Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1954 (4 page)

 
          
“And
that’s where you come in,” said Grimes to Barry. “Our boat from
Saint Louis
down to
Memphis
is the
Graham
,
and it’s run by old friends from
Hannibal
. Bart Bowen is the captain, his brother Sam
is the pilot, and their sister Amanda will be aboard when the
Graham
docks here. You’ll work your
passage south by helping her carry this big freight of mail—it’s more than
double what she could tote around.”

 
          
“And
you?” prompted Barry, his heart beginning to thump at prospect of the
adventure.

 
          
“I’ll
meet you in
Memphis
,” Grimes told him, as though making
arrangements for a simple visit.

 
          
The
meeting broke up before dawn. Mrs. Wilson blew out the light, and the ladies
picked their way upstairs and out the front door, one by one, as the first gray
showed in the sky. Absalom Grimes ate hard-boiled eggs with Barry and Mrs.
Wilson, and gave Mrs. Wilson a letter to send, with the envelope addressed in
her hand, to Bob Louden. Then he, too, departed, and did not come back.

 
          
The
days passed with maddening slowness. Barry felt guilty, lolling around the
house and eating and drinking. Mrs. Wilson told him to stay indoors by
daylight, for Joe had brought word that someone named Buckalew Mills had asked
the
Saint
Louis
police to look for a runaway “farm apprentice” and send him back to
Pike
County
.

 
          
“I’ll
have to stop thinking of the farm as my home, now,” Barry said to Mrs. Wilson.
“All the more reason for me to be a soldier.”

           
Then, after
noon
dinner on May 12, Mrs. Wilson quietly bade
him prepare for the journey to
Memphis
. He packed his few possessions and went out
to the carriage house, where he crept into the rear seat of a carriage, ready
hitched to a chestnut horse. A few moments later, Joe mounted to the front and
drove them out and away.

 
          
“Relax
yourself
, Mr. Barry,” Joe advised him in an undertone.
“Sit back, like a gent’man enjoying the spring air. I’ll do the rest.”

 
          
They
drove riverward, through downtown
Saint Louis
, and Barry thought he had never seen so
many drays, barrows and horse cars. The crowds on the cobbled sidewalks were
liberally sprinkled with blue uniforms. Barry wondered if there weren’t enough
Union soldiers in
Saint Louis
alone to conquer the hard-pressed Confederacy. Then they were rolling
over heavy, hollow-sounding planks, and Barry saw wharfs and piled freight at
the water front. Beyond these flowed the broad, brown
Mississippi
, with high steamboat stacks jutting skyward
upon it.

 
          
“Sit
tight, Mr. Barry,” warned Joe again, and guided the chestnut through a maze of
piled kegs, boxes and bales. Just short of the final line of wharfs, Joe reined
in, glanced toward a lounging figure, and touched his old hat.

 
          
“This
gent’man’s looking for you, Cap’n Bowen,” he said.

 
          
“Get
out, son,” the stranger told Barry.

 
          
As
Barry did so, the stranger offered his gloved hand. He cut a tall, elegant
figure, in a beautifully tailored blue frock coat with shining buttons, a
diamond in his shirt front and a tall, cream-colored chimney of a hat. Brown
eyes smiled in a ruddy- moustached face.

 
          
“I’m
Captain Bart Bowen,” volunteered the magnificent one. “Joe, tell Mrs. Wilson
all’s well. Now come with me, son. What’s your name?”

 
          
“Barry
Mills, sir,” replied Barry as they turned toward the wharf front.

 
          
“Mm,”
murmured Captain Bowen thoughtfully. “I’ve heard that name—Yankee provosts are
looking for a lad named Barry Mills. Suppose you answer to George Jones a
while, eh? We might have the wrong sort of ears among the passengers aboard the
Graham
.”

 
          
They
approached a neat, middle-sized steamer, painted white, with landing stage in
place. Barry’s

 
          
heart
beat faster than ever at the thought of capture by
police or soldiers. He had never sailed on a steamboat—he had only dreamed of
it.

 
          
“Go
ahead of me,” muttered his companion. “Head aft—rear of the boat. Go
below,
sit in the blacksmith shop till we start down river.
Then come up to the pilot house. If anybody asks you, you’re the new cub,
learning the river from my brother, Sam, the pilot. Understand?”

 
          
“Yes,
sir,” said Barry, keeping his own voice soft. He headed up the stage and on to
the deck of the
Graham.

 
          
A
FULL hour later, Barry sat in the sooty blacksmith shop and heard the whistle’s
deep-throated howl. The
Graham
stirred and pulled away from the wharf. He gave her time to gain midstream
before he mounted to the deck, then to the texas house, with its officers’
quarters, and on up to the pilot house. This was a glass-walled cell, where
Captain Bowen was talking to the man at the wheel. The captain had exchanged
his tall hat for a visored cap and held a big silver watch in his hand.

           
“
Two o’clock
,” he announced. “We’ll make
Cairo
before sunup
tomorrow,
and
Memphis
the next morning, without straining a
paddle. Oh, hello, Jones. Sam, this is George Jones, your new cub.”

 
          
The
pilot was nearly as tall as Captain Bart Bowen, and had the same rosy,
long-moustached face. “I’m Mr. Sam Bowen, son,” he introduced himself. “See
that ice-water pitcher on the shelf behind me?”

 
          
Barry
saw a bright silver pitcher with a snug lid.
“Yes, sir.”

 
          
“Take
it down to Stateroom Number Seventeen,” the pilot told him. “Knock twice.
When the lady answers, say, ‘Ice-water, ma’am.’
”

 
          
Barry
stared, then took the pitcher and hurried down the stairs. He had not counted
on becoming an errand-runner. However, he went along the corridor between rows
of silent stateroom doors, and knocked at the one numbered 17.

 
          
“Who
is it?” asked a woman’s muffled voice. “Ice-water, ma’am,” Barry repeated
dutifully.

 
          
The
door opened and a slim hand beckoned him in. Barry faced a small, level-gazing
young woman with the rosy face and brown eyes of the two men he had left in the
pilot house.

           
“I’m Amanda Bowen,” she said, barely
louder than a whisper. “Captain Bart and Pilot Sam are my brothers. And
you’re—”

 
          
“George
Jones,” Barry remembered to say.

 
          
“Yes.
Bart told me that name; and said you’d come down. You and I have charge of
these. I can carry one, if you can manage the other two.”

 
          
She
gestured at three swollen traveling bags. One was the carpetbag Absalom Grimes
had fetched from
Bowling Green
. Grasping two by their handles, Barry
managed to hoist them.

 
          
“Right
heavy to drag off the boat at
Memphis
, ma’am,” he observed.

 
          
“We’ll
drag them a longer way than that,” said Amanda Bowen. “We don’t land at
Memphis
—we drop off above town, at Colonel
Selby’s.”

 
          
“Above
town?” echoed Barry. “Why?”

 
          
“A
telegram came just as the boat cast off.” Amanda Bowen showed him a message on
yellow paper. “It’s in code, and it says that there’s a doublesharp watch being
kept on passengers to
Memphis
from
Saint Louis
. Sometimes their baggage is searched on the wharf, and we can’t risk
that. So our
Memphis
friends want us to leave the
Graham
upstream from town, and come in by horse from Colonel Selby’s.” “What about
Captain Grimes?” asked
Barry.
“We’ll see him in
Memphis
. But that’s day after tomorrow. Now we
wait, and try not to look suspicious, because there are Union men among the
passengers. Don’t come back here until you’re sent for. Here, take the pitcher
back with you.”

 
          
Returning,
Barry found Captain Bart Bowen gone from the pilot house. A black-moustached
stranger in pepper-and-salt
clothes,
sat on the bench,
talking to the pilot. Sam Bowen glanced at Barry.

 
          
“High
time you came loafing back, cub,” he snapped. “Pour a glass for Mr. Newlands
here, and then see if you can keep us in mid-channel.”

 
          
Barry
poured water for the stranger,
then
took the wheel. It
had been the dream of his life to pilot a steamer, and he felt an eager thrill;
but Sam Bowen, lounging beside Newlands, grunted sour advice.

 
          
“Lighten
your hand on the wheel; you’re not sawing wood,” he scolded. “Hold her
steady—steady, I say! Look for-ard there—see that foam? Pull wide of it, it may
be a snag. No, not as wide as that, you’ll run us aground! Why did I take a
half-brained fool like you for a cub?”

           
Thus it went for a full hour, while
the pleasure oozed out of Barry. Then Newlands left, and Sam Bowen resumed the
wheel.

 
          
“We’re
carrying a Federal paymaster,” he said in Barry’s ear. “That’s the detective
with him. I combed you pretty rough so he’d be sure you
were
my cub. And I want it to seem logical that you get away before
we reach
Memphis
.”

 
          
Barry
stared.

 
          
“When
you and Amanda drop off in the yawl,” Sam Bowen explained, “my brother and I
will howl about how you couldn’t stand the work and ran off. Amanda will stay
in her stateroom till you leave, and nobody will miss her because she won’t be
seen aboard. Understand?”

 
          
When
a bell clanged below, Sam Bowen dismissed Barry, who went to join the deck
hands at supper in the hold. Then someone showed him a berth, and he slept
until dawn. The
Graham
was already
nuzzling the wharf at
Cairo
, on the river’s left bank.

 
          
As
they left, the river looked wider and browner, with much shipping on it.
Mounting to the pilot house, Barry saw a trio of squat, lead-colored gunboats
steaming southward. The
Graham
gave
them a whistle-whoop of greeting as it paddled past and then ahead.

 
          
In
his character of pilot-teacher, Sam Bowen continued to point out landmarks, to
talk about current and danger of snag and sand bar, and, when a stranger
happened to appear, to pretend lofty impatience with his supposed cub. Now and
then he turned the wheel over to Barry, who thoroughly enjoyed his make-believe
job as cub pilot.

 
          
That
night he sought his berth and lay down without undressing. Captain Bart Bowen
nudged him awake hours later.

 
          
“Time
for ice-water again,” said the captain.

 
          
Rising,
Barry hastened to Amanda Bowen’s stateroom. She was waiting, in bonnet, shawl
and cloak, the three carpetbags at her feet. She looked grave, but confident.

 
          
“We
hop from steamboat to yawl without a spark of light,” she told him. “Are you
game?”

 
          
“I’m
game,” he said.

 
          
“I
knew it. Come on.”

 
          
She
took one bag and walked into the corridor. Barry flexed his muscles to lift the
other two and followed. She led him out upon the after deck. Leaning over the
rail beside her and straining his eyes in the night, Barry saw an open boat
hauled close on a line. Someone whistled softly.

 
          
“Help
me down,” whispered Amanda Bowen. “Then the bags, then you.”

 
          
Active
as a squirrel for all her flowing skirts, she swung over and down. Barry caught
her wrists and lowered her until her feet came to the bottom of the boat. Then
he handed down the bags, one by one, and Amanda Bowen and someone else took
them. Finally he scrambled down into the silent boat.

 
          
“Cast
off,” muttered a male voice, and Barry loosened the line. The steamboat pulled
away, and they floated alone on the broad river. The dark shape of an oarsman
turned the boat left and rowed strongly for the shore none of them could see.
Barry made out the shape of the levee at last, a black more solid than the
first gray hint of dawn. Then a lantern glowed, and a voice called, “Who’s
that?”

 
          
“Homing
pigeons,” replied Amanda Bowen, as though giving a password.

 
          
“Come
ashore, Miss Amanda. We’ve been waiting.”

 
          
The
boat’s nose grated against the rungs of a ladder. Barry caught them, and made
the boat fast. Amanda Bowen slid past him and climbed up. She called down to
him and he hoisted up the heavy bags, one after another,
then
climbed to the rough planks of the landing. By the lantern light he saw her
talking to a slender man in a tail coat.

 
          
“All
clear?” called the oarsman. “Then I’m off.”

 
          
Barry
gazed after the departing boat, until Amanda Bowen touched his arm and
introduced him to Colonel Selby, who was old and wiry, with a daggerlike beard
tuft. He shook Barry’s hand, and called a Negro servant to take the mail bags.
Then they ate an early breakfast, served by their host’s brownhaired daughter,
Miss Emma.

 
          
“No
trouble getting into
Memphis
from here,” the colonel assured Barry. “And Ab Grimes will get you out
on the south side of town. You’re going to drive our spring wagon.”

 
          
The
ride to
Memphis
was uneventful. Barry drove with Amanda
Bowen beside him, and the precious bags hidden in the wagon, under hay and odd
parcels. They rolled into town past a sentry post at the outer limits, where
Union infantrymen lolled carelessly.
Memphis
was not as large as
Saint Louis
, but seemed just as busy. Drays and wagons
packed the streets, and on the sidewalks moved crowds of soldiers.

 
          
“Around
the next corner,” directed his companion. “You’ll see a sign that says Blaney’s
Livery Stable. Drive in and pull up and wait.”

 
          
Barry
nodded and followed directions. Blaney’s Livery Stable had a huge dark door,
like a cave, and into this Barry guided the wagon. One or two men moved among
distant shadowy stalls, but nobody spoke or looked his way. A full minute
passed. Then Barry started violently as a man in blue Federal uniform strolled
from somewhere, straight toward them. A moment later, he felt a pulse of joy as
he recognized the brown-bearded face.

 
          
“Amanda,”
said Absalom Grimes with his usual quiet courtesy, “my apologies for not
escorting you to the wharfs. The
Graham's
waiting, but so is the provost guard, and they might like to see me.” He gave
her his hand to help her down. “Goodbye,” he said. “I’ll be back in
Saint Louis
by June, as I reckon. Barry, help me shift
these bags over to my buggy. A driver is waiting to take the colonel’s wagon
back to him.”