3stalwarts

by Unknown

  “Like horses?”

  “Horses and hogs pretty good. Mostly I admire cows.”

  They came out on a level piece of road where the trees opened on either side into meadow and pasture, with here and there a house.

  “It ain’t very far to Boonville, now,” remarked the peddler. “That’s a nice town.”

  Men were working in the fields, mowing oats. As the wagon passed a yellow house under big elms, a woman came out of the door. She wore a pink sunbonnet and carried a bucket in her hand. The squeak of the wheels attracted her attention and she looked up and recognized the peddler.

  “Hullo, Mr. Turnesa,” she called. “Have some root beer?”

  “Afternoon, Mrs. Sullivan. Thanks.”

  He picked up the reins and yanked them. The woman pressed close to the off front wheel and lifted her bucket, in which a dipper lay, mysterious in the brown drink. Turnesa held down his beard with his left hand and brought the dipper, brimming, sidewise to his lips. He drank noisily.

  “Won’t your friend?” suggested the woman, nodding out from under her bonnet. She had a plump, red, pleasant face, blue eyes, and a mouth suggesting capability. Harrow thanked her and drank eagerly. The beer was cool and very good.

  “Done any peddling down the canal?” she asked.

  “Only down the feeder. I don’t go below Rome any more. That railroad spreads my line of goods too quick through the main line.”

  “Awful things, them railroads. Some say it’ll kill the boating in time.”

  “Maybe,” said the peddler. “But I don’t think it will. It ain’t got the traction. Mules have, and the railroads can’t use mules. I say let the railroads take all the people that’s fools enough to risk ‘em. Packet boats was a nuisance anyhow.”

  “That’s right,” said Mrs. Sullivan. “Lord help me, though, I wouldn’t ride in one of them trains. They go too fast.”

  “Yeanh.”

  “Any news Rome way?”

  “They say Mary Runkle’s trial’ll come up next month.”

  “Who’s she? Oh, I remember! It was she choked her husband to death while they was in bed together. It don’t seem true.”

  “You can’t tell,” said Turnesa thoughtfully. “She had the strength.”

  “Say,” exclaimed Mrs. Sullivan, “Drake Gallup was up from Boonville last night. He says all the folks down there is turble brustled up about there being a criminal loose on the canal.”

  “I wonder who it is?”

  “Don’t know for sure, but they think he’s the man’s been pulling these holdups on the canal. Stopped Drake.”

  “Did Drake get a look at him?”

  “No. The man wore a handkerchief over his face. He rode a big grey horse and was dressed like a spark, pipe hat and all. They call him Gentleman Joe Calash. He don’t seem to hang in one place any length of time.”

  “He will one day.”

  Mrs. Sullivan laughed.

  Young Harrow had been listening attentively with a gleam coming into his eyes.

  “Excuse me, mam. What do they want him for?”

  Mrs. Sullivan smiled at him.

  “Plenty. The posters is made out, ‘Dead or alive.’ “

  “Yeanh,” said the peddler. “I guess he’s a bad one, all right. Say, I’ll have to get on. Thanks for the drink. Geddup!”

  He struck the horse with the ends of the reins and leaned back on the seat. Mrs. Sullivan nodded to Harrow.

  “Good-bye. Young man going to Boonville?”

  “Yeanh,” said Harrow, diffidently. “Aim to get work there on the canal. Thanks.”

  The horse walked.

  “So you’re going on the canal?” said the peddler.

  “Yeanh.”

  “Who with, if I might ask?”

  “Pa said once that Hector Berry might give me a job.”

  “That’s right, he needs a driver. He’s here now— Boonville, I mean. He’s boating one of Uberfrau’s fleet. Guess he’ll take you on.”

  He puffed his pipe in tune to the click and creak of the wagon.

  “It’ll be a new start for you.”

  He glanced at his companion. Harrow sat leaning forward on the seat, elbows on knees, staring at his large-jointed hands, a kind of hesitation in his blue-green eyes. He did not look stupid. He had been hatched by soli-tude, which nourishes men on musing, not on thought. But as he glanced up in answer to a question the peddler saw a native shrewdness lurking in the corners of his eyes.

  “Well, I hope you’ll like it. The Erie is a swarming hive. Boats coming and going, passing you all the while. You can hear their horns blowing all day long. As like as not there’s a fight at every lock. There’s all kinds of people there, and they’re all going all the while. It ain’t got the finish and style as when the packet boats was running, but you’ll find fancy folk in the big ports. It’s better without the packet boats; let the railroads take the passengers. It leaves the pace steady for growing. There’s freight going west and raw food east, all on the canal; there’s people going west, New Englanders, Germans, and all them furrin folk, and there’s people com-ing east that’ve quit. But the canawlers keep a-moving.”

  The peddler folded his hands over his knee.

  “Water-level trade route, they call it, and it is. By grab, it’s the bowels of the nation! It’s the whole shebang of life.”

  He glanced at his companion. Harrow was staring over the old horse’s ears. The cool of evening was born in the air, and shadows began to take a longer shape. Behind them Tug Hill and the sun were sinking together.

  “A man can’t tell what’s coming to him,” said the peddler after a while. “The Constitution of these here States says we’re all born alike, and I guess maybe that’s right. But something takes hold of us different after that. Some people goes after money, and some after women, and some just drinks. I don’t know but what they’re right; but me, I’ve set on a wagon all my life, so I don’t rightly know. You’re a-going out after something.”

  “I’m wondering where the road will fetch me out,” he added after a moment.

  “Yeanh.”

  “Geddup,” the peddler said to the horse, but the old beast switched his grizzled tail and snatched at a morsel.

  The peddler glanced at Harrow from under his tufted brows.

  “What’U you do if you don’t like the canal?”

  “I ain’t thought.”

  “Thought only how he’d like it,” the peddler said to himself.

  “Well,” he said aloud, “you’re to rub around with a queer lot. If I was you I’d stick to Berry. He’s all right, I guess. I hope you’ll like it down there.”

  “Reckon I will.”

  “Ever do any reading?” the peddler asked, after a pause.

  “Some. Pa learnt me. I went to school by Turin for a spell.”

  “Well, then, here’s something to take with you.”

  The peddler felt about under his hams and presently produced the vol-ume he had been thumbing when he greeted Harrow.

  “It’s a good thing to have a book if you’re tied by alone for the night.”

  Harrow took the book hesitatingly and weighed it in his hand. Then he looked at the title.

  “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.

  $2000.00 REWARD

  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.