Jingo Django (3 page)

“Come in, sir,” I heard her say in a voice as smooth as lard. “I don't usually receive callers this late in the day. Especially not without a
proper
appointment, but I can see you're a special fine gentleman.” I heard the shrouds whipped off the furniture. “Sit down, sir. I don't usually have a moment off my feet. My flock of orphans hardly leave time to catch my breath. Now then, what was it you said your name was?”

“I didn't, madam,” he replied. “I gave you my card.”

“Glory be, of course you did. Tush! Here it is in my hand.”

Wasn't she putting on airs, though, I thought! And all the while she'd be skinning him with her hawk's eyes. She'd probably already weighed and bit every coin in his purse, and from her manner she must have reckoned it considerable. She read off his card as reverently as if it were a bank note.

“Jeffrey Peacock, Gent. I knew you were a true gentleman right off, sir! And what brings
you
to our poor orphanage, Mr. Peacock? Is it a little apprentice you'd like to take home with you?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“My little girls can scrub, scour and sew. They're proper trained, I assure you. My boys are strong and healthy. Young dray horses, they are! Is it boy or girl you've come for?”

“A boy, madam.”

“I'll choose you a fine chap. Indeed I will.”

He paused. “The boy I want would be about twelve years old.”

“Oh, I've a good supply of twelve-year-olds, Mr. Peacock.”

“His name would be Jango.”

“Jingo!
Is that who you mean! Tush, Mr. Peacock. He's not the chap for you. A bad bargain, Jingo is. Slippery as an eel. Why, before your back was half-turned he'd make off with your fine gold-headed walking stick.”

“Capital,” he answered evenly. “That's to my liking. A thief.”

I bristled at hearing myself branded a thief. Slippery, for sure, and a bad bargain, maybe, but Mrs. Daggatt was laying it on almighty thick about the gold-headed walking stick.

She seemed kicked speechless by his reply. And then I wondered if Mr. Peacock wasn't laughing to himself. Maybe he was putting on airs of his own.
Avali!
I thought. Mrs. Daggatt had met her match.

But why me? He'd got my name wrong, but he'd come close and I wondered what mischief he was about. I had certainly never heard of any Jeffrey Peacock, Gent. Maybe he was a highwayman, a knight of the road like Captain Thunderbolt, and I found the thought dreadfully pleasing.

Mrs. Daggatt finally got her wits back. “Bless you,” she said piously. “I understand perfectly, Mr. Peacock. Indeed I do. You hope to take my shabbiest castoff and turn the little maggot into a fine Christian gentleman such as yourself. Commendable, sir.”

“That's not my intention at all, madam. I would consider it a service if you would fetch the lad.”

Silence again. Her head must have been given another spin. Then the tone of her voice hardened. “That's quite impossible,” she said.

“Indeed, madam?”

“If
it's Jingo you're set on he's already spoken for. Apprenticed out.”

“To whom?”

“That's a matter of confidence, sir. But it would cost a pretty penny to buy up his contract, I assure you.”

“How much?”

She now had a solid grip on the business. I could almost hear her run up figures in her head. The walking stick would start the bidding. If he were wearing a silk cravat it would lift the sum a digit or two. And I pitied him if he had stepped into her parlor with a well-brushed top hat. It would double the price.

“Two hundred dollars,” she announced finally.

“Fetch him,” Mr. Peacock replied calmly, and I imagined Mrs. Daggatt could have bit off her tongue. She might have doubled the price again and got it just as easily. But what an infernal humbug she was, I thought. She had drawn up no apprentice papers with General Scurlock.

“Then it's settled,” Mr. Peacock said, and I could hear him rise from his chair. “You'll find me at the Black Horse Inn. I'll expect the boy tonight.”

Mrs. Daggatt cleared her throat. “The money in advance, if you please.”

“The money when you deliver the boy,” he countered, and I could hear him stride toward the door.

“Mr. Peacock, may I ask why you insist upon Jingo and no other?”

His footsteps came to a stop and he must have turned to face her. I thought for a moment he wasn't going to answer. But then his voice hit me like a cannon shot.

“I'm his father,” he said.

I might have fallen out of the chimney had I believed him. The man was a jolly rogue, but he didn't know my pa was a one-legged man.

He left, both heels clicking on the hardwood floor.

5

CACTUS GOLD

Mrs. Daggatt must have sent for General Scurlock quick as lightning, for I saw him loping up the street like an answering clap of thunder.

I spied him from the roof. I had hoped to get a look at Mr. Jeffrey Peacock, Gent., before he departed, and had climbed the flue, but I was too late. I fancied he had driven off in a carriage with a fine span of horses. I remained aloft in the open air, thoughts tumbling about in my head and the whale's tooth in my pocket.

General Scurlock ducked in the back way and I reckoned Mrs. Daggatt would be waiting for him in her private parlor. I capered silently over the slate roof to her own chimney top. I thought I might lower myself for the entertainment of their conversation. Mrs. Daggatt would explode like a dropped pumpkin to learn that Mr. Peacock's two-hundred-dollar apprentice had slipped through General Scurlock's fingers.

But when I reached the chimney their voices came echoing up the flue. I stuck my head in. Tempers were clashing below and words rose like sparks on the updraft.

“You blundering, thick-skulled fool!” she roared. “You let the little brat run off?”

“Me dear Daggatt!” he protested.

“Don't dear Daggatt me! And hasn't the whale's tooth given you the slip as well!”

“A temporary embarrassment. A mere momentary setback. A bit o' patience is in order here, me dear Daggatt!”

“Patience! I promised to deliver the boy tonight!”

“Faugh! What's the gentleman's pittance to us once we lay hands on the scrimshaw? There's a treasure of cactus gold waiting for us in Mexico. I saw it with me own eyes, didn't I?”

“You were boozefuddled, the lot of you! Tavern tales, that's what it amounts to! I don't believe in the whale's tooth anymore'n I do that cactus gold.”

Wasn't
she trying to humbug him, I thought!
She
had the whale's tooth all along. Only
I
had it now and I'd be glad to see her face when she found it missing.

“Do ye take me for a jill-poke?” he thundered. “Didn't I trail little Billy Bottles soon as I was mustered out? And didn't I finally catch him up right here in Boston? And didn't I rattle his backbone and shake his teeth until he coughed up the old map?”

“Billy Bottles!” she scoffed.

“Aye, a weasel was Billy. But no worse than the rest of us, me dear Daggatt.”

They kept up a windy clamor. I missed bits and pieces, but directly I began to get the gist of things. During the Mexico war, Scurlock and Billy Bottles and two or three others had stumbled across a peck of old coins hidden in a clump of cactus. Well, they weren't about to share out that minted gold with the whole U.S. Army. They hid it somewhere and planned to dig it up after the war.

But Scurlock and Bottles, being friends at the time, I reckon, had decided to fingle-fangle the others. They snuck out the cactus gold and buried it somewhere along the Mexico border. They drew a map, but then Bottles decided to fingle-fangle Scurlock himself. He popped the treasure in another spot while Scurlock was laid up with a bullet wound in the leg.

“Aye, that gold went leaping about like a Texas jack-rabbit,” Scurlock was bellowing. “A buzzard could get lost in that country without a map. And our map wasn't worth the cowhide I had drawn it on! But I had Billy by the throat, didn't I?”

“And you let him get away!”

“Was I to know he'd grown up a soot devil? But when I saw him snatch up a whale's tooth and shoot up the flue, didn't I put two and four together? He'd scrimshawed a new map and dodged me all over Boston like a chimney swallow. When he took a header down this very fireplace, didn't he call out me name and tell ye with his last cackling breath he'd left the whale's tooth chimney-hid? Aye, ye knew ye were on to something, me dear Daggatt! But ye needed
me
to discover what it was and ye bargained like a fishwife! Didn't we come to a partnership, open and fair and half and half on the treasure? And didn't I set myself up a sweepmaster with a flock of climbing boys to find it?”

“Numskull! He meant to send you on a fool's errand.”

It was falling dark with great black clouds tumbling in from the sea. I remembered a
rumpus
in Mrs. Daggatt's parlor about a year before, but she'd told us it was only a thief caught and captured in the night. Billy Bottles!

I leaned my back against the chimney stack and examined the whale's tooth. I felt the first wild stirrings of treasure fever. But there wasn't enough light to make out the map.

I slipped it tight under the waistband of my breeches like a hidden pistol. Scurlock was no match for Mrs. Daggatt, I thought.
She had fingle-fangled him from the beginning!

Billy Bottles must have had the scrimshaw
with
him when he fell. How else could she have got her claws on it?

Then she had flummoxed Scurlock with the story that the whale's tooth was chimney-hid. Maybe she expected him to give up the chase, for the tooth would likely be charred as the winter passed, and useless. In due time, by my reckoning, she intended to go venturing after that treasure by herself.

But Scurlock hadn't given up the chase. Before long he slammed out of the orphan house. I waited up in the night sky until he was well gone. Then I began easing myself down along the roof. I was burning to have a good look at that scrimshaw map.

But a slate shingle broke loose under me and my footing gave way. The shingle clattered to the ground and I slid like a hog on ice toward the cloud of elm branches along the edge of the roof. I tumbled into the tree, gulped a breath of air and slithered down the trunk. I meant to make a quick run for it.

I reached the ground. And there stood Mrs. Daggatt, her eyes ablaze and her hands out to grab me.

6

THE MISSING FACES

The Black Horse Inn stood like a ship anchored and lantern-lit in the muddy darkness of the upper Post Road. A windy rain had come up. In a livery shay, and taking the reins herself, Mrs. Daggatt meant to deliver me in person. At our approach dogs came loping out of the stable yard to surround us, barking and whipping their tails about.

There was no danger of my jumping away. She had tied my thumbs behind my back with twine. The whale's tooth was still snugged and hidden under my shirt at the waist of my trousers. Now that we had arrived she undid my thumbs, and took me by the collar of my shirt. A tavern boy met us with a black cotton umbrella, but she held me out in the rain to wash the soot devil off me.

“Your father's here to fetch you,” she wheezed. “A fine gentleman he is — better than you deserve. So you'll watch your tongue and say nothing about being put out to scraping chimneys.”

When she judged I was washed clean enough, clothes and all, she marched me into the Black Horse Inn. The public room was a bright, cheery place with great wooden beams and a creaky floor. Men and dogs were warming themselves at the open fireplace. They glanced at me as if I were a half-drowned cat.

It didn't take Mrs. Daggatt long to spy out Jeffrey Peacock, Gent. He was seated alone, reading a newspaper in the far corner and smoking a long clay pipe. A tankard stood at his elbow.

He didn't bother to look up even as we approached. I had conjured up a peacock of a man with a stolen ring or two blazing from his fingers. But there was nothing foppish about him. Mr. Peacock was taller'n a stackpole, with his legs stretched out and crossed on an opposite chair. His glistening jackboots looked a yard long. His coat hung from his shoulders like a cape and his white shirt stood open at the neck. Chestnut hair curled and tumbled gloomily over his forehead and down his neck. He had the air of a weary traveler who had yet to reach his destination, or maybe had no destination at all.

“Ah,
there you are, Mr. Peacock,” Mrs. Daggatt said with a sudden gust of smiles. “And see here who I've brought along — your very own son! Isn't he the spittin' image? I see it now myself. Indeed, I can, Mr. Peacock!”

He gazed up from his paper. Slowly, he arched one eyebrow and fixed her with an icy blue-eyed stare.

“I beg your pardon, madam?”

“It's your son, Mr. Peacock.”

“What the devil are you talking about?”

“My dear sir! It's two hundred dollars we agreed upon.”

He hadn't so much as whisked me a glance. “How do you know he's my son?”

“Tush, Mr. Peacock, you said so yourself. This afternoon, at the orphanage.”

“Do you believe every posturing, brazen-faced stranger who walks through your door?”

Her face began to swell and redden. “I mistook you for a gentleman,” she scowled.

“That's a pity.”

Oh, he was a rare one, I thought!

“Do you want the little guttersnipe, or don't you?” she crackled.

“What's this? You sell your orphans like poultry?” For the first time his eyes slid over to me. “He looks like you dragged him from the river, madam.”

“You can have him for a hundred. A hundred dollars, Mr. Peacock, and let's be done with it.”

“What's your name, lad?”