Lost Man's River(244)

Lucius reported the Carrs’ account in the same words it was told to him, Lee Harden asked if he believed their story, and he admitted he did not. At the same time, he reminded Lee that the Hardens had no evidence whatever, which meant they had no hope at all of seeing the Carr boys prosecuted in a court of law. And if they took the law into their own hands, they would bring a firestorm down on their clan which would destroy it.

Lee Harden thanked Lucius gruffly, saying that his family would take care of the problem in their own good time. For the moment, all Lee needed to know was what Walker Carr had effectively admitted, that his sons had fired at the Harden boys down at Shark River.

After Carr moved his family back to Everglade, a silent tension would pervade the settlement whenever the Harden men came north from Lost Man’s River. No one spoke to the Hardens, not one word, as if they were trying to “hate” them out of the region, a traditional remedy in the old Border lands from where most of their clans had come.

One day Lee Harden ran into the culprits, down the street from Barron Collier’s new courthouse. Though the Carr boys were frightened, they did not run because a small crowd gathered. They stood with eyes down when Harden circled them twice, three times, as if consigning some unpleasant scent to future memory. Abruptly he broke off his circling and walked away.

In later years, as the tension eased, folks started saying that those Hardens had it coming and that everything had worked out for the best. Owen when drunk would even hint behind his hand that you-know-who had put a stop to those damned mixed-breeds. And young Turner went along with it, confiding that he had fired, too—in fact, how he was probably the one (though he sure felt terrible about it) who had finally put that Roark Harden out of his misery.



A month after the young Hardens disappeared, Henry Short rowed his skiff down Turner River and on south through the inland bays, coming ashore and walking up the beach as Lee Harden jumped up and went to meet him. Shaking hands, kicking the sand, Henry asked if there was any way that he could help. Even Earl Harden finally agreed to let Henry go, look for the bodies, knowing that Short was the best tracker on the coast.

Henry Short knew plenty of reasons why it was a poor idea for him to go. He owed a lot to the Harden family, but he also knew how dangerous it was for him to get mixed up in this at all. “Lordy, Lordy,” he kept saying, tugging on his earlobe. Lee decided it was not fair to ask him, but Henry decided that he had no choice.

At Shark Point, Henry located a rain-rotted pelt salted and stretched in the painstaking way that Henry had taught those Harden boys himself. Another camp not far away had been abandoned in a hurry. He poled upriver, checking the mangroves on both banks for any small sign of disturbance. He poked and prowled and pried and peered till he found overhanging willow branches, bent and broken, in a small hidden creek on the east side of Shark Lake. All alone, far back up in the Glades, he pushed upstream.

At the head of the creek the Harden skiff, charred by a hasty attempt at burning, lay half-sunk and half-hidden beneath hacked-off branches. Taking his shovel and a length of rope, rigging his shirt over his nose and mouth, he followed the mud smear of the gator’s belly and great tail, matting the saw grass. Vultures flapped aloft as he drew closer.

The bodies lay on the open savanna, bloated so badly and so torn that he could scarcely tell which boy was which. He buried what was left of the boys’ bodies. Then he said a prayer under the sun and returned to the main river. On his way north, anticipating what Lee Harden would do, and fearing the certain retribution which any such action would bring down upon the Hardens—and knowing, finally, how often black men had been put to death for the mere witnessing of evil acts they had no part in—he decided that no good could come from telling the Harden clan what he had found.

Arriving at Lost Man’s after dark, Henry stopped at Lucius Watson’s cabin. Asked about that second camp he had located at Shark Point, he would only say that three trappers had used that place and that they had broken their camp in a hurry, and that their prints were also present in the Harden Camp. He did not identify the Carrs by name. Lucius agreed with Henry’s instinct not to tell what he had found, because that would leave the Hardens with no choice but to load their guns and take the law into their own hands.

Keeping their secret from this family which had been so good to both of them became one of their uncommon bonds. By the time Alden Carr blurted out the truth a few years later, Earl had renewed his Chokoloskee friendships and his invitation to maintain them. Even Lee resigned himself to the fact that there was no way to avenge his son and nephew without inviting the annihilation of the Harden clan.