Crows and Cards (Houghton Mifflin Stereotype Editions)

by Joseph Helgerson

  "Never you mind about her," Chilly said from halfway upstairs. "If you know what's good for you, you'll forget she was ever here."

  Seeing my chance, I squeezed out of the pantry and rabbited through the back door. Quick as you can dot an i, I buried myself in the pack of hounds tied up behind the inn. They may have been rough on raccoons, but they didn't have no issues with friends of Ho-John's and washed me with their tongues to prove it. That was exactly the kind of welcome I was in desperate need of. I stretched out there, soaking up their attentions, trying to conjure up what to do next, and—I'm sorry to say—asking all sorts of why-me questions till Chilly tracked me down.

  "Get out from under them dogs," he ordered, yanking me to my feet. "It do beat all the places you find to get to."

  Here was my golden opportunity to teach him a lesson for shoving me around, but fast as he was hustling me along by the scruff, I couldn't do nothing but kick air as he herded me back toward the inn, where he could keep an eye on me.

  "Squire Zeb," he railed after planting me on a kitchen chair, "tonight you're going to learn a thing or two." When I didn't act grateful enough about that prospect, he added roughly, "If you know what's good for you."

  ***

  Supper was sootier than usual, but Chilly didn't notice, busy as he was bragging about how he was going to do the chief out of his crown. Then, when everyone finally had his fill of scorched chicken and undercooked beans, Chilly announced all casual-like, "I guess maybe I'll go pass on some winnings to the poor and needy."

  Hearing such a bold-faced lie riled me up bad, which at least proved that I had some pride left. What I didn't have was a lot of sense, 'cause I up and blurted, "I been meaning to ask if I could get me a refund."

  "A refund?" Chilly snorted, not understanding what I was getting at. "On what?"

  "My apprenticeship."

  "What's this about?" Chilly froze halfway out of his chair.

  "Well, sir," I jabbered despite myself, "I've been working it over in my head and it's got me thinking that maybe gambling ain't exactly the life for me. I ain't sure my hands is fast enough."

  "Didn't you slip a king in your hand just yesterday afternoon without my seeing?" he came back.

  Well, I thought I had but apparently not.

  "And the late hours," I mewed. "They seem to be giving me a rash. Under my arm."

  I held up my arm, where I had me a handy rash from a spider bite, but Chilly wasn't interested, so I kept on gibbering away, fast as I could muster.

  "And my eyesight's going down on me too. Some nights I can hardly tell the difference between a king and a queen. So it's all got me to thinking that you might be better off finding another boy. One who's better suited for your needs."

  Chilly sat still as a rattlesnake while listening to all that. One of his hands went to jingling some coins in his pocket, adding to his rattler qualities. When he started in on a smile that even an undertaker wouldn't have called warm, my insides turned all to mush.

  "'Course, I wouldn't expect the whole seventy dollars back," I stumbled on. "Not with you having educated me for going on a month now. But if you could see your way clear to giving back sixty-five of it, I'd say we could call 'er square and I'd be on my way. You could even keep my share of our winnings."

  Right about then old Goose couldn't hold it in no more and threw back his head to bray like a donkey. It was so unexpected and loud that I jerked backwards in surprise. I didn't tumble off my chair though, not with Chilly's big hand nabbing my upper arm.

  "After all I've done for you?" Chilly snarled. "Why, I'm so disappointed, I could cry."

  "Oh, please don't cry," Goose begged, once he managed to quit hee-hawing. "I can't stand to see a full-grown gambler cry.

  "I say you should indulge yourself," the Professor advised. "I generally feel better for days after I've had me a good weep."

  "Say," Goose said, sounding inspired, "ain't we forgetting something here? Ain't this boy sworn into some brotherhood or other? You know the one I mean. That outfit that never lets anybody quit except to go to the cemetery."

  The Professor just looked at me kind of pitiful-like for believing such truck, but Chilly and Goose had themselves a good hoot over my predicament. My blood ran icy to hear 'em, 'cause you could tell by their jeers that the Brotherhood wasn't nothing but another lie they'd served up to trick and hogtie me. But what really stung was how well it'd worked.

  "You fellas don't fool me," I sputtered, brave as I could muster, which wasn't much puffier than a church mouse. "There ain't no Brotherhood."

  "Oh yes there is," Chilly came back. "And you're looking at 'em."

  With that, Chilly dragged me over to the pantry, flung me inside, slammed shut the door, and rolled a barrel before it. I dug in my heels some, for all the good it done me.

  "What's got into that boy?" Chilly yelled.

  "Maybe a conscience," suggested the Professor.

  "Where'd he all of a sudden get such a thing as that?" Chilly demanded.

  "Some claim we're born with 'em," said the Professor.

  "More likely you've been talking to him," Chilly shot back. "You just keep this in mind, Mr. Professor: I'll put the boot to any conscience that sticks its nose in my business, and I'll do it good and proper too."

  By then my jaw was too locked up for my teeth to be chattering, and my heart was thumping against my chest like a trapped bumblebee. I punched out in the dark as hard as I could, aiming at Chilly for all the good it did me. My fist smacked a timber and my arm bone rang clear up to my ear. "Pa!" I shouted, maybe blaming him for my fix. That might not have made a whole lot of sense, but it's the way I felt about it. If he'd let me stay to home, none of this mess would have ever happened to me. And besides, didn't blaming him beat blaming me? Better yet, it helped me skip over all those promises I'd been peddling myself about stopping Chilly from treating me worse than mud.

  Outside the pantry, the gamblers were commiserating over what an ungrateful little twig I was, and how a good tanning would likely do wonders for my attitude, and how it never rained but it poured. Even the Professor allowed I wasn't to be trusted, though the way he said it, he almost sounded proud of me. None of that mattered though. By then I was so full of wretchedness and general all-around despair that I just crumpled up and fell to the floor and lay there like some June bug caught on its back.

  By and by it got quieter out in the kitchen, and after a bit I heard Ho-John creep to the pantry door and whisper, "You all right in there?"

  I didn't have the heart to answer, so he gave up and left me alone to wallow. But after a while I felt something hardening inside me that I hadn't known was there. It must have been backbone I was feeling, 'cause pretty soon I was telling myself that I shouldn't take being treated such a way and that I ought to do something about it. That sure enough sounded like some free advice of my pa's, which surprised me, all right, mad as I was with him. But it wasn't long till such thoughts left me feeling a touch braver too. About then I seized up hard, struck by an idea on how to help the chief and myself. The only problem was getting word to him of my plan. In the end, it was hearing Ho-John rummaging around the kitchen that gave me a notion of how to proceed.

  I could still hear Chilly going on about all the generous turns he'd done me and how these days everyone spun right around and bit the hand that fed 'em and wasn't it a crying shame how parents didn't bother to teach their offspring any better. Somewhere in there the Professor struck up his violin and Goose retaliated at the piano, which started the dogs off. Chilly announced at the top of his lungs that he was going to tidy up before heading downtown on business. "And that fool boy better be in that pantry when I get back!" Hard as Chilly then stomped upstairs and loud as the Professor and Goose were having at their instruments, I figured it was now or never if I was going to do something. What with all the noise, nobody was going to hear me lifting up Ho-John's floorboards, no matter how trembly and clumsy I was about it.

  Dropping beneath
the house, I started to lower the floorboards down after me but stopped with only one in place. Fast as I'd be moving when I came back, I didn't guess there'd be much time for hunting up the pantry's loose boards, so I left the hole wide open and struck out for the street, praying that no one would dare pay the pantry a visit, not after the way Chilly had carried on. Luck was with me, and I didn't run into any rampaging mummies or half-buried coffins while crawling out of there.

  Once out from under the inn, I headed for the levee and Chief Standing Tenbears, running all the way 'cause I knew that Chilly was somewhere behind me. By the time I made it to the river, Dr. Buffalo Hilly and the chief were done hawking elixir and visions for the day, but I did have a dab more luck and spotted the cross-eyed loafer who'd been so keen on sampling Buffalo Hilly's tonic. He was weaving sideways down the street in between nips on one of the doctor's bottles and told me straight off where the medicine show could be found.

  "This time of night?" He hiccupped. "They'll be camped up to Chouteau's Pond. Direct across from the mill."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I FOUND MY WAY BY ASKING FOR DIRECTIONS and following the accordion music. Dr. Buffalo Hilly had set up camp between a couple of low-hanging trees, on the edge of a half-moon-shaped pond that in the gathering darkness looked too wide for swimming and just right for drowning.

  As I squirmed in closer, I seen that the doctor was serenading his camel, which stood there chewing thoughtfully on a shrub and gazing off into the night. Since Buffalo Hilly appeared to be on speaking terms with Chilly, I didn't barge right in and ask where I might find the chief. Instead, I crept around the edges of the campfire till stumbling across a deer-hide tepee on the far side of the medicine wagon. It was smallish, not much taller than a man, and hung on three or four poles that crisscrossed up top. A kitcheny kind of perfume curled out its smoke hole. There was some singing too—low and solid and hard-driving—an Indian song, all right, and hearing it give me a chill, creeping around under a dark cloudy sky as I was.

  When the song pulled up lame for a bit, I cleared my throat real polite-like, not sure how you were supposed to come calling at a tepee. After the third time I ahemmed, the princess lifted her voice to say, "My father wonders if that is the west wind talking to him."

  "'Fraid not." I apologized in a hurry-up whisper 'cause I was expecting Chilly to show any second. "It's only me, Zebulon Crabtree, come to warn you off something."

  The princess's head popped out the door flap right quick after that. One look at me and back inside she went. There followed a flurry of Indian words, and then out she came again.

  "Did the Birdman send you this time?"

  "Not that I know of." I winced, hoping she wouldn't send me packing, but then she surprised me.

  "Doesn't matter," she said, holding the tent flap open. "My father's been expecting you."

  I had a rough breath or two soon as I heard that, but I moved ahead anyway, ducking through the door flap and past the princess in a flash, not wanting anyone else to see me. Inside, a leathery, smoky smell covered me like a nice, homey blanket. Lit up by a fire, the tepee was surprisingly bright. A pot was simmering away over the coals. Grass had been piled up around the bottom of the walls so there weren't any distracting drafts. Logs had been laid around the fire to hold in sparks.

  Old Chief Standing Tenbears was sitting with a buffalo robe slung over his shoulders and a long pipe stuck to his lips. The pipe couldn't have been doing him much good, for every once in a while he had to leave off sucking on it so that he could have himself a low, racky cough. In the glow of the fire, he didn't look too much older than stone. He'd taken off his war bonnet, which must have been a heavy load to cart around, and replaced it with a top hat that had two black feathers sticking out its back. His eyes were white and ghostly as ever.

  "What's this big warning?" The princess sounded snippy, like she didn't believe I had any such thing.

  "Only that Chilly Larpenteur's been cheating you."

  There. It was out. I sure wish I could report that saying it aloud lifted a weight off my chest and shoulders and every other part of me too, but it wasn't anywhere close to so. Soon as I quit worrying about the chief I started feeling powerfully low and itchy about Chilly. He wasn't anything but a scoundrel and a blackleg who'd locked me in a pantry and scuffed me up regular, but then again, hadn't he been willing to take me under his wing and say a kind word when I'd needed it most?

  To top it off, I didn't exactly get the idea that Chilly's cheating habits were a whirlwind of news to the chief.

  No, when the princess told the chief what I'd said, he threw back his head and laughed real bold, plenty long and hard too, which started him to coughing. I got me a pretty good look at his tongue and the few yellowed teeth that floated around it. After settling down, he speechified a long spell to the princess, who summed up what she heard this way: "He knew that."

  "Did he need all them words to tell you?" I crabbed, still fretting about Chilly.

  "He asked if you brought something for the cooking pot."

  "Was I supposed to?"

  "Only if you'd been raised right. And he wanted to know if you'd written your ma yet."

  "I'm working on it," I grumbled, not taking kindly to being reminded.

  "Don't forget to ask about the picture of the horse with two humps."

  "I thought I told you—"

  "It's in her book," the princess insisted. "The one with all the words in it."

  "Her dictionary?" I said, dumbstruck.

  Without having a vision, how could the chief have known Ma had one of those left over from her teaching days? Chilly couldn't have told him 'cause I never brought that book up around the inn, not even during the night when I sometimes whimpered in my sleep. How did I know that? Simple. I'd never in my life dreamed about that dictionary, thank goodness. The thought of copying out the definitions to all them words never failed to give me the fantods.

  "The only horse pictured in Ma's dictionary is a unicorn, and it's got a horn, not humps."

  "The horse like Buffalo Hilly's," the princess told me. "Buffalo Hilly won't sell his, so my father wants a picture instead."

  "Are you talking about that camel?" I asked, sitting up straighter with a jerk.

  "Some call it that, yes."

  Soon as I heard her answer, something big crashed inside my head. Ma's dictionary did have a picture of a camel in it. I could see it plain as day and could even remember getting hand cramps writing out its definition. His knowing about that picture sealed it for me. Far as I was concerned, the chief really did have powers enough to confound a minister. Ma's dictionary sat closed on a shelf a hundred and sixty-some miles upriver. But even if that book had been sitting in the tepee with us, would his seeing inside it have been any less a miracle? He was blind as some anchor but could see far as the ends of Missouri, if not beyond.

  And if that was the case, then I was honor bound to believe that he'd seen my ma and pa wringing their hands and wanting a letter so they could know how I was doing. I nearly shouted Hallelujah! Right there I understood that I'd been holding back on something that scared me worse than slivers, deep water, heights, fires—the whole kit and caboodle. The way my folks had bundled me off to St. Louis had pretty near convinced me that they didn't care one whit what happened to me. Hadn't I pleaded with 'em to keep me? Hadn't I reasoned? Begged? Sassed? Stormed? But far as I knew, they hadn't listened to a smidgen of it. So what was I supposed to think?

  'Course, in the back of my heart I'd always sort of secretly hoped that I was wrong about their not caring, but now I had certifiable proof that I was wrong. And when it comes to questions big as how your folks feel about you, proof is the difference between lightning bugs and lightning. There wasn't time to celebrate though 'cause right about then someone called to the chief from outside the tepee. Even though it was a voice I'd been expecting all along, hearing it still gave me January shivers. Chilly Larpenteur had arrived and was sounding mighty full of
himself.

  "You to home, Chief?"

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I MUST HAVE LOOKED DESPERATE as a trapped possum, 'cause the princess had to jerk on my arm to get my attention. Pointing out a pile of buffalo robes, she gave me a shove. I scrambled around the chief and burrowed into those robes without any thoughts of tomorrow.

  "Who's asking?" the princess said, buying me some time.

  "Why, your old friend Chilly Larpenteur. I was just heading home and thought to stop off and offer my condolences."

  "We didn't know we needed any of those," the princess answered, opening the door flap.

  Then came the jingle of coins in Chilly's pockets, followed by the rustling of his feet. Pretending to be brave, I straightened a finger to push up on the robe covering my head. I couldn't see much of anything though, only the chief's back and, on the far wall, the shadow of Chilly's top hat.

  "After you lost all them gold eagles?" Chilly gushed, smooth and friendly as ever. "I believe that a kind word is the least I can offer."

  "We've been thinking you did us a favor," the princess countered. "Now we don't have to carry that heavy sack around."

  "Well, I'm glad to lend a hand with such a problem whenever I can," Chilly answered, serious as a sermon. "But I've still got my regrets about it."