Читать книгу The Comancheros - Paul Iselin Wellman - Страница 10

As for Paul Regret, it still remained for him to learn how little a man can understand a woman, no matter how he prides himself on his ability to do so; and how, when he thinks his way around a circle concerning her, she has often completed the circle and is halfway around it again in her thinking concerning him.

When he climbed down the vine on the tavern wall, and slipped away through the courtyard to the street beyond, his most important emotion was bitterness at what he considered Eloise’s feminine treachery.

Then he stopped to take stock of himself. He had the clothes in which he stood, and the money in his wallet. Like most gamblers, it was his practice to carry considerable sums, and on this day he had on his person perhaps five hundred dollars—not enough to take him any great distance, or support him for any reasonable period of time, since his tastes and habits had never been inexpensive.

He wondered where to turn, and for a moment, with the injustice and futility of his position, he was near to despair. But presently he rallied himself to think out his first step.

One thing was evident: he was too well known to lurk in the streets, or even the alleys, of New Orleans in daylight, without courting recognition every minute.

By a sort of desperate inspiration he stepped into a tiny hole-in-the-wall coffeehouse, which he never before had given a second glance, much less entered. A fat Italian, smelling villainously of garlic, and a too buxom girl—who, however, he noticed, had fine eyes—were alone in the place. They stared, openmouthed, as he closed the door and turned the key on the lock inside.

“Your name?” he said to the Italian.

“Niccolo Sabetti,” the man answered.

“And this young lady?”

“My daughter, who waits on the tables.”

Regret surveyed them grimly. “How much does a place like this take in during a day’s business?”

Obviously they believed he intended to rob them, perhaps commit other violences, for they saw in him a certain desperation.

“Not—not very much, monsieur,” the Italian faltered. “My daughter and I—only enough for a bare living—a few dollars——”

“Twenty dollars?”

“H-hardly, monsieur.”

“Ten?”

“Perhaps—on a very good day——”

“Then attend, Monsieur Sabetti, and you too, mademoiselle. It is my whim to be a solitary customer for all of this day. Never mind my reason. For you, it’s enough that it is so. Lock the door with a sign on the outside, ‘Closed.’ I won’t molest you, so long as you do as I say. At dark, I’ll depart, and for this service I will pay you—fifty dollars. Is that satisfactory?”

They seemed profoundly relieved, and the man nodded. The girl so far recovered from her first fright as to simper at him.

Thereafter, all that day, Regret drank bitter chicory coffee and stared out of a dirty window on the street. The Italian and his daughter did not venture to come near him unless summoned, but watched him half fearfully from the rear of their establishment.

Twice during the afternoon he saw patrols pass—part of the dragnet set out for him by Judge Beaubien. But customers for the coffeehouse were few at best, and the sign on the door discouraged investigation, so they were undisturbed. When darkness came at last, he paid the Italian, gave a handsome tip to the plump girl, and slipped out into the shadowy street.

Which way to go? Upriver to Natchez or Vicksburg? By sea to Charleston or New York? Down the gulf to some Mexican port? He could not decide. But escape from New Orleans he must—and that immediately.

Humiliating as it was, he sneaked furtively through dark alleys and side streets. It is an eerie and mysterious experience for one accustomed only to the brightest lights to find himself thus submerged in opaque blackness in unfamiliar byways. The silence seems to brood, the touch of the cold stone wall to the exploring hand startles like the touch of a reptile, inequalities underfoot seem like pits into which one may fall. The clouded sky of the night increased the blackness of the intricate lanes with which he was so ill acquainted.

After a time he saw a leaping fire ahead of him, and heard the sound of drumming and voices chanting some weird rhythmic chorus. That would be the Congo Square, an open space surrounded by a picket fence, with a few large sycamore trees in it, which was reserved for Negro slaves and never entered by white men, except when the police each evening at nine o’clock went in to fire off a cannon in the center as a curfew. He advanced toward it. About the bonfire were many black figures, and a dance was in progress—perhaps the Calinda or Bamboula, favorites with the slaves, and connected with their voodoo practices.

Regret stopped in the darkness. The spectacle reminded him of something of which he had not thought before. Just across the river from New Orleans was the village of Algiers, a huddle of mean huts and shacks, occupied almost wholly by Negroes, so that white men usually gave it a wide berth at night. What safer place could exist for a man like Paul Regret, since nobody who knew his tastes and habits could by the widest stretch of the imagination picture him as going there?

At once he began a detour, which took him, after an hour of groping, to the river front. For a dollar, a Negro boatman rowed him across the Mississippi. And hardly had he landed on the other shore, when he discovered that from the ferry head a stagecoach was departing for—of all places—the new and raw Republic of Texas, which lay somewhere in the far hinterlands west of all civilization.

Texas? It was the one destination Regret had not considered. For one hundred and fifty dollars he bought passage to some outlandish place called Washington-on-the-Brazos. It was the end of the stage line, and it sounded like the end of the world: and the end of the world, where he might be as far as possible from Judge Beaubien—and the mocking laughter of New Orleans—was exactly where Paul Regret craved to be.