Tap chuckled. “Yeah, I’m doomed to sinning,” he shot back. “But don’t tell your maw I admitted such. It’s better she believes she can save my soul. Then if I ever have to fall on my knees an’ beg her forgiveness, it’ll be real meaningful for her. She can take great pride in having saved me from eternal damnation.”
I chuckled and turned in the saddle for a final gander at the two-story building with three doorways. “What goes on inside there, anyhow?”
“That’s the Scarlet Knight, the prime rum parlor of Cincinnati. At the Scarlet Knight, the keg never runs dry an’ the dollies are never scarce. Saul Bartlett, the owner, brags it’s the onliest tavern on the Ohio big enough to warrant not one, but two three-holers. That’s the both of them behind the near corner there. Mighty plush fixin’s, wouldn’t you agree?”
I could but nod my head and wonder if the rear wall of the Scarlet Knight sported as many doors as did the front. With the river readily available, it seemed like a waste of costly lumber if it didn’t.
Toward the western end of the waterfront, a plank cabin sat landward of a double line of tents that extended downriver another fifty yards. Beyond the tents, packhorses milled within a fenced enclosure. The light was by then so poor I could just make out their shapes enough to recognize that the baggage animals were present.
Tap reined up before the cabin and dismounted. A slim, black male with a decided limp emerged at his yell of greeting. “Evenin’, Mr. Jacobs. How may I help yuh?”
“Tige, is Caleb Downer about?”
“Naw, he ain’t here. Ain’t nobody here but me,” Tige said slowly. “Mr. Downer, he went upriver to Columbia yesterday.”
Tap sighed. “Where might we find Cyrus Paine?”
Tige’s brief smile flashed large white teeth. “He be at that tavern, that Scarlet Knight. He likes the table at the back, Mr. Paine do, sir.”
“You got anythin’ warmin’ over the fire, Tige?”
“No, Mr. Jacobs, I doesn’t. I’m right sorry. Wasn’t expectin’ no one at the table till Mr. Downer returns in the mornin’, sir.”
I was onto Tap’s thinking. Paw was away, and Tige had no victuals ready after a long ride. He had a perfect excuse for seeking sustenance elsewhere, elsewhere being the place we’d most likely encounter Cyrus Paine during the evening hours. And just in case Tige had to vouch for us later with Paw, Tap stated our excuse loud and clear.
“Well, by damned, young Mr. Downer, that presents us with but one solitary choice,” the old scout chimed. “We’ll have to partake of dinner at the Scarlet Knight, won’t we now? Let’s care for these animals. I’m hungry enough to eat fresh dung.”
Horses unsaddled, watered, and fed what meager forage was available at the stock enclosure, we wended back along the waterfront. We left our saddles and gear with Tige but went armed and ready. Tap issued a blunt warning before we entered the nearest door of the huge tavern. “A man can lose his life easy as his vitals here any night with a mere wag of the head. Stay on my shoulder, Ethan. I knows who greases the hog at the Scarlet Knight an’ who don’t.”
I didn’t mind the old scout giving me orders. He had me so anxious and excited to push inside, I would’ve carried him across the threshold if necessary to hurry things up. It wasn’t often a young gent got to look the elephant square in the eye. The trick was to not let the elephant stomp you too badly.
A few grunting shoves, and we slipped inside. Smoke from countless clay pipes pooled in clouds that hung like white fog over a sea of heads in the flickering light of the guttering candles. The room was more crowded than I would ever have imagined without seeing it firsthand. The shifting press of flesh in the space surrounding the dining tables and the square bar fronting the fireplace of the rear wall threatened to knock you from your feet if your legs weren’t solidly braced at knee and hip. Drink requests were called out, and tavern wenches responded promptly, threading through the dining tables to pass into the crowd steaming tankards fresh from the insertion of a fire-heated poker. How those painted, sweating females made any sense of the myriad requests being shouted at them, I was never to determine.
For some minutes it was purely a treat to hold your place with outthrust elbows and watch. But before long, you realized you could go thirsty as well as hungry the entire night you didn’t assert yourself. Tap’s impatience was no less severe than my own. Our saving grace proved his friend and ardent admirer, Sally with the tall, black wig. Somehow she spied the old scout among that shouting horde. Tap yelled for me to follow him, but I did him one better. When the bodies separating us from the dining tables parted slightly in response to Sally’s repeated pleadings, I latched onto Tap and forged ahead, his smaller frame riding on my cocked hip. It damn near winded me, but I levered us free of the crowd.
Next we needed to locate an available table. Sally solved that problem by leading us around the corner of the serving bar to empty chairs against the rear wall. I shouldn’t have been surprised. The one occupied chair at the table was filled with a bald rat of a creature wrapped in a black coat despite the blazing fireplace scant steps farther along. Tap’s greeting was an unnecessary confirmation as to the creature’s identity. “Evenin’, Cyrus. Considerate of you to let us join yuh.”
Paine’s laugh was sharp and brittle. His voice was mostly a grating squeak. “I’ll extract proper payment from our Sally whore later, never you fear.”
I could tell by how Tap squeezed his lips together he resented Paine’s public branding of Sally for what she was, but the old scout kept the peace, having bigger game to hunt this night. “What they servin’, Cyrus?”
“Many meat stew and bread dry and crusty,” squeaked the clerk. “Though that don’t tally to nothing, the rum is hot and buttered like always.”
Two heaping platters, followed by two steaming tankards, thudded onto the tabletop, and Sally bent to give Tap a big, wet kiss, smearing his cheek with her thick rouge. Tap circled her waist with an arm and hugged Sally close, then released her as the hearty aroma of the stew teased his smeller. “Fill your gullet, yuh old goat, an’ we’ll make the rope sing later,” she promised, returning to her duties at the bar.
We ate while Cyrus Paine sipped steadily on his rum. The clerk, I decided, was flat-out ugly. It was as if a huge hand had grasped his nose, cheeks, and chin and pulled most of the flesh and bone into a long snout undercut by buckteeth that overlaid his lower lip. His amber eyes, cold and inhospitable, were without brows and ceaselessly roved the tavern. He showed so little interest in us we might as well have been made of wood.
Tap Jacobs, howsomever, was not to be ignored. We had finished our second platter of stew and bread and were into our third serving of rum, my ears beginning to ring from the liquor, when his tankard smacked down on the table. “Cyrus, yuh seen anythin’ of Dyson Barch the past week or two?”
The clerk’s amber eyes stopped roving and focused on the old scout. I knew what Tap intended and was wishing maybe he had waited till we talked to Paw first. A man who rudely awakened a pack of sleeping dogs risked losing a chunk of his leg. And Paw liked to handle his own affairs without any meddling from others, including those in his employ.
The old scout leaned forward, his beard hovering over his empty platter. “Yuh deaf, Cyrus?” he demanded.
I tried kicking Tap out of sight to gain his attention and missed entirely, managing to smash my moccasin-covered toes against the center leg of the table. I winced at the pain setting my foot to throbbing as Cyrus Paine demanded in turn, his voice suddenly less of a squeak, “An’ what business would you have with Barch if you did find him?”
The wily clerk had trumped as well as stumped Tap at one and the same time. The old scout should have ceased and desisted then and there. He had failed to learn Barch’s whereabouts without raising Paine’s suspicions. But the old scout’s open dislike of Paine, coupled with his stubbornness, was his undoing. He wasn’t about to concede the evening to the individual he believed was the cause of some, if not all, of
Paw’s troubles.
He proceeded to upset the whole kettle of soup. “I want to chat with Barch about the manifest for the shipment Caleb and Ensign Young inspected last month,” Tap blurted, laying his rifle on the table with a loud clatter.
If Paine was roused or upset by the abrupt appearance of Tap’s long gun, it showed nowhere on his snout of a face. A small red tongue resembling that of a snake licked the bottom edge of his buckteeth. His amber eyes glittered in the candlelight. The squeak was almost entirely gone when he spoke. “Don’t threaten me, you old windbag of a fart. You lay a finger on me, you’ll answer to Court Starnes. He’ll kill you with his bare hands.”
Tap wasn’t a coward, but he recognized an honest threat to his person when he heard it. Anger colored his cheeks, but he sat still as a tree butt as Cyrus Paine slid his tankard toward us and rose slowly to his feet. He flexed his arms to settle his black coat smoothly about his shoulders and with a glare of defiance, swooped around the table and was gone into the milling throng beyond the bar. I watched him depart, realizing that the clerk’s true image was more akin to that of the nocturnal bat as opposed to the wharf rat.
A different realization now flushed the wind from Tap’s sails. He groaned and threw himself against the back of his chair. “Oh, for chrissake, Ethan, I don’t need to fret about Starnes killing me. Soon as your Paw learns how far I stuck both feet in my mouth, he’ll shoot me or hang me. Rum, Sally, bring me rum! Bring ’em two at a time, darlin’! Only a fool can reward his own stupidity.”
The midnight hour came and went, the crowd gradually thinning. Tap’s thirst never slackened. He resisted my plea that having possibly ruined Paw’s day in court, perhaps we should retire so we could at least talk sensibly with him upon his return from Kentucky later in the day. Tap’s response was to tug his purse from his frock yet again, dump additional coins on the table, and slobber on Sally’s neck. My being drunker than ever before myself, my speech was so slurred I was probably wasting my breath. The urge to pee had me thumping my knees together. I left Sally to watch the old scout and stumbled through the nearest rear door, my objective either one of the Scarlet Knight’s three-hole outhouses.
Stars pulsed bright then dim in the black of the night sky, or it seemed they did in my rum-blurred vision. I lurched and swayed. I avoided stepping on a prone body just off the stoop, then saw no one else. The log wall of the outhouse was raw on my palms. I fumbled, found the latchstring, and plunged inside, yanking the door closed.
Thank the Lord, I was alone. I had no idea where the seat holes were in the dark, and the last buttons of my breeches proving too great a chore, I yanked them over my hips, and let fly, spraying merrily I knew not where, but by the rapidly spreading wetness, mostly down my own legs.
Starlight illuminated the seat hole inches from my knees as the door swept open behind me. Cursing that I had been caught peeing on myself, I spun about. There was a slight whisper of air, a cracking thud, and exploding pain. Fast as a candle being snuffed, my eyes snapped shut, and I was out cold face first in my own piss in less time than that.
The black void I fell into was at first without sight and sound. After a while, I sensed I was approaching whorls of fuzzy light. I don’t remember if I had to open my eyes. Red flame, hot and searing, leaped and spat. A brown line split the fire. I peered closer, and the line gained detail. It was the rosewood handle of Starkweather’s gift knife, and blood not yet dry stained the blade. I tried mightily to move, to stand and run, but my legs were heavy as lead. Then the pain was upon me once more, greater than ever.
I succumbed to it, seeking that wonderful, feathery blackness, seeking to escape the fire and the heat and the blood, for I could be nowhere but at the rim of the devil’s abode.
And if that were true, I was dead.
Chapter 12
Early Hours, 10 October
The worst part of hell aside from the heat and the pain was the stench: the raw, ripe stink of vomit, dung, and rancid sweat. The stink was so powerful it overwhelmed the nose and threatened to overturn my innards.
Paws rough and clasping lay hold of me from out of the blackness. I struggled to escape them, twisting and turning, fearful that I was about to suffer the sinner’s ultimate fate, the headlong toss into the fiery pit of damnation where you roasted forever.
A voice sounded, garbled and distant. I tried to listen, and the voice stopped speaking. I concentrated, praying it would return, and I could yell for help.
The rough shaking popped my eyes open. All was a gray, whirling blur, but at least, by damned, there was no fire, no searing heat, and only the godawful stench. Maybe I was being carried from the devil’s clutches to safety. Then I felt myself being lifted and launched. I cringed, not knowing where or how I would land. Straining to see, I thrust my arms in front me, hoping to break my fall.
The cold shock of the water chilled me to the core and chased the breath from my lungs. I kicked and thrashed and gulped, sucking in water instead of vitally needed air. My elbow struck something solid. I felt quickly with my hand and encountered what had to be thick mud—bottom mud. I thrust upward with my head and pulled my legs beneath me. Before it was too late and I blacked out from lack of wind, I pushed downward with all my might as soon as my feet touched the mud. My head broke the surface, and as I spat my mouth empty and filled my lungs, my vision cleared somewhat, and I discovered I was standing in a mere three feet of water.
Protests erupted over my shoulder. “Goddamn it, it ain’t fair. Only a son of a bitch dunks a friend!”
I came about, and a large splash drenched my face. The body suddenly in the water with me flailed and sputtered. I peered at what I now knew was the bank of the Ohio, and a murky shape stood at the water’s edge. Even in the dark of the night’s final hour, one look at what I could make out, the flat crown of a hat and wide shoulders told me it was, of all people, my father.
Tap lunged to his feet and wrung water from his beard. “Goddamn it, Caleb, I catch my death, I’ll never forgive you,” he cried.
“Be quiet and follow me, the both of you, less’n you want to hang,” Paw ordered.
Those words took the zest out of Tap’s bitching in one fell swoop. The pain where I’d been struck on the forehead was awesome but not so great I didn’t hear precisely what Paw had said. Maybe the hurt was the least of my troubles.
Tap and I waded from the river. Tige waited with dry blankets. “Get those about your shoulders and come along,” Paw said. “We’ve a fire burning at my tent. Hurry now!”
How we had arrived there, I didn’t know, but we were well down the river toward the stock pen, a goodly piece from the Scarlet Knight. A fire roared twixt an oversized tent and the water. Two wagoners, heavy of beard, muscle, and boot, lounged by the fire with our rifles. They levered upright upon sighting us.
“Thank you, Thaddeus,” Paw said. “You and Timothy have been most helpful. We’ll break the fast together later this morning. Rest assured, I won’t forget the service you’ve rendered.”
“Our pleasure, Mr. Downer,” Thaddeus responded. At a nod from Timothy, the wagoners passed Paw our long guns and walked in the direction of the stock pen.
Paw stowed the weapons in his tent, opened a trunk, and emerged with a pair of full-length woolen breeches and a fringed, buckskin hunting frock. “Here Ethan, you’re growed enough to wear these. Best jump into them quick. Come daybreak, we wouldn’t want the women gawking thisaway.”
The frock being a favorite of his, I done as told with no lost time. Tap having no spare clothing, he shucked to the skin, wrapped his blanket tighter about himself, and spread his discards over a log next to mine to dry.
The old scout warmed shaking hands over the fire. “Wondered who was toting me. They could’ve been a mite more tender with me. How come they didn’t bring me all the way here?” The old scout shivered from hairless head to bare feet. “Caleb, you’re a danger to the best of friends, damned if’n yuh ain’t.”
“Not nearly as mu
ch as you two are to yourselves,” Paw countered.
“Now just a solitary minute—”
“Quiet, Tap,” I interrupted, my patience with the old scout ebbing. I stepped closer to the fire to keep my teeth from chattering. “Paw, you said something about our hanging. What’d you mean by that?”
Paw bent at the waist and fished fingers into a tall riding boot. What he slid forth was my knife. He flipped it end to end, something I couldn’t accomplish without cutting myself, and presented it to me handle first. “Since the scabbard on your belt is empty, I assume this blade belongs to you, Ethan. Am I correct?”
I took the knife from him and stammered, “I must have lost it on the floor of the outhouse.”
Paw fixed his piercing gaze on me, the one that held you spellbound. “Nope, that’s not where I found it.”
“Then where?” I asked.
“Sticking in the guts of Cyrus Paine lying next to you,” Paw informed me, his tone level and deadly serious.
My jaw sagged nearly to my waist. “Chrissake, I didn’t kill him. I swear I didn’t!”
Paw’s head shook. “Never said you did. You’re not a killer, Ethan, not even when you’re liquored up. But somebody wanted to make it seem thataway.”
I was thoroughly confused and unable to think. “How’d you get involved, Paw?”
“Tige is fascinated with the dice box. He likes to sneak to the rear window and watch the gaming at the Scarlet Knight. He saw you enter the privy. He looked a few minutes later, and the door was ajar with an arm flopping over the sill. He ran to the privy, saw it was the same young Mr. Downer who’d been with Tap earlier, and Tap being too drunk to help him, he came to get Thaddeus to tote you to my tent. About then I rode up, home early. On our way back to you, a cabin across the street from the Scarlet Knight burst into flames when the mantle log burned through. The whole damn tavern emptied to battle the fire.”
Blood at Dawn Page 13
