Saved by the Bullet

by Preston Shires

  It seemed odd to me that Prudence offered this rather ridiculous explanation. I picked up Gunshy and looked at Prudence. She looked away, saying, “Just a thought. I wouldn’t want you to be wasting your time. You know, there are no witnesses, so it’s impossible to know what happened.”

  She walked to the bedroom door and paused in front of it. “I think I’ll lie down a bit, if you don’t mind. I’m dreadfully fatigued.”

  “Pay no mind,” I said. But as she shut the door, an eeriness settled over my soul, like when you think you hear another’s footsteps in the dark of night, but you’re the only one home, and then the lone candle, that’s far off in the adjoining room, extinguishes itself.

  CHAPTER 7

  On Monday morning, the twenty-second of June, I planned to awaken myself before my guest could stir but found Miss Straightlace ahead of schedule, standing over my bed fully armed for the day. She had laid out a dress for me but I had no intention on attending a funeral, so I picked out my own.

  I was less successful in walking a direct path to the gazette office, she managed to deviate our course toward the Nebraska House where we retrieved Jonathan. Extricating him from the hotel was an effort, as he wanted to discuss matters with the indulgent chambermaid, Kitty.

  In particular, he detained her to describe an illness to which he had fallen victim. It consisted of headache and fever, but nothing consistent with what others experienced. His was grander and higher than anything a man had suffered since the Great Plague, but he bore it without complaint, and he told us this multiple times. And even though he ought to have been hospitalized, he agreed, after Kitty excused herself to attend to another guest, to ignore the pains that a normal mortal could never bear, and accompany us.

  As we finally moved forward to the office, Jonathan pestered me with questions about Kitty, and wondered out loud why she cleaned rooms when her grandfather bathed in dollars. “Precisely,” I told him, “he’s her grandfather, not her father. If we inherited directly only from our grandparents, my father would still be wealthy but I would be a pauper.” Deeming this sufficient knowledge for someone really only interested in himself, I didn’t bother explaining the whole story concerning Kitty’s parents, who had estranged themselves from the grandfather.

  After entering the official headquarters of the Brownville Beacon: A Lady’s Gazette, perhaps like von Steuben entering the barracks of the colonial militia, I found Teddy seated on the table with at least three loafers. One was Christopher Martin, phrenologist. Rising from the lone chair in the room, the scientist placed a newspaper under his elbow and informed me that he had just come from the wharf, where he’d found a copy of the Wilmington Herald. He said this while patting the newspaper as if it were an appreciative cat.

  I doubted his judgment of time, for when I had traversed the threshold, he was so well ensconced in my chair and so at ease in emitting a flow of words commensurate with a speech of the illustrious Daniel Webster, that I imagined he had been stewing in my office for quite some time. Whilst I was calculating this, Teddy hopped off the table and walked spritely over to the east side of the room, gathered up his strewn effects, and stuffed them into his trunk. The two other gentlemen had obviously arrived after Mr. Martin, as they had no claim on the chair and had accordingly propped themselves up against the wall, or should I say they slouched themselves up against the wall, somewhat like tall sacks of grain that bend in the middle. Neither made a move to greet me or even recognize me. One of them chewed on a burnt-out pipe.

  Prudence, unacquainted with Mr. Martin, who did rise to greet her, introduced herself and immediately apprised him of what we were going to do with our gazette.

  Martin, knowing my mission aforehand, interrupted her with a scoff, especially mocking abolitionism and temperance by uttering some sort of aphorism he’d contracted from the Wilmington Herald: “‘What would prove sport to you, would be death to us,’ said the frogs when the boys were pelting them with stones.” He stood back to judge the effect, but seeing none, he felt obliged to explain. “My dear Miss Withers, temperance is a waste of time, except for those with unshapely heads.”

  “My dear Mr. Martin,” returned Prudence, “alcohol is the fuel of vice.”

  “You,” reposted Mr. Martin, “remind me of the old lady who rushed into the garden in search of her daughter, on being told that the young lady had gone there with a rake.”

  “Bravo for the mother. A young woman’s honor cannot be too well protected!”

  I observed this exchange quietly as it brought to mind my schoolmaster telling us that in order to calculate the volume of a cylinder one needed to use pi, and Zach, considering how close it was to noontime, asking which kind of pie. Now Zach, I judged, to be of a clownish disposition. My dear Miss Straightlace, on the other hand, being as high minded as a telegraph pole, and just as chatty, could not have been responding with wit.

  I intervened. “If you can accept alcohol, then why not the Negro?”

  The professor of phrenology stared down upon me as if he’d just stepped in something unpleasant in a back alley. “The Negro is born of a different creation. Have you not heard of Professor Agassiz’s discovery of the various ice ages that have englobed the earth over the centuries? After each there appeared a new creation of flora and fauna. Though the professor does not say as much, I hold that the Negro was not of our creation. Seriously, I cannot believe that even you could look a man born for slavery in the face and find that face fit to make decisions on its own.”

  There’s a time for reasoned argument and a time for feminine intuition, and the situation clearly called for the latter. Beautiful as he may have thought his skull to be, I looked around for an object with which to rearrange it. My parasol looked up at me invitingly, so, grabbing it by the handle, I raised it against the Canaanite. Observing that Teddy had retreated behind the press, Mr. Martin’s stare of snobbery transformed into one of either anger or horror. I couldn’t take any chances and tilted the tip of the parasol backwards to get more of a whipping effect if need be.

  Mr. Martin came at me ferociously, leaning forward as he did. Some might have thought he was simply retrieving his hat from the table, but like I said, I could take no chances.

  “Dare you strike a woman!” I cried, while delivering a well-placed blow upon his well-honed skull. I imagine that if he measured it anew, after my ministration, he would have been even more proud of it, as it no doubt increased a fair inch in girth.

  “Good Lord!” he exclaimed, picking up his hat.

  “Yes, he is good.” I agreed. “And he created us all in his image. And I can think of no fairer face than that of a sable brother or sister. And I am not alone in my thoughts, for our Republican Party is a multitude, and I dare say all of my sisters carry a parasol.”

  He didn’t respond immediately, but seemed preoccupied with rubbing the back of his head. He rather cautiously moved toward the door, deferentially, without turning his back to me as if I were royalty. Once on the threshold, however, he resumed his professorial pose and claimed I was not quite the multitude I thought. He then invited me to listen to what my fellow Republicans of the Wilmington Herald had to say about the Negro.

  “The editor says,” he read. “‘Whenever negro suffrage becomes one of the planks of the Republican platform we shall feel free to seek some other political organization, and we think we shall find most of our Republican brethren in the same way.’”

  “You’ll note he did not speak for the women.”

  “And why should he? The right to vote is given to you neither by the U.S. Constitution nor by your own mental constitution.”

  “Yet our efforts, as mothers of the Republic, to guide our nation and right our wrongs shall not be in vain.” Having said this, I gave a nod to Teddy, and said succinctly, “On his ear.”

  I had never before seen a phrenologist shift from a professorial stance to a sprint on such short notice. Even his fellow loafers, the tall sacks of grain propped up against the wall,
grew legs and found their way out the door.

  * * *

  In the early afternoon, Prudence and I put away our writings and I surveyed the office. Jonathan had wandered into town to exercise his lungs amongst a boatload of freshly arrived emigrants, no doubt expounding upon how much more difficult his trip to the frontier had been compared to theirs. Teddy had gone off not long after helping Mr. Martin out the door, to lath and plaster walls in Mr. Whitt’s house.

  Mr. Whitt, I thought, what audacity to buy my humble office building out from under me. If my gazette turns profitable, I might just purchase another lot and put up a building of my own. It couldn’t be any more spartan than this one.

  Meanwhile, I needed more information on the Friend murders in order to write a story that would attract readers.

  Making my way onto Main Street, I crossed paths with Judge Black, newly arrived in town. Mr. Furnas was giving him a tour of our settlement and introduced us. I used the opportunity to ask our new judge about the Friend murders, but he, like Judge Kinney, claimed that their confrere Judge Norton duly settled the question a year ago. Mr. Furnas, always interested in promoting the finer history of our colony, echoed Judge Black.

  Prudence and her brother found me in the street. When Mr. Whitt exited his shop, apparently to better judge the figure of a young emigrant woman on the other side of the thoroughfare, I asked them to remain where they were for the moment while I approached him.

  “Why, good evening Miss Furlough,” he said, looking at me with his head turned as if he thought I might want something but was afraid to ask. Oh, how little he understands women. I kept my silence to see if he could remember his promise about visiting the Friend farm.

  Apparently, the promise had retreated into the recesses of his brain as he concentrated on exuding a certain male charm. Smiling, he asked, “Would you give me the pleasure of accompanying me for a walk along the levee? I wouldn’t want such a fashionable lady as yourself to hold a grudge against me. Your brother is well worth his wages, I had just overlooked his payment. Besides, my clerk is doing an inventory and I wouldn’t want to distract him in his arithmetic.” He thrust out his elbow and I took it.

  “Certainly,” I said, “I do appreciate a man of his word.” I gave a discreet nod to Prudence so that she and Jonathan follow on.

  “Yes, yes,” he repeated a few times. “Yes, the levee, I’m so glad I mentioned it.” He was thinking on his feet, trying to come up with something pleasing to say, but as his feet were moving, he had difficulty. Finally, he recited Latin names for plants we saw. Then, sensing we were not alone, he looked over his shoulder. “I see we have the Withers taking up the same promenade as we, only her parasol is straight. Whatever happened to yours?”

  “It got in an argument, and won.”

  “Oh, did it now?” He said this in an interesting tone, somewhat like the doctor, who sees nothing at all problematic about his patient’s bedroom, but hears her describe to him monkeys of various colors crawling up the walls. I had a great aunt, of Puritan stock mind you, but unfortunately given to drink, who described just such a setting to her doctor. She was very good at storytelling, but he brought up, what I would have considered the critical point, that monkeys were not native to Massachusetts. “Oh,” she said to him in the very same tone he had used with her, “and so you believe we’re in Massachusetts?”

  “Yes,” I said, “Mr. Martin had been most disagreeable with his contempt for others who do not look like him. I had to shoo him out of my office. Hence the state of my parasol.” We walked along a little farther, and I dropped my veil to confound the gnats and mosquitoes. I complimented Mr. Whitt on his scientific knowledge and assured him that he would be a splendid teacher if ever we built a high school. He admitted his interest in teaching and told me the passion was shared between himself and Mr. Martin, who, in spite of his sometimes awkward manners, knew his science. Apparently, Mr. Martin was now traveling about the countryside in search of settlements desiring to establish high schools. We walked a little more to where the end of the levee approached.

  “I think we ought to take the trail,” I suggested.

  “Sure enough, there’s a splendid little meadow not far off, and an excellent hillside where we might seek some repose.”

  “Well,” said I, “I doubt we have time to take our leisure. I don’t want to return too late from the Friend farm.”

  The words “Friend farm” brought Mr. Whitt to a halt. I could see by his expression that all had suddenly become clear to him. “The Friend farm? Why it’s quite a walk down to it, and there’s really nothing to see there. I’ve yet to till the ground and haven’t even finished putting up a structure.”

  As Prudence and Jonathan joined us, I reminded him of his promise, and that my friends had taken useful time out of their day to accompany me.

  My druggist surveyed us one by one, and I would say there was a mix of desperation and futility in his eyes.

  I looked at him gently, as I had at Gunshy when reaching down to pick her up underneath that bush. “We’re almost there. It shan’t take long. You’ve no doubt things to attend to any given day of the week, so there’s no better time than the present.”

  Mr. Whitt conceded and we continued our peregrination through the wilderness. Sunlight danced down upon us through the overhead leaves, and the uneven shadowing of the trail created a medieval atmosphere wherein one expected to see a gnome, or some other mythical creature, slip behind the trees, ever out of reach.

  Jonathan broke the spell by comparing our gothic trail to the highway back in Ohio. If the men of Brownville had half the pluck of their ancestors, he argued, but mostly to himself, there would already be not only a road but also a railroad through Nebraska. I pointed out that railroads didn’t exist in the days of our forebearers and that I rather liked our delicate trails, and, though I hoped the railroad would not tarry in coming, I also trusted there would always be a place for these humble paths in the hearts of our entrepreneurs. He paid no mind to my comment and expanded upon the necessity of a bridge to cover the Missouri, like the one recently built over the Muskingum River in Ohio.

  I hadn’t really noticed at first, but as Mr. Whitt informed us that we were reaching our destination, I observed that Jonathan was a half-step ahead of us. He reminded me of Raven, an old horse we kept on the farm, who insisted on being leader of the pack whenever we went for a ride, stretching her stride out just enough to stay a nose ahead of whichever young mare was next to her.

  Mr. Whitt veered off to the left to show us a claim marker he’d pounded into the ground. Jonathan continued along the trail absent-mindedly.

  Mr. Whitt removed his hat and scratched at his scalp. “If memory serves me right, the house site should be just ahead, unless the Missouri came up and washed it away.” It’s true that the river has little patience for sedentary types, and the Pawnee respect this riverine attitude by moving about.

  The vegetation was thick where there were no trees, but we didn’t expect to find the charred remains of the log cabin under a leafy canopy, so we wrestled our way through the brush. Mr. Whitt referenced the river two or three times more before abandoning hope.

  I began to think. It seemed to me the cabin should not have been far from the trail.

  Then Jonathan hollered out, “You lookin’ for the remains of a fire?”

  We made our way over to him and sure enough, not far from the path, you could see the outlines of a cabin with charred logs spread out here and there. I stared at the remains, thinking of the family that once lay amongst the ashes.

  “You can pretty well see how she was constructed,” observed Jonathan.

  Indeed, the scorched area formed a rectangle, with a particular variety of broadleaf weeds that benefited from the ashen soil. On the edge that was furthest from the river lay a heap of stones, which I judged to have been the fireplace. Naturally, their front door would have been opposite it, facing the river and the rising sun.

  “Yep,” said
Mr. Whitt. “That were it, now I remember.” He allowed a little silence to pass before adding, “So I suppose we can start heading back.”

  Jonathan nodded in agreement, but I interposed. “No, I’d like to take a close look.” I studied the ground carefully. “If the fireplace were there,” I said pointing to the stones, “and the door behind me, then either side would have had a room or a separation of some sort for sleeping quarters.” Walking the perimeter I found, on the north end, melted glass, the remains of a mirror, and hinges, most likely from a trunk. “This end,” I said, “must have been where the parents slept.”

  I took my parasol and began poking around where I thought the bed might have been. Suddenly we all heard the parasol go “thunk,” it was a deep and resounding “thunk.” I pulled up my dress enough to where I could get on my knees. I looked at my gloves and removed them. I could wash my hands better than my gloves.

  “Miss Furlough,” said Mr. Whitt, “I really think it’s getting late.”

  “It won’t take but a minute, sir,” I said. And I pulled up some weeds and pushed the soil to one side. Soon appeared a flat, white stone. I picked up the pace and began digging with my fingernails to scrape off the dirt all around it.

  “Whatever’s in there is mine,” announced Mr. Whitt.

  I looked up at him. “Is that why you’re claiming the land? You heard there’s some sort of treasure buried here somewhere?”

  “It wasn’t uncommon knowledge at the time that the family had more than enough to pay their preemption. Not a penny of it discovered on Mr. Lincoln or his associates. So finding it would be, of course, a bonus for the claimholder...me!”

  “Enough to buy a newspaper office?”

  By his galled and surprised look, I could tell my landlord had betrayed a confidence.