3stalwarts

by Unknown

  There was a roll of wood on wood, and two men appeared rolling barrels across the dock. Another man with a short barrel track jumped into the pit, and the barrels began rolling down. Wilson stood on the edge of the pit, watching, occasionally blowing into his hands.

  “We’ll be first out of Utica at the weighlock,” the Jew said to Dan. “But if there’s an upstream line we’ll have to wait for them to come through.”

  Wilson signed the bill of lading and Dan tossed off the tie-ropes. The loading hands jumped back to the dock, grabbed poles, and pushed the Xerxes out into the current. Wilson passed the towline over the bow standard, so that it would clear boats against the dock, and Ben Rae shortened it at the eveners to avoid the deep sag.

  They went ahead. Some of the boats were coming to life, with sounds of crockery in the cabins and smell of smoke from the stoves. But the Xerxes seemed the only boat astir. Ahead of her a black tunnel loomed in the fog. And then boats began issuing on the other side of the canal, the teams’ nodding heads visible an instant as they passed.

  Lanterns bobbed ahead, crossing and recrossing the tunnel. As they came closer, Dan saw the weighlock, a boat lying in it, heard a muffled voice calling, “Seventy-one, -two, -three, seventy-three-nine eighty-five.”

  From a lighted office on the other side of the narrow roofed slip a voice answered, “Seventy-three tons, nine hundred.”

  The boat lay in an empty trough on a ribbed rack, with arms fore and aft extending under the office. At the last words the tender slammed down a lever, water came sucking in, and the boat rose to canal level. The gates opened, the mules took up the slack, and the boat slid through.

  Beyond the door, the toll-taker spoke to the captain: “Class of freight?”

  “Merchandise. Misc.”

  The upper lock gates closed, the lower opened, and the tender bawled, “Next!”

  Already a boat was sliding in. A man on the bow with a pole to keep it from fending the side. The mules passed on a narrow runway.

  “By grab, come slower, Marcy. You’re always running in too fast. You’ll take off them gates some day.”

  The tender snatched up a pole and pushed back against the bow of the boat, which was moving with a dangerous momentum. It came up against the upper gates with a heavy thud.

  “Gorl!” breathed the tender, running to close the lower gates. “By Cripus,” he cried to the driver, “the next time you come in like that, I’ll be danged if I’ll let you drive into this lock! What do you think it is, a rubber extension?”

  The driver spat into the lock and sat down.

  “Oh, go pull up your pants, Buscerk.”

  Inside the office the toll-taker was making change. “What you got, general merchandise, George?” The captain of the line boat which had passed snorted.

  “Swiss! They’ve brought the hull damn works with ‘em. Ploughs! You ort to see ‘em. Regular teaspoon trinkets! Every dang little thing. Pitchforks. They’ve set up a clock in the cabin with a funny set of works. Dangdest racket. And their talk! High jabber, high jabber, jabber-jabber, jabber-jabber-jabber. God! I don’t get no rest at all. Jabber! There ain’t no sense into it. Jabber this. Yes, mam, it’s a mule. No, boy, it’s a calf. Jabber that. No, mam, mules don’t have any. Jabber! Jesus!”

  He stamped out after the line boat.

  The muffled voice was calling again: “Fifty-one, -two, fifty-two, even.”

  “Sold!” cried the clerk, under his oil lamp. “Boat number, name, and cargo.”

  “Number 1793. Freedom’s Flower. Albany. Four bales of ‘baccer. Printing press for Rochester, special valuation. All the rest is merchandise for St. Louis. Boots and shoes from Lowell, Mass. Two crates of hats. Haberdashery to clothe the pioneer.” He chuckled.

  Already another boat was coming in.

  “How many boats out there?” the Jew shouted across at the tender, pointing his thumb at the misty entrance to the lock, where the headlights of the boats made feeble smears.

  “Expect about forty. Next!”

  But the boat was coming in already, deftly, under the guidance of a one-armed man. “Whoa!” he yelled as the bows came into the gates and the boat slid in without a rub and drifted to a stop, dead centre.

  “That’s Jason Jukes. Handiest man with a boat I ever see.”

  “Hullo, Ben!” His quick smile showed a flash of gold teeth. “Number 3991. Tammany Hall, Rome. Carrying rope.”

  He went inside, reappeared, and the mist swallowed him and the faint light of his boat on the far side.

  Sitting side by side on the runway, the crew of the Xerxes watched the boats come in. The fog formed drops on their faces and ran down their necks. Boat after boat. Manufactured goods. “Stoves,” said Wilson. “Fancy furniture; did you ever see such articles?”

  “That’s forty-three of them,” cried the lock-tender. “Next!”

  He waited a second.

  “Next!”

  He waved his arm at Wilson.

  “East-bound boats! Hurry up, there.”

  Wilson leaped up and ran back and jumped aboard. “Geddup!” said the Jew to the mules. “Whoa!” cried Wilson, and the mules stopped. The Jew jumped aboard on one side as Wilson jumped off on the other and stepped into the office. “Number 1613,” he said. “Xerxes short-hauling the Michigan Six Day. Ashes to Schenectady. Fifty bar’l.”

  “Damn it,” said the toll-taker. “What do they got to bother us for with that trash?”

  The gates opened. “Geddup,” the Jew bawled at the mules. Dan started after them. As soon as the Xerxes cleared the lock they stopped and waited for Wilson. He took a running jump from the towpath and made the deck. Dan heard the scrape and thump of his feet as he scrambled up. “Go on. Lay into them, Dan! We’re hurrying now.”

  The city seemed dead as they passed out of the warehouses into the open country. The mules were nervous in the fog, and kept their heads low to the towpath, snorting now and then. They were a young pair and kept a fast pace. Dan felt the stiffness going out of him as he kept up.

  “Don’t let ‘em burn themselves out,” said the Jew. “They’re green young.”

  “All right,” said Dan. He slowed them a trifle.

  “You can always tell a green young mule by the way he handles his ears,” said the Jew. “Look at the fancy twirl they’re a-putting on. Now an old mule’ll either prick ‘em or let ‘em dangle plain. He knows he’s got enough to do just keeping the boat moving.”

  A boat passed on the other side of the canal; and the puff of the horses, and the oily snap of the snake whip, the sound of the wash meeting their own, the smell of wood smoke; and the boat had passed. More went by.

  Little by little, Dan could distinguish their shadows against the mist. There lurked in it now a restless feeling of motion.

  Suddenly it thinned, dropped, and for a few seconds he and the mules were wading in it knee-deep, and he saw the canal marked by teams com-ing up, and men standing in it steering. The sun was red far down the valley, and a wind began to draw over the hills to the south. Then the mist was all about him for twenty minutes, and but for the momentary droop of it he might have thought himself alone with the mules, pulling mysteriously on a rope. But it lifted again as the wind knifed under, wavered, and went away. And the sunlight swept up the valley, glistening on all things.

  They started unloading at Westfeldt’s soap factory at one o’clock. By two they had eaten a late dinner and were pushing on, the empty Xerxes light upon the mules. All day, passing Fall Hill and the ancient Mohawk Castle, the East Canada Creek, where the devil Butler had his head chopped off by two Oneida Indians, and Fort Plain, with the sunset red upon it. They changed teams at Canajoharie, and went on in the dark, with thunder overhead and hard rain drumming on the deck. White lights marked the locks, and dozing tenders put them through in silence. When the rain cleared, a stillness came upon them. Farms near the canal brooded unseen, recognizable only by the pungent odor of their barnyards. Once a white hound mourned as they went
by, and Dan heard the clink of his chain.

  The night swallowed them again. They passed Schenectady in the morning, with the canal once more astir with boats. They went through the cut of the Young Engineer and the Wat Hoix Gap, with the Mohawk roaring through the heavy rapids on their right, and the White Horse tossing his mane of spray.

  Then over the long aqueduct and down the locks; early in the afternoon they floated out into the basin, and by six o’clock saw Albany rising on a hill to their right… .

  4

  THE SARSEY SAL

  Morning, Albany

  Two days later Dan watched the Xerxes pulling away towards Troy. He was standing on the outer bank of the great basin, the Hudson at his back. The basin and the canal beyond it were thronged with boats. Dan could scarcely have believed so many boats existed. Albany was the eddy in the long current of trade that swept from New York— from Europe, for that matter-to the farthest reaches of the West. Here the long tows of barges came up the Hudson to dump their freight into the canal boats. Steamers towing queues of canal boats nosed into the basin embankment; Dan counted one line of ninety-eight. Men jumped ashore and went after their horses, left in the great round stable off the north end of State Street; or they brought their horses off the boats, stiff-legged from their long ride, the land uneasy to their hoofs, but rested and fat. Agents for the steamboat lines ran about with ledgers under their arms signing up captains for a queue on the Ronan line or the Swiftsure, or any one of ten. They quarreled among themselves, crying down the other company, fighting sometimes, while the boater grinned as he looked on and signed with a third man. The blare of voices rose in a long murmur under the city smoke; the hiss of steam slid into it here and there from the river, making white cotton-wool patches against the towering black boat-stacks.

  On one side the city rose in tiers of brown-housed streets, its smokes pulling away westward, a buzzing hive, its crown of white state buildings aloof above the noise. But, down below, the frayed ends of life were gathered up and loosely knotted. Here came a line of coal barges from the Delaware and Hudson; even the washed clothes snapping in the river wind were grey from the open cargoes of coal. A passenger train was sliding down the hill from the west, the drivers of the engine aglitter with speed; and a stately white steamboat far down the river, stretching on the water its clean white lines, its stacks rolling forth black clouds, sent its long wail between the hills. Its passengers crowded the forward decks, their gaze on the city ahead, with no eyes for the murk their passage left on the blue river.

  Men jostled Dan, men of all tongues, arguing for passage money to the West, while their women stayed back with the baggage and held their wide-eyed children hard by the hand. It was bewildering to watch, the urge for hurry begetting confusion which begot again the urge for haste. All the wide tumult of men who had to be on time, who learned its value, talked of it in fractions and measured it anxiously,— clerks getting off their ship-ments, emigrants seeking passage that they might be settled for the spring sowing, trains scurrying on their narrow rails to fulfill their tables, boat captains sounding whistles for their start,— and all had forgotten that time had no measure, that it had no passage, that it was an image of their own creation, built out of minutes and seconds and purchased with dollars and cents. On Sundays their ministers called it God. By unconscious irony they had come to call the daily transcript of their lives a “press.”

  Far up the canal, beyond the crowded boats, Dan caught again a glimpse of the Jew’s white beard and saw him raise his hand. Then the bustle and confusion swallowed him, and Dan was alone, bewildered. The meagre Tug Hill farm, set between the pointed balsams, had given him no standard by which he could grasp the great restless haste about him and make it his own.

  He shoved his way among the people until he stood by the waterside. There he sat down on a short pile, his long legs dangling. All along the wharf, for the better part of a mile, boats had been tied up. They moved slightly, muttering, with the motion of the water, the noon sun washing their decks and whittling the men and women small with its hot light. Directly before him an old brown boat squatted, its cabin windows on a level with his eyes. A woman was washing clothes on deck. She was heavily built and bent only slightly in reaching into the tub; and when she straightened up she breathed hard and squeezed the suds angrily from her reddened hands.

  After a while she caught sight of Dan and fell into conversation with him.

  “Hullo, young man,” she said.

  “Morning, mam,” said Dan.

  She jerked a man’s shirt from the tub and wrung it and shook it and hung it on a line between the cabin and the stable. It shuddered in the wind limply, then tossed out its arms and danced.

  “It’s a very pleasant day,” observed the washerwoman, going on with her rubbing.

  “Yeanh,” said Dan.

  The noise of the wharves tumbled about them, but the woman’s voice was clear and pleasant; she did not raise it, but she talked to Dan with no thought of the people bustling by, so that it was easy for him to hear.

  “The sun is a pleasant thing, to be sure,” she went on.

  “Yeanh,” said Dan.

  “Where do you come from?”

  “Tug Hill,” said Dan.

  “Where is that?”

  “Fifteen miles north of Rome.”

  “That’s a long way to be from.”

  “Yeanh.”

  She bent to her work.

  “A house is a fine thing,” she said, straightening up again to wring out a nightgown. “The boat comes and goes. It’s always stopping, but it never stays.”

  “No.”

  “I married a man once, honey, and had a house and a patch of praties and a fine man to come in for his dinner.”

  She finished her washing and dumped the grey water of the tub with a slosh into the canal. She stopped for a moment, with one hand taking hold of her hip.

  “Are ye working on the canal, honey?”

  “No,” said Dan, “not now.”

  “Are ye looking for a job?”

  “Yeanh.”

  She sighed.

  “It’s a hard thing to find with the years mounting up in a body’s bones. But you’d not have much trouble. You’re a handsome young man.”

  Dan blushed.

  “I must put on a bit of my best, honey, and go off to my marketing.”

  She went below, leaving Dan in the midst of the noise, sitting there idly, his eyes on the blue water, thinking of Molly Larkins, and wishing one of all the many boats might be his own.

  The Chase Begins

  It was with a start that Dan became aware of two men going aboard the boat. The first walked heavily with his chin drawn in, his eyes on the ground. In the second, Dan recognized the man Henderson, who called himself a horse trader.

  They went down into the cabin. After a minute Dan began to pick out their voices above the hum round him. The curtains were drawn over the windows, so that they could not see him.

  “I’ve tracked him down here, Samson,” said Henderson.

  “Where’s he now?” the boater asked.

  “That’s what I wanted to find out from you. Do you know where he’d be likely to hang out?”

  “Probably one of the canawl houses— Jason Grew’s, or Ficha Thrall’s, or in the Bent Window Hotel.”

  “I’ll look into them,” said Henderson.

  “Bad actor, eh?”

  “On the records. I was sent out from the Central Office. I’m not in no hurry to lay my hands on him. I’ve got his description, and I’ve seen him once, not to see his face. I got on his trail in Black Rock.”

  “Going to snatch him here?”

  “Bad place, Samson. If he got away he’d beat me to New York. Of course, I’d get word through first, but New York’s an easy place to miss him, and then he could cut out for Europe if he had to. That’d be too bad.”

  “Surely,” said the boater. “That would be bad.”

  “I’ve been tracking him
for two months. He isn’t going to break loose here; he wants to hide out and wait for things to cool off. Probably he was born in this part of the country. No, Samson, I aim to wait till he’s in the middle of the state afore I put out my hands at him.”

  “Maybe you’ll get him,” Samson said. “I hope you do.”

  “Sure, I ought to get him. I’m good at these things. He don’t know who I am. All he knows is we know where he is. That comes in the posting for him. I had that done to keep the people excited after him. They’re beginning to wake up now. When I’m ready to get after him he’ll be easier to track. Yes. I know some of his hideouts in the ports now. If he heads to a port, I won’t have to lose time looking. He don’t know who I am. Thinks the sheriffs are doing the posting. It’s a hot day, Samson.”

  “That’s right, Sam— real hot; kind of sweaty.”

  “Makes a man feel dry,” said Henderson.

  “Yeanh.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “How about a rum noggin, Sam?”

  Henderson cleared his throat.

  “Now you say it, Samson, I think it would go pretty good.”

  Dan heard the boater moving about the cabin.

  “Great place for a man to hide out, the canal is,” Henderson observed. “There’s so danged many boats and so danged many people working on ‘em or going through West. The boaters ain’t like settled people. They don’t keep track of any one place. The only people on the canal I can get anything from is the bank walkers. They’ve got their patrols to make. But most of them are deef.”

  “That’s probably why he tracked into here,” said the boater.

  “I guess so. This noggin’s pretty good, Samson.”

  “Yeanh. It’s grateful to a man’s innards. The lemon makes it kind of blend the stummick, Sam.”

  “It does, at that.”

  “Ain’t going to make a nab at this Calash here, then?”