Colter's Path (9781101604830) (5 page)

“Got any of the kill-devil about you, Bob?” Scarlett asked.

“Dry as powder, Ben. Dry as powder.”

“Same here,” Scarlett replied. He turned a mournful face toward Jedd. “Bob, you reckon a rich man like Mr. Colter here might take pity on two broke old dusty-dry drinking men?”

Bertram sniffled and pulled out the rag again to wipe his nose, then took a look to see what he'd delivered up. What he saw made him wince, and he threw the rag into a nearby empty rain barrel. “That's the sorrow, Ben. Jedd says he ain't rich at all. Says he's broke.”

Scarlett looked at Jedd as if he were a wonder of the
world. “Broke? Ain't what I'm hearing. I hear Jedd Colter got a whole creekful of California gold!”

“Ain't true, Ben. Wish it was,” Jedd said.

Scarlett sighed. “Not much a poor man can do to help a poorer one, is there?”

“Not much. Sorry.”

“Why are you back in Knoxville, Mr. Colter?”

“Call me Jedd. I'm back because a man wanted to meet me here to hire me to pilot a California venture.”

“You going to do it?”

“I am. Why don't you come with me, Ben? You, too, Bob. Put the liquor aside, get yourself free of it, and come to California where you have a chance to make something of yourself.”

Ben was at a loss for words for a moment. “Costs too much money,” he said. “How much is it to do it?”

“That'll be up to the men running the venture, Mr. Plumb and the Sadler brothers.”

“Sadler brothers!” Bob Bertram exclaimed bitterly, and spat on the ground. “That puts me out right there. Them two got it in for me, especially Wilberforce Sadler. They'd sell me to the Injuns or feed me to the wolves along the way, just for meanness. Uh-uh. I'll be staying right here. 'Specially if the Sadlers are leaving town and going west.”

Ben explained quietly, “The Sadlers had Bob here locked up when he stole a carpenter hammer from that store they got. He's had no use for them since.”

“Warn't my fault,” Bertram said. “I was drunk, and I needed a hammer. I was just looking at it, trying to figure if it was what I needed, and if I could afford it. I warn't stealing it. Just walked out with it in my hand, not really thinking about what I was doing.”

Ben turned his face slightly to hide it from Bertram, and silently mouthed to Jedd: “He stole it.” Jedd nodded slightly.

“What about you, Ben?” Jedd asked. “If you could come up with the money to pay your way, would you consider becoming an argonaut?”

“Argo-what?”

“Argo-
naut
. It's what they call them who are going to California to look for gold. I don't know why they call them that.”

“I ain't fit to make the journey, Mr. Jedd, even if I could afford it. I don't much like traveling, and this old back and these sorry knees of mine couldn't handle squatting by a stream all day. I'd not be able to stand up again after a day or two. No, sir, it's Knoxville for me, for good.”

“Ben, your ‘old back' and ‘sorry knees' manage to hold up when you spend nights curled up under boardwalks or sleeping in woodsheds. Hell, I heard once you spent a night curled up sound asleep in the bottom of a big, dried-out rain barrel. You could do better than you think in the gold fields.”

“Got no money to make the journey, no-how,” Ben said. “Nor any good way to get it.”

Jedd found himself almost ready to tell Scarlett he would front him enough money for the journey and Ben could pay him back when he struck color in the gold fields. He caught the impulsive words just in time. As kind a gesture as it would be to help out the man, Ben Scarlett was not a good risk, and Jedd was himself too poor at the moment to validly make the offer.

“Gentlemen, it has been good to see you,” Jedd said, touching the brim of his hat and turning to go. “I wish and commend the best to both of you. Now, you two stay put a minute…. I'll be back very shortly.”

Jedd didn't know if Bertram's talk of being hungry was valid or simply a ruse to get drinking money. Even so, he went to a café around the corner and came out with a half loaf of bread and a little packet of cold fried sausages left unsold from that morning's breakfast offerings. He presented the food to the two vagrants, instructing them to divide it, but Ben Scarlett declared he had eaten aplenty that day and gave the entire lot over to Bertram. A valiant act, Jedd thought.

The way Bertram fell to the sausages made Jedd confident that his talk of hunger had been no falsehood, and the way Ben Scarlett intensely watched him eat made
Jedd figure Ben's claim of being already well fed was based more on a generous spirit than on the truth.

Jedd walked away from the alley entrance, thinking of his own need for a meal and hoping he had enough left of his meager resources to buy himself one. He did. Enough for two, in fact.

It was hard to be poor. He'd had his fill of it. Figuring Ben Scarlett knew far greater poverty than he, he circled around again after a few minutes of walking, and found, as he had hoped, Ben walking alone, Bertram having finished his rough meal and crawled back under his boardwalk. Jedd buttonholed Ben and took him with him to the same café he had visited before, and bought himself and Scarlett a meal.

“Ben, this rumor about me having found gold in California…where do you figure it came from?”

Ben gave a quizzical shrug at the question, which had been asked over coffee and apple pie that could have been fresher, but which to a man such as Scarlett were like the victuals of paradise. “Rumors are like wind somebody breaks in church…. Unless you hear it with your own ears when first it emerges, ain't nobody who'll own up to it after the fact.”

“You do have your own way with words, Ben. That I've got to say.”

“Why, thank you, sir. Thank you indeed. And I'm a right good singer, too, if you don't mind me bragging on myself a little. I inherited a good singing voice from my great-uncle Earl.”

“What do you know? And I didn't even realize you could inherit things from a great-uncle.”

“Live and learn, Mr. Jedd. Live and learn.”

T
here was no written message, just a meagerly built black boy waiting in the lobby of the hotel to which Jedd had returned after finishing his meal with Ben Scarlett. The boy advanced toward Jedd as soon as he entered.

“Mr. Colter, sir.”

“Hello, young gentleman.”

“I've come to let you know you've been asked for, sir,” the boy said. “My name's Lankford; most call me Lank.”

“I'm Jedd Colter, Lank. But I believe you must already know that.”

“Yes, sir. You've been asked for, Mr. Colter, sir. At Seventeen Addington Street, sir.”

Jedd held silent a moment. He knew that address well. It had been
her
address, before her marriage to the deplorable Stanley Wickham. The same address before which he had lingered so recently with Treemont Dalton.

Her former address…or might it not be “former” any longer? Emma's letter that Treemont had saved from the campfire had hinted that her marriage was quite troubled and possibly moving toward a premature end. If that perhaps had happened, she might be back
home in this very town. Back living with her father, Zebulon McSwain, president of Bledsoe College, the oldest institution of higher learning in Knoxville and indeed the entire state.

Might Emma herself have sent this invitation Lank had just presented to him? He ached to know, but Lank declined to answer the question. “I was told just to give you the address, no names.”

“When, then?”

“Tomorrow evening, sir,” Lank said. “Seven of the evening. That's when you'll be 'spected to be there. There will be supper in it for you, sir. A good one. My mama Jane is the cook. Mutton. Good, tender mutton.”

“I'll look forward to it,” Jedd said. “Do I need to send a written reply home with you? And if I do, should I make it out to a mister or a missus?”

The lad would not be tricked. He grinned up at Jedd and said, “No note needed, sir. All I got to do is just tell what your answer is.”

“My answer is yes. I'll be there,” Jedd said. “Do I need to wear any fancy duds? I hope not, 'cause I got none.”

“Just come as you is, sir. As you is. That's all that'll be expected. Have a fine evening, sir.”

The boy scampered out the door, leaving Jedd smiling and puzzling over what might await him, and why, when he visited at Addington Street the next evening.

It took Jedd a long time to fall asleep that night, his mind filled with thoughts of Emma and speculations about the upcoming visit to her old home. At last his mind grew weary of racing in circles of speculation, and he drifted into sleep scolding himself for letting his imagination run off with him. He'd had his chance to win Emma, and she'd rejected him. She'd married another, and done was done.

Yet even as he fell asleep, countering thoughts pecked like hens at his mind:
She sent you that letter. She told you of how her husband had disappointed her, of his strayings and his coldness and untoward ways. She hinted at a possible
parting of ways with him and perhaps a return to her home. And you know in the honesty of your mind that it is your hope you can regain what you lost…no, what you never had, but wished for and might have had.
He buried his head in his pillow and rolled onto his left side, his favored position for slumber.

Then he saw himself sitting on a cross-topped church steeple, playing a fiddle with his thighs rested on the horizontal bar of the cross, legs straddled on either side of the upright. Aware that there was no such church nearby he could have climbed, and that he had never held, much less played, a fiddle in all his days, Jedd knew he was dreaming and surrendered himself to slumber.

He awakened still thinking of the coming evening appointment on Addington Street, pondering how he would fill the hours of the day until that time came. He began with breakfast, purchased at the same café he had visited the evening before with Ben Scarlett. He'd expended almost every cent he possessed already and was able only to afford two day-old biscuits and a scrap of salty ham, but these he accepted and washed down with water.

His straits were dire ones, no doubt, and he knew where he had to go if he hoped to better them. Otherwise he would be forced to flee his hotel with his lodging uncompensated, and this he, as an honest man, was unwilling to do. He had no horse left to sell. He and Tree had already sold their mounts to help fund their journey to Tennessee.

So he made his way across town to the paper mill where the Sadler brothers kept their offices, overseeing their empire. It was a small empire by the standards of larger eastern cities, but substantial for the area in which it existed. Sadler holdings included mills, stores, land sales, and publishing interests. Jedd straightened his clothing, fingered his shaggy hair into submission, and wished he'd bothered to shave so as to be more presentable to men of business. Then he went inside, easily talked his way past a shabbily dressed, very mild-mannered, and
sparely built secretarial clerk with the astonishing name of Ferkus Varney, and walked into the sanctum of the Sadlers, a world alien to such a man as Jedd Colter.

Though the building in which it existed was functional and plain on its exterior, the second-floor suite where the Sadlers made their offices was elegantly appointed. Jedd immediately felt out of place when he walked into the carpeted hallway and looked at the big paintings decorating it. Most were copies or stylistic imitations of classical work, but rumor around Knoxville had it that some were rare masterworks of tremendous value. Jedd didn't know and it didn't matter. His concept of art was that which nature created…mountains, trees, rivers, thunderstorms. He found it difficult to see why folks found it necessary to put paint on canvas to make a false mountain that was no more than image, when by simply stepping out their door they could see the real thing.

Certainly he couldn't see much sense in investing wealth in collections of pictures and statues and the like, when there was land to be had. A man who had land had the most real and tangible thing there was, beautiful in a way a painting or drawing could do no more than crudely mimic.

But as Jedd looked around him, he was forced to remind himself that the Sadlers were men of power, influence, and wealth, while he was a restless wanderer so poor it nearly bankrupted him to buy a supper for a town drunk. So, who were the smart ones here after all? It was a question he didn't like to face, or to answer honestly.

“It's yonder, through that door,” said Varney behind him, startling him. He wheeled and faced the spruce little man with a look so intense and fearsome that Varney faltered backward, stumbling and falling to his rump.

“I'm…sorry,” Jedd said, extending his hand downward to help the fallen man up. Behind him, just then, a door opened and three figures emerged. Jedd pulled Varney to his feet and looked at the newcomers, none of whom he immediately recognized. He figured, though,
that two of them were the Sadler brothers, Witherspoon and Wilberforce, men Jedd had never met but had heard described. Witherspoon was short and rotund, head round as a billiard ball; Wilberforce was tall and looming and thin, his skin nearly a Mediterranean olive whereas his brother's was as ruddy as an Irish farmer's. Jedd turned a glance to the third man present; then the glance became a fixed and astonished stare, for this man he did know, though he was so changed Jedd had not immediately recognized him.

The violent loss of his teeth had changed not only Ottwell Plumb's appearance—his mouth was now crumpled and small, his chin sitting higher into his face than before, his whole countenance seemingly in a state of collapse—but also his demeanor. The pain of what he had endured lingered in the dimmed light of his eyes, the wrenched cast of his brows, the pinched corners of his puckered mouth.