Читать книгу The Long Rifle - Stewart Edward White - Страница 30

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Thus by slow stages they gained to Pittsburg, which was at that time the point of embarkation for the West. It seemed to both the trapper and the country boy a busy and bewildering place. They made their way promptly to the river, stared at curiously; found by inquiry that a steamer was due to leave in two days, and betook themselves to camp in a hardwood grove outside the city. By now Andy, with the quick adaptability of youth, believed himself to look upon houses with a scorn equal to Crane’s own. He had been accustomed to sleeping out, by a fire; and since he had had no blanket, he considered himself as a tough, hardy citizen, and was inclined to look down scornfully on such lads as passed. Indeed Andy may have strutted just a little; there is no question that he hung close to Crane and tried to look as though he had always belonged with the Mountain Man. Venturing, boylike, to hint at this enormous superiority over the commonplace slaves to comfort who stared at them, he was chastened by Joe’s sardonic reminder that they had up to now enjoyed perfect picnic weather. He made Andy buy himself a blanket. The boy did so, rather under protest.

“But you have no blanket,” he pointed out. He did not quite dare to claim, in so many words, an equal hardihood with his hero. Crane returned an evasive reply. “We better see about gittin’ on this steamboat,” he turned the subject.

The river boat lay alongside a wharf. She was flat, broad and built high in stories, with the pilot house grandly atop of all, and two tall slim smokestacks bound together with a crisscross of stays, and a diamond-shaped walking beam having a gilded Indian with drawn bow. Dozens of Negro laborers swarmed back and forth across her broad gangplanks carrying or pushing or rolling all sorts of freight. This was checked and disposed by clerks and mates, their sleeves rolled up, their shirts open, their caps thrust back, their voices hoarse, the sweat of honest exasperation on their brows. In contrast to the inferno of bustle and noise below, the upper deck dozed in a celestial calm. It was empty of life except for the figure of the captain, leaning, arms folded, over the rail. He looked cool and fresh and neat in his trim buttoned uniform: and he smoked a contemplative cheroot; and gazed down at the insane hurly-burly with the reposeful eye of complete detachment.

Joe Crane approached one of the busy checkers at the gangplank. The latter paid him no attention. After waiting uneasily for a few moments the Mountain Man ventured to address him. Gone was his swaggering air of self-confidence. In this alien environment of bustle and noise he was as ill-at-ease as a schoolboy.

“How much to St. Louey?” he asked in a small voice.

The checker did not even look up from his list.

“Sanborn!” he howled above the din. “Oh, you, Sanborn!”

At the summons a small, pale, fishy-eyed man popped out from a cubby hole on the lower deck. He too was in his shirt sleeves and carried a list in his hands.

“Well?” he demanded impatiently.

The checker did not reply in words, but jerked his head toward Crane and Andy. The Mountain Man repeated his question. The small man looked him over disparagingly.

“Hundred dollars, deck passage, find yourself,” he vouchsafed at last.

“That the cheapest?” enquired Crane.

The purser half turned away.

“Fifty if you wood up,” he flung scornfully over his shoulder; then vouchsafed to explain, “We’ll take you for fifty dollars if you help carry wood aboard whenever we stop for fuel.”

“I’m Joe Crane,” said the Mountain Man, “I’m just back from——”

“I don’t care who you are,” interrupted the purser. “Do you want a ticket, or don’t you?”

“Can’t I work my passage?”

“We got plenty niggers already,” sneered the little man.

Crane did not appear to resent this. He pondered helplessly.

“How much for a hundred and eighty pounds of freight?” he enquired at last.

“Eighteen dollars.”

“That shines,” replied Crane with a grin. “I’ll go as freight.”

The little man spun on his heel and stared malevolently at the Mountain Man, his eyes blazing.

“Say, you!” he snarled. “Do you think I’ve got nothing to do but listen to you trying to be funny? Get out of here before I have you thrown off the dock.”

He turned away.

“Mr. Sanborn.” The captain’s cool remote voice from above arrested his steps.

“Sir?” the purser craned his neck upward.

“Book the gentleman.”

“Sir?”

“I say book the gentleman. Take him as freight. And, Sanborn, stow him in the hold—under the flour barrels.”

He had not raised his voice, but it had somehow carried above all the din of loading. Those within its immediate hearing burst into a roar of laughter. The Negro stevedores cackled, dropped their loads to double up in merriment unrebuked. They passed back the word to others who had not heard, and they too slapped one another in delayed appreciation. On his Olympian height the captain smoked meditative, indifferent, remote, staring across the reposeful calm he alone inhabited. Joe Crane, followed by the bewildered Andy, fell back abashed behind the warehouse shelter. He looked at his young companion, humorously shamefaced.

“Well!” he said comically. “Here’s damp powder and no fire to dry it!”

“Haven’t you any money?” asked Andy.

“My possible sack is mighty nigh as clean as a hound’s tooth.”

“But——” Andy was nonplussed. “How did you expect—— How did you——”

“I didn’t need none goin’ east, so I spent what I had. But it seems like Joe Crane goin’ to Washington to see the President and Joe Crane goin’ home again is two different beaver,” confessed that individual. “Looks to me like a man ought to be allowed to work his passage, anyway.”

Andrew was fumbling with the cord about his neck.

“You got money?” cried Crane interestedly. He snatched the bills from Andy’s hands, stared at them a moment, then leaped into the air and uttered a wild war whoop that brought several men running around the corner of the building to see what it was all about. He paid them no attention but marched swaggering across the decks and up the broad gangplank to the purser’s office, thrusting aside without ceremony the laden stevedores, glaring down the first impulse of the officer who moved to stop him.

“Here, little man,” he commanded, slapping down the roll of bills. “Two tickets to Saint Louey—and carry your own wood and be damned to you!”

Andy, trailing helplessly behind his triumphal progress, looked up to meet the captain’s calmly amused eye.