by David Nickle
Jason figured this would be something his mama would have approved of more than hunting a pretty smile on a locomotive. It would, after all, lead him to self-sufficiency.
Coming upon civilization as he had, all at once through the haze of grief, after spending his short life on a Montana pig farm, and with no one but a new-found aunt to guide him, Jason Thistledown was a boy in need of bearings. Nothing made that clearer to him than the fascinating, loud and stinking machinery of the Pacific Northwest steam engine and the cars it hauled. The thing’s engine made a noise like thunder that didn’t ever stop, and threw out fat clouds of black coal-soot as evil as anything Jason had ever smelled. The locomotive, as Aunt Germaine called it, scared hell out of Jason and he knew he’d have to conquer that fear (along with the fear brought on by all those strangers in their suits and skirts and high leather boots, and their peculiar expressions) if he were ever going to have a life beyond Cracked Wheel.
When he got back to Aunt Germaine, she looked right at him.
“Are your legs well-stretched?” she asked, and Jason looked away for only an instant before he told her they were, which was at least true.
§
The train pulled in to Sand Point two days later. They debarked, but not because that was the end of their trip. As Aunt Germaine explained it, they would next take a short line ride to a place called Bonner’s Ferry, where they would be met by a man from Eliada who would take them the rest of the way by barge and horseback, down the Kootenai River to the town.
As they debarked and waited for the short line train, Jason happened to spot Ruth Harper for the second time.
This time, he tried to be mindful of Aunt Germaine’s advice and his mama’s wisdom, and made an effort not to gawk.
It was quite an effort. Jason felt his heart thundering in his chest, and a profound quaking in his stomach, and those parts along with every other part of him seemed to be hollering: There she is! Look over there, you damn fool! Perhaps she’s smiling!
Once or twice—for an instant each time—he obeyed, glancing down the platform, under the overhang where all the passengers gathered against the cold spring rain, to be-spy her sitting on the bench next to her chaperone, reading from a book in her lap. She would stir, he imagined, feeling the heat of his look even though she didn’t look up to meet it—just smiling a little more each time.
Later, Jason would learn that he was off the mark but not entirely. For while it was true that his gaze drew notice, it was not from Ruth Harper, but Miss Louise Butler, who sat near to her friend but beyond the scope of Jason’s attention. At only his second glance, she whispered to Ruth:
“We have an admirer.”
“Do we?”
Miss Butler’s hands remained folded in her lap, but she nonetheless motioned in Jason’s direction, with progressively indelicate thrusts of her right forefinger. In spite of this, Ruth did not look up from her book. She did, however, smile a little.
“Is it one of those filthy loggers?”
“He might be. How does one tell a filthy logger from a smooth-faced young man who obviously does not know how to dress himself?”
Ruth sighed. “Is he looking now?” she asked, and when Miss Butler said he wasn’t, Ruth spared her a sidelong stare of withering significance. “Well?”
“There.” Miss Butler pointed.
“Oh,” she said, glancing quickly and then returning her eyes to her book. Her smile was noticeably wider this time than the last.
“Him.”
§
The train to Bonner’s Ferry was not so luxurious as the one from Helena. It was mostly hauling freight, and the single passenger car was old and cheap, with hard wooden benches instead of cushioned seats, and boot-worn slats on the floor in place of the deep red carpeting of the Pullman cars of the Pacific Northwest.
The passengers seemed generally suited to the humbler appointments. They were almost all men—unshaven, uncouth and probably unbathed fellows of the sort that Jason would watch close if he encountered them with his mama at his side. More than one of them sent leering glances in the direction of Misses Harper and Butler, who this time did not have the luxury of their own car. The men’s obvious intentions vexed Jason.
Let them try something, he said to himself. As the train wound through the hills, he found his thoughts drifting back to those nights he spent guarding his mama, wondering about wolves and ammunition and such things as followed from those.
“You figure these fellows have numbers?” he asked an hour or so in.
“Numbers?” Aunt Germaine blinked. “Oh. ERO numbers. It is possible, but unlikely. We have not been at this long enough yet. If any of them had been in prison, or hospitalized . . .”
“I bet a few of them have been in prison,” said Jason, and Aunt Germaine chuckled into her handkerchief.
“No doubt,” she said. “But please keep your voice down, Nephew. If you are correct, we don’t wish to provoke an incident.”
Jason sat quiet and tried as best he might to look beyond the window. The land here was not dissimilar to that around his mama’s old homestead: low foothills covered thick in pine trees, little tongues of lakes with rocky beaches, but mostly—trees.
For parts of the trip, those trees would draw in on the train, so all you could see going past was greenery and the shadows beyond. Then they would open up, and the green would spread out forever, crawling up the sides of far mountains strange to Jason’s eye. Jason understood Bonner’s Ferry to be a mill town like Eliada, only one that had been there longer. He figured towns like that would do well up here for a long time, all those trees they had to chew on.
“Is there a prison up in Eliada?” he asked.
“No,” said Aunt Germaine. “They don’t have a great many prisons up this way, I shouldn’t think. What’s in Eliada is perhaps even less common.”
“Well, Aunt?” said Jason, after a long moment watching her stare out the window, not telling him what was less common. “Are you going to tell me what?”
She smiled. “Here comes the town,” she said, as the train whistle hooted. The view out the window went dark then as the wind blew the smoke from the engine down and they started a slow turn. “Get ready for a boat ride, Nephew.”
Jason found that he liked Bonner’s Ferry, and he was disappointed it was only a way station. It smelled like sap and sawdust and wood smoke, and was dominated by a towering sawmill on a river that was all but covered in floating tree trunks. It was raining quite hard under a rolling dark sky as they got off the train, but that didn’t stop the men in this town from going about the hard business of logging and lumber-milling. There was an air of industry here, unlike any he’d seen in Helena or Sand Point—or especially, in those days when its inhabitants still drew breath, Cracked Wheel. Perhaps, he thought, Eliada will be the same as Bonner’s Ferry.
“Where do we go?”
Germaine pointed. “With that fellow.”
Jason looked. There was a moustachioed man in a black coat and a bowler hat standing very straight at the far end of the platform. He held an umbrella in one hand and a sign in the other, which had painted on it neatly “Eliada.”
“Oh,” said Jason as Aunt Germaine waved.
As the fellow drew closer, Jason saw that he had more umbrellas rolled up under his arm: four of them altogether. He juggled the sign into the crook of his arm, pulled out two umbrellas and handed one to Aunt Germaine and one to Jason. Then he tipped his hat. “Sam Green,” he said.
Aunt Germaine introduced herself and Jason, at the same time as she expertly popped open the umbrella and swung it over her head. Jason watched to see how she’d done it, but she was too fast for him to see exactly, so he had to fiddle with his. He did not get far, though. Sam Green reached down and found the catch, and a second later Jason was dry under his own black dome, still not sure of the trick to it.
“How soon may we be off?” asked Aunt Germaine.
“Presently,” said Sam Green. “Mr. Harper�
��s new boat is waiting at dock. But I must first gather the rest of our party.”
“The rest of our party?”
Sam Green tipped his hat once more. “Please stay here, Ma’am. I shall return.” And he strode off toward the train.
“So there’s a boat waiting for us? A new one?” said Jason. He set Aunt Germaine’s carpet bag down. “I thought it would be a barge. Maybe that is what it is and Mr. Green simply misstated.”
Aunt Germaine smiled. “Mr. Harper is a wealthy man—becoming wealthier by the day. If he has a new boat, it will be a fine one. It was not so long ago that a trip to Eliada meant a long and hazardous march or a horseback ride through wilderness. Not now, though. It seems that Mr. Harper’s investments are paying off, and civilization draws northward.”
“Who is Mr. Harper, anyhow? Aside from a rich man getting richer.”
“Garrison Harper?” Aunt Germaine began. “Why—”
“Why, he is my father.”
Jason turned. He found himself staring into a smile that was all too familiar. The girl it belonged to curtsied, her own black umbrella tilting to one side and a wash of rainwater splashing off it.
And that was when Jason Thistledown learned the thing he thought he never would.
“I am Ruth Harper,” said the girl. “May I introduce my companion, Miss Louise Butler of Evanston, Illinois.” The other lady—a little taller, with darker hair, a longer forehead and thin, half-smiling lips—likewise curtsied. “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” she said.
Ruth Harper glanced behind her, where Sam Green was supervising two porters who were each hauling a large steamer trunk. “Mr. Green informs me that we will all be travelling together—” and she turned back to Jason, her smile fading and her eye catching his directly “—for a short while longer.”
Jason nodded and blinked. Aunt Germaine smiled.
“He is cross with us,” she continued. “Mr. Green is, I should say—because we dismissed his associate in Chicago. Vulgar man. He smelled so. I believe—” she leaned forward and whispered to Aunt Germaine: “—he drank.”
“Ruth!” said Miss Butler.
“Mr. Green will overcome it,” said Ruth. “We are after all here in one piece. Two pieces.” Then she turned and looked at Jason in a direct and discomforting way.
“Well?” she said at length. “I believe, sir, that you have the advantage.”
“Thank you, Miss Harper,” Jason managed at last. “But I don’t see it that way at all.”
Ruth Harper’s laughter was the prettiest sound that Jason had ever heard. He did not know how he felt about having it directed his way, but he sure did like how it fell on his ears. So he grinned and joined in.
“I am Germaine Frost,” said Aunt Germaine when they had quieted down. “This is my nephew.”
“Jason Thistledown,” said Jason.
“Really,” said Ruth. “Thistledown.”
Her smile faded, and was replaced by a look that Jason had not seen on her before: an eyebrow arched a hair higher than its twin, and her mouth half open, a fold of her lower lip pinched gently in her teeth.
Days ahead, when he had composed himself and knew her a little better, he would learn what that look signified.
Miss Harper’s considerable store of curiosity was mightily piqued.
§
Jason found the Harper steamboat not so very impressive. Not more than fifty feet long, it had a shape that reminded Jason of a shoe. The boat was a side-wheeler, with a tall, fluted smokestack coming out the middle, a wheel on either side to propel it, and an interior that was mostly filled with barrels and crates and sacks. It was called The Eliada, which, while not imaginative, at least hit the point. Its skipper could take a wrong turn or even two, and it would not stay lost for long before someone read the bow and sent it on its right way home.
Sam Green collected the umbrellas as they stepped on board, then cleared off a bench for them that allowed them to look out the side of the boat without getting rained on.
“It’ll be a few hours,” he said. “The river gets rough in spots as a matter of course, and the weather today is not ideal for it.”
Aunt Germaine smiled in a kindly way. “It is preferable to the alternative—riding horseback through Indian country.”
“Oh,” said Ruth, “I don’t know about that. I always enjoyed the trek. Particularly the horses. And the Indians—the Kootenays—oh, they were never any trouble. Mr. Green and his people were always most helpful in that regard.”
“I am just as happy,” said Miss Butler. “Indians terrify me.”
“There is no reason they should,” said Ruth. “Not these days.”
“Most of ’em are over in Montana now anyhow,” said Jason. The two women looked at him, and he shrugged. “Government set up a big reserve for Kootenays last year. I expect they’re all of them headed over there by now. ’Twas all the talk of Cracked Wheel.”
Miss Butler giggled. “Cracked Wheel? What sort of name is that?”
“Name of my home town, miss,” said Jason. “It is not very large, I guess. Or it was not,” he added.
“Was?” Ruth looked at him. “Mr.—Thistledown. You speak of your town with the weight of the world on you. Is there something the matter?”
Aunt Germaine caught his eye and gave him a warning glare, but that wasn’t what shut Jason up on the subject. He didn’t want to stray back to Cracked Wheel, didn’t want to pick at the scab forming over his grief. He’d misspoke, he saw, naming it at all.
So all he said was: “Sorry I brought it up. No. Nothing’s the matter.”
Had Ruth Harper known Jason a little better, she might have known to leave it lie, let him to himself for a few minutes. As it stood, her curiosity got the better of her, and she persisted.
“You,” she said, turning a third toward him on the bench, “have a secret, Mr. Thistledown. Is it, I wonder, a secret connected to your infamous surname?”
“My infamous surname?”
“I am sure,” said Aunt Germaine, intervening, “that he is unrelated to that scoundrel.”
“Well, Madame,” said Ruth, “as his aunt, you ought to know. Still—” she turned to Jason “—those are, as they say, ‘mighty big shoes to fill.’”
“Ruth!” said Miss Butler, but Ruth rolled her eyes. She looked at Jason, and pointed with her index finger. “Bang!” she said, and giggled.
Jason felt his hands squeezing into fists. He pushed them between his knees, and took a breath.
“Miss Harper,” he said. “I must apologize but I cannot make head nor tail of what you are saying.”
Miss Butler was trying not to laugh herself by now. “You are not alone, Mr. Thistledown. She has, I daresay, read altogether too many dime novels for her own good. And your name—”
“What about my name?” said Jason.
“You mean to say you don’t know?” said Ruth, having composed herself. “Never mind having not heard of the man—it beggars the imagination to conceive that no one would have suggested to you the similarity of your own name to that of Jack Thistledown’s.”
Jason thought that he might have enjoyed studying Miss Ruth Harper from afar a little longer. He did not like this sort of conversation.
“Oh come,” said Ruth. “Jack Thistledown—hero of the Incorporation Wars. Killed a dozen men fighting against Granville Stewart and his vigilantes, over the cattle ranges of south Montana. One of three men to walk away from the shootout at Snake River. Does that not jog your memory?”
“My pa’s name was John,” said Jason.
“Jack is another name for John.”
Jason sighed. This would come up from time to time in Cracked Wheel, when fellows were passing through town and overheard someone calling his name in the store. Jason said now the same thing he’d said then.
“I didn’t know him too well. But he was no good.”
“The same might be said of Jack Thistledown,” said Ruth. “Well—this is exciting. The son of a famous
gunfighter—right here on this boat! I feel I ought to be swooning.”
“Ruth!” said Miss Butler, and this time Sam Green intervened too.
“Leave the boy be, Miss Harper,” he said. “It’s his own business who his pa is.”
This seemed to make an impression on Ruth where her old friend Louise Butler could not. Her face took a more sympathetic cast.
“Of course it is,” she said. “And look—my questions have made you positively crimson! Oh, I must apologize, Mr. Thistledown. As my dear Louise attests, I am quite mad for the dime novels. And here on my way to a summer at Utopian Eliada . . . Well. I am too hungry for intrigue and so invent it where there is none to be found. Can you forgive me?”
Jason had not been aware that he was crimson. He was not sure he liked having it pointed out. “I can,” he said.
They sat quiet for awhile, watching the shore of the Kootenai River transform from docks to tilled field to wilderness. After a moment, Aunt Germaine excused herself to freshen up. As she did so, Jason caught Ruth looking to him again. This time she looked away quickly, and Jason was fine with that. Let her turn all crimson for a change.
“What’d your pa buy this boat for?” asked Jason as they drew around a bend and the river stretched wide before them. “If I am not prying in asking.”
Ruth didn’t look over when she answered, and she spoke in a cool tone. “I suppose that he told the investors it was to haul his brailles of logs and lumber back to Bonner’s Ferry more efficiently. When he invested in the town, Father had hoped that the markets downriver in Canada might take an interest in Eliada wood; and he has always hoped that the Great Northern Railway might finally complete a line south through the town. Given that they have not . . .” She spread her hands to indicate the whole of The Eliada “. . . voila!”
“Voila. That’s what he told his investors,” said Jason. “You suppose.”
Now she did smile. “Yes. But you didn’t ask the proper question.”
“And what is that?”
“Why, given everything, did not my Father acquire his steamboat much sooner?” She did not wait for him to ask it. “That would be because it is only now that Father feels his grand project is enough of a success to let the world in.”
