Hays leaned toward me. “What a racket!”
“Yeah.” If Charlie Stevens was in there we were going to have to go someplace else to talk.
We pulled up at what appeared to be the office. I dismounted, once again leaving Hays to watch the gold. I went inside a little room that had one desk and a little wood-burning stove. An Indian-looking fellow was at the desk. He looked up. He said, “Howdy.”
I told him howdy. There was a big window in the back of the office that gave off into the mill. It appeared to me that they were running three band saws, all cutting at the same time. There appeared to be about four boilers. I could see men shoveling sawdust into the fireboxes of each one. That, I thought, was a smart idea. Make your own fuel. The only thing I wondered was where they got the logs. I figured they had them hauled in from somewhere because there damn sure wasn’t enough trees around the area to support such an operation.
I said to the man at the desk, “I’m looking for Charlie Stevens.”
“Mister Charlie gone to his house. Went to eat.” He pointed to a clock at the wall. “Noontime.” He looked young and smart, but I’d given up on figuring Indians.
“Where’s he live?”
The clerk pointed south with a pencil. “Down that way, just a little beyond the edge of town. Big white house. But Mister Charlie making his meal right now.”
“All right, how long has he been gone? Long enough to eat? This is important. I’ve come a long way to see Mister Stevens.”
“Mister Charlie gone half hour. Not long enough to eat. Then Mister Charlie make a little nap. Mister Charlie getting old.”
“I know how old Mister Stevens is. Does he still work here?”
The Indian pulled his head back like I was a fool to be avoided. “Work here? This Mister Charlie’s mill. Mister Charlie don’t let nobody else run his business. We all work for Mister Charlie.”
“Is this an Indian town?”
He gave me a blank look. “What you mean, Indian town? This Anadarko.”
“Is there a place where me and my partner can get a bite to eat while we wait for Mister Stevens to eat his lunch and take his nap.”
“Sure.” He swept his pencil. “You go back up to the end of town and ride down Main Street, plenty places to eat. Maybe three, four.”
I hesitated. “Uh, are white men welcome?”
He looked at me for a few, long seconds and said, “I don’ know, brother. You don’ look white to me. You tryin’ to make some people think you ain’t an Injun?”
Then he smiled slightly. “Go anyplace. They don’t care so long as you got money. I got to tell this one to Mister Charlie.”
I went back outside feeling like a damn fool. As I was mounting up I told Ray what the situation was. He said, “Aw, goddammit, Justa, that just means we got to lug these saddlebags into another damn cafe and sit there eatin’ with one eye on the floor and the other on the plate. Hell, ain’t they someplace safe we can store this dynamite?”
“Maybe there’s a bank. Hell, you’re right. I’m as sick of this damn gold as you are.”
We rode back the way we’d come and circled the line of buildings on our side of town, and then started down the main street looking on both sides for a bank. At the second intersection we saw an imposing brick building on the corner with a sign that said FIRST UNITED STATES CHEROKEE BANK. I said, “Let’s try in here. You wait with the horses and the saddlebags until I go in and see if they’ll take it.”
I went inside. It appeared to me that most of the customers were Indian and most of the clerks and such that ran the bank were white. I went up to one of the windows and told the young man there that I wanted to see one of the bank officers, preferably the president. He stood there in a high-starched collar wearing a foulard tie on an Indian reservation and gave me a good looking-over, obviously on the premise that I was probably a bank robber. I was pretty trail-worn, or rather pretty train-worn, so I could understand his suspicions. I just didn’t have time for them. I said, “Look, go tell the head man that a friend of Charlie Stevens is out here and I need to discuss something with him in private. Now be quick about it.”
Well, the name of Charlie Stevens did the trick, as I had expected it would. The bank president came out, and I introduced myself and said I had a little problem. We went back to his office and I told him about the gold. He tried not to show any expression, but he couldn’t keep a tone out of his voice when he said, “You have come all the way from south Texas with twenty-five thousand dollars in gold in your saddlebags? My gawd!”
He was an obliging fellow, and said he’d be more than glad to put the gold on deposit for us. I went outside, and me and Hays lugged in the saddlebags and went directly into the president’s office. He closed the door after calling a couple of clerks in to handle the counting and sorting. He said, “No use telling everybody in town about this. We don’t have many bad apples around here, but you never can tell who might be drifting through town.”
When the counting was done he gave me a deposit slip and said he was actually glad to have it on hand. “The natives around here prefer gold for some reason.”
It kind of stopped him when I said, “Sir, I wish you wouldn’t do anything but hold it for a little while. A few hours.”
“You mean you want to keep it as it is?” He gave me a kind of funny look. He half smiled. “I can assure you that money is money. Are you Cherokee?”
Hell, I was getting tired of that damn question. Here he was taking me for some Indian that didn’t trust greenbacks and preferred gold. I said, a little stiffly, “No, it has nothing to do with me. It has to do with Charlie Stevens, my father’s old partner. I’m only acting under orders.” As I said it I gave Howard another damn good cussing in my mind for saddling me with the damned gold. “If you’ll be kind enough to leave it in its present form, somebody will be here to tell you what to do with it.”
He said, not near so friendly, “We close at three.”
Going out, Hays said, “That’s some high-hat bastard.”
I said, “Hell, Hays, he figured he was getting an unexpected deposit of twenty-five thousand dollars. That’s a big deposit to a bank like that. Then he finds out I only want to put it there for safekeeping. Man was disappointed, he wasn’t high-hatting.”
“Hell, he’s gonna git it anyway, ain’t he? Turn it over to this Stevens fellow. This town don’t look like it’s got more’n one bank to me.”
We mounted up. I said, “Let’s get something to eat and then go see Charlie Stevens. God, it feels good not to have that damn gold to worry about.”
“I heard that,” Ray said. “And you can say it again. I never knowed money could be such a bother!”
“It gets heavy,” I said.
We ate at a little cafe that looked to be about the best of the bunch. It had already gone one o’clock, so we had the place pretty well to ourselves. I had my mouth all set for a steak and a few beers, but they didn’t have steak and they didn’t have beer, so we made do with some beef stew and corn fritters.
Hays said, “Don’t they sell liquor in this town? Is this an all-Injun town an’ they ain’t got no spirits?”
“I saw a couple of saloons. Both ends of town. Maybe Mister Stevens can put us straight on the matter.”
“I can’t remember when I was so anxious to meet up with a genn’lman as I am with this Mister Stevens.”
“Not as much as me.”
“I take it as soon as we see him and you do your business we can light a shuck fer home.”
“Just as fast as it’s done.”
Charlie Stevens himself answered the door. He lived in a large, nicely built, two-story white house right at the edge of town. He had a nice yard that still had a little bit of green in it, and I’d caught sight of a little winter vegetable garden out back as we rode up. I’d left Hays outside the white picket fence, and climbed the steps to the porch and knocked on the door. I didn’t figure Hays needed to know why we’d packed that gold all the
way from Blessing, and if it got to eating on him so much, I’d just make up some lie. But right now, it was business between Howard and this Charlie Stevens.
A friendly-looking gray-haired man came to my knock, opening the big wooden front door but leaving the screen door between us. He was in his shirtsleeves, only his right sleeve didn’t have an arm in it. He said, “Yes?” looking me over through the screen.
I’d done what I could to knock some of the dust off my clothes, but I still didn’t look all that fair. I said, “Charlie Stevens?” trying not to look at his missing limb.
He nodded and I could see, the way the sun was slanting in under the porch roof, that his hair was more white than gray. But he was still a vigorous-looking wiry man for his age. It give me a pang to think Howard could have looked as good except for the death of Alice, our mother, and the bullet through his chest. He said, “Yeah, I’m old Charlie Stevens. Least that’s the way they refer to me around here. Now who might you be? Something familiar about you, though I can’t place it right now.”
“My name is Justa Williams. I’m the oldest son of Howard Williams. He sent me up to deliver something to you.”
He stared at me for a long moment and then opened the door. I saw him glance past me at Ray Hays. But he said, “Then I expect you’d better come in. What about your companion out there?”
I was in the hallway of the house now. It was dim in contrast to the bright sunshine outside. I said, “He’s all right for now. He’s one of my hired hands.”
Mister Stevens said, “Still no reason to leave him sitting a horse out in the cold.”
I was uncomfortable and really didn’t know why. “I don’t reckon our business will take all that long.”
He was leading me into the innards of the house. He said, looking back at me, “That so? You’ve come a long ways if you’ve come from where I think you have. Long trip, short visit, huh?”
“I’m just a messenger boy, Mister Stevens.”
We were in a large comfortable living room by then. It seemed to kind of jut out from the house because it had windows, big windows, on three sides and was just flooded with sunlight. Mister Stevens sank into a big, overstuffed morris chair that looked like the mate to the one in my own parlor. He waved his hand. “Take a chair, take a chair. Sit anywhere you want to.”
I thanked him, and sat down in a straight-backed chair with padding on the bottom but none on the wooden back or arms. There was a piano over in the corner and the room, though well lived in, was obviously furnished by someone of means and taste. I set my hat down on the floor beside me.
Mister Stevens pointed over at the hat. He said, “They don’t do that around here. In fact, come to think of it, they don’t do it much of anywheres except Texas.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. “What’s that, sir?”
He pointed again. “Set their hats down on the crown. They set ’em brim down around here.”
I half smiled. “Then all the luck will run out. Besides that, it saves the shape of the brim. But Texans tell folks about the luck. Makes a better story.”
He was looking at me carefully. He had lively blue eyes and a kind of naturally inquisitive look to his face. Maybe it was the wrinkles in his forehead that made him look like he was about to ask a question. He said, “So you’re Howard’s oldest boy.”
“Yessir,” I said. His sleeve was pinned with a safety pin.
“You favor him. Some. But I can see a lot of your mother in you.”
I was surprised. I said, “You knew my mother?”
He gave me a quick look and then smiled, a big smile. “Oh, yes. I knew your mother. Yes indeed.” He looked over toward a sideboard where some decanters that I reckoned to be different kind of liquors were sitting. He said, “Would you like something to drink?”
“Nosir,” I said. He didn’t seem at all conscious about the stump of his arm.
“I never knew Howard Williams to pass up a drink of whiskey. Has the acorn fallen far from the tree?”
“Nosir, I just had some lunch. We were waiting for you to eat and get in your nap.” The truth of the matter was I wasn’t certain of what was going to get said in the next few minutes, and if the occasion was to turn ugly or unpleasant I didn’t want to be sitting there with a drink of the man’s whiskey in my hand. Of course I didn’t see how it could turn unpleasant. I was bringing him money, and Charlie Stevens didn’t look like the kind that held a grudge or could even be provoked into being unpleasant. Still, a man never knew and it was best to be certain. After all, it had been Howard that had caused the man to lose the biggest part of his right arm. But I had never seen a man maimed like him who seemed to take no notice of it. He used his left hand just as readily as if he’d been using it all his life. I wondered how he fared with his everyday habits and chores, like lighting a cigar or cutting his meat or saddling a horse.
He said, “You must have stopped by the mill.”
“Yessir. Then we went by the bank and saw the president, Mister . . .” I looked at the ceiling trying to think of the man’s name. “Mister . . . uh.”
Mister Stevens said, “Felton Holmes. Comes from Missouri. Been down here a long time. He give you what help you needed?”
I had been studying on how to tell him about the $25,000 in gold. I figured about the only way was just to up and tell him. But he’d aroused my curiosity so much by saying he’d known my mother that I couldn’t get my mind off that. I wondered when. I knew it couldn’t have been when he’d come to Matagorda County to get his money, or whatever it was that Howard had said he’d come for, the time he’d lost his arm as a result of Buttercup’s shot. It couldn’t have been then because Howard hadn’t even married Alice. Didn’t even know her so far as I knew. But then Howard had said he and Charlie Stevens were both from Georgia and my mother had been from there. Maybe he’d known her as a girl. Maybe that was the trouble. Maybe they’d both been courting Alice and my father had won out.
But then that didn’t make any sense because Howard had said he’d met her when he’d driven a herd of cattle to Georgia, and that had been toward the end of the Civil War. Hell, it was all a mess and all so damned long ago that it was none of my business, and anyway, Hays was sitting out in the cold and probably getting madder and madder by the minute. I said, “Yeah, Mister Holmes gave me all the help I needed. Took some gold off my hands I was sorely tired of packing around.”
“Gold?”
“Your gold. Howard sent me to bring it to you. Damnedest fool thing you ever heard of. Insisted the money had to be in gold and wanted me to horseback it cross-country clean up here because that was the way he’d gotten it and he wanted it returned the same way.”
Mister Stevens laughed a little and shook his head. “Is he back on that? That little loan? Hell, I don’t even remember how much it was. I bet I’ve had ten, fifteen letters from him through the years and he always mentions that money.” He shook his head. “Howard has his own way of thinking, I reckon.”
I got out the deposit slip. “Well, it’s in your bank. I figure all I got to do is sign my name on this paper here and write in yours and that ought to do it. Or we can go by the bank and get it straight.” I got up and handed him the deposit slip.
He looked at it for a minute. Then he said, “Twenty-five thousand dollars! Hell, Howard is really trying to buy off his conscience. You packed this much gold cross-country from south Texas?” He looked up at me.
I shook my head. “Naw, I cheated. We trailed for the better part of three days, but then I said the hell with it and we took the train. I’ve got a fair-sized ranch to run and I just can’t spend this kind of time, not even to please my own daddy. It was a damn fool idea anyway. And then he wouldn’t let me bring the best gun hand on the place, my youngest brother, Ben. Wouldn’t have it, wouldn’t let me tell him.”
He looked at me. “I know who Ben is.”
Then it struck me. He’d said he’d been getting letters from Howard. That meant that Howard
knew where the man was. Then why in hell didn’t he just come out and tell me instead of suggesting I might have to look all over Oklahoma for him? By God, I decided Howard was going to have a few things to answer for when I got home. If I did.
I was still standing by Mister Stevens’s chair. He handed me back the deposit slip. “I don’t want this money.”
I just shrugged and went and sat back down. “I was just told to bring it to you. What you do with it after that is your business. On our way out of town I’ll stop in at the bank and have it put in your account. I reckon you got an account there? If you don’t I’ll open you one.”
He frowned slightly. “Mister Williams, I don’t think you understand it. This matter between me and Howard is not about money.”
“Mister Stevens, Howard is getting old. I guess if he’s been writing you you know he took a bullet through the breast some years back. That and the death of our mother have taken their toll. Howard is in bad health and sometimes he don’t think so straight. But he wants this matter off his conscience before his time comes. He said it in those exact words. So I’d like to be able to go back and tell him that you took the money, that the debt is square. He’s got it in his head he stole the money.”
Mister Stevens was looking at me intently. He said, “I think I’m beginning to understand why Howard sent you. He wants me to tell you something that he’s either afraid or too ashamed to tell you.”
I straightened a little in my chair. “Mister Stevens, with all respect, my daddy is the bravest man I’ve ever known. If something needs doing or telling he doesn’t lay it off on someone else.”
Cherokee Page 17