Kitabı oku: «Winning the Wilderness», sayfa 19
The rafts sped along the cable, and squad after squad went pell mell into General Luna’s stronghold, under stubborn fire from the frantic rebels.
Thaine Aydelot was on the last raft to cross the river. Doctor Carey watched with eager gaze as the last men reached the farther bank. He saw them scrambling up from the water’s edge. He saw Thaine turn back to lift up a comrade blinded, but not injured, by the smoke of a gun. He saw the two start forward. Then the faint “ping” of a Mauser came to his ears, and Thaine threw up his hands and fell backward into the water and sank from sight, while the other soldiers, unknowing, rushed forward into battle.
For a moment, Horace Carey stood like a statue, then he sprang into the river and swam against the fire of the hidden foe to where Thaine Aydelot had disappeared. Ten minutes later, while Luna’s forces were trying vainly to resist the daring Americans, Thaine Aydelot lay on a raft which Carey, with a Red Cross aid, was pulling toward the south bank.
When the Fighting Twentieth soldiers were relieved from service, and turned their faces gladly toward the Kansas prairies, whither hundreds of proud fathers and mothers and wives and sweethearts were waiting to give eager, happy welcome, Thaine Aydelot lay hovering between life and death in the hospital at Manila. The white-haired doctor who had saved him from the waters of the Rio Grande watched hourly beside him, relying not so much on the ministrations of his calling as in his trust in an Infinite Father, through whom at last the sick may be made whole.
CHAPTER XX
The Crooked Trail
Life may be given in many ways,
And loyalty to truth be sealed
As bravely in the closet as the field.
– Lowell.
“Here’s yo’ letter from the Fillippians, Mis’ Virginia; Mr. Champers done bring hit for you all.” Boanerges Peeperville fairly danced into the living room of the Sunflower Inn. “They ain’t no black mournin’ aidge bindin’ it round nuthah, thank the good Lawd foh that.”
Virginia Aydelot opened the letter with trembling fingers. It was only a brief page, but the message on it was big with comfort for her.
“It is from Horace,” she said, as her eyes followed the lines. “He was with Thaine when he wrote it. Thaine is perfectly well again and busy as ever. He and Horace seem to be needed over there yet awhile. Isn’t it wonderful how Thaine ever lived through that dreadful bullet wound and fever?”
“I jus’ wondeh how you all stand up undeh such ’flictions. Seems to me a motheh done wilt down, but they don’t. Mothehs is the bravest things they is,” Bo Peep declared with a broad grin of admiration.
“Oh, we get schooled to it. Asher’s mother waited through six years while he was in army service; and remember how long I waited in Virginia for him to come back to me! I wondered at the test of my endurance then. I know now it was to prepare me for Thaine’s time of service for his country.”
“I done remember, all right, ’bout that time in ol’ Virginia, an’ the day I taken you the letteh up in the little glen behind the ol’ mansion house whah hit wah so cool and the watah’s so cleah. Misteh Horace wah home that day, too. Say, Mis’ Virginia, did – did he done mention my name anywhar in that letteh?”
The pathos of the dark face was pitiful.
“‘My best love to Bo Peep.’” Virginia pointed to the line as she read.
“Kin I please have this huh envelope?” Bo Peep pleaded, and, clutching it as a sacred treasure, he said: “Mis’ Virginia, didn’t I done tellen you Misteh Thaine would come back?”
“How did you know?” Virginia asked with shining eyes.
“Becuz of what Doctoh Horace lef for me to tell you. It cain’t do no hahm to tell hit thus fah.”
Bo Peep hesitated, and Virginia looked curiously at him.
“Doctor Horace won’t never come back. I tol’ you that sufficiency times. When he lef, he say, ’Tel Mis’ Virginia, if I don’t come back, I’se done goin’ to be with Misteh Thaine an’ take care of him, ’cause I love the boy, – hit cain’t do no hahm to tell you that while Misteh Horace still writen to us. An’ didn’t he tak’ care of Misteh Thaine? Didn’t he lef his place an’ go down to that Rigrand Riveh, an’ didn’t he see Misteh Thaine fall back with a bullet pushin’ him right into the watah? Yes, an’ be drownded if Doctoh Horace hadn’t done swum right then and fish him out. An’ didn’t he stay night time an’ day time right by the blessed boy, till he’s pullin’ him out of dangeh of death’s wing? Oh, yo’ son done comin’ back ’cause Misteh Horace say he sho’ goin’ jus’ tak’ care of him.”
“But, Bo Peep, why do you not believe we’ll have Horace here again?” Virginia asked.
The black man only shook his head mournfully as he answered determinedly, “Ef yo’ saves a life, you has to give one for hit, mos’ eveh time, an’ mo’ specially in the Fillippians whah they’s so murderful and slaughterous.”
“Oh, you ought not think that way,” Virginia urged. “Run quick, now, and take the news to Asher. I don’t know where he is this morning.”
“He’s talkin’ to Mr. Dabley Champehs out to the barn,” Bo Peep said as he hurried away.
Asher Aydelot was standing before the big barn doors when Darley Champers turned from the main road and drove into the barnyard. It was a delicious April morning, with all the level prairie lands smiling back at the skies above them, and every breath of the morning breeze bearing new vigor and inspiration in its caressing touch.
“Good morning, Champers; fine morning to live,” Asher called out cheerily.
“Mornin’, Aydelot; fine day, fine! Miss Shirley told me last fall she got her first inspiration for buyin’ a quarter of land with nothin’ and faith, and makin’ it pay for itself, out of one of Coburn’s Agricultural Reports. I reckon if a book like that could inspire a woman, they’s plenty in a mornin’ like this to inspire old Satan to a more uprighteous line of goods than he generally carries. I never see the country look better. Your wheat is tremendous. How’s the country look to you?” Champers responded.
“I can remember when it looked a good deal worse,” Asher replied. “The Coburn Reports must have helped to turn bare prairie and weedy boom lots into harvest fields.”
The two men had seated themselves on the sloping driveway before the barn doors. Asher was chewing the tender joint of a spear of foxtail grass, and Champers had lighted a heavy cigar.
“You don’t smoke, I believe,” he said cordially, “or I’d insist on offering the mate.”
“No, I just chew,” Asher replied, as he bent the foxtail thoughtfully in his fingers and looked out toward the wheat fields already rippling like waves under the morning breeze.
“Say, Aydelot, do you remember the day I come down this valley and tried my danged best to get you to sell out for a song? I’ve done some pretty scaly things, all inside the letter of the law, since then, but never anything that’s stuck in my craw like that. I guess you ain’t forgot it, neither?”
“I remember more of those first years than of these later ones, and I haven’t forgotten when you came to the Grass River schoolhouse one hot Sunday about grasshopper time, but I don’t believe anybody holds it against you. You were out for business just as we were,” Asher replied with a genial smile.
“Say! D’recollect what you said to me when I invited you to cast your glims over this very country, a burnt-up old prairie that day, so scorched it was too dry and hot to cut up into town lots for an addition to Hades?”
Asher laughed now.
“No, I don’t remember anything about that. It was just the general line of events that stayed with me,” he said.
“Well, I do; and I’ll never forget the look in your eyes when you said it, neither. I’d told you, as I say, just to look at this God-forsaken old plain and tell me what you see. And you looked, like you was glimpsin’ heaven a’most, and just said sorter solemn like an’ prophetic: ‘I see a land fair as the Garden of Eden, with grazing herds on broad meadows, and fields on fields of wheat, and groves and little lakes and rivers – a land of comfortable homes and schoolhouses and churches, and no saloons nor breweries.’ And then I broke in and told you I see a danged fool, and you says, ‘Come down here in twenty-five year and make a hunt for me then.’ And, by golly, Aydelot, here I am. You’ve everlastingly conquered the prairies for sure, and you are a young man, not fifty-five yet.”
“Well, you can see most of those things that I saw that day out yonder, can’t you?”
Asher’s eyes followed the waving young wheat and the blossoming orchards, the grove, full of birds’ songs, and the line of Grass River running deeper year by year. Then he looked at his hard, brown hands and thought of the toil and faith and hope that had gone into the conquest.
“Yes, I’m still among the middle-aged,” he said, straightening with his habitual military dignity of bearing. “But I don’t know about this everlasting conquest of the prairies. There’s still some of it waiting over beyond those headlands in the open range where John Jacobs has a big holding. I’ll never feel that I have conquered until my boy proves himself in civil life as well as on the battlefield. If I can bring him back when he is through with the Orient, then, Darley Champers, I will have done something beside subdue the soil. Through him, I’ll keep the wilderness from ever getting hold again. If we live so narrowly that our children hate the lines we follow and will not go on and do still bigger things than we have done, do we really make a success of life?”
At that moment Bo Peep appeared with Doctor Carey’s letter, and the subject shifted to the problems of the far East.
“We aren’t the only people who are having trouble,” Asher said. “I read in the papers that the Boxer uprising that began in southern China last year is spreading northward and making no end of disturbance.”
“What’s them Boxers wantin’? Are they a band of prize ring fellers?” Darley Champers asked.
“Pryor Gaines writes Jim Shirley that they are a secret order of fanatics bent on stamping out all Christianity and all western ideas of advancement in the Orient. Things begin to look ugly in China, even from this distance. When a band of religious fanatics like the Boxers go on the warpath, their atrocities make a Cheyenne raid or a Kiowa massacre look like a football game. I hope Pryor will not be in their line of march.”
“Pryor Gaines’d better stayed right here. It’s what’s likely to happen to a man who goes missionarying too far, and we could ’a used him here.”
It was an unusual concession for Darley Champers to make regarding the church, and Asher looked keenly at him.
“Say, Aydelot,” Champers said suddenly, “you have more influence with John Jacobs ’n anybody else, I know. If you see the Jew, pass it on to him that Wyker’s at his old cut-ups again over in Wykerton, and he’s danged bitter against Jacobs. I can help him on the side like I did before, but the Jew’s got hold of enough over there now to run things, with ownin’ land all round and holdin’ mortgages on town property just to keep joints out of ’em. I do no end of business for Jacobs now. Never had dealin’s with a straighter man. But he’d better look out for Wyker. The Dutchman’s insides is all green with poison, he’s hated Jacobs so many years.”
“I guess John will make it hard on him if they come to blows again. The jail sentence and fine Jacobs fastened on him let Wyker down easy. John Jacobs is one of the state’s big men,” Asher responded.
“We lost another big man when we let Doc Carey go,” Champers went on. “I used to set up nights and rest myself hatin’ him. He done the biggest missionary work in me the two weeks I stayed at his house ever was done for a benighted heathen. I hated to see him go.” The sadness of the tone was genuine. “But I mustn’t be hangin’ round here all the mornin’; I’ve got other things to do. Hope your boy’ll keep a-goin’ till his term’s out. Goodday!” And Champers was gone.
“Till his term’s out!” Asher repeated with a smile. “Wouldn’t that six-footer of a soldier boy, whose patriotism burns like a furnace, see the joke to that! Till he gets his stripes off and forgets the lock-step! My Thaine, who is giving a young man’s strength of body and inspiration of soul to his country’s service! But Carey did do a missionary work in Champers. The fellow was crooked enough ’inside the law always,’ as he said, but no more out of line than scores of reputable business men are today. And the fact that he’s Jacobs’ agent now measures the degree of trustworthiness Carey has helped to waken in him.”
Darley Champers’ business took him down the river to the Cloverdale Ranch, where he found Leigh Shirley training the young vines up the trellis by the west porch.
“You got a mighty pretty place here; just looks like Jim Shirley,” Champers declared as he greeted the young gardener.
“Yes, Uncle Jim is never so happy as when he is puttering about the lawn and garden,” Leigh answered.
“How’s your alfalfa doin’?” Champers asked as he turned toward the level stretch of rich green alfalfa fields. “Danged money-maker for you,” he added jovially.
“We’ll clear the place with the first cutting this year. It’s just the thing for Uncle Jim,” Leigh asserted.
“Yep, Jim’s in clover – alfalfa, ruther. You had a good business head when you run your bluff some years ago, an’ you wan’t only nineteen then. You walked into my place an’ jest bought that land on sheer bluff.” Champers laughed uproariously, but he grew sober in the next minute.
“Miss Shirley,” he said gravely, “I ain’t got much style nor sentiment in my makin’s, but I’ve honestly tried to be humane by widders an’ orphans. I’ve done men to keep ’em from doin’ me, or jest ’cause they was danged easy, but I never wronged no woman, not even my wife, who divorced me years ago back East ’cause I wouldn’t turn my old mother out o’ doors, but kep’ her and provided for her long as she lived.”
Nobody in Kansas had ever heard Darley Champers mention his home relations before. Leigh looked at him gravely, and the sympathy in her deep blue eyes was grateful to the uncultured man before her.
“Miss Shirley, I ain’t wantin’ to meddle none, but I come down here to ask you if you know anything about your father?”
Leigh gave a start and stared at her questioner, but her woman’s instinct told her that only kindly purpose lay back of his question.
He had sat down on the edge of the porch and Leigh stood leaning against the trellis, clutching the narrow slats, as she looked at him.
“I think he is dead,” she answered slowly. “Uncle Jim says he must be. He was a bad man, made bad not by blood but by selfishness. The Shirleys are a fine family.”
“Excuse me for sayin’ it, Miss, but you took every good trait of that family, an’ Nature jest shied every bad trait as far from you as it took the sins of our old savage Anglo-Saxon ancestors off of our heads; them that used to kill an’ eat their neighborin’ tribes, like the Filipinos, they was. Don’t never forget that you’re a Shirley an’ not a Tank. Your grandma’s name was Tank, I’ve been told.”
Leigh made no response, but something in her face and in the poise of her figure bespoke the truth of Darley Champers’ words.
“I jest come down to tell you,” he continued, “that the man I represented when I sold you this quarter, he represented your father, Tank Shirley, and Tank got it through this man away from Jim out of pure hate. I sold it back to you out of pure spite to Tank’s agent, who was naggin’ me. If your father is dead, there’d ought to be somethin’ comin’ back, as the money you paid for the land would help you some if we could get it back. I come as a friend. I’m kinder in Doc Carey’s shoes while he’s gone, you see. You’ve got the land as good as paid for. It will be clear, you say, by June. Buyin’ it of your own father, if there’s any estate left of him, you’d ought to have it. Money’s always a handy commodity, an’ I’d like to see you git what’s your’n after your plucky bluff and winnin’. You could use it, I reckon?”
“We need it very much,” Leigh assured him.
“Say, would you mind tellin’ me if you find out anything about your father’s whereabouts or anything?” Champers queried.
“Yes, I will,” Leigh replied, “but will you tell me what you know about him; you must know something?”
It was Champers’ turn to start now. “N-not much; not as much as I’m goin’ to know, and it’s not for my profit, neither. I don’t make money out of women’s needs. I never made a cent on this sale to you, but it was worth it to get to do that agent once,” Champers declared.
Leigh waited quietly.
“I’ll be in better shape inside of two days to tell you something definite. I wish Carey was here. Do you know where he got the money he loaned you?”
“I never asked him,” Leigh answered.
“He borrowed it of Miss Jane Aydelot of Cloverdale, Ohio.”
Champers did not mean to be brutal, but the sharp cry of pain and the look of anguish on Leigh Shirley’s face told how grievous was the wound his words had made.
“Why, you paid it all back; she ain’t lost nothin’. Besides, I heard with my own ears folks sayin’ she’d always loved you and it was a pity Jim ever took you away from her. She might ’a done well by you, they said. You got no wrong due. Lord knows you’ve paid it conscientiously enough,” Darley Champers insisted.
“Mr. Champers, will you be sure to tell me all you know as soon as possible? Meantime, I’ll try to find out something to tell you.”
“I sure will. Goodday to you.”
When Champers rose to leave, Leigh put out her hand to him, and the winning smile that made all Grass River folk love her as they loved her uncle Jim now touched the best spot in the heart of the man before her.
“God knows it’s a lot better to do for folks than to do ’em, and in the end I believe you prosper more at it. My business, except the infernal boom days, never was so good as it’s been since I had that time with Carey, and it’s all clean business, too, not a smirch on it. Wish I could forget a few things I’ve did, though.” So Darley Champers thought, as he drove up the old Grass River trail in the glory of the April morning.
That morning, Leigh Shirley wrote a long letter to Jane Aydelot of Cloverdale, Ohio. Leigh had written many letters to her before, but never one with a plea like this. Miss Jane had mentally grown up with Leigh and had built many a romance about her, which was only hinted at in the letters she received.
In the letter of this morning, Leigh begged for all the information Miss Jane could give concerning her father, and further, she pleaded boldly for the reconciliation of the Aydelot family, a thing she had never written of before. Five days later her letter came back “unclaimed” with a brief statement from the Cloverdale postmaster that Miss Jane Aydelot had passed away on the day the letter was written, much beloved, etc.
John Jacobs had no need to be warned by Asher Aydelot of Hans Wyker’s doings. He knew all of Wyker’s movements through Rosie Gimpke. Jacobs had been kind to Rosie, whose bare, loveless life knew few kindnesses, and she harbored the memory of a good deed as her grandfather harbored his hatred. Moreover, the Wyker joint had played havoc with the Gimpke family. Her father had died from a fall received in a drunken brawl there. Two brothers, too drunk to know better, had driven into Little Wolf in a spring flood and been drowned. A sister had married a drinking man who regularly beat her in his regular sprees. For a heavy-footed, heavy-brained, fat German girl, Rosie Gimpke could get into action with surprising alacrity for the safety of one who had shown her a kindness.
And it was Rosie Gimpke, whom John Jacobs called the Wykerton W. C. T. U., who swiftly put the word to him that her grandfather was again defying the law and menacing the public welfare.
Unfortunately, the messenger who served Rosie in this emergency was overtaken by Hans and forced to divulge his mission, threatened with dire evils if he said a word to Rosie about Hans having halted him, and urged to go with all haste on his errand, and to be sure of the reward, a ticket to the coming circus and two dishes of ice cream from the Wyker eating house, as per Rosie’s promise.
The boy hastened from the grinning Hans and did his errand, and afterward held his peace, so far as Rosie was concerned. But he stupidly unloaded his message and Hans’ interference and threats to John Jacobs as an outsider whom the Wyker family rows could not touch, and had another dish of ice cream at Jacobs’ expense.
This messenger was able, for he brought the word to Rosie that John Jacobs would come to his Little Wolf ranch the next day, and late in the evening drop into Wykerton unexpectedly, where he knew Rosie would give him easy access to the “blind tiger” of the Wyker House. The boy carried a message also to Darley Champers to meet Jacobs at the top of the hill above Little Wolf where the trail with the scary little twist wound down by the opening to the creek, beyond which the Gimpke home was hidden. Then Hans Wyker, with threats of withholding the circus ticket and the ice cream, was told both messages just as they had been given to him for Rosie and Champers. Hans, for reasons of his own, hurried out of Wykerton and took the first train to Kansas City.
All this happened on the day that Darley Champers had made his trip to the Cloverdale Ranch. The fine spring weather of the morning leaped to summer heat in the afternoon, as often happens in the plains country. On the next day the heat continued, till late in the afternoon a vicious black storm cloud swirled suddenly up over the edge of the horizon, defying the restraining call of the three headlands to sheer off to the south, as storms usually sheered, and burst in fury on the Grass River Valley, extending east and north until the whole basin drained by Big Wolf was threshed with a cyclone’s anger.
Darley Champers sat half asleep in his office on the afternoon of this day. His coat and vest were flung on a chair, his collar was on the floor under the desk, his sleeves were rolled above his elbows. The heat affected his big bulky frame grievously. The front door was closed to keep out the afternoon glare, but the rear door, showing the roomy back yard, was wide open, letting in whatever cool air might wander that way.
Darley was half conscious of somebody’s presence as he dozed. He dreamed a minute or two, then suddenly his eyes snapped open just in time to see Thomas Smith entering through the rear doorway.
“How do you do?” The voice was between a whine and a snarl.
Champers stared and said nothing.
“It’s too hot to be comfortable,” Smith said, seating himself opposite Champers, “but you’re looking well.”
“You’re not,” Champers thought.
Thomas Smith was not looking well. Every mark of the down-hill road was on him, to the last and surest mark of poverty. The hang-dog expression of the face with its close-set eyes and crooked scar above them showed how far the evil life had robbed the man of power.
“I got in here yesterday morning, and you went out of town right away,” Smith began.
“Yes, I seen you, and left immediately,” Champers replied.
“Why do you dodge me? Is it because you know I can throw you? Or is it because I got full here once and beat you up a bit over in Wyker’s place?” Smith asked smoothly, but with something cruel leaping up in his eyes.
“I didn’t dodge you. I had business to see to and I hurried to it, so I wouldn’t miss you this afternoon,” Champers declared. “What do you want now?”
“Money, and I’m going to have it,” Smith declared.
“Go get it, then!” Champers said coolly.
“You go get it for me, and go quick,” Smith responded. “I’m in a bad fix, I needn’t tell you. I’ve got to have money; it’s what I live for.”
“I believe you. It’s all you ever did live for, and it’s brought you where it’ll bring any man danged soon enough who lives for it that way,” Champers asserted.
“Since when did you join the Young Men’s Christian Association?” Smith asked blandly.
“Since day before yesterday.”
In spite of himself, Darley Champers felt his face flush deeply. He had just responded to a solicitation from that organization, assuring the solicitors that he “done it as a business man and not that he was any prayer meetin’ exhorter, but the dollars was all cleaner’n a millionaire’s, anyhow.”
“I thought so,” Smith went on. “Well, briefly, you have a good many things to keep covered, you know, and, likewise, so have your friends, the Shirleys. The girl paid about all the mortgage on that ranch, I find.”
Darley Champers threw up his big hand.
“Don’t bring her name in here,” he demanded savagely.
“Oh, are you soft that way?” The sneer in the allusion was contemptible. “All the better; you will get me some money right away. Why, I haven’t let you favor me in a long time. You’ll be glad to do it now. Let me show you exactly how.”
He paused a moment and the two looked steadily at each other, each seeming sure of his ground.
“You will go to these Shirleys,” Smith continued, all the hate of years making the name bitter to him, “and you’ll arrange that they mortgage up again right away, and you bring me the money. They can easy get three thousand on that ranch now, it’s so well set to alfalfa. Nothing else will do but just that.”
“And if I don’t go?” Darley Champers asked.
“Oh, you’ll go. You don’t want this Y. M. C. A. crowd to know all I can tell. No, you don’t. And Jim Shirley and that girl Leigh don’t want me to publish all I know about the father and brother, Tank. It might be hard on both of ’em. Oh, I’ve got you all there. You can’t get away from me and think because I’m hard up I have lost my grip on you. I’ll never do that. I can disgrace you all so Grass River wouldn’t wash your names clean again. So run along. You and the Shirleys will do as I say. You don’t dare not to. And this pretty Leigh, such a gross old creature as you are fond of, she can work herself to skin and bone to pay off another mortgage to help Jim. Poor fellow can’t work like most men, big as he is. I remember when he got started wrong in his lungs back in Ohio when he was a boy. He blamed Tank for shutting him out in the cold one night, or something like it. That give him his start. He always blamed Tank for everything. Why, he and Tank had a fight the last time they were together, and he nearly broke his brother’s arm off – ”
“Oh, shut up,” Champers snapped out.
“Well, be active. I’ll give you till tomorrow night; that’s ample,” Smith snapped back. “Hans and you are all the people in town who know I’m here now except the fat woman who waits on the table at Wyker’s. I’m lying low right now, but I won’t stay hid long; Wyker’ll keep me over one more day, I reckon. Even he’s turned against me when I’ve got no money to loan him, but I’ll be on my feet again.”
“Say, Smith, come in tomorrow night, but don’t hurry away now.” The big man’s tone was too level to show which way his meaning ran. “I’d like to go into matters a little with you.”
Smith settled back in his chair and waited with the air of one not to be coaxed.
“You are right in sayin’ I’d like to hide some transactions. Not many real estate men went through the boom days here who don’t need to feel that way. We was all property mad, and you and me and Wyker run our bluff same as any of ’em, an’ we busted the spirit of the law to flinders. And our givin’ and gettin’ deeds and our buyin’ tax titles an’ forty things we done, was so irregular it might or mightn’t stand in court now, dependin’ altogether on how good a lawyer for technicalities we was able to employ. We know’d the game we was playin’, too, and excused ourselves, thinkin’ the Lord wouldn’t find us special among so many qualified for the same game. Smith, I know danged well I’m not so ’shamed of that as I should be. The thing that hurts me wouldn’t be cards for you at all. It’s the brutal, inhumane things no law can touch me for; it’s trying to do honest men out’n their freeholds; it’s holdin’ back them grasshopper sufferer supplies, an’ havin’ the very men I robbed treatin’ me like a gentleman now, that’s cutting my rhinoceros hide into strips and hangin’ it on the fence. But you can’t capitalize a thing like that in your business.”
“Well, I know what I can do.”
“As to what you can do to me, you’ve run that bluff till it’s slick on the track. And I’ve know’d it just as long as you have, anyhow. Here’s my particular stunt with you. I had business East in ’96, time of the big May flood, and I run down to Cloverdale, Ohio, for a day. The waters was up higher’n they’d been know’d for some years.”
Thomas Smith had stiffened in his chair and sat rigidly gripping the arms. But Champers seemed not to notice this as he continued:
“The fill where the railroad cuts acrost the old Aydelot farm was washed out and kep’ down the back water from floodin’ the low ground. But naturally it washed out considerable right there.”
Smith’s face was deadly pale now, with the crooked scar a livid streak across his forehead. Champers deliberated before he went on. All his blustering method disappeared and he kept to the even tone and unruffled demeanor.
“The danged little crick t’other side of town got rampageous late in the afternoon, and the whole crowd that had watched Clover Crick all day went pellmellin’ off to see new sights, leavin’ me entirely alone by the washout. I remember what you said about pretendin’ to commit yourself to your Maker there in an agreement between you as cashier an’ Tank Shirley, an’ the place interested me a lot.”
A finer-fibred man could hardly have resisted the agonized face of Thomas Smith. A cowardly nature would have feared the anger back of it.
“It was gettin’ late and pretty cloudy still, and nobody by, an’ I staid round, an’ staid round, when just at the right place the bank broke away and I see the body of a man – just the skeleton mainly, right where you didn’t commit your pretended suicide. Somebody committed it there for you evidently. There was only a few marks of identification, a big set ring with a jagged break in the set that swiped too swift acrost a man’s face might leave a ugly scar for life, and if the fellow tried too hard to drown hisself he might wrench a man’s right arm so out o’ plum he couldn’t never do much signin’ his name again. I disposed of the remains decent as I could, for Doc Carey was leisurely coming down National pike from Jane Aydelot’s, an’ it was gettin’ late, an’ no cheerful plate nor job in a crowd in sunshiny weather, let alone there in the dusk of the evening. Wow! I dreamt of that there gruesome thing two weeks. I throwed the shovel in the crick. Would you like me to show you where to go to dig, so’s you can be sure your plan with Tank Shirley worked and you didn’t drown, after all? And are you sure you ain’t been misrepresenting things to me a little as agent for Tank Shirley? Are you right sure you ain’t Tank Shirley himself? I’ve kep’ still for four years, not to save you nor myself, but to keep Leigh Shirley’s name from bein’ dragged into court ’longside a name like yours or mine. I never misuse the women, no matter how tricky I am with men.”
