Humbug Mountain

by Sid Fleischman

  I think I stopped breathing. As far back as I could remember I’d heard tales of the Fool Killer. He was supposed to carry a bur-oak club on his shoulder and wander the countryside searching for fools. He’d smite them on the head. He was always barefoot, and he had such a long jaw he could eat oats out of a nose bag. Pa said there was no such real creature as the Fool Killer, but the hair on my neck had gone as stiff as hog bristles. This barefoot man was so long-faced he could eat out of a churn.

  He upended me, caught my ankles in his big, rattle-boned hands, and carried me like a dead chicken up some stairs to the top deck. I figured he must be going for his bur-oak club. If I didn’t do something quick I was done for.

  From one smokestack the crows began to squawk again.

  “Fool Killer!”

  “Bash’m!”

  His hands were powerful as iron chain. I was in a blue fright. If only I’d thought to glance at my mirror ring I’d have seen him come ghosting up behind me.

  He’d have to let go of my ankles when he fetched up his club, I thought. And I’d be off quicker’n high-lightning.

  The Fool Killer kicked open a door. From inside came a thunderous snort and snoring.

  “Shagnasty,” the Fool Killer called out.

  We were in the pilothouse. I could make out the tall oaken steering wheel, and daylight aglow at the huge windows. Then I saw a man rouse himself from a bedroll on the floor.

  “Cuss it all, Fool Killer,” he said. “Can’t a gentleman take a wink of sleep around here?”

  “I catched me another fool,” said the Fool Killer.

  “Don’t look like nothing but a shirttail boy. Set him down.”

  The Fool Killer kicked the door shut and swung me right-side up. For the first time I got a square look at Mr. Shagnasty. He wore a mangy old bearskin coat and he was big around as a sauerkraut barrel. His beard was dirt-brown and greasy and all a’tangle, like the hairs on a smelly old billy goat.

  “Fool Killer,” he snorted. “Ain’t you got more sense than to bring him aboard? You give away our hideout.”

  “I spied him cat-footing around.”

  The other man fixed his eyes on me and hitched up his gunbelt. “Is that a fact?”

  “No sir,” I said. “I wasn’t sneaking about. I was walking plain as day. But I reckon my grandpa’s nowhere around, so I’ll just be going.”

  “Well, now, sonny, it’s a mite late for that.” Mr. Shagnasty pulled out a blue bandanna and gave his lumpy nose a thunderous honk. He wasn’t wearing a shirt; just long red underwear, and it was so full of holes you’d think he carried his own moths. “You know who we are,” he said.

  I answered quickly. “No sir, I don’t.”

  “ ‘Course you do! Ain’t a sheriff anywhere in the territories not looking for the heads of Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer. The terror of the prairies—that’s us!”

  “I declare,” I muttered, struck with awe. I’d never talked to real outlaws before and I was getting all-over lathers of sweat. They were genuine blood-and-thunder badmen. “I won’t tell a perishing soul,” I added earnestly.

  “Can’t no boy keep a secret,” said the Fool Killer darkly. “Worse’n them crows.”

  “Nothing we can do about the crows but chunk stones at ’em,” Shagnasty John said, scratching through his beard. “But dash it all, boy, me and the Fool Killer can’t chance you. It don’t leave us much choice. You can see that, can’t you?”

  “No sir,” I answered, trying to stretch out the time. “You must be terrible bad shots if you can’t shoot those crows.”

  Shagnasty John rumbled out a laugh. “Oh, we can fire straight enough. Stop edging toward that door! The Fool Killer is kind of gone-minded, sonny, and you don’t want him to crack you in two like a chicken bone.”

  The Fool Killer reached out his long arm and yanked me back. “I’ll drop him in the woods with a mighty bash of my club.”

  “Fool Killer, don’t get anxious,” said Shagnasty John, regarding me with slow, crafty eyes. The whites were brown-streaked like tobacco stains. “Who you traveling with?”

  I’d forgot all about Glorietta gone to fetch Ma and Pa. “I’m purely alone!” I declared.

  Shagnasty John snorted. “You don’t tell me.”

  “Yes sir! I run away from home.”

  “Wearing shoes? And dressed for church? Sonny, you must figure I got no more brains than God gave geese. Fool Killer, see who else is scuttling about.”

  The Fool Killer let loose of me to peer out the wheelhouse windows. I leaped for the door, opened it, banged it shut behind me, and ran like a scared rabbit.

  Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer ran thrashing through the cottonwoods after me. But I wasn’t in the trees. I’d ducked under a boxed paddle wheel and snugged myself out of sight. But I couldn’t stay there. I had to warn Pa.

  My heart was banging away something fearful. I hardly waited to catch my breath before I slipped out of hiding, climbed the dry creek bank, and ducked into the trees. I could tell that Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer were some ways off. The crows were flapping over the treetops, following them.

  I ran smack into a rope corral. It held two horses. Their horses, I thought.

  I picked out the spotted mare, grabbed her mane, and heaved myself onto her back. Then I shot out of there lickety-quick.

  And along came Pa and Ma and Glorietta! They were walking through the spring weeds, clear as bull’s-eye targets, and not suspecting a thing.

  “Go back!” I yelled. “Run!”

  But they couldn’t fathom what I was yelling about. Or what I was doing on horseback.

  Finally I pulled up and slipped off the mare’s back. I could hardly believe I’d got this far without Shagnasty John drawing his gun and filling the air with lead.

  I danced the horse around broadside to the trees so that we could shelter ourselves behind her.

  “There are terrible outlaws back there!” I burst out. “They mean to kill us!”

  Ma gave me a startled look. “Now really, Wiley. You must be imagining it.”

  “I suppose I’m imagining this horse!”

  Pa gave the cottonwoods a tight-eyed gaze. “How do you know they’re outlaws?”

  “They told me, Pa. Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer. Every sheriff in the territories is looking for them. They’re using the Phoenix for a hideout.”

  Ma’s fingers had crept to her spidery lace collar. “Is Grandpa there?”

  “No, Ma.”

  “There’s no such man as the Fool Killer,” Pa said,

  “There is now, Pa. Peevish and meaner’n a hornet. Both of ’em.”

  “Wearing guns?”

  “Shagnasty John is. The terror of the prairies, he said.”

  “Never heard of him.” Pa stood calm as an owl at midnight. “It baffles me that he didn’t pop some lead your way, Wiley. Especially since you rode off on one of their horses.”

  “He could have been afraid of shooting the mare,” Ma said.

  “Must have,” I said. And yet, I thought, he’d had a clear shot when I’d busted out of the pilothouse—and maybe again before I’d reached the stairway.

  “Downright peculiar,” Pa remarked, more to himself than us.

  “They’re over in those trees,” I said, pointing. “Where you see the crows. Watching us for sure. Hadn’t we better edge back in a hurry?”

  “Wiley, there’s no place for us to run where they can’t find us out here,” Pa answered. “It seems to me they’d already be in full view and shooting up a hailstorm—if they could. It’s unnatural. Unless their cartridge belts are empty. Did you notice?”

  No, sir.

  But the Fool Killer would have armed himself with his bur-oak club, I thought. I glanced at Glorietta. I could see she was feeling scared about the Fool Killer and all the stories we’d heard.

  Pa checked his pepperbox pistol. I peered under the horse’s belly and spotted the crows. Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer were keeping
themselves mouse-quiet.

  “We’ve come this far and we’re not turning back,” Pa declared. “Not until we find out what happened to your grandfather. He might have left papers aboard. A logbook, certainly. I have an idea I can send those rascals packing.” He handed Ma the short, six-barreled pistol. “Don’t fire this bric-a-brac unless you’ve got no choice.”

  “Rufus!” Ma exclaimed. “You’re not going out there!”

  “I promise you the terrors of the plains are going to be mighty glad to meet me.” Pa gave us a wink. “I want all of you to stay put until I settle matters. Shouldn’t take five minutes.”

  And he was gone. He went striding across the bare city limits of Sunrise, the knife-blade brim of his hat cocked at an angle.

  8

  THE GHOST

  I watched Pa’s lanky, high-headed figure and hoped I’d grow up to be as fearless as that. You’d think he was just going out for a stroll. Before long he disappeared into the cottonwoods.

  We waited. I listened for the sudden crack of gunfire. Pa might have miscalculated Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer. A minute passed without a sound reaching us. There was just the crows flapping from one treetop to another.

  “Well, don’t worry about your pa,” said Ma. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and he knows them all.”

  Glorietta couldn’t hold back a whisper. “What did the Fool Killer look like?”

  “Never mind,” I said.

  “Was he carrying a bur-oak club?”

  “Glorietta, you know he’s pure hogwash. Pa said so, didn’t he?”

  “But you saw him, Wiley. Did he have a horse-face? Could he eat out of a nose bag?”

  “Be quiet.”

  For a long while none of us said another word. I was certain a good five minutes had passed. Maybe more. We just watched the trees, getting more and more fidgety.

  I turned to Ma. “I could gallop in with the pepperbox pistol.”

  “Don’t talk rubbish.”

  “That fool killer man is gone-minded. He might be trying to bash Pa over the head. He’s infernally blood-thirsty.”

  Ma was getting edgy. “Pa told us to stay put!”

  We waited some more. I never knew time to run so perishing slow. At least there was no crack of gunfire. Pa must have reckoned right that their ammunition was used up. Suddenly I remembered that they had tried to rid themselves of the crows by chunking rocks at them. If Shagnasty John had bullets for his gun, wouldn’t he have shot them?

  And then we saw Pa.

  He came out of the trees on horseback. He was riding as straight-backed as a general of the army. And stepping along behind him came the terrors of the plains like prisoners of war. They were balancing lumber and boat poles on their shoulders.

  Pa reined up beside us. He turned to the outlaws. “I want you to meet my family. My wife Jenny, our daughter Glorietta— and you’ve already met Wiley.”

  Shagnasty John tipped his ragged old hat. “Howdy, m’am. Pleased to meet you, Miss Glorietta. How-do, Wiley.”

  I was struck wordless. Pa had tamed them gentle as sheep. It was an eyebrow-lifter.

  “Jenny,” Pa said, “you three make yourselves at home on the boat. These two neighborly squatters have kindly agreed to move our belongings aboard.”

  “Anything you say, Colonel,” remarked Shagnasty John.

  “Glad to oblige. Yes indeed, sir, the sooner you get the law off our trail the better.” Then he turned to Ma. “The Colonel says you brought along chickens on the hoof. I declare if they don’t make the mouth water. Me and Mr. Fool Killer here, we ain’t had lead to shoot any wild game in weeks.”

  The Fool Killer caught hold of the spotted mare. Glorietta was owl-eyed behind her glasses. She stared at him as if he were the devil with his clothes still smoldering from down below.

  “Come along,” Pa said, and the three men headed toward the river. We stood where we were like fence posts. How Pa had got the best of those outlaws was a wonder. It fogged the brain.

  Then Ma gave her head a toss. “I don’t know what your Pa is up to, but I do hope he keeps those two men downwind of us. They smell stronger than skunk cabbage. Now then, what’s Grandpa’s boat doing over in those trees?”

  Ma’s green eyes wandered sadly from one end of the boat to the other. “The poor old Phoenix. She was pretty as a duck on the water. But look at her now. Dirty as a pigsty. Grandpa wouldn’t allow it. Something dreadful must have happened. He’d never abandon the Phoenix.”

  He might be dead, I thought. Maybe we all thought it, but no one ventured to say it.

  We trooped across the gangplank to the cabin deck. “Pa said the logbook might tell us a thing or two,” I muttered.

  Ma nodded. “In Grandpa’s stateroom. Or up in the pilothouse.”

  We opened the cabin doors, one after another, and looked in. It felt as if we were opening tombs. Each stateroom sat in heavy silence, with a red plush chair pulled up to a marble-topped table and rosy light pressing through stained glass at the top of the windows.

  Grandpa’s cabin was far forward and easy to spot. There was a speaking tube hung on the wall, a brass bed, Grandpa’s pilot’s license framed near the door, and baby pictures of Glorietta and me. There was also one of Ma as a young girl and another of Ma and Pa together.

  Still, the room looked ransacked and the bed looked freshly slept in. We didn’t find the logbook, but Glorietta discovered a club under the bed. A bur-oak club.

  She gave me an anxious glance. No doubt about it, the Fool Killer had been sleeping in Grandpa’s brass bed.

  Ma opened the window to air out the cabin.

  We climbed the stairs to the top deck. The pilothouse sat like a box of windows to the rear of the black smokestacks. But there wasn’t a scrap of paper to be found inside. Not even Grandpa’s river charts.

  Ma shook her head. “What had he been doing, steaming off out of the main river!”

  “Fool Killer!”

  “Hang’m! Bash’m!”

  Both Ma and Glorietta looked up in surprise. I’d forgot to tell them about those spooky ol’ crows. They’d flocked onto the crown of the smokestack again.

  “Ravens!” Glorietta exclaimed.

  “Just common crows,” I said.

  “Same kin,” Ma remarked. “I wonder who taught them to speak.”

  “Maybe it was Grandpa,” I said. “Those birds keep worryin’ Shagnasty John. The Fool Killer, too. They keep chunking rocks at them.”

  We kept searching for papers. The ship’s log must be somewhere. And there might even be a letter or two Grandpa had meant to send off to us.

  I ended up poking around on my own. The freight deck was piled to the guardrails with stacks and stacks of milled lumber and windows and barrels of nails. I explored around and ended up at the door of the engine room. I turned the brass knob and looked in. I could make out the huge furnace and the white-faced steam gauges and the brass tubing gleaming in the shadows. I edged inside and gazed all around. Almighty clean, the engine room, I thought. There wasn’t even the feel of grit under my shoes.

  I was starting back outside when I whirled about. A faint rustling sound had caught my ear.

  “Who’s there?” I said quickly.

  I peered into the gloom and waited, but no one answered. Something had moved, but I couldn’t make out a thing. Maybe a rat, I thought. Ma would have a perishing fit if she thought there were rats underfoot, and I didn’t much like the idea myself. I scrambled out of there and shut the door.

  Pa and the outlaws returned with our trunks and sacks of dry food and Mr. Johnson and the chickens and the heavy printing press and all the newspaper stuff. They had fixed boat poles to the sides of the horses like wagon shafts and had dragged everything through the weeds on rough platforms of lumber lashed together. In my Quickshot Billy stories I’d read about Indians toting their belongings that way.

  “Colonel,” Shagnasty John said, wiping his face with his bandanna. “If I was you I’d c
amp right here in the cottonwoods.”

  “Nonsense. There’s good shelter aboard the boat.”

  “I’m downright anxious to be up and gone. We made an agreement, didn’t we? Shook on it, too. You don’t want to pack all this plunder aboard.”

  “Of course I do.”

  Shagnasty John flashed the Fool Killer an uneasy look. Then he turned his eyes back to Pa, who was handing me a couple of Ma’s flowerpots.

  “I’m thinking of the women and children, Colonel,” said Shagnasty John. “They won’t like sleeping even one night aboard that cussed riverboat. No sir.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Shagnasty John’s gaze seemed to float off somewhere. Almost under his breath, the Fool Killer said, “Can’t nobody sleep much.”

  Shagnasty John was clearly embarrassed to tell what was on his mind. Finally he spit to one side and said, “No one tougher’n me and the Fool Killer. Ain’t scared of nothing. But you’ll never print up that newspaper for us. Not on the boat.”

  Pa said, “I gave you my word, sir.”

  “It’s the woman and children, Colonel. They’ll be too scared. That’s the truth.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Wait’ll you hear them peculiar sounds that come in the night,” Shagnasty John said. “And things’ll disappear. And those blasted crows’ll start calling out your name. I tell you, Colonel, it was all me and Fool Killer could do to stay hid out here. That boat has a ghost aboard. And that’s a fact. It’s haunted.”

  9

  THE SHERIFF OF SUNRISE

  Pa set up his printshop in a rear cabin. The boat haunted?

  “Flap-jawed foolishment,” he declared. And Ma said, “I’d sooner have a ghost aboard than those two high-smelling ruffians.”

  She gave Mr. Johnson and the chickens the run of the freight deck. I thought about the sounds I had heard, in the engine room. Maybe it wasn’t a rat. Glorietta gave my sleeve a tug. “Wiley, what if there is a ghost aboard?”

  I tried to sound as certain as Pa. “Foolishment,” I said.

  “But Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer—they heard him.”

  “One see is worth twenty hears,” I answered.