he was struggling with the uncanny feeling that they were all three strangers living one hallucination.
With faces haggard and tense, they stopped before him.
“No sign of the babe?” asked Magby, with a trace of hoarseness.
“None,” said Tompkins.
“I guess then maybe there’s a chance it’s alive,” said Grissom.
Magby noticed the submerged tremor in his young friend’s voice.
“I doubt hit,” said Tompkins. “They’s little reason them kind of men’d keep a babe alive. They probly kilt hit. Probly, though… hit’s body bein’ so tiny, hit was burnt up with the cabin.”
“I reckon that’s the state of things,” said Magby. “No sign then of Moses?”
“None,” said Grissom, hands on hips. “I’m fair to certain, Silas, us three couldn’t have overlooked another body.”
“I am, too,” said Magby.
“So,” said Grissom, “them over there’s the only two grown folks that perished here last night or early this morning—whenever it was.” He nodded beyond Magby’s shoulder.
Automatically, Magby turned and stared toward the two partially charred corpses, lying about twenty paces away, near where his horse and those of his companions were placidly grazing. Ten minutes or so before, he and his fellows had carried the barely recognizable body of the man from the ashes and had laid it there. As they had stepped again toward the blackened jumble of logs, he had told Tompkins and Grissom that he wished to pause a moment and study things over before continuing the search. Grissom had nodded, but had said tensely that he wished to go on looking then. Waiting to know the answer was not good. Tompkins had agreed.
“Two bodies,” Magby muttered, returning his eyes to Grissom.
“Yep,” said Tompkins. “Stegall’s missus and that surveyor-fella, Major Love.”
“I heard tell,” Magby said, “how he was coming here yesterday to see Stegall about some land purchase or other. I guess Moses and his wife asked him to spend the night.”
Unexpectedly, Tompkins chuckled. The hoarse, strained cackle rang with an odd mixture of delight and apprehension. “I reckon that Major’s spirit, if’n hit can look down from wharever hit is, regrets acceptin’ that invitation. Him plannin’ to spend the night in Stegall’s cabin and them two hell-bent devils a-showin’ up and splittin’ his head wide open with an axe!”
“What’d shame King Herod,” said Grissom, his usually poised voice quivering, “is what they done to Stegall’s missus. There must be over thirty stab wounds all over what’s left of her body, and that one knife was shoved so deep up inside her that the handle wasn’t even scorched.”
“I know,” said Magby. “Men that would do a thing like that, they don’t seem human.”
“Tell me, Silas,” said Grissom. “You fought the Redcoats and then the Injuns in Tennessee. Did you ever see anything as bad as what these men do?”
Magby thought a moment. “I reckon in my thirty-eight years, I’ve seen a lot of what people don’t like to tell their womenfolk about. I seen men bleeding to death, Will, and dying of gangrene. I’ve seen men’s bodies after the Injuns scalped them, and I’ve seen some men still living and moaning after the redskins done that to them. But these two brothers—I don’t know.... What they do is beyond God’s comprehension. Lord, I don’t know. It’s like there’s some strange disease or poison in their blood. I’ve never encountered men like them.”
Tompkins looked squarely at Magby. The small man’s pale blue eyes showed an unwonted intensity. “Squar Magby, I reckon you won’t like what I’m going to say, ‘cause you got a reputation of being a man of book reading, and a lot of men of learnin’ don’t believe such things, think they’re foolish. But just maybe there’s some truth in what the niggers and a lot of white folks is startin’ to say.” He paused, looking nervously at Magby.
Magby nodded for him to continue.
“They’s a lot of folks a-saying them brothers, they ain’t nacheral humans like you, me, and Will here. That they’re the devil’s sons sired by Satan himself on a witch woman, and when they look at you, they hex you with their glittering eyes like a sarpent, and you just lose all will and stand dumb until they come up and tomahawk you.”
Magby pushed back the brim of his hat and for a moment looked askance at Tompkins. More than one farmer about Robertson’s Lick chuckled that Old Jim Tompkins was “a trifle daft.” A spare old bachelor, living alone in a rundown cabin, given to bouts of heavy drinking and outbreaks of sudden temper, Tompkins certainly encouraged such rumors. Magby himself had more than once wondered about Tompkins’ soundness. But as he stared at the man’s narrow, sunken, vulture-blue eyes, he brushed aside the question of whether the old farmer was a bit touched.
Tompkins’ words were simply an unhappy reminder that Western Kentucky was infested with rife and bedeviling superstition. A ramshackle body of beliefs that kept young girls creeping to the cabins of beldams for love pfilters and that provoked frightened families to place a broom and a Bible upon the doorstop on the assumption that a witch had to count every broom straw and touch each page before entering the cabin— tasks that presumably would take all night. Magby sighed almost inaudibly. Such beliefs infected lives with rootless hopes and pestering fears. Yet there was little that he or any man could do about them. But no need existed to criticize Tompkins. Magby sucked on his pipe, then said, “I’m afraid, Jim, “I can’t accept those beliefs.”
“Well, maybe you’re right, Squar Magby. But something nowadays ain’t right. Maybe hit’s these here August dog days. When they come, everything goes rotten. The worl