“Have you anything to say?” Judge Ravenel asked after the verdict had been pronounced.
“How much time have I?”
“Brevity alone will avail.”
“Then remember Galileo,” Bilbo said, glancing upward to the clouds.
“I’d love to hang you. Perhaps some day it shall be my pleasure to do so. For the present, and in conformity with the statutes, I sentence you to twenty-seven lashes with the horsewhip, said punishment to be carried out at once.”
The judge rapped his gavel—a pistol butt—and the court was adjourned.
A sturdy corporal nearly as tall as Bilbo, and twice as broad at the shoulders, was selected to lay the cowhide on the miscreant’s back. I confess I had no stomach to witness the spectacle and repaired to the deserted museum while Bilbo’s cries of “Balls! Balls! Balls!” echoed in the distance. And it was during this carrying out of sentence that dear Uncle suddenly revived. I heard a groan and rushed to the crate where he lay to find him blinking and licking his lips. But though he woke from his five-day slumber like a man roused from nothing more than an afternoon nap, some of his faculties were slow in returning to full function: his memory, for instance. He knew Judge Ravenel, but could not for the life of him identify Clark and Lewis, for whom he had felt such a keen rivalry upon our commission in Washington City.
“I know those two from somewhere,” he whispered to me as we convened around the supper fire. When Judge Ravenel introduced the two officers, it finally came to him. “The Corps of Discovery!” Uncle exclaimed.
The amiable Clark smiled to be so acknowledged, whilst the broody Lewis attacked his catfish fillet and scowled.
“We are indeed honored to meet you here on La Belle Riviere,” Clark declared, “but I had your assurance that you would not tread in our footsteps, Mr. Walker, and here you are.”
“Louisiana is not the object of our mission,” said I to assuage their jealousy.
“Then what is its object?” Lewis asked bluntly.
Uncle seemed puzzled, as though he could not remember.
“Have you pen, ink, and paper?” I asked.
Soon I had concocted another sketch of our quarry. The officers laughed as they examined it.
“Looks like a warthog,” said Lewis.
“’Tis the giant sloth, and we are commissioned to secure a specimen.”
“I have seen the bones of this monster with my own eyes, gentlemen,” Judge Ravenel avouched.
“At Mammoth Lick it was,” Uncle inserted, and I was glad to see his faculties coming back into focus.
“Indeed, we saw some pretty mastodon bones there ourselves,” Clark said.
“Where is the rest of your corps, Mr. Walker?” Lewis asked without mincing words. “Didn’t you tell us it numbered upward of fifty men?”
“It does, sir.”
“Then where are they?”
“We are the vanguard, Captain. The others follow some days behind us.”
If Judge Ravenel detected prevarication on our part, he kept his own counsel, realizing no doubt that Uncle, a close friend of the President’s, had his reasons.
“You serve as your own scouts, then?” Lewis pressed his interrogation.
“We do not shrink from danger, sir,” I countered his insinuation, “and we are no longer in a court of law, if you please.”
For the first time, Lewis smiled. It was an artificial-looking thing, but I was happy to observe the discomfort it evinced.
“Had any luck thus far?” Lieutenant Clark changed the subject diplomatically.
“We saw a few of the beasts up Tennessee way.”
“Where are your specimens?”
“Strange to relate, they are such thundering great creatures that a rifle ball affects them like the sting of a gnat.”
“I have heard the same thing about the great yellow bear of the prairie,” Clark said.
“A toast, gentlemen, to the prodigalities of our republic,” Judge Ravenel proposed, hoisting his tin flagon in salute, whilst we four rival adventurers eyed one another with suspicion. I had no doubt that Messrs. Lewis and Clark regarded us as spies sent to shadow the Corps of Discovery—for Lewis had served as Jefferson’s personal secretary and knew better than anyone his master’s devious mind.
After the meal, the men broke out their jaw’s harps and a fiddle, not to mention their flasks of ever-flowing whiskey, and commenced a’capering by the light of their campfires. I excused myself from the officers’ mess and went to find Louis, whose allegiance to his sweetheart was undimmed by her family connection.
Bessie was applying a poultice of mosses and mud to her father’s raw back, while Neddy lay upon all fours in the firelight quietly sharing Bilbo’s misery like a loyal hound. Louis was gazing dejectedly into the fire as I approached.
“My friend, how happy I am to see you,” he said without much conviction.
“There is he: Judas in buckskins!” Bilbo sneered. Neddy bared his teeth and growled lowly.
“May I speak to you in private, Louis?” I asked.
He assented and we withdrew down to the river’s edge. The peacock-blue western sky was coming alive with countless twinkling stars, and the katydids chirped so loud they all but drowned out the boatmen’s songs.
“Why did you not take supper with us tonight, Louis?”
He shrugged his shoulders and flicked a pebble out into the river.
“You know we must leave tomorrow, Louis.”
“Where do we go from here, Sammy?”
“Uncle and I to Natchez on the Mississippi. Yourself to St. Louis with Captain Lewis and Lieutenant Clark, who are officers of our government and will see to your safety.”
“What will happen to me in St. Louis, Sammy?”
“You will wait there while the President and his cabinet are notified.”
“Then what will happen to me?”
“You will be transported to Washington City.”
“On a boat?”
“Several boats, I should imagine.”
“What will happen to me in Washington City?”
“You will wait until General Bonaparte is cast out of France and then you will claim your throne.”
“When will this happen, Sammy?”
“I don’t know. Not more than a few years, I shouldn’t think.”
Louis nodded his head. I was rather surprised to notice how brown his face and hands had become from days spent in the sun, and how he was beginning to lose the bloated, pear-shaped figure, a result of the first physical labors he had ever performed.
“May I not come with you and Uncle William?” he asked following a long silence.
“I don’t think so, Louis. For we must penetrate into the wilderness, where there is much danger.”
“I will help you.”
“No, Louis. You are the King of France. Your life must be protected for the sake of your people.”
“At Chateau Félicité my life was protected,” Louis recalled with a sigh. “So many years. Do you know, Sammy, that I was never allowed outside the gate?”
“Not once?”
“Never. The world outside was a pretty picture in the window, nothing more. Since I am with you and Uncle William is the first time I have felt like a living creature, out here amid the other creatures. The world is such a beautiful place, more beautiful even than Chateau Félicité. I would like to stay in this world.”
“But you shall, Louis.”
“I don’t think so, Sammy. I think I shall be once again a prisoner.”
“But you must be patient if you want your throne.”
“I am not so sure that I desire this throne. Am I not an idiot?”
“No,” I assured him emphatically. “You are not. The longer we are acquainted, the more I am convinced that your education was deliberately thwarted by Monsieur LeBoeuf.”
At the mention of his former guardian, a tear came to his eye as he harked back upon what had been—till two weeks ago—the only home he had eve
r known.
“Very well, perhaps I am not an idiot, but I am not a genius like Monsieur Napoleon Bonaparte. Let him be King of France. I think he would make a better king than me.”
“Do I understand that you will not go to St. Louis with these officers?”
He nodded his head in the affirmative.
“Still, you cannot come with us.”
“I will go to New Orleans with monsieur doctor—”
“With Bilbo! Louis, I cannot permit it.”
“You cannot permit it!” he retorted with astounding vehemence. It was not a little intimidating to see such a large young man lose his temper. “Who are you to prevent me? You are not my uncle. You are Sammy. I am a man too, you know.”
“But … but he is a villain, a scoundrel, a fraud, a thief, a—”
“You should hear what he says about you. Besides, he has a beautiful daughter.”
“Beautiful! Why, she is a monster.”
“Then why did you go into the whortleberry bush with her?”
“I was merely helping her search for something.”
“I know what she was looking for, Sammy. She has asked me to become her husband.”
“Louis, I beg you, wait before you make this decision—”
“I do no more waiting,” he declared in a manner more regal than he might ever know.
“But you have so little experience in the world. When you are King, all the beauties of the realm will come to your door.”
“Sammy,” he put his hand on my shoulder. “I will never be King.”
“But it is your birthright.”
“Are you my friend?” he forced me to look into his large brown eyes.
“Yes, Louis. You know I am your friend.”
“Then forget that I am this King, please, and let me just be Louis.”
“Very well,” I gave in. “I will do as you wish.”
“O, I am so happy!” he threw his arms about my neck. “Come, let us tell monsieur doctor.”
Bilbo took the news with surprising equanimity, considering his smarting back and what little he had seen of his prospective son-in-law’s intelligence.
“I always said I’d live to see my little Bessie dressed in Paris silks,” he averred, and I wondered if he had come to believe Louis’s true identity, or whether he was merely happy to have found his beloved offspring a serviceable husband. “After the ceremony, we shall embark for New Orleans.”
“After the ceremony—?”
“Why yes, surely that judge friend o’yours will tie the knot. ’Tis his civic duty as much as hounding the trail-blazers of medical science with lawsuits and prosecutions. I shall ask him myself tomorrow.”
“But what is the hurry?”
“Indeed, why wait,” Bilbo gathered Bessie and Louis under each enormous arm, “and deprive the happy couple of marital bliss?”
So it was that the two lovebirds were united in wedlock under a bower of Rubus odoratus the next day at nine in the morning—a rude hour, but the Corps of Discovery, and Judge Ravenel with them, were anxious to be under way. The bride wore her Oriental pantaloons and veil—and I stood as Louis’s best man. Bilbo gave Bessie away, and Uncle gnashed his teeth. When the deed was done, Bilbo started a keg of Monongahela whiskey and passed out rations to all present. He even took the opportunity to sell over a dozen jars of his Universal Physic to the crew, for it had been many miles between towns, and they had had nothing to spend their pay upon.
Finally, it came time to bid adieu to the old mountebank, and more particularly to Louis—promising to meet him in New Orleans anon—for we assumed we would be traveling at least as far as the confluence of the Mississippi in convoy with the Corps of Discovery. And so imagine our chagrin to learn that they would not grant us even this minor courtesy.
“Sirs,” Uncle appealed to them as they boarded their flagship, “would you leave us in the clutches of this contumacious villain?”
“We are bound for St. Louis, Mr. Walker,” Lieutenant Clark stated, “whilst you are headed in the opposite way, to Natchez.”
“Yes, but let us follow to the Mississippi, for heaven’s sake.”
“I think not,” the gloomy Lewis shook his head, looking down upon us with squinched eyes and grim-set mouth.
“President Jefferson will hear about this!” I cried up at them, shaking my fist.
“That I do not doubt,” Lewis said.
“Felix, tell them who I am,” Uncle implored his old friend.
“We know who you are,” Lewis said, throwing back his head and laughing.
Judge Ravenel made a helpless face and held his palms up. “They are determined, William,” he said. “And I am going only so far as Ballard County.”
“Then come with us.”
“You have not room for my horse on your little boat.”
“Cast off the lines, men!” Captain Lewis shouted. “I warn you, Walkers, do not follow.”
“Felix!”
“Good luck, William!”
The great keelboat, with its attending pirogues to the stern, hove away from shore and out into the Ohio’s current. In a matter of minutes they rounded a bend and vanished out of sight.
“What a strange mistress is fate,” Bilbo commiserated, nipping at a bottle of his physic. “But how I will enjoy the pleasure of your company all the way down the Big Muddy.”
13
“The devil you know is never as bad as the devil you don’t know,” quoth Doctor Melancton Bilbo. The Mississippi, he elaborated, was bound to be infested with piratical scum and therefore we would be foolish not to join forces upon our journey southward, we to Natchez, he to New Orleans. Besides, we had a keelboat while they possessed an open pirogue, and a leaky one at that. “Think of the newlyweds,” he appealed to us, and so we agreed to travel in their company.
The tent of the Western Museum was struck and stowed on board, and off we floated a few hours behind the damnable Corps of Discovery. In two days, without event, but in sizzling hot weather, we made the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi. The difference between the two streams was at once apparent.
The Ohio, except at spring flood, runs blue and clear, while the Mississippi flows like liquid earth. “Too thin to plow, but too thick to drink,” the old adage goes. Miles below the confluence, the water on the Kentucky side of the river remained clear, while that along the western bank ran as brown as coffee, with a clear line of demarcation between them. It was many more miles before the two waters completely mingled.
Where the Ohio runs relatively straight, especially below Cave in Rock, the Mississippi loops about in so many devilish meanders that you are as often floating north as south, and the length of your journey is double the distance that the crow flies. No sooner do you round one bend than the furtive river steals around the next. To every compass point you see nothing but a wall of vegetation, and the effect is like being trapped in a maze.
Unlike the rolling country of the Ohio Valley, the Mississippi flood plain offers little relief to the traveler’s eye. In spring flood these flatlands are yearly submerged, often to the distance of twenty miles from the main channel. The course of the river is constantly changing. The action of the water undercuts the bank, sending trees crashing into the water. These beget the thousandfold snags that make navigation such a hazard and that send immense quantities of driftwood and silt to the Gulf of Mexico. Where the trees have been undermined and toppled there sprout prodigious canebrakes—called “bearbrakes” because they are a favorite haunt of old bruin.
The river is often two miles across, and if pirates lurked upon any of the innumerable islands, we were able to give them a very wide berth. Many commercial flatboats were abroad at this season, and their crews laid low with the ague. Bilbo did a brisk business with them for his Universal Physic. He had left Fort Assurance with enough of the weed to last a lifetime, but the old rogue was running out of whiskey and bottles, and so we stopped at the town of New Madrid to take on fresh supplies.
The old Spanish settlement had been one of their chief outposts during the somnolent centuries when Spain owned Louisiana. The town was still half Spanish and retained an air of decayed antiquity. A few grizzled duennas on the main boulevard regarded us with a baleful eye as they hurried home from market. A slaughtering ground lay hard by the river, and the stench of rotten meat was everywhere. Still, it was the first town that Louis had ever laid eyes on, and to watch him among the stalls of the shabby market was to see a babe newborn to a land of wonder.
“Look, Sammy,” he cried with delight, “commerce everywhere!”
While Bilbo hawked his physic on the town wharf, Uncle and I repaired to the only tavern in the village. There we dined on stewed goat and enjoyed cups of Spanish Jerez whilst I passed a sketch of megatherium around to the other patrons. Most shook their heads, but one hoary old bushranger avouched that he had seen such a monster years before in the country of the Creeks, and a thrill ran though me to think that we would soon be back upon the right trail.
Between New Madrid and Natchez lay not a single town of any consequence. For a thousand miles and three weeks’ time we floated relentlessly southward. The monotonous bends and wearisome flatness were sometimes relieved by the sight of high clay bluffs. Upon several such cliffs we spied convocations of savages, whom Bilbo said were Chickasaw and “devils to whom the Shannoah compared as cherubim.” At night their lurid fires blazed against the dark forest, and not even Neddy dared set foot ashore to hunt us a supper lest he lose his scalp.
In this season of low water, and lacking any knowledge of the river, we daily encountered snags and shoals. Once, the keelboat became entangled in a most horrific puzzle of several whole trees. We hung there a day till an Ohio broadhorn loaded with fifty tons of hides threw us a line and towed us free. At last, on the third of August, we arrived at lovely Natchez.
An Embarrassment of Riches Page 28