Читать книгу Where Your Treasure Is - Holman Day - Страница 6

Table of Contents

I TRUST you have noted, by this time, that my yarn is not a mere chronicle of disconnected incidents. Linked circumstances seemed to be tying me up. One happening had pushed me on to another and I had allowed myself to be pushed. It might be urged, of course, that I had no business in inciting a mob to play hob with Mr. Bird—but I had my own interests to consider, and I had been listening to my uncle’s teachings on the subject of looking out for number one.

“You know what happened to your father when he went to running his legs off on somebody else’s business,” he told me. “If it hadn’t been for me helping him in his other scrapes, your mother would have been playing hungryman’s ratty-too on the bottom of the flour-barrel oftener than she did. I hope you’ve got an ambition to be somebody and to have something.”

I did have, but you may be sure I did not tell my uncle that my principal hankering to get money was so that I might lay it at the feet of Zebulon Kingsley’s daughter.

Now, by the expressed wish of that daughter, I started out to control happenings and to set myself in new ways.

I passed the word to the Skokums, keeping my promise to Celene.

I was obliged to be indefinite, for I was guarding that little secret between her and myself as my most precious treasure.

As I remember it, I put it to the gang this way: “We ought to behave ourselves and protect the good name of the town.” They laughed at me and asked me if I had joined Judge Kingsley’s Sunday-school class.

I knew they didn’t suspect the truth, nevertheless that dig nearly put me out of countenance on account of the secret I was cherishing. I blushed and stammered and I lost my grip then and there as a leader—and it was the same old story—it was on account of a girl. A girl does rattle the gear of man-business!

One of the fellows remarked that I was getting almighty pious after I had used them to clean up my own dirty job. He said the most of them had matters of their own which needed attention, and wanted to know if I proposed to sneak out on them after all the help they had given me.

I told them that I had thought the thing over carefully and had decided that what we had done to Mr. Bird was not right or lawful and we’d better make no more mistakes.

“Then perhaps you want us to correct that mistake and make up a bee and carry the furniture back to the old cuss,” suggested one of the Sortwell boys.

When I failed to welcome that notion they turned on me in good earnest, and in my own heart I had to admit, looking on the surface of the thing, that they had good reason for thinking that I was both selfish and ungrateful.

In the Sixth Reader, at school, I had found the story of Frankenstein’s monster. I saw that in organizing the Skokums I had built a lively little monster of my own.

“I have a special and a private reason for asking you to quit and be good, boys,” I told them.

“A member who keeps his private and special reasons to himself and doesn’t trust the rest of us isn’t much of a help in time of trouble,” said Ben Pratt. “I have never taken a whole lot of stock in you, Ross Sidney, and now I take less than ever before.”

From remarks which were dropped I gathered that the rest of them held similar sentiments.

“They’re going to have a detective in here,” I told them.

“Who said so?”

But that was Celene Kingsley’s secret.

I had hoped that the threat might scare them. It had just the opposite effect; the boys of Levant had never seen a detective, but they had read every five-cent thriller on the subject. To be the object of a real detective’s attention seemed like glorious adventure—and they were sure that they were, when on their own prowling-grounds, match for any sleuth who ever dodged behind trees.

But I had stood up before her and had beaten fist upon my breast and had assured her that she could trust all to me. What sort of a knight was I to wear lady’s favor and then fail to do and dare in her behalf?

“I had hoped that you knew me better and that I stood higher with you fellows,” I said. “I’ll admit that you did a big job for me, and I am grateful. But you all had your fun out of it, for you have said so, over and over. You’ll have to admit something, yourselves; you’ll have to own up that we are ashamed of what we did to poor old Bangs. If you keep on you’ll do other things to be ashamed of. I’m advising you to stop.”

“We don’t want your advice,” said Ben.

“Then you’ll get something from me which you’ll like a blamed sight less than advice.”

Plainly they were hungry for information.

“What’ll that be?” asked one of the Sortwell boys.

“Try on any more of your doodle-busting in this town and you’ll find out,” I said. Then I left them and went home.

Some bright chap has made a simile about having as much privacy as a goldfish. At any rate, by leading an open life, one may be in a position to prove an alibi.

I took to spending my evenings in the bar-room of the Levant Tavern.

That was by no means such a roystering sort of a life as it sounds to be. They used to sell liquor in the tavern in the old stage-coaching days, when the place was a post station; the little catty-cornered bar is there in the big room, its worn wood shiny from the dragging of rough fists and from many scrubbings; behind is the cupboard, with wavy glass set in diamond-shaped panes. But the cupboard was bare in my boyhood days and the shelves were dusty. Dodovah Vose, the landlord, was a teetotaler and believed in impressing that principle on others.

“I have seen what liquor will do and undo,” he said when he used to get on to the subject. “In my young days, when the West Injy trade flourished and rum held its place without blushing, I have set in meeting and seen the parson soop a sip of rum-and-water between the firstly and secondly, and so on. It may have improved him and the sermon—I’m not arguing. But do you think that liquor would ever have improved my brother Jodrey and made him the best deep-sea diver on the Atlantic coast, as he is to-day? No, gents! Where a man needs the strength of his arms, the full power of his ten fingers, the quickness of his brain, and the help of his lungs and a good heart—then he’d better let liquor alone. That’s what my brother says and he has been deeper underwater than any other man—and you can look around you and see some of the queer and wonderful things he has brought up for the peerusal of mankind.”

The old foreroom was really a storehouse of curious pickings and gleanings which had been sent up-country, from time to time, by the diver brother. It had been one of my earliest haunts, for I had always hit it off nicely with Dodovah Vose. I did not lark about the room or molest the curios, as other boys in the village sometimes did.

On the contrary, I always surveyed them with respect and interest; the awe I felt when I first laid eyes on them never left me, entirely. I have not been able to determine, exactly, whether my boyhood study of those objects inspired the hankering I developed, the burning desire to go down into the depths of the sea some day, or whether the queer things merely catered to my natural instinct in the matter. At any rate, I touched them reverently and I asked many questions of Landlord Vose and he told me hair-raising stories which, he said, his brother had told him. I remember that when I was so young I was still wearing a plaid kilt, I got down on all-fours and stuck my leg in the air at his request; he called it “playing circus,” and gave me a penny. He said I was a smart boy and allowed that a smart boy might grow up and be made a diver by Jodrey Vose. So there was an idea put into my head at an early age. And Dodovah Vose used to call me “Lobster Sidney”—a truly deep-water nickname! He had a rather droll idea of a joke—it was to prompt youngsters to go and make fools of themselves. My folks gave me the middle name of Webster. In order to plague the new schoolma’am, Dodovah Vose told me to insist on the first day of school that my name was Ross Webster Lobster Sidney—and I did, even though the boys in the school laughed themselves sick. Mr. Vose praised me because I had obeyed orders, and gave me a conch-shell on which, by the aid of three finger-stops, one could play more or less of a tune. He had already given to me a shell which whispered in my ear the everlasting murmuring of the great ocean I had never seen.

It was a big fountain-shell from somewhere in the West Indies, and it fairly boomed, deep in its spirals, when I held it to my ear; I sensed all the vastness and the mystery and the solemnity of the ocean depths. The more I listened the better acquainted I seemed to be with a wonderful stranger far away at the other end of a wire.

It really seemed like a call to bigger things, and my job with my uncle was getting less and less to my taste. If there’s any such thing as the angels looking down on earth over the parapets of heaven in their hours off duty, some of the things my uncle would do in horse trades, in order to get back at other cheaters, must have grieved the judicious in the upper spheres.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I can look back now and see how my lashings to the life in Levant were in the way of severance, one by one.

I found no comfort in the lull of Skokum activities; I reckoned that the boys were reorganizing and getting ready for a really big slam. I felt as a timid girl must, feel in a thunder-shower when the thing is right overhead and there’s an extra wait between claps.

I continued to visit the tavern evenings and I came, into closer intimacy with Dodovah Vose. He brought, out old letters written by his brother and read them to me. In one Jodrey Vose described his venture on the sunken British frigate Triton somewhere off the coast, of Nova Scotia. She was bringing pay to the Hessian troops in the American colonies, so old reports had it. Jodrey Vose was more of a diver than a writer and his, letter had no frills. He informed his brother, who had invested modestly in the gamble at Jodrey’s suggestion, that the thing was a failure, though the frigate had been located by dragging and Jodrey himself had gone down and explored her where she had lain for more than a century.

Diver Vose stated bluntly that he believed, from what; he saw down there, that the Triton had been scuttled or blown up by certain of her officers, who secured her treasure, escaped to the main in small boats and reported her loss in a storm; tradition has it that there was always considerable doubt about that storm. Also, tradition has it that those officers settled in America and lived happily ever after. Diver Vose tried to help pay expenses by raising the cannon. But though they seemed sound enough under the sea, they crumbled into lumpy masses after they were exposed to the air.

“But I never begrudged the money I put in,” Dodovah Vose told me. “I got my curiosity scratched where it had been itching for a good many years, ever since Jodrey and I first began to talk about the Triton. And I helped my brother get something off his mind. He wouldn’t have died easy if he hadn’t made sure about that treasure. I stand ready to invest in another scheme of his if he ever gets ready to tackle it. That’s to go down and dig in the bottom of the river Tiber, providing he can fix it with the town officers of Rome. As near as we can find out from history, Jodrey and I, when the Romans wasn’t throwing their treasures into the river to keep ’em away from one another in their civil wars, the barbarians were up to the same game, because they didn’t enjoy art. And, of course, there’s always the treasure of the Golden Gate! That’s in modern times.”

But it was not in times sufficiently modern so that I knew anything about it, as my blank stare showed.

“She caught fire on her way from San Francisco to the Isthmus and was run ashore with three or four million dollars’ worth of gold ingots in her. That’s fact! But Jodrey says there’s been so much blasted lying done since by owners, underwriters, divers, claimers, and others, that nobody knows for sure just what has become of the treasure. That’s another of his hankerings—to find out!”

More and more did I feel the spirit of adventure stirring in me!

I could not understand why the whereabouts of that great treasure should remain in doubt, and so I expressed myself to Mr. Vose.

“There’s some sort of a mystery about it—and so far’s my brother is concerned he can’t drop regular contracts to go chasing dreams—only once in so often. That Triton case made a hearty meal for his curiosity—he hasn’t been hungry for high-spiced stuff since.” He looked at me with shrewd kindness. “Maybe he’ll let you go on that job after he has made a diver out of you.”

I felt a flush in my cheeks.

“I suppose you have been poking a little fun at me all along when you have hinted at my being a diver, sir. Do you really believe your brother would give me a thought?”

“He might, if you went to him backed up with a letter from me.”

“I have a mind to ask you for that letter.”

“And you’ll not get it, my boy! I don’t propose to have your uncle Deck come yowling and clawing at me like an old tom-cat because I have coaxed his handy-Andy away from him.”

“I don’t like the kind of work he puts me to, Mr. Vose. I have grown up to be a man, almost, and I understand better than I did at first.”

“You understand, for instance, that when you took that cow away from Andrew P. Corson last week you left his baby without milk!” He stroked his nose and peered at me from under eyelids that were cocked like little tents.

“There was a bill of sale! He made me go and get the cow.”

“But do you know what your uncle did, after that?”

“No, sir!”

“He went to Andrew P. Corson and said you acted without orders. He lent Corson the money to buy another cow.”

I stammered out something about not understanding that.

“But I do,” said Landlord Vose. “Your uncle Deck wants to get into politics in this town—he wants to get into politics far enough so that he can do something to Judge Kingsley. He reckons you don’t need any popularity. He is starting you out with considerable of a handicap if you mean to live and prosper in your own town. However, I won’t do anything to encourage you to leave! I’ve got to keep on living in the town—alongside your uncle Deck!”

A flash of family loyalty prompted me to assert that my uncle was good to the poor.

“That he is,” said Dodovah Vose. “He is a queer man, your uncle is. But I don’t want to make a pauper of myself in order to curry favor with him.”

It came to me that I’d better have a talk with my uncle, and I started out, crossing the village square on my way home.

All at once something landed heavily and violently on my shoulders, and the attack was so sudden that I was borne to the ground with such a crack of my forehead on the hard earth that I became unconscious, but not until I had felt claws of some sort tearing at my cheeks.

When I came to my senses I was back in the tavern foreroom and Dodovah Vose was swabbing my face with a sponge wet in warm water. In a corner of the room Constable Nute and two helpers were hog-tying old Bennie Holt, the village fool.

“I ain’t a dove of peace no longer—I ain’t a rooster no longer,” he was squalling. “I’m a bald-headed eagle! They told me I’m an eagle. I allus knowed I was some kind of a fowl. They lied to me when they said I was a dove of peace. I’m an eagle. See what I’ve done! I’ve mallywhacked him. He made fun of me when I was a dove. Others made fun of me—but now they’d better look out. I’m an eagle.”

Whatever the old idiot had been or thought he had been, he was then plainly a raving maniac. In his struggles he was shedding turkey feathers with which he had thatched his coat. As far back as I could remember old Bennie Holt, he used to stand in the square with feathers of various sorts stuck around his hat, harmlessly indulging his vagary. But never before had he raised his hand against any human being.

“I reckon that this time you fired a boomerang, young Sidney,” stated the constable, reproachfully. “Old Bangs didn’t fly back and hit you, but this one has. The village will be glad to hear it.”

“You’d better be careful what you report about me,”

I told him. “I had nothing whatever to do with old Bennie. Mr. Vose will answer for me.”

“We know where to plaster the blame when anything happens in this place,” insisted Nute. “Now you’ve sent another one to the bug-house!”

It did not seem to be of much use to talk to that raving old man, but I tried it. I asked him who had been talking to him.

“My guardeen angels,” he screamed. “They all come to me and told me. They was in white and they told me.” I myself had furnished the pillow-case cowls to the Skokums out of the second-hand stock in my uncle’s storehouse!

“There must be some mistake this time, Nute,” said Landlord Vose. “Young Sidney has been spending his evenings here in the tavern for quite some time.”

“Trying to put up a bluff, that’s all. The one who-torches on a fool can’t complain if the fool kicks back. Here’s more expense to the town, boarding an insane man at the State hospital. It didn’t cost us anything as long as he e’t broken crackers out of the grocery-stores, and slept in the livery-stable. I reckon Town-Treasurer Kingsley will say that this ends up his patience.”

“Don’t you dare to tell Judge Kingsley that I had anything to do with getting old Bennie in this state,” I cried. My face smarted dreadfully, for Dodovah Vose-. was putting on some kind of stuff to kill the poison of the-, tool’s finger-nails, so he explained.

“I don’t need to tell him; he’ll know it for himself.”

“I’ll find out who did do it! I know well enough!”

“Of course you know.”

It was maddening—this determination on the part of Levant to put me in the wrong in all matters of local disturbance. Here was I, victim of the resentment of the Skokums because I was trying to obey my promise to Celene Kingsley, now in imminent danger of further repute as the ringleader of the latest atrocity—even though I was the sole sufferer after the devil had been stirred up in the old loafer.

“You fired him, and the boomerang swung around back and hit you—that’s all,” insisted the constable. “His mouth has been full of something you have done to him. If it wasn’t you he wouldn’t be talking about you.”

While Dodovah Vose was finishing with my lacerated face I pondered on what he had said about my uncle’s indifference in regard to my popularity in town.

Then I stood up in the tavern foreroom and cursed family and foes and town with such lurid invective—my vocabulary and force being so far beyond the ordinary capabilities of youth—that even the crazy man was shocked into silence. I was ashamed of myself even as I ranted. But then, as in after-times, my temper swept me out of myself. I was blind and dizzy and there was a roar in my ears like the rush of water. I swung the fires of anger about myself as a juggler whirls his flaming torches. I was sorry as soon as it was over—I have always been sorry when my frenzy has passed.

When I bowed my head and walked out of the tavern I heard the constable clucking away like an offended old hen.

“It’s all a matter for the judge to consider—language and all,” he declared.

“But I insist that he is a good boy in his heart,” said Dodovah Vose.

“Can’t be—coming out of that family—and with the general reputation he has got since he has worked for his uncle the last four years,” insisted the constable. Fine dwelling-place for me—Levant, eh?

My uncle was in bed and asleep when I got to the house—and perhaps it was just as well, because I was quickly forgetting my shame and was ready for a further squabble; a disposition on my part which has never been especially helpful during my life.

I made careful and disgusted study of my striped face in the looking-glass before I went to bed. In spite of my innocence, there I was, the labeled participator in an affray. In this world, as you have probably noticed, the man who carries around a blacked eye or a bunged lip never succeeds in dissipating the suspicion that he has been in some sort of a disgraceful mix-up, in which he was more or less to blame. You may remember how you yourself have felt in the case of your friends, even when a sliding rug or a closet door has been saddled with the blame. A man with a marked-up physog is never at his best as a defendant. I dreaded the next day, for it seemed pretty certain that I would have to face Judge Kingsley. But the feeling that his daughter might be brought to doubt the sincerity of my promises, when she heard the story and beheld my face, kept me awake more effectually than did the pain of that ferocious clapperclawing.