Crows & Cards (16 page)

Hearing all that wrapped my head in fog and cottonwood fluff. Worse storm of it I'd ever seen. The way Chilly checked his watch whenever playing cards came rolling back to me, proving Ho-John's point.

"If you're wanting paper and such," Ho-John went on, setting down one clean-plucked chicken and starting right in on another, "try one of them general stores. They be happy to sell what you need."

That was an answer I'd probably known all along but hadn't wanted to go into. I just didn't have the strength to go trailing all the way down to the levee again. What if I ran into Chief Standing Tenbears? What if he'd run across more news from home? Then what? It'd peck my bones clean to hear it, that's what. 'Sides, I didn't have any idea what I could put into a letter to home that wouldn't leave me feeling airy and blue as some ghost doomed to haunt the Mississippi till it ran dry.

Leaving my half-plucked chicken with Ho-John, I went out toward the front of the inn, where I stood gaping at the road as if the answer to all my woes had gone trotting past just before I had got there. I was still standing there all woolly headed when Chilly caught up with me.

"What's this I hear 'bout you wanting paper and things?" he demanded, pinching my upper arm hard.

"It's just a thought I had." I tried squirming free without luck.

"Well, put a torch to it. You ain't got no time for such truck, no matter what that fool chief heard from your ma. I bet I've heard him tell twenty others their ma wants a letter. It's one of his favorite fallbacks."

"But down to the levee," I said, "he knew all about me."

"That's 'cause I had a talk with him and his daughter right after we hit town and maybe let slip more about my new assistant than was smart. I can see that now. He's a curious old cuss and wanted to know all about you."

"He did?"

"Only 'cause the princess spotted you standing beside me."

"She did?" That perked up my ears.

"She don't miss much. Now listen up, boy: that chief ain't got any more visions than a wood stump could have."

Don't think that I swallowed much of that, not after hearing the chief name Ma's biscuits and Pa's mule. And what about the Professor's heart-shaped locket? None of that sounded like something a stump could rattle off. But I didn't have the steam to tell Chilly so, not the way he was crowding me. And while he went on, I couldn't take my eyes off the gold watch chain dangling out of his vest pocket, not after hearing what Ho-John had to say about it. Wanting to believe at least one thing Chilly'd told me, I asked, "But the chief does have a crown, doesn't he?"

"Never you mind about that crown," Chilly growled. "I don't even want to hear another breath out of you 'bout it. And being as how you're a member of the Brotherhood, there won't be any letter writing home either. We don't allow that till you been with us ten year or more, and then only on good behavior. Hear?"

"Yes sir." I swallowed hard, 'cause there was another fair-sized chunk of me that was vengeful and hoped Ma and Pa couldn't do nothing but wring their hands and feel terrible about shipping me off to some distant, star-crossed land. But if ten years had to pass before I had a chance to write and remind 'em what they'd done, well, they'd have forgotten all about me, which didn't seem right at all.

"And I better not have to tell you again," Chilly rumbled on. "Now get back inside and practice hiding cards or something."

Then he gave me a shove toward the inn, where I found myself being pulled toward the pantry. More and more regular my shelf had been calling out to me. With as much time as I'd been spending there, it'd begun to feel comfortable when nowhere else did. I'd made it up neat as home, with a ten-pound sack of oats for a pillow, a scrap of quilt for a blanket, and a crockery or two of pickles and crackers to snack on.

Curling up on the shelf, I promised myself that if Mr. Chilly Larpenteur ever laid a hand on me again, I was going to settle his hash. How I'd manage that wasn't too clear at the moment, but I vowed that he'd be thinking twice about ever roughing up a Crabtree again. Gradually, my mutterings lessened and the next thing I knew, I was asleep and dreaming. I'd rather not go into what I was dreaming, except to say it was full up with Ma and Pa and my brothers and sisters and every other little thing in life that was guaranteed to wet up my eyes real good. They were calling to me from across the river, clear over to Illinois, trying to warn me off something or other. All their shouting and arm waving and hollering was what woke me.

Or at least I thought that was the case. At first. After a bit though, I came to see that it was talking in the parlor that must have roused me. 'Course, the real voices weren't calling my name or shouting. Just the opposite. They was whispering and carrying on as secret as a gang of grave robbers.

Wanting to see who was sneaking around the main parlor in the middle of the afternoon, I rolled over and squinted through the peephole. Sitting at the table before me was Chilly, in his usual chair over the loose floorboard. To his right, pulled up close, was a woman wearing a hooded cloak.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I
BLINKED AND SHOOK MY HEAD SOME,
but none of it changed the cloaked figure into a man. For a tremble or two I thought it was my ma come to rescue me, but that was my fuzzy-headed dream talking. This woman's voice didn't have Ma's snap to it at all. The trouble was, I couldn't get a clean look at her face. If it had been night, the lanterns would have been lit and I wouldn't have had any trouble seeing her, even with her hooded cloak, but during the day the parlor was splotchy with shadows.

"I told you never to come down here," Chilly scolded in a whisper.

"Oh now don't you worry," she teased sweetly. "Nobody saw me."

"Still and all..." Chilly complained.

"And even if some old busybody did see me," the lady whispered, "they wouldn't have recognized me, all dressed in gray like this."

"Well, that's true enough," Chilly allowed. "I hardly knew you myself. But why take the risk at all?"

"Now you know how these orphans are," the lady said with an easy laugh that made you glad to hear it. "They take a lot of looking after."

Cloak or no cloak, I figured right then and there who she was—the orphanage lady named Rebecca! It appeared that somehow or other she and Chilly knew each other pretty well, close together as their heads were pressed, though not a month before they'd acted like perfect strangers on the
Rose Melinda.
Now they were thick as thieves, which I had a low-slung feeling was exactly what they were, especially after Chilly had got so overheated 'bout my talking to her.

"What if I told you," Rebecca went on, "that Captain Horacio has an excursion of high hats leaving for St. Paul tomorrow? Then would you know why I'm here?"

"Horacio?" Chilly moaned, sounding sick to hear it. "Why, he looks the other way for next to nothing."

"So what do you say?" Rebecca asked.

Chilly didn't cave though. He seemed to have some other pickings weighing on his mind.

"That I hope they make it back from St. Paul with some money left in their pockets."

"Now Charles," she pouted, using Chilly's proper name, "I've never known you to be so shortsighted. There's a world of bad things that could happen to them between here and St. Paul. And not a one of them has anything to do with lining your pockets."

"True enough," Chilly agreed, acting terribly put out to hear himself say it.

"And Charles," Rebecca went on, sounding as though reasoning with a stubborn child, "you know how rich people get to feeling all generous and lordly if you up and mention orphans. It's a proven fact. And once you've got 'em leaning that way, it's only a matter of time before they're wanting to shell out a little something for a child who might not have had the same luck as them in this cold, cruel world. It makes them feel ever so much better about themselves. I'm guessing we could double or triple what we took off the
Rose Melinda,
and same as always, it'd be half for you, half for me."

"Don't forget them orphans," Chilly quipped.

"They can have the half that's left."

To which they both cackled as though she'd said something powerfully witty, though the only thing that adding up all those halves gave me was a terrible longing to be dead and gone.

"Oh, it's tempting," Chilly admitted. "But I've got my own gold mine right here and it ain't no humble pie either."

"You mean your little telegraph?" Rebecca teased.

"Have you been smiling at Goose again?" Chilly asked, turning cross at the thought of her pumping his partner.

"Oh now Charles," she coaxed, resting a hand on his arm, "won't that telegraph and the silly boy you've got running it be here when we get back?"

Silly boy!

"I expect so," Chilly said. "Least I believe the boy would be. His head's got more sap than a swamp pine. Why, do you know that I got him believing I pass out my winnings to the poor every night?"

"Now when do you find the time to do that?" she tittered.

"On my way to the faro tables."

They had themselves a good, long snicker over that. I sort of blacked out to hear it. Not that I really went under, 'cause I could see Chilly's lips moving and all, but I couldn't hear a word of what he was saying. If you dragged me behind a stagecoach clear across Missouri and out into the territories, you might be approaching how busted up I was feeling on the inside, 'cause right about then I was poleaxed by what had been slowly creeping up on me all along: we weren't cheating just rich gents who needed help in learning how to be generous. As the nights wore on, it turned out there weren't enough of them to keep us busy. So we'd started working the telegraph on as many store clerks and liverymen and stage drivers as we could without raising suspicions. And now it turned out we were even cheating the orphans too?

Finally, I forced myself to hear more.

"But you see," Chilly was saying, "I just about got my hands on the chief's crown."

"You and that crown," Rebecca scoffed. "How do you even know he has one?"

"Buffalo Hilly vouches. Says he was sitting right there when King Wilhelm of Prussia or Italy or someplace dropped it on the chief's head, a gift from one monarch to another. Buffalo says that seeing that thing in bright sunlight nearly knocks your eyeballs out, it's so stuffed full of diamonds and rubies and emeralds and what have you."

"And how long have you been after it now?" she reminded him.

"Too long."

"So won't it keep a week or two longer?"

"Maybe that's a yes," Chilly grumbled, "and maybe that's a no. I skinned the chief good last night, and something tells me he's going to come roaring in here real soon to win back his medicine bundle. I'm betting he'll finally have to put up his crown to do it, which is something I don't plan on missing. Ain't every day you get a chance to win what belonged to royalty."

So Ho-John had read Chilly's secret desire to be a gentleman exactly right, and he appeared to have been talking straight about Chilly's feelings concerning good-luck charms too. The whole while Chilly sat there, he couldn't keep his hands off that gold watch of his.

Just hearing how Chilly was lying in wait for the chief boiled my blood so fast, I could hear it bubbling in my ears. At the same time, I'd have to say I was getting a taste of what it felt like to be cheated, 'cause what else could you say Chilly had done to me, right along with everyone else? At last I understood in my gut that cheating was cheating, no matter how fancy you dressed it up, and that was what made up my mind for me: I was going to ask for my seventy dollars back. Oh, if Chilly made a fuss, I'd tell him to keep five dollars of it, though I thought he owed me way more than that piddling amount for my share of our winnings.

What's more, I planned on telling that Rebecca to hand over the nickel I'd given her on good faith. And once I'd straightened them out on all that, I'd march myself right down to the levee to hunt up the chief and warn him that Chilly was after his emperor's crown. (I wondered how the princess would think of me after that.) Then I'd search up that excursion boat of rich folks and make them take a pledge not to go donating money to any orphanage ladies who might show up, no matter how good it might make them feel.

Oh, the chickens were all coming home to roost, and what a pecky, mad lot they were too.

With all that out of the way, I supposed rather reluctantly that it would be time to humble myself in front of my Great-Uncle Seth and see if I couldn't wrangle my way into his services yet. Being a tanner might not be glory wrapped, but at least it was honest. I was beginning to see there might be something to be said for that, though I couldn't help but wonder if working with hides wouldn't leave me sneezing my way to an early grave.

The only trouble was, before I could do anything about these revelations, the pantry door creaked open and in tiptoed Ho-John, his arms full up with a tin box, a rolled-up blanket, and a medium-sized poke that looked awful stuffed. He left the door open a crack for some light, and it was a shock to see him move so catlike, what with his chains and all. Quiet as he was creeping, he must have known that Chilly and Rebecca were out in the parlor, but it didn't appear he had any idea I was holed up on my shelf. I didn't say nothing either, figuring that if I did, it would make him jump and give away the both of us.