The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (7 page)

“I’m a poor foundling boy,” I said, using a word from out of an English book they handed us at the Secondary School, a very good story that I’d read through four or five times. “He isn’t my blood uncle—they left me on his doorstep, in a basket, one night when it was snowing and sleeting. I was near about froze when they found me, him and my Aunt Harriet, his second wife; the first was shot while poaching hares.”

This didn’t seem to fit the occasion, but I was stuck with it, so I let it go, and anyway it was in the book.

The old man looked up at his companions and said, “Durn me, if this boy ain’t the champeen long-distance talker of Missouri, and they was
all
born with a flappy jaw hereabouts, if I’m any judge.” Turning back to me, he says, “Son, your tongue waggles like a billygoat with the St. Vitus.”

I didn’t relish the compliment, specially when the beefy man spoke up to suggest that, “Let’s cut it out and improve his looks.” Behind him on the horse, I could see the black-haired girl stiffen up and look frightened and miserable.

It took me only about five minutes to make up my mind that these were common highwaymen, dangerous, too, and that I’d better watch my step, and not get frisky. Even so, I was beginning to fix a sort of plan in my mind.

The three of them had drawn off for a consultation; now the old man came back. Just as I thought, he’d been working on my story, and didn’t altogether care for it.

“You say you was separated from your Uncle Jessie? Now how in the name of common sense can anybody with the brains of a muskrat get lost on a wagon trail? And why didn’t they send back to search?” He put his face down—I hadn’t noticed before what a wild glitter his eyes had—and said in a tone that made me gulp,
“Son, if you want to live long and die hearty, you’d better spit out the truth and spit it out quick.”

Before I could answer, he said, “Now ain’t the facts that you’re an apprentice and have run off to shirk toil? Ain’t that so? Talk up, or by Jupiter, I’ll—”

Seizing my jacket, he gave me a yank that put a crick in my neck, and I began to blubber.

“I couldn’t stood it any longer. I was black and blue the whole first year. He beat me up regular, whether I deserved it or not, and didn’t give me anything to eat except cold leavings from the second table.”

“That’s all well and good; the point is, what’s to be done
now
?”

I tried to look pitiful, but he went on:

“My partner here, Mr. Baggott, who’s known for his merciful ways and love of children, favors putting a bullet in you, so you won’t have to suffer any more. What do you think of that?”

I commenced to sniffle again, and said I hoped they would spare me—I couldn’t do them any harm, but only wanted to escape in peace, so that nobody would take me back for the reward.

The old man’s ears pricked right up.

“What reward? See here, who was you bound out to, anyway? And whereabouts?”

“Mr. Chouteau, sir,” I said, wiping my eyes on my sleeve. “Up in St. Louis. He’s the wealthiest merchant in those parts, and the meanest. He placed a reward of two hundred dollars on me out of spite and revenge, because he couldn’t have wanted me back, seeing how he treated me.”

“How’d
you
know about this reward?” he inquired suspiciously, putting his face down again.

“I hid out for two days under some pilings by the river, foot of Market Street. I saw the notice on a handbill when I was out nights rummaging through garbage cans.”

It sounded good, dropping in Market Street like that, as if I’d been around there for years, but I remembered it from hearing
my father ask my mother how to get to Mr. Chouteau’s establishment.

They had drawn off for another pow-wow now, and when they came back they said I must go along with them toward St. Genevieve “for protection,” else I might meet up with some “hard cases” and get hurt.

“But I’m traveling in the other direction, sir!” I cried in alarm. I told them I was aiming to go south as far as New Orleans, and find honest work there, with maybe a chance to go to school on the side, which was all I’d ever wanted since I was old enough to know what I was doing. These last words got sort of stuck in my throat, but I finally coughed them out after a little difficulty.

“You’ll do what you’re told,” said the old man, and Mr. Baggott, possibly out of his love for children, unslung the rifle he had tied to his saddle, humming a little tune.

As he did so, the girl behind him suddenly spoke up for the first time. “Don’t you touch him!” she cried in a low, fierce voice. “The child’s had enough trouble. Leave him go on his way.”

All right, I said to myself, you’re not here because you like it. You need help, and I’ll try to see that you get it.

Baggott’s reply to her outburst was to turn half around, rising in his stirrups, and in a quick, sure motion strike her across the mouth with the back of his hand. In the woods stillness, the smack rang out like a report.

She gasped a shocked, “Oh!” and put her palms to her cheeks, but said nothing more.

Paying no attention, the old man vaulted back on his horse, surprisingly nimble and springy. Jerking its head around—it had been droopily trying to find grass—he said, “Get up behind Slater,” which I judged was the one in black, and when I had done so, he called out, “Come along,” and we started along the trail.

For about an hour we rode toward St. Genevieve, with the sun coming up over the pines to our right, and everything sparkling and dewy and fresh in the morning sunlight. Once in a while we came up onto a high baldy knob where we could see the river, broad
and silently moving, and across the way parts of the Illinois shore, like drowneded islands now in the big floodwaters. I was glad I didn’t live there. You could smell the river—that cold, muddy-bottom smell, mixed up with dead fish and swamp rot and tree stumps. But it was mighty pretty just the same, and made you want to get out on it in a skiff or a raft and slide down, stretched out in the sun and watching the spring-rise sights. I had done it on the Ohio many’s the time, sneaking away on the sly. You could make a tolerable raft, to hold three or four boys, from out of two big logs and a few drift planks, unless they had got water-soaked and sumpy.

Presently we called a halt so the girl could go over in the woods, and as she did so Mr. Baggott got off a few coarse jokes, calling after her a time or two, to inquire if she needed help, and advising her to watch out for snakes. The old gentleman said nothing, merely sitting without stirring, darkly thoughtful, but Mr. Slater muttered under his breath. He and I had exchanged no words of any kind. Riding along, I’d been stiff and uncomfortable, not finding anything to hang onto except his waist, which I didn’t like to bother for fear of making him mad and being shot. So I held onto his coattails, in case there should be an emergency of the horse shying or like that.

Getting on toward noon, we stopped to eat, and I learned some more about the party. About the first thing that turned up was that the old gentleman, who went by the name of John, claimed to be John Murrel, the pirate and outlaw. I was acquainted with this Murrel, or leastways with the real article. He had been written up in a paper-backed book I’d got off a shantyboater for two stringy rabbits from my traps. According to the reports, he had ended up by going around trying to coax all the slaves to rise up against their masters and kill them with axes and hoes, upon which he would run a “southern empire,” with whiskey and women for all. It might have worked, too, but one of his partners named Steward told on him, and the people around Natchez charged forward and placed Murrel in jail, where they hoped he would be less of a nuisance. After that they had a kind of picnic, going overboard on the other
side, as reformers generally do, and hung all his friends, and some of his acquaintances, and several strangers, including a number who were just passing through, and wound up by flogging everybody else in sight. Then they called it a good day and said they wished they had a conspiracy to put down more often.

Anyway, Murrel sat in prison for ten years, if you cared to believe the book, and when he got out he was real woozy in the head. He stated that he would be a preacher from now on, which was about all he was fit for, I reckon. In the ten years, he had loaded up on scriptures until he had some kind of verse to cover everything, and the last they saw of him as he staggered off into the woods, heading north, he was shouting and singing and waving his arms, calling on the Lord to tidy up this or that situation, dropping in quotations as he did so, and a few of the citizens around Natchez felt downright sorry to see him so reduced, for he had been a dignified and upright figure when he was a pirate.

From that time—four or five years back—he had disappeared completely out of view, but now here he was again, up in Missouri, or allowed to be, though I didn’t much believe it. Neither did Mr. Baggott and Mr. Slater, I judged, because they always spoke to him very mocky and overcourteous, as if they were addressing a poor, addled humbug who was out of his mind and should be humored. But they were afraid of him, too. His eyes were so crazy and flashing that a person realized there wasn’t any more bluff to him than there is to a spider.

We let the horses forage, and sat down on a couple of fallen trees. The girl, who they called Jennie, was so pale I thought she was sick. It was too bad, because she had a sweet face, with black hair and curling lashes and very white, even teeth, and a gentle, interesting expression, as if she had known better people once. She lay back against a limb and closed her eyes, refusing to eat, and Mr. Slater put a coat over her, saying, “The lass is beat out. We ought to hole up somewhere and rest.”

“Don’t mind her,” said Shep. “She’s likely got something in the oven. They mostly do after they get to be ten or eleven.”

“You have a rough tongue, my friend,” Mr. Slater told him, and the old man suddenly threw back his head and cried, “ ‘Oh, thou oppressed virgin, daughter of Zirdon: arise, pass over to Chittim; there also shalt thou have no rest.’ ”

“Mighty pretty,” said Shep. “I imagine you learned it when you was thieving and murdering down along the Trace. Or was that from one of the Sunday schools they had in the Pinch Gut?”

His mouth was so sneering, and his tone so raspy, that I made sure the old man would pull out a revolver and kill him, but he appeared not to hear. Instead, he consulted a very dented silver watch with a stained face, and said, “How far do you make it to St. Genevieve?”

“In the neighborhood of two mile, so we better look peart,” replied Shep. “People will be driving hogs in to market.”

“I don’t know when I’ve encountered such a run of threadbare luck,” the old man went on. “In the book of Daniel it is set forth that the Lord will provide, but I’m blessed if He ain’t been snoozing on the job. Them last two bunches couldn’t a raised enough cash for a basket of turnips. All we got was the pleasure of knocking them on the head and this girl here, and that only because of Joe’s fastidity notions.”

I had been eating on a piece of pork which they took from a saddle bag, saying nothing about the sowbelly I had in my pocket, or the gold, either, you can bet—just listening and wondering what they aimed to do next.

Slater’s name was Hard-Luck Joe Slater—I found that out when Shep took to ragging him about gambling. Slater would have liked to have been an honest gambler, but he never could catch any cards, so they said. If he came up with an eight-high flush, somebody else snatched the pot with a nine-high flush. It had gone on so long it turned him sour. It was disgusting to him, and broke his spirit. He began to cheat, but he didn’t have any luck at that either, because they always nabbed him and gave him a knuckling.

He and Shep, who was a mule skinner by profession but graduated to be a mule thief, which was quicker, had joined up with the
old man in Memphis, in the Gut, or Pinch Gut, and had been working the Missouri side of the river as far north as St. Louis. I wasn’t clear about the manner of work they did, but I had the idea that Reverend Murrel had backslid since they let him out of jail. Or maybe he hadn’t located a pulpit yet and was filling in the time.

Back on the trail, we rode for about an hour and arrived at a fork where several roads came in, with St. Genevieve not far off. “This’ll do,” said the old man. “We’ll lay up in that clump of alders, and the first one makes a noise’ll have me to deal with.”

I began to get scared, not knowing what was going to happen, but if somebody had told me, I wouldn’t have believed it.

Pretty soon a farmer and his wife hove into view driving a broken-down wagon with one tire iron flapping loose. It was Saturday; they were going in to trade. The wagon was filled with produce and sausage bags, but looked ornery and poverty-struck. In our sheltered place in the bushes, the old man raised his hand and whispered, “Leave them pass. What we’re after’s a party going t’other way.”

Jennie, I noticed, had her eyes closed and her lips were moving as if she might be saying a prayer. Shep looked impatient, and Mr. Slater, as usual, sat his horse like a man without a purpose. The sun was high, and the bugs were out; I was itching to get at a couple on the back of my neck, but I didn’t dare. It was a handsome day, one of those clear, breezy spring mornings when the sky is a blue well, without a bottom, with now and then puff-ball clouds floating in it like blossoms off a snowball bush. If you stared up at it, it somehow made you thirsty. Altogether, the scenery was too cheerful for trouble, so I guessed they were fixing to buy provisions.

“All right,” the old man said quickly, bringing my mind back to earth, “here they are. Shep and I’ll ride out first.”

Around the bend, out of the woods, came a very clean and bright-appearing young man with his wife, one of those red-cheeked, plump girls that can work a man down any day in the week. They were riding horses, and behind them followed a wagon hitched to two mules and driven by a youngster of eleven or twelve. Two
other children were in the wagon, both little girls; they could have been twins.

“Howdy, folks,” cried John, and up he rode, digging his heels into his mare with little nervous nibbles. Shep was right beside him, having put Jennie down to the ground, and we followed along after.