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FLASHES OF MEMORY

The sight of this man Wilson, or Shipley, had carried Tom back ten years. In a series of pictures, which gradually connected themselves, his early life unrolled itself.

He was a waif to begin with, after his father and mother had died of yellow fever in New Orleans. He kept body and soul together by doing odd jobs around the wharves. Here Mose Shipley had picked him up and had taken him around the river country to help him in his exhibitions. For Shipley was a fake doctor, the proprietor of a nostrum known as the Indian Queen Tonic. He gave street entertainments during which he did card tricks and exhibited his skill with a pistol. Tom’s part in this was to stand with hands outstretched against a board background while his master shot an outline of his body with bullets. The man was a dead shot, but he drank to excess. Tom often went to his post fearfully.

Even now, after this lapse of years, Tom could remember the man’s patter to the crowd, or at least part of it.

“Friends, this sick-bed comforter, if used properly, is well intended to snatch you from the very jaws of grim death. The Indian Queen Tonic is a sovereign specific which will almost instantly cure all diseases, including lung and liver affections, rheumatism, gout, scrofula, humours, wens, tumours, stiff joints, ague, aches, coughs, hip and back troubles, and all female diseases. Why submit yourself and your dear ones to nostrums of nauseous contents which are but as chaff before the wind compared with my beneficent tonic?”

So it ran on, endlessly, for Shipley had a glib tongue and much effrontery. He had, in those days, the presence to back his claims. The street faker stood six feet two, with broad shoulders and lithe waist and loins. Coal black hair fell in heavy ringlets to his coat. Except for a drooping black moustache he was clean shaven. His clothes were of fine quality, the shirt of ruffled lawn, the vest above it elegantly flowered. He wore a black frock suit with a bell-crowned beaver hat of the latest New Orleans mode. With women, he counted himself irresistible.

In the course of their travels, the faker and his little white slave had come to St. Joseph. It was the year of the great migration, the spring when thousands upon thousands of covered wagons were waiting to start the trek across the plains to California. Their camp fires flashed from the willows and the cottonwoods that edged the hempfields.

At one of these camp fires, Tom was always welcome. Abner Leeds had become the friend of the small waif, and not only Abner but his sister Mary Gallup and his red-headed little daughter Virginia. To these the boy had given his heart wholly, though he had a shy, fierce pride and a quiet dignity that never allowed him to put this feeling into words. In a ten-year-old fashion, he was in love with the young widow Mary, who was so gay, so generous, so full of warm emotion. His admiration for Abner was unstinted, because the man walked fearlessly in clean strength through the dangers of life. As for six-year-old Jinny, he was the slave of her imperious wishes.

Abner Leeds was sorry for the little boy. It was in his mind to take him along to the Pacific Coast.

“This scalawag Shipley is a no-account bummer takin’ in big money for this hogwash he calls Indian Queen Tonic. An’ the way he beats up Tom is scandalous, Mary,” the emigrant said.

His sister agreed. “But he’s a bad man—always quarrelling and fighting. Don’t have trouble with him, Abner.”

“No, I won’t. Not if I can help it,” he promised.

At that very moment, Dr. Moses Shipley was emerging from a store a mile away with a new blacksnake whip in his hand. Behind him, a few paces in the rear, trotted a freckled barefoot youngster in a tailed coonskin cap and ragged buckskin breeches that had been cut for a large man. They had been made to fit the boy by the simple process of sheering off the lower part of the legs with a dull knife. The youngster was apparently lost in a pair of sacks that came as high as his armpits.

At sight of the whip, Tom’s heart sank. Experience had taught him that, sooner or later, a whip in the hand of his master meant a lashing for him.

Shipley’s light stride carried him up the street and to the left at the first turning. He stopped in front of a small frame building bearing the legend.

DOCTOR HOMER CORLISON

Hebrew Plaster Makes You Well

The fake doctor glanced through the window, caught sight of a small wrinkled man, and, without waiting to knock, pushed open the door and entered. He closed the door behind him.

The boy outside heard a startled exclamation followed by a shrill, frightened protest.

“What you doing here, Mose Shipley? Don’t you dass touch me. Don’t you.”

“You been advertising that my tonic is no good,” Shipley charged.

“You started it about the Hebrew Plaster yore own self. Keep away from me. Ouch! Oh, my God! You’re killin’ me.”

After that came the rapid shuffling of feet, the crash of an overturned chair, the swish of a whip through the air, and a shriek of terror-stricken pain. That scream was the first of many. The tortured victim begged and pleaded and grovelled.

When Shipley burst out of the room, his eyes gleaming with the cruel lust of satisfied malice, Tom was no longer to be seen. He had dodged round the corner and fled. It might be his turn next. One never could tell.

Tom’s feet carried him instinctively to the Leeds wagon. To Abner and his sister the boy told what had occurred. In the veins of Abner Leeds was the blood of a modern crusader. His temperament had made him an Abolitionist and a temperance reformer. Corlison meant nothing to him, but he resented hotly the big man’s bullying arrogance, especially in relation to Tom. He said little, far less than his sister, but there were in the flash of his gray eyes kindling anger and perhaps a crystallizing resolution.

Shipley and his blacksnake were, for a day or two, the talk of the town. Among the Argonauts waiting for the start to California were many rough characters, but the inhabitants of St. Joe itself were law-abiding citizens. The big ruffian swaggered up and down the streets under the impression that he was regarded as a public hero. He was not thin-skinned, and it took him some time to realize that, except for the low frequenters of the drinking places, he was being avoided. When this came home to him, he resented the fact. He was a poseur and liked to sun himself in the admiration of others.

Becoming sullen, he took refuge in liquor, went on one of his periodic sprees, started a fight, and was arrested and locked up. For several days he cooled his heels and accumulated venom in jail. When released, he was in a very ugly temper.

Sulkily, he returned to the cabin where he and his factotum slept. It was unfortunate for Tom that, an hour later, he dropped in to get for Virginia some horse chestnuts he had stored there. Abner waited for him outside.

“Come here,” ordered Shipley as soon as the boy had closed the door.

Tom’s heart sank. The room was dark, and Shipley had been lying in a dark corner. Tom had not known of his presence.

“I—I didn’t see you,” he quavered.

“Where you been?” demanded his master.

“D-down among the covered wagons.” Tom knew without being told that his day of judgment was at hand. He felt sick, as though the bottom had dropped out of his stomach.

“Didn’t I tell you to stay home an’ not go runnin’ down there?”

“Yessir, but you was away, an’——”

The blacksnake hung on a wall within reach, suspended by a loop from a peg. With what was almost one and the same lithe movement the ruffian had it down and the boy pinned by the scruff of his neck to the bed.

Tom let out one despairing yell before the lash twined around his shrinking flesh like a rope of fire. Abner Leeds heard that yell, raced for the cabin, and burst open the door.

“Stop it, you man of Belial,” he cried.

Amazed at this interruption, Shipley let his hand loosen on the boy’s neck. Tom twisted away and dodged back of Abner. He stood there, quivering and trembling, shaken with hysterical sobs while he clung to the coat of his preserver.

“What’s that?” rasped Shipley.

“Man, you’re a cruel brute to treat a child so. You’ve got to whop me or be whopped.”

The bully could not believe his eyes and ears. He was a large muscular man, a fighter notorious along the river for fifty miles. Abner Leeds, on the other hand, though broad of shoulder and well knit, lacked twenty pounds of his weight.

Shipley let out a roar of rage. “Hell’s hinges, I’ll eat you up,” he shouted.

Since then, in camp and on the trail, Tom had seen many hand-to-hand encounters, but of them all this one stood out as the most savage and relentless. Now, ten years later, some of the details were clear as though it had been last week.

They stood toe to toe, slogging hard, careless of defence, each trying to break down the other by the crushing impact of steady hammering. Shipley was heavier than Leeds, a better boxer, a more experienced fighter. Tom could see that, child though he was. Yet somehow, bruised and bleeding, his friend weathered the smashing attack and made Shipley fall back with a snarl of baffled rage. Leeds had built up his sinewy muscles, his fine shoulder development, by years of wood chopping and log rolling and rail splitting. Add to this a resolute will not to be beaten. Add, too, the fact that Shipley had weakened his resistance by years of dissipation.

Abner crowded the bully hard. Pantherlike, Shipley evaded him, sidestepped with catlike tread, and lashed out hard with a left that travelled like a streak of light. The blow flung Abner, reeling and dazed, against the wall of the cabin. He covered up, clinched, hung on desperately. Then, as his head cleared, he drove home heavy, short arm jolts under which the big man winced.

Shipley tried to break away. The short stiff jabs under the heart and in the stomach took all the fight out of him. He gasped for breath, his face splotchy. The will to win was no longer in him.

He reached for the bowie knife in the leg of his boot, but straightened up without it when Abner pumped in two hard blows to the midriff. Again he broke ground, clutching at the handle of the knife. He turned, a cornered wolf, bowie in hand.

Tom still remembered how that moment froze him. He could still see Abner catch up a three-legged stool and send it crashing down on the head of his foe.

The fight was over.

“Is he—dead?” Tom asked in a whisper staring at the huge figure sprawled on the floor.

Abner brought water and poured it upon the face of Shipley. The eyelids quivered, and the man opened his eyes.

“I’ll get you sure,” he promised Abner. “Soon, too.”

Tom went out with Abner into the pleasant sunlight. His heart was heavy. He knew Shipley. The man was shamed and humiliated. He would never hold up his head until he had had his revenge.

“I—I wisht I hadn’t hollered,” the boy gulped.

Tom never forgot Abner’s answer. “Don’t you blame yoreself, boy. A fellow has got to take what life brings him or be a yellow cur. If he walks straight an’ fears God nothing can hurt him. It’s what you make it, this world is; good if you’re good, bad if you’re not.”

“He’ll do you a meanness. I know him,” Tom said.

A smile broke through Abner’s distorted features. “He’ll have to hurry. We get off to-morrow, an’ you’re going with us, son.”

That night, going down to the river for water, Abner was shot in the back of the head by an assassin and died before his body struck the ground. Mose Shipley was not to be found in St. Joseph next day, nor was he ever seen there again. The manner of his disappearance remained a mystery.

The murder had altered the life of the three dependent upon Abner. Mary adopted Virginia, moved to Independence, and opened a boarding house there. Tom, thrown on his own resources, had lost sight of them after a few months.

But he had always remembered their friendliness and loved them for it, just as he had remembered and tried to follow Abner’s words.

“A fellow has got to take what life brings him or be a yellow cur. If he walks straight an’ fears God, nothing can hurt him.”

Yes, that was it. To walk straight and clean and not be a yellow cur. It was Tom’s religion that, if he did that, everything would be all right.