Jingo Django

by Sid Fleischman

  But Scurlock hadn’t given up the chase. Before long he slammed out of the orphan house. I waited up in the night sky until he was well gone. Then I began easing myself down along the roof. I was burning to have a good look at that scrimshaw map.

  But a slate shingle broke loose under me and my footing gave way. The shingle clattered to the ground and I slid like a hog on ice toward the cloud of elm branches along the edge of the roof. I tumbled into the tree, gulped a breath of air and slithered down the trunk. I meant to make a quick run for it.

  I reached the ground. And there stood Mrs. Daggatt, her eyes ablaze and her hands out to grab me.

  6

  THE MISSING FACES

  The Black Horse Inn stood like a ship anchored and lantern-lit in the muddy darkness of the upper Post Road. A windy rain had come up. In a livery shay, and taking the reins herself, Mrs. Daggatt meant to deliver me in person. At our approach dogs came loping out of the stable yard to surround us, barking and whipping their tails about.

  There was no danger of my jumping away. She had tied my thumbs behind my back with twine. The whale’s tooth was still snugged and hidden under my shirt at the waist of my trousers. Now that we had arrived she undid my thumbs, and took me by the collar of my shirt. A tavern boy met us with a black cotton umbrella, but she held me out in the rain to wash the soot devil off me.

  “Your father’s here to fetch you,” she wheezed. “A fine gentleman he is — better than you deserve. So you’ll watch your tongue and say nothing about being put out to scraping chimneys.”

  When she judged I was washed clean enough, clothes and all, she marched me into the Black Horse Inn. The public room was a bright, cheery place with great wooden beams and a creaky floor. Men and dogs were warming themselves at the open fireplace. They glanced at me as if I were a half-drowned cat.

  It didn’t take Mrs. Daggatt long to spy out Jeffrey Peacock, Gent. He was seated alone, reading a newspaper in the far corner and smoking a long clay pipe. A tankard stood at his elbow.

  He didn’t bother to look up even as we approached. I had conjured up a peacock of a man with a stolen ring or two blazing from his fingers. But there was nothing foppish about him. Mr. Peacock was taller’n a stackpole, with his legs stretched out and crossed on an opposite chair. His glistening jackboots looked a yard long. His coat hung from his shoulders like a cape and his white shirt stood open at the neck. Chestnut hair curled and tumbled gloomily over his forehead and down his neck. He had the air of a weary traveler who had yet to reach his destination, or maybe had no destination at all.

  “Ah, there you are, Mr. Peacock,” Mrs. Daggatt said with a sudden gust of smiles. “And see here who I’ve brought along — your very own son! Isn’t he the spittin’ image? I see it now myself. Indeed, I can, Mr. Peacock!”

  He gazed up from his paper. Slowly, he arched one eyebrow and fixed her with an icy blue-eyed stare.

  “I beg your pardon, madam?”

  “It’s your son, Mr. Peacock.”

  “What the devil are you talking about?”

  “My dear sir! It’s two hundred dollars we agreed upon.”

  He hadn’t so much as whisked me a glance. “How do you know he’s my son?”

  “Tush, Mr. Peacock, you said so yourself. This afternoon, at the orphanage.”

  “Do you believe every posturing, brazen-faced stranger who walks through your door?”

  Her face began to swell and redden. “I mistook you for a gentleman,” she scowled.

  “That’s a pity.”

  Oh, he was a rare one, I thought!

  “Do you want the little guttersnipe, or don’t you?” she crackled.

  “What’s this? You sell your orphans like poultry?” For the first time his eyes slid over to me. “He looks like you dragged him from the river, madam.”

  “You can have him for a hundred. A hundred dollars, Mr. Peacock, and let’s be done with it.”

  “What’s your name, lad?”

  “Jingo,” I said. I earnestly hoped he’d take me.

  “Is that the name you were instructed to say?”

  “No, sir,” I answered. “I’ve been Jingo long as I can recollect.”

  “Jingo what?”

  “Jingo Hawks, sir.”

  “How long have you been at the orphanage?”

  “Seven infernal years, sir,” I replied. A wrathy hiss escaped Mrs. Daggatt’s lips.

  “Would it take your fancy to go traveling with me, lad?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Peacock.”

  He tossed a leather pouch on the table and turned to Mrs. Daggatt. “There’s your two hundred dollars, madam.” And he picked up his newspaper and resumed reading as if she had ceased to exist.

  She snatched up the pouch, turned on her heels and went rumbling and grumbling out. It was a momentous occasion. I felt nearly light-headed to see the last of her. Mr. Peacock was a strange one, and maybe I was bought and paid for, but I was free of the orphan house forever!

  Suddenly he tossed the newspaper to the floor and burst into dark, angry laughter. I was taken by surprise and stood open-eyed and stock-still.

  “The old harpy!” he said. “Greedy as a muckworm. I took her measure the moment I cast eyes on her. Tush! Glory be! What fawning rubbish.”

  I wiped a trickle of rainwater off the tip of my nose, and stared at him.

  “But we gave her a little of her own back, didn’t we? She squirmed like an eel when she thought I’d send her packing empty-handed.”

  “You were almighty generous, sir,” I said, hesitantly. His eyes seemed to be avoiding me. “Mrs. Daggatt would have settled for ten dollars. Less, even.”

  “It’s shabby for a man not to honor his word,” he stated flatly. And then the dark shadows lifted from his face. He laughed again, shifting his glance, and took my measure.

  “You do look like a guttersnipe, don’t you, Jango?”

  “Jingo, sir,” I said. “My name’s Jingo.”

  “You’re scrawny as a cat-stick. Don’t you eat?”

  “When I can.”

  “Innkeeper!” he called.

  But it was the landlord’s wife who came rustling over. She was a brisk, smiling little woman with cheeks shiny as porcelain. “Yes, Mr. Hemlock!”

  My eyebrows shot up smartly. Hemlock?

  “Dry this lad’s clothes by the fire,” he said. “Take him to my room and have a hot supper brought up to him.”

  “The poor tyke,” she sighed, melting at the scruffy sight of me. “Is he run away from home?”

  “Surely you can see the spittin’ image, my good lady,” he answered, relighting the long clay pipe. “He’s my long lost son.”

  “Lamb o’ the Lord!”

  “Have my account drawn up. We’ll be leaving first thing in the morning.”

  I was led up a narrow flight of stairs to a corner room. I withdrew the whale’s tooth and stripped off my wet clothes in the dark. I handed them out the door to the innkeeper’s wife and lit a candle. I saw two vast beds under a low ceiling and blank canvas in gold frames stacked along the walls.

  I jumped into bed to wait for my supper. I began to examine the whale’s tooth in the candlelight, even though my thoughts kept wandering. Mr. Peacock had turned into Mr. Hemlock. A swindler for sure, I thought. What use did he have for me?

  I kept gazing at the whale’s tooth, but could hardly cipher a proper treasure map in the scrimshaw carvings. I made out a river with a small boat afloat on it, a swarm of bees or hornets, a man’s elbow, several oxen with enormous long horns and a fence wandering around a strange flat-roofed house with a crooked chimney pipe. But there was a mysterious word carved like lace in the bone:

  SOROMATAM

  I pondered the signs, but it didn’t help much. And then I calculated that Billy Bottles had been everlasting clever about it. Maybe he wanted to be sure that his cactus gold map didn’t look like a map.

  I decided not to bother my head about it. There were those blank frames against the wa
lls, and the man’s bluff that he was my father. I wondered how I fit into any swindle he was about. Finally I hid the scrimshaw under my pillow, took hold of the candle and got out of bed.

  I crossed the room to the stacks of canvas. The gold frames glistened. And then I realized they were wrong side out.

  I turned one over and saw a painting of a lady, from the waist up, in the grandest finery. But it gave me a start. The woman had no face. None at all.

  Quickly, I began turning other pictures about. The finery was different, but one thing was the same. Every confounded painting was faceless — blank and white as an egg!

  7

  FINGLE-FANGLED

  We were on the road at daybreak. The rainstorm had passed, leaving puddles scattered about like broken glass.

  Mr. Peacock-Hemlock traveled by private coach. Sitting beside him I felt that I had come up wondrously in the world. But he was neither a gentleman, I decided, nor a judge of horseflesh.

  He had no coachman. He took the reins himself. The coach was an old thing, with great creaking wheels and two nags to pull it. They shambled along like plow horses.

  He shook the reins from time to time to keep the animals from dozing off. The inside of the coach was piled helter-skelter with pots, pans, sacks of oats, boxes, blankets and the ghostly paintings of faceless ladies. They fairly boggled the mind.

  Mr. Peacock-Hemlock had hardly uttered a word to me since the night before and I kept my thoughts to myself. But I thought some midnight darkness occupied his head; it stood me well to be on guard. And I thought some horse trader had most certainly got the best of him in those flea-bitten coach horses.

  We rode along in silence. The tall coach wheels sliced along the muddy road without once bogging down. The sun warmed our backs and suddenly Mr. Peacock-Hemlock, or whatever his name might be, broke into a whistling tune.

  “You don’t talk much, do you, lad?” he said with a sudden grin.

  I was caught up short. But glimpsing his smile I calculated he was only trying to cast off his brooding silence.

  “I do well enough on occasion, sir,” I answered.

  “You need a pair of boots.”

  “They’d only get muddy,” I said, though I wished I had a fine pair of jackboots to stride about in, like his own. “What do you call your animals?”

  “The off-horse is named Billygoat. The one on the left is Sunflower.”

  I began to feel easier in his company. “I imagine you had to do a lot of clever trading to find gentle animals like that. Slower’n stock-still, I mean.”

  “Slow!” he erupted, laughing, and the tree branches seemed to shake. “Why, Jango, they’re racehorses, both of them.”

  If he had a touch of madness, I thought, he was being mortal good-humored about it. “My name’s Jingo, sir.”

  “Have you ever driven a coach before?”

  “No, sir.”

  He handed me the reins. “All you have to do is hold the beasts in check. Otherwise they’ll take off like a streak and we’ll be clear to the Mississippi before sundown.”

  His long, booted legs stretched out like stovepipes, and he pulled his hat down over his forehead. I gripped the reins tightly and suddenly felt years older driving that coach. I wondered if that was why he had brought me along — to train me up as his coachman. Well, that would suit me fine!

  “Where we heading?” I asked.

  I waited for an answer, but he didn’t answer, so I didn’t ask again. I calculated he had his own secrets and I’d better not pry.

  The coach went wee-wawing through the mud. If Billygoat and Sunflower were racehorses I’d be glad to go dashing after the cactus gold. The whale’s tooth, snugged inside my shirt, was my own secret and I decided to keep it to myself.

  He started whistling again and my thoughts went skittering over the thumping mysteries of the day before. Finally, I decided to chance a few questions while he was in an uncommon good mood.

  “Sir, how come you turned up looking especially for me at the orphan house? By name, I mean?”

  He didn’t answer. He just went on whistling.

  “You’re not my pa,” I stated.

  His blue eyes shifted under the brim of his hat. “Obviously,” he stated right back.

  “But you pretended to Mrs. Daggatt.”

  “You’re free to run off anytime you choose,” he answered, which was no answer at all.

  Now it was my turn to fall silent. I didn’t want to run off. Not while I could sit high and important on the coach seat and drive that span of horses. I wondered if that was why he had turned the reins over to me. He was devilish smart.

  He crossed his legs and gazed at the road ahead. “You recollect your father, don’t you, lad?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well enough to pick him out in a crowd?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “He’s a one-legged man with teeth blacker’n tar. A cutthroat, most likely.”

  “Splendid,” he muttered. “You can help me find the scoundrel.”

  My heart dropped a notch or two. Mr. Peacock-Hemlock meant to use me to spy out my pa — that was the reason he had fetched me from the orphan house.

  I felt fiercely disappointed. I felt fingle-fangled. The last man alive I wanted to go searching for was my pa. I’d as soon stick my head in a beehive as shake his confounded hand. He’d abandoned me to the orphan house and I didn’t intend to forgive him — not in a thousand years.

  “We’ll keep a sharp eye out for a one-legged man,” Mr. Peacock-Hemlock said.

  I clamped my jaws shut. He’d wake up one morning and find me gone in a burnt hurry. He was not more than a cut above Mrs. Daggatt and General Dirty-Face Jim Scurlock, I decided. They were a pestiferous lot, all of them, turning me to their own advantage.

  I simmered for a considerable time. It didn’t once occur to Mr. Peacock-Hem lock that I might have contrary feelings in the matter. As far as he was concerned I was bought and paid for.

  But slowly my thoughts began to turn around. I thought of the scrimshaw map and the cactus gold and pondered a way to fingle-fangle things to my own liking.

  “No, sir,” I remarked finally. “No sense in looking. You won’t spy out my pa around here.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Certain.” I stared straight ahead. “I know for a fact that he lit out for the Mexico border. Still there, most likely.”

  That was a howling lie, but he answered it with a casual gesture of his hand. “Then that’s where we’ll head. Mexico it is, Jango.”

  And he picked up whistling again.

  He could look for my pa till doomsday, I thought. I meant to look for that cactus gold.

  8

  CAPTAIN DAYLIGHT

  Three days passed before we met our first highwayman.

  Billygoat and Sunflower ambled along like sleepwalkers, putting mile after muddy mile between us and Boston. At the rate we creaked along I expected to be full grown before we reached the Mexico border.

  And Mr. Peacock-Hemlock delayed us at every crossroad. He’d step down as if to stretch his legs, but that wasn’t what he was up to. Sometimes he would scatter fresh grass like a green ribbon between the ruts of the road. Other times he’d set a stick at the crossroads — always a long one with a stub left on.

  If he had a touch of madness I wasn’t anxious to tangle with it. I didn’t ask questions. And I hadn’t a notion why he was on the trail of my pa. It was clear enough that if Mr. Peacock-Hemlock wanted me to know a thing, he’d tell me.

  But as the days went by, sharp and clear, curiosity got the best of me. “Them cat-sticks supposed to hold off evil spirits, sir?”

  To my surprise he answered straight out. “I’m setting a gypsy trail.”

  “Gypsies?” I must have gaped at him. “Are you a gypsy gentleman?”

  He was polishing the gold head of his walking stick. But I don’t think it was gold. I suspicioned it was brass. “No,” he answered quietly.

  And that’s wh
en we came upon the highwayman.

  He sat on horseback at the crossroads brandishing a pair of pistols at a buggy. I hauled back on the reins.

  “What are you stopping for?” Mr. Peacock-Hemlock asked.

  “Robbers!”

  “I only see one. Drive on.”

  I swallowed hard and shook the reins. No doubt about it, I thought. Mr. Peacock-Hemlock was thatchy in the head. He’d get us both shot full of holes.

  We pulled up to the buggy and he said, “Excuse me, gentlemen. You’re blocking the road. Kindly pull to one side, like good fellows, and get on with your business.”

  The highwayman shifted his eyes to us in the wildest amazement. And he shifted his pistols as well.

  “Stand and deliver!” he scowled. He was a blunt-nosed man with tangled hair and rings on all his fingers.

  “Deliver what?” said Mr. Peacock-Hemlock with the utmost unconcern.

  “Bust yur haslet!” the highwayman exploded. “Do you think I’m standing here to collect yur linen! Gold, man! Yur watch and jewels! Deliver!”

  You’d think Mr. Peacock-Hemlock had gone deaf. “I declare, sir, those dueling pistols take my eye. Handsome as I ever saw. They do you credit.”

  “Deliver, you pesky fool!”

  All the while the man in the buggy sat trembling and washing his hands with worry. He was a smallish man in a black frock coat that hung as loose on him as a shirt on a beanpole.

  “Well, sir,” said Mr. Peacock-Hemlock, “if you intend to rob me I’ll have to insist upon a small favor.”

  “I’ll favor you with a window in yur skull!” replied the highwayman.

  “No, thank you kindly,” Mr. Peacock-Hemlock smiled, climbing down from the coach. “You see I’m carrying a considerable sum. Unfortunately, it doesn’t entirely belong to me. I have a partner and I’m afraid he’d never believe I was robbed in broad daylight on a public road.”

  “Deliver, I say!”

  “In due time, sir.” Mr. Peacock-Hemlock threw open one of the coach doors. “Now if you would be generous enough to put a bullet through the door I could hardly be accused of deceit. Evidence, sir. Surely a ball of lead is a fair exchange for a hundred times its weight in gold.”