Mrs. Roberto - Or the Widowy Worries of the Moosepath League

by Van Reid

  A vast silence followed upon the heels of this quotation.

  “I saw a ghost once,” said someone. It was Big Eye himself.

  “A ghost?” said Ephram. He had been lying on his back, almost falling asleep as he listened. Now he turned half onto his side to see Big Eye’s wide orb shining bright on the other side of the fire.

  “I thought it was a little person when I first saw her,” said the hobo. “She looked about two inches tall. I thought she was close by, but I was seeing her, to begin with, from far away. Leastwise, she was far away in the spirit world walking toward me. I hardly dared move a muscle. She was all aglow, white as Gabriel’s wings, and growing as she walked closer. She was pretty as an elf. That’s what I thought she was, too, for a bit, and I was ready for her—my hat turned back and my thumbs hitched together. She disappeared, though, before I got a close look, and I was a little sorry.”

  “Do you think she was a ghost?” said Ephram.

  “Oh, well,” said Big Eye with deep philosophy. “She was something.”

  “We saw an apparition at a seance,” said Eagleton.

  “Yes, last fall,” said Ephram. “Where did you see your phantom?”

  “In the midst of a wood, very much like this,” pronounced Big Eye.

  Ephram rolled onto his back, his coat beneath his head. He pulled his borrowed blanket up to his chin.

  “It was very strange,” said Big Eye.

  Someone yawned and someone else began to snore.

  “Good night,” came a now familiar drawl from out of the dark.

  “Henry says, ‘Good night,’” came a second.

  The Moosepathians were both wearied and enlivened by their day, and by the promise of the day to follow. They felt the residual movement that sometimes follows travelers to their beds—in this case, either the sway of the carriage or the shimmy of the rails. The snapping of the campfire was of great comfort, as was its light and warmth. Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump listened to the many yawns, and then the snores, and finally the wind rising in the trees. One by one, they dropped off to sleep. Eagleton was the last, thinking about Blind Po’s prediction of a storm.

  And then that great ripping crash brought them all—hobo and Moosepathian alike—to their feet with a concerted shout.

  48. All Something Breaks Loose!

  The wagon was quickly wheeled out of the way and the Ferns’ Sunday carriage brought into the yard. Sundry took over, and if he did not dog the work he did approach it with a degree of moderation that Mister Walton could not mistake. Only once did Mr. Fern object while Sundry was pulling links.

  “It’s when you hurry,” said the young man, “that you forget a strap or a buckle and find yourself in the ditch a mile down the road.” Hercules followed Sundry about with interested grunts; Sundry scratched the pig’s head, then went on with his business and pointed out what needed tightening as he moved around the horse and rig. It was done with more speed than others might have credited, considering his deliberate manner, and Mr. Fern seemed calmer for Sundry’s capable presence.

  The children were all out in the yard by now, and Mrs. Fern and the older girls, including Madeline, stood about with their nightrobes drawn about them and their hair tied up. Mrs. Fern wavered between humor and irritation with her husband, and Madeline rolled her eyes as her father stomped about. He realized that he was not entirely dressed and sent one of the boys in for his boots, which were thrown inside the carriage.

  “They have half an hour on us!” declared Mr. Fern, his emotion rising.

  “Ten minutes,” said Sundry. He looped the reins over the foot rail. “Where did they go?”

  “South, is all I know, but we’ll find them.” There, in his stocking feet, Mr. Fern snatched up the whip and handed it to Sundry. “I don’t trust myself to drive while I’m in this state,” he said.

  “I’ll get us there,” said Sundry, so he climbed into the driver’s seat, and the other men boarded as the rig swayed and creaked.

  “You watch your state, Vergilius Fern!” declared the farmer’s wife.

  “Yes, Ruth.”

  “Do you know where you’re going?” asked Madeline of Sundry Moss.

  Sundry was good humored about the adventure. “South,” was all he could hazard.

  “She’s eighty-three years old!” Mrs. Fern was insisting.

  “I know that!”

  “Eloping!” said Mrs. Fern. “Who would have thought!”

  “Where did she meet him, I’d like to know,” growled Mr. Fern.

  Sundry peered into the carriage window from his seat. “All in?”

  “Go, go!” said the farmer.

  Sundry gave a snap to the leads, and in a moment they were out of the yard, bounding down the road and jouncing against the ruts with a single lantern and the lowering moon to light the way. Behind them, and to their left the dark clouds hung—a great blind mass. Sundry cast a glance back and had the picturesque view of Mrs. Fern, Madeline, the children, and the great white pig gathered in an uncertain clump before the house. Madeline waved.

  He drove the horses up the knoll, where the moon shone a little more brightly, and only slowed a bit when the road dropped and wrapped itself around a shadowed comer. Just before they came to the mudhole that Johnny Poulter had skirted two days before, Sundry remembered that boggy place; he stood against the reins and nickered the horses up the bank.

  There were some shouts (from Mr. Fern) and rueful laughs (from Mister Walton) as they jolted along the ridge above the road, and Sundry only caught a glimpse of the slough below him and the remnants of a carriage wheel. “Look!” he shouted. There were lights, perhaps a quarter of a mile ahead of them, disappearing down the further side of a slope.

  “What is it?” called Mr. Fern, who was half hanging from the window.

  “Carriage lights ahead!” bellowed Sundry over the noise of their movement. “Not half a mile. There was a wheel left behind in the boggy place, back there. I think they might have turned over.” He admired Jacob Lister if the old fellow had righted a carriage and replaced a wheel in that short time by himself. Perhaps they had only lost the spare wheel that some carriages had strapped beneath the body.

  “He thinks they might have overturned,” said Mr. Fern when he pulled himself back into the carriage. The news sobered him somewhat. “I only hope she’s not injured.”

  “He would have come back if anything had happened,” assured Mister Walton. He had a firm grip on the ceiling strap beside him as they joggled and bobbled along the field above the road.

  “If he didn’t think I would shoot him,” said the farmer.

  Sundry was a good driver, but he was not so familiar with the road, and the moonlight, flickering over the hills and through the occasional grove or solitary tree, made it difficult to judge distance and form. Still, he might have urged the horse to greater speed if he’d been alone or this had been a mission more worthy of risk. The wind and noise of their movement, the tension in the reins, and the sense of things falling past them was exhilarating and not conducive to caution in anyone less steady than Sundry Moss, but the young man had not forgotten that his friend and employer was riding behind him.

  “The village!” shouted Sundry. They thundered over the West Branch Bridge and he stood again, searching the places between buildings to catch sight of the fleeing carriage. On Front Street, he pulled up to avoid an old dog. The creature trotted out of harm’s way, and they clattered through the sleepy town. Sundry suspected that they were not the first noisy passage in the last few minutes, for lights were on in several windows.

  “Behind us!” Mr. Fern shouted, half hanging from the window of the carriage. “Behind us! Heading east!”

  Sundry turned to scan the way behind and realized that back across the bridge, and some yards beyond, he had missed a road to their left. He saw a flash of light moving into the stillness and the dark.

  Their carriage wheels racketed over the bridge again, then the rig leaned to the right and th
ey were back on the trail. Mr. Fern called to Sundry, warning him about a sharp turn—just in time, it seemed, for they barely made the corner without tipping over. Sundry took them through a crossroad at double speed, then hauled back on the reins as they drew up to the mouth of the Abagadasset and a ferry dock. “Whoa! Whoa!” he called.

  “Blast! The ferry!” shouted Mr. Fern. He burst out of the carriage before it had fully stopped. “Have they got it?”

  “I believe so,” said Sundry.

  “Blast!” shouted the farmer again, and loud enough to attract the ferry man’s attention.

  Lanterns shone on the dock and on the ferry. The craft was cast off, but it had barely rendered enough steam to keep it bow first and the pilot looked concerned. An elderly man on board was discussing something with the ferry man, who had looked up at the sound of Mr. Fern’s shout. Jacob Lister hardly looked pressed and only offered a casual glance back. Aunt Beatrice stood, arms folded, looking defiantly at her nephew, who shouted once again.

  “Aunt Beatrice! You get back here!”

  “Vergil!” she called back. “How come you are so hidebound about one thing when you’re so even about everything else?”

  “Auntie! You can’t run off with that rumrunner!”

  “Maybe if I live to be a hundred he’ll have time to ruin me,” she called back, hardly perturbed.

  “Auntie! He’s driving much too fast!”

  “He’d drive slower if you weren’t chasing us!”

  Mr. Fern had driven himself into a state of terrible frustration and he was hopping about the dockyard like an angry rooster.

  “Vergilius!” shouted the old lady. “You’re going to burst a blood vessel!”

  In the midst of this shouting, Mister Walton said quietly to Sundry, “So, the ladder was the clue.” They were standing by the carriage like onlookers at an outdoor play.

  “With Hercules’s mysterious ailment,” said Sundry, “and the dirt on the foot of the ladder, I did wonder, but the lilac among the hydrangeas made me pretty sure. There were marks where the ladder had stood among the hydrangeas. I thought it was Madeline or, goodness’ sakes, one of her sisters.”

  “The old fellow had been courting her at the window,” said an amazed Mister Walton.

  “And lacing Hercules’s slops with rum to keep him quiet.”

  “Good heavens! But you would think that someone would have heard them.”

  “With that thunderous noise every night? We could hear Mr. Fern snoring halfway through the house.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “At least, I hope it was Mr. Fern.”

  “We can’t wait for the ferry,” said the farmer. He came around the carriage with a new plan. “We’ll go back to the crossroad and head north. There’s a road some miles up that will connect us with that peninsula.” He nodded to the other side of the river. “It’s a little longer by that route, but their way will be harder going.”

  Mister Walton gave Mr. Fern the slightest shade of an uncertain expression, but the man did not see it.

  “What if they wait for us to disappear and come back over with the ferry?” wondered Sundry.

  Mr. Fern looked astonished. “I hadn’t thought,” he said.

  “Or what if they have a minister waiting for them in a house, right over there?” Sundry pointed after the ferry.

  “Do you think?”

  Sundry laughed. “Not really.”

  Mr. Fern shot Sundry a perturbed glance. “Perhaps we should drive over the next hill,” he suggested. “Then we can douse the light and creep back to watch them.”

  “That’s a good idea,” said Sundry, but there was something in his manner that made Mister Walton chuckle. Sundry held his hand palm up and looked up at the sky. They followed his gaze. It did feel like rain.

  “I am sorry to drag you gentlemen all over creation,” said Mr. Fern

  “You don’t know how much we enjoy an adventure,” said Mister Walton, that previous chuckle still evident in his voice.

  And so they turned the carriage about, and Sundry drove them over the next rise. The lantern was blown out and they hurried back to the top of the slope. It was a little while before the ferry made the other side of the water, though it was a short way. The silence of the weather, the absolute stillness in the air, began to play on their nerves now that their initial excitement had spent itself.

  “They might douse their own light,” said Mr. Fern, who had begun to have all sorts of suspicions since listening to Sundry.

  “They might have someone across there to take the carriage for them while they ride the ferry back,” said Sundry.

  “Mr. Moss!”

  Mister Walton said, “Ahem!”

  “Sorry,” said Sundry.

  “I am beginning to think that you’d be rather good at this sort of thing,” said Mr. Fern, not without a hint of humor.

  “Do you mean elopement?” said Sundry, without looking at the man. “I think I might hire out.” Then he did turn and regard Mr. Fern. “I apologize if I seem to be making light of the situation.”

  “You are very good to come out with me,” said Mr. Fern. “And you’re driving is not to be faulted.”

  There was a silence. The carriage light in the distance mounted the hill above the ferry and headed north.

  “Perhaps we should head back home,” said Mr. Fern quietly. No one else said anything. The farmer kicked at a rock in the road and chuckled ruefully to himself. “Let’s go home and have some breakfast before we go back to bed.”

  Mister Walton yawned involuntarily.

  Sundry looked over Mister Walton’s head as if he had seen something or sensed something from the starless portion of the sky; that dark sector suddenly flashed with a broad streak of lightning. Mister Walton had turned away from the north, and Mr. Fern’s head was down, but the burst lit their surroundings like broad daylight.

  The thunder took two or three seconds to arrive, but then it filled the air as had the flash, charging down river and echoing among the hills like an extended barrage of cannon fire. After the great silence, the thunder was deafening and it shook them to their bones.

  “I wonder where that hit,” said Mr. Fern. The back rumble of a distant echo reached them, then another. A more earthbound explosion of light illumined the cloud cover in the north, and a deeper, longer sort of thunder soon followed.

  “Good heavens!” said Mister Walton. The light from below diminished but did not die entirely. It glowed like a giant’s hearth against the intervening hills and trees.

  “Good Lord!” said Mr. Fern.

  “What could that be?” wondered Sundry.

  “That’s Richmond,” informed Mr. Fern. “They have some massive icehouses up there.”

  “Icehouses?” said Mister Walton. “I wouldn’t have guessed an icehouse was subject to that sort of fire.”

  “They’re filled with sawdust to insulate the ice, and much of the ice has been shipped out of the upper levels by this time of year so there’s nothing but sawdust.”

  Again there was a silence while they recovered from the awful thought.

  “Shall we hurry to see what we can do?” said Mister Walton.

  “Yes, quickly,” said Mr. Fern. “Mr. Moss?”

  “Jump in!” Sundry was already running to the carriage. He hopped onto the driver’s seat, gathered the reins, and as soon as his fellows were aboard he snapped the leads and turned right at the crossroads. The glow in the north grew brighter and more definite as they rushed along the old post road, and, half an hour later, when they crested a hill overlooking the town of Richmond, they could see the source of the conflagration—a great mass of flames, still a mile away, at the place called Iceboro.

  BOOK SIX May 30, 1897

  (Before Dawn)

  49. The Crack Before Dawn

  To begin with, there was the lightning itself.

  At that potent bark of thunder, Ephram and Eagleton jumped with concerted shouts from their rough beds as if ti
ed to the same string.

  “Good heavens!” remarked Ephram.

  “My thoughts exactly!” cried Eagleton.

  Other, less proper declarations were heard as the rest of the camp leaped to its collective feet. Grumbling echoes rolled back from distant hills, and the ground trembled as beneath a succession of heavy footfalls.

  Ephram had used his coat as a blanket, and he endeavored now to put his arms in the sleeves. Eagleton was in the midst of a similar undertaking when Thump (still asleep) let out a grunt that startled them once again. Watching the movements of the roused hoboes, Ephram and Eagleton had revolved in different directions (Ephram clockwise, Eagleton counterclockwise, according to Moosepath tradition), when Thump’s unexpected outburst caused them somehow to insert their outstretched arms into one another’s sleeves.

  Ephram and Eagleton found themselves back-to-hack, each struggling with an unknown assailant. Eagleton was sure he had been seized by one of the villains who had imperiled Mrs. Roberto and he began to shout, “They’ve got me! They’ve got me, Ephram!”

  “I am caught as well!” shouted his worthy friend.

  Thump wakened, blinked in the darkness, and sat up. In his ears were the cries of his companions; before him were two struggling figures. Thump gained his feet and apprehended the pair of shadows as he imagined an officer of the law might nab a fleeing criminal—that is, headfirst with a great leap. Shouts and grunts came on the heels of this heroic effort till somebody’s foot kicked the nearest fire into renewed life and they found themselves staring at one another’s grimacing features in the resultant glow.

  “Good heavens, Eagleton!” shouted Ephram. “Is it you?”

  “Ephram!” declared Eagleton. “You came just in time!”

  “Did I?” replied a perplexed Matthew Ephram. “I was going to say the same about yourself!”

  Sitting up, they shrugged themselves into whichever coat was left to them. Ephram took note of Thump, who was rubbing his forehead.