Crack in the Sky by Terry C. Johnston Page A

turned back to Gray and Hatcher. “You ain’t bald-facing me, now, are you?”
    “This nigger can play,” Jack testified.
    Porter seemed dubious. “So where’s your own squeezebox if’n it’s the true you can play?”
    “Lost it,” Gray began, his face gone morose. “More’n a year ago now. Damn, but it broke my heart.”
    “Just up and lost it, did you?”
    Hatcher explained, “Didn’t rightly lose it. Elbridge got it crushed a’neath a packhorse when the critter slipped off the trail and took it a slide down the mountainside.”
    “Had to shoot my packhorse,” Gray added morosely. “And then I found that squeezebox smashed like fire kindling when I untied my packs to carry ’em back up the slope.”
    Hatcher leaned forward and whispered, still loud enough that most men could hear. “The man sat right down, then and there, with what was left of his squeezebox broke all apart in his two hands … and took to bawling like he was a babe.”
    “I loved that thing,” Gray defended himself in a squeaky voice, hands fluttering helplessly before him.
    “Here!” Grimes shouted as he burst back onto the scene.
    “Gimme that!” Gray screeched as he lunged to his feet, reaching for the concertina, ripping it from the other man’s hands. “Oh, J-jack—ain’t she ’bout the purtiest sight you’ve ever see’d?” he gushed, running his fingers over the oiled wood of both octagonal end pieces and the wrinkled leather bellows.
    Hatcher turned and winked at Bass. “Damn sight purtier’n that’un ye got smashed under a dead horse what took a tumble long ago.”
    “It is purtier, ain’t it? It is for the truth of God!” Gray shouted in glee as he hitched up his leather britches before stuffing both hands inside the wide leather straps tacked to the wooden ends of the concertina.
    Scratch whispered into Hatcher’s ear, “He really can play?”
    “This boy can play like the devil his own self,” Jack replied. “Eegod! He’s better’n me!”
    Nodding in amazement, Bass turned to watch Elbridge Gray’s merry face as the trapper slid up and down some scales, listening intently to the instrument’s tuning. For the moment Scratch was amazed to find himself in the fastness of these mountains—where he had been put afoot, where he had lost three friends to the savages somewhere downriver, where he had been scalped and left for dead, then resurrected by Jack Hatcher and his buffalo-worshiping Shoshone—out here in the great beyond to find not only did Hatcher have along a fiddle he could play tolerable well … but now he discovered that Elbridge Gray could make all sorts of sweet sounds emerge from that hand-me-down concertina.
    Here in this intractable wilderness, he had found music. Real music. Not just the dimming memories of tunes he carried inside his head, off-key and little used, whistled or hummed in tattered fragments as he went about his icy labors … but real, heart-stirring music.
    “‘Hunters of Kentucky’!” Gray cried above the whooping and clapping of those crowding close.
    “Get back, there—give us some room, dammit!” Hatcher demanded from the gathering as he dragged the bow long across the strings in prelude. Turning to Gray with as big a grin as Jack ever had on his face, he roared, “Do it, ’Bridge!”
    Elbridge yanked the two ends of the concertina apart and began to stomp about in a tight circle, thumping the grassy ground with his floppy moccasins, his eyes squinted shut, fingers flying in a blur as he wheezed life into that instrument, squeezing sweet music from it, pumping the magic of song into the lonely lives of lonely men in a lonely wilderness.
    With the second playing of the chorus, Caleb Wood started to sing at the exact moment Jack Hatcher raised his own croaking voice.
    We are a hardy, free-born race
,
Each man to fear a stranger;

Whate’er the game we join in chase
,
Despoiling time and danger
,
And if a daring foe annoys
,
Whate’er his strength and