by Van Reid
“I couldn’t be such a nuisance…” began Frederick.
“Nonsense!” said Mister Walton. He was leaning back to make way for his bowl of pine bark soup, which had been ordered by everyone at the table upon the strength of his recommendation. The waiter placed the steaming bowl before him, but he was lost in the consideration of another expedition. Then his expression altered slightly, and he said, “But I have promised to deliver this letter tomorrow.” He patted a coat pocket.
Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump had been as excited as Mr. Walton about the proposed trip, and each hoped that he might be included in the plans to accompany the Covingtons. (The notion of trekking about in the snowy woods had thrilling implications.) Now they realized, however, that they had a further duty to fulfill.
It was Ephram who spoke first. “Mister Walton, we shall be pleased to deliver the letter for you. The members of the club.”
“Hear, hear,” said Eagleton.
“Hmm?” said Thump. He was brushing back his beard in anticipation of his soup. Spoons were poised; the table napkins had been unfurled upon their respective laps.
“Thank you, Mr. Ephram,” said Mister Walton. “But I hesitate to burden you with an errand that I took for myself.”
“No burden at all, I assure you,” said Ephram, who felt quite adamant about the issue now that the suggestion had been made. “What is our great pleasure could never be a burden.”
“Bravo, Ephram,” said Eagleton.
“Hmm?” said Thump.
It occurred to Mister Walton that the members of the club would have liked to accompany them on such a journey, but also that a smaller party would surely be less trouble for the Covingtons. “I thank you again then,” he said. “The letter is to go to a Mr. Ezra Burnbrake, who is expected at the City Hotel.” He lifted Mr. Tempest’s letter from his coat pocket and solemnly passed it to Matthew Ephram, who very solemnly placed it in his own coat.
“It shall be delivered on the morrow,” pronounced Ephram.
“Now,” said Mister Walton, “I hope I haven’t taken anything for granted, but we are at your service. And I will be there to explain to my friend, who would have probably jumped at the chance to accompany you in any case.”
“Wonderful!” said Mr. Seacost.
“Isabelle?” said Frederick to his wife.
“Good company speeds the hour,” she said, and again moved the entire table with a very pretty smile.
“Moxie!” said Thump, and Ephram and Eagleton raised their water glasses to join in his cheer.
“I should tell you,”said Covington, hoping to avoid further misunderstanding and possible embarrassment. “Moxie is the name of my dog.”
“How very wonderful!” said Eagleton, his glass raised. Ephram and Thump too thought it a fine name.
“Moxie!” shouted Thump again, and now they all raised their glasses and said, “Moxie!” amid much laughter.
“It’s a wonderful toast,”said Ephram, “though I’ve never heard it before tonight.”
“I think it has been freshly coined,”said Isabelle with a sympathetic smile.
The members of the club, who loved nothing better than to be at the cusp of new things, were delighted.
“Are you coming, Mr. Seacost?” asked Sundry.
“I think not, Mr. Moss, though I will be waiting, of course, to hear of your new adventures or read of them in the papers perhaps. Don’t let them lead you into kidnappings and gunfights, Frederick.”
“We will be very cautious,” promised Sundry.
“I am nothing if not stimulated by the prospect of our chairman’s expedition!” exclaimed Christopher Eagleton as they collected their hats and coats in the foyer of the Shipswood Restaurant.
“And that is not to mention the anticipation of delivering this letter!” said Ephram. He patted his coat pocket meaningfully.
“To say nothing!” agreed Thump. “To say nothing!”
“Hear, hear!” said Eagleton.
“Is Moxie coming?” asked Sundry of the Covingtons.
“Oh, yes,” said Frederick.
Outside the restaurant the members of the club were amazed to discover that the dog they each had seen on the way in was in fact the Covingtons’ dog. Coincidence was rampant!
Moxie shook hands with them all, delighting them, and once the Moosepathians bid the others good-night, they strode into the night with a cry of “Moxie!”
“Moxie!” came the nearly hilarious reply.
The dog let out a happy bark.
7. The Members Were Disarming
Lincoln N. Washington had been a steady, if not overly ambitious, worker during his days on the wharves. He had ingratiated himself with his fellow laborers rather than his employer, so when a crane rope broke and a crate of machine parts crushed his foot, he had been given an extra dollar by a sympathetic foreman and let go. a few days later some of his fellow workers had raised almost three and a half dollars among them and left it with Lincton’s landlady, who kept it against the next month’s rent. Two months later he was on the street.
Now, standing in an alley that emptied onto Commercial Street and the waterfront district of Portland, with the warp of three pints convoluting his judgment, young Lincton held his father’s pistol shakily before him and considered the old man’s self-proclaimed military glory.
The late Jacob Washington had been, if anything, less steady and certainly less ambitious than his son and had parlayed patriotic declarations and a minor wound into a life of homebound idleness. Lincton’s mother, dead these ten years, had supported the family as a laundress, and Jacob had failed his children as an example, even as he railed against their inadequacies in the shadow of his ever-enlarged military accomplishments.
Lincton hardly understood what he was going to do till he heard footsteps and conversation growing out of the right-hand shadows of Commercial Street. He leaned around the corner of a brick building, just enough so that he could see three figures moving toward him, silhouetted against the streetlamp that stood across from the Shipswood Restaurant.
He pondered the heavy piece of iron in his hand, raising it a little to peer down the narrow blue gleam of the barrel at a window across the way. He felt oddly calm, for the moment, and though desperation lurked nearby, fogged slightly by drink, he had no real murderous intentions. It is significant that he did not cock the pistol.
He wanted to look out at the approaching men again, but forced himself to wait in darkness, trusting his ears to tell him when they were almost upon him. Then the realization of what he planned to do struck him from the top of his spine to the forward edge of his scalp; it jolted him like the touch of a cold piece of steel or a bucket of seawater.
The first of the three figures stepped into sight.
Among the Moosepathians, Ephram walked with the longest stride, and he occasionally outstripped his friends by a yard or two before holding back a step so that they might catch up with him. He was just halting for this reason when he reached the mouth of the alley and a shout came out of the darkness. What Lincoln N. Washington was saying, in the harshest tones he could muster, was “Give it over, now!”
What Ephram, who was in the midst of hitching back his stride, did was double hitch his stride. What Thump and Eagleton did was collide with their friend, and what they all did was slip upon the snowy sidewalk.
Ephram clutched for the only thing within reach, which was the young man who had stepped out in front of him. All that he managed to grasp, however, was a length of cold metal, which (quite by accident) he tore from the newcomer’s hand. With nothing else to hold him up, Ephram fell to the sidewalk with a very loud exhalation.
The unseasoned bandit was in this process pulled from his own feet and forward, and Thump, who was reaching for Ephram’s shoulders as a means to keep his own short stature upright, caught hold instead of Lincton’s.
To Lincton’s uncoordinated senses, one man had snatched his gun away from him, and the second was throwing him to the g
round.
Eagleton managed somehow to step over the newly developing heap, but he placed his heel upon a bit of icicle that had fallen from the eaves above and slid two or three feet before landing on his most padded portion. He possessed a certain innate athleticism in his otherwise untrained limbs, however, and, by catching at the edge of a door stoop, was able to use the impetus of his slide to lever himself back into an upright posture. The effect, had anybody been watching, was not unlike that of a runner sliding into a stolen base, and no one could have been more surprised than Eagleton himself.
Young Lincton knew that he had flushed the wrong birds, and leaping to his feet, he turned about and ran into Eagleton, who had come into contact with another portion of the fallen icicle and who gripped Lincton’s shoulders with a little more fervor than would a man grasp the rail who had been washed overboard. Lincton was caught, since he was utterly terrified by these men of action and could not at the moment move a muscle.
Ephram in the meanwhile was unconsciously imitating the progress of his Darwinian ancestors as he attempted to stand erect. With one hand he administered aid to Thump’s similar postural campaign, and with the other he leveled the pistol toward Lincton’s back, or rather, he leveled the pistol’s grip to Lincton’s back, since he was gripping the weapon by the barrel.
“Good heavens!” declared Ephram. He had never handled a gun before, but he knew enough to swap ends with the revolver by transferring it to his other hand. “Good heavens!” he said again. “Is this yours?” he asked of Lincoln N. Washington.
The young man closed his eyes and seemed ready to fall on his knees. “Oh, please!” he shouted. “I beg your forgiveness!”
“Good heavens!” said Ephram again. He found the grip of the revolver very awkward in his left hand and thought how best to get it by the grip in his right hand. The operation was not as complicated as he feared it might be, and a very pleasant smile lit his face.
“Oh, please!” said the young man, turning to face Ephram and Thump. “I never meant harm!”
“Never meant harm!” said Ephram. “Good heavens, lad! It was I who ran into you!”
“An unfortunate accident,” rumbled Thump.
“Are you injured?” inquired Eagleton. There was enough combined illumination from streetlamps along the way that he was able to notice the young man favoring one foot.
“I beg your pardon?” said Lincton.
“I beg your pardon,” said Ephram, who realized that he had been pointing the gun at the young man. The mandate against pointing anything at people had been ingrained in him since his earliest memories, and he quickly transferred the pistol, barrel first, to his left hand again. Thump, who had seen Ephram relocate the pistol-barrel in right hand to grip in left to grip in right to barrel in left-thought his friend awfully clever. “I do beg your pardon!” said Ephram again with great emphasis.
“I beg your pardon?” said Lincton again, who wasn’t sure why his own pardon had been begged. He was confused, and not a little frightened by this mysterious solicitude.
“Not at all,” insisted Ephram, not elucidating matters for the erstwhile bandit.
The next few moments were a blur to Lincton. Eagleton helped dust him off, while Ephram pressed the pistol back in his hand and Thump handed him several bills of generous proportions. Then Ephram saw some dirt on the fellow’s sleeve and brushed that off, while Eagleton, who had been a little shocked at the condition of the fellow’s coat, pressed several bills of generous proportions into Lincton’s hand that was not occupied by the pistol. Then they all begged the young man’s pardon again several times over, and while Ephram put into the young man’s already well-moneyed palm several bills of generous proportions, Thump passed Lincton his card and assured him that they were looking for help at his family’s shipping firm if he was in need of employment.
“Are you sure you are not injured?” asked Eagleton again.
“Terribly clumsy of me,” said Ephram.
“Good evening,” said Thump.
And they each raised their hats to him and continued on their way, Ephram showing particular care whenever he approached the mouth of an alley or the corner of a building.
Lincoln N. Washington sat down on the nearby stoop. He had counted more than twenty-nine dollars when the events of the past few minutes caught up with him. He was shaking again. He looked up the street, after the three gentlemen, but they had disappeared beyond the next streetlamp. He considered Thump’s card through a blur of tears, realizing that he had just tried to rob three men, and in return they might have saved his life.
8. The Portrait and Apple Pandowdy
Mister Walton was thinking of Phileda McCannon when he and Sundry arrived home at Spruce Street that evening, which is not to say that there was anything very different in his thought processes just then. He had hoped for the opportunity to see Miss McCannon again since escorting her to the Hallowell Harvest Ball nearly two months ago, but Phileda was in Orland now, tending an ailing aunt, and letters from her had been short and direct.
Phileda was a direct sort of person, to be sure, but Mister Walton had hoped to glean from these communications some sense of attachment beyond friendship. He had been encouraged by their time (and the pleasantness of that time) spent together, and twice his (admittedly tentative) courtship had been cut short by happenstance and calls for help in other quarters. Their association was left unresolved; he had not heard from her in more than a week, though he had written twice.
A expected, Mrs. Baffin (the elderly cook who, along with her elderly husband, continued to watch over Mister Walton and his home) had left something in the warming oven: two large helpings of apple pandowdy. Mister Walton and Sundry could smell it the moment they entered the front hall; shaking the snow from his boots, Sundry volunteered to venture forth to the kitchen so that they might fortify themselves before packing.
Mister Walton hung his coat upon the hatrack in the hall and, returning to the front door to be sure it had been pushed to, caught a glimpse of light reflected against the portrait in the parlor.
Anyone who had observed Mister Walton in the past several weeks might have predicted what came next. He stepped into the darkened parlor and ted up the lights. The portrait standing against the opposite wall by the bookcase troubled him. The lovely young woman with the soft expression gazed back. It wasn’t proper somehow to relegate the picture to a closet or turn it against the wall, yet the notion of actually hanging the painting somewhere seemed presumptuous.
He had received three or four letters from Mrs. O’Heam, written at her farm in Veazie, where she and her son Wyckford and other members of their immediate family were taking care of the little boy. Bird had “grown an inch,” she wrote, and though he remained a silent child for the most part, she believed that he was coming out of his shell a little bit at a time. The child had gone through much hardship, and among the O’Hearns he was truly safe for perhaps the first time in his young life; Mister Walton was disquieted by several elements in the affair, but none more than the haunting suspicion that Bird might be better of not knowing his origins or anything about this beautiful young woman.
But the possibility that Bird’s mother—and Mister Walton was certain that the portrait represented just that person-was alive and suffering for the fate of her child was enough to counterweight his apprehensions.
It had been a month and a half, or nearly so, since Editor Corbell of the Eastern Argus advertised an engraving of the portrait and printed three articles about the events leading to the picture’s discovery. (These pieces were purportedly written by one Peter Mall, though Mister Walton suspected this to be a pen name for Mollie Peer, who was directly, if accidentally, responsible for Bird’s rescue in the first place.)
In uncharacteristically (for the newspapers of the day) quiet prose these items related how Wyckford O’Heam had snatched Bird from Eustace Pembleton’s underground lair, how the criminal elements of Portland’s waterfront had believed the boy
knew the whereabouts of a wealthy cache, and how Bird had been rescued from further hazard. There had been the tale of the tunnels beneath Fort Edgecomb, to which Bird led them, and in which that troubling picture had been found. a reward had been offered for information about the woman, but in a month and a half, though several hopeful leads had been presented, they were no closer to knowing where (or even who) she was.
Mister Walton was a little transfixed (and not for the first time) by the large brown eyes looking out at him, the loveliness of the oval face, or perhaps simply the mystery behind it all. Sundry found him there when Mister Walton failed to show in the kitchen. The younger man was standing in the doorway, hands in his trouser pockets, leaning with a shoulder against the jamb, when the portly fellow realized his presence with a start.
“I was just wondering whom I most feared for,” said Mister Walton, “the mother or the child.”
“We know the boy is safe,” said Sundry, echoing his employer’s thoughts, “but the mother is perhaps beyond our concern.”
“It is true.” Mister Walton turned down the light in the parlor, and even then he could discern the outline of that face in the portrait. “I wish I could let her know that her child is in good hands.”
“Perhaps you will yet,” said Sundry.
Mister Walton moved into the hall and the younger man lingered briefly in the doorway. Sundry had spent some meditative moments himself, considering that enigmatic face.
“From the size of these portions,” said Sundry when in the kitchen he opened the door to the warming oven, “Mrs. Baffin expected the members of the club to come home with us.”
“There’ll be cream in the icebox,” Mister Walton reckoned aloud. Mrs. Baffin’s apple pandowdy was a source of great comfort to him.
“Another expedition!” said Sundry happily.
“Indeed!” said Mister Walton, who realized that he was in want of distraction. “It has been quite an evening, what with the Covingtons’ mission and Mr. Tempest’s letter.”