“And once he wanted to learn to be a barber and go to America where the big money was. And for a while he did well with a special assessment. He fixed up some sort of warrants and got receipts as he went around and collected small sums from every household in town. But after a while people began to ask him what the special assessments were for, and by what authority he collected them. And after another while he could charm no more money out of them (did I mention he was charming? He was, that was the oddest thing about him) so he had to set aside the special assessment idea.
“Martha kept getting him jobs at the docks. This hurt his pride at first and he learned a heart-rending cough which he said handling the heavy foreign merchandise gave him. It is the same sort of cough that ghosts use (you have heard them) when they ooze through the closed door of your room at night and you laugh at them; then they give that pitiful little cough to show you how cold and damp it is in the grave; and you cannot but feel sorry for them even though you know they are putting it on. It was that way with Martha. She knew his cough was as phoney as a clay piastre, but it tore up her heart.
“However, after he had learned the joys of bale-busting and all the little tricks of pilfering, appropriating, and commandeering of strayed and mismarked merchandise he began to have more pocket money and more fun on the docks.
“And after this sideline had been spoiled by the unspeakable tyranny of the brutal port police, he turned from this borderline activity to his greatest coup. He kidnapped an American millionaire and held him for ransom. This was last Tuesday.
“As you know I left the ship at El ‘Arish two weeks ago and took a sabbatical, traveled over land by motor caravan to see the country, and am rejoining our ship here. I arrived in town the same day as Hiram H. Hiragespinst, the eminent American millionaire who had returned to visit the town of his grandfathers.
“Jack the quack approached me within seconds of my checking into the hotel. ‘Are you the eminent American millionaire?’ ‘I am certainly eminent. I am an able-bodied American seaman and as rich as the devil. If I'm not actually a millionaire you couldn't tell the difference by the way I spend my money.’ I always talk like that. ‘What's your name?’ he asked me. ‘John Sourwine, but my friends when I had them called me Sour John.’ ‘Sourwine is sure a funny way to pronounce Hiragespinst. Are you sure you know how to pronounce your name?’ ‘Dammit man, I ought to know my own name hadn't I?’ ‘That's true. We have something planned for you. I want it to be a total surprise. Come along.’
“I walked with the little man down the crookedest lane in town. It is the only lane in town, and you can see one segment of it from here. It doubles on itself like a snake and then it dies. Where it dies is the meanest house in town and that is where we went.
“When we were inside I heard the alarming news that I was a prisoner and would be held for ransom. ‘We will hold you for twenty-four hours until the consternation caused by your disappearance has been allowed to develop. Then we will make our move. We will chop off one of your fingers and send it with a messenger so they can identify it and know for certain it is you we hold. We will send a note with the finger asking for a million in cash. When we get it we will let you go; but not before we have cut off another finger to teach you that you can't trifle with us. I will now let you stew in your own juice till you are frantic. And my wife who is like a tigress will guard you.’
“I looked at him and I was uneasy about the way he moved on his feet. He was small but wiry and he could have been very rough. I am however a very rough medium-sized man myself and I was about to take him. Then I looked at his Martha and I did not. Her look was a kind but firm warning. So he went out and left his wife to guard me.
“It was in the ensuing hours that I became acquainted with her and learned all her story that I am telling here. But one thing I will make clear: she really was a tigress. When I remarked after a while that I would stroll downtown to look for a little booze and that I would be back in a few hours to see how the plot was developing, and when I started to stroll off, then I suddenly found myself flat on my back with one of her knees doing violence to my wind-pipe, and the point of the sharpest knife you ever saw right against the tip of my nose; and if you think she was kidding, then you never will know how my nose got all scratched up. After that there was no more nonsense about strolling downtown on my part.
“ ‘I have never discovered a non-violent way to subdue a man,’ she said. ‘I am sorry if I hurt you. I wish my husband wouldn't think up these little schemes, and I wish he wouldn't make me a part of them. But I will not let him be made a fool of. If it has to be I would kill you to prevent that from happening. I am a faithful wife and if he says to guard you I will guard you. After all it is only for twenty-four hours, and then we will cut off one of your fingers to identify you and send it with a note somewhere. After they ransom you we'll let you go, possibly. Or else we will not if he says we will not. But understand this, I will not have him embarrassed or his plan thwarted just because it is foolish and a little bit criminal. Remember that you have me to contend with. Now tell me about yourself. I never met a millionaire before.’
“She was a beautiful little woman with eyes the color of corn-flower so I told her all about myself.
“I told her about the time we were mistaken for the revolutionary junta when we missed our ship at Vega and cut across the jungle to catch it at Puerto Limón. They asked us to form a cabinet to stop further bloodshed. We did, and it was the best cabinet they ever had. It also lasted longer than any cabinet they ever had, nine days.
“I told her about the time that Tommy McGinn got them to set three of us off in a little boat near Dingle in West Ireland so he could visit his home town. We rowed about four miles and came ashore just at dawn. Tommy told them we had rowed all the way across from New York. This is still believed in the country around Dingle Bay.
“I told her of when I lived in a town whose name is Southern Comfort in Spanish and planted a crop of peanuts with the last of my resources and waited vainly for the plants to bear. It was many years later that I learned they grew underground.
“I told her about the time that we believed that we were the first white men ever to see the deep voodoo rites, and of the damnable bloodlust of the ceremonies and the sickening sense of Devil presence in the cursed proceedings. And how we found the next day that what we had seen was not deep voodoo at all, but an initiation of some freshmen into a fraternity at the new high school at Mombasa. And then I was told by one of my friends of certain school initiations that in former years obtained in the little towns around Knoxville, Tennessee, and for the first time in my life I was really shocked and frightened.
“All these accounts amused her. ‘I had no idea it was so much fun to be a millionaire. If I were capable of envy I would envy you. The possession of very great wealth liberates one and one is able to enjoy the work as a child does. I would have enjoyed a free life my myself, but poverty and the care of an irresponsible husband has hindered me. The Sisters used to tell us that we should each try to leave the world a better place than we found it; but it sickens faster than I can heal it however hard I try, and I sometimes feel that I am the only one trying very hard. It is past my power to leave the world better than I found it; but I bet when I leave it it will be better than if I had not been here. And now if the time passes slowly for you we could play a little gin rummy for as little as a piastre.’ But I was too wary to play with her though I was already convinced that she was a holy woman and good in all things. She was good in all things but I had the feeling that she was a little too good in this.
“We talked all night and I came to a glowing admiration for her simple virtue and clear wisdom. For holiness and wisdom always go together. And now her wisdom appeared in its complete power. She knew the truth of the matter. ‘You are not a millionaire at all. You are only a seaman with some of your wages put by from your last voyage. This is a bad situation. My husband has made a terrible mistake. I always feel so sorry
for him when he blunders like this. I would do anything to spare him that awful despondency that comes when the feeling that he has again been a cosmic dope comes crashing down on his head. I would go so far as to kill you to spared him. He hates to be a howling idiot. What'll we do?’
“ ‘If he really is a howling idiot—’
“ ‘He is.’
“ ‘—maybe we could fix it so he won't know that he is.’
“A little before sun-up Jack ibn Kahb came back to the house. ‘It's not twenty-four hours yet, but it's time enough. The consternation of your disappearance should have developed by now. Well, chop one of his fingers off, Martha, and you Mr. Sourwine tell me where to go, and I'll be off to collect the ransom.’
“ ‘One thing puzzles me’ I said. ‘How will my finger identify me?’
“ ‘That's the way they did it in an old story when they captured the Caliph. They chopped off one of his fingers and sent it so his ministers would know it was really he they held. Why? Wouldn't they recognize your finger?’
“ ‘I doubt if there is a person in the world who would recognize one of my fingers detached.’
“ ‘Well you can write a note then. That will have to do. Or we could do both. But you better write the note first. I still like the finger idea.’
“ ‘I don't. Now the next thing is to agree on the amount.’
“ ‘I thought we had agreed on a million.’
“ ‘No, we have agreed on nothing. That is too much. You have to come down a long ways. I would go maybe a hundred.’
“ ‘You are not even worth fooling with for a hundred. Think of all the brains I put into this. But I would take a hundred thousand.’
“ ‘Far too much. Two hundred is my best.’
“ ‘Ten thousand is my worst. Cut off all fingers, Martha, cut them all off.’
“ ‘No, wait. Five hundred.’
“ ‘Five thousand.’
“ ‘We will split the difference.’
“ ‘Agreed.’
“ ‘One thousand.’
“ ‘You call that splitting it? Well all right. But I had no idea millionaires were that cheap.’
“ ‘Good. Now a thousand piastres would be five English pounds. I give you an advantage. There should only be 197 to a pound and I'm allowing 200.’
“ ‘Piastres? Were we talking about piastres?’
“ ‘Certainly, what would we be talking about, Chinese money? Now, converting that further and roughing it off it looks like about thirteen dollars American.’
“ ‘Is that all? You multiply it out, Martha. Is that all it will come to?’
“ ‘Yes, his figures are right. That's what it comes to. And that's what you agreed to, a thousand piastres.’
“ ‘Was it piastres we agreed to? Well, it can't be helped now. I had thought I could get more from a millionaire. I didn't know that you would turn out to be that kind of a cheap jack sort of one. Still thirteen dollars is more than I made this year, or last year either if you take out one sum that I had to give back. Well, write a note, and tell me where to go get the money.’
“ ‘Here, take this note and go to the desk clerk at the hotel. I left some money for him to keep for me. He will give you thirteen dollars when he reads this.’
“ ‘Which hotel?’
“ ‘How many are there in town?’
“ ‘That's right, there is only one. And which clerk?’
“ ‘And how many of those are there?’
“ ‘That's right. There is only one hotel and one clerk at the hotel.’ Then he quickly chopped off one of my fingers to show that he was still master and went to get the ransom. He was back quite soon with it and I was freed.
“That is all. But I shall always remember that look of deathless gratitude that Martha gave me for not letting her husband know he was a howling idiot. She bore the heaviest of crosses, to suffer a fool daily, and she is a holy woman if I ever saw one.”
“But I remember how you lost that finger, Sour John. It was seven years ago and you lost it in a wind-lass.”
“Is it that long? It seems like only yesterday. I had forgotten for the moment how I lost it. Well, perhaps he didn't chop it off but he sure would have liked to.”
“And when in time to come this is told of you it will go down as the story of Sour John and the Girl with-the Corn Flower Eyes.”
“Sha ‘Allah.”
Rain Mountain
Atorrante was a four-year-old male, of the colour and texture of pale moonlight. One who knew lions would have guessed him at two hundred and twenty pounds, yet he moved as though he were without weight; and a great part of the time he was invisible against the evening background. His head was large, and he wore a black mask; distinct markings about the eyes and muzzle. His three brothers had all been marked in the same way at birth, but their markings had faded. It is quite unusual to keep the markings into adulthood.
For Atorrante looked like the Black Panther of the stories, though there is an argument never settled whether there is such a thing as a Black Panther, and whether the panther and the mountain lion are the same thing.
Atorrante had lately lost his mate, and had himself been shoulder-shot. Yet he now moved one hundred and eighty miles in forty-eight hours. Nobody has yet found the reason why the Mountain Lion will travel. But once he begins — he will move till he dies. He may go a thousand miles in three weeks. And a traveler does not act right. He will go till he is killed.
Atorrante crossed water, cleared brush, and disappeared into the flanks of Rain Mountain.
Rain Mountain is of blue granite, and it slept now in hazy pink twilight. It is not the highest, it is not the steepest, it was not the largest of the near mountains. But it was the wildest, the most brambled and overgrown; it was just plain the lonest mountain in that hundred miles between Medicine Park and Haystack Mountain. It was a desolate blue mountain rising from the tangled banks of one of the little Reds. For the Red River itself disappears here into its squabbling branches, and there is no main river: only the Prairie Bog, Town Fork, the Salt Fork, the North Fork, the Deep Red Run, and the Cache Creek Run of the Red. This was the Deep Red Run, as shabby and wild a creek as Rain Mountain was a wild and shabby mountain. Old Rain was often uninhabited. Johnny Blue Stone had a shack there, but Johnny might be gone for months at a time. He had only to hear the whistle of the train thirteen miles away, or to smell cut-off timber burning, or to watch wheat yellow the far horizon, and he would be off somewhere, anywhere.
And on old Rain Mountain was a dug-out style rock hut that had once been the mining claim of J. T. Gilford, and then had been a sheep herders' haven in the years when there had been sheep on Rain Mountain; and had later been lived in by an Indian named Charley Coldstream.
Charley Coldstream had now been dead for seven years; yet there were nights when he came back, and his fire could be seen in the old rock hut. Or that is what the boys in the Panther Patrol told each other.
For the third habitation on in Mountain was the cabin of the Panther Patrol.
There were seven boys in the Panther Patrol, and six of them came up onto Rain Mountain together that evening, the first Monday in June: Terry McGuire, Tommy Tipton, Dionigi Manovello, and Conrad Crain, all of a size and the same age, twelve; and Hayden Flood and Stanely Ridgepole, two boys several years older. These six came up the five miles from the Tipton farm where they had assembled, and moved their gear into the Panther cabin at sunset. The seventh member of the patrol, Carl Cornhouse, had not been able to come with them.
“Get wood, before it's dark, quite a lot of wood,” said Hayden, “and water. Fill everything.” For the Panther Patrol cabin was on almost the highest point of Rain Mountain and high above both wood and water. For, though it was a mountain full of water, yet the highest spring broke out nearly two hundred feet below them; and the top of the last pine was a long leap down from Panther Ridge.
The cabin itself was hardly walled. It had a fitted rock floor, six piers of cemen
ted stone, and a good rough rafter and shingle roof with quite an overhang. Well drained, it was almost rainproof except in the most driving wind. But it was not really walled. Yet the rock floor was always a high dry place for the sleeping bags, and the rafters gave storage for a number of things that had been carried up there, high lashed on bags or on poles, animal-safe and dry.
And the campfire was built half in half out, under the western overhang in a low rock-walled oven or hearth.
“My father says not to worry whatever they pull,” said Terry McGuire. “He says the first night in the Panther Patrol cabin on the mountain is an initiation. They'll try to scare us. They'll tell us wild stories. And then in the night they'll make a noise or a disturbance. But we are not to let them scare us. The Panther Patrol was started a long time ago. He said that if all the boys that had been scared on the mountain were laid end to end they'd reach all the way to Lone Wolf.”
“We don't want those branches,” said Tommy Tipton. “They're too hard to carry up through the bushes and brambles. Let's just chop up this old fall into two-foot lengths and carry them up. My father says there's no such thing as a panther. There's no such animal. A leopard was called a panther once, and a tiger was called a panther. And in America the mountain lion is called the panther. But Panther is a Greek word, and it means ‘all the animals’. It was made up of a tiger's head, and a leopard's body, and a bear's paws, and a lion's tail. It was only a storybook animal. And there isn't any such thing as a Black Panther. It's only something to scare you with.”
They carried the wood up from White Mule Draw to the top of Rain Mountain. There used to be a white mule in White Mule Draw. He had lived there yet when the father of Terry McGuire had been in the Panther Patrol. He had been forty years old when he died, the oldest mule in the county. He had been a mine mule from the time that J. T. Gilford had mined here.
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 17
