Читать книгу By Dim and Flaring Lamps - Alan Le May - Страница 5

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Shep Daniels’s new clothes changed his way of life with great suddenness, and far beyond anything he had expected of them; and he began finding it out in his first ten minutes aboard. He went straight to the main deck stockpens, meaning to change into the butternuts he always wore around the livestock, but his new canvas “telescope” suitcase wasn’t in his tack pile. He had to go hunting for it on the upper deck, feeling most God-awful conspicuous as he tried to walk naturally among the first-class passengers. He seemed to stick out of his new rig too far, here and there, as it fitted in some positions but not in others. He knew everybody was staring, yet he couldn’t catch anybody so much as glancing at him; he couldn’t see how they did it. And presently he found out, with a shock, that he had been installed in a first-class stateroom, about as expensive as there was on the boat.

Pap hadn’t raised him to even consider the possibility of such a waste of money. Like the time Shep had wanted to buy a cheap watch. Pap had a watch, a gold hunting-case affair, fat as a beaten biscuit; he had won it in a trotting race, once. Shep, as eldest son, would inherit it, when Pap passed on. Pap said stiffly that a man must be insane to buy a watch when he had a good one coming anyway, sometime. What was wrong with the sun? Even on the cloudiest days a man who couldn’t read the sun couldn’t tell time at all. “What’ll I do on cloudy nights?” Shep objected. “Go to bed,” Pap recommended.

A stubborn campaign to get his baggage transferred to the cargo got him no place. “Cap’n say” was all he could get out of the chief steward. It finally turned out that Jim Sam Delorme was deadheading him. Something about the mules going to Tyler Ashland ...

And next thing he learned was that he was also expected to eat with the passengers. Always before, in the days he had slept on the cargo, he had climbed the after-ladder to the galley, where they had handed him a tin basin heaped with side meat, greens, and black-eyed peas, the same as the rousters. But now, if he applied at the galley in his butternut dungarees, he was told they wasn’t to let him eat there, he’d have to git et up fo’ard with the other gemmens. This forced him to a good many scrub-ups, but it was worth it. A whole new world opened up, and it happened to be Julie Delorme’s world—or the outer fringe of it.

Up to here Shep Daniels had always looked forward to winter, which was their off-season; they never tried to move much livestock then. He could often get away to go trapping, or wild-hog hunting, or anything he felt like, for weeks at a time. He got as cold and wet in these pursuits as if he had been at work, but he had been out in every kind of weather so much of his life that he never thought about that. To him, summer had always been a time when a man toiled endlessly under damp heat, while dawns came early and darkness late. Even then, of course, the job of stableboy was a lot more fun on the rivers than on the roads or at home; but what with the stockpens mostly being set up next to the boilers, which somehow not only radiated hell’s own heat but cut off all the breeze, and the chaff that kept sifting down your neck to cling to your streaming hide, Shep had never realised what life aboard the packets could be like.

Ashore the muggy heat of mid-country dog days might be abuzz with mosquitoes by night and flies by day, but a cool breeze almost always stirred on the rivers, or if it didn’t, the travel of the steamboat made a breeze of its own. So there were no flies to speak of and no mosquitoes in the long twilights, when the fireflies lighted up the lowland woods along the inlets. Even on nights when people in the little towns sat rocking and slapping on their front sidewalks until after midnight, rather than smother under netting in their clapboard ovens, the lace-trimmed upper decks were pleasant with cool airs. He hadn’t known what river travel was while he lived with the mules.

And there was Julie Delorme ...

He was afraid of her at first, though he wasn’t shy of girls as such; hadn’t been since he had begun running Pap’s river errands on his own, at the age of fourteen. The river towns had a good many women who took the air on the sloping, cobbled landings as dusk came on, and they were of a kind whose sex and its uses were no more embarrassing to a farmboy than the standing of a jack to a mare. But here there were other factors.

Pap’s remark about their first million hadn’t been needed. Only a little while ago, within the memory of living men, this rich river basin had been a deadly wilderness and men had been rated by their ability to survive. But the wilderness was overcome, and now great sudden fortunes were being made. Money was the new scoreboard, the scale for measuring both power and success. Senators and governors spoke courteously to it; small men stood twisting their greasy old hats in front of it. Even Southern pride of blood had to lean on it, for it made the difference between an aristocratic planter and his sharecropping first cousin, to whom he never spoke. Shep was acutely aware that Julie Delorme was the daughter of great wealth. The Tealwing was almost the least of the twelve or fifteen steamboats Jim Sam owned, which included some of the finest packets in the Mississippi trade; along with an unknown amount of property ashore.

And there was something else. Julie was not only rich, but the daughter of an overpowering legend besides. Captain Jim Sam Delorme came from well-to-do St. Louis people, well-connected in New Orleans, but he had run off up the wild Missouri in his early teens. His family thought he would get enough of the river in a hurry, but he did not. He was a pilot on the dangerous Upper River at nineteen and a “lightning” pilot in 1831—the year Pierre Chouteau reached a new head of navigation at Fort Union.

Jim Sam Delorme’s people, originally an offshot of old Louisiana Creole stock, had appeared in St. Louis more than three-quarters of a century before, in a condition of extreme indigence, which they swiftly remedied.

St. Louis had been a wild scramble of a town when they first came, overrun by adventurers among whom the Delormes proved well able to hold their own. They got into fur handling in a small way, then in a big way, later spreading out into warehousing, waterfront properties, merchandising, and banking; their initial indigence was long since forgotten. The Delormes had had their duellists, their rakes, and their free-plunging gamblers in the early years. It was as they rose to wealth that they became sedate, conservative, and cherishing of their position, until now the old wild days were not referred to in the family any more. Jim Sam’s childhood was spent in an atmosphere of courtly dignity, patterned after that of the older New Orleans aristocracy.

He proved to have a natural gift for handling steamboats, as shown in his uncommon talent for “flanking”—a matter of drifting crosswise on a fast current to negotiate otherwise impossible turns.

The mountain boats took over a monopoly of the rich North-west fur trade, and Jim Sam was swept along as the river came into its great days. The steamboats stacked up on shifting sandbars, they burned, they snag-ripped and went down. But the turbulent Missouri trade was not only opening a million miles of the North-west, it was supplying the great overland trails to a newly building nation upon the Pacific. The high returns drew a savage competition, in which the toughest rivermen on earth struggled with a thousand miles of treacherous waters, hordes of hostile Sioux, and each other. The men who fought their way to command of such a trade were bound to become great legendary figures—and Jim Sam was one.

In legend Jim Sam was shaggy, cobble-fisted, and moved like the front end of a horse, but he wasn’t like that now. He was courtly of manner, well-combed, and in the hands of downriver tailors. He almost never went to the head of navigation any more. Only when he sometimes seized the wheel in a vicious crossing could still be seen resemblances to the fire-eyed and bellowing king of ruffians he was supposed to have been. Sometimes Shep wondered if Jim Sam had really been more remarkable than many others, who had not ended as legends but merely as seedy old men whom nobody wanted to hear anything from or about. Hundreds of other bully-boys as reckless and hard-fighting must have hunted fortune on the Upper Missouri, with this difference: Jim Sam had found it, and Julie glowed in its light.

And on top of everything else, Delorme had to be the brother-in-law of Tyler Ashford, the one customer above all others who must never be ruffled or unfavourably impressed.