Humbug Mountain

by Sid Fleischman

  By then Mr. Slathers had shown us that we could store water in the engine-room boiler. He and Pa stretched tarpaulins like awnings to catch rainwater from any passing downpour. It would beat hauling water an everlasting distance from the river. Ma set out her flowerpots. During the day she turned Mr. Johnson and the chickens loose in the cottonwoods to fend for themselves. It was our job to round them up before nightfall.

  We didn’t hang around much, Glorietta and me. We found a couple of potato sacks aboard and set out to collect buffalo bones. Four dollars a ton, Captain Cully had said. Cash money!

  We followed the dry riverbed and pounced on anything bone white that caught our eyes. Mr. Johnson took to tagging along after us, and we were forever trying to chase him back. He’d give a honk and beat his wings, but a bull goose is hard to reason with. After a while we gave up on it.

  Before long, buffalo ribs were sticking out of our sacks like sticks of bleached stovewood. Some of them we had to dig out with our bare hands, where grass had grown up over them.

  “Wiley, how big a heap do you reckon it takes to make a ton?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “What are you going to do with your share of the money?”

  “Haven’t given it a thought.”

  “Maybe I’ll buy a piano. Ma’d like a piano.”

  “With two dollars!”

  She shot me a defiant look. “I didn’t say I was going to stop with one ton of bones, did I?”

  “We get a piano, you’ll have to practice. Me too, probably.”

  “I’d like to practice the piano.”

  “You’re plumb addled,” I said. It was likely Pa and Ma would need every cent. Their own money must be about gone, and it was bound to be a long wait for Grandpa to turn up.

  We went scavenging all the way to the end of the old riverbed. The Missouri had thrown up acres of silt and a monstrous heap of dead logs before cutting itself a new channel.

  We emptied our sacks near the river. That way it would be easier to load the stuff aboard the Prairie Buzzard when Captain Cully came steaming back.

  Glorietta looked over our tangle of bones. “How much you figure we got?”

  “It’s a mighty puny pile,” I answered. “A nickel’s worth, maybe.”

  “That all?”

  “We just started. What in tarnation do you expect?”

  Mr. Johnson was eating grass grown up through a whole rack of buffalo ribs. We ambled over.

  “What if Captain Cully steals our bone pile, Wiley? After we’ve got a big heap, I mean. Two or three tons maybe.”

  “He’s shifty enough,” I said. “We’ll have to keep our eyes sharp.”

  “And why do you suppose Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer were in such a lather over two tons of dirt? Dirt, of all things!”

  I tried to shoo Mr. Johnson out of the curved rack of ribs. “It doesn’t make a thimbleful of sense to me.”

  “What’s Mr. Johnson got?” Glorietta said. Then her voice jumped sky-high. “Wiley, there’s a man buried here!”

  I scurried around to her side of the tall bones.

  A hand reached up out of the ground.

  We stood frozen, both of us. The fingers were bent like a bird’s claw. The whole hand looked kind of mummified. Mr. Johnson was still tearing away at the grass with his bill.

  I chased him away with a stick and then poked the hand. Stiff as a dead branch.

  “It couldn’t be Grandpa,” Glorietta said, glancing at me.

  “Of course not,” I declared. “Buried for ages, looks like.”

  “I don’t want to touch it!”

  “Then don’t.” I wasn’t too anxious to touch the hand myself, but I began clawing out the dirt and weeds around it. Pretty soon I had scooped clear the whole, entire arm down to the elbow. I tapped it again. “Solid as a rock,” I said.

  “We’d better get Pa.”

  We left our sacks and ran. Mr. Johnson came honking after us.

  Ma had strung up a rope in the sun and was hanging up a washing.

  “Pa’s not here,” she said in a busy tone of voice.

  “Mr. Johnson found a dead man!” Glorietta exclaimed. “Pa had better see it.”

  “Where’d Pa go?” I asked.

  “Left for a while.” Ma didn’t even turn to look at us. “A dead man?”

  “Turned hard as a rock,” I said. Pa gone? It caught me up short and Glorietta, too. We always got that chill feeling whenever Pa left for anywhere. “Did he say when he’d be back?”

  Ma turned and looked at us. “Children, there’s nothing to worry about. We’ll be safe enough. Pa left me his pepperbox.”

  “But where did he go?” Glorietta asked in a paper-thin voice.

  “Well, now, we need supplies, don’t we? You know that. Pa and Mr. Slathers decided to set out on foot for Wolf Landing.”

  “When’ll he be back?” I asked. “Did he say?”

  “No more than four days. You can count on it.”

  Of course we could, I told myself. Pa wouldn’t disappear on us. He wouldn’t leave us out here in the middle of nowhere. “Do you want to see our dead man?” I said.

  “Heavens, no!” Ma exclaimed. “Certainly not.”

  14

  JIM CHITWOOD

  For all I know Glorietta had been crying in her sleep. She came down with the dolefuls whenever Pa turned up missing. She didn’t want to go bone-hunting the next day. She didn’t want to go back to the dead man. She was just going to sulk around the boat, I guess.

  “I’ll go without you, then,” I said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Doggone it, Glorietta, this isn’t like the other times. He has Mr. Slathers along. And you heard what Ma said. They went for supplies.”

  “He could have taken us with him.”

  “A man doesn’t have to tote around his whole family all the time,” I said.

  “He could have waited to say good-bye.”

  “He’ll say hello when he gets back. Can’t he get out of sight without you getting all fidgety? He’s not tied to Ma’s apron strings and he won’t be tied to yours either. Grab your sack and let’s go.”

  “You get fidgety too,” Glorietta declared.

  “I’m not a bit fidgety,” I said, although that wasn’t strictly the truth. You could never really be sure about Pa. “You coming?

  “No.”

  I left without her.

  I kept my distance from the dead man for a couple of days. I just wandered about, and if Mr. Johnson wasn’t following me it seemed that the crows were. Sack by sack the buffalo bones began to pile up, but I wished the days would go a little faster.

  Every so often I passed the hand sticking up out of the ground and I tried not to look at it. A dead man wasn’t exactly pleasant to have around, even if he had turned hard as stone. But I couldn’t help looking at it, all grayish green and perishing old and with dirt clinging to it. When the grass was swaying in the wind I began to imagine I saw the hand move, as if that man was going to rise up out of the ground and shake himself off. It was spooky, that hand, and I finally dropped to my knees and buried it.

  I spent a long time at the pilothouse windows on the day Pa and Mr. Slathers were due back. Ma had said they’d struck off due west instead of following the meanders of the river. Not a speck was moving toward us on the horizon. Finally I got my potato sack and left the boat.

  It surprised me to find that Glorietta was already out bone-hunting. I reckoned she didn’t want to be there when Pa got back. It was as if she would kind of be getting even with him a little. Maybe he’d think she was lost. Or even had run away.

  When I met up with her, I didn’t say anything and neither did she. We worked our way along the Missouri. Suddenly I hauled up short.

  There was a birchbark canoe pulled up out of the water, and a man sitting on a buffalo skull.

  “Where in damnation is Sunrise?” he ripped out, kind of mad-looking. He was a bandy-legged man with stuck-out ears,
and he was wearing a fur cap.

  “Sunrise,” I said and pointed. “The city limits are right over there.”

  “I don’t see anything but nothing that way. Or any which way. I been paddling up and down all morning.”

  “There’s nothing in Sunrise but weeds and jackrabbits,” I said.

  “Well, where in damnation is the gold rush?”

  I glanced at Glorietta and then back at him. “What gold rush?”

  “The one I read about in the paper. First lump found in the craw of a chicken.”

  “But that was just a gold locket!” I said.

  “This one,” Glorietta declared. “The one I’m wearing.”

  He stood up. “Don’t try to rumsquaddle me.”

  “Honest, mister,” I said.

  “I mean to stake my claim. Looks like I beat everyone else.”

  “More are coming?” I asked, dumbfounded.

  “More? Hordes! You can count on it. I’ve got my pan and shovel. Just point me to the gold diggin’s.”

  “Sir, it’s all a mistake. You see—”

  “I seen you two doing some prospecting yourselves.”

  “We’re just digging buffalo bones.”

  “Horsefeathers! Jim Chitwood ain’t likely to be taken in by a couple of shut-mouth young’uns. You know where that lump of gold was found!”

  His voice wasn’t entirely friendly. So I pointed toward the dry riverbed and said truthfully, “Over there.”

  “That’s more like it,” he said. We backed away. “Much obliged.”

  When we got back to the Phoenix, Mr. Slathers was there. But Pa hadn’t returned with him.

  “Locked himself up in a hotel room and wouldn’t come out,” Mr. Slathers said. “He asked me to see after you until he gets back.”

  15

  THE DIGGINGS

  A whistling cold wind swept over the prairie for days on end. It set the tarpaulins flapping and the cabins to creaking. “Whipping down out of Canada,” Mr. Slathers said cheerfully, “and not even a barbed wire fence to stop it.”

  He meant to look after us while Pa was away, and took it seriously. He sawed wood for the potbellied stove in the main cabin and kept a red-hot fire going. He showed me how to sharpen fishhooks and how to set a rabbit snare, but my mind wasn’t on it. He didn’t know about Pa and we tried not to let on. But he could tell we were all kind of edgy waiting.

  “He’ll be along, your pa,” he said. And when the wind turned wet he said, “You don’t expect the Colonel to slosh through all that downpour!”

  The sky flashed and thundered, and the wind about took off the roof of the wheelhouse. Mr. Jim Chitwood scurried for cover from his harebrained gold-prospecting, and Ma rented him a cabin. The rain turned to great whistling balls of hail and a couple of other men turned up to warm themselves around the stove in the main cabin.

  “Shucks, there’s no gold strike around here,” Mr. Chitwood scoffed at them. It appeared to me he was trying to deceive them into clearing out. But they didn’t believe him any more than they did us. Ma rented them cabins, too.

  “The Phoenix is turning into a regular hotel,” she smiled. She seemed glad to be busy with things. Ma had a way of carrying her feelings locked up tight.

  I kept pretty much to the pilothouse. During the worst of the storm it felt like being on a ship at sea. At times I couldn’t see ten feet. I read my Quickshot Billy books all over again. But I was drawn back to the windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of Pa returning.

  And then we woke up to clear, fresh skies. The earth began to steam under the sun. Mr. Chitwood lost no time making for his gold diggings. The other two men went dogging after him, and other strangers began turning up.

  But not Pa.

  I began to feel all thundery inside. How could he turn his back on us again? How could he be that way? Words I didn’t want to think stormed about in my head. He was a cussed father. I didn’t care a hoot if he never came back. Ever!

  Glorietta wandered up to the pilothouse. We didn’t say anything. One look and I could tell that she had been crying in her sleep again.

  She spent a long time staring out the windows, due west. Finally, in a tight voice, she said, “Mr. Slathers wants to go back to Wolf Landing and fetch Pa. Ma won’t let him. Let it be, she said. Why won’t she let him? Is that what Pa does when he’s gone? Locks himself up in a hotel room?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged and picked up my potato sack. Did Pa think it was enough to palm us off on Mr. Slathers? “It doesn’t matter. We can get along without Pa.”

  I didn’t know that Ma had come up and was standing in the doorway. “Wiley, don’t say a thing like that.”

  I spun and red-hot anger spit out of me. “I hate him!”

  Ma hardly lifted an eyebrow. She stood looking at us both and acting infernally calm. “Pa has his reasons. He’ll turn up with a smile on his lips and a tip of his hat. That’s the way it’s always been. You know your father.”

  “No I don’t!” I said. I threw the gunnysack over my shoulder and left.

  We could make our living with buffalo bones, I told myself. Me and Glorietta and Ma. I dumped the sack and wandered about again to fill it up.

  It wasn’t long before a pack of men hailed me from a swiftly floating raft. They were looking for Sunrise. I guessed there was no use telling them about Glorietta’s gold locket, but I tried and they just laughed.

  With the weather cleared, it wasn’t ten minutes before I saw another three men trudging about. A sudden idea all but lifted me out of my boots. If they were so anxious to start using their picks and shovels maybe they could dig the Missouri River back where it belonged—and refloat Grandpa’s boat!

  “Over that way,” I called out, pointing. “At the end of the dry riverbed. Not a bit of gold, but that’s where the other miners are digging.”

  All that day men kept flocking in, and I kept pointing them to the old riverbed. By the next day gold-seekers were turning up in heaps and hordes, just as Mr. Jim Chitwood said they would. Some of them had come with tents, but others had been in too much of a rush. Ma rented out every cabin on the Phoenix.

  Mr. Slathers set out baited hooks every afternoon and in the mornings there’d almost always be a catfish or two to haul in. He showed me how to skin them. “Can’t tell,” he said. “Those fools in the dry bed might turn up another lump of gold. We had a deckhand picked himself up after a fight—lost a gold tooth.”

  The pile of bones was beginning to look like something. As often as not I’d find the crows sitting on top waiting for me.

  “Fool Killer!”

  “Hang’m!”

  “Wiley!”

  That caught me up short. Mr. Slathers! I thought. He’d taught the bull crow my name!

  Every so often I’d stand at the dry riverbank and gaze at the men scrambling after gold. They swung picks in great arcs. Shovel loads of earth flew. Tents had sprung up along the bluffs like mushrooms after a rain. An army of men! And more rushing in from every direction.

  One day Mr. Jim Chitwood, carrying his birchbark canoe over his head and shoulders like a tortoise shell, climbed the bluff and stomped past me.

  “I’m clearing out,” he said. “No blasted gold here.”

  “We tried to tell you,” I said.

  “Rumsquaddled!” he scowled.

  He headed off toward the river. I was glad to see the last of that bandy-legged man with his stuck-out ears.

  I went about my business. My gunnysack was about full and I headed for the bone pile. I reached the spot where the dead man was buried.

  The hand was sticking up again.

  It rose in plain sight and gave me a start. You’d think it had clawed its way out of the ground.

  Only the rainstorm, I thought. Must be. The rain had washed away the loose dirt. I shouldn’t let the thing spook me that way.

  I dropped to my knees to cover it up again.

  “Wiley!”

  That bull crow, I thought, perched w
ay off on the bone pile.

  But the voice came again, closer this time, and not a crow voice at all.

  “What you got there, Wiley?”

  I turned. It was Pa, with a smile on his lips and a touch of his hat.

  16

  THE PETRIFIED MAN

  I gave Pa a lightning flash of eyes and turned my back again. He’d been gone for eleven confounded days, but from his easy manner you’d think he’d only been out for a ten-minute stroll.

  “That looks like a dead man,” he said.

  I picked up my heavy gunnysack and started away.

  “Hold on, Wiley,” he called softly.

  “You’re back. I can see that, sir.”

  “And you’re angry. I can see that, too. I’d be surprised if you weren’t.”

  I shrugged a little, my back still to him.

  “I found another Quickshot Billy nickel novel over in Wolf Landing,” he said. “It’s kind of dog-eared and mouse-nibbled and not worth reading, but I thought you’d like to have it.”

  “You thought wrong.” My insides were churning. I’d never talked to him that way before. “I’m too old for those infernal dumb stories anymore.”

  “I see. Ma tells me you and Glorietta have gone into the buffalo-bone business. Enterprising. That’s mighty enterprising. I’m proud of you both, Wiley.”

  “I’ve got a mess of work to do,” I said.

  “And I don’t mean to keep you. But I declare, Wiley, that piece you wrote in The Humbug Mountain Hoorah certainly increased the population of Sunrise! All that amazing activity in the riverbed! I thought at first I’d come home to the wrong place. It wouldn’t hurt if you turned around and looked at me. I’d be obliged, Wiley.”

  I took my time swinging around. I was trying to hang on to all my anger and at the same time trying to keep the water from rising to my eyes. “You needn’t have rushed back for us,” I said, doing my best to match his own loose and easy manner. “Hardly missed you. Me and Ma and Glorietta can take care of ourselves. We’ve done it before.”

  “Know that. Knew you could. It eases my mind, Wiley.” He threw up the collar of his corduroy coat against the wind blowing off the river. “Truth is, your father’s a shiftless, no-account, here-and-there sort of man. It pains me to admit it. I’m downright sorry.”