by Bill Bright
Cyrus Gregg cleared his throat.
Daniel gave a start.
“Relax, boy. I’m not going to bite your head off.”
Daniel grinned defensively. He didn’t relax.
“On our way back…,” Gregg began.
Back?Any mention of a return trip was good news.
“…we’ll take a small detour to pick up a machine and deliver it to my house.”
“Yes, sir,” Daniel said.
Papers shuffled. “Have you ever seen one of these?” Gregg asked, holding a piece of paper in front of Daniel.
It was a drawing of what looked like a wooden barrel on its side sitting in some sort of trough with legs. A hatch opened in the middle of the barrel, and there was a crank on one end.
“No, sir,” Daniel said.
Gregg sported a schoolboy grin. “It’s the patent drawing for a revolving washing machine. I’m an investor in the company that is producing them. My partners have shipped one to me.”
Daniel stared at the picture, intrigued.
“You put the clothes in here.” Gregg pointed to the hatch. “You add soap, latch the door down, and turn this handle at the end. The trough is filled with water.” He sat back. “This machine can do the work of two scrub women with half the effort.”
Daniel had to admit the idea was ingenious.
This pleased Gregg. He shuffled the papers and produced two more drawings. “These are our competitors. This first one forces the clothes through two sets of rollers on a vibrating frame, while this second one agitates the clothes, pounding them with four hammers which are attached to a crankshaft.” Gregg spoke with animation.
Daniel was taken aback. Did Gregg want his opinion? Or was he just wanting Daniel to agree with him that his model was obviously the best machine of the three?
To give Daniel a good look at the drawings, Gregg was leaning against him. Daniel had never before been this close to his employer. His sideburns looked like sparsely bunched little white corkscrews growing on a field of splotchy pink skin.
Daniel glanced up the empty road, then focused on the two drawings. “The one on the right, the one with the hammers…the idea is to simulate a washerwoman’s arms—the scrubbing motion—right?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, it’s just that, from the drawing…it doesn’t seem that it has enough leverage to be effective. I mean, I remember my mother washing clothes. She used to bear down so hard that her tongue stuck out the side of her mouth.”
“An interesting observation. Go on.”
“That’s it. All I’m saying is that when she taught me how to scrub something clean, she told me to use plenty of elbow grease—meaning to bear down, to really give it a good scrubbing. From the configuration of the drawing, those thin wooden rods…well, they wouldn’t generate very much elbow grease. I mean, if a woman had arms that thin, you wouldn’t mistake her for a washerwoman.”
Gregg laughed. “And this one?”
After another glance at the road, Daniel studied the second drawing. “This one looks like it has better leverage, just the way it’s built. And the rollers are a good idea, squeezing the clothes through them like that.” A thought made him sit up.
“Yes?” Gregg said.
“I wonder what happens when buttons go through there. Big buttons. That would really foul things up, wouldn’t it?”
It was Gregg’s turn to sit back. He took a long look at Daniel, one that made Daniel feel good. There was approval and respect in Gregg’s eyes, something Daniel had never seen in his uncle’s.
“I just paid a couple of investment firms a substantial sum of money to come to the same conclusion you arrived at in just a few minutes,” Gregg said.
Cyrus Gregg’s words worked like a tonic, warming Daniel all over inside.
“All right,” Gregg said, shuffling the cylinder washing machine drawing to the top of the stack. “What about this one? Be honest, now.”
Feeling flush with success, Daniel examined the drawing. “I like the trough. It obviously holds more water than the other models, which means it probably rinses the clothes better.”
“Very good! And…?”
“And…”
Daniel stared at the drawing. Nothing came to him. He looked harder. He wanted to say something insightful, something that would impress Cyrus Gregg.
“Well, it has legs, so that it stands up higher than the others. That has to be easier on the back, I suppose.”
“Yes,” Gregg said but not with the enthusiasm of before.
“And…” Daniel stared at the drawing of the hatch. It was raised. The opening was shaded black. “What’s inside?”
“You tell me,” Gregg said.
“I was just thinking…”
An idea came to him. It took him a few minutes to work it through. Gregg gave him time. Unlike Uncle Asa, he didn’t expect an answer immediately to every question.
“It just seems to me,” Daniel explained, “that if the walls of the cylinder are smooth inside, with the soap and water, it’s going to get slippery, don’t you think? And the clothes will just slip around and not really…”
The word he wanted wasn’t coming.
“Agitate?” Gregg suggested.
That wasn’t exactly what he was thinking, but the more Daniel thought about it, the more he liked the word. “Yeah, I guess that explains it about as well as anything else. Agitate.”
“What would you recommend?” Gregg asked.
Daniel wished his uncle were here, listening to this conversation. Asa Rush held Cyrus Gregg in high esteem. And here Daniel and Cyrus Gregg were, having an intelligent discussion, and Cyrus Gregg was not onlylistening to him butseeking his advice.
“Rails,” Daniel said. “I was thinking there should be wooden rails nailed to the inside walls, something to catch the clothes and turn them over, but not enough for them to get caught up in.”
Gregg was staring at the drawing like he’d never seen it before. “A series of wooden rails evenly spaced inside to increase the agitation.” With his index finger, he drew an imaginary horizontal line the length of the cylinder.
“Actually,” Daniel said, “I was thinking they should be angled slightly.” He reached over and showed Gregg what he meant with his own imaginary line. “That way, the agitation has a spiraling effect.”
Cyrus Gregg nodded. He smiled. “Brilliant.”
Daniel wasn’t certain if he’d heard correctly. Did Cyrus Gregg just call his idea brilliant? Never had that word even been remotely associated with Daniel Cooper. That single word uncapped a wellspring of good feeling inside Daniel. It bubbled forth with such emotion that he had to fight back tears.
“Rome; Oneida Lake; Lock 23 is just east of Oneida Lake; Baldwinsville; Seneca Falls; Clyde; Lyons; Newark; Palmyra; Macedon…”
Cyrus Gregg looked on with an amused grin as Daniel named the locks of the Erie Canal from east to west. Their discussion had turned to canals when Gregg told Daniel that he was part owner of the Patowmack Canal that ran from Georgetown to Cumberland.
“Have you ever seen the Erie Canal?” Gregg asked when Daniel finished his list.
“No, but I know everything about it.”
“Everything?” Gregg said, lifting an eyebrow.
“Aya,” Daniel replied. “I think so.”
“Then you wouldn’t mind a little test. Just to amuse us along the way.”
Daniel had become so caught up in their conversation, first inventions and now canals, that he’d lost track of time. Normally he would have hated the thought of a test. He’d had his fill of them at school. But then school never asked questions about things that interested him, like music and canals. Daniel saw no useful purpose for knowing what dead Romans and Greeks said or thought thousands of years ago. But facts about mankind’s most recent engineering marvel? Daniel couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t interested in things like that.
“What is the total length of the canal?” Gregg asked.
Daniel rolled his eyes. “Ask me something hard.”
Gregg looked disappointed. “Stumped so easily?”
With a flat tone, Daniel said, “The Erie Canal is three hundred and sixty-three miles long.”
Gregg nodded that was correct. Before he could ask another question, Daniel added, “It has eighteen aqueducts and eighty-three locks with a rise of five hundred and sixty-eight feet from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. The Niagara escarpment presented the greatest engineering problem with its sixty-foot rise. Nathan S. Roberts solved the problem with a double set of five combined locks—one set for ascending traffic, the other for descending traffic.”
Gregg listened as though he’d just heard a mesmerizing symphony and didn’t want to speak too quickly for fear of breaking the mood. “All right,” he finally said. “What size are the locks?”
“Ninety feet by fifteen feet. They’re designed to accommodate boats up to sixty-one feet long and seven feet wide with a three-and-a-half-foot draft. Do you want me to tell you how they function? About how the sluices, or ground paddles, operate?”
“Tell me the purpose of the lock gates meeting a chevron,” Gregg said.
Daniel smiled. Gregg thought he had him on this one. “The two halves of the lock gate meet at a point, which points against the flow of the water. This keeps the locks from succumbing to the pressure of the water between an empty lock and the full force of the canal above it.”
“Impressive,” Gregg said. “Where did you learn all this?”
“My father collected articles. I used to sneak into his study when he was gone and read them.”
“I thought your father was a minister.”
“He was. But he was a lot like his hero, Thomas Jefferson. He felt an educated man should be knowledgeable in a wide variety of subjects.”
“And your uncle?”
Daniel frowned. “Uncle Asa doesn’t care what you have to say unless you’re a Greek or Roman orator who has been dead for a thousand years.”
This made Gregg laugh.
“Are you familiar at all with the Patowmack Canal? I know it doesn’t begin to compare with the Erie…still, thousands of boats have locked through the Great Falls carrying flour, whiskey, tobacco, and iron downstream, and cloth, firearms, hardware, and manufactured products upstream.”
“When my uncle brought me out here, we were going to stop awhile at Matildaville, and he was going to let me watch the lock in operation. But then he got a headache on the journey and just wanted to get home, so we didn’t stop.”
Gregg pulled a pipe from his pocket and began stuffing tobacco into the bowl. “I understand your uncle no longer travels well.” He lit the pipe and huffed and puffed until the tobacco caught on. “What would you say if I told you I was partner in an effort to extend the Patowmack Canal from Cumberland to the Ohio River?”
The idea was so fantastic, it stunned Daniel. “Is that possible? The engineering problems—”
“Would make the Erie Canal look like child’s play in comparison,” Gregg said with a tone more humble than boastful.
Daniel thought a minute. “It can be done.”
Gregg laughed. “You’re certain of that, are you?”
“I think man can pretty much do whatever he sets his mind to do.”
“I wish my financial backers were as optimistic as you.”
“It’s a matter of vision,” Daniel said. “And what’s to stop you at the Ohio?”
“Explain.”
“The Northwest Passage. You know—the one all the explorers were searching for…”
“Go on.”
“We know now that nature didn’t create such a passageway, but what’s to keep man from doing what nature didn’t do? After all, nature didn’t connect Albany and Buffalo with a waterway.”
Gregg looked at him with wonder, the type of gaze that encouraged Daniel to continue, so he did.
“Think of it. What’s to keep us from creating our own Northwest Passage? Creating a waterway, a canal, that links the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans?”
“A transcontinental canal. A water passageway capable of shipping food and goods across the nation,” Gregg said, catching the vision. “The fabled Northwest Passage.”
“Why not? It’s technologically feasible.”
“Indeed. Why not?”
Chapter 7
So caught up was Daniel in his discussion with Cyrus Gregg about machines and canals that he forgot to be afraid of the man with whom he was riding and about where they were going. Clearly, this was not the man Daniel had thought him to be. This was not the man in the alley who had consented to Braxton’s murder. Did Cyrus Gregg have a brother? Possibly a twin?
At the moment, it seemed more likely to Daniel that his Uncle Asa would be involved in a killing than the man riding in the wagon next to him.
“Take this road here.” Gregg pointed to his left.
The wagon tipped back and forth as the wheels intersected frozen ruts in the main road. Barely wide enough for wagon passage, they followed a descending path, crossing over Mills Creek on a wooden bridge that complained under the weight of the wagon.
Daniel felt foolish that at the outset he’d considered jumping from the wagon to escape Cyrus Gregg. He looked forward to the return ride with great anticipation. First, to see the working model of Mr. Gregg’s revolving clothes-washing machine, but also because Daniel wanted to ask Mr. Gregg his thoughts on steam.
Daniel had read predictions somewhere that engines powered by steam would someday replace the horse, just as steamboats were challenging the sail. Daniel had never seen a steam engine except in pictures, nor had he ever met someone who’d seen a steam engine. Had Mr. Gregg? Daniel was anxious to ask him. Also, to tell him of an idea he had.
If steam engines would indeed someday replace horses, wouldn’t it make sense to lay tracks for these locomotive engines, as they were called, parallel to canals and pull barges with them?
Already, Daniel could hear Cyrus Gregg’s voice in his head, saying, “Brilliant!”
A cabin came into view.
“That’s it.” Gregg sat forward in his seat and yelled in its direction. “Epps! Epps!”
Daniel pulled the wagon to a stop in front of the cabin. He jumped out and circled to the back to unload the casket while Gregg climbed out and went to the cabin door, which was standing open.
“Epps!” he shouted inside.
Daniel hopped into the back of the wagon and waited. It would take two men to unload the casket.
“Epps!”
Getting no answer from inside, Gregg walked around back, calling as he went. Daniel placed his hands in his pockets and searched the immediate vicinity for a man named Epps. He saw nothing but forest.
The shuffle of boots on wooden floorboards and a movement in the doorway drew Daniel’s attention back to the cabin.
The next thing he knew, he was staring into the face of Braxton’s killer.
The hat and coat were gone, but it was him. Daniel was sure of it. His imposing stature. The way he stood, feet apart, was identical to that of the man who had stood at the mouth of the alley while a whimpering Braxton clawed at the cobblestones, attempting to escape.
Piercing, gray, wolflike eyes fixed on Daniel, as though from a black den—only in this case the shadows were black facial hair. A thick, full beard covered everything on the man’s face except sharp cheekbones and those threatening eyes. Attached to the man’s belt was a large hunting knife, the size of the one that had slit Braxton’s throat.
Daniel stood frozen by the killer’s stare.
He recognizes me, Daniel thought.He knows I was there.
“Epps! There you are!” Gregg said, coming around from the back of the cabin. “Why didn’t you answer?”
Even now, the killer didn’t answer him. Not until he was done staring at Daniel, which seemed an eternity.
“You woke me,” Epps said in a deep, groggy voice. He stretched like a bear emerging from hi
bernation.
“At this time of day?” Gregg said.
Epps turned and walked back inside.
“Where are you going?” Gregg demanded.
From inside the house Epps said something Daniel couldn’t make out. With the hunter’s gaze no longer immobilizing him, Daniel’s thoughts turned to flight.
“Daniel, come down here,” Gregg said, walking toward the wagon.
Daniel glanced around him. Now was his chance. If he was going to run, he’d have to do it now.
“Hurry, boy,” Gregg said in a low voice. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
Had Daniel not connected with Cyrus Gregg during the ride to the cabin, he probably would have run. But the connection was strong, and it held. Against his instincts, Daniel jumped over the side of the wagon, landing in front of Cyrus Gregg. But he kept his eyes on the door of the cabin, just in case.
Gregg put a hand on Daniel’s shoulder. “Listen to me, son,” he said in a fatherly tone. “I meant to tell you this on the ride out here, but our conversation took such a pleasant turn, I let the time slip away. I wanted to warn you—”
Epps emerged from the cabin. Daniel took a sharp intake of breath. He couldn’t help himself. Epps appeared wearing the hat and long coat that he had worn the night before in the alley. He looked exactly as he did before he killed Braxton.
“Let’s get to it,” he said, pulling on a pair of gloves.
Gregg tightened his grip on Daniel’s shoulder. “The deceased—”
“He’s back here,” Epps said, walking to the rear of the cabin.
“We’ll be right there!” Gregg shouted at him impatiently. Turning back to Daniel, he said, “You know the deceased. It’s Emil Braxton. I’m sorry you have to hear about it this way. It was a very unfortunate accident.” He released Daniel. “Go help Epps load him up. I’ll explain it all to you later.”
Daniel didn’t move.
“Go on,” Gregg urged him.
Daniel’s body didn’t seem to be working.
“I’m sorry to spring it on you so suddenly,” Gregg said. “But you weren’t close, were you? You’ve known him only a couple of months.”
“No,” Daniel managed to say. “We weren’t close.”