Читать книгу By Dim and Flaring Lamps - Alan Le May - Страница 7

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Trapper Daniels trotted his lively Morgan up the Tealwing’s stage plank, slipping and chicken-footing, in the last moments before it was hauled up. On the main deck forecastle the animal slid to a stop in a seated position on the planking; so Trapper calmly dismounted by no more than standing up, letting on that the manœuvre had been on purpose.

Shep’s younger brother was eighteen, not as tall as Shep but compact and very supple. His resemblance to Shep was not great. His eyes were a bright, sharp blue and his hair very light in contrast to Shep’s haylike thatch. His fair skin tanned evenly, without freckles, to the colour of a toasted biscuit, except for his forehead, which was always white where his hat-band protected it. As a small boy, which wasn’t so long ago, his bright-cheeked rosiness had earned him the nickname of Peaches and made a willing, even joyful fighter out of him for life. He had not, of course, been christened “Trapper.” He had a couple of other names, but considered them too fancy for earthly use, so had renamed himself at the age of seven, when he took up muskrat catching, and had never answered to anything else again.

He pushed back his hat now and looked over the people along the rails of the upper decks, his eyes unhurriedly touching each face. Years later he would be able to tell a stranger, “Yes, I seen you aboard the Tealwing—upriver run, June of 1860—” that being the kind of memory horse trading develops in anybody who is going to get anywhere with it. As his survey came to Julie, where she stood with Shep, he paused to study her with a country boy’s open stare. Shep acknowledged him with a lift of one finger, chagrined that Trapper’s mobility had taken him by surprise.

“Who’s that?” Julie demanded.

“Who? You mean that little towhead feller? That’s my brother. I forget his name.”

“How come I’ve never seen him before? I’ve often enough seen you.”

He didn’t like that “enough.” “I don’t believe Pap’s ever used him on the Missouri. Unless maybe once, about five-six years ago. Or on the Mississippi either, for that matter. Pap’s been kind of breaking him in to take over the Cumberland and Tennessee. We never see your boats over there.”

“Well, I think he’s cunnin’. Go fetch him up.”

“Now, Julie, you know you’re not interested in all these little shirt-tail nippers——”

“Little shirt—— That boy is eighteen if he’s a day! He’s as old as I am, right this minute.”

“That’s what I say. Likely little feller, isn’t he?”

“Hey! Get yourself down here!” Trapper bawled from the forecastle. And now Shep went down.

Trapper held him at arm’s length with a short, hard handshake, and stepped back. The brothers were always glad to see each other, even when they had been fighting about something when they last parted—which this time they had not. But formerly Shep had been accustomed to seizing Trapper under the arms, tossing him overhead, and catching him, and this had continued into Trapper’s teens, to his great mortification. Trapper now weighed some hundred and sixty pounds, and Shep had only about three inches advantage in height. No tossing in the air had occurred for some time, but Trapper was wary of it still.

“I don’t know this colt,” Shep said, to put off showing any interest in why Trapper was here. “Not much good, I guess—I see you’re trying to break his leg, so’s we can shoot him.”

“I never scrappled a leg yet, did I?”

“What about the time——”

“With twelve exceptions,” Trapper qualified.

How can you argue with a knothead like that? The criticism was only a matter of habit; neither he nor Pap had been able to cool off Trapper’s style of horsemanship yet, nor saw any hope they ever would. It was amazing what chancy riding Trapper lucked his way through.

They put the horse away. “Thought you were supposed to meet Pap, down at Rolla,” Shep began.

“That’s what I done. And we was in Waynesville before nightfall the next day. About the time you was wheeling slowly into the mouth of the Missouri,” he exaggerated. “From Waynesville this is only a piddling eighty-ninety miles. I could have beat you here by a week was there any call to. So Pap and me, we rode out to the Potter farm——”

“I guess I better have dinner and come back in about an hour,” Shep said. “Maybe you’ll have got to the point by then. What the hell are you doing here? That’s what I want to know!”

“I got to fetch a team back to Waynesville. Old Man Potter lost them Norman mares.”

“Lost them?”

“They was run off on him. Bunch of bushwhackers got ’em. Burnt his barn. Made a try at the house too, but she wouldn’t catch. Old Man Potter got his leg bust with a Minnie ball; they saved the leg, but he’s bad crippled up. After he was out of it, Saloney stood in for him—she wouldn’t tell me if she kilt anybody—but her and the two boys finally fought ’em off. Caylin, the younger girl, she was reloading them old muskets; seems they had a spare. So everybody got in it, except the old woman—she just prayed. Tom Potter lost a finger. I told him not to worry about it, seein’s he still had eleven left. But he didn’t think it was funny.”

Shep couldn’t understand it. “The Potters are good, honest Southron people,” he marvelled. “Loyal to the South every step of the way. How many of ’em was there?”

“About thirty.”

“Thirty? Seems awful deep in from Kansas for Jayhawkers to be operating. But—hell, it had to be Jayhawkers!”

Trapper said he didn’t think so. They didn’t seem to need any rightful excuse for robbing and horse stealing down there no more; they raid anybody who had anything, on any old lying misclaimer. Burn-outs and run-offs in all directions. “You sure Pap’s in his right mind? God knows why he’s so dead set on keeping them people going at all costs, but he is. I might just as lief take three-four loaner teams down there, while I’m at it. So ... I’ll ride with you a piece—maybe overnight; and drop off at Midway, or Boonville——”

“You will not! You stick some cornbread in your pocket, right smart quick, while I holler for the plank! And you get on back the same way you come!”

“Don’t want to go back that way.”

“Why?”

“Because I kept getting shot at, that’s why! Twice. One miss and one graze.”

Shep lost his temper. He assumed—wrongly, as it turned out—that this was the big showpiece Trapper had been holding back, while he dragged out everything else he knew first. Probably he had worked on this story, and worked on it, every mile he rode, to make it just as aggravating as he could. “By God, I ought to belt you right in this river! Where was you grazed?”

“Coming through them dogwood thickets, along the Osage.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it! By God, I thought you was riding mighty high in your irons! If you haven’t got a fresh patch in the seat of your pants, let’s see you prove it!”

“It was my other pants.” This wasn’t true; Trapper had been hide-creased across the back, but he let it go by.

“Now, that better be all you’re holding back, or I swear by the Almighty I’ll——”

It wasn’t all. “Well ... you know ... a minute ago, I asked you if Pap might be sliding into the dodders? All right. Let’s hear what you think of this.” Trapper picked a long timothy straw out of the fodder bales and chewed on it, speaking carefully, so that what he said next should be right. “Pap sent you a message. He says, ‘Tell Shep if he runs across our Norman mares, that Potter had, he’s to let on he doesn’t know ’em.’ ”

“Wha-at?”

“ ‘Make sure Shep understands that,’ he says, ‘because that’s an order!’ I says, ‘Pap, you sound like you know who took them mares.’ And he just says, ‘No, son, I don’t know.’ And he wouldn’t talk no more.”

Now Shep picked himself a straw and chewed on it, his eyes on the water.

“There’s a little more, of a sort,” Trapper said. “I cut a circle through the woods, looking for sign. The Potter boys already tried it, when the trail was fresh, but they can’t track nothing. So I tried it anyway, and sure enough I found where the mares was drove off. And, you know, after all that time—many weeks—I could still have trailed them critters? They’re so hootin’ big, they sink deep wherever they set foot on damp ground; then it dries, and the track stays forever, almost. Them big dinner-plate hoofs—I swear, a mortified skunk ain’t easier to foller. All you do, you keep leap-frogging ten-fifteen miles ahead, and look at all the river crossings. You’re bound to turn up sign of ’em.”

“And lose ’em at the first steamboat landing.”

“Maybe. Point is, Pap forbade I foller ’em. The Potters felt awful. That ain’t the first team they lost us, you realise. There was that fly-by-night Yankee banker, taken up that good team of ours for the Potter mortgage. And Pap only said he was glad the mares was there, to be took in place of their farm—and he turned around and loaned old Potter the Normans. You remember?”

“Yup.”

“So now, they just begged him to let me track. But Pap said, no, he’d handle it himself; and he promised them these mules I come for. And Old Man Potter, and the old woman, and both girls—they bawled, and hung on him and slobbered over him—it was sickening. And——”

“Who do they think done it?”

Trapper said the Potters wouldn’t talk much. And neither would other folks round and about. Either they knew, and it scared them, or they were scared to know. As for Pap, maybe he had some plan he wanted to work out and maybe he didn’t, but the way it looked to Trapper, Pap was another scared one.

“Trapper,” Shep said, “I’ve worked with Pap a long time; three years longer than you. If Pap’s scared, it’s something about losing either livestock or money. Because he don’t scare worth a river shrimp off a corpse, for anything other.”

“There’s something riding his mind,” Trapper insisted.

Though they didn’t look much alike, there were times when they moved so much the same that it was kind of ridiculous, once you noticed it. So now each took the straw out of his mouth, studied the end of it, and put it back.

“I’ll tell you what I think it is,” Trapper said, “if you want to know. These aren’t just peckerwoods, and swamp-runners, raising all this hell down there. It’s holdovers from all those kangaroo societies they whomped up when they was trying to clean out Kansas. Like the Blue Lodge, and the Sons of the South, and the Cavalry Club—you hear those names dropped down around Waynesville, right now. And next, whoever said it, he makes out it was a slip—he don’t know anything about it——”

“Look, Trapper. Some of the biggest men in Missouri set those societies up. Men like Governor Jackson, and General Stringfellow, and Jo Shelby——”

“Where there’s big men there’s big thieves.”

“I admit that. Some of them would steal a railroad, or a river, or a state. But horse thieves? No!”

“All right. But there was always plenty riffraff swarmed along too, for what there was in it. I figure they’re the ones on the road again now. I betcha every time some hellion off a big plantation runs short of cash he reaches for saddle and gun; and you think there ain’t plenty rednecks game to throw in with him?”

“And that’s the kind of hoot-owlers you think Pap is scared of? I never heard such——”

“I can name one rough-horn old raider Pap don’t want to rassle with. Name comes up about every third deal we make in Missouri.”

“Who’s that?”

“Tyler Ashland.”

Oh, Lord. I don’t know why I waste words on him. Every time I get the idea he’s finally growing up he trips over a fool-hen’s nest with a silly’s egg in it, and comes up with an outrage fit to stun you. But this whups his record. ... “No, sonny,” Shep said wearily. “Tyler Ashland did not make off with our mares. Nor he didn’t steal any pellets off a hen roost, nor any washing off the line, nor anybody’s green apples. Just take my word for it.”

“He run roughshod over Kansas, didn’t he? He helped burn down Lawrence, didn’t he? Got his oldest boy killed over there, I heard tell.”

“Look,” Shep said with great patience. “Those people were trying to save Kansas. They might have made the whole Union safe, only the Federal troops come in; and the Missourians wouldn’t fire on the flag. Any theory Tyler Ashland’s liable to turn around and steal Old Man Potter’s team—if you knew him you’d realise how ridiculous that sounds to me!”

But in the same moment that he said it Shep felt a prickle at the back of his neck, and when it was gone it left a chill. What had popped into his mind was Rodger Ashland, Tyler’s son, a scapegrace as hotheaded as his father and without his father’s brains.... He wasn’t going to speak of this to Trapper; but now his young brother stumbled on to it for himself.

“Well,” Trapper admitted doubtfully, “you know old Ty, and I don’t. Never saw him, I don’t believe. Saw his son, once, some rods off. Name of Rodger ... Say—there’s the kind of feller I mean it might be!”

“You don’t know him either.”

“No, but I sure heard plenty. Oh, he’s made a name! Wilder than his old man ever thought of being. All he does is go helling up and down the Mississippi, pistol duelling, rooster fighting, throwing money around—where does all that come from? I heard he’s keeping an octoroon woman in Natchez. Now think what that kind of yaller gal must cost to keep up. You think his old man’s shelling out for all that?”

Shep thought it over and had to admit it didn’t seem likely.

“Some say old Ty’s so mad he’s cut him off already. But if Rodge is riding nights—in the name of helping the South, of course—that would account for it, wouldn’t it?”

There it is. True or not don’t hardly make any never-minds, now this sprawl-haid young’un has tied on to it. Just one word of it, backtracked to us, and we’re through in Missouri. And every place else, most likely.

“Now, you look here!” he exploded, in a hopeless effort to put it out of Trapper’s mind. “That’s all a lot of blather, without a flyspeck of fact. But it’s also gunpowder, and we’ll mighty soon smell the smoke of it if you ever let drop a word!”

“Well, it sure fits in pretty good with the way Pap——”

“Shut up! Just one hint of such a notion, to anybody, and we’ll leave this country about one jump ahead of the fastest bloodhounds in Missouri! Forget the whole thing—you hear me?”

He turned his back on Trapper and went up the after-ladder. But he knew Trapper would not forget, and neither would he. Trapper’s theory was not a new one in Missouri. Among a thousand harsh contentions, full of unexpected split-ups, bitter divisions, feuds, and violences, you could hear every kind of charge and countercharge you wanted to—including Trapper’s. Useless even to weigh such rumours without you had certain knowledge of your own, and most likely that was the last thing you wanted. But ...

New thing now was Pap’s strange caution. All his life the old man had been game to walk through the middle of a fist fight between God and the devil without batting an eye. Yet, plainly, there was something about this thing Pap was afraid to probe into—if he wasn’t pretty sure of the answer already; Trapper was right, and an involvement of Rodger Ashland would explain it. Trapper talked a lot of nonsense, but he had blundered on to a pattern.

Shep didn’t suppose that Rodger Ashland himself had raided the little Potter family. Too much long-shot coincidence in that. But it didn’t need to be Rodge, for at least a dozen families of the planting aristocracy on the Missouri had wild rattle-brained sons, habitually short of throwaway money and resentful that they had missed the big raids into Kansas. Any one of those clans could make Missouri too hot for the Danielses if they imagined a threat to the family name. Maybe none of them had had anything to do with the Potter raid at all, but Pap believed that some such people were leading bands of raiders sometimes, that in itself might make him afraid to know.

The hell with it. Pap wants to handle it by himself, so let him. Got nothing to do with me, and most likely never will. Best thing is put it out of my mind.

Then suddenly an unaccustomed pessimism overwhelmed him, and his belief in his own luck left him like the bottom dropping out of a bucket. Whatever was the worst thing that could happen took on the aspect of the only thing likely, or even possible. Of course Rodger Ashland was night riding, if anybody was; he would be the first of his kind to rush into it. Undercover, on pious pretexts, and without the knowledge of his father—but playing reckless hell to his own profit just the same....

From that moment Shep was certain in his heart, as certain as he would ever be, that Rodger Ashland personally, and no other, would someday be their comeuppance in Missouri.

“You didn’t bring your brother up,” Julie reproached him.

“Couldn’t. An accident happened to his other pants.”

“Well, I think you’re mean to him. Now you get him out of those smelly stockpens, you hear?”

“Yes, mam.” Shep went below, picked four mules to go south, and set Trapper ashore.