On Kingdom Mountain

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Doc Harrison and the low high sheriff, who stood four feet ten inches in his cowboy boots and who wore at all times a .45 Colt pistol whose barrel extended well below his knees, were in a very jolly frame of mind, having already sampled Dr. Pinkham’s finest and found it good. Although it was a moonless night, the stars were out, and Henry had no difficulty tracing the long sheen of the lake below back to Kingdom Mountain and setting the biplane gently down in Miss Jane’s water meadow, where the glass gallon jugs of Dr. Pinkham’s relieving compound were transferred to the rear seat and trunk of the sheriff’s touring car. Roof light flashing, siren wailing, Doc and Little Fred roared off over the covered bridge on their errand of mercy. Henry, for his part, gravely presented his artifact from the defunct church to Miss Jane, who washed it off under the pump in the soapstone sink, then began to laugh.

  “Mr. Satterfield,” she said, “do you know what this is?”

  “I thought it might be an old collection plate.”

  “This, sir, is a genuine porcelain enameled chamber pot. An old-fashioned thunder mug that the priest kept handy to use between confessions or healings.”

  Still chuckling, she said, “Never mind, it’s still a grand find. Look. We’ll call it the golden helmet of Mambrino, after the headpiece of the good gentleman from La Mancha. We’ll let the Loup-Garou wear it as a crown.

  “Here,” she said, clapping the old thundermug upside down on the head of her carved wolfman beside the door. “I dub you Sir Chamberpot Blockhead of the North Woods.” She continued to smile quite gleefully over her tea and later in bed as she read Don Quixote, which she so loved and admired that she had not “edited down” or blue-penciled out a single word of it. As for Henry Satterfield, even after Miss Jane had read him the wonderful passage on Mambrino’s helmet, he was deeply chagrined by his misadventure at the site of the sacred shrine of Our Lady of Memphremagog, and more determined than ever to find the Treasure of Kingdom Mountain.

  17

  COME ONE COME ALL

  TO THE INDEPENDENCE DAY GALA

  ON THE GREEN IN KINGDOM COMMON

  FOR A PICNIC & AEROPLANE RIDES

  A HISTORICAL PAGEANT

  AND A PARADE

  TO BE FOLLOWED BY FIREWORKS AT DUSK

  TO BENEFIT THE CONNECTOR

  BETWEEN KINGDOM COMMON AND CANADA

  The flyers had been printed up by Editor Kinneson at the Kingdom County Monitor office, in accordance with Eben Kinneson Esquire’s directions. And although no one, least of all Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson, could have imagined that she and Henry Satterfield would be distributing them by air from the Burgess-Wright, here they were, just a week before the gala, dropping several thousand of the small yellow leaflets on all of the towns within a twenty-mile radius of the Common. Jane still had no idea what Henry had planned and why he was willing to help Eben and the fathers with their fundraiser. Their featherbed chats notwithstanding, they both kept their own counsel about certain matters. All the rainmaker would say, usually from the hammock he had slung in the shade of the Virginia creeper at the west end of Jane’s porch, and often with a significant glance at the incomplete riddle on the slate beside the door, is that they had bigger catfish to fry, and the gala in the Common could be used to this end.

  The celebration was all the talk in the village. Besides the biplane rides, there would be an early-afternoon baseball game between the town club, the Kingdom Common Outlaws, and their archrivals from Pond in the Sky, a late-afternoon barbecue, the historical pageant, and, at dusk, just before Henry’s pyrotechnics, a reenactment of the Great Kingdom Common Raid.

  The drought had held through June, though the oracular old Civil War soldiers on the hotel porch were confidently predicting rain for the Fourth, and indeed seemed to be hoping for it, both to be proven right and to confirm their own deep belief in the unwelcome but inevitable irony that lay at the bottom of all things in this world. To their disappointment, the big day dawned clear. The Common began filling up with celebrants by midmorning. Henry Satterfield’s airplane rides started at noon. A landing strip had been cleared on the village green, and everyone, it seemed, wanted to go aloft, from President George Quinn of the First Farmers and Lumberers Bank of Kingdom Common to Canvasback Glodgett, the fish peddler.

  The ball game was a great success, with the Outlaws defeating Pond in the Sky 3–2, on Editor Kinneson’s ninth-inning home run off the bandstand in deep center field. The smoke from the barbecue mingled with the haze that had hung over the county for weeks, so the picnickers on the green had a rather illusory look, as did the participants in the historical pageant that followed. First came the village’s brass marching band, blaring out a spirited version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” At the heels of the band, a contingent of men dressed in buckskins and carrying flintlock muskets represented Robert Rogers’ Rangers, who had come through the Kingdom in 1759 after their bloody raid on Miss Jane’s Memphremagog ancestors across the border. Close behind were several of the Outlaws wearing feathered headdresses and war paint and enacting the role of the Memphremagogs who had overtaken Rogers on the shore of the big lake and killed several of his men. There were settlers carrying felling axes; Revolutionary soldiers, including Judge Allen in the incarnation of his famous ancestor, whose statue gazed on benignly from the north end of the common; lumberers and river drivers in red shirts and black slouch hats; a squadron of Civil War veterans in blue; doughboys from the Great War with round helmets and gas masks; even a few modern-day whiskey runners and G-men in shiny black coupes. A Number One tagged along in an engineer’s cap, giving out a heartfelt train whistle from time to time. Sadie Blackberry stood waving in the bandstand.

  As the procession completed its second circuit, shots rang out east of the village. Two horsemen in gray uniforms came galloping into town, past the hotel, firing rifles into the air. Bank President Quinn, decked out in a swallow-tailed frock coat and a stovepipe hat, who had just locked the proceeds from the gala fundraiser in the bank vault for the night, was taken captive and forced at gunpoint to reenter the bank. The brass band played “Dixie” as one of the raiders stood guard outside the bank while the other rushed inside with flour sacks. Moments later he emerged with the bags bulging and remounted; firing their guns, the two horsemen rode back out of town toward Kingdom Mountain.

  In the meantime, unnoticed by most of the spectators, Henry Satterfield had taken off in his biplane. As the raiders galloped away, Henry swooped after them in the Burgess-Wright, just over the treetops, with Miss Jane in the passenger seat firing blanks at the robbers from Lady Justice. The horsemen turned around and, with the plane low overhead, allowed themselves to be herded back into town, hands over their heads. They returned the laden flour sacks to George Quinn just as the biplane landed on the green at dusk to a terrific ovation. Then Henry and Jane and the raiders and President George Quinn shook hands all around.

  Not five minutes later, into the twilit summer sky shot multicolored pinwheels, green and pink skyrockets, exploding rainbows. It was Henry Satterfield’s fireworks display. There were great pyrotechnic battles in the clouds, volcanic eruptions of vivid primary colors, thunderous explosions high over the church steeple and courthouse tower. A red and yellow panorama swept up the sky above Anderson Hill, resembling the fiery fall foliage on Kingdom Mountain. Then, streaking blue and silver across the northern horizon, there appeared an astonishing reproduction of the aurora borealis, followed by a meteoric shower of yellow sparks like gold coins, falling onto the south end of the green. The finale was a huge American flag, unfurling in the night. The sky went dark. A prolonged detonation seemed to come from all the points of the compass at once. Then silence. The celebration was over.

  18

  “I COULDN’T HELP but think, Mr. Satterfield,” Miss Jane called up through the ceiling grate that night, “how much my father would have loved the goings-on today in the Common. Especially the re-creation of the Great Raid and the historical pageant.”

  “It wa
s a wonderful pageant, Miss Jane,” Henry said. He was propped up on three goose-down pillows, reading a story by lantern light in the latest issue of True Detective, about two brothers with the rather improbable names of Wendell and Kendell Orbison, who had recently escaped from Leavenworth Penitentiary in a prison hearse.

  “Your father was, I believe, a lawyer?” Henry said.

  “He was a lawyer and judge and the State Supreme Court chief justice and a farmer,” Jane said. “My mother used to say he was the best chief justice and the worst farmer on Kingdom Mountain. It was a joke and not a joke. But even though my dad was no farmer, he was a crack shot and a very good hunter. Every fall he located a good buck on the mountain, and woe betide the unwary moose that wandered down from Canada and into the sights of Lady Justice at any time of year. Father believed that moose compete with deer for the available feed, and he dealt with them accordingly. So too do I.

  “About the time I reached my teens,” she continued, “my father took it in his head to make me into a hunter. Not just an ordinary run-of-the-mill weekend hunter, either. Dad’s idea was to turn me into a kind of Kingdom Mountain female Nimrod, so that I could follow in his footsteps and carry on the Kinneson family tradition of providing meat for their own table.”

  Henry was not surprised to note, in his copy of True Detective, that his own aversion to guns was not shared by the brothers Orbison, who, by the time they ran into a roadblock in Amarillo three days after the breakout, had acquired six rifles, three shotguns, and a Thompson submachine gun with which they fired an estimated two hundred and fifty rounds at the police.

  “Miss Jane?”

  “Aye?”

  “What does the word q-u-i-e-t-u-s mean?”

  “Why, it is usually used to mean a death.”

  The True Detective article had ended with the sentence “And so it came to pass that, at a dusty crossroads in the Lone Star State, young Wendell and Kendell met their just quietus.”

  “Father picked the fall I was sixteen for my initiation into the mysteries of deer slaying on the mountain. The trouble was, opening day of hunting season fell on Homecoming Saturday at the Academy, and Ira Allen had just asked me to the homecoming ball. It was my first real prom, and though it’s amusing to me now, it wasn’t then. However, once I realized that Ira was impressed that I was going to deer camp, I began to hint to him, scheming minx that I was, that I was an old hand at stalking the roebucks of kingdom Mountain.”

  Henry, only half listening, turned the page of his detective mag and began reading the story of a crazed vigilante who had set fire to a churchful of millennialists in Newark, New York. Guiltily, he sneaked a look ahead at the end of the story. “On the Ides of March, in the year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-nine, John ‘Laughing Jack’ Before, who had burned up twenty-three (23) misguided devouts and laughed about it, burned in THE CHAIR in Ossining on the Hudson. He did not, at the time of his incineration, appear to be laughing.”

  “Father’s plan was that we would establish ourselves at Camp Hard Luck, on the far side of the mountain, and spend the first afternoon hunting the lower north slopes. I was still angry with him for dragging me along, and quite determined to spite him and myself by refusing to cooperate. The November morning we headed out was very cold after a week of unseasonably cold weather. The three ponds in the Chain of Ponds were iced over from shore to shore, and we walked up to the camp over the frozen surface. In the middle of the afternoon it began to snow. We scouted along a game trail at the foot of the mountain for an hour or so, then Father said the deer would bed down until the snow stopped and we might as well return to camp.”

  “A wise decision, Miss Jane. But to tell you the truth, hunting has always made me uneasy. It seems somehow akin to armed robbery of the woods, you know. I’ve never approved of armed robbery.”

  Miss Jane found this a peculiar statement. Who, other than one of the hardened gunmen Henry loved to read about in his crime periodicals, did approve of armed robbery?

  “During supper, my father went over his plan with me again. If the snow had stopped by morning I would hike up the game trail beside the big wooden chute that used to convey logs down the mountain to the pond below. There I’d wait, with Lady Justice, while my father drove the far side of the mountain.”

  “‘I knowed that if I pulled that trigger, I’d never again be the same little blue-eyed country gal from Manhattan, Kansas.’” Thus began “The Diary of a Small-Town Gun Moll.” Henry wondered. Would the girl’s eyes change color if she pulled the trigger? There was a grainy picture on the opposite page of the Manhattan country gal who had fallen in with bad companions. Wearing a baby-doll nightie, she crouched behind a haystack, wielding two machine pistols. The caption read, “Setting a Deadly Ambuscade.” A sturdy-legged little filly like that would have been a natural-born wingwalker, the airman thought.

  “Have you nodded off, Mr. Satterfield?”

  “By no means, Miss Jane. You planned to set a deadly ambuscade on the mountaintop.”

  “I planned no such thing. I thought about my high school chums, marching around a bonfire on the village green, enjoying cider and doughnuts and one another’s company while I was trapped up on that forlorn mountain. What I planned was to spend the morrow sulking. Still, if by some stroke of sheer blind luck I killed a buck, I might, by an act I could only see as barbaric and under utterly false pretense, win Ira Allen’s heart, which I could then wickedly break. That was worth considering.”

  “And?” Henry said.

  “And what?”

  “Did you get your deer? And impress your beau?”

  “You will find out,” Jane called up through the grate, “in due time. For now, I will let you get back to your literature.”

  19

  AT 8:15 ON THE MORNING after the Fourth of July celebration, President George Quinn strode across the common toward the First Farmers and Lumberers Bank. The barbecue pit was still smoking, and the green, littered with hotdog wrappers and bits of fireworks casings and empty Nehi and Coca-Cola bottles, had about it the slightly melancholy air of an empty fairgrounds. By any measure, George thought, the fundraising gala had been a success. Miss Jane seemed to have come round, the Connector would go forward, and the Common would at last join the twentieth century. As usual, George got out his keys, unlocked the front door, and stepped into the lobby. As usual, he inhaled deeply to catch that first satisfying whiff of furniture and brass polish, old wood, and money. This morning what he smelled instead was the acrid odor of powder, which still hung over the village from the fireworks display the night before. Why would that scent be stronger inside the bank? The answer was almost immediately apparent. The massive vault door had been blown entirely off its hinges, and the emergency exit at the rear of the bank stood wide open for the entire town to come and go as they pleased. George actually thought he might be having a stroke. Not since the Great Raid of 1864 had the First Farmers been robbed or had any patron lost a single penny.

  Only later that morning, after it was ascertained that the stacks of greenbacks from the celebration the day before, right out in the open inside the vault for the safecrackers to see and help themselves to, about three thousand dollars in all, not to mention the trays upon trays of silver and the few hundred dollars in gold coins that the bank still kept on hand, were intact, was George able to take a relaxed breath. Whoever had blown their way into the First Farmers had taken nothing but the contents of a large safety deposit box in the lower row of boxes near the back of the vault, rented decades ago by Miss Jane’s father, Morgan Kinneson.

  “Here’s something,” Henry said that afternoon, holding up his True Detective for Miss Jane to see. He was lounging in the porch hammock with his white hat pushed jauntily back on his head, like a teenage boy on his first ice cream soda drugstore date. On the yellowish page of the magazine was a touched-up black-and-white photograph of a biplane swooping low over a little town that looked to be somewhere on the Great Plains. Standing on the
dreary street below, by an automobile with a star embossed on the door, were two men in uniforms, firing Tommy guns at the aircraft. Obviously the photograph had been staged. The headline read COURTEOUS CLYDE OF THE CLOUDS STRIKES AGAIN.

  In his best recitation voice, cultivated at the knee of his schoolteacher mother, Henry read aloud the following paragraph.

  The so-called “Courteous Clyde Barrow” of the Clouds has not been professionally active in his old stomping grounds for several months. The polite robber/pilot, renowned for saying “please, sir” and “thank you, ma’am,” has not been seen in Oklahoma, Kansas, or Missouri since robbing a string of banks in that region in an 18-month period ending this past March with his near-capture in Tulsa. “Courteous Clyde”—his true identity is not known—has developed a unique modus operandi. Stealing a local automobile, he then robs the bank, drives to a field outside of town and is met by a biplane flown by his bonny (“Bonnie”?) bride, or partner, described as an exceedingly goodlooking young woman. The couple has endeared themselves to the populace of the “dust bowl” states by quite literally “papering” the towns they target with some of the currency taken from the bank. Also, Clyde generally takes with him into the bank a sack which, when the more important business has been transacted, he thrusts across the teller’s counter, requesting that it be filled with “silver dollar cartwheels for the children,” which he then showers down upon the local schoolhouse in a gleaming cascade just before flying into the “blue yonder.”

  As reported in our April issue, after a spectacular midday robbery in Tulsa, in which “Courteous Clyde” landed on the main street of town in front of the Wheatgrowers’ Savings and Loan, which he promptly and politely proceeded to rob, he was fired upon by one Charles “Choctaw Charlie” Flying Eagle, age 14, returning to town with his .22 rifle from a successful prairie dog hunt. It was thought that “Bonnie” may have been struck by one of the bullets.