Читать книгу The Iron Mistress - Paul Iselin Wellman - Страница 14

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Though it was Sunday, a brig with a cargo of rum from Havana was being unloaded by a gang of slaves at the Parisot wharf. Bowie watched the Negroes, moving in line like a colony of ants, save that they displayed none of the ants’ eager energy in their work. All were strong and muscular, outlandishly dressed in ragged dungarees and shirts of faded linsey, in each face the expressionless vacuity of the slave.

The spectacle was familiar. The dock hands trundled ahead of them two-handled, two-wheeled trucks, shuffling indolently, although a white man in a ship’s officer’s cap was yelling himself purple at them. Leaning against a stanchion with a coiled whip in his hand was a man in riding boots, with a black beard and a bloodless face: the overseer. He shared none of the mate’s excitement, but his eyes ceaselessly watched the slaves as each in turn received an oaken keg on his truck, and slowly trundled it back across the gangplank to the dock, where two of their fellows piled the fat casks high in an open warehouse.

Now and again Audubon glanced at Bowie. “What do we here?” he ventured at last.

“I’m hoping to find Monsieur Janos Parisot.”

“The merchant?”

“Yes. I have a letter of introduction from Judge Boden of Opelousas. Do you know him?”

“By sight.”

“Buys lumber?”

“Lumber—and many other things.”

“My two brothers and I own a lumber mill on the Bayou Boeuf,” Bowie said. “John and Rezin are older than I am. Older and steadier, I reckon. Rezin likes to hunt, but he has a practical side. He was the one who discovered the stand of timber on the Bayou Boeuf, but John worked out the details of setting up the saw pit and getting the lumber out.”

“And thee?”

Bowie half laughed. “I’m the youngest. And the longest-legged. And maybe the laziest.”

“Ha!” said Nez Coupé. “Jim take the pit end of the whipsaw an’ wear out both his brothair at the up end in a day’s work. Look at those shouldair! Jim get him from the whipsaw!”

“I work hard when I work,” Bowie said, “but I can’t see a life with nothing but the broadax and the whipsaw. I like to hunt. When I take a notion, I like to get my rifle and be gone for a few days.”

“Jim know every cabin an’ every pretty Cajun girl for forty mile around,” said Nez Coupé. “He nevair miss a cockfight, dance, broom jumpin’, or hunt——”

“Sounds bad, don’t it?” Bowie grinned. “John and Rezin used to sort of—well, talk with me—once in a while. Until I got big enough so’s I could handle ’em both. But we got along all right, until Dr. Carter Carter of Opelousas died. He was buying our lumber.”

“So thee seek now a new market?” asked Audubon.

“That’s correct. John’s about to get married, and Rezin’s in politics. So they sent me. That’s why I’m here right now—I’ve been told Parisot visits his dock every day.”