After breakfast he said he reckoned I wouldn’t mind earning my keep, so he handed me a snaggley-toothed saw and took me up into the woods. There was a pile of about forty saplings lying there, the lower ends sharpened, and he said I must saw some more the same size and he would trim them up with the ax.
While I worked, he chewed tobacco and eyed me carefully, as if he had something on his mind. Presently he commenced to ask foolish little questions, like:
“Yore paw got any size to him?”
I answered that my father was a large man, husky and able, and with a temper to frighten a bobcat, because if this fellow was planning any deviltry, I wanted him to feel he might expect trouble later.
“You look stout enough,” he observed after a while. I nodded and kept on sawing, wondering what was next. It had turned into a kind of game, and went along like this:
“Often sickly?”
Then, after my no, a few chunks of the ax, a pause or two to spit, and:
“Weight how much, did you say?”
I told him, and in a minute he inquired, with a sharp look: “Much of an eater?”
“One of the poorest eaters in Ohio—they used to complain about it at home, and give me tonics to fat up.”
Chunk, chunk, pause, spit, chunk.
“Don’t favor meat, I suppose?”
I said I never cared for it, hardly ever touched it, only a piece now and then to thicken my blood, but I’d take a piece to oblige him, if he preferred it, and many thanks for the offer.
“Tain’t no offer,” he said, and then he asked:
“Did much ploughing with a mule?”
I was enjoying myself now, being convinced that he was an outright lunatic, though harmless, and I rattled on, as overblown as a rooster.
“Very little,” I said. “Back home in Cincinnati my father was the county sheriff, and I mostly helped out with the hangings and such.”
He chunked away for several minutes, stopping to spit at a beetle, which got out of there in a hurry, and asked:
“Say he reckons you drowneded?”
I was sure of it, I said, but it didn’t matter because I intended to push right on to St. Louis and find him. In a way, I was telling the truth, because I knew my father had a letter of introduction to a friend of my mother’s family, a Pierre Chouteau, who was one of the biggest traders in St. Louis, or so they said.
“Maw expect you back soon?”
“Not so you could notice it—we were counting on two years at least.”
He seemed satisfied with these answers, and we worked until noon, when we went back to the house and had some more side-meat, this time with compone and collards. In the afternoon we carried down the saplings, and he loaded me up till my knees buckled, after which he kept asking me boneheaded things like: “Tired?” “Wears you out, does it?” and “Appear to be much of a heft?”
I was tired by now, and it was in my mind to damn him and his saplings to perdition, but something about him, a shadow of meanness in his dark, broody face, made me think this mightn’t work out very well. The more I mulled him over, the better convinced I was that he had something up his sleeve, so after supper, as soon as they mentioned how late it was, I volunteered to get a fresh bucket of water. Once outside, I streaked to the well and raised two or three wails from the wheel, then tiptoed back and peered in the window, listening hard. They had their heads together, as thick as three in a bed.
“I can easy get him bound out, Agather,” he was saying. “The judge’ll take my word against his’n, and besides that, he’s counting on my vote. We need somebody on the place, and this boy’s stout I put him to the test. He ain’t real bright between the ears, but if it’s hauling you want, why teach a jackass to sing? He’ll do, or I’m mistook—it’s the chance of a lifetime.”
So that was it! Here I’d been playing him for a dunce, and he’d been using me for bait, all the time. He was going to apprentice me, and bind me out to him for maybe seven years, the way they did, and I’d have to like it or lump it.
As soon as I could, I said I was ready for bed—they had given me a blanket and told me to sleep in the loft on the straw—but the woman picked up the bucket and says, “I thought you went out for water.”
Confound the luck, in my anxiousness to overhear them, I’d forgotten to fill it. The man flashed me a suspicious look, and they exchanged a glance that gave me goose-pimples, but I spoke up and said, “I stumped my toe coming in, and the water splashed out, but I thought there was enough left to drink. Here, I’ll get some more.”
“Leave it lay,” he said; then he added irritably, “Git on along up—there’s work to be done tomorrow.”
I didn’t need to be told twice. I skinned up the ladder and made a show of slapping down the straw and scrunching up a bed. Then I heard one of them blow out the lamp, and I waited for them to begin breathing heavy, so sleepy I was near about dead. But they were restless. Twice I could hear them talking, and once I heard the man get up and drink out of the bucket.
Suddenly I snapped awake—the moon was up; I had dozed off for no telling how long. I was in a sweat for fear I was too late; that I would be an indentured servant and punished by law if ever I broke away. I crept to the trap door—all dark below—and started down the ladder, skipping the fourth rung from the top, which was loose and creaked—I’d counted on the way up—and padded silently across the room. If Ferd had had trouble getting to sleep before, he was making up for lost time now. His mouth was wide open and he was dredging up noises that sounded like a pig stuck in a rail fence. The woman, a shapeless lump beside him, was having a dream, something about how hard the ploughing was, for I heard her threaten to take a spade to Gomer, which was the name of their mule.
Out in the smokehouse, I borrowed some matches and a piece of sowbelly, and with my blanket over my shoulder and some shoes on at last—a pair of buckskin moccasins that didn’t seem to be working but were too big and needed rags stuffed in them for comfort—I lit up the hill and on into the woods. I wanted to take his shotgun, but I didn’t think it would be polite, and if there was one thing my mother was a stickler on, it was to be courteous and mind your manners while you were in somebody’s house visiting.
So I took his hatchet instead, which was stuck upright in a stump. While we were sawing, the day before, I’d pumped him about the way to get to St. Louis, and he took me back a piece and pointed out a wagon trail to St. Genevieve, which he said was about halfway, “give or take a hundred miles,” but I imagined this was a joke. The trail was grown up with tree shoots, and the ruts filled in with weeds, but he said it was traveled a-right smart in the summers. It would have been used more, he said, except that when they busted up the river pirates around Cave-in-Rock and Natchez, some of them drifted up here and were always accommodating and would cut your throat without charge.
This was travel news on about the same level as Ware’s Guide, but I hadn’t any choice, so I struck out, wishing I knew what time it was. Unless I misjudged my late host, he would rip around in the morning, and cuss, and of course blame everything on his wife, and maybe give her a couple of licks; then he would follow up the St. Genevieve trail for about five miles, mostly to avoid working. After that he would lose interest. So if I could do ten miles before dawn, I was safe. Or anyway, that’s what I figured.
The trail was in the deep woods mainly, and sometimes hard to see, but once in a while it came out into a mossy glade of scrub evergreen, and then it was bright and pretty in the moonlight. Even in the big woods the paleness sifted down, because not all the trees had leafed out yet, and the ground was speckled with light. Very little sound except an occasional hoot owl, and the rustle of small animals—night-prowling possums and coons, along with foxes hunting them and a soft wind that swayed the trees and breathed through the high-up larch boughs, lonely and sad, like spirits flying by.
I made good time, and wasn’t scared, only at bushes crackling too near at hand. I thought I must have walked for two hours
, and was so sleepy I’d begun to stumble. It was cold, too. This wouldn’t do, so I knew I’d got to take a nap. At the next open place, I went off a hundred yards or so, keeping the moonlit clearing in view, then made a small fire in the shelter of an oak, well out of sight. Rolled up tight in the blanket, I lay down and melted into the leaves.
Chapter V
“Turn him over! Shake him up!”
“It’s only a boy.”
“Never mind that—prod him out of there.”
I sat up, then sprang to my feet, stupid with sleep, but with an icy grabbing of my heart, too.
They were an old man, hatless, with tumbled gray hair, two younger ones—a tall, sallow fellow dressed in gambler’s black, neat even here in the woods, and a beefy, yellow-haired brute with as ugly a face as you’d be apt to meet ouside a jail—with a pale, black-haired girl of eighteen or nineteen. They were mounted on poor-looking horses, the girl riding double behind the beefy man.
“Well, you had to investigate, now you know the long and short of it,” said this last. “Put a ball in him and let’s be along, else he’ll describe us for sure.”
“Hold your tongue,” replied the old man in what I thought was a very careless tone, considering the difference in their ages and size. “If I was you, Shep, I wouldn’t try to think. You haven’t had the experience.”
The old gentleman got down—he was taller than I thought, and straight as a slat. He said, “Now let’s have a chat, sonny. What are we doing out here in the woods, eh? Don’t be afeard. Speak right out.”
My teeth were chattering at the talk of shooting me, but I had begun to take heart a little, and felt brasher.
“I’m mighty glad you found me, sir. I was lost—I got separated from my Uncle Jessie and the others. They were on their way to Memphis to see Uncle Jessie’s stepbrother. Merle, that runs the brewery.”
“Hold on, hold on—you’re running away with yourself. Who’s this Uncle Jessie? Why ain’t you home with your maw and paw?”
“I’m a poor foundling boy,” I said, using a word from out of an English book they handed us at the Secondary School, a very good story that I’d read through four or five times. “He isn’t my blood uncle—they left me on his doorstep, in a basket, one night when it was snowing and sleeting. I was near about froze when they found me, him and my Aunt Harriet, his second wife; the first was shot while poaching hares.”
This didn’t seem to fit the occasion, but I was stuck with it, so I let it go, and anyway it was in the book.
The old man looked up at his companions and said, “Durn me, if this boy ain’t the champeen long-distance talker of Missouri, and they was all born with a flappy jaw hereabouts, if I’m any judge.” Turning back to me, he says, “Son, your tongue waggles like a billygoat with the St. Vitus.”
I didn’t relish the compliment, specially when the beefy man spoke up to suggest that, “Let’s cut it out and improve his looks.” Behind him on the horse, I could see the black-haired girl stiffen up and look frightened and miserable.
It took me only about five minutes to make up my mind that these were common highwaymen, dangerous, too, and that I’d better watch my step, and not get frisky. Even so, I was beginning to fix a sort of plan in my mind.
The three of them had drawn off for a consultation; now the old man came back. Just as I thought, he’d been working on my story, and didn’t altogether care for it.
“You say you was separated from your Uncle Jessie? Now how in the name of common sense can anybody with the brains of a muskrat get lost on a wagon trail? And why didn’t they send back to search?” He put his face down—I hadn’t noticed before what a wild glitter his eyes had—and said in a tone that made me gulp, “Son, if you want to live long and die hearty, you’d better spit out the truth and spit it out quick.”
Before I could answer, he said, “Now ain’t the facts that you’re an apprentice and have run off to shirk toil? Ain’t that so? Talk up, or by Jupiter, I’ll—”
Seizing my jacket, he gave me a yank that put a crick in my neck, and I began to blubber.
“I couldn’t stood it any longer. I was black and blue the whole first year. He beat me up regular, whether I deserved it or not, and didn’t give me anything to eat except cold leavings from the second table.”
“That’s all well and good; the point is, what’s to be done now?”
I tried to look pitiful, but he went on:
“My partner here, Mr. Baggott, who’s known for his merciful ways and love of children, favors putting a bullet in you, so you won’t have to suffer any more. What do you think of that?”
I commenced to sniffle again, and said I hoped they would spare me—I couldn’t do them any harm, but only wanted to escape in peace, so that nobody would take me back for the reward.
The old man’s ears pricked right up.
“What reward? See here, who was you bound out to, anyway? And whereabouts?”
“Mr. Chouteau, sir,” I said, wiping my eyes on my sleeve. “Up in St. Louis. He’s the wealthiest merchant in those parts, and the meanest. He placed a reward of two hundred dollars on me out of spite and revenge, because he couldn’t have wanted me back, seeing how he treated me.”
“How’d you know about this reward?” he inquired suspiciously, putting his face down again.
“I hid out for two days under some pilings by the river, foot of Market Street. I saw the notice on a handbill when I was out nights rummaging through garbage cans.”
It sounded good, dropping in Market Street like that, as if I’d been around there for years, but I remembered it from hearing my father ask my mother how to get to Mr. Chouteau’s establishment.
They had drawn off for another pow-wow now, and when they came back they said I must go along with them toward St. Genevieve “for protection,” else I might meet up with some “hard cases” and get hurt.
“But I’m traveling in the other direction, sir!” I cried in alarm. I told them I was aiming to go south as far as New Orleans, and find honest work there, with maybe a chance to go to school on the side, which was all I’d ever wanted since I was old enough to know what I was doing. These last words got sort of stuck in my throat, but I finally coughed them out after a little difficulty.
“You’ll do what you’re told,” said the old man, and Mr. Baggott, possibly out of his love for children, unslung the rifle he had tied to his saddle, humming a little tune.
As he did so, the girl behind him suddenly spoke up for the first time. “Don’t you touch him!” she cried in a low, fierce voice. “The child’s had enough trouble. Leave him go on his way.”
All right, I said to myself, you’re not here because you like it. You need help, and I’ll try to see that you get it.
Baggott’s reply to her outburst was to turn half around, rising in his stirrups, and in a quick, sure motion strike her across the mouth with the back of his hand. In the woods stillness, the smack rang out like a report.
She gasped a shocked, “Oh!” and put her palms to her cheeks, but said nothing more.
Paying no attention, the old man vaulted back on his horse, surprisingly nimble and springy. Jerking its head around—it had been droopily trying to find grass—he said, “Get up behind Slater,” which I judged was the one in black, and when I had done so, he called out, “Come along,” and we started along the trail.
For about an hour we rode toward St. Genevieve, with the sun coming up over the pines to our right, and everything sparkling and dewy and fresh in the morning sunlight. Once in a while we came up onto a high baldy knob where we could see the river, broad and silently moving, and across the way parts of the Illinois shore, like drowneded islands now in the big floodwaters. I was glad I didn’t live there. You could smell the river—that cold, muddy-bottom smell, mixed up with dead fish and swamp rot and tree stumps. But it was mighty pretty just the same, and made you want to get out on it in a skiff or a raft and slide down, stretched out in the sun and watching the spring-rise sights.
I had done it on the Ohio many’s the time, sneaking away on the sly. You could make a tolerable raft, to hold three or four boys, from out of two big logs and a few drift planks, unless they had got water-soaked and sumpy.
Presently we called a halt so the girl could go over in the woods, and as she did so Mr. Baggott got off a few coarse jokes, calling after her a time or two, to inquire if she needed help, and advising her to watch out for snakes. The old gentleman said nothing, merely sitting without stirring, darkly thoughtful, but Mr. Slater muttered under his breath. He and I had exchanged no words of any kind. Riding along, I’d been stiff and uncomfortable, not finding anything to hang onto except his waist, which I didn’t like to bother for fear of making him mad and being shot. So I held onto his coattails, in case there should be an emergency of the horse shying or like that.
Getting on toward noon, we stopped to eat, and I learned some more about the party. About the first thing that turned up was that the old gentleman, who went by the name of John, claimed to be John Murrel, the pirate and outlaw. I was acquainted with this Murrel, or leastways with the real article. He had been written up in a paper-backed book I’d got off a shantyboater for two stringy rabbits from my traps. According to the reports, he had ended up by going around trying to coax all the slaves to rise up against their masters and kill them with axes and hoes, upon which he would run a “southern empire,” with whiskey and women for all. It might have worked, too, but one of his partners named Steward told on him, and the people around Natchez charged forward and placed Murrel in jail, where they hoped he would be less of a nuisance. After that they had a kind of picnic, going overboard on the other side, as reformers generally do, and hung all his friends, and some of his acquaintances, and several strangers, including a number who were just passing through, and wound up by flogging everybody else in sight. Then they called it a good day and said they wished they had a conspiracy to put down more often.
The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) Page 5
