[Mark Twain Mysteries 01] - Death on the Mississippi

by Peter J. Heck

  “I suppose he must; at least I can’t say I always understand him,” I admitted. “Have you read many of his books?” We turned and began to walk along the deck.

  “Not very many, I’m afraid. I like to read romantic things, things that make me wish I could meet the person in the book—things like The Three Fates, or Sara Crewe. It’s not the same as really meeting somebody famous in real life, of course—I never dreamed I’d meet Mr. Twain the very first day aboard the ship. And there are so many other interesting people aboard, too.”

  “Oh, which ones?”

  “Captain Fowler, for one,” she said. “The captain looks just as I’ve always thought the captain of a ship ought to. Then there’s the detective you mentioned when we first met. I still don’t know which one he is, and I’ve been trying to guess who he is, and whom he’s following, and whether he’s going to arrest someone. And the men who play cards are so intent on their game, so feverishly concentrated—I don’t think there’s anything more fascinating than men wagering vast fortunes on a single turn of the cards, whether they win or lose.”

  “I’m afraid that makes me hopelessly dull,” I said. “I’m not much of a cardplayer, and I certainly don’t have vast fortunes to wager, even if I were.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’re being modest,” she said, smiling. “I can’t imagine Mr. Twain having a dull person in his employment.”

  Before I could reply, I saw Major Demayne come around the bend in the deck. His face broke into a broad smile as he recognized me. “Hello, young fellow,” he said. “Have you spent all your winnings yet?”

  “My goodness,” said Miss Patterson. “Mr. Cabot was just now telling me he doesn’t play cards.” She turned to me with a stern expression. “Have you been misleading me, sir?”

  The Major laughed. “No, no, miss. Young Mr. Cabot and I were partners in a billiard match, in which he acquitted himself quite well, in my opinion. I don’t know a thing about how he plays cards, except that he’s almost certainly luckier than I am. I consider it a good game when I manage to break even.”

  “I’m always very lucky,” said the young woman. “Perhaps I’ll show you both how to play cards. My luck might be catching!” She smiled, twirled her parasol again, and ducked into the main cabin.

  Seeing Major Demayne set off a twinge of conscience that I had not yet looked at his poetry. We chatted idly for a little while, then I excused myself and headed to my stateroom, still keeping an eye out for possible suspects in the New York murder case. As before, I saw nobody whom I could say with any confidence had crossed my path in New York—or anywhere else, except on the boat. Nor could I concoct any reason to point a suspicious finger at any of my fellow passengers, who were as ordinary a group as ever I saw.

  Slightly disappointed in the results of my detective work, I went into my cabin and picked up the Major’s manuscript. It was every bit as thick as when he’d given it to me, and as I lifted it now it seemed to have gotten even heavier. The first page bore a title in a clear, bold hand: “The Sanguinary Clash of Two Great Armies at Antietam, as Describ’d in Verse by an Eye-Witness.” Below that was the author’s name, “Maj. Roy Demayne, 25th New Jersey.”

  The text began on the second page. It read:

  Somewhere I hear the cannon’s fearsome roar—

  Antietam! Waves of blood roll on thy shore!

  My Comrades fall, their lives not spent in vain—

  I lov’d them, and remember still their pain.

  Napoleon’s armies reach’d no greater heights;

  Engrave in Golden numbers, Muse! their fights.

  E’en I, unworthy wretch, am spar’d to tell

  Deeds of renown, in Sharpsburg’s deadly dell.

  Ten thousand fell on that ensanguin’d field,

  O’er whelmed by fire, but not about to yield!

  Secession’s minions cannot win the day;

  E’en Lee himself cannot the Vict’ry stay!

  Eagles of Triumph above our standards soar—

  Youth’s slain and crippl’d, but the battle’s o’er.

  Out of the blood the Union rises whole—

  Union Forever! I shout with all my soul.

  I was not sure what to make of this. The sentiments were certainly just, and the language vigorous. But I could make neither head nor tails of what the fellow was trying to say. The next page was even more obscure—and the verses did not even rhyme! I remembered a sorry, rather argumentative, fellow at Yale who fancied himself (among other things) a poet. That young nonconformist had maintained that rhyme was a vestige of a less refined era, but I had paid no more attention to him then than when he railed against private property, religion, marriage, and the like. On one occasion, these opinions got him dunked into a watering trough by two of the proctors. But the Major had little except obscurity in common with that campus iconoclast. As to the merit of his verses, I was as much in the dark as if they had been written in Chinese.

  I leafed back to the first page; perhaps a second reading would make the verses more perspicuous. But beyond the theme of victory and sacrifice, and of the Union triumphant, I could make no more sense of it than on my first reading. At last, I resolved to put it aside for now and give it another try later before reporting to Mr. Clemens. After all, the Major had done me a good turn on at least two occasions, and I owed it to him to give his writing a fair chance before condemning it. I put the manuscript back on my bedside table and went out on deck.

  Proposing to resume my observation of my fellow passengers, I climbed down to the hurricane deck, where the sightseers seemed to be gathered. But no sooner had I found an open space by the rail than the Reverend Dutton’s wife spotted me. “Well, good day, Mr. Cabot,” she chirped, sweeping forward with her daughters Gertrude and Berenice on either flank, in an enveloping maneuver that would have done credit to the Prussian General Staff. “I was just telling the girls how fortunate we are to be traveling in such distinguished company. Why, who would have expected to find a Cabot way out here, practically on the frontier?” Gertrude and Berenice giggled in a sort of unmelodic unison.

  “I would hardly have expected it myself, before this summer,” I said. “But this is a far cry from the wild frontier, Mrs. Dutton. With electric lights on board, and all the latest conveniences, we’re hardly going to be camping out. Most of the towns we’ll be stopping at even have telephone service.”

  “Yes, but the people are so unrefined,” said Mrs. Dutton. “They all speak with the most dreadful accents—why, I can barely understand them, half the time.”

  I was somewhat surprised to hear myself responding, “I can’t really agree with you, Mrs. Dutton. After all, the man I work for speaks in one of those ‘dreadful accents,’ and I have no trouble understanding him.” It was true; a few short weeks ago, I might have felt much as she did, but Mr. Clemens’s rich Missouri drawl had insinuated itself into my ear so thoroughly that I hardly noticed it nowadays. And at the moment, I could think of other western accents I found a good bit more listenable than Mrs. Dutton’s dry New England speech. Deciding that I preferred to enjoy the scenery in privacy, I politely extricated myself from the conversation and climbed back up to the texas deck.

  “How do you like the ride so far, Wentworth?” I turned around with a bit of a start; Mr. Clemens had caught me daydreaming again. The views had been dramatic all afternoon, with stands of trees atop high banks and the sun shining brightly on the river. Somewhat to my surprise, after having heard all the old river hands lament the falling-off of traffic, I had seen several other boats on the river during the day. Most of them were freighters of some kind, or stubby towboats pulling barges. We saw one other passenger ship, the Diamond Jo St. Louis-St. Paul packet—going upriver. Mr. Parks blew his whistle at the pilot of the other boat, and everyone on both decks waved gaily as the other pilot signaled back. It was a grand way to travel.

  Perhaps the hot sun and the leisurely pace at which we were rolling down the mighty river had mesmerized me, or
perhaps I was just a bit tired. Whatever the reason, I had fallen into a deep state in which the Major’s verses, the murder mystery, and the ten thousand dollars in gold hidden somewhere in Arkansas played a strange counterpoint against the half-seen landscape drifting by. I had felt myself on the verge of some profound revelation when Mr. Clemens brought me back to reality.

  “Did the scenery put you to sleep already?” Mr. Clemens laughed. “I knew the river was tame these days, but I hadn’t guessed it was soporific. Mind you, Wentworth, don’t sleep leaning on the rail, unless you know how to swim. I’d hate to have to try finding another Yale man in Iowa.”

  I laughed. “I assure you I can swim. Of course, I can’t guarantee that I can keep up with a steamboat.”

  “Usually they stop, if they know somebody’s fallen over—unless he’s jumped off the deck to escape a jealous husband, in which case letting the passenger swim ashore unimpeded is the best policy. As Slippery Ed could probably tell you, there’ve been shots fired from on deck at a man in the water more than once over the years. If you do fall in, make sure you clear the wheel, either by going wide or diving under. With a stern-wheeler like the Greeley, going wide is better.”

  “I’m not planning to fall in, but I’ll remember your advice.”

  “Good. I’d hate to have such exemplary advice go to waste.” Mr. Clemens took out a cigar. “I’ve had a wonderful day today, Wentworth. It takes me back to when I was your age.”

  “Yes, sir, I could see that you were enjoying yourself.”

  “I enjoyed myself even more when Parks let me steer the boat. It’s a grand feeling, standing way up there and holding the wheel in your hands, looking out over the river like a king. No, it’s better than a king. Kings have parliaments and ministers they must please. In the old days, a Mississippi river pilot was beholden to no one but himself, and today I felt like that again for a little while—until that damned detective came up and started waving papers in my face.”

  “Ah, he said he was going to look for you,” I said. “Did you learn anything useful from his passenger list?”

  “Well, I managed to identify a couple of dozen names—people I felt I could vouch for. Most of them are ordinary folks with an interest in travel and literature, about as likely to fly to the moon as to stab somebody in an alley. He scratched them off his list pretty much on my say-so.”

  “He certainly didn’t eliminate me so quickly,” I said, somewhat put out.

  “Oh, Berrigan has to act like a policeman sometimes, or nobody will take him seriously,” said Mr. Clemens. “He has to bluster around and search for clues, and make most of the passengers uncomfortable, or he won’t feel as if he’s earning his salary. It doesn’t occur to him that he’s making enough commotion to scare away his suspect, if you swallow the notion that there’s a suspect on board this boat to begin with.”

  “I take it you still have your doubts about that.”

  “I ask myself why a murderer would be following me, and I don’t get any good answers. If somebody was looking to rob me, he’s missed a dozen better opportunities than he’s likely to get on board a boat—not that I carry around enough money to be worth bothering with, these days. And while I have my share of enemies, they’re more likely to write a scurrilous article about me than to hire an assassin.”

  I glanced around to make certain there was nobody close to overhear us; then I asked, “Wouldn’t the gold in Arkansas be reason enough? Men have been killed for a good bit less.”

  “That supposes someone who knows about it—not impossible, I grant you. But there can’t be very many men alive who know about it, and what are the odds one of them’s on this boat?”

  “Couldn’t McPhee be one of them? Detective Berrigan doesn’t believe his alibi for New York,” I said.

  “Why, neither do I,” said Mr. Clemens. “Slippery Ed would lie to a policeman just on principle; you’re best off not believing anything he said in Berrigan’s presence. But Ed wouldn’t pull a knife on a bigger man—which is what we’re assuming here—unless he was cornered and had to fight for his life. And in that case, he’d have shown some damage himself. No, Ed has an instinct for keeping his skin in one piece. In the old days, given a choice between standing and fighting or lighting out for the next town, Ed would always run. The Throckmorton boys probably handle Ed’s dirty work these days, and Berrigan thinks their alibi is good.”

  “What if McPhee had an accomplice in New York?”

  Mr. Clemens turned and gave me a sharp look. “Now, that’s another question entirely,” he said. “Of course, it doesn’t change one thing—Slippery Ed’s still not likely to pull a knife on me himself. So we’re still looking for some other person, assuming he’s on board at all. The trick is to find that person, or more likely to find proof that he doesn’t exist, so we can relax and enjoy the rest of the trip without Berrigan’s impositions.”

  “What about Farmer Jack Hubbard? Have you seen anyone on board who looks like him?”

  “Nobody who looks the way he used to, at any rate. I’m sure I haven’t talked to everyone on board, so I may yet spot him. But I don’t think he’s our man, either. I never knew Jack to harm a fly. He always managed to talk his way out of trouble—I once saw him persuade a fellow who’d been ready to throw a punch at him to buy the house a round of drinks instead. Of course, Jack wasn’t likely to get caught with an extra ace in his pocket, so he had a lot less trouble than somebody like Slippery Ed to begin with.”

  “That may be so, but all the evidence points to him as being involved in this case somehow.”

  “Granted. And both he and Ed might know something about that Napoleon, Arkansas business,” he said. “But to capitalize on that, they need to keep me alive. And unless everything I know about human nature is wrong—and human nature is a novelist’s stock in trade, Wentworth—neither one of them’s a killer.”

  “If neither one of them is the killer, then who is?” I asked nobody in particular.

  “Nobody on board this ship, I hope,” said Mr. Clemens. “Nothing would make me happier than a telegram at the next town telling me that the New York police have found their man, and are calling Berrigan home.”

  “Then we should have a grand journey downriver,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m having a grand journey already,” said Mr. Clemens. “It would be close to perfect if it weren’t for this highly improbable notion that somebody on board might want to kill me.”

  14

  Our journey down the river gradually fell into a pleasant routine, varied by the ever-changing scenery and the different towns in which we docked for the night. Except when we had an unusually long run between towns, we did most of our traveling during daylight—especially on the upper river, with its lofty banks and picturesque views. After Lake Pepin, the Chippewa River joined the stream; the outline of the bluffs along the shore became even more striking, and small islands dotted the waters. There were two bridges at Winona, and an island that towered some five hundred feet above the river’s surface at Trempealeau, near the confluence of the Black River. At La Crosse, we passed under the railroad bridge we had gone over on our way to St. Paul.

  The towns were closer together below La Crosse, but the landscape between them continued to present a picturesque wildness unlike anything I had seen back in Connecticut. We crossed from Minnesota into Iowa near Victory, where in 1832 Black Hawk and his army of renegade Indians were brought to their knees after a desperate fight. A few miles farther south, the Wisconsin River joined our course near Prairie du Chien. We passed into Illinois just opposite Eagle Rock, three hundred feet high, and the banks became lower, the scenery less romantic. Still, the weather continued fine, and I would spend much of the day looking over one of the rails at the river and its banks. The hours slipped by as easily as the miles of river.

  My employer had continued to spend a good deal of every day with the pilot, reminiscing about the river and taking an occasional turn at the wheel. But after the first couple
of days aboard the Horace Greeley, he began compiling notes for his new book about the river, making a special point of talking with any passenger old enough to remember the great era of steamboating, before the Civil War. Often he asked me to sit in on these interviews, and I would hastily jot down the subject’s reminiscences; I began to regret that Yale had not included shorthand in its curriculum. I also began to despair for the health of our native tongue in the hinterlands—the convolutions of grammar and pronunciation I was forced to inscribe on my tablets would have given my old schoolmaster fits. At the end, Mr. Clemens would ask his interviewees to write out a paper giving him permission to quote them in his book—“the damned lawyers are always afraid people will sue me for stealing their stories,” he said—which I dutifully filed, along with my notes on the interview.

  Usually we would arrive at a town a little before suppertime, to allow passengers to go ashore while there was still daylight, for sightseeing or whatever other entertainment the town afforded. In the smaller towns, it was not uncommon for the mayor and a selection of local officials to meet us at the dock. As often as not, a local brass band (usually surprisingly good for such small towns) would be there to contribute a bit of joyful noise to the occasion. Mr. Clemens and Captain Fowler would shake hands with the local notables, and my employer would say a few words, mostly inviting the townspeople to see his lecture at eight o’clock that evening. Then the local band would play another piece or two, and the shipboard band would play a few pieces of its own. Finally the assembly would break up until “the trouble started,” to use Mr. Clemens’s term for the beginning of his talk.

  After these brief ceremonies, I would usually head directly for the post office to dispatch Mr. Clemens’s mail and pick up any letters being held for him. He was always eager for any letters from his wife and daughters; he kept up a steady correspondence with them, and often expressed his frustration at not being able to join them in Europe, due to his financial obligations. On the few occasions where there was no mail from them awaiting him, he fell into a dark mood that made me wish I could avoid his company—but alas, there was no way to do so and still perform my work.