Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
It was the close of day when a boat touched Rodney's
Landing on the Mississippi River and Clement Musgrove,
an innocent planter, with a bag of gold and many presents,
disembarked. He had made the voyage from New Orleans in
safety, his tobacco had been sold for a fair price to the King's
men. In Rodney he had a horse stabled against his return, and
he meant to spend the night there at an inn, for the way home
through the wilderness was beset with dangers.
As his foot touched shore, the sun sank into the river the
color of blood, and at once a wind sprang up and covered the
sky with black, yellow, and green clouds the size of whales,
which moved across the face of the moon. The river was covered
with foam, and against the landing the boats strained in
the waves and strained again. River and bluff gave off alike a
leaf-green light, and from the water's edge the red torches
lining the Landing-under-the-Hill and climbing the bluff to
the town stirred and blew to the left and right. There were
sounds of rushing and flying, from the flourish of carriages
hurrying through the streets after dark, from the bellowing
throats of the flatboatmen, and from the wilderness itself,
which lifted and drew itself in the wind, and pressed its savage
breath even closer to the little galleries of Rodney, and caused
a bell to turn over in one of the steeples, and shook the fort
and dropped a tree over the racetrack.
Holding his bag of gold tight in his hand, Clement made
for the first inn he saw under the hill. It was all lighted up
and full of the sounds of singing.
Clement entered and went straight to the landlord and inquired,
"Have you a bed for the night, where I will not be
disturbed till morning?"
"Aye," replied the landlord, who brushed at a long mustache--an
Englishman.
"But where have you left your right ear?" said Clement,
pointing to the vacancy. Like all innocent men, he was proud
of having one thing in the world he could be sharp about.
And the landlord was forced to admit that he had left the
ear pinned to a market cross in Kentucky, for the horse stealing
he did.
Clement turned and went on up the road, and the storm
was worse. He asked at the next inn, which was equally glittering
and bright, indeed he could not distinguish them in his
memory from one year's end to the next, if he might be accommodated
for the night.
"Aye," said the landlord, showing his front teeth all of
gold.
"But where have you left your left ear?" Clement asked,
and he had that man too. The fellow said it had been clipped
away in Nashville for the sad trouble he got into after the
cockfights.
On he went, the rain worse all the time, until it sounded
like the quarreling of wildcats in the cane, and at last, at the
very top of the hill, he found an inn where he was able to
pronounce the landlord honest.
"Since you appear to be a scrupulous man," he said, "I
would like to engage of you a bed for the night, with supper
and breakfast, if not too dear."
"To be sure," replied the landlord, the very image of a hare,
whose large ears were easily set a-trembling. "But, sir, this is
a popular house, if I may say so. You may have one bedfellow,
or even two, before the night is over."
At that very moment there came a loud gust of laughter
from the grogshop at the side--"Ho! Ho! Ho!"
"But it is early yet," the landlord said, his ears beginning
to quiver nonetheless. "If you go up at once, you will be able
to take first choice of place in the bed."
Clement stopped only to eat a supper of beefsteak, eggs,
bacon, turkey joints, johnnycake, pickled peaches, plum pie,
and a bowl of grog before saying good night to him.
"Pleasant dreams!" the landlord said, and the traveler went
up the winding stair.
Clement was the first man to the room. The storm was
unabated, the wind was shaking the house like a cat a mouse.
The rain had turned to hail. First he hid his moneybag under
that end of the pillow which was nearest the door, and then
he sat down to take off his boots before getting into bed,
such being the rule of the house. But before he got his first
boot off, in walked a second traveler.
This was a brawny man six and a half feet high, with a blue
coat, red shirt, and turkey feather stuck in his cap, and he held
a raven on his finger which never blinked an eye, and could say,
"Turn back, my bonny,
Turn away home."
"Ah, stranger," said this fellow to Clement, striding up.
"It's been a long time since we slept together."
"So it has," said Clement.
"Have you got the same old smell you had before?" asked
the stranger, and Clement did not say no.
"Are you just as lousy as ever?" he roared, and Clement
said he was.
"Then shake hands!"
Before Clement could get the second boot off, the third
traveler walked in.
He was as brawny as the other, though but six feet tall, and
dressed up like a New Orleans dandy, with his short coat knotted
about him capewise. But for some reason he wore no hat,
and his heavy yellow locks hung over his forehead and down
to his shoulders.
"Ah, stranger," said he to the second traveler. "Crowded
days! It's been a long time since our heads were side by side
on the pillow."
"Long as forever!" sang out the other.
Then Clement knew they were all three strangers to one
another, with the stormy night ahead.
When the third traveler removed his cloak, there was a little
dirk hid in the knot, which he placed with his moneybag under
the pillow. And there were the three bags of gold sitting
there side by side, like hens on their nests. So Clement held
up the snuffer over the light.
"Wait!" said the third traveler. "Are we dreaming already?
We are going off without the last nightcap, gentlemen."
"Ho! Ho! Ho!" said the second traveler, punching himself
in the forehead and kicking himself in the breeches. "That is
a thing I seldom forget, for my mind is as bright as a gold
piece."
All three of them sat and uncorked their jugs and at the
same moment drank down. And when they looked up, the
second traveler had drunk the whole jugful.
"Remarkable!" said the yellow-haired stranger, who had
made way with half a jug. Poor Clement, who had swallowed
only a fourth, could say nothing.
"That was only a finicky taste," replied the other, and
throwing off his blue coat, he yelled, "Drink again!"
And he seized Clement's own jug out of his finger and
emptied it.
"A master!" said Yellowhair. "But I dare say that is the end,
the show is over. You can do no more."
"Ho! Ho!" said the other, and taking off his red shirt and
filling his bristling chest with a breath of air, he seized the
other's own jug and finished it off.
Then, sailing his cap in the air, he gave a whistle and a shake
and declared that he was none other than Mike Fink, champion
of all the flatboat bullies on the Mississippi River, and
was ready for anything.
"Mike Fink! Well now," said the yellow-haired stranger,
and putting his head to one side studied him with all the signs
of admiration.
"Yes indeed I am," said the flatboatman crossly. "Am I not
Mike Fink, as you live and breathe?" he roared at Clement.
It was a cautious night, but Clement believed him, until the
yellow-haired stranger said, "Well, I doubt it."
"You doubt that I am Mike Fink? Nevertheless, it is true!"
yelled the flatboatman. "Only look!" And he doubled up his
fists and rippled the muscles on his arms up and down, as slow
as molasses, and on his chest was the finest mermaid it was
possible to have tattooed at any port. "I can pick up a grown
man by the neck in each hand and hold him out at arm's
length, and often do, too," yelled the flatboatman. "I eat a
whole cow at one time, and follow her up with a live sheep if
it's Sunday. Ho! ho! If I get hungry on a voyage, I jump off
my raft and wade across, and take whatever lies in my path
on shore. When I come near, the good folk take to their heels
and run from their houses! I only laugh at the Indians, and I
can carry a dozen oxen on my back at one time, and as for
pigs, I tie them in a bunch and hang them to my belt!"
"Strike me dead!" said the yellow-haired stranger, and he
yawned, got into bed, and shut his eyes.
"I'm an alligator!" yelled the flatboatman, and began to
flail his mighty arms through the air. "I'm a he-bull and a he-rattlesnake
and a he-alligator all in one! I've beat up so many
flatboatmen and thrown them in the river I haven't kept a
count since the food, and I'm a lover of the women like you'll
never see again." And he chanted Mike Fink's song: "I can
outrun, outhop, outjump, throw down, drag out, and lick any
man in the country!"
"Go down to the corner and buy yourself a new jug," said
the yellow-haired stranger. His eyes were shut tight still,
though Clement's, you may be sure, were open wide. "You're
still nothing but an old buffalo."
"So I lie?" bellowed the flatboatman, and, leaping out of his
breeches, he jumped across the room in three jumps and said,
"Feast your eyes upon me and deny that I am Mike Fink."
Clement was ready to agree, but the yellow-haired stranger
said, "Why, you're nothing but an old hoptoad, you will make
me mad in a minute. Now what is it you want? If you want
to fight, let us fight."
At that, the flatboatman gave one soul-reaching shout and
jumped into the featherbed and burst it, and the yellow-haired
stranger leaped up with a laugh, and the feathers blew all
around the room like the chips in a waterspout. And out the
window it was storming, and from the door the raven was
saying,
"Turn again, my bonny,
Turn away home."
As for Clement, he removed himself, since he was a man of
peace and would not be wanted on the scene, and held the
candle where it would be safe and at the same time cast the
best light, and all the while his bedfellows sliced right and left,
picked each other up, and threw each other down for a good
part of the night. And if he sneezed once, he sneezed a thousand
times, for the feathers.
Finally the flatboatman said, "Let us stop and seize forty
winks. We will take it up in the morning where we leave off
tonight. Agreed?"
"Certainly," said the other, dropping him to the ground
where he was about to throw him. "That is the rule Mike
Fink would make, if he were here."
"Say once more that I am not Mike Fink and, peace or no
peace, that will be your last breath!" cried the flatboatman.
And then he said cunningly, "If by now you don't know who
I am, I know who you are, that followed this rich planter to
his bed."
"Take care," said the other.
"I will bet all the gold that lies under this pillow against
the sickening buttons you wear sewed to your coat, that your
name is Jamie Lockhart! Jamie Lockhart the----"
"Take care," said the other once more, and he half pulled
out his little dirk.
"I say for the third time that your name is Jamie Lockhart,
the I-forget-what," said the flatboatman. "And if that does
not make it so, we will leave the decision to this gentleman,
whose name has not yet been brought out in the open."
The poor planter could only say, "My name, about which
there is no secret, is Clement Musgrove. But I do not know
Jamie Lockhart, any more than I know Mike Fink, and will
identify neither."
"I am Mike Fink!" yelled the flatboatman. "And that is
Jamie Lockhart! And not the other way around, neither! You
say you do not know who he is--do you not know what he
is? He is a----" And he took hold of Clement like a mother
bear and waltzed him around, whispering, "Say it! Say it! Say
it!"
The poor man began to shake his head with wonder, and
he did not like to dance.
But the yellow-haired stranger smiled at him and said coolly
enough, "Say who I am forever, but dare to say what I am,
and that will be the last breath of any man."
With that delivered, he lay down in the bed once more, and
said to Mike Fink, "Blow out the candle."
The flatboatman immediately closed his mouth, put his
breeches and shirt and his coat back on, blew out the candle,
and fell into the bed on one side of Jamie Lockhart, if it was
he, while the planter, deciding that affairs were at rest for the
evening, lay down on the other.
But no sooner had Clement given a groan and got to the
first delightful regions of sleep than he felt a hand seize his
arm.
"Make no sound, as you value your life," whispered a voice.
"But rise up out of the bed."
The storm was over, and the raven was still, but who knows
whether he slept? It was the yellow-haired man who had whispered,
and Clement had to wonder if now he should find out
what Jamie Lockhart was. A murderer? A madman? A ghost?
Some outlandish beast in New Orleans dress? He got to his
feet and looked at his companion by the pure light of the
moon, which by now was shining through the shutter. He
was remarkably amiable to see. But by his look, nobody could
tell what he would do.
So he led Clement to a corner, and then placed two bundles
of sugar cane, that were standing by the wall, in their two
places in the bed.
"Why is that?" said Clement.
"Watch and wait," said he, and gave him a flash in the dark
from his white teeth.
And in the dead of the night up rose Mike Fink, stretching
and giggling, and reaching with his hands he ripped up a long
board from out of the floor.
As soon as it came under his touch, he exclaimed in a delighted
whisper, "Particle of a flatboat you are! Oh, I would
know you anywhere, I'd know you like a woman, I'd know
you by your sweet perfume." He gave it a smack and said,
"Little piece of flatboat, this is Mike Fink has got you by
the tail. Now go to work and ruin these two poor sleeping
fools!"
Then he proceeded to strike a number of blows with the
plank, dividing them fairly and equally with no favorites between
the two bundles of sugar cane lying between the feathers
of the bed.
"There! And there! If we have left you one whole bone
between you, I'm not the bravest creature in the world and
this pretty thing never sprang from a flatboat," he said.
Next, reaching under the tatters of the pillow, he snatched
all three bags of gold, like hot johnnycakes from a fire, and
lying down and stretching his legs, he went to sleep at once,
holding the gold in his two hands against his chest and dreaming
about nothing else.
When all was still once more, Clement stretched forth his
hand and said, "Are you Jamie Lockhart? I ask your name
only in gratitude, and I do not ask you what you may be."
"I am Jamie Lockhart," said he.
"How can I thank you, sir, for saving my life?"
"Put it off until morning," said Jamie Lockhart. "For now,
as long as we are supposed to be dead, we can sleep in peace."
He and the planter then fell down and slept until cockcrow.
Next morning Clement awoke to see Jamie Lockhart up
and in his boots. Jamie gave him a signal, and he hid with
him in the wardrobe and watched out through the crack.
So Mike Fink woke up with a belch like the roar of a lion.
"Next day!" announced Mike, and he jumped out off bed.
With a rousing clatter the moneybags fell off his chest to the
floor. "Gold!" he cried. Then he bent down and counted it,
every piece, and then, as if with a sudden recollection, he
stirred around in the bed with his finger, although he held his
other hand over his eyes and would not look. "Nothing left
of the two of them but the juice," said he.
Then Jamie Lockhart gave Clement a sign, and out they
marched from the wardrobe, not saying a thing.
The flatboatman fell forward as if the grindstone were hung
about his neck.
"Bogeys!" he cried.
"Good morning! Could this be Mike Fink?" inquired Jamie
Lockhart politely.
"Holy Mother! Bogeys for sure!" he cried again.
"Don't you remember Jamie Lockhart, or has it been so
long ago?"
"Oh, Jamie Lockhart, how do you feel?"
"Fine and fit."
"Did you sleep well?"
"Yes indeed," said Jamie, "except for some rats which
slapped me with their tails once or twice in the night. Did
you notice it, Mr. Musgrove?"
"Yes," said Clement, by the plan, "now that I think of it."
"I do believe they were dancing a Natchez Cotillion on my
chest," said Jamie.
And at that the flatboatman cried "Bogeys!" for the last
time, and jumped out the window. There he had left three sacks
of gold behind him, Clement Musgrove's, Jamie Lockhart's
and his own.
"Gone for good," said Jamie. "And so we will have to get
rid of his gold somehow."
"Please be so kind as to dispose of that yourself," Clement
said, "for my own is enough for me, and I have no interest
in it."
"Very well," said he, "though it is the talking bird that
takes my fancy more."
"You may have that and welcome. And now tell me what
thing of mine you will accept, for you saved my life," said the
planter in great earnestness.
Jamie Lockhart smiled and said, "I stand in need of one
thing, it is true, and without it I may even be in danger of
arrest."
"What is that?"
"A Spanish passport. It is only a formality, and a small matter,
but I am a stranger in the Natchez country. It requires a
recommendation to the Governor by a landowner like yourself."
"I will give it gladly," said Clement. "Before you go, I will
write it out. But tell me--will you settle hereabouts?"
"Perhaps," said Jamie, making ready to go. "That is yet to
be seen. Yet we shall surely meet again," he said, knotting the
sleeves of his coat about his shoulders and taking up the bird
on his left forefinger. It said at once, as though there it belonged,
"Turn back, my bonny,
Turn away home."
Clement decided then and there to invite this man to dine
with him that very Sunday night. But first, being a gullible
man, one given to trusting all listening people, Clement sat
Jamie Lockhart down in the Rodney inn, looked him kindly
in the face, and told him the story of his life.
"I was once married to a beautiful woman of Virginia," he
said, "her name was Amalie. We lived in the peaceful hills.
The first year, she bore me two blissful twins, a son and
a daughter, the son named for me and the daughter named
Rosamond. And it was not long before we set out with a few
of the others, and were on our way down the river. That was
the beginning of it all," said Clement, "the journey down.
On the flatboat around our fire we crouched and looked at
one another--I, my first wife Amalie, Kentucky Thomas and
his wife Salome, and the little twins like cubs in their wrappings.
The reason I ever came is forgotten now," he said. "I
know I am not a seeker after anything, and ambition in this
world never stirred my heart once. Yet it seemed as if I was
caught up by what came over the others, and they were the
same. There was a great tug at the whole world, to go down
over the edge, and one and all we were changed into pioneers,
and our hearts and our own lonely wills may have had nothing
to do with it."
"Don't go fretting over the reason," said Jamie kindly, "for
it may have been the stars."
"The stars shone down on all our possessions," said
Clement, "as if they were being counted and found a small
number. The stars shone brightly--too brightly. We could see
too well then not to drift onward, too well to tie up and keep
the proper vigil. At some point under the stars, the Indians
lured us to shore."
"How did they do it?" asked Jamie. "What trick did they
use? The savages are so clever they are liable to last out, no
matter how we stamp upon them."
"The Indians know their time has come," said Clement.
"They are sure of the future growing smaller always, and that
lets them be infinitely gay and cruel. They showed their pleasure
and their lack of surprise well enough, when we climbed
and crept up to them as they waited on all fours, disguised in
their bearskins and looking as fat as they could look, out from
the head of the bluff."
"They took all your money, of course," said Jamie. "And
I wonder how much it was you would have had to give. Only
yesterday I heard of a case where travelers captured in the
wilderness gave up three hundred doubloons, seventy-five bars
of gold in six-by-eights, five hundred French guineas, and any
number of odd pieces, the value of which you could not tell
without weighing them--all together about fifteen thousand
dollars."
But if he spoke a hint, Clement did not hear it. "The money
was a little part," he said. "In their camp where we were
taken--a clear-swept, devious, aromatic place under flowering
trees--we were encircled and made to perform and go naked
like slaves. We had to go whirling and dizzied in a dance we
had never suspected lay in our limbs. We had to be humiliated
and tortured and enjoyed, and finally, with the most precise
formality, to be decreed upon. All of them put on their blazing
feathers and stood looking us down as if we were little
mice."
"This must have been long ago," said Jamie. "For they are
not so fine now, and cannot do so much to prisoners as that."
"The son named after me was dropped into a pot of burning
oil," said Clement, "and my wife Amalie fell dead out of
the Indians' arms before the sight. This made the Indians
shiver with scorn; they thought she should have lived on
where she stood. In their contempt they turned me free, and
put a sort of mark upon me. There is nothing that you can
see, but something came out of their eyes. Kentucky Thomas
was put to death. Then I, who had shed tears, and my child,
that was a girl, and Salome, the ugly woman they were all
afraid of, were turned into the wilderness, bound together.
They beat us out with their drums."
"The Indians wanted you to be left with less than nothing,"
said Jamie.
"Like other devices tried upon a man's life, this could have
compelled love," Clement said. "I walked tied beside this
woman Salome, carrying my child, hungry and exhausted and
in hiding for longer than I remember."
"And now she is your second wife," said Jamie, "and you
have prospered, have you not?"
"From the first, Salome turned her eyes upon me with less
question than demand, and that is the most impoverished
gaze in the world. There was no longer anything but ambition
left in her destroyed heart. We scarcely spoke to each other,
but each of us spoke to the child. As I grew weaker, she grew
stronger, and flourished by the struggle. She could have taken
her two hands and broken our bonds apart, but she did not.
I never knew her in any of her days of gentleness, which must
have been left behind in Kentucky. The child cried, and she
hushed it in her own way. One morning I said to myself, `If
we find a river, let that be a sign, and I will marry this woman,'
but I did not think we would ever find a river. Then almost
at once we came upon it--the whole Mississippi. A priest
coming down from Tennessee on a flatboat to sell his whisky
stopped when he saw us, cut us loose from each other, then
married us. He fed us meat, blessed us, gave us a gallon of
corn whisky, and left us where we were."
"And you turned into a planter on the spot," said Jamie,
"and I wonder how much you are worth now!"
"There on the land which the King of Spain granted to
me," said Clement, bent to tell his full story now or burst, "I
built a little hut to begin with. But when my first tobacco was
sold at the market, Salome, my new wife, entreated me in the
night to build a better house, like the nearest settler's, and so
I did. There was added the fine bedroom with a mirror to
hang on the wall, and after the bedroom a separate larder, and
behind the house a kitchen with a great oven. And behind
the kitchen in a little pen was a brand-new pig, and tied beyond
him to a tree was a fresh cow. A big black dog barked
in the dooryard to keep anybody out, and a cock jumped on
the roof of the house every morning and crowed loud enough
to alarm the whole country.
"`How is this, wife?' said I.
"`We shall see,' Salome said. `For it is impossible not to
grow rich here.'"
"And she was right," said Jamie.
"Yes, she was right," Clement said. "She would stand inflexible
and tireless, casting long black shadows from the candle
she would be always carrying about the halls at night. She
was never certain that we lived unmolested, and examined the
rooms without satisfaction. Often she carried a rifle in the
house, and she still does. You would see her eyes turn toward
any open door, as true as a wheel. I brought her many gifts,
more and more, that she would take out of their wrappings
without a word and lay away in a chest."
"A woman to reckon with, your second wife," said Jamie
with a musing smile.
Clement closed his lips then, but he remembered how in
her times of love Salome was immeasurably calculating and
just so, almost clock-like, in the way of the great Spanish automaton
in the iron skirt in the New Orleans bazaar, which
could play and beat a man at chess.
"As soon as possible," said Clement aloud, "I would bring
her another present, to stop the guilt in my heart."
"Guilt is a burdensome thing to carry about in the heart,"
said Jamie. "I would never bother with it."
"Then you are a man of action," said Clement, "a man of
the times, a pioneer and a free agent. There is no one to come
to you saying `I want' what you do not want. `Clement,'
Salome would say, `I want a gig to drive in to Rodney.' `Let us
wait another year,' said I. `Nonsense!' So there would be a
gig. Next, `Clement, I want a row of silver dishes to stand on
the shelf.' `But my dear wife, how can we be sure of the food
to go in them?' And the merchants, you know, have us at their
mercy. Nevertheless, my next purchase off the Liverpool ship
was not a new wrought-iron plow, but the silver dishes. And
it did seem that whatever I asked of the land I planted on, I
would be given, when she told me to ask, and there was no
limit to its favors."
"How is your fortune now?" asked Jamie, leaning forward
on his two elbows.
"Well, before long a little gallery with four posts appeared
across the front of my house, and we were sitting there in the
evening; and new slaves sent out with axes were felling more
trees, and indigo and tobacco were growing nearer and nearer
to the river there under the black shadow of the forest. Then
in one of the years she made me try cotton, and my fortune
was made. I suppose that at the moment," said Clement in
conclusion, but with no show of confidence (for to tell the
truth, he was not sure exactly what he was worth), "I may be
worth thousands upon thousands of gold pieces."
"You are a successful man," said Jamie, "willy-nilly."
"But on some of the mornings as I ride out," said Clement,
"my daughter Rosamond runs and stops me on the path and
says, `Father, why was it you shouted out so loudly in the
night?' And I tell her that I had a dream. `What was your
dream?' says she. `In the dream, whenever I lie down, then it
is the past. When I climb to my feet, then it is the present.
And I keep up a struggle not to fall.' And Rosamond says, `It
is my own mother you love, swear it is so.' And Salome listens
at the doors and I hear her say to herself, `I had better wake
him each morning just before his dream, which comes at
dawn, and declare my rights.'" Clement sighed and said, "It
is want that does the world's arousing, and if it were not for
that, who knows what might not be interrupted?"
But Jamie said he must go, and reminded him of the passport
that was needed.
"You have interested me very much," said Clement, when
he had written it out; for the poor man was under the misapprehension
that he now knew everything about Jamie, instead
of seeing the true fact that Jamie now knew everything
about him. "And in order to persuade you to settle near-by,
and come and talk more to me in the evenings, I invite you
to dine with me on next Sunday night. It is only three hours'
ride away, and I will meet you here to show you the way."
"And I think I will come," said Jamie, his teeth flashing in
a smile. But his look was strange indeed.
"I wish to introduce you," said Clement, nevertheless, "to
Salome; and to my daughter Rosamond, who is so beautiful
that she keeps the memory of my first wife alive and evergreen
in my heart."
Then they both rode away--Clement through the wilderness
to his plantation, and Jamie on an errand of his own,
with the raven perched on his shoulder.