Читать книгу Parade of the Empty Boots - Charles Alden Seltzer - Страница 4

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Clara Burleigh had been awakened by the noises that Colonel Burleigh had heard in his dreams. Unlike her father, she had not heard the splashing of paddle wheels; and when, disturbed and startled, she got out of her berth to lift a shade at one of the windows, she did not see the running lights of a steamer. She heard a thumping, as if dozens of floating logs were striking the steamer; she heard hoarse voices, and scuffling, and the pattering of feet, bare or moccasined, on the upper deck.

All along she had mistrusted the boatman to whom her father had given the gold pieces, and now, with a dawning consciousness of the nearness of tragedy, she swiftly slipped a lounging robe over her night garments, opened the stateroom door, ran through a short passageway, to reach the upper deck in time to see a blur of figures near the rail, to hear a thud and a savage voice saying: “That settles yo’, damn yo’!” She screamed and ran toward the blur of figures, frenziedly striving to tear her way through them to reach her father, but a dozen arms seized her, held her, and raucous laughter smote her ears. Bodies pressed against her in an ever-tightening compress; heads were close to hers; she heard the heavy breathing of excitement, the voices of easy, sudden triumph. She was smothered by the weight of men crowding close to her; she was panting wildly in the grip of their arms, yet in her frenzy of anxiety she fought them desperately, crying out for her father.

“You’ve killed him!” she cried. “Oh! You’ve killed him!”

Loud laughter arose from the press around her.

“I reckon he air dead enough!” declared a voice.

She must have fainted then, for when she again became conscious she was lying in her bunk in her stateroom, which was crowded with men who were staring at her in the light of the wall lamp. They were all grinning at her; hugely they were enjoying the amazed terror in her eyes as she comprehended what was happening and what had happened. The men were of various shapes and sizes; they were tattered, unkempt, with long hair and beards, but with increasing terror she noted that their eyes all seemed to carry the same expression—an avid greediness, a cold cruelty, a gargantuan satisfaction over her predicament, of the knowledge lying naked in her eyes—that she was afraid of them. They were watching her with hawklike intensity, laughing, and she felt that while she had been unconscious they had been discussing her, looking at her. They were pressing close to her bunk, and when a man with a leering face reached out a hand to touch her bosom, which she had involuntarily covered with her night robe the instant she had returned to consciousness, she slapped his grinning face with all her strength, whereat the others roared with laughter and jibed the culprit, who scowled with rage and embarrassment.

“Yo’ better keep yore hands offen her, Bill,” said one of the men. “She’ll be Forbush’s gal, I reckin. He’ll bust yo’ wide open ef yo’ go to monkeyin’ with her. Besides, yo’ got a wife and a batch o’ young ’uns.”

“My father!” cried Clara. “Where is he? What has happened to him?” She tried to get out of the bunk but was forcibly shoved back into it, and she sat up, staring at them helplessly.

“Thet was yore dad, eh?” said a voice whose owner grinned wickedly. “Wa-ll, yo’ don’t need to worry none about him. He’s as dead as the rest of them.”

They had killed the crew too. Suddenly realizing the truth of it all, the dread finality of it—that it was beyond her power to do anything about it—she covered her eyes with her hands to shut out the sight of the horrible, grinning faces of the fiends who had done the murders. Her crying stopped the laughter, and it trailed off to low, sober comment, some of which she heard. After a while, a long while, she looked up to see that only two of the men remained in the cabin. They were huge and powerful, and when they saw her looking at them they grinned at her hideously, with appalling significance.

“Feel like movin’ now?” asked the larger of the two.

“Where am I going?” she said defiantly.

“Yo’ air goin’ with us. We-all air takin’ yo’ to the shore, whar Forbush is waitin’ fer yo’.”

Twice she had heard this name.

“Who is Forbush?”

The men looked at each other, grinning.

“Yo’ll find thet out soon enough, I reckin,” said the tall man. “I swear he’ll be tickled to see yo’. Ef he ain’t, then Vauchain will, or maybe Craftkin.” He eyed her critically. “Yo’re purty, ma’am, and them’s the kind Forbush and the Leopard likes. Craftkin ain’t so pertickeler.” He made a gesture of impatience. “Git into yore duds,” he added.

“I’ll be glad to, if you will leave me alone.”

“Kain’t do it, ma’am.” They both grinned again, horribly. “We got orders not to let yo’ out of our sight, and we aim to do as we’re told. Effen yo’ don’t put yore duds on we’ll hev’ to take yo’ without any clothes. We’ll turn our backs, won’t we, Clell?” They grinned and winked at each other.

There was no help for it, she knew, so when the men turned their backs to her she swiftly slipped out of the berth and began to dress. Only once during the process did the men violate their pledge to her, and upon that occasion a small water pitcher hurtled through the air, missing Clell’s head by inches. It was shattered against the wall. The next time they looked she had finished.

They took her down the passageway to the lower deck, holding her tightly by the arms, evidently divining that she might attempt to break away to search for her father, which thought was in her mind. The lower deck swarmed with dark figures which were moving about loading everything of probable value into the various punts which floated alongside. Here and there stood other men, holding pine flares which lighted the scene grotesquely. Boxes, barrels, packages, crates and the inevitable miscellany were carried over the side and loaded into the punts. Then, while one of the men held Clara, the other climbed into an empty punt, and presently she was in the punt, too, with one of the men holding her while the other poled the craft into the darkness beyond the flickering light of the flares.

Clara now cared little where the men were taking her, and as the punt moved off into the darkness she stared at the steamer, reluctant to leave her father’s body, hoping wildly that he had not been killed after all, crying again, fighting the man who held her, desperately striving to leap overboard and swim back to the craft to find her father. The scarecrow forms that moved about the vessel in the light of the pine flares seemed like demons dancing in ghoulish glee over the destruction they had wrought. The punt moved swiftly into a wall of blackness, the steamer growing ever more distant, until at last Clara could see only the lights of the pine flares. The punt must have veered around a bend in the river, for suddenly the lights vanished.

A few minutes later the punt grounded upon a shallow, and her captor lifted her, swung her around in front of him, stepped off into the water and carried her up a slope, the second man following. The men had uncanny sense of direction or they were familiar with their surroundings, for they had brought her to the road that paralleled the shore line, to finally run inland—the road she and her father had seen from the steamer. She could feel its hard surface through the thin soles of the light shoes she wore.

For a time the two men stood there, holding her, seeming to listen. Then one of them called loudly:

“Forbush! Whar air yo’?”

Instantly a deep voice answered, “Here!” and Clara heard someone moving toward them. It was very still here, with the peculiar moist atmosphere of the swamp heavily enveloping her, and Clara could hear horses impatiently stamping, their hoofs thudding into the damp clay of the road. And then she felt a new presence near her, and a deep voice, low and pleasant, was saying:

“It’s Clell and Dexter, isn’t it?”

“Shuah is,” answered the tall man. “She’s right yere.” He seemed to know exactly where Forbush stood, for he pushed Clara forward, straight into Forbush’s arms, which closed gently around her, and then firmly, as if to make certain that she did not escape him.

He was a big man, and powerful, for though she struggled to escape, he held her easily, laughing at her.

“There, there,” he said. “Don’t try to get away. You couldn’t go very far, you know. There is swamp all around us, full of snakes and quicksand. Just be quiet now. No one is going to harm you.”

He stood for a short space, holding her, one hand lightly brushing her shoulders and her head, as if he sought by that method to determine her height and size. Then he spoke shortly to the two men who had brought her, telling them to go back to the steamer to help the others transfer the cargo to the punts. When he heard the punt shove off he lifted Clara in his arms and began to move slowly along the road. She fought him to no avail. He carried her easily, lightly, as if she were a child. Much as she loathed him for the part he was playing in this drama of violence and bloodshed, she felt he was mentally and physically superior to the depraved, vile and unclean clan aboard the steamer. The cloth of his garments was smooth and satiny, and when she had fought him back there where he had lifted her to carry her away, her hands had come into contact with a silk stock around his neck and with a ruffled shirt bosom. Her fingers had also gripped his hair, which was thick and curly.

All her sensations were subconscious. Overwhelming everything was a sickening and bewildering knowledge of loss, which made even her capture by the uncouth clan and her subsequent delivery to Forbush trivial incidents. She had not been afraid of any of them. She was not afraid of Forbush as he swung her upward, into what, she thought, was a wagon seat, and mounted beside her, still holding her arms.

They sat there in the darkness for a little space, saying nothing. Horses were hitched to the wagon; she could hear them stamping, could hear the creaking of the harness, the tugging of the wagon tongue.

“You are trembling,” said Forbush. “Let me put my cloak over you.” Which he did, and drew her closer to him, without her caring. She was crying again and whispering her grief, saying over and over again, “Father, Father, oh, Father!”

“That won’t help,” said Forbush. “It won’t bring him back. I didn’t want them to do it, but they were too many for me.”

There was no comfort in words, no matter how sympathetic and persuasive. She paid little attention to what Forbush said to her, for this terrible experience had dazed her to incoherence, to dull apathy. She no longer cared to know what was happening to her, around her or near her. She did not know how long she sat upon the wagon seat with Forbush holding her. She heard voices—the voices of the unclean and depraved clan, close to her and from a distance—the hateful voices. She heard punts grounding upon the shore, the rattle of poles, the clanking and thudding of collisions at the water’s edge. She heard curses as men heaved heavy boxes and crates into the wagon, and after a while she saw the darkness lift as gray dawn stole into the sky. One by one, then, she made out the shapes of half a dozen other wagons with teams of horses hitched to them, strung out upon the road in front of the one in which she was sitting with Forbush. She looked up, when the light became strong enough, to see Forbush—tall, muscular, darkly handsome, his black curly hair showing under the brim of his felt hat, his white teeth gleaming, his gray eyes smiling at her. She turned away from him, shuddering at something she had seen in him, and stared back over the water at the Clara Belle. She saw tongues of flame writhing here and there, licking the rails of the upper deck, and black smoke rising to drift away in the wind. She screamed, bowed her head and covered her face with her hands. The wagons started to move.