Colter's Path (9781101604830) (9 page)

McSwain frowned. “Don't put stock in rumors, Ben, no matter what they are.”

“Good advice, sir. I had trouble believing it, anyway. I can't figure anybody wanting to sack a good leader.”

McSwain shot a glance at Jedd to see if he had comprehended
what Ben had just said. He had. And McSwain was troubled to know that a mere town drunk would be aware of the acrimonious and forced nature of his departure from the institution with which he had been long associated.

McSwain addressed Jedd. “I told you, Jedd, that I have made enemies. Apparently some of those enemies have made certain that my personal affairs are made public. Mr. Scarlett is correct. Even if Bledsoe College was not being absorbed by the other college, my position of leadership was gone. Accusations were made to give grounds for pushing me out of the presidency. Those accusations have been not only harmful to my reputation, but actually dangerous to me as an individual. We have seen an example of that tonight, with this armed fellow whom Mr. Scarlett so fortunately frightened away.” McSwain looked at Ben. “I owe you a debt of gratitude, sir.”

Ben shrugged and flickered out a grin. “Just looking for something I could eat, that's all. Happened to be in the right place at the right time to run off a notch-eared troublemaker.”

Jedd asked McSwain: “Are you saying that whatever trouble or rumors or charges or whatever it was are vicious enough that somebody would want to see you hurt?”

“Or dead,” said McSwain, nodding. “You can see, Jedd, why I find the prospect of traveling with your emigrant band to California to be such an appealing one.”

“I can.” Jedd was overwhelmed with a desire to ask just what McSwain's alleged transgressions had been, but politeness restrained him, and McSwain volunteered nothing.

“Do not believe everything you hear on the street, Ben,” McSwain said. “And I ask you…keep it to yourself that I am leaving Knoxville.”

“I'll do that, sir. Going to join your daughter, are you?”

Jedd was again surprised. “Emma is in California?”

“She is,” McSwain said. “In a new, fast-growing mining town called Bowater Gulch.”

“With
him
.”

“Yes. With him.”

“I received letters from Emma, Zebulon. They were the biggest part of the reason I came back here. Those letters came from Knoxville, not California.” He paused. “Do you know anything about those letters, Zeb?”

McSwain flicked his eyes at Ben Scarlett for half a second. The man didn't want to speak with an extra set of ears listening in. Ben picked up that message, rose, thanked McSwain again for the unexpected meal, and departed. Jedd watched him go, then stared at McSwain, waiting.

“I doubted a plea from me would be enough to draw you back here all the way from Missouri,” he said. “I had those letters written by a local woman who could be trusted to keep quiet, and who possesses the ability to copy very closely the handwriting of others. She imitated Emma's hand quite well, using an old letter Emma had sent me as a guide. I told her what words to write. I am sorry for the deception, but it was crucial that I speak to you.”

Jedd thought of the things the letters had said, things that had given him hope that, somehow, there might yet be a future for him and Emma. Anger rippled through him at the realization it was all false. Had he been a man of lesser self-control, he might have risen and allowed his fists to convey his feelings to McSwain.

“I can't see what was ‘crucial' in involving me,” Jedd replied. “You can join the Sadlers' California venture without any help from me. All that is required is to inform the Sadlers' secretarial clerk, Mr. Varney, pay the fee, and be prepared to leave at the designated time and date. I'm just the pilot, the guide. I neither recruit nor sign up individual travelers. You didn't need me back here at all.”

“There is more to it all than you yet know,” replied McSwain. “Now is not the time to explain it, while your feelings are stirred up against me. I do most sincerely apologize for having drawn you here with a false letter.”

“Tell me why you did it.
Now
. Not later. Now!”

“Well, I will tell you part of it. Wilberforce Sadler chairs the trustee board of Bledsoe College. The same board that declared itself desirous of losing my service as president. I could hardly expect him to welcome me into his band of California travelers unless I have the support and influence of someone he has cause to listen to.”

“And the rest of the reason?”

“Later, Jedd…later. Not just yet.”

Jedd rose and without another word left the room, then the house. He strode down Addington Street with Zebulon McSwain watching him through a window. Jedd felt a fool. Deceived by forged letters! How could he have been so gullible? And what could have motivated Emma's father to such a depth of deception?

There was more here than Jedd was able to figure out. It was surprising, confusing, and most of all, infuriating.

A black-and-white cat walked into Jedd's path and darted quickly across. He stopped and watched the cat vanish into a hedgerow beside the road. “Cicero?” Jedd called softly. He'd just realized that something had been missing at McSwain's house, something that had always been there before. It was McSwain's beloved old black-and-white tomcat, Cicero, which Jedd had seldom seen anywhere except on Zeb McSwain's lap. Emma had never liked the cat because it made her eyes water and nose run to be near it for long, and Jedd had been amused many times when she'd made half-serious accusations to her father, claiming he cared more about the cat than about her. McSwain, naturally, had always refused to respond to such comments.

Cicero had not been there tonight. That must have been Cicero who just ran across in front of him. But no. This cat had possessed a completely black head, whereas Cicero had a white face with one black ear and one white one. Quite distinctive. Maybe this newer cat was one of Cicero's feral offspring.

His mind left the subject of cats and drifted back to McSwain himself, and the unrevealed trouble that had
beset him and taken his career. It was overwhelmingly puzzling.

Jedd walked for twenty minutes, expending pent-up energy, and then a realization came that he knew someone who might be able to add some clarity to the mystery of McSwain's situation and peculiar behavior.

He was well away from Addington Street when he stopped suddenly, listening hard to the sounds of the town. One in particular caught his ear, distant and strange. He puzzled over it, then walked on until it had faded into nothing.

In his big house, Zebulon McSwain had heard the same sound, and was now seated in the darkest corner of his bedroom, into which he had locked himself so securely even his servants could not enter. He kept an ear turned toward the window, listening for what he had heard to be heard again. But he heard it no more, and was grateful for the silence.

Home for Crozier Bellingham was a little block of rented rooms in an upstairs corner of a cheap boarding house. Humble as it was, it was cozy and secure, and he enjoyed being there at the end of a long day. With the strained meeting with the Sadler brothers and the human oddity named Ottwell Plumb now some hours behind him, Bellingham was glad to stretch out on his narrow bed, hands behind his head, and stare at the ceiling while awaiting the coming of sleep.

He was blinking on the edge of slumber when a pounding at his door jolted back his awareness. He sat up fast, then jumped out of bed. “Who's there?”

“Crozier? Is that you? Jedd Colter here!”

Bellingham went to the door and opened it. “Come on in, Jedd.”

“Need to ask you about something,” Jedd said. “It has to do with Zebulon McSwain.”

Bellingham ran his fingers through his hair and nodded Jedd toward a chair. When Jedd was seated, Bellingham asked, “So, what do you want to know?”

*    *    *

When Jedd had asked his question, Crozier Bellingham paced about the room as he answered. “Jedd, the truth is, I don't know the precise problems that McSwain had with his college board. I don't think anyone knows except for the people directly involved.”

Jedd shook his head. “There have to be rumors, at least. McSwain is a notable man in this city, and when something happens to a notable man, people talk.”

“Why do you care, Jedd, if I may ask?”

“Because he's told me he wants to go with us to California. And he's in trouble of some sort…. Someone's after him. There was a man with a gun sneaking around outside his house tonight. He ran when he was seen.”

Crozier was intrigued. “Interesting. And surprising. The kind of men who serve on college trustee boards don't tend to skulk around houses with guns.”

Jedd replied, “But some of those men might hire another person to do such a thing. So you don't have any notion at all of what put him and his higher-ups at odds?”

Bellingham sat down and leaned toward Jedd, an earnest and secretive look on his face. He answered almost as if there were hidden, listening ears all around, “Jedd, the rumor I have heard, and it is purely a rumor from my standpoint, is that there was a theft.”

“McSwain stole something?”

“So say the whispers on the street, for what they are worth. Which perhaps is nothing.”

Jedd thought hard for a few moments. “It would have to be something of value to the college. Maybe…”

“College funds?” said Bellingham. “That's what I suspect. He stole college funds. Probably after he found out that the trustees were about to let Bledsoe College be absorbed by another institution, and the president's job was inevitably about to disappear. McSwain saw the end of his career rushing at him and grabbed what he could while he still had access to it. That's my guess.”

“And now the trustees, or somebody on the board of trustees, want to get back what he took? And are willing even to threaten his life for it?”

“Maybe so,” said Bellingham. “Maybe so.”

Jedd mulled it over. “So that would give McSwain a reason to put as much distance as he can between himself and his old life. And then fate throws in its hand. Along comes gold being found in California, giving him a pretext for leaving that few are likely to question, since so many others are uprooting and making the same move.” Jedd paused, thinking again, and continued more quietly. “And for him there's a whole other reason to go. His daughter, already in California, with a man not worthy of her. He can go to her, maybe have a chance to make her situation better than it is.”

“You're losing me now,” Bellingham said. “I don't know about any of that.”

“Never mind it,” Jedd said. “It's just me speculating about things.”

Bellingham went to a nearby table and picked up a leather-bound book that looked like a small ledger. He opened it and Jedd saw pages of neatly written words. Bellingham flipped through to the first blank page, sat down, and with a pen and small bottle of ink, began writing.

“That's not the same book you wrote your notes in today,” Jedd observed.

“No. That was my notepad, where I record things in their rawest and barest form, just notes and facts and general broad observations. What I'm writing in now is my personal journal, where I put it all together in a way that makes sense, at least to me. This is what will eventually become the book I write about the California enterprise. An outline of the key elements and themes and story of my book, if you will.
My
book,
my
work…not those self-serving newspaper reports the Sadler brothers are looking for.”

“Are you going to write something about Zebulon McSwain in your book?”

“I'm going to write about whoever and whatever proves to be the most interesting, all of which will make itself evident as we go along. But writing about McSwain in the direct sense, or any other actual living individual,
for that matter…no. Because what I will write will be a novel. I shall be the Charles Dickens of the gold fields. I am determined to do so. You're the first person to whom I've revealed that. I hope you don't think I'm just a foolish dreamer.”

“You'll write a made-up story, you're saying?”

“Only in a sense. It will be a made-up story that follows actual reality. Our journey to California, and the people and situations and events that will constitute it, those will be the ore from which I mine my novel. Names and so on will be changed. And some details will certainly be changed as required to carry the story through.”

“Why not just write it straight, using the actual folks involved?”

Bellingham, though previously weary, was becoming enlivened and animated by Jedd's questions. This was his subject, the kind of thing he'd thought through and could readily articulate, so he was glad to talk about it. “There are advantages to a writer in telling certain stories in the form of fiction,” he said in a professorial tone. “Fictionalization frees the writer to hone and refine his story, making small adjustments and deviations that allow the tale to be told in the most entertaining manner rather than as a slavishly fact-bound narrative. It lessens his concern over an accidental libel or slander of an actual person. And most of all…” Here Bellingham paused, drew in a deep breath, and delivered an obviously practiced line. “…it frees the author from the narration of mere
facts
and allows him to instead present
truth
. For though truth does not contradict facts, it does
transcend
them.”

Jedd wasn't accustomed to such heady concepts—his conversations were more likely to run to how best to set a fish trap or read deer sign—but he nodded politely. Bellingham looked pleased with himself for his profundity and gave a tight little smile.

Jedd grinned back, but thought of Ottwell Plumb and of the bickering Sadlers and their delicate little personal secretary, Ferkus Varney, who, Jedd had ascertained in the earlier meeting, would accompany his bosses across
the country.
I'm going to be surrounded by strange little noddy fools all the way to California,
Jedd thought.