The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana)

by Robert Lewis Taylor

  Can you imagine better luck than to have fallen in with such selfless benefactors? Wish me Godspeed—things move forward with almost unsettling celerity. But more of that anon; for now I close, to hie myself to the post office in quest of a stamp “for 300 miles or beyond”—price ten cents! Thus the penalty for wayfaring. Bless you all, and be sure to remember in your prayers,

  Your devoted husband,

  SARDIUS MCPHEETERS, M.D.

  (in Systemic Surg.)

  Chapter IX

  I think they might have spared Slater if it hadn’t been for the killing of that hostler. The boy was popular; he cheered folks up and made them laugh, and tempers were pretty high when he got ridden down. Especially when Jennie and I told our stories. We didn’t lay any blame on Joe, but I’ve noticed that lawyers have a sort of wormy way of getting things out of you before you know it. We had to admit, then, that Slater was in with John and Shep, and was along during the murders.

  So they threw him into a low, square, red brick building, which was the county jail, and said they would try him the next day and hang him the day after that. “I’m aiming to give him fair play,” stated the sheriff, a man with a belly so fat he probably hadn’t seen his feet in years, as we stood in his office with Mr. Chouteau and some others. “There’s been a lot of loose talk about old Judge Lynch around here, but no man, and I repeat, no man, be he white, black, green or striped, is going to be hung in this county without a trial beforehand.” Then he said they had to hold the trial tomorrow because the circuit judge would be in town that day, but had to make an election speech in St. Charles the day after.

  Except for Mr. Chouteau, who I noticed was looking on with a kind of distaste, everybody said this was as fair as anyone could wish, and they said they knew Slater would feel better at the hanging to have had a trial first, with a regular judge, and so on. Then they organized what they called a “posse comitatus” and went tearing all over town, and out in the outlying districts, looking for John and Shep, and they didn’t leave a stone unturned in their efforts to locate them, but hauled in a number of suspects that were about as likely a bunch of candidates as a party of Eskimos, including a harmless pair of traveling evangelists, several men drunk in a saloon, and a darky that had been sitting on the riverbank fishing. They shot a man in the leg, too, and he wasn’t doing anything more serious than riding along on a white horse without any hat on, which they said tallied with the description and he shouldn’t have answered up so brisk when they told him to dismount and undress.

  Mr. Chouteau took us out to his house, which was a stone mansion grander than anything I ever saw in Louisville, and on the way told us about my father’s visit and how they had gone to all that trouble to find me. I felt bad that I’d caused my father the grief, because he had enough worries without adding me to the list, but I was glad they missed me, too. So I explained some about my adventures, but I didn’t exactly put it all in, especially about the gold, for I’ve observed that the less jawing a person does about his money, the longer he’s apt to hang onto it. Which was the perfect opposite of my father. If he found a million dollars’ worth of diamonds, he’d collar the first ten people he saw on the street and tell them all about it, and maybe give them each a handful to make them believe it. But that’s the way he was—he wanted everybody around him to be in on whatever he did.

  Mr. Chouteau introduced us to his family, a middling-large group with several children, and he told the ladies, who were very nice and kind, with shiny black hair in coils, and the laciest kind of clothes, what a hard ordeal Jennie had been through. So they put her to bed, with servants, as gentle and considerate as if she’d been a duchess, and waited on her, and gave her broth to drink, and I noticed when they took me up to see her the color had come back in her cheeks; she looked pretty.

  I felt a little stiff, not knowing what to say as I stood beside the big high bed, canopied over with ruffles and silk, there being two of the Chouteau women in the room, watching, but by and by she smiled and put out her hand and took mine. “You’re a good, brave boy. Jaimie.” she said, being probably a little out of her head. “I’ll look after you till you find your pa.”

  We talked awhile, then, and agreed that I should visit Slater in jail, to see if we could make things easier for him. “He was an honest man once,” she said. “I’m sure of it,” Before I went out of the room, they got up a letter to my mother, telling how I’d been found, but leaving out the awful parts, and I added a paragraph saying I was homesick but not suffering, to make them feel good, and wound up by hoping that the children in school were learning as much as I was, but doubted it. I was itching to inquire if Professor Yandell had any courses about how to swim out of the Mississippi River in May and, maybe by use of Mental Arithmetic, make his way to St. Louis with a group of murderers, but I fought it down. I had yet to see anybody gain anything by being smart-alecky with my mother; somehow it didn’t pay.

  The cooks in the kitchen fixed a box of fried chicken and deviled eggs and cake and things like that, and Mr. Chouteau slipped in two bottles of wine. Then in the evening I was taken to the jail and they let me in Joe’s cell. He was sitting on a bench playing solitaire, and seemed in neither lower nor higher spirits than usual, but that’s the way he was—his face hadn’t any more expression than a ham.

  “Well, boy,” he said when he saw me. “You’ve hauled us all down, but if it hadn’t been you I expect it would have been something else. The odds were against us.”

  “I’ve brought you a box of food and wine.”

  “It might surprise you, but the prospect of being hanged has taken my appetite. Still, I’m obliged to you—have an egg?”

  I gulped and said no, I’d already eaten my supper.

  “Warden!” he cried, and slapped on the wall. Presently a shiftless-looking fellow wearing very dirty clothes slouched up to the bars and said, “Here, here, what’s all the racket?”

  “A piece of fried chicken for a cigar—fair exchange.”

  “Don’t try any of your murdering tricks with me,” said the turnkey, but I noticed that he looked hungrily at the chicken, all the same.

  “Oh, come along, don’t be shy,” said Slater. “Say two pieces, with an egg thrown in.”

  The man disappeared and came back in a minute with three long, black, sort of twisted-up cigars that were thinner than any I’d seen, and he said, “Put the food through the bars first.” Eyeing the other two, Slater offered to play cards for them, against the rest of the lunch, and after some haggling he dealt out two hands of showdown poker, one on the inside of the cell and the other through the bars on a hat. But not with his own cards; the turnkey got a deck from the sheriff’s office. I’d never known Slater to be so happy and outgoing. He acted more like a man about to have a monument unveiled to him, and I had to shake myself to remember that all the merriment was because he was in danger of being hung.

  Sure enough, he won the cigars, after dealing the cards out twice, with a lot of flourishes and gestures that were meant to look professional, I guess. When the turnkey had left, feeling pretty sour, he said, “Now what do you think of that? I cheated him both times and got away with it. He didn’t notice a thing. It’s the perfect note to end up on.”

  He lit a cigar and said he would tell me his life story, and he said, “I was born in the meanest brothel in New Orleans, and my mother hated me from the minute I arrived. Now you may ask yourself, how can this fool enjoy himself so much when he’s in such bad trouble, and I’ll tell you. This is the most notice that ever was taken of me in my whole life. There aren’t many would admit that sort of thing, but I’m so near finished it doesn’t make any difference. As a boy, I grew up loitering around low dives and running the orneriest kind of errands, and most of the things I did wouldn’t be fit for a decent boy’s ears. Over all, I had less than a year of schooling, in a convent, but when my blessed mother got her own place she took me out and put me to work as can-rusher and linen boy.

  “I learned
my educated speech from the high-born people that came there. We had the very best custom, even the Mayor, and professors from out of colleges. And all the reformers that now and then started clean-up drives would always come back once they’d made their first visit. I’ll say this for my mother; she ran a fair house and never tried to hurry a customer, or encourage the girls to wink him in.

  “A gambler taught me to deal cards, and I broke away when I was fourteen to go on my own. I think I can rightly say that the first thing I ever did to be proud of was stand still when those two swine ran out. It must have been my father’s blood, it couldn’t have been my mother’s. Who do you suppose he was? I often wonder. He’ll stir in his sleep tomorrow night, for his wandering boy’s about to mount the scaffold.”

  “You didn’t do murder,” I broke in, somehow affected and mixed up by all this poor, silly speech. “They’ll find you not guilty, they’re bound to.”

  He held out the hunting-case watch that was taken off the farmer they killed below St. Genevieve. “A gambler has instincts,” he said. “Someday you’ll be going along and you’ll say to yourself, that fellow looks familiar, and it’ll be the towheaded brat of those people we slaughtered for a few baubles down the road. Give him back his watch.”

  I was angry at myself, for I was about to cry, though knowing he wasn’t worth it, so I seized the watch sullenly and got up to leave.

  “One more thing,” he said. “The girl Jennie. Shep killed her folks, all of them, in a shanty in Illinois. He propped logs against the doors and burned it after he’d caught her down at the spring. John was planning to put her in a crib in Memphis. You look after her—take her to your paw and see she’s well treated.”

  When I left, he had opened a bottle of wine and lit another of his cigars. He seemed perfectly content, so I figured that he realized they couldn’t convict him on evidence as flimsy as what they had.

  But at the trial next day they didn’t waste much time, but got right down to brass tacks. It was in a dingy brick building with a courtroom of ugly benches and a raised platform at one end where they had a pine desk, very high and important, for the judge. He was late getting in, and seemed in a poison bad humor, and kept looking at his watch, as if it was our fault. He had on a checkered waistcoat and a pair of steel glasses and he kept drinking water one glass after another till I began to wonder if he hadn’t eaten something that didn’t agree with him the night before.

  Jennie and I were witnesses, so we told our stories, but neither of us laid anything real bad against Slater. They didn’t have a jury, but said it would be better not to, in a case of this severity. Besides, they agreed it would take too long to raise one, with the judge leaving tomorrow and all. A prosecutor, who they said was employed by the county, out of taxes, got up and made a long speech, and in the middle he crooked a finger at a colored boy in the rear who had a big armful of books, with paper markers sticking out of them, and when he brought them up, the prosecutor read out a lot of tiresome long references that he said were “precedents.”

  They mostly showed that when a man shoved in with a group and that group did something contrary to law, he was just as guilty as they were. “This defendant is an accessory not only before the fact but after the fact,” said the prosecutor, and the judge said, “It will be so taken into account in the summing up.”

  At the beginning of the trial, they had asked Slater if he was represented by Counsel, and he got up and stated that he couldn’t afford it, he only had a few small coins and the clothes he was wearing, unless they would care to make him a price on a deck of marked cards he had, along with a pair of no-seven dice. Both the judge and the prosecutor had a look at them, but they said there wasn’t any sense making an offer, they were so clumsy a child could spot them, and so they told Slater he was just out of luck, he’d have to defend himself. Then the judge added that it was generally the custom for the Court to appoint a counsel in cases of this kind but there was only one lawyer qualified in the area and he was over in Illinois having some land surveyed.

  While all this went on, I noticed Mr. Chouteau, sitting next to me, stirring around angrily from time to time, and now he muttered that this was “a damnable farce” and that the people ought to stop it. Later on he told me that the administration that was in then was corrupt and run-down, and that it would likely be voted out at the next election.

  Anyhow, they heard all the witnesses, which were Jennie and me, along with the people that were in Mr. Chouteau’s store, and then the judge asked Slater if he was ready to present the defense. Slater got up, looking interested and relieved that they’d noticed him, and said that the defense was built around the fact that he hadn’t killed anybody. Then he sat down, and the judge thanked him, as he said, “for making such a clear and well-organized defense, without taking up the Court’s time a-wandering off on side issues.” When he came out with this piece of poppycock, Mr. Chouteau stirred around so I thought he was going to get up and leave, but somebody reminded him he was a witness, so he sat back down again.

  Afterwards, the judge banged his gavel and spent ten minutes “summing up for the jury.” He explained first that although there wasn’t any jury in this case, he would prefer to sum up just the same, because it was the only part of the trial he enjoyed, and besides, he had got kind of used to it. So he told the jury to be sure and avoid prejudice one way or the other, and not let Slater’s ratty appearance tell against him, but only consider the evidence, and that in the sight of God, Slater and a man like Pierre Chouteau were equal, and when they were born you couldn’t tell one from the other. Then he went ahead and fixed the time of the hanging at eleven o’clock the next morning.

  I’m not going to dwell on that day, for it wasn’t something you’d care to remember, in spite of the fact that nearly everything they did was mostly comical, if you consider it apart from the final misery for Joe. First off, the sheriff, who’d received a lot of criticism lately for hanging people in a bored and listless way, announced he was “going to do a job on Joe Slater that will make St. Louis go down in history.” Boiling it down, then, they turned it into a regular celebration, with a procession and hawkers selling candy and pamphlets about famous murders of the past, and somebody dug up the old book about Murrel, which they said told how Slater got his start, only his name wasn’t mentioned in it anywhere—I remember well enough from reading it. A kind and thoughtful delegation came down to the jail early, bringing some elegant new clothes, including a stovepipe hat and a frock coat, for as one of them said, “It would be a crying shame for a man to be the poorest dressed figure at his own hanging.” The hat had black crepe paper wrapped around it nearly to the top, which was fashionable just then, but everybody said it would be especially appropriate in the present instance.

  But the most ridiculous thing was when they asked Joe if he had any last wishes, and he said yes, he’d admire to take a steamboat ride. So they dressed him up and went parading down Market Street, with Joe and the sheriff in front, all blown up with importance, and they got the ferryboat out and a whole passel of them rode across to Illinois and up and down both banks, with the sheriff and others pointing out landmarks and telling him their plans for this and that piece of real estate, just as if Slater would be on hand to see it.

  The sightseeing tour took so long, and ate up so much of the morning, that everybody agreed it would be better to have lunch before going ahead. So they went to the Planter’s House and had a whopper of a banquet, also out of taxes, and Slater tanked up on punch so that his legs were kind of rubber, you might say, and that’s the way he went to the gallows, which was a very good thing, in my opinion.

  Mr. Chouteau said that, all in all, it was the most disgusting exhibition that administration had put on yet, but the sheriff stated that he’d taken a canvass and hadn’t found anybody with a complaint worth mentioning, excepting possibly the corpse. “I hope it will end all this talk of skimping,” he said. “From now on maybe they’ll realize that when we hang a man
in St. Louis, we aim to hang him in style.”

  That night at the Chouteaus’ it was decided that Jennie and I should take the boat for Independence, where the wagon trains formed. “If you find your father gone,” said Mr. Chouteau, as generous and considerate as always, “you come back and we’ll see you home to Louisville. Your trip got off to a stormy beginning, but perhaps that means smooth sailing from now on.”

  I hoped so, but I really didn’t believe it for a minute. I was too used to trouble, and as it turned out I was right.

  Chapter X

  It was very early in the morning when we said goodbye to the Chouteaus, with the ladies sniffling and taking on in their fussy, kindhearted way. They had got the cooks to put up a basket lunch that would have fed a family of ten back and forth to Russia, I reckon, and it weighed so much we had to carry it together. This was lucky, for the cooking on that boat had gone to rot and ruin, mainly because the regular cook, which was a darky, had had a misunderstanding with a lady acquaintance in town, and her arguments had been set out in the form of five or six punctures with an awl. So that, making a joke, they said his goose would be cooked for quite a spell.