Sacrifice: Chapter 9
Embarkations (NORTH) – Chapter 2. Rumors
On the third day of his convalescence, such as it was, he sat out in the open air under the elevated veranda of the hotel where he had been renting his board, with his enormous black wolf lying at his feet, its paws crossed in front of it and its muzzle on its paws. He was seated in a rickety old chair at the far corner of the deck, a piece of furniture, gray and worn, that seemed to be older than any building of the town itself, as though it had been carried there from some other place before the town had been dreamt to ensure that whatever else its owner might lack in those vast and inhospitable vistas at least he should have a comfortable place to recline. He wore still the cotton bandages that the doctor had applied to his whip cuts and the gauze wrappings still encircled the lean strong trunk of his abdomen to hold them in place, but these were covered by his clothing and no man would have guessed that he had suffered such wounds, for his posture was easy in that chair, he sitting back in it and balancing upon its back two legs, and holding this position with the front two feet suspended in the air by his own legs which he had thrown upon the balustrade and had crossed at the ankles as though in mirrored mimic of the wolf, or the wolf of him. The sun of a noon cast down upon the veranda porch roof and was cut there in twain, with its living end falling upon his ankles, marking his pant legs there as though they had been woven of two fabrics. Long he sat there, in just that apparently unstable posture, reading a book.
He had had but few visitors in that time: the doctor, to check his wounds and tend them and dress them anew; the owner of the hotel, with whom he made some brief small talk before the fellow grew uneasy at certain turns of the conversation and excused himself on a pretext; and the man for whom he had lately been wage-working, to inquire what had become of him. He told his erstwhile employer that he had been bullwhipped and was taking his ease by the doctor’s orders. His employer – the owner of a general store there who had paid him for numerous odd jobs, advantaging himself of Tenner’s wide and competent knowledge of a variety of trades – though he himself was not a deep man was neither a stupid one. He demanded to know how Tenner had gotten bullwhipped in the first place and Tenner calmly explained that he had asked for it, and reproduced the affair in an almost insultingly perfunctory way without even mentioning Strongman Sam, evidently amusing himself at the other’s growing bewilderment. The general store owner stood ogling at him when he had finished as though he could neither believe the story nor fathom any reason why a sane man should lie about such a thing, and finally demanded to know how long it would take for him to recover, adding irritably that there was work aplenty to be done, and that his store was backlogging on account of Tenner’s absence and the recent flood of customers. Tenner looked at him and observed that nature had her hours and her rhythms and no man could second guess her nor cast number upon her movements. As for the work to be done, he kindly suggested Sam Govin, known as the Strongman, in his absence, who, as he had been told, had lately been seeking gainful employment and was powerful and resistant as an ox, practically immune to pain and certainly good to haul any weight upon his back.
His employer considered him a moment. “Yo’re really tellin’ me that you asked Ham Miller to go out there and flay you with a bull whip? How in Gawd’s name did you e’er dream up such a all-fired thang?”
“Haid nothin better to do.”
The general store owner shook his head and folded his arms before him and regarded the sitting man with a look of estranged wonder. “Why, you are one bonified madman, Tenner. You could just eat the devil with his horns, you know that?” At that moment it finally occured to the good general store owner that any man who would play truant for so deranged a reason was perhaps not worth the money he was paying, and he informed Tenner that his services would no longer be required. He turned and left without another word and Tenner returned to his reading in all tranquillity, as though the business had been but a distraction to the words on the page. This had been two days ago and since then he had spoken to no man but the doctor who had come once more on the task aforementioned. Yet it almost seemed to those who passed by the hotel deck that Tenner had not so much as altered position in the course of that time, but sat there like some kind of statue or sentry.
The wolf tracked the passersby with its ember-orange eyes as they moved down the road, but made no other movement whatsoever and might have seemed if not for the action of its gaze a mere imitation of a wolf. Tenner sat there reading his book, and if he gave any mind to the glances and veiled looks of vexation that attended this activity from those who passed by on the road below, he did not show it. Only when a low growl began to vibrate from the depths of the animal at his side did he calmly raise his dark and yet strangely luminous eyes.
Standing some ten feet off in an attitude of hesitant contrition was Miller, his long bearded face peering up at Tenner, his hat pinned between his hands at his chest. He was nervous and unsure and might as well have been standing before a woman to whom he intended to propose, as to a convalescent at his leisure.
“Well, come on over,” said Tenner, waving the man in. “He won’t get you,” he added, nodding to the animal at his feet and smiling somehow wolfishly himself. Miller loitered a moment as though sifting the malice out of these words and then tentatively approached the balustrade. When he had covered half that distance the wolf sat up sharply, revealing a perfect white star upon its chest; and it slitted its eyes and bared its teeth, but Tenner without a word dropped his feet from the balustrade and set them flat upon the ground, threw his fist downward and pointed at the ground with his whole arm like he was throwing a thunderbolt, and the wolf sank docilely at once as though some tense nerve running through its whole body had just snapped. And there it stayed, though the curl of its lip did not altogether cede and its eyes fixed unnervingly upon the man below. Miller, heartened somewhat by this display of mastery over the beast, risked a few more shy steps forward and then stopped at yet a cautious distance. He looked from man to wolf to man again and for all his bulk and musculature seemed childlike and anxious before the one and the other. His hands jittered about his hat rim.
“Say, Tenner, I just come to apologize about the other day. I, uh… Don’t know how I lost count there...”
Tenner smiled, but the smile was fairly unreadable; it seemed to bear neither absolution nor ill will, nor perhaps even anything friendly and communal, but as with all that Tenner did seemed to pertain to some other sphere of sentiment altogether. “I invite a man to whip me, I expect he’ll do it right,” was Tenner’s single equivocal remark. Miller smiled nervously, and plunged into speech as into the one navigable road on the long terrain standing between them.
“Say, you hear? Strongman Sam was goin’ about tellin’ everyone what that I done went easy on you cause I’d done him a’ready and was all wore out.” Tenner smiled again and seemed perhaps to shake his head, as if all of this had been foreseen by him and he was merely acknowledging the universally recognized follies of men.
“No doubt you will not tolerate such slander, Miller?”
“Well, I mean... I told ’em that I done my duty with the both a ya. Said to e’ryone that if a man’s fool enough to beg to git bullwhooped... that is, I don’t mean nothing by it, Tenner, you know that, but you’ll allow it is mighty funny, and what’s more the point, folks think it’s mighty funny... Then, I got my good name to pertect... but I sure din’t mean to say you was no fool...”
“‘The fool baulks ’fore e’ery word,’” quoted the man on the deck.
Miller stirred. “Well... I ain’t rightly sure as I know just what that means, Tenner... but point is, I been standin’ up for you as well as I may, tellin’ people that I sure din’t go easy on you. No sir!”
The smile once more. “Why, it is right gentlemanly of you to insist upon so finely whippin’ me, Miller. And Sam?”
Miller shifted uneasily and looked away. “Ah, that Sam, he’s a real boastful type, you know... And well, he’s been bluffin’ about, sayin’ all kinds a things...”
“Such as?”
He turned the hat brim in his hands like a wheel and seemed to be considering something off to the right of him, the arrival of some wayfarer bearing news of coming catastrophe and making his invisible and ominous way down the road, weaving swiftly amidst the incarnate folk there like a snake through blades of grass. “Well… that is… he done said you’d got your five uns, jus’ like him. Said that as you din’t cry out, you sure won the bet as it had been stated, but that he himself only coughed and din’t cry out at all. Said you was twistin’ around there like a shot jackrabbit and prolly had a hole in your tongue from where you was bitin’ it, and couldn’t even stand up afterwards but had to wait on the doctor…”
Tenner eased forward and gazed down at the man in erect silence a moment like some kind of high dignitary contemplating what judgement he would pass, and Miller but glanced up once or twice to meet that hard and burning gaze before his eyes flitted off once more to alight on the safe distances. He swallowed and furrowed his brow as though troubled by some thought to cross his mind, that phantasm wayfarer and his fey news.
Tenner leaned back. “Now I had taken that man for a brain-gutted imbecile of the first order, but I had not figured him a scoundrel of so fine a grain.”
“Well, now, Tenner, it ain’t nothin’ to get riled at! No one’s gonna believe him, after all. E’ryone hereabouts knows Sam’s all bluff and blather.”
“I do not give one deepcut damn what you folk do or do not think.”
Miller kicked about in the dust a moment, then looked up again. “You ain’t fixin’ to go out after him, now, are you, Tenner?”
“Just might do. Just might have to.”
“’Cause he’s done gone...”
Tenner’s eyes thinned. “Gone?”
“Yessir. Done lit out for the Norther Country, this very mornin’!”
“Idiot hain’t even done mendin’ yet and he’s lit out north? What in Bacchus’ name does he think he’ll find up there?”
Miller’s eyes widened. “Hell, Tenner, ain’t you heard?”
“Heard what?”
“I thought for sure as e’rybody had heard by now...”
“Damnit it, Miller— ”
“Heard, I mean to say, about the gold!”
“Gold? What gold?”
“Why, it’s been nothin’ but the very talk a’ the whole dern town, is all! Ain’t you seen nobody lately?” But reading something menacing on Tenner’s face and not for a moment forgetting the wolf the man had coiled at his side he did not pend the answer to his query, but hastened on. “Well, anyways, it started over in Randall’s Saloon, a few days before you and Miller and me... Well, anyhow, I was over there and saw it with my own eyes, and can attest to it my own self. I was just a-settin’ to my whiskey there, when in walks these two young bucks, strongish lookin’ sorts, dirty as all get out, and they go straight up to the bar, and I’ll be damned if they don’t order whiskey for e’ry man present!”
The bartend, Miller continued, had obliged them, and a crowd quickly assembled in curiosity at these wayfarers and signs of fortune, and began to ask after them, who they were and where they were from and where they were heading. They said they were heading south from the wildlands up north. Said they were on the trail home to Louisiana, bearing good news, and, since this was the first town they had lit upon in the Territories of any estimable size at all, they had wished to pass an hour in celebration with the men there at the great fortune that had been theirs. They called themselves Cody and Hud. They had been, they said, the foremen of a group of prospectors who had struck upon a lode of gold in the riverbed of a fork of a stream up in Washington Territory. They set to panning, they said, and hit paydirt fast, and they had done so well with it they had already made their fortune, and were now on their way back home. Said that the colors up yonder would rival even those that had been panned over in California at its heyday. Said that all it took now were enterprising men of strong will and strong back who would go up there and put that river to shame.
Someone asked them why they weren’t yet digging there if such riches were to be had and they said that they were returning to their fiancées, bearing with them this good news of the affluence they had earned from their exertions, such as would set them on their way for a lifetime. They said they had no need of anything beyond that. The onlookers asked them why they hadn’t kept the affair a secret then for the good of their remnant companions, and they said that they had talked with their fellows before their departure and agreed they couldn’t dredge up all the gold anyway, being as they were just ten hands all told, and that besides they had need now of fellow laborers to get the job done right. It took digging now, and that meant labor and laborers.
Some member of the audience grew skeptical and observed that they story didn’t sit quite right, and they nodded as though expecting this skepticism and one of them pulled from his jacket a mason jar filled with gold and set it down on the table and said they had much more where that came from but had hidden it away where no man could find it until they could arrange for themselves a mule and a wagon to transport it across the long stretch of earth that yet lay between them and their home, as well as a posse of trustworthy men from back home to accompany this treasure so that it would not fall prey, neither to bandit nor to Indian. And finally their audience asked them how to find this new El Dorado, and one of them said that it would not be easy, but if a man headed north until he hit the Oregon trail and followed it to Fort Hall, he could find a man named Scrawny Tawnkins there who would guide them the rest of the way. He said that the earth there was wealthy beyond imagining and any man who went up there would become so too, and that it was but a matter of stooping over and plucking up the gold off the ground like mushrooms. He suddenly was inspired to draw them a map, and a map he did draw them.
“Well, it might not a’ come to much,” shrugged Miller. “Folks round here remember Pike’s Peak, after all; e’ryone runnin’ around tellin’ stories about windfalls and such, and our boys as went up there come back pretty much empty-handed. Why, you remember old Carlyle? Carlyle Crane? Well, that might could’a been before your time. He’s gone now a year or more. Anyway, he was keen on the whole Pike’s Peak expedition till he got up there and seen the elephant. That’s how he put it. He done seen the elephant…
“Anyway, this boy in the saloon said that several more were headed our way to corrob’rate. I don’t think anybody expected them to come, but come they did — just the very day that the doctor was trussin’ up you and Sam.” Three had come this time, and while they had been less ostentatious than the first, all eyes had been watching for them. The townsfolk had extracted a description of the second arrivals from the first, and were waiting for them almost in ambush. When they rode into town and entered the same saloon and ordered drinks for themselves they were approached almost at once by Bill Bryson and George Tell. They were reticent to speak but Bryson and Tell changed their minds alright, and word spread fast. Soon a crowd had once more gathered round, this one bigger than the first, and the saloon was so packed that a man was hard-pressed to get within it, people spilling out into the streets, hushing one another and straining to hear. But Miller had been there in the center of it and heard what those boys said, and how they did indeed corroborate to the detail what the first drifters had claimed.
That had done it. The town rose into an uproar. Men arguing with one another over what was to be done, whether they could catch this rush at the start and make themselves wealthy by year’s end if they left at once. Whether the news would not have reached other parts first. Whether, even if it had, their early departure would not carry them hence in time. Gold on everyone’s tongue, gold on everyone’s mind. They whipped each other into a frenzy, said Miller, and practically drove one another on like cattle up to the northlands. They wove dreams out of air and fancied themselves kings and millionaires already. They cast everything aside — work, projects, plans, pride — set their fiancées and their wives and their families on the shelf and began buying whatever they needed to go. The local stores had been run down to their nubbins; the entire town was ransacked. It was unlike anything he had ever seen. For himself, he had no intention of running off, leaving his cattle and his horses behind. He reckoned that most of these men would be returning maybe even by year’s end despondent and broke, sulking back to abandoned womenfolk with nothing to show for their hasty departure but months of lost time, empty pockets and emptier bellies. He, Miller, was no such damn fool, and he reckoned he could talk frankly to Tenner about this madness, for Tenner was too clever to fall for these ravings and vanities.
Tenner listened to all of this without speaking, and his silence made Miller once more nervous. Miller could not read him, whether he was curious or cautious or indifferent, or weighing the matter with some kind of secret inner deliberation on scales whose weightside was ridden by motives that no man but he could rightly comprehend. His fear of the man on the porch kept him speaking, and when he ran out of story he circled round to repetition and elaboration: yessir, these strangers’ words had caused such a stir in that town as had not been seen in some time. He reckoned the entire face of the town had changed, for a large society had been formed and already gone, so swiftly had their decisions been reached and their destinations sown in the urgency of the thing. And Sam had gone with them. They hoped to get what supplies they yet lacked on the trail, and to purchase their possibles as they proceeded. But they had been racing all across town to find whatever they could before they left. Miller expressed some amazement that Tenner had not noticed all the to and fro and the coming and the going of men preparing to set out, but Tenner merely stated that he had other matters to attend to than the jittering of the crowd.
“Truth is, whole story seems fishy to me,” shrugged Miller.
“I’ll say.”
“Am I right? There’s somethin’ about it that jus’ don’t sit right. What do you reckon about it, Tenner?”
His gaze did not break from Miller’s, those strange notions turning secretly in the lumed shadows of his eyes. Yet he seemed utterly to have forgotten the man at whom he was staring. “Well,” said he softly, “seein’ as how I have just been officially divested of my terms of service hereabouts, and find myself bereft of the duty of gainful employment, I do believe I might just mosy on up northward, and see what all this fuss is about.”
You have just read a chapter of the serial novel SACRIFICE, by John Bruce Leonard. A new chapter will be published each week. Subscribe below to receive new chapters directly in your email.
