3stalwarts (77 page)

“Say, we had a book like that to home. Said ‘Shakespeare’ onto the back of it. I never read out of it, though.”

“Maybe you’ll like it,” said the peddler. “It’s a funny thing. Books is all right— stories, I mean— when there’s people around. But when you’re so by yourself you keep thinking about it, a play is better. There’s people talking all the while, and coming in and going out, and it seems right you should be sitting where you be to see ‘em. But in a book you can’t go around with anybody without knowing all the while you’re setting by yourself.”

Harrow did not understand, but later he found that it was so.

The wheels of the wagon began to spin suddenly at a fair rate of speed that seemed miraculous after the lethargic manner of their former revolutions. Both looked up to see the old horse bestirring himself.

“Durned if we ain’t almost there,” said the peddler.

Harrow saw a neat village street growing out of the road directly in front of him. Large trees sprang on either side, and the sunset behind sent the shadow of the horse’s head before them into the town.

“Boonville,” said the peddler.

The horse trotted on past an open triangular space of trees and grass and swung into an alley beside a three-story building of grey limestone with pillars running all the way up the front to support three tiers of porches.

Hurlburt House read the black-and-white sign.

They stopped in a large yard, with wagon sheds opening on two sides and the doors of a great stable on the third. A heavy man with a black beard and unpleasantly light blue eyes was sitting on a bucket in one of the open doors watching a cricket, which was persistent in its efforts to enter the barn. Whenever the insect reached the boarding, the man spat unerringly and counted. “Five!” he shouted for the benefit of someone in the stable. Then, seeing the cricket turn away, “Buttoned him up that time, too,” he said. Hearing the creak of the peddler’s ancient wagon, he glanced up.

“Got your usual truck of junk, ain’t you?” he asked. He rose from the bucket, spat on the horse’s legs, stuck his hands in his pockets, and started out to the street.

“That’s Jotham Klore. He’s pretty near the bully of the canal.” The peddler grunted. “But some day he’s going to get whipped-and it’ll be bad.”

He watched Harrow put the volume of Shakespeare into his carpetbag; then they got off the wagon and faced each other.

“Reckon I’ll move on,” said Harrow. “Thanks for the ride and the book.”

“Nothing at all, son; see you again sometime. You’ll find Berry’s boat at Uberfrau’s dock; it’s the Ella-Romeyn. It’s got a red stripe around the cabin roof. You go out on the street and turn left and go on till you get to the basin, and then follow that to the right, and you’ll get there.”

They shook hands. The peddler began to unhitch.

Harrow walked out into the street.

2

THE HAUL TO ROME

The Man on the Docks

It was growing dark. The windows of the Hurlburt House threw rectangles of light across the stone porch floor and out on the plank sidewalk. For a while Dan Harrow lingered by them, listening to the clatter of knives and forks and crockery, and drinking in the smells of roasting pork and boiled turnips. The sky was fleeced with small clouds which the moon had just begun to touch, and the streets were quiet.

A lull in the noises from the dining room of the hotel caused him to glance toward the door, and his eyes fell upon a sheet of paper tacked in a conspicuous position beside the frame. He walked over to it and began to read.

FOR INFORMATION LEADING TO THE CAPTURE, DEAD OR ALIVE , OF JOSEPH P. CALASH

“Desperate criminal,” remarked a high voice at Dan’s shoulder.

Turning, Dan saw a stoutish man dressed entirely in brown, with a black pot hat on his head and a green tie loose round his neck, who stood with his legs wide apart and his hands thrust into his hip pockets. The man regarded him out of shiny brown eyes, almost hidden between puckered lids, and pursed his lips in a silent whistle.

“Not that they’ve got a great chance of catching him,” he went on, “giv-ing such a innocuous likeness.”

“Yeanh?”

“Yeanh, my boy. What does it say? Six feet, thin, dresses like a gentleman. Hell! They’ll get information about half the county.”

“What’s he wanted for?” Dan asked.

“Plenty,” said the man. “Dead or alive! Two thousand dollars!”

He pulled a cigar out of his waistcoat pocket.

“Have one?”

“No.”

The man stuck it into his mouth and began rolling it from side to side, while Dan turned back to his inspection of the poster.

“Last seen in Utica. Riding a grey horse. Sixteen hands.”

“That’s what interests me,” explained the stranger. “I’m a horse trader by profession— I might say by nature. I had a horse like that taken out of my string in Utica. That was a loss! I’m looking for that animal.”

“That’s hard,” said Dan.

“Sour! Prettiest horse you ever see. Sixteen hands and dappled grey. White mane and tail. Gent’s horse.” He sighed gustily. “Well, it’s a hard business. Here to-day, there tomorrow. A man can’t find an honest man outside of himself in a horse trade— and if he’s honest himself, he’s either a fool or a damn sight cleverer than the other feller.”

“Yeanh,” said Dan. “I guess that’s right.”

“You ain’t seen him?” the man asked hopefully.

“No,” said Dan. “Have you got any notion who took him?”

“Stableman said he was a thin, tall man. Couldn’t see his face.”

“You’d ought to watch out for him,” said Dan.

“That’s what I’m doing.”

“Sounds like this feller,” said Dan, pointing his thumb at the notice.

“Think so myself,” said the man. “Say, son, if you was to see that horse, I’d call it an almighty favor if you’d notify me where. You can write to the Odd Fellow’s Lodge, James Street, Rome. Sam Henderson’s the name, care Alva Mudge, Esquire. Here it is wrote out.”

He scribbled the address on a slip of paper and handed it to Dan, who read it over, folded it, and put it in his shirt pocket.

“What’s your name, son?”

“Dan’l Harrow.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Mr. Henderson, holding forth his hand. Dan took it dubiously.

“It’s worth fifty dollars to you, if you find that horse. Best I ever got my hands on!”

He sighed.

“Yeanh,” said Dan. “I guess he was. They most generally be.”

He stepped into the street. Once he glanced back to see Mr. Henderson staring after him, framing a whistle with his lips— and the cigar for a note.

Figures were running in Dan’s head.

“Fifty,” he said to himself; then, “Two thousand dollars.”

He walked on.

“The dirty twerp!”

Following the peddler’s directions, he went down a street marked Schuyler high up on a limestone house, where nobody in the world could be expected to see it, and where nobody was expected to. Perhaps a hundred yards, with a slight incline at the end, brought him to the basin, a long, rectangular strip of water, with the feed canal flowing in round the base of a hill opposite, the Watertown Branch flowing out on the left, and far away to the right the Rome Canal winding out of sight between low hills.

Warehouses with big stupid windowless fronts ran along the shore, and stubby quays jutted into the water from their sides. Dan went down to the waterfront and walked along a planked run wide enough for a wagon, with turnouts on the wharves. There were no boats near him, but a little down the basin he saw one of the docks outlined by a lighted window cut into an indistinguishable shape, very low upon the water.

A slight breeze tickled his forehead. The night was cool and the air thick with the odor of grain. He stopped to listen to the slap of the ripple against the piles.

He was to ask Hector Berry, whom he had never seen, for a job; but first he would eat a supper he had in his bag. So he sat down on the planks of the dock with his back to a warehouse, in the thickest of the shadow, and ate slowly two great sandwiches of salty butter and ham, and a piece of green-apple pie.

As he finished the last bit and wiped his hands along his trouser legs, he became aware of a horse walking slowly along the dock. He sat still.

Suddenly the horse stopped, and low voices broke out round the corner of the building. With slow ease Dan rose to his feet and stepped noiselessly to the corner. The moonlight fell at a slant between the high walls, upon a tall dappled grey horse with high raking withers and straight hind legs the very look of which spelled speed. He stood quietly with his head at the shoulder of a man whose back was turned to Dan, but whose pipe hat shone grey in the white light and threw a long zigzagged shadow angle-wise against the clapboards. Facing him was a big man with a long-visored cap, who leaned against the wall and talked in a hoarse harsh voice. The moon fell on his face and brought his black beard into vivid contrast with the pallor of his eyes. As he talked, he punctuated his sentences with long squirts of tobacco juice. In the action Dan recognized the man he had seen in the stable yard.

It took Dan a moment to accustom his ears to their low voices. Even then he was able to hear only occasional snatches of their talk. “Two thousand dollars,” from the bearded man. “Better not get me riled and helping them … They’ve got a Department man after you … Half and half … Nothing to you …” And the man in the pipe hat, “Go ahead … Watch out if you do … No marshal … If there is, he’s scared … One dead … Jotham Klore …” And Klore again, “Bitch, Calash … I will … Marshal … Damn right …”

Suddenly Dan thought of the poster and the fat man and the grey horse.

Then he saw the tall man’s left hand stealing to the saddle holster, saw the moon trace the revolver barrel and Klore turn round to face the wall, while the tall man walked up behind him and raised the barrel and brought it down. Klore dropped to his knees and the tall man hit him again, and Klore stretched out on his belly. It all happened without a sound for Dan to hear, only the men and their shadows in a corner of the moonlight. Then the horse dropped his head and shook himself, jingling the stirrup irons, and let out a long breath through blubbering lips.

After watching Klore for a second or two, the tall man backed to his horse, mounted quickly, and galloped off up the canal. Dan stared at Klore, lying beside the warehouse and snoring heavily.

“Calash,” he said, to himself. “Gentleman Joe. Jeepers!”

He wondered whether he should go for help; but it seemed to him that Klore was only stunned. “Buttoned up,” he said to himself. His sympathy was all with the hunted man, a stranger, like himself, to the canal. He felt a secret kinship between them, roused, perhaps, as much by the beauty of the man’s horse as by the man. There lay no temptation for him in the reward.

He gazed up the canal. He wished that he might have seen the man’s face. Stepping back round the corner, he picked up his bag and walked on down the dock to the lighted window.

The Ella-Romeyn

A few steps more, and he found himself staring through the lighted window in the cabin of a boat which had been tied up to the dock, stern on to the bank. The name of the boat was cut in two by the tiller shaft, rising stubbily above the roof of the cabin to the ponderous sweep. The name, which had once been dressed in gilt, still carried enough of its paint to be legible. Though Dan spelled out the frank capitals— Ella-Romeyn— he scarcely noticed them, for his eyes had been caught by the dark band above the windows. Brown in the lamplight, it would look red to the sun.

He stood back a pace and looked the boat over carefully. Freighted to the gunwales with early potatoes, the Ella-Romeyn squatted on the water with the pregnant massiveness of a farrowing sow. Now and then her timbers grunted under the new load as she shifted against the tie-ropes.

Through the window and the geranium leaves that made a fringe along the sill, Dan caught a diagonal view of the cabin. The cookstove stood against the forward wall with the dish cabinets on each side of the stovepipe and the iron ventilators up above the heating shelf. To the right, under the windows, was a small sewing table, with a shelf over it bearing a ball-dialed clock on a shaft of imitation crystal. And on either side of the clock were cast the shadows of the occupants of the room, themselves invisible from the window.

Using the shelf for a table, and oblivious of the clock, these shadows were playing a comedy at cards. There were three of them: a stoutish man, with his back to the light, who played cautiously, putting his cards on the table with deliberate motions of his invisible hands; a very small man, his right hand to the light, with an egg-shaped head drawn out ridiculously by the angle of the wall; and opposite him an enormously fat woman, gesturing her paddle-like shadow hands with irrepressible flair. The two men were solemn in their game, though the little man was nimble in putting down his cards, in motions which the light carried clean across the shelf to the end of the fat woman’s nose. And she, with indefatigable good humor, leaned forward to meet the thrusts, and then leaned back, with chuckles that reached all the way to her bonnet, until the ribbons quivered in grotesque parody of her Gargantuan heaving. He was infected with the fat woman’s sense of humor, ridiculous in its parodied motions on the wall; he wanted to see her in the flesh, to mix with her kind, to be accepted as one of kindred joviality. As the comedy proceeded, he chuckled to himself and went aboard the boat. The unfamiliar feel of the gangway beneath his feet brought back the timidity he concealed under his slouch; yet he felt his way aft to the steersman’s position, where sufficient light escaped under the cabin door to show him the steps down.

The fat woman’s laughter echoed against the panels.

“Mix me another of them rum noggins,” she said, “and put in lots of lemon, and don’t forget the sugar like you did last time. Dealing makes me dry. What’s your bid, Sol?”

“Two hundred!” exclaimed a cracked voice in high determination.

“It’s by me,” said the third player mournfully.

“I got two suits stopped right here,” said the fat woman, “so I’ll say two-twenty.”