by Frank Yerby
“Sleeping!” he cried, “Mon Dieu! While that swine Hugo plots how to kill you. He insists upon pistols, Stephen, and we could not dissuade him!”
“Why did ye try? No harm can come to me. I’ll pink him a bit—a ball through the arm, or perhaps the knee cap to give him an illustrious limp, and that will be the end of it.”
“But suppose it’s you . . . ?”
“A chance I’ll have to take. What is it, Georges?”
“It’s a Neg’Mericain of Monsieur Warren with a message!”
“Send him in,” Stephen said.
The Negro stumbled into the room, his black face glistening with sweat and his chest rising and falling in great animal-like pants.
“What is it?” Stephen said sharply. “What do ye want?”
“Mas Warren say come quick!” the Negro gasped. “Yo’ warehouse done cotched fiah!”
Stephen was out of the bed in an instant, drawing on his trousers.
“Saddle Prince Michael,” he said over his shoulder to Georges. “How is your horse, Andre?”
“Blown. I’ve done thirty miles today. Get along with you. I’ll join you as soon as I can.”
When Stephen came out of the doorway, Georges was already waiting with the horse. The sky toward the river was an angry orange red. Stephen could hear, as Prince Michael thundered through the dark streets, the brazen clangor of the bell in the Saint Louis Cathedral warning the sleeping city. The four clumsy engines from the Dépôt des Pompes at the Cabildo must already have reached the scene, he decided, and by now the fools would be fighting over which one got there first and won the fifty dollars!
He burst suddenly out of the gloom of the old city into the full glare of the fire. There was a great crowd milling about, trying to follow the directions of some twenty fire commissioners who were all waving their white truncheons and giving quite contradictory orders. A bucket brigade had been formed, and one of the four engines had actually gone into action—the oldest one of the lot—and its feeble stream, sent up by a hand-operated pump worked by four strong men, curved to earth yards short of the burning building.
There was a compact crowd of men near the front of the warehouse, and Stephen could see Tom Warren towering over all the rest. He reined Prince Michael in and dismounted, striding over to the little group.
“Well, Tom?” he said.
“It was set, Mr. Fox,” Warren said heavily. “Deliberately and maliciously set. This here Nigra . . .”
Stephen followed the pointing finger downward. The Negro was stretched out at Tom Warren’s feet. Half a glance told Stephen he was quite dead.
“Ye shot him?”
“Yes. He was coming out of the warehouse with the torch in his hand.”
“I gave ye credit for more head, Tom. Now we will never know who sent him.”
“There were another one,” one of the other men put in. “He run out jest afore this one come out. I seed him.”
Tom Warren turned toward the speaker and his little eyes held for a second.
“No,” he said coldly. “You’re mistaken. There was only one.”
“I coulda sworn—” the man began doubtfully.
“ ‘Tis of no importance,” Stephen said. “The question is, who sent him?”
“Thas right,” the man declared. “Tain’t likely the nigger burnt yore warehouse for his own amusement.”
Stephen started to speak, but the sound of hoofs pounding through the street behind him caused him to turn. Andre dashed up to the group as fast as the ancient nag he’d rented from a public stable could bring him. He swung down from the saddle before the horse had stopped moving, lost his balance and fell to his hands and knees a scant yard from the dead Negro. He did not get up at once, but crouched there looking from the body to the burnt-out torch that lay inches from the outstretched fingers of the dead man’s hand. Then, slowly, he straightened.
“I think,” he said clearly, “that you need not be lenient tomorrow, Stephen.”
“But we have no proof,” Stephen said.
“Who else could it be?” Tom Warren asked.
“Who else?” Stephen echoed, and turned his face toward the flames that were billowing upward, pushing the night back, bloodying the sky.
Under the oaks in the morning, it was cool and green. The sun was struggling with the mist, and everything was touched with unclarity, like figures in a dream landscape. Hugo took the pistol from Jacques Fabre, who had started life as Jacob Weber, and squinted along the barrel.
“A good piece,” he grunted. “ ‘Twill throw true. I will try to leave your visible parts unmarked, sir, so that your elegant ladies can kiss you goodbye without horror.”
“Thank you,” Stephen said, and walked very slowly to the marked place.
“You know the terms, gentlemen,” Doctor Lefevre said. “You’re to fire one shot each at the count of three. If neither of you is hit, you may reload and fire again, or you may choose the wiser course and consider yourselves satisfied. Are you ready, gentlemen?”
“Yes!” Hugo said, “Yes!”
“Yes,” Stephen said very quietly.
“One!” Doctor Lefevre said; and Hugo jerked his pistol level, aiming carefully. Stephen left his pointing earthward, dangling at his side. “Mon Dieu!” Andre and Arceneaux said in the same breath. “Why doesn’t he . . .”
“Two!” Stephen’s pistol remained unmoved. Hugo pulled the hammer further back with a click that to Andre seemed loud as a shot.
“Thr—” Doctor Lefevre began, but the rest of the word was lost in the crack of Hugo’s pistol. The whole world was suddenly a sick dizziness to Andre, but when it cleared, Stephen was still standing there, swaying a little, but inch by inch, with deliberate, terrifying slowness, his pistol came level, pointing at Hugo.
It was still in the clearing under the oaks. A single leaf that had clung all winter long to its naked branch dropped down and brushed Andre’s cheek. He jumped at the touch. Still Stephen did not fire.
The little beads of moisture began collecting on Hugo’s forehead and running down into the corners of his loose, flabby lips. He stood there unmoving until at last the morning damp of the earth stole up his legs and into his spine. Then the shivering started, the whole gigantic fatty mass that was Hugo’s body trembling all over so that even Stephen, thirty yards away, could see it through the drifting smoke and the haze and the red curtain closing down over his left eye where Hugo’s ball had ploughed along his temple and laid open his scalp.
There were three things he could do, Stephen decided without haste. He could point the muzzle of the dueling pistol skyward and spare Hugo with a grand gesture. But such opera bouffe theatricality was French and he would have none of it. Or he could fire his shot straight downward into the earth and give Hugo back his miserable existence with abysmal contempt; but that, too, was a gesture and Stephen despised all gestures. Or he could deliberately miss Hugo, throwing so close that the quivering hulk of nerves would carry with him always, branded on his brain, the whistle of the passing ball.
So it was, that at the exact moment when Andre, unable to contain himself longer cried out:
“For God’s sake, man, fire!” that Stephen carelessly, without seeming to take aim, pulled the trigger, the muzzle pointed slightly to the left, far enough to miss Hugo as he now stood, but not far enough to miss the huge hulk as Hugo threw himself downward and to the left to avoid the anticipated path of the ball. Then the big man was hanging there, like an oak does when it is cut almost through but cannot yet yield to the ax, and fall. He opened his mouth to say something, but the blood gurgled up through his throat and he went over backward against the earth, his head making exactly the same sound as a log would have, striking the ground.
Doctor Lefevre knelt briefly.
“I think, gentlemen,” he said as he rose, “that the less said about this affair the better—considering the unusual features of the occasion.”
“What do ye mean?” Stephen asked coldly.
“You’ll take that back!” Andre cried. “Or I’ll demand satisfaction.”
“Softly, Andre,” Stephen said. “There has been enough blood letting for one day. The good doctor is entitled to his opinion. And now, sir, if I may trouble ye to staunch this scratch, I have work to do.”
V
MINNA Waguespack sat huddled up before the fire weeping. Outside, it was raining—a hard, steady downpour, slanting down across the windows. Now and again a gust of wind caught itself in the rain and whipped it against the windows in a lacy spray and all the shutters banged. But most of the time it was silent— a vast, echoing silence into which the rain fell sullenly, and in which the slow drip of the water through the leaky roof, and the occasional whimper of a hungry child was lost, unheard. Minna cried soundlessly without change of face or expression. The rain kept up its slow, unceasing whispering. And the ancient door groaned on its one remaining hinge until at last the wind slammed it shut.
It was one of the smaller children who first heard the clop of the horse’s hoofs in the muddy courtyard. She jumped from her place at the corner and ran screaming to her mother. Minna held her close against her ample bosom, feeling the pounding of the tiny heart under the thin ribs.
“Hush!” she whispered. “Sit still!”
She sat there holding the child, staring at the door. The other three children huddled around her, and the smaller ones began to sob aloud.
Pray God he’s not drunk, Minna thought.
But the footsteps that clumped down from the horse and strode slowly, painfully almost, across the gallery were lighter than the heavy boots of Hugo, and when the light, almost gentle knocking came through the door, Minna released the child with a sigh.
“Who is it?” she called.
“Herr Fox,” the clear baritone answered. “Let me come in!”
Minna sprang to the door and threw it open. Stephen stood swaying in the doorway, his face drained of all color, hatless, with the water streaming down from his tangled coppery hair across a sodden bandage. Where the water had touched the bandage, it was tinged with crimson, creeping along the line of Stephen’s jaw.
“Ach Gott!” Minna cried. “You’re hurt!”
“A scratch,” Stephen said. His eyes sought and held hers. “Your husband, Minna—is dead. I’ve killed him.”
The blue eyes widened endlessly. The rain blew down the chimney and hissed into the fire.
“Dead,” Minna whispered. “Dead.”
“Yes,” Stephen said awkwardly. “There was a duel. I—I tried not to hit him but he moved. If there is anything . . .”
But Minna was looking at him closely.
“You’re hurt,” she said. “Bad hurt. Sit yourself down while I for you hot rum punch make. Otto! Bring you here a chair.”
“But you don’t understand, Minna. Hugo is dead. I’ve killed him!”
“I understand. You have Hugo shot. He is dead.”
“Don’t you—don’t you care?”
“Yes. Hugo I loved. Very much I loved him. He was hard, and sometimes he a beast was, but he was also a man. But this thing I for a long time expected have. If not you, then someone else. Always with the men he was quarreling. What happens, happens. For this thing I am sorry. And most of all am I sorry that it had to be you.”
“Minna,” Stephen said, “I haven’t much money left, but what I have is yours. Ye can stay here if ye will or I will give ye a note for this place, payable out of the first crop I make. And the children, for them I’ll send ye money as long as I live.”
“You’re good. . . . But no, it is too much. Pay for me and the children the passage to Philadelphia. I have there an uncle who me in his business wants. He runs there a bakery. He long ago told me not to marry Hugo, but I young was, and a fool.”
Stephen sipped the fiery liquor, feeling its warmth curling somewhere deep in his middle and the strength flowing back.
“When wish ye to go, Minna?” he asked.
“Tomorrow! There is nothing to do—we have nothing to pack.”
“Then I’ll send a coach for ye,” Stephen said rising. In the doorway, he paused. “I have your forgiveness, Minna?”
“Yes,” she said. “Go with God!”
By the time that Stephen got back to Harrow, after leaving Minna and her brood, the warmth had left him and he was shaking with weakness and the chill. Tom Warren was waiting, surrounded by a huddle of wet, thoroughly miserable Negroes, shivering in their ragged clothing.
He pointed to a row of open-faced lean-to’s, from which blue wood smoke was rising, only to be beaten back to earth by the rain.
“That’s the best I could do as yet, sir,” he said. “What with the rain and all.”
“ ‘Twill have to do, Tom,” Stephen said wearily. And then with a wry smile: “Which one is mine?”
“God forbid!” Warren declared. “You’re coming back to town with me. Why, in your condition ‘twould mean your death!”
“I’ll chance it, Tom,” Stephen said. “ ‘Tis too late, and there’s too much to be done. But I have a commission for ye. Hire a coach and bring it to Waguespack’s place by eleven tomorrow morning. And book passage on a steamer for Minna and the children. Give them a thousand to tide them over. I’m paying them for the place.”
“You’re over kind, Mister Fox. Seems to me that Waguespack’s children are no concern of yours. After all, you held his note . . .”
“Please do as I ask,” Stephen said sharply. “Bring Jacques Fabre along to draw up and witness the papers. They’ll have to be done in German and French and Fabre knows both.”
“All right, sir, but I protest. You’re being unwise. Your debts now are upward of fifty thousand and your assets practically nil. I’ve held aside enough to pay for whatever machinery you’ll need and added a bit of my own . . .”
“Thank ye, Tom. I shall not fail ye.”
“You’ll need an overseer for the Nigras.”
“Not yet. I’ll do my own driving. But get along with ye, Tom; it grows late.”
“As you say, sir. But try to keep warm and dry. I’ll bring Doctor Lefevre . . .”
“No. I need no damned sawbones! Now will ye go!”
Tom Warren touched his hand to the brim of his hat and, mounting his horse, trotted away in the direction of New Orleans.
Stephen stood there in the pouring rain and looked over his land. It came to him then that never in all his life had he seen a more dismal sight. The slate-gray sky clamped down like a lid no higher than the tops of the oaks, and the palmettos, waving their fingers in the wind, seemed a thousand hands lifted in derision and accusation. From the Negroes around him came something like a moan, half whispered so that he felt it as much as he heard it.
“Get ye inside,” he said harshly. “And warm yourselves!”
“Mo ganye faim,” an old black wailed. “I’m hongry!”
“And ye’ll stay so till morning,” Stephen told him. “Now inside with ye, at once!”
He bent his head and entered one of the lean-tos. A smoky fire burned fitfully at the entrance, struggling bravely with the damp wood. He lay his cloak down upon the wet earth, and stretched out beside the fire, his head throbbing like all the hammers of hell, and his stomach sick to nausea with hunger and weakness. He closed his eyes, but opened them almost at once. From outside there had come a faint whimper. Looking out, he could see the mulatto girl that Odalie had wanted to buy and old Tante Caleen. They were soaked to the skin and shivering all over. This was the lean-to that had been built for them.
“Come in,” he said. “Don’t stand there like a pair of dolts! Ye’re no good to me dead of lung fever!”
The girl looked at Caleen timidly. The old woman nodded. Then the two of them came in past the fire, almost extingiushing i
t with the water from their garments.
The old woman searched in the back of the lean-to until she bad found a few twigs, but they were too few and too damp. So she got up without a word and went back out into the ~ain. Stephen saw her disappearing into the gloom of the gigantic oaks. She was gone almost a half hour, but when she came back, her arm was full of twigs and fagots that were comparatively dry. She had dug them out from under the overhanging branches and roots which had sheltered them from the rain.
In a little while, she had the fire blazing merrily, so that Stephen could feel the stiffness and the cold stealing out of his limbs. The lean-to was filled with the smell of steaming clothing. In one corner, the mulatto girl sat with her head buried against her knees and wept Stephen paid her not the slightest attention. He was watching the old woman.
One of her black, spidery hands went down among the folds of her garments and came out with a knife. With it she sharpened a stick into a point. Then again she was gone, out into the rain that was lessening now into a cold, miserable drizzle. Stephen put his aching head again against the collar of his cloak.
Tante Caleen was a long time coming back this time—more than an hour, Stephen guessed. She walked in a stooped-over position, holding her apron up with one hand. It seemed to be filled with something. In the other, she held a small iron pot she had brought from the supply wagon. Bending down, she placed the pot on the fire. Stephen could see that it was half filled with water. Then she loosed the tail of her apron, and several dozen crayfish dropped into the pot. Also into the pot went salt brought from one of the wagons and wild sassafras leaves and wild pepper. Then the old woman sat back contentedly and waited for the pot to boil.
When it was done, she took out a crayfish, broke off the head and sucked the meat from the shell, nodding her head to Stephen to indicate that this was how it was to be done. Then she pointed at the pot.
“Eat, master,” she said. “It is good.”