Humbug Mountain (9 page)

“Except the chief engineer,” Pa remarked.

“I was tempted,” answered Mr. Slathers. “But I couldn't leave my boiler and valves and rods to rust away, could I? Still keep things oiled.”

“Then you expect Captain Tuggle back!” Ma exclaimed.

“I about give up on that,” Mr. Slathers mumbled. “It's goin' on two years.”

There was a spell of quiet.

Mr. Slathers shifted uneasily in his chair. Then he said, “A quantity of the captain's friends bought his riverside lots, sight unseen. Just from the picture. His partners in St. Louis had that thing lithographed up. Captain Jack meant to make that picture good. Why, we got a ten-room hotel aboard, the lumber all cut to size, windows and all. A fine little opera house, too. Came from Chicago—Bridges Ready-Made Houses. The captain paid cash. But Sunrise is never going to be now, and the captain's gone bust. Can't pay his friends back their money. Won't show his face. His partners disappeared with the cash.”

I had been careful not to open my mouth, being all ears, but I said, “I reckon Grandpa's out tracking them down. I bet he is!”

“It crossed his mind. But he calculated they'd have the money spent before he could shake any greenbacks out of their pockets. No, he won't be back—not until he can pay off everyone or make good on the town. That's how it is with the captain.”

Ma took a breath and looked at Pa. “We'll start packing. And start looking.”

Mr. Slathers gave his head a shake. “M'am, his trail is dog-nose cold.”

Pa was gazing off into space. Then he cocked his head, lifted an eyebrow, and smiled. “Simple. It's all very simple. We'll stay right here.”

“What?” Ma said. “Rufus, we can
try
to find him.”

Pa's smile broadened. “No need to.
He'll
find us.”

“He will?” Glorietta said vaguely. She didn't understand any better than I, but we both knew when Pa had a surprise up his sleeve.

“Certainly!” He ripped out a laugh. “Those two useless outlaws don't know it, but they're going to be doing us a great service. Holy jumped-up Moses! They'll be handing out
The Humbug Mountain Hoorah,
won't they? Some folks won't have better sense than to swallow it whole. And that's bound to put Sunrise gloriously and firmly on the map. Yes, indeed—the city where the notorious Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer were caught, tried, hung, and buried. Word'll spread mouth to mouth. Sunrise, a thriving metropolis boasting that fearless lawman, Sheriff Wiley Flint. The Parnassus of the West, with its own justice of the peace and the first lady mayor. That's you, Jenny.”

Glorietta's eyes lit up behind her glasses. “That was
my
idea!”

Pa exclaimed, “News of that nature is certain to find its way to Captain Tuggle—wherever he is.”

“Merciful powers!” Ma said. She was smiling now too. “He's bound to come back.”

“Quick as one-two-three,” said Pa. He fished a couple of cigars out of his pocket and tossed one to Mr. Slathers. “Light up, sir.”

And Ma said, “Mr. Slathers—will you join us in peaches for dessert?”

13

THE DEAD MAN'S HAND

It was a couple of days later that Mr. Johnson discovered a dead man's hand.

By then Mr. Slathers had shown us that we could store water in the engine-room boiler. He and Pa stretched tarpaulins like awnings to catch rainwater from any passing downpour. It would beat hauling water an everlasting distance from the river. Ma set out her flowerpots. During the day she turned Mr. Johnson and the chickens loose in the cottonwoods to fend for themselves. It was our job to round them up before nightfall.

We didn't hang around much, Glorietta and me. We found a couple of potato sacks aboard and set out to collect buffalo bones. Four dollars a ton, Captain Cully had said. Cash money!

We followed the dry riverbed and pounced on anything bone white that caught our eyes. Mr. Johnson took to tagging along after us, and we were forever trying to chase him back. He'd give a honk and beat his wings, but a bull goose is hard to reason with. After a while we gave up on it.

Before long, buffalo ribs were sticking out of our sacks like sticks of bleached stovewood. Some of them we had to dig out with our bare hands, where grass had grown up over them.

“Wiley, how big a heap do you reckon it takes to make a ton?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“What are you going to do with your share of the money?”

“Haven't given it a thought.”

“Maybe I'll buy a piano. Ma'd like a piano.”

“With two dollars!”

She shot me a defiant look. “I didn't say I was going to stop with one ton of bones, did I?”

“We get a piano, you'll have to practice. Me too, probably.”

“I'd
like
to practice the piano.”

“You're plumb addled,” I said. It was likely Pa and Ma would need every cent. Their own money must be about gone, and it was bound to be a long wait for Grandpa to turn up.

We went scavenging all the way to the end of the old riverbed. The Missouri had
thrown
up acres of silt and a monstrous heap of dead logs before cutting itself a new channel.

We emptied our sacks near the river. That way it would be easier to load the stuff aboard the
Prairie Buzzard
when Captain Cully came steaming back.

Glorietta looked over our tangle of bones. “How much you figure we got?”

“It's a mighty puny pile,” I answered. “A nickel's worth, maybe.”

“That
all
?”

“We just started. What in tarnation do you expect?”

Mr. Johnson was eating grass grown up through a whole rack of buffalo ribs. We ambled over.

“What if Captain Cully steals our bone pile, Wiley? After we've got a big heap, I mean. Two or three tons maybe.”

“He's shifty enough,” I said. “We'll have to keep our eyes sharp.”

“And why do you suppose Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer were in such a lather over two tons of dirt?
Dirt,
of all things!”

I tried to shoo Mr. Johnson out of the curved rack of ribs. “It doesn't make a thimbleful of sense to me.”

“What's Mr. Johnson got?” Glorietta said. Then her voice jumped sky-high. “Wiley, there's a man buried here!”

I scurried around to her side of the tall bones.

A hand reached up out of the ground.

We stood frozen, both of us. The fingers were bent like a bird's claw. The whole hand looked kind of mummified. Mr. Johnson was still tearing away at the grass with his bill.

I chased him away with a stick and then poked the hand. Stiff as a dead branch.

“It
couldn't
be Grandpa,” Glorietta said, glancing at me.

“Of course not,” I declared. “Buried for ages, looks like.”

“I don't want to touch it!”

“Then don't.” I wasn't too anxious to touch the hand myself, but I began clawing out the dirt and weeds around it. Pretty soon I had scooped clear the whole, entire arm down to the elbow. I tapped it again. “Solid as a rock,” I said.

“We'd better get Pa.”

We left our sacks and ran. Mr. Johnson came honking after us.

Ma had strung up a rope in the sun and was hanging up a washing.

“Pa's not here,” she said in a busy tone of voice.

“Mr. Johnson found a dead man!” Glorietta exclaimed. “Pa had better see it.”

“Where'd Pa go?” I asked.

“Left for a while.” Ma didn't even turn to look at us. “A dead man?”

“Turned hard as a rock,” I said. Pa gone? It caught me up short and Glorietta, too. We always got that chill feeling whenever Pa left for anywhere. “Did he say when he'd be back?”

Ma turned and looked at us. “Children, there's nothing to worry about. We'll be safe enough. Pa left me his pepperbox.”

“But where did he go?” Glorietta asked in a paper-thin voice.

“Well, now, we need supplies, don't we? You know that. Pa and Mr. Slathers decided to set out on foot for Wolf Landing.”

“When'll he be back?” I asked. “Did he say?”

“No more than four days. You can count on it.”

Of course we could, I told myself. Pa wouldn't disappear on us. He wouldn't leave us out here in the middle of nowhere. “Do you want to see our dead man?” I said.

“Heavens, no!” Ma exclaimed. “Certainly not.”

14

JIM CHITWOOD

For all I know Glorietta had been crying in her sleep. She came down with the dolefuls whenever Pa turned up missing. She didn't want to go bone-hunting the next day. She didn't want to go back to the dead man. She was just going to sulk around the boat, I guess.

“I'll go without you, then,” I said.

“Go ahead.”

“Doggone it, Glorietta, this isn't like the other times. He has Mr. Slathers along. And you heard what Ma said. They went for supplies.”

“He could have taken us with him.”

“A man doesn't have to tote around his whole family all the time,” I said.

“He could have waited to say good-bye.”

“He'll say hello when he gets back. Can't he get out of sight without you getting all fidgety? He's not tied to Ma's apron strings and he won't be tied to yours either. Grab your sack and let's go.”

“You get fidgety too,” Glorietta declared.

“I'm not a bit fidgety,” I said, although that wasn't strictly the truth. You could never really be sure about Pa. “You coming?

“No.”

I left without her.

I kept my distance from the dead man for a couple of days. I just wandered about, and if Mr. Johnson wasn't following me it seemed that the crows were. Sack by sack the buffalo bones began to pile up, but I wished the days would go a little faster.

Every so often I passed the hand sticking up out of the ground and I tried not to look at it. A dead man wasn't exactly pleasant to have around, even if he had turned hard as stone. But I couldn't
help
looking at it, all grayish green and perishing old and with dirt clinging to it. When the grass was swaying in the wind I began to imagine I saw the hand move, as if that man was going to rise up out of the ground and shake himself off. It was spooky, that hand, and I finally dropped to my knees and buried it.

I spent a long time at the pilothouse windows on the day Pa and Mr. Slathers were due
back.
Ma had said they'd struck off due west instead of following the meanders of the river. Not a speck was moving toward us on the horizon. Finally I got my potato sack and left the boat.

It surprised me to find that Glorietta was already out bone-hunting. I reckoned she didn't want to be there when Pa got back. It was as if she would kind of be getting even with him a little. Maybe he'd think she was lost. Or even had run away.

When I met up with her, I didn't say anything and neither did she. We worked our way along the Missouri. Suddenly I hauled up short.

There was a birchbark canoe pulled up out of the water, and a man sitting on a buffalo skull.

“Where in damnation is Sunrise?” he ripped out, kind of mad-looking. He was a bandy-legged man with stuck-out ears, and he was wearing a fur cap.

“Sunrise,” I said and pointed. “The city limits are right over there.”

“I don't see anything but nothing
that
way. Or any which way. I been paddling up and down all morning.”

“There's nothing in Sunrise but weeds and jackrabbits,” I said.

“Well, where in damnation is the gold rush?”

I glanced at Glorietta and then back at him. “What gold rush?”

“The one I read about in the paper. First lump found in the craw of a chicken.”

“But that was just a gold locket!” I said.

“This one,” Glorietta declared. “The one I'm wearing.”

He stood up. “Don't try to rumsquaddle me.”

“Honest, mister,” I said.

“I mean to stake my claim. Looks like I beat everyone else.”

“More are coming?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“More? Hordes! You can count on it. I've got my pan and shovel. Just point me to the gold diggin's.”

“Sir, it's all a mistake. You see—”

“I seen you two doing some prospecting yourselves.”

“We're just digging buffalo bones.”

“Horsefeathers! Jim Chitwood ain't likely to be taken in by a couple of shut-mouth young'uns. You know where that lump of gold was found!”

His voice wasn't entirely friendly. So I pointed toward the dry riverbed and said truthfully, “Over there.”

“That's more like it,” he said. We backed away. “Much obliged.”

When we got back to the
Phoenix,
Mr. Slathers was there. But Pa hadn't returned with him.

“Locked himself up in a hotel room and wouldn't come out,” Mr. Slathers said. “He asked me to see after you until he gets back.”

15

THE DIGGINGS

A whistling cold wind swept over the prairie for days on end. It set the tarpaulins flapping and the cabins to creaking. “Whipping down out of Canada,” Mr. Slathers said cheerfully, “and not even a barbed wire fence to stop it.”

He meant to look after us while Pa was away, and took it seriously. He sawed wood for the potbellied stove in the main cabin and kept a red-hot fire going. He showed me how to sharpen fishhooks and how to set a rabbit snare, but my mind wasn't on it. He didn't know about Pa and we tried not to let on. But he could tell we were all kind of edgy waiting.

“He'll be along, your pa,” he said. And when the wind turned wet he said, “You don't expect the Colonel to slosh through all that downpour!”