by Win Blevins
“Hiram and I are playing a little game,” said Grumble. He showed three face cards, gentleman, lady, and boy with a hoop, and began to shuffle them. His shuffling was so clumsy that Sam realized he must be arthritic, or his hands somehow crippled. He interleaved the cards slowly and painfully. Then he spread them on the barreltop facedown. “Go at it, Hiram.” Aside to Sam he said, “Hiram wins by picking the boy with a hoop. For a half dime.”
Hiram and Grumble plunked half dimes next to the cards. Hiram reached out and tapped one card with a huge, hairy hand. Grumble turned it over. The lady.
Merrily, Grumble turned over the boy with a hoop, which was the middle card. “Hiram, you’ve got to keep an eye on that boy.” Clumsily, he picked up the two half dimes.
This time Sam watched carefully as Grumble shuffled. Keeping track of the boy with a hoop was easy, the dealer’s hands being so slow and fumbly.
This time Hiram picked the gentleman.
Sam knew where the boy was, and sure enough, Grumble showed it, before collecting the half dimes.
They played another hand, and this time Hiram won.
“Mind if I try it?” said Sam.
“Welcome to it. Both of you. Win and you play again. Lose and the other man gets a turn.”
Sam put down his half dime. “No bet until you’ve caught on to the game,” Grumble said.
He watched carefully as Grumble shuffled the cards. When the cherub laid them out, Sam knew right where the boy with a hoop was, and picked it out with a grin.
“Very good,” said Grumble. He picked the cards up clumsily and began to reshuffle.
Sam put the half dime back down. “For real this time.”
He followed the boy through his changes again, and when Grumble laid the cards down, reached straight to the youngster.
“Impressive,” said Grumble.
Sam picked up Grumble’s half dime and left his own. His concentration got even sharper now. If this old man thought he was going to cozen a rube … Sam’s eyes followed the boy with a hoop through Grumble’s awkward shuffle like he was a gold dollar. Right in the middle it went.
Except that it was the gentleman.
Grumble giggled like a school child as he swept away one half dime. “Your turn,” he said to Hiram.
“I need a drink,” said the big man, as he got up and stepped to the improvised bar.
Grumble cocked an eye at Sam.
Glad of the chance, he plinked down his half dime.
He lost it.
And the next one.
And the next.
Sam was frustrated. Grumble was shuffling those cards slow as can be with those cripped-up hands of his. This wasn’t a hard game. Sam just had to sharpen up his eyes. He put down another half dime and concentrated.
He lost it.
Sam looked challengingly into Grumble’s eyes. “You’re running a streak of bad luck,” the elderly cherub said. “Perhaps you should take a …”
Just at that moment a man as big as Hiram loomed between them. “Sam Morgan?” he said in something like the voice of God.
Before Sam could open his mouth, Grumble said mildly, “This is my son, Jonathan Grumble, Constable.” Sam noticed the fierce glint in Grumble’s eye, but the The Voice seemed to miss it. “What business could you have with us?”
Now Sam saw the badge of office pinned to the man’s waistcoat and the pistol held high and pointed toward the ceiling. He also saw a squat constable and a tall, thin constable behind The Voice. The squat man also held a pistol high, and surveyed the room against danger. Sam kept his mouth shut.
“What’s your name, boy?” rumbled The Voice.
“Jonathan Grumble,” Sam replied without hesitation. He saw Grumble’s eyes smile at him.
“You fit the description of one Sam Morgan,” said the officer. Then to his companion officers, “You think so?”
“Absolutely.”
“Yep.”
“Jameson, go get Carter.” The tall, skinny one left. The squat one kept eyeing the room. “I have a warrant for the arrest of Sam Morgan, sworn out this afternoon by Owen Morgan.”
Sam felt his blood rise. Owen?! Out to get me arrested?
“That’s nothing to do with us, Constable,” Grumble put in smoothly. “We’re just having a drink in peace.”
“You from Pittsburgh?”
“Just passing through,” said Sam.
“How’d you get here?”
Grumble shook his head slightly and Sam took the cue not to answer.
“Flatboat, was it? A fourteen-foot flatboat rowed down from Morgantown? One you stole from Owen Morgan?”
Sam thought, Damn you, Owen. But he didn’t say a word.
Watching Sam’s face, Grumble saw the truth.
“Let me see that rifle,” ordered the Constable.
“You have no call for that,” said Grumble quickly. “It would be an unreasonable search.”
“He even quotes the Constitution,” mocked The Voice. He instructed the squat constable, “Show him what that means to us.”
The man ripped The Celt out of Sam’s hands before Sam could even flinch.
Over Squat’s shoulder Sam saw Hiram give him a wink.
While Squat held the butt in front of him, The Voice read the engraving on the plate aloud. “Jacob Schmidt, Lancaster, gunsmith. That’s the information we have.”
“Give that rifle back,” Grumble snapped. “You have no right …”
The Voice slapped his face so hard Grumble’s keg rocked. “Speak when you’re spoken to,” he said. He held up the pistol and glared menacingly.
Half the eyes in the room were now on The Voice. The barkeep was fixed on him.
Grumble started standing up. To Sam the constable said, “What caliber is this rifle?”
As Sam opened his mouth to lie, Grumble whacked the constable’s arm upward like a club. The man’s pistol sailed away.
Hiram kicked The Voice ferociously in the tailbone. The man flew forward and plowed sawdust with his nose.
Leaping at Squat, Sam seized The Celt at both ends and turned it hard full circle. The short constable hollered out in pain.
At that instant Jameson barged in the door with another officer and the man Sam had sold the boat to, Carter. The officers were shouting, “That’s the culprit! Hold him!”
Grumble stepped between Voice’s legs, cocked a foot far back, and kicked him smack in the balls. Voice made a pig squeal of anguish.
Hiram grabbed Squat by the seat of the pants and the shirt collar and threw him through the air into the middle of a table where men were playing euchre. Cards, mugs, glasses, and men scattered in all directions, sloppy with ale, beer, and whiskey.
Two of the euchre players attacked the intruding Squat. The other two went after Hiram, who appeared to welcome their entry into the fracas.
Any number of men swarmed on the incoming officers. “Throw the damned law out,” somebody yelled.
Grumble grabbed Sam by the sleeve. “Run!” he growled.
Sam followed Grumble, ducking under the improvised bar. The barkeep was lifting a handsomely polished walnut club and showing his teeth fiercely. Swiftly he pointed to the left and back.
“In your debt!” yelled Grumble. The barkeep rolled into the turmoil with a fighting grin. “I’ll get the booly dogs,” he growled.
Sam and Grumble ran past the casks of liquor, through a hall with a desk, and out a back door into the night.
“Wharf!” shouted Grumble.
Through the dark streets they charged toward the Allegheny, stumbling, sprinting madly, and stumbling some more. Occasional bars of light angling out windows showed the way.
The wharf area was darker even than the town. Grumble caught Sam’s sleeve and led him nimbly between stacks of barrels and boxes toward the water. Soon they clambered into a rowboat. Several quick strokes and it was under a dock. Dexterously, Grumble tied the painter around a piling.
They settled into the bottom of the boat,
rocking on the river and scraping against piles deep in the shadows of the dock. Breath came easier to Sam.
Grumble whispered, “Fun, wasn’t it? For now they’ll be searching. Best get comfortable.”
“What’s a booly dog?”
“Rough talk for a police officer.”
Sam scooched down into the bottom of the boat. It was going to be a long night. He slid back up onto the seat. Damn, the water in the boat’s bottom was cold.
By a shard of light from town he could see Grumble had settled all the way to the floorboards, water and all. “Miserable doss, isn’t it?”
“What’s a doss?”
“Rough talk for a bed.”
Sam wasn’t sure he wanted to learn rough talk. But he settled down into his wet, cold doss.
“Only the young sleep like the dead.”
Those words woke Sam. He didn’t think he’d slept at all. His whole back side was cold, stem to stern. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes against the dawn light.
“Behold, lad.” Grumble was doing something with his fingers. “And learn.” Now Sam could see. The cherub had a coin in each hand, held between fourth and fifth fingers. Then he slipped each coin merrily from fifth-fourth to fourth-third, then to third-second and second-thumb. And back, without dropping either coin, or even hesitating.
Sam caught on, but Grumble continued the demonstration. He held up a deck of cards and shuffled them as nimbly as ever anyone saw. Then he made them shoot through the air from one hand to another like a flock of ducks in close formation. He did another trick or two Sam had never seen. The man could do anything with a deck of cards.
“Sorry for the deception, young Sam. If we’re going to be fugitives together, we should be honest with each other.”
“Who are you anyway? What are you?”
“I am a man of many names. If I had a title, it would be trickster.”
“Way you took my money wasn’t honest.”
“I hope you learned something, gambling with strangers.”
Sam felt peevish. “You take Hiram’s half dimes too?”
“He was my shill.” When Grumble explained this, Sam began to see humor in the situation.
“How about giving my money back?”
“Better, don’t you think, if I teach you to survive in this half-crazed underworld you know nothing about? That’s worth more than a few half dimes.”
“Don’t want to be a card sharp.”
“You’ll find I have knowledge far more valuable than that. For instance, how are we going to get around the law now?”
“Guess I’m in pretty big trouble.”
“Owen Morgan—is he your father or your brother?—probably would have dropped the theft charges. But the constabulary doesn’t take lightly to assaults on officers or resisting arrest.”
“How come half the men down there helped us? Wasn’t their fight.”
“Ruffians. They hate all authority. Once you were the coppers’ enemy, you were their friend.”
“Still …”
“Still, we must take measures. Do you truly want to go downriver?”
Sam regarded his new friend. “Nothing could suit me better.”
“We’ll both use my escape hatch,” said Grumble.
Chapter Five
It was the movement that woke Sam. At first he didn’t know what it was. He’d slept a couple of hours, maybe more, and the noise and bustle didn’t wake him. Plenty of loud activity—the crew hauling the downstream cargo on board the keelboat, flour, salt, iron, bricks, barrel staves, and more, in crates and barrels. Chairs, tables, rugs, brooms, beds, tick mattresses, uncrated. He’d tried to wrap his mind around the idea that someone might need to buy this paraphernalia from a boat, of all things, but he wasn’t up to it.
What woke him up?
Fortunately, Sam and Grumble didn’t have to help with the loading. In the dawn light Captain Stuart had swept the fugitives to the back of the roofed hold, well out of sight of the constables, and told them to lay low. Which Sam did until now, when the movement itself woke him, teased his mind out of sleep and into awareness of … he didn’t know what.
He stood up and stretched. His body creaked, stiff from his awkward position in the rowboat. And his bones still felt chill from the water. Next to him Grumble’s wide back and butt made a wall. Grumble was rummaging in a trunk next to them. “You travel with luggage?” Sam asked through a yawn.
“Tools of my trade, lad. You’d be surprised what I carry.”
“Up your sleeve?”
“Among other places.”
Sam got to his knees and peered into the trunk. A fiddle case. A dozen decks of cards. At least two wigs. A pile of official-looking papers. Stacks of clothes, including at least one woman’s dress. “The boat has been my hotel for a couple of days.”
“What’s in the fiddle case?”
“A fiddle. You needn’t be suspicious of everything. And drop the Friday face. I got you out of a pickle.”
“What’s a Friday face?”
“Hangings are on Friday.”
The boat lurched, and Sam knew what motion woke him up.
Sam picked up The Celt and walked through the stacked barrels and bricks and out into the sunlight—the noon sunlight, it turned out. The sun had climbed only halfway up the sky from the south. It glinted sharp off the water—he visored against it with a hand.
Right now they were floating past the Golden Triangle, a piece-of-pie-shaped point of land where Fort Pitt sat in the midst of a clutter of streets and businesses and homes. Just ahead the Monongahela joined the Allegheny from the left to make the Ohio, one of the two great rivers of the United States. Four men pushed hard on the great sweeps mounted starboard and larboard on the cabin roof, shoving the boat from this slow water into the current. Captain Stuart was at the helm, and another man in front keeping lookout. The eddy line jostled the big craft, and the main current swept them away from the wharf and toward the wedding of the waters.
A great voice roared behind them. “You son of a bitches, get back here. You son of a bitches …”
Sam jumped, it sounded so close.
“Tethered men complain when free men rise and go,” said Grumble, stepping up beside Sam. He waved off-handedly back toward the shore.
The Voice stood there, the sun flashing off his badge of office. He gesticulated wildly. “Stop them, they’re escaping,” he boomed.
Grumble waved sweetly, almost like a girl. “We’ll miss you too.”
Captain Stuart walked up smiling. “Leave off, boys. You wouldn’t want to find warrants for your arrest in Cincinnati or Louisville.”
He strode into the shade of the hold and was back in a moment. “Mr. Grumble says you never let go of that rifle.” He stuck out a hand to Sam. Earlier they hadn’t introduced themselves properly. “Sly Stuart, captain and merchant navigator of this vessel.”
Sam shook his hand, hoping he’d eventually learn what “merchant navigator” meant. Captain Stuart looked a fine figure of a fellow, the sort of man who bears himself like he’s in uniform even when he’s not, and he carried a don’t-mess-with-me look. “My father heired the rifle to me, Sir,” he said. “Sir” didn’t feel comfortable on his tongue. He hadn’t often said it.
“You might get a chance with it. We got another man, though, says he can shoot a bee on the fly and clip just a wing off.”
Sam felt better when Grumble and the captain laughed at this.
“What’s your name, towhead?” He touched his hand to the top of his short-billed sailor’s cap. The gesture made it look like he had papers or something else hidden in the cap.
“Sam Morgan, sir. Not towhead.”
Stuart smiled at this. “Sam, you are on board the new flatboat Tecumseh. We stop to deliver and pick up at several cities, and we’ll make port in New Orleans in about a month.”
Sam was just glad to be on a flatboat, now a river man, ready to work his way up toward alligator horse.
“M
r. Grumble is signed on as the boat’s cook,” said the captain politely. “We have myself, a pilot, four deckhands, and Mr. Grumble. Cook of salt pork and burned bread, if experience tells.”
“And what’s my job, sir?” Sam asked.
“Job?” The captain looked embarrassed. “You don’t have a job. You’re our paying passenger.”
Sam flushed. A passenger, not a river man? He searched for Grumble’s eyes, but the round trickster was staring off in another direction, any other direction, Sam guessed. “How much am I paying you?”
“Two dollars to Cincinnati.”
“Two dollars? That’s every cent I’ve got.”
“Mr. Grumble and I determined that before we decided on the fee. Not bad for a fugitive.”
“You searched me?!” He fished in his hunting pouch with two fingers. He pulled out a note instead of the coins. He opened the note and stared at it. “Can’t read.” He handed it to the captain.
Without taking it, Captain Stuart said in a don’t-challenge-me mode, “It promises you passage and room to Cincinnati for the two dollars, and further without charge, if you contribute by hunting.”
Sam regarded Grumble, but saw only his back.
“Or we can give you to the constables,” said the captain.
“God love the booly dogs,” said Grumble.
Sam was thinking, I’m going to get even with Owen.
“I’m not getting paid either,” said Grumble.
“Can you hunt?”
“I can,” Sam said sullenly.
Captain Stuart smiled like that was that and strode away, and suddenly Grumble was facing Sam.
“You got some nerve!” Sam exclaimed.
“Enough to rescue both of us from the clutches of the law.”
“I wish we were going to St. Louis.”
“You seem stingy with gratitude.”
Sam gave him a sharp look. “St. Louis seems the new world, New Orleans is the old.”
“I confess I look only for opportunities to practice my craft.”
“How’d you know I could hunt?”
“A shrewd guess,” said Grumble, “and the way you never let go of that rifle. Even if you can’t, you’ll be a long way from Pittsburgh when the captain puts you off.” He winked and walked away.
“Try not to get us in water that’s too damn deep,” Sam called after him.