Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier Page A

task that the tip of his tongue, grey as the foot of a goose, was stuck out at the corner of his mouth. The other man was studying a newspaper. He wore leavings from a uniform, but the bill to his forage cap had been torn off so that the crown alone topped his head like a grey tarboosh. It was cocked off to the side at a sharp angle, and Inman supposed the man styled himself as a rounder. Propped up against the wall behind the man was a fine Whitworth rifle, an elaborate brass-scoped artifact, with many complex little wheels and screws to adjust for windage and elevation. The hexagonal barrel was plugged with a tompion of maple wood to keep out dirt. Inman had seen but a few Whitworths before. They were favorites of snipers. Imported from England, as were their scarce and expensive paper tube cartridges. At .45 caliber, they were not awesome in power, but they were frightfully accurate at distances up to near a mile. If you could see it and had even a measure of skill in marksmanship, a Whitworth could hit it. Inman wondered how men like these might come by such a fine rifle.
    He walked past them into the store, and they still did not look up. Inside by the fire two old men played a game on a barrel top. One man put his hand out on the circle of wood and spread his fingers. The other stabbed at the spaces between the fingers with the point of a pocketknife. Inman watched a minute but could not figure out what the rules might be, nor how score might be kept, nor what might need to occur so that one or the other would be declared the victor.
    From the store’s meager stock, Inman bought five pounds of cornmeal, a piece of cheese, some dried biscuit, and a big sweet pickle, and then he went out onto the porch. The two men were gone, had left so recently that their rockers were still in motion. Inman stepped down into the road to go on walking west, eating as he traveled. In front of him a pair of black dogs crossed from one patch of shade to another.
    Then, as Inman came to the edge of the town, the two men who had been on the porch came from behind the smithy and stood in the road blocking his way out. The smith stopped pedaling the wheel and stood watching.
    —Where you going, son-of-a-bitch? the man with the cap said.
    Inman said nothing. He ate the wet pickle in two big bites and stuck the remainder of the cheese and biscuit in the haversack. The nipple-pick man moved off to the side of him. The smith, wearing a heavy leather apron and carrying the scythe, came out of the lean-to and circled around to come at Inman from the other side. They were not big men, not even the smith, who seemed in all ways unsuited to his craft. They looked to be layabouts, drunk maybe, and overconfident, for they appeared to presume, since numbers were in their favor, that they could take him with no more weapon than the scythe.
    Inman had begun to reach behind him into the roll of his bedding when the three jumped as one, swarming at him. At once they were fighting him fist and skull. He had not time even to remove his pack and thus brawled encumbered.
    Inman fought them backing up. His last wish was for them to mob him over onto the ground, and so he gave way until he was forced against the side of the store.
    The smith took a step back and came over his head with the scythe like a man splitting wood. His thinking, apparently, was to cleave Inman down the center, cut him open from collarbone to groin, but it was an awkward blow, made doubly so by the shape of the implement. He missed by a foot and the point of the blade buried itself in the dirt.
    Inman jerked the scythe from the smith’s hands and used it as it was intended, making long sweeping strokes close to the ground. He went at their feet with it, mowing at them and making them drop back before they were cut off at the ankles. It felt natural to him, holding a scythe in his hands again and working with it, though the current effort was different from mowing fodder since his strokes