'Hadden, look in the street. See if Captain Bull is still about. Fetch him.'
'If anyone is hung for stealing cups, it will not be me. Wharf-rat, am I? You gallows bird.'
'Threatening my life, is he? Now I'm not going to be too hard on you. Ah-ha-ha-ha. As long as you had the decency to admit your theft. Having a bad time getting work since you burned your hand, eh? Well, my Captain Bull is taking the Unicorn to Guadalupe on ebb tide. Maybe you'd like to settle in Guadalupe? Boston is getting a little crowded. More opportunity in Guadalupe for lying, thieving, scurvy knaves!
Hadden came back with Captain Bull. Johnny gave the captain one startled glance. He was an enormously powerful man, with a neck as big as Johnny's waist and huge hands hanging down to his knees. Each hand looked as large as a bunch of bananas. The courtly bow he attempted at his employer only made him seem more the baboon, but this formality gave Johnny one split second. He shot out of the inner office before Captain Bull had recovered from his bow. Hadden flung up his bony arms trying to stop him, but went down like a bunch of fagots.
Johnny kept on running up Long Wharf and the short length of King Street. He dove down Crooked Lane into Dock Square, knocked over a basket of feathers a woman was selling, for a moment was mixed up in a drove of squealing pigs, but he knew where he was going and shot down Union Street. Salt Lane at last, and the little man observing Boston so genially through his spyglass. Then he stopped, looked behind him. The street was empty. No Captain Bull. Baboons could not run that fast.
Rab was not in the shop. Only Uncle Lorne.
'Do you still want a horse boy?' He was breathing so hard he could hardly speak.
'Why, yes,' said startled Mr. Lorne, 'sometime—but there's no such a hurry. We've been hiring a boy from the Afric Queen for a month and...'
'Will I do?'
Mr. Lorne went to the window opening on the shop's back yard. Rab was out there brewing up a kettle of printer's ink. The Webb twins were learning how and fetching fagots for him.
'Rab, Rab,' his uncle called to him, 'here's that Johnny back again. Will he do for a rider?'
'Yes.' Rab's voice, cool, haunting, drifted back on a cloud of evil-smelling black smoke from the yard.
'Very well, Johnny. Of course you know how to ride?'
'I've never been on a horse in my life.'
'Well, I'm afraid now, really...'
'I can learn.'
'Rab!'
'What?'
'Can that Johnny Tremain learn to ride a horse?'
'Yes.'
'All right, boy. You sit down and catch your breath and I'll explain. This isn't a full-time job and I can't do more than sleep you, bait you, and clothe you. But you'll have the first four days of the week to pick up money for yourself, or to go on with your learning (if any). I've got a fine library. If Rab says so, you can sleep in the loft above this shop with him. If he'd rather go on alone, my wife will put you up across the way. The Observer is out every Thursday and the papers are delivered to the Boston subscribers on that day. You can do it faster on horseback, but on foot if you'd rather. That takes most of the day. Then next day, Friday, you start about five in the morning, and you ride through Dorchester, Roxbury, Brookline, Milton, and so on—Rab will draw you a map—leaving a certain number of papers at various inns. The subscribers go fetch them themselves. So late Friday or early Saturday you cross the Charles and go through Cambridge, Watertown, Waltham, Lexington, and so on, and last is Charlestown. From there you cross back into Boston on the ferry Saturday night.'
Rab came in with a kettleful of the warm, black, syrupy ink. There was not a smootch on his white shirt or leather apron. The Webbs were black as imps from Hell.
'Rab,' said his uncle, 'where's Johnny to sleep?'
'With me, of course.'
'Well, you show him where. But first take him over to the Queen's stables and show him that horse you bought. If ever you made a bad bargain, it was when you gave money for that Goblin. But you take the afternoon off and give Johnny a lesson in equitation—show him how to fall off without getting hurt. He'll need it if he's going to ride that devil...'
Johnny's new life had begun.
2
'What's the matter with Goblin?' Johnny asked, a little nervously. 'Mr. Lorne doesn't seem to hold by him much.'
'Well,' saiad Rab mildly, 'if you can ride Goblin you can really ride. After him anything will seem easy. But that's a good way to learn. Now remember, Johnny, there's not such a lot to riding except getting along with your horse. Horses are timid animals at heart, but Goblin's the most timid of all.'
'Has he been treated badly?'
'Yes—whipped because he's so timid. I got interested in him out in Lexington where my folks live. He had four owners in one year. Each time he was sold, he went for half price. The last owner practically gave him to me. He's not mean, nor a bully. He's as sweet and gentle an animal as you'll ever find. A piece of paper blowing in the street might make any horse shy—and he's ashamed of himself next moment. But Goblin doesn't ever stop to see what it is. He thinks maybe it's a little white dog about to bite his heels and he jumps out of his skin and leaves. Sometimes it takes half an hour to quiet him again. As for clothes on the line, they aren't just shirts and petticoats. He thinks they are white hippogriffs big enough to carry horses off in their talons. From his point of view the only sensible thing is to get moving, and he moves pretty fast. Now what you've got to do is to get his confidence so completely he'll know you'll never let anything hurt him—you can't do that by whipping him. Then he'll go through Hell, a laundry yard from his point of view, for you.'
'But I don't know how to ride.'
'It's about like dancing ... keeping rhythm. You'll learn right off. Of course you'll be scared, but just remember this: no matter how scared you are, he's more so.' They were entering the Afric Queen's stable.
'The horse boy who has been riding him for us has made him worse and worse. If I had time I could get his confidence and cure him—somewhat. Nobody could make him safe and steady. Now you just look at him. Isn't he a beauty?'
Rab had gone into one of the many stalls and backed out a tall, slender horse, so pale he was almost white, but flecked all over with tiny brown marks. The mane and tail were a rich, blackish mahogany. His eyes were glassy blue.
Rab said: 'I never saw a horse his color before. His sire was Yankee Hero, a white horse, fastest horse I ever saw run. Narragansett breed. We could no more afford to own one of Yankee Hero's sons than we could the Lytes' coach unless there was some little thing wrong with him. Eh, Goblin?'
The beautiful, wild, timid thing breathed softly, caressingly at Rab, but at the same time the queer, crystalline eyes watched Johnny as though sure that this was a boy who ate horses.
'Now you put on a bridle like this—see? And when winter comes, don't ever put a cold bit in a horse's mouth. Breathe on it first. The saddle blanket—steady, steady, Goblin—it won't hurt you. And then the saddle. Now you lead him out in the yard. You hold the reins like this—left hand always and the thumb on the upper side, but down on the reins. And you put your left foot in the stirrup. If you get on from the right side and get kicked, it serves you right. There, see how easy? On and off just like that. You hold him a second.'
Rab went into the tavern, and when he came back he had permission to take out the landlady's genteel nag. With Johnny on the nag and Rab on Goblin, they went to the Common. Here were acres upon acres of meadow and cow pasture, hard ground cleared for the drilling of militia. The sun and the wind swept through them. Trees were turned to scarlet, gold, beefy red: blueberry bushes to crimson. Through one patch a white cow was plodding, seemingly up to her belly in blood. The cold, wild air was like wine in the veins. And across the vast, blue sky, white clouds hurried before the wind like sheep before invisible wolves.
'Easy, easy,' cried Rab. 'Easy does it.' Goblin had been cavorting, blowing through his nostrils, begging to be let out. Rab kept him at a close canter. The lan
dlady's sorrel flung himself after him. Now and then Rab would glance behind to see how Johnny was making out.
'Not so stiff ... give more. I said keep your thumb up.' Then they would stop a moment, Rab making Johnny mount and dismount. 'Trot him from that stump yonder, back again to me.'
Once again both in the saddle, and he was setting a faster pace. The two horses tore across the packed earth of the drill ground, and for the first time in his life Johnny heard that wonderful music—galloping hoofs on hard earth.
At the end, when Goblin had got most of the play out of him, they changed horses. Actually Goblin's gaits were so smooth he seemed easier than the sorrel.
Johnny felt he had learned a lot in his first lesson. A few more and he would have had no fear of Goblin. But there were no more lessons. Rab was too busy. He was teaching Johnny to ride as he did everything else—with a minimum expenditure of his own energy. Every day Johnny led Goblin to the Common, for it was quite a long time before he dared ride him through the narrow, crowded streets. And he sat in his manger and talked to him.
The idea that Goblin was more scared than he gave him great confidence and so did Rab's belief in him and his powers to learn. He had always been quick on his feet, rhythmic and easy in his motions. He had no idea that learning to ride by himself, with a notoriously bad horse for one instructor and a boy who never left his printing press for the other, he was doing an almost impossible thing. But one day he overheard Uncle Lorne say to Rab, 'I don't see how Johnny has done it, but he is riding real good now.'
'He's doing all right.'
'Not scared a bit of Goblin. God knows I am.'
'Johnny Tremain is a bold fellow. I knew he could learn—if he didn't get killed first. It was sink or swim for him—and happens he's swimming.'
This praise went to Johnny's head, but patterning his manners on Rab's he tried not to show it.
For the first week Uncle Lorne did hire the landlady's gentle nag for Johnny. Even with the lists and maps Rab made for him, those three days of delivering papers, first through Boston, then circling out through the surrounding towns and returning Saturday night by ferry from Charlestown were confusing enough.
Soon, however, these three days of riding became a delight to him. He was a town boy, knowing little of country ways. The ships in the harbor he knew. The wharves and the world of shops and trade. Now he reveled in broad harvest fields, orange pumpkins, shocked corn, frost-touched grapes. And the towns clustering around Boston interested him.
He liked to make a handsome entrance. Even if he and Goblin had dawdled a bit on country roads, they both liked arriving at the inns at a gallop. Then Johnny would bustle in with his newspapers and often find the subscribers already sitting about the taproom waiting for him. Because he came from Boston and rode for the Observer, he was often questioned about the political thinking at the capital. By reading the papers, talking to Rab and Uncle Lorne, listening to the leaders of opposition about Boston, he quickly became well informed. In only a few weeks he changed from knowing little enough about the political excitement, and caring less, to being an ardent Whig.
He also enjoyed the showy, queer beauty of his horse. When people on the streets or at the taverns complimented him on his mount, there would come the same fatuous expression on his face he had often ridiculed on Cilla's when people stopped her and said how angelic Isannah was, but he did not know it.
At first he fell off fairly often and it would take him half an hour to catch the wary animal, but once a farmer's wife gave him his hat full of bad apples and he lured Goblin easily. After that he always stuffed his pockets with windfalls. If Goblin would approach something he feared, Johnny rewarded him with a specked apple, but when he did fall off, he would come home smelling like a cider press.
The boys shared the loft above the printing shop. It was reached only by a ladder, but was large, comfortable, and had a big fireplace. There was one odd thing about this attic and that was the number of chairs stored there. He started to ask Rab why this was, but thought better of it, and at last Rab told him.
It was here in the attic, ever and anon, 'The Boston Observers' met. It was a secret club, as powerful as any in Boston, and here in the last few years had been hatched much 'treason,' as the Tories called it. Rab did not even tell Johnny to keep his mouth shut. He knew he would.
Breakfast they made for themselves. Dinner was sent over by Mrs. Lorne. Supper they either got for themselves or ate at Aunt and Uncle's. Rab's aunt was a plump, red-headed, white-skinned woman. She must have been a variation of a well-known family pattern, for Johnny often heard people say, as they looked at Rab, 'That boy is a regular Silsbee from Lexington.' If he was, then she was not. But her eight-months-old son was. He was the longest baby Johnny had ever seen, had the straightest black hair, cried the least and ate the fastest. Never fussed, and watched the world through enigmatic, questioning, dark eyes. Even Uncle Lorne, who might have preferred that his only child should have repeated the fox-like, scholarly brightness of his own face, admitted, as he looked thoughtfully at his baby, 'That child of yours, Jenifer, is a regular Silsbee of Lexington.'
Johnny became absorbed in Goblin. He was afraid the stable boys at the Afric Queen struck at him, bullied him because he was timid, so he took upon himself the feeding and care of the animal. This saved Mr. Lorne a few pennies a week on the board bill, and he generously gave the money to Johnny. The landlord at the Queen liked the boy. When guests wished a letter delivered faster than the dawdling post riders, he would recommend Johnny. So once that fall he rode as far as Worcester, and again to Plymouth. This money was divided between the owner of the horse and the rider, and Johnny bought himself spurs, boots, and a fur-lined surtout, all second hand.
Although Johnny held the reins in his left hand, as Rab had taught him, many times as the horse was off on a wild tear and he was struggling to get him once more under control, he was forced to use his crippled hand. He could not keep it proudly in his pocket while careening about on a horse like Goblin. Although too badly injured ever to be skillful again, it was no longer in danger of atrophying—as it had been in Johnny's pocket. As a silversmith he had already learned to use his left hand a certain amount. Rab never said to him, 'Now, Johnny, you've got to learn to write with your left hand,' but he would give him things to copy, take it for granted that he could—and he did.
For the first four days of every week Johnny was his own master. He spent his time exercising his horse, unless he got an order to ride express for the Afric Queen, in learning to write with his left hand, and an orgy of reading. Mr. Lorne had a fine library. It was as if Johnny had been starved before and never known it. He read anything—everything. Bound back copies of the Observer, Paradise Lost, Robinson Crusoe—once more, for that was one of the books Rab had brought him to read in jail—Tom Jones and Locke's Essays on Human Understanding, Hutchinson's History of Massachusetts Bay, Chemical Essays, Spectator Papers, books on midwifery, and manners for young ladies, Pope's Iliad. It was a world of which he never had guessed while living with the Laphams, and now he remembered with gratitude how his mother had struggled to teach him so that this world might not be forever closed to him. How she had made him read to her, when he would rather have been playing. Poor woman! Her books had been few and mostly dull.
So he sat for hours in the Lornes' sunny parlor, the books about him stretching to the ceiling. Mrs. Lorne never called to him to help her in the kitchen. She, Uncle Lorne, and Rab all took it for granted that Johnny ought to read. Mrs. Lapham could not have borne the sight of so 'idle' a boy. But Aunt Lorne never interrupted him except to come in now and then with a plate of hot ginger-bread or seed cakes, and once in a long time ask him if he would mind baby as she went out marketing or visiting.
'I'll just put baby in his cradle here, and if he doesn't go right to sleep you rock him a little with your foot.' The first time he read Tom Jones, he got so excited he absent-mindedly rocked baby for half an hour, but even this did not upset t
hat regular Silsbee of Lexington. The baby gulped a little, but took it philosophically—just like Rab. Secretly, and only when alone, Johnny began calling him 'Rabbit.' It was easy for him to love, and he loved the baby. He would have died before he would have let anyone guess he was so simple, but Aunt Lorne knew. Sometimes she would come into the kitchen quietly and hear Johnny holding long, one-sided conversations with Rabbit. When she came into the room where he was with the child, he would merely say scornfully, 'Aunt Lorne, I think it is wet,' and pretend to be lost in his book.
Then she would feel so fond of the lonely boy, who never knew he was lonely, and so amused at his pretense of scorn for something he in his heart loved, she could not help but kiss him. She always kissed him where his hair began to grow in the middle of his forehead. He had never known until she told him that he had a widow's peak, which she assured him was a great mark of beauty. 'Why, I'd give anything for a widow's peak,' she would say, 'I'd give a plate of cookies,' and off she would waddle—for she was tiny-footed and too plump—and come back with the cookies.
Johnny thought Rab was lucky to have an aunt like that.
3
This was Johnny's new life. He liked it, but was at first a little homesick for the Laphams. He had never been so glad in his life as that Thursday, a few weeks after he had begun delivering newspapers, when he saw Cilla and Isannah standing by the town pump in North Square. He had left his last paper for the day with Paul Revere and was starting back to put up his horse at the Afric Queen. He had felt he could never again go to the Laphams'. Mrs. Lapham and her Mr. Tweedie had been too ready to let him hang. He'd just about kill Dove if ever he met him.
'Cilla!' he cried. She looked at him and her eyes shone.
Goblin stretched his muzzle toward the empty drinking trough.
'I'll pump him fresh water.' Cilla pumped and the horse drank gratefully.
'Cilla, do you come over often to fetch water?' It hurt him that the heavy yoke and the two buckets which he had worn so often, to his humiliation, had somehow descended upon her thin shoulders.
Johnny Tremain Page 10