Читать книгу Long Storm - Ernest Haycox - Страница 5

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ADAM MUSICK whistled for the Oak Street wharf at three o'clock and brought the Daisy McGovern softly against the piling. Lou Bradshaw and Emmett Callahan made the lines fast and the down-river passengers left the boat; then George Pope came from the engine room and the four men hustled a short load of freight ashore. Afterwards Musick took the Daisy across the river and nosed into the bluff at Pierpont's to take on wood for the next day's trip. It was six o'clock before the Daisy returned to the Oak Street landing for her night's berth.

Musick descended from the pilothouse to record the day's business in the purser's office while George Pope finished his engine room chores and Bradshaw and Callahan washed down the decks. The four of them made a partnership in the Daisy McGovern and they all worked extremely long hours rather than to spend money on extra help. This, Musick thought as he posted his books, was the way it was generally in Portland; the country was still young and everybody was in a fever to become rich by seizing the chances around him. They could wait until they were older to slow down and enjoy themselves. Then, in the back of his head, a thought had its way with him: If we're able to enjoy anything by that time.

He moved into the saloon where Callahan and Bradshaw were arguing over supper. George Pope presently came up to join the argument. These three lived on the boat and did their own cooking, and seldom agreed on what they wanted to eat. Callahan said: "I'll go get a chunk of fish."

"Get meat," said George Pope. "We had fish last night."

Bradshaw said, "Good trip today," and a brief pleasure warmed his eyes. He was lean and dry and preoccupied, with a narrow face and small eyes set deep. "How much we taken in?"

"About nine hundred dollars," said Musick.

"It'll be like that all summer," said Bradshaw. "If that's our freight in the shed we should wrestle it abroad tonight."

"Hell with it," stated Callahan. "I'm going to Dennison's for some fun tonight."

"You're a fool with your money," said Bradshaw. Callahan's smile roughened his cheeks. "I like a drink and a laugh and a woman once in a while. Don't you?"

"Four bits admission," said Bradshaw, "a round of drinks for a dollar—and maybe the woman's expensive. Ain't worth the price."

Musick half listened to this invariable argument and half read the day's copy of the Oregonian. George Pope nursed a cigar in silence, neither amused nor interested. He had his mind on the Daisy's machinery.

"Well," said Callahan, "it is few enough years that a man can get drunk and wake up next mornin' feelin' fine. And it's only when a man's young that he can catch the fancy of a woman. I'm an ugly scoundrel anyhow. I'll be a damned sight uglier five years from now. I'll be good and save money when women stop smilin' at me."

He stepped to the bar at the saloon's fat end and brought back a bottle of whisky and four glasses; he poured the drinks around and lifted his drink toward the light and regarded it with warm interest. Musick, reading down the paper's columns, said aloud: "Dolly Rawl and her troupe of entertainers leave Portland for the mines, via the Julia, tomorrow morning."

"That will draw passengers to the Julia," said Callahan.

"Why?" asked Bradshaw.

Callahan burst into laughter. "Ah God, Lou, is there no blood in you at all?"

Musick, continuing with the Oregonian, had come upon an editorial which interested him. "Listen," he said:—

"We have communications from the East to the effect that the Knights of the Golden Circle—that despicable secret tool of the Confederacy—is again resurgent after a period of inactivity enforced by some excellent detective work by the Government's Mr. Pinkerton. One crop of Knights having been harvested to prison, another crop now has arisen. As an organization it never has been extinguished. It has its chapters throughout the north and enrolls as members those disaffected people who are outright Southern sympathizers, or belligerent Northern States' rights believers, or those gentry who have no honest faith but who stand to profit politically or otherwise by a breakup of this Union, or those who hate Mr. Lincoln. To all of them the issue is clear: This Union must be dissolved by any means.

"Citizens may suppose we are exempt in Oregon from such an organization. They are mistaken. There are Knights in this state, and Knights in this town. Of that we have been privately assured. This state is Union, and will demonstrate that fact at the June election. But let nobody suppose there are not men desperately working to effect a separation of the coast states from this Union. Senator Gwyn's idea of a separate Pacific Republic is still a glittering charm to foolish eyes; and there are enough Southerners up and down the coast to wish for an actual alliance of the coast states to the Southern cause. Either event would be the final disaster to this Union, and none know it better than those who seek such dissolution. The stakes are high, the men bold. This is another battlefield and we must expect trouble. Its nature we cannot know, but its eventual appearance we must look for and resist."

"And who would such men be, walkin' our town?" wondered Callahan. "I do not know anybody who is not Union. If I found one I'd break his damned head."

"We might come to that," said Musick.

Bradshaw said: "Keep out of politics. It's not good for business. It makes enemies. We got trouble enough running this boat against the Navigation Company. It would be foolish to add any more trouble."

"Lou," said Callahan, "if you cut yourself you'd bleed vinegar."

"You know what we've got here?" said Bradshaw. "We've got a million dollars if we can stick it out. The mining boom is good for five years. We've got a fortune, if the monopoly don't squeeze us."

Callahan, having heard all this many times before, shrugged his shoulders. "I'll get steaks."

"Thick ones," said Pope.

Musick left the saloon with Callahan and paused on the dock to run his glance along the Daisy's hull and superstructure, observing that there would need to be some patching presently done on the forward deck. They had bought her cheap from Collins and Thompson in San Francisco who had found her small size unprofitable on the Sacramento. She was half the size of the Carrie which lay at the dock below; she was narrow-beamed and of small carrying capacity and sometimes handled roughly in the short rollers which chopped up the river in bad weather. But since she was small she was not regarded as serious competition by the Navigation Company, which was jealous of its monopoly; so far the Company had not troubled the Daisy by the usual device of lowering freight and passengers rates to the breaking point. Thus, for carrying the surplus traffic up the river—that traffic which the monopoly could not immediately handle—the Daisy was ideal; and on the run between Portland to the Cascades she could at any time beat the Carrie or the Julia by a full twenty minutes.

Callahan murmured: "We've had enough of her for one day," and moved on.

Musick followed, saying: "We'll have the graveyard filled by fall." The graveyard was what they owed Collins and Thompson for the Daisy.

"It will be a blessing," said Callahan. "We're working longer days than I like. But we'll never make Bradshaw's million. The monopoly will let us eat and make day wages. It will never let us get any bigger."

"There's another way of looking at it," said Musick. "If we stay small they can wipe us out whenever it suits them. If we get big they might not like a fight."

They crossed the levee and came into a yellow pool of lamplight lying before the Nugget Saloon. Rain came steadily on and wind rushed heavily over the town's housetops; night's blackness squeezed down with its weight and its loneliness. Stragglers moved along the street, roving in and out of the town's fifty-five saloons, and already there was music in Dennison's Opera House. Emmett Callahan stopped as though a hand had seized him and he laughed in the softest way, his eyes turned toward a woman emerging from the darkness. It was Emily von Gratz, an umbrella tipped before her. She gave Callahan a glance, and then she stared at Musick and held his attention a moment. She said, "You both look dog-tired."

Callahan's smile grew brilliant. "Not now, Emily, not now." He had been a lonely man until this moment, but suddenly he became buoyant with what was in him. There was nothing mean on that roughly built face; there was only a stirred gentleness.

"You're a hard Irishman," she murmured, and went on.

Emmett laughed and stabbed a thumb into Musick's chest. "We work too much," he said and moved toward The Shades Saloon.

Musick continued north, following Pine's black lane.

House lights formed crystal squares at wet windows but none of this light reached the dismal street. The rank odors of Pounder's livery came through the building's open arch, as well as the sound of drunken men idly arguing. At Seventh he turned through the Barnes's gate, now catching the rough and tumble report of the wind in the timber at the edge of town. He let himself into the front room's warmth and heard Lily's voice come from the kitchen. "That you, Adam?"

"Yes," he said and moved over the room, to pause at the kitchen's doorway. He had both hands plunged in the front pockets of his jacket and his hat shadowed his features—the meaty, creased lips, the heavy nose and mouth, the gray-blue eyes. He had been up since four that morning and he was tired; he had Callahan on his mind: Callahan's warning that they were all working too hard, Callahan's laughter when looking upon Emily. He watched Lily's hands move over the pans on the stove, the turning of her body, the evenness of her expression. Abruptly he had a picture of her lying in bed with her face against the black background of her unpinned hair.

"Was it a good day, Adam?"

He walked on to the back porch. He hung up his hat and jacket and rolled back his sleeves. "Best this year," he said and brought the wash basin to her. She filled it from the teakettle and gave him her first moment of undivided attention. Her eyes were as gray as his own, and they had for him a certain impersonal interest. As long as he had boarded here—six months—she never had varied that manner.

He took the basin to the rear porch, spraddled his legs and washed in a noisy thorough way. He combed his hair, had a look at himself in the cloudy porch mirror, and stepped back to the kitchen. He stood by the stove, liking the warmth against his muscles.

"You need a hair cut."

"I'll have to bring the Daisy in early some day."

"The Daisy's a hard woman," she said.

"That's what Callahan said tonight. He wondered why we worked the way we did. Emily von Gratz came by and Callahan got philosophy when he saw her."

Another woman, Edith Thorpe for instance, would have made some sort of a gesture to cover up the indelicacy of the subject. Lily was neither shocked nor pretended to be. She had either a charity or an indifference in the matter which was probably the result of her father's training. Webley was an educated, defeated man whose views were unlike his neighbor's views.

"Did she look at you, as well as at Callahan?"

"She looked at both of us," he said. "I suppose it made no great difference to her."

"A woman can't look at two men without having a preference."

"She's past the point of choice, isn't she?"

"Unless she moved to another town and started fresh."

"It would catch up with her," he said.

She glanced at him, murmured, "Are you sure?" and turned from him to push her pans to a cooler part of the stove. "Dad's not home."

He heard the change of tone and he knew what it meant; he went to the rear porch for his coat and cap. "Where'll I look first?"

"The Pioneer, probably."

He returned to the night's hard fat rainfall. The wind once more had gathered itself, moving up from the southwest in storm force and creating a destructive racket of the timber west of the town's edge. A wash basin fell from somebody's porch and rolled erratically along the walk, and at the intersection of Front and Pine he observed all sorts of debris—paper and chunks of shingles and snapped-off fir stems—floating in the loose mud. The gold seekers who this day had arrived via the steamer Brother Jonathan now crowded the saloons and billiard rooms and hotels, passing restlessly from one place to another. They stood in dismal groups beneath the street's occasional board awnings; he heard them cursing both the weather and the country as he went by.

At Washington he crossed over, entered the Pioneer's over- crowded saloon, and discovered Webley Barnes alone at a table. He sat down opposite Barnes. Liquor had shaken Webley Barnes loose from his restraint; it had brought him to that stage where his vision was too clear, to the point where he saw the world and himself too well. He was not more than forty and inoffensively vain of his appearance; he was a handsome man, his features flexible and sensitive rather than rugged, and he took care to keep himself well-clothed and well-kept.

"I know," said Barnes, "I should go home. Have a drink first."

Musick rose and fetched an extra glass from the bar. He poured his whisky and refilled Barnes's glass. He made a gesture at Barnes, drank his liquor straight down, and sat back in the chair to give the other man time to pull himself together. There was nothing new in this scene. For as long as a month Barnes might maintain his pose as a brisk businessman; then, as though he had forced himself too long, his vitality ran out, strangeness came upon him and he turned to the Pioneer to drink himself into the blackest kind of a tunnel. It was a cycle which never failed.

"What about tomorrow's passengers?" asked Musick.

"Half a load."

"I'm pretty hungry, Webley," said Musick, rising.

Barnes looked regretfully at the whisky bottle. "Don't suppose you want another drink?" He stood up and remained still until Musick came around and got his arm. The two pushed through the crowd to the street, crossed the intersection and made their way beneath the densely driving rain. Most of Barnes's weight was against Musick. Suddenly his odd fancies began to pour out of him.

"Barbaric land. Dark—deep—wet land. Siwashes sitting in a log house, naked and unclean by their fire. You see their red eyes through their rotten hair. You smell 'em. They crouch and eat their dog meat with their fingers and itch their flea bites. They sleep in their dirty blankets. Some kind of a pagan god threatens them with thoughts of punishment, but they don't believe it too much. They've got some kind of a happy land hereafter with plenty to eat and a lot of sunshine. But they don't believe that too much either. We white people eat better and keep cleaner, but we don't believe in our gods much more than they do. It is a beast of a world. There's no difference in their lot and ours, except we are not bitten as badly by the fleas."

"Sure," said Adam. "Sure."

"Life's not much to them. They go out and kill each other. We think that's savage but we kill each other in slower ways. They buy a woman with a horse and a blanket and a string of beads. We think that's indecent. But the string of beads works for us, too, if the beads come from Amsterdam and flash in the light."

"That all there's to it, Webley?"

They went across Second, across Third and Fourth, before Webley Barnes answered.

"Well, there's a beautiful light in the world, but nobody will see it. We are miserable, stupid, cheating, senseless animals."

The wet, wild night should have sobered him, but it did not. He had taken in too much whisky; his mind functioned, his muscles failed. At Seventh and Oak he was no longer able to walk. Musick lifted him like a sack of potatoes in his arms and carried him the rest of the way. It had happened like this before, and Lily, knowing what it might be like, waited at the door for them. Musick climbed the stairs and laid Barnes on a bed. Lily came in with a lamp, and the two of them stood over the bed, looking down on Webley Barnes, whose face had turned pale and loose. He opened his eyes. He said: "Don't feel bad, Lily. Don't ever let anybody get inside you and hurt you. Keep everybody outside. Don't love too much. Don't hate too much. Don't hope too much." He stared at them and he added in an exhausted, futile voice, "You are better than they are. God damn their pretentions and their snobbery and their cat claws. You're better."

He closed his eyes and was dragged down into a partial sleep whose wild vision shook him and made him whimper. Lily put a hand on his forehead. She bent over him, her voice dropped to a whisper. "Nothing's wrong—nothing's wrong." Adam Musick watched her face, arrested by the heavy softness of her lips, by the affection so clearly there. But there was no softness in her eyes. They were distressed, they were dark.

"I'll put him to bed," he said. After she had gone he pulled off Webley Barnes's wet clothes and rolled him under the cover. He opened a window to let in the raw wind and he lowered the light until Barnes's face was a white and wondering mask in the shadows.

He went down to supper in the kitchen and sat across from Lily. The calm remained with her and he had the feeling that nothing he could do, or any man could do, would break it. She was a mystery to him and perhaps she meant to be—locking herself away from those things which had destroyed so much of her father. The handsomeness of her father had come to her and he suspected she possessed a love of life as strong as her father's. Somewhere and somehow Webley had been betrayed and disillusioned by it; she meant not to be betrayed.

"Whose cat claws?" he asked.

"I don't know."

"Something bit him. Too bad."

"He's asleep. He's happy."

"No way of changing him?"

"Why try? His life's been sad. He had a good education but never found a way of using it. He inherited money and lost it. He loved my mother, but she only lived two years after they were married. Everything he touched went bad. Now he's afraid to touch anything. I'm all that's left, and he's afraid he'll do something that will hurt me. That's what he was talking about. Let him drink, if it helps him. I don't mind. It's his life."

"Who would want to hurt you?"

She had no answer; she remained beyond the reach of his curiosity. He helped himself to fresh coffee from the stove and ate his pie. He sat back to enjoy the fragrance of his pipe and, to feel weariness comfortably loosen him. The heat and the meal made him heavy-lidded. He spread his heavy legs under the table and relaxed on the chair. Light set up a metal glitter on his day's growth of whiskers.

She said: "Better make your call and come back to bed. ''Your day is too long."

"Callahan said that. He said he had to hear Dennison's minstrels."

"I'd like to hear them too."

"That place is not for you."

"Is it wrong to sit where people are laughing?"

He opened his eyes fully. "Would you go if I took you?"

"Yes."

He got up and was not pleased with her. "I wouldn't take you."

"I knew that."

He stood by, watching her body sway and turn as she moved about the room. He watched the slight changes of her face, the quickening, the loosening, the small expressions coming and going. She kept at her work, but she knew he was watching her.

"I don't know you," he said, "when you talk like that."

"What good would it do you to know me? Better go make your call."

Musick put on his jacket and cap, listening to the rising beat of the storm. He walked to the door, filled his pipe and discovered that he had no great desire to go out; yet he was restless.

Lily said: "Don't you want to see her?"

"Maybe it is Dennison's I need tonight."

"That's for those who have no other place to go. I'm surprised at you."

He turned about and found her watching him. In another woman, and once more he thought of Edith Thorpe, right and wrong were like the well memorized rules of a game. Edith knew the rules and was quick to call them. Lily seemed not to care about rules, but he could not be sure, since he could not penetrate her guard. He thought she was lonely and that many warm things stirred and unsettled her; but neither was he certain of this. Turning, he left the house.

Half a minute after Ringrose left the Pioneer's bar, Mr. Perley McGruder—whose glance had struck up a fragment of memory in Ringrose's head—moved from the barroom to the hotel lobby and let himself into the street by the hotel's main door. The street lamps had recently been lighted to give some relief against the onset of a squalling nasty night; a few townsmen walked abroad, muffled and bent against the southwester's violence. Ringrose was by that time halfway down the adjoining block, traveling toward the northern quarter of town. Mr. McGruder observed him for a moment, lifted his coat collar, and set out on a discreet job of shadowing. He crossed Washington, turned and crossed Front and walked along the dark face of the buildings on the west side of Front, in this manner having a better observation of Ringrose diagonally over the way.

At Stark Mr. McGruder settled against a building wall, noting that Ringrose had wheeled into a saloon farther along. This appeared to be a matter of waiting under extremely disagreeable circumstances; for no matter how he turned and slanted or hitched his short broad body, he could not keep the wind-driven rain away. It trickled down inside his collar, it fell from the brim of his hat as a miniature waterfall, it collected on his beard and spread inside his shirt, it soaked his boots until they were as soft as moccasins. Mr. McGruder experienced a mild form of outrage at such weather; it was the sort of thing which deserved mention in a letter to the editor of the local paper. Absorbing the bitter nourishment of his sodden cigar, he was phrasing such a letter in his mind when Ringrose came from the saloon, retraced his way to Stark, stopped to have a look around him, and went up Stark to another saloon.

He was obviously making a tour of the town's bars for particular reasons. Mr. McGruder gave up the job and returned to his room in the Pioneer to wring as much of the night's moisture as possible out of his clothes and his beard. Then he descended to supper, detouring by way of the bar to insure himself against the chills; following supper, he climbed to the room and sat down to compose a letter.

Allen Rusk

Sansome Street

San Francisco, California

Honored Sir:

Our Subject left The Dalles via horse two days ago. I judged he would go to Portland and, acting upon that Decision, I took boat for this town. My Decision was correct. He is here, now touring the various saloons with the intent of making connection with other Knights. In the bar of this hotel I overheard him drop the Password but made no contact.

You may infallibly trust my discretion and energy in the Matter. There has been no public Act of his in the past thirty days which I have not witnessed. As soon as he establishes connections I shall certainly know of it. I am convinced that his major business will be here. I do not know what is afoot but I believe it to be Grave and shall bend every effort to ascertain it. I flatter myself that I shall succeed in this instance as I have in the past. You may inform Washington telegraphically of my whereabouts and efforts. There is an Election here in June and I am certain all things must boil before then. It would be a good thing if Washington might check that end to discover how great are the Sums of Money being supplied our Subject. The greater the Amount, the greater their Intentions here undoubtedly will be. I am, Sir,

Y'r Ob't H'mble S'v't.

Perley Mcgruder

Agent

He sealed the communication, placed it in his coat pocket and gave a great belch; then he drew his chair to the room's window so that he might command a view of the nearest intersection, drew and lighted a cigar, and settled to his watch.