Humbug Mountain

by Sid Fleischman

  “I didn’t say Pa sold them,” Glorietta said. “No one around here would buy them. Sunrise is too dreadfully far off.”

  “Glorietta, you’re just making things up to pass the time. Pa paid cash money for this wagon, didn’t he? We’re not busted.”

  “I suppose I’m making up that he’s not wearing his gold watch and chain this morning.”

  I could hear a distant clap of thunder, but it was all inside my head.

  “He sold them off for traveling money,” Glorietta said.

  We stopped in one town after another. We’d let Mr. Johnson swim around in a horse trough while Pa scouted about, looking for Opportunity. He always pronounced the word with a capital O.

  He’d return with a larksome smile. “Another Mulesburg,” he’d say, and we’d move on. Some of those towns had newspapers, and we could all set type—especially Ma. She was wondrously quick at it. Glorietta and I had both learned to read by sorting spilled type. But Pa wouldn’t hire us out. He didn’t say anything, but I could tell there had been opportunities. But not Opportunity.

  I always felt a mite uneasy whenever Pa was out of sight. It was something Glorietta and I hardly ever talked about. Pa had a way of disappearing. Sometimes for weeks at a time. We never knew when he walked out the door if we’d ever see him again. Even in these little towns I felt a huge relief when I caught sight of him returning to the wagon.

  We camped out every night. Ma made a kind of merry time of it. She said it didn’t bother her a bit when we heard strange noises in the dark. “Why, there’s no better watchdog than a goose,” she smiled. “And Mr. Johnson’s the best.”

  Day after day we were getting dustier and dirtier. Finally, miles from anywhere and with night coming on, there rose up a narrow, slab-sided building with a tall false front at the edge of the road. It didn’t seem to belong there. It looked like a building that had wandered away from town and got lost.

  Pa pulled up and we all gazed at the sign. Glorietta peered through her glasses and said, “It’s spelled wrong.”

  Pa beat the dust out of his hat and Ma laughed. “It’s spelled right enough for the occasion,” she said. “And ‘sure enuf,’ that’s where this family is going to stay the night.”

  We took baths, and after dinner Pa unrolled the colored lithograph and stared at it. Then he cleared his throat.

  “Wiley,” he said. “Glorietta. Your mother and I have hit upon a splendid notion. Opportunity? Why, Opportunity’s been hiding right under our noses. Sunrise! At the foot of Humbug Mountain. That’s where we’ll head. To Sunrise—the Parnassus of the West!”

  3

  THE PRAIRIE BUZZARD

  Soon after daybust we left the Sure Enuf Hotel. We were in high good spirits. I don’t think even Pa knew exactly where Sunrise was, but we were bound to find it once we reached the Missouri River. We’d board a steamboat in St. Louis and buy passage straight to the Parnassus of the West.

  “Nausea,” Glorietta muttered. She had become uncommonly fond of that word. “What’ll Grandpa think when he sees me in these ugly spectacles?”

  “They’re not ugly.”

  “Infernally ugly. He’ll think I’m homelier’n a basket of knotholes.”

  “Oh, nausea yourself,” I said. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

  She spread her toes and stared at them. “I wrote him a letter last Christmas. He didn’t answer.”

  “Of course not. Town builders hardly have time to stop for air, let alone scratch out a lot of mail. But there could be a whole tote of letters floating around, trying to catch up with us.

  She shrugged. “He’ll be mad that I lost my locket he gave me.”

  “Stop pining about it,” I said. “Won’t he be surprised when we turn up! I’ll bet he’ll give us free rides on his steamboat. We’ll go skimming up and down the river like high-lightning. Maybe he’ll let me steer.”

  She looked up from her toes. “What about me?”

  “You too,” I said.

  By the time we reached St. Louis I had charged through all four adventures of Quickshot Billy—again. I wished I had a finger ring with a mirror so I could see behind me. Outlaws were common as crows out west and a thing like that might come in handy. But Pa said he didn’t think Captain Tuggle would allow outlaws inside the city limits. Grandpa was strong as a bull, and when he gave an order the blast of his voice set windmills spinning ten miles away.

  And he might be right here in St. Louis to pick up a cargo of supplies or something. That would be a great stroke of happenstance! The first thing Pa did was buy a newspaper for Ma. She quickly turned to the shipping list. Glorietta and I hung over her shoulders as she ran her finger down the column of arrivals and departures. The Phoenix wasn’t there.

  “Oh drat,” Ma declared. She wasn’t usually given to intemperate language of that nature.

  Pa put us up in Planters Hotel and took me along the levee to choose a steamboat. We moved at a great clip—Pa was a high-headed sort of man with a brisk stride—and hauled up at a side-wheeler with most of the paint curling off. It looked like it was molting.

  “Wiley, how does that vessel take your fancy?” he asked.

  It was a pestiferous old boat that wouldn’t hold a candle to Grandpa’s Phoenix. But I said, “Fine, Pa,” and we walked aboard.

  The captain was sitting in the shade of a tattered awning. He was of monstrous size and was trying to button a little wing collar and not choke himself in the bargain.

  Pa pulled the newspaper out of his coat pocket. “I see by the public prints, sir, that you depart upriver tomorrow evening.”

  “A misprint, sir,” the captain said. He seemed a friendly sort. “I depart when I get this confounded collar buttoned. That could take a week.”

  “Soon enough,” Pa grinned. “I’d like to book cabin passage to Sunrise.”

  The left wing of the collar sprang loose. “Ah, the scoundrels! They’ve shrunk my collars. Sunrise, did you say? I know every snag and sandbar on the Mississippi, sir, and I’ve never heard of Sunrise.”

  “Hardly surprising,” Pa said. “It’s on the Missouri.”

  The other wing of his starched collar popped. “The Missouri! Sir, do you take me for a confounded blockhead? That’s not a river. It’s a shifty, half-bred, half-born, sand-dogged abomination. It chews up riverboats for breakfast and picks its teeth with the jack staffs. Why, I’d no more head this splendid craft into the Missouri than tie up to a tree full of woodpeckers.”

  “Are you saying, sir, that it’s unnavigable?” Pa remarked.

  “Only eight months of the year. Then it’s so shallow you have to spit over the side to raise the water level.” The captain’s plump fingers had finally got hold of both ends of his collar. “But you’re in luck. It’s in spring flood. You’ll find a few confounded fools along the levee who enjoy playing hide and seek with those Missouri currents and sandbars.”

  Grandpa a confounded fool? I spoke up, brushing the lank hair out of my eyes. “Maybe you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Captain Tuggle, sir. He’s my grandpa and he’s almighty fond of the Missouri River. Prefers it, in fact. I reckon he considers the Mississippi too tame to fool with.”

  Pa gave me a one-eyed look. I suppose I was laying it on too thick. The captain got his collar buttoned at last and broke into a smile. “Your own grandsir, is he? Didn’t mean to offend you, lad. I remember Captain Tuggle well enough. Reputation finer’n silk. None better. Why, your grandsir could steer a boat over nothing deeper than a heavy dew with room to spare. Haven’t seen him about in years. Gone up the Big Muddy, has he? To Sunrise?”

  “The Parnassus of the West,” I nodded. “And that’s where we aim to go.”

  “Hunt up the Amos Pikes or the Marigold. They’ve been running the Missouri. There’s also the Prairie Buzzard, but I don’t recommend it. The captain cheats at cards.”

  The Amos Pikes was undergoing repairs. It had just come down the Missouri from way up in Montana Territory and the
captain said he wouldn’t go back up if they hung candy on trees. The master of the Marigold had never heard of Sunrise, nor Humbug Mountain neither. He couldn’t find them on his charts, but that didn’t surprise me. The charts of the river were so fly-squashed and food-splattered I don’t think he could find St. Louis if he weren’t already moored there. Anyway, he said he wouldn’t venture farther west than Kansas City. That left us the Prairie Buzzard.

  It was a dirty, trampish stern-wheeler with chalky white animal bones heaped on deck. Piles of them—skulls and all. Roustabouts were heaving the bones into freight wagons alongside.

  I can’t say I liked the sight of that boat, or the captain either. He was a short, long-nosed man with oyster-pale eyes and a sweaty bald head. But he did favor us with a smile when we stepped aboard. At least, I think it was a smile.

  “Captain Cully, at your service,” he said in a voice soft as goose grease.

  “Colonel Rufus Flint, sir,” Pa said. “Will you be departing for the Upper Missouri in the near future, Captain Cully?”

  “As soon as these buffalo bones get unloaded.”

  “You deal in a surprising cargo, sir.”

  “What’s surprising about buffalo bones? Off they goes to the fertilizer factory. Prairie gold to my way of thinking, Colonel, prairie gold. I buy and sell—and take a passenger or two when the price is right, if that’s what’s on your mind.”

  “It is, sir,” Pa said. “Sunrise is our destination. It doesn’t seem to be on the river charts.”

  “I don’t use charts,” Captain Cully scoffed. “Charts’ll wreck your boat. The Big Muddy ain’t never held still long enough to have its picture drawn, Colonel. But I recollect Sunrise and I’ll guarantee to set you down at the landing—if the price is right.”

  “And what would the right price be?” Pa asked.

  I think Captain Cully had already calculated what he might squeeze out of Pa, for the figure was waiting at the tip of his tongue. “One hundred and fifty dollars a head, Colonel, and eighty cents a hundredweight for your freight and baggage.”

  “Most reasonable, sir,” Pa remarked, to my astonishment.

  And to Captain Cully’s, too. “A decided bargain. Will there be other passengers aboard?”

  “I pick up and drop off a chap now and then.”

  Pa looked crestfallen. “Only a few? Well, that is a disappointment. A river trip is most tiresome without fellow passengers to take a hand at cards. Cards, sir, are my joy and my folly. I’ve lost six or eight tidy fortunes at the gaming table. I’m sorry, Captain, but I must decline your generous offer.”

  Captain Cully’s pale little eyes began to flutter with confusion. He wasn’t going to let a man who had lost six or eight fortunes at cards get away. “Hold on, Colonel. I don’t mind admitting that I enjoy a game of cards myself—though I’m not very good at it, you understand. Still, we could pass some pleasant hours together.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Pa said. “Your days would be busy with currents and snags and sandbars.”

  “You come aboard, and I’ll shave the price. Why, this is just a fertilizer boat and I oughten to ask first-class fares. Say thirty-five dollars a head and your freight and baggage free. I’d consider it most gracious if you’d join me upriver, sir, and maybe learn me the fine points of the game.”

  Pa hesitated so long that Captain Cully’s freckled hands got fidgety, and I noticed them for the first time.

  “Agreed, sir,” Pa said finally. “But only because I’m in some haste to reach Sunrise.”

  “The Prairie Buzzard will be ready to cast off the day after tomorrow.”

  “Splendid.”

  But I was hardly listening. The moment I had Pa alone along the levee I said, “Did you see what he had on his finger!”

  “A ring.”

  “Pa, he must have got it from Quickshot Billy himself. That ring had a mirror in it.”

  That stopped Pa short and he looked at me with a smile lurking in his dark eyes. “Are you dead certain, Wiley?”

  “Dead positive.”

  Pa looked back and then busted into a laugh. “I declare! A shiner! Why, the unspeakable rascal. Thank you, Wiley. That will make it ever so much easier to teach Captain Cully the fine points of the game.”

  4

  THE SHINER

  We left St. Louis on a windy spring morning. As soon as our plunder was loaded aboard, Pa sold off the horses and freight wagon, paid the hotel bill, counted out our steamboat fare into Captain Cully’s hands, and still had cash left over.

  “We won’t be needing a freight wagon in Sunrise,” Pa said. But I do think he was sorry to give up those matched iron-gray horses.

  “Pa, what exactly is a shiner?”

  He chuckled and gave me a wink. “Be patient. You’ll see.”

  There was no end to things Pa knew about, but he could be infernally shut-mouthed when it pleased him.

  “But he cheats, Pa,” I said. “You’re not going to play cards with Captain Cully?”

  “Cheating will make the game ever so much more interesting,” he said, and lit a cigar.

  I don’t think Ma knew about the bargain he’d struck with Captain Cully, for she seemed without a care in the world now that we were on our way to Sunrise. I decided not to open my mouth to Glorietta. They had both bought new hats in St. Louis, and parasols in the bargain, and sat on deck as if we were traveling aboard a grand packet instead of a buffalo-bone boat.

  Before long the wharves and warehouses of St. Louis slipped behind us. The Prairie Buzzard went snorting up the Mississippi, her stern wheel churning up a muddy bobtail of river water.

  I reckon we had steamed five miles or so when Captain Cully stuck his head out of the wheelhouse window and blew the whistle and rang a bell and made as much noise as possible. The black woodsmoke, tumbling upward from the single tin funnel, was shot through with live sparks like fireflies.

  We were entering the mouth of the Missouri River.

  I found Glorietta beside me, watching the sights through her specs. “Wiley?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to go to Sunrise.”

  I gave her a look. “Grandpa won’t think you’re ugly. I told you.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Doggone it, Glorietta, what’s eating you now?”

  “What do you think Pa’ll do?”

  “In Sunrise? Start a newspaper, of course.”

  “He might leave us, Wiley. The way he has before.”

  “He didn’t walk off and leave us in St. Louis, did he?”

  “But there’ll be Grandpa to look after us. Pa might never come back next time.”

  I fell silent a long time. Then I shrugged. “Pa cares about us. You know that as well as I do.”

  Her voice rose a little in the wind. “Then why does he run off?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Do you ever hate him?”

  “Doggone it, Glorietta, Pa won’t leave us in Sunrise.” I said it as if I really believed it. I was trying hard to. Maybe Humbug Mountain was exactly the yonder sort of place in the back of his mind when he’d toss his gaze at the horizon. There’d be a house to build on one of our very own lots, the newspaper, plays going on in the opera house, and all manner of things. “You can count on it. Pa’ll stick closer’n paint.”

  I don’t know how far upriver we ventured before night came on and Captain Cully tied up to a cottonwood thicket. The Missouri wasn’t as fearsome as I had expected. As far as I could tell it was just another river, though the paddle wheel churned up as much mud as water. And I reckon the current was uncommonly strong, for the Prairie Buzzard kept yanking at her mooring lines.

  We were served a tolerable supper of catfish and common trimmings. I kept looking from Pa to Captain Cully. They both seemed in high spirits, waiting for the duel at cards to begin.

  I must confess that some folks looked upon Pa as a thundering-great sinner and pitied Ma. I reckon he gambled at cards and dra
nk whiskey and cussed something fierce—though not within earshot of women, children, or dogs.

  But I’m certain he never cheated at cards, and that’s what worried me. He’d be no match for Captain Cully. As for those other sins, well—I never saw Pa step out of a saloon tangle-footed. And all newspapermen cuss, so that can’t rightly be held against him.

  Suddenly Captain Cully fixed his pale eyes on Glorietta, who hadn’t uttered a word throughout the meal. I reckon he meant to be sociable, but Glorietta could be awfully clever about people. It was as if with her weak eyesight she could see clear through strangers. I don’t think she liked the sound of his voice, which seemed to come whistling out of his long, thin nose.

  “Little lady,” he said, and I’m sure it set her teeth on edge. “Little lady, you can pick up heaps of spending money out there on the prairie. I’m referring to buffalo bones. You just stack ’em up like cordwood and when I return downriver I’ll pay you four dollars a ton. You’ll find them easy, scattered all about.”

  Glorietta gazed up from her plate. “Why?” she asked.

  “Why what, little lady?”

  “Why’ll we find ’em easy, scattered all about?”

  “Because that’s the way the buffalo hunters left them,” Captain Cully grinned. “Millions of the beasts left to rot, and good riddance.”

  “But why?” Glorietta said.

  “Why? For the buffalo robes! I can tell you there’s hardly a buffalo left wearing his own hide. There’s just the bones, and I pay four dollars a ton.”

  “I never heard anything so dreadful in my life,” Glorietta said flatly. And then she couldn’t help laying it on extra thick. “Sir, the buffalo is my favorite animal.”

  She’d never seen a buffalo in her life, but that didn’t matter. It was her favorite animal now.

  “You’ll change your mind, little lady,” Captain Cully snickered. “Just stack ’em up like cordwood along the river-bank.”

  Glorietta kept her nose high in the air. “I’d rather perish than collect buffalo bones, sir.”