Читать книгу By Dim and Flaring Lamps - Alan Le May - Страница 4

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On Tuesday, 21 June, 1860, Shep Daniels stood on the St. Louis levee, at the stage plank of the little side-wheeler Tealwing, supervising the loading of five horses and forty-four huge young mules; and it seemed to Shep that he had never seen a prettier first day of summer in his life. All the long cobbled slope of the landing was aswarm with rousters, loading the close-ranked steamboats, and the riverport world was a world of sound. Bull-moan of boat whistles, clangour of bells, boom of barrels rolled down the stones, wheeze of steam. Rattle of a stage plank as the rousters went down its great springy length in the bouncing lope they called the coonjine. Big baritone voices in an improvised work song—“Swing them bunks o’ black-eye peas—load me down, load me down!” Faster chatter of a white-wooled sing-boss, calling rhythm for a gang moving railroad iron—“Now go back an’ git the other—you got the wrong one then! Now all pick it up, doo dah, doo dee, and you walk, walk, doo dee, doo dah, and you set it down, doo dee!” Crash went the iron and “Hi-ya-a-a-ay” rang the work chorus....

Nothing anywhere on a mile of levee made a more heartening big-drum sound than Shep Daniels’ whopping young mules, sent a few at a time up the plank to the pens on the Tealwing’s cargo deck. He had watched the same thing a hundred times before, but this loading was different, and so was this day and this year. Since the age of twelve he had travelled with his father and their livestock, always as stable hand, often as chief drover; many times—first when he was fourteen—he had handled whole trips by himself—a big swing to pick up mules where they were, another big swing to deliver them where they weren’t. But this was his first trip in charge of all their operations on the Missouri River, from the Mississippi to St. Joe. He had his own stable hands to do the work, he was free to make his own deals and trades—though his father still owned the stock; and he had his new clothes. Something close to exultation lifted him every time his stiff collar gouged his sunburned neck, reminding him that he was virtually his own man.

At twenty-one Shep was sometimes aware that he was pretty rough around the edges. He didn’t know how to wear clothes, because he had seldom had any very good ones, and his shock of hay-coloured hair was rebellious to the comb. When he wasn’t thinking about it he was inclined to walk with an awkward, slinging lurch, chiefly suitable for making good time over rough ground. His formal education had been obtained in a one-room schoolhouse, where a single schoolmaster taught all grades at once; and even this, since the age of twelve, had been limited to those winter months when road conditions made the movement of livestock impractical. In general he was a whole lot more at home on the cargo deck of a steamboat than on the upper decks where the quality rode.

Still ... he was better than six feet tall, all lean bone, and stood as straight as a board, so that properly cut clothes hung on him well enough, when he let them. He knew a great deal that was not to be found in books about the horse and mule trade, as carried on over most of Kentucky, Missouri, southern Indiana and Illinois, and parts of Arkansas and Tennessee. He had a stockpen acquaintance with hundreds of mule users, including a number of the great planters who were the power and the glory of the Mississippi basin. A defensive mimicry gave him a certain protective coloration among these latter, and such basic manners as his mother had taught him made him considerably more presentable than he himself would have supposed.

He kept his sixteen-foot mule whip coiled in his hand, but his boots were polished; he wore a well-made black suit, a buckskin-coloured vest, and a boiled shirt. His father, who stood slightly in the background, trying hard to swallow all the advice that came to his mind, wore about the same kind of things, but looked rumpled, and faintly rusty, by comparison.

Pap Daniels was even bonier than Shep, but not nearly as tall. He seemed skimpily put together out of rawhide string and hickory slats, much warped and weathered. But there was an authority about him that lifted mules into the collar with half the lung power his sons required. When he angered, such fire jumped in his eyes that both men and critters got out of his way; and when he was in a hurry, any ordinary man could have been killed off by no more than trying to hang on to the tails of Pap’s coat.

“I wish your ma had lived to see you,” Pap said, almost plaintively. “You look slicker than a nickel’s worth of hog jowl. And that’s a solemn fact.”

Actually, Pap would never wholly approve his son’s present cultivated appearance. If he had had to visit a back-country customer in a fresh new rig like that, Pap would have worn the boiled shirt collarless, the band fastened with a brass collar button, imprinting a green spot on his sun-creased neck; and probably would have ridden a few miles with the pants under his saddle, to give himself at least a respectable fragrance of mules. And yet, at the same time, his wish that Shep’s mother could have seen her son all currycombed and flowered-out was sincere.

Shep’s mother had come from Rosedale, Mississippi; her people down there claimed a distant, poor-relation connexion with a distinguished Mississippi family named Shepardson, for whom Shep had been christened. The relationship had become more distant with each generation, and not even a remote contact with affluence had survived Ma’s marriage to Pap Daniels. Yet, in a shabby-genteel sort of way, Ma had clung to her early dreams; to her, the mule had always been a species of brute that a gentleman might appraise, or purchase, but should never be seen actually handling.

With all his heart, Pap had wanted to give Ma a good life, the best anybody in the Mississippi Valley knew. He would have got it done, too, in some degree if he had not kept raising his sights to higher stakes. Ploughing back every cent he could scrape into more mares—always for just one year more, and one year more—Pap had kept them about as mule-poor as anybody could possibly be. The Danielses were big-scale breeders now, rather than merely traders. Their little farm behind Paducah wasn’t big enough for more than a holding yard, but Pap had developed a farm-out system; they had hundreds of brood mares, hundreds of mule colts, and scores of the biggest jacks the Mississippi Valley had ever seen, sprangled out all over parts of seven states. But he had tried too hard, for too much. Ma had not lived to see his plans bear fruit, so all his labours had come to nothing in the end.

Sad old man ... pitiful old man, perhaps, if he had known it. He kept on now, going through the motions he had always made, telling himself that Ma would have wanted him to make real his dream, for the sake of Shep, and Trapper, the younger brother....

“I believe, if I was doing it,” Pap said now, “I’d carry the whole bunch right on to Ash Landing, and give Tyler Ashland his pick. Keeping holt of Tyler Ashland is the whole difference between profit and loss, on the Missouri River.” He stopped himself. “But you’re in charge. All that is up to you.”

Pap Daniels was not sharing his son’s exalted mood. He looked uncommonly grim, Shep thought, and he had an absent, distracted look that wasn’t like him. Shep knew what he was worrying about, or thought he did. All hell was to pay in the back country of southern Missouri, where strong bands of night riders had for some time outpowered the law. The Danielses had a lot of livestock down there, strung out across a whole belt of counties they seldom visited more than once a year; most of it was well in range of the worst disorders. Reports of losses in some counties fitted in with an ominous silence from others. A lot of their mule raisers seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth.

Shep said uneasily, “Pap, you sure you won’t need me?”

“Trapper’s going to meet me with the horses, down at the end of the steam-car spur. He can ride up to the river and cut you off, if you’re wanted.” He’ll play hell, Shep thought, but didn’t argue. He dropped the possibility out of his mind.

Missouri’s troubles went back some six years, to 1854, when neighbouring Kansas voted on whether it was to be slave or free. Pro-Southern Missouri watched with deep concern, convinced that if abolition could expand and slavery could not, the Southern way of life would soon stand at bay. Then, at the eleventh hour, the outcome was predecided by a butt-in from far away. Into Kansas poured a sudden flood of abolitionist settlers, armed and sent west by the hastily formed Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society. To Missourians, this brazen strong-arming of a free election seemed an open act of war. Such respected Unionists as Tyler Ashland himself were among the partisans who galloped into Kansas, sworn to run the Damnyankees home if they could or exterminate them if they had to. Over and over Missouri raiders rode the Kansas prairies, shooting and burning.... Yet the Kansas settlers stood fast.

Inevitably, perhaps, the violent measures frustrated in Kansas turned inward upon Missouri itself. Pro-Southern hotheads took the saddle to clear their own state of the minority who opposed them. Pro-slavery secessionists and pro-slavery Unionists turned on each other; feudists took saddle to avenge the victims. Finally, outlaws of no principles at all, like the James boys and the Younger brothers, rode unprosecuted, killing and plundering in the name of any Cause that came handy. Nobody was safe any more, no matter what his politics might be.

Politically, the Danielses carried no special torch for any faction. Their self-interest was with the mule, a critter unaware of any line between slave and free. And Pap was an honest trader; he backed every deal they made, at whatever loss, so that all over Missouri a scattering of people could be found to swear that the Danielses were all right. Up to here they had seemed immune to bushwhacker depredations.

Evidently they were not immune any more. “Don’t see how to handle such a damn thing,” Pap complained, sounding fretful. “How do you take a man’s work team away—his crop in the ground, and all—on the theory he might get robbed, sometime?”

“Don’t worry so much,” Shep said. “We can do without that whole God-forsaken wilderness if we have to.”

His father looked him over sidelong, with a cold and weary eye. The Danielses never did carry any substantial reserve of uncommitted funds. They had pyramided an enormous potential for producing draft teams, but it was a kind of thing hard to raise quick money on. If the southern counties were in as bad a shambles as rumour made out, the wrong brick might very easily be pulled out of the whole far-flung structure Pap had built. He had to go in there and see. But——

“Maybe,” was all he said now.

Something in the sound of that one word awoke Shep’s occupational wariness, as if an alarm bell had been softly tapped; so softly he wasn’t sure he had heard it at all. Now that he noticed it, there was a peculiar look in Pap’s eyes, one he had almost never seen there before. Not an expression, exactly; more of an emptiness of expression, a sombre lightlessness that even seemed to make his shoulders sag when they did not.

“You feel all right?” Shep asked. “Maybe two teaspoons of soda in a cup of hot water——”

“Oh, no, no—I’m fine.” The remedy was one the old man sometimes took for a number of ills he lumped together as the bellyache, but his failure to get mad at his son for suggesting it was a bad sign.

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” Shep said.

Pap drew a deep breath and seemed about to answer, but there was an interruption. The last three mules were at the top of the stage plank, hesitating over setting foot to the forecastle deck. Up in the pilothouse Captain Jim Sam Delorme had been watching the loading; and now, for no reason whatever, he reached for the whistle cord, his big bearded face impassive, and let go with such a blast as should have shattered the cobbles. The three mules whirled, as the old scoundrel must have known they would do, to bolt down the plank for the shore.

Shep’s long whip licked out—one, two, three—and each mule in turn stopped short as the snapperlash exploded louder than a forty-four, inches in front of his nose. Three times more it cracked, just to one side of each nose, this time. The mules turned back and went aboard.

A scatter of passengers along the rail of the boiler deck promenade broke into spontaneous applause. Astonished, Shep looked up, and at once saw Julie Delorme, looking very trim and made eye-catching before all others by the expensive plainness of her travelling outfit. He had seen her often, for she was much aboard her father’s steamboats, and though they had never spoken, he had known who she was for a long time. She smiled at him, as their eyes met, and patted her white gloves together in a silent pantomime of applause. Taken off-balance, he made no acknowledgment, until Pap raised his hat; when Shep gave his hat brim an impersonal tug, without looking up there any more.

Pap grumbled something into his moustache about not knowing she was going to be aboard. “There’s Jim Sam’s girl up there,” he said.

“Never noticed,” Shep shrugged it off.

“Well, she notices you. There’s one I wouldn’t fool around with much, boy.”

Pap gave little heed to what Shep was up to on his own time, but one thing he would not stand for was any messing around with the womenfolk of business connexions, of whatever kind or status. Shep said crossly, “You know me better than that! I never so much as stood on the same deck with her in my life!”

“You will now,” Pap told him. Then, with a strange gentleness: “I didn’t mean it like you think. It’s only—if you was to bust blind headlong into something ... like a June buzzle bashing into a torch basket ... I believe I’d feel it was my fault more’n it was yourn. We’re still working on our first million, son.”

“You started to tell me something,” Shep insisted.

“Forget it. It wasn’t anything.” Pap shook himself into action. “Hup, now!” he ordered, as to a mule. “Good luck, and keep your powder dry!”

He banged his hard old paw on Shep’s back with a power that started him bodily up the plank and pretty well dispelled any question as to the state of Pap’s health. Then he turned and went up the levee with his reaching, clodhopper stride, never glancing back. And Shep went aboard, to his mules.

There’s something else, he was thinking. Something’s bothering him he wouldn’t tell me. It made him uneasy, Pap had always been so all-fired near impossible to scare.