"Saint Louis?" said one boy.
"Where’s Clark?" said another.
But the boy with the pistol didn’t say a thing. I continued, "We got an artist all ready to take your likeness and then make an etching of you, three heads"—I saw another one sitting up in his blankets on the floor—"four heads in one picture, and Clark, too, that’s five." It was hard to talk fast in my croak and still be understood, and the boys were sleepy and didn’t look like they were quite following me.
"Who’re you?" said Pistol.
Well, I didn’t quite remember just at that very minute. "Don’t matter," I croaked. "You boys are the ones who matter. I’m just a reporter—"
"What’s your name?" insisted Pistol.
It came to me. "Lyman. Lyman Arquette. I’m from Palmyra!"
"Haw!" said one of the boys. "I’m from Hannibal! You know the Smart family up there in Palmyra?"
I smiled, readying an evasion, but the boy in the bedclothes got up, saying, "Shut up, Lewis." To me, he said, "You get in here and shut the G— — d- door!"
I did as I was told. Once the door was closed, two things were apparent to me: I was a little distant from my weapon and, depending on Athens, getting more so, and it was plenty dark inside the cabin, with only the sunlight coming through cracks in the chinking to see by. Even so, as my eyes adjusted, I could see that the boys weren’t all boys. The last to get up, who seemed to be the leader, was my age (as a woman) or older, as was one of the others—they had thick beards. The one who’d opened the door was younger, maybe fourteen, and the one with the pistol was a little older than that, maybe sixteen. They were all unwashed, hirsute, and in poor flesh, and the air of the cabin was overpowering. This group didn’t look either happy or healthy. I croaked, "You boys killed any abolitionists?"
’Almost had us one," said Lewis. "We laid in wait for him, and he come right along, jest the way we thought he would—"
"He’d been out nigger-stealin’ that very night, I’ll bet," exclaimed the youngest boy as he pulled on a pair of trousers.
"But he musta heard us, because when we come out into the road to stop him, he had his pistols out already, and he shot Mabee’s horse, here! Can you believe that? He shot his horse right out from under him and run off. I call that lily-livered."
"Didn’t even stand to fight!" said the youngest.
"That’s the only one we’ve found," said Lewis, "but the next time, we’ll be ready, because we know they an’t real men you ken expect a good fight from, but you got to shoot ’em down like a dog!"
This time, I had my notebook out and was scribbling at it. The older men hadn’t said anything, but they hadn’t stopped the boys, either. I said, "Who’s the captain here?" There was a long pause, and then Lewis said, "Mabee is." We all looked at Mabee, who nodded. I whispered, "Perhaps you can tell me a bit about your background, sir." He smiled at this and softened, and I saw that I had a natural talent for this newspaper business.
"I come up from Louisiana about a year ago. If you want to know, I was working a steamboat, but she run aground and wrecked, so I thought enough a that, I’m a horseman, anyway, not a riverman. And I was sorry to lose that mare. She was a Kentucky mare. You could turn her on a dime, and she could go like sixty. If I ever see that G— d— abolitionist again, I’ll kill him for sure!"
Once Mabee was chattering, then the last holdout started chattering, too, and I got busy scribbling notes as fast as I could, mostly for show, though, as I was sure I wouldn’t be able to read anything I’d written down in such dim light. But they had more to them than one little article, and I knew I wouldn’t have much trouble with my composition. A good half hour or so went by, and then I said, "What’s your plan, boys?"
A silence fell over the room, then Mabee said, "Cain’t tell you that! Can we? We live a secret life!"
Now the volubility went out of them, and they glanced back and forth at one another, and then at me. It must have just been occurring to them that I intended to publish their story and reveal them to the world. After a minute, Lewis, who had struck me as the sharpest of the lot, said, "If we get famous and have our pictures in the paper, how are we gonna get the jump on abolitionists?"
They all thought for a moment. I said, "Abolitionists don’t read our paper. Abolitionists can’t abide our paper."
Mabee said, "What would happen, we’d have to leave this area and conduct our operations in K.T I been thinkin’ we should push off that way, anyhow, because right here we’re livin’ off our friends. We want to live off our enemies."
I whispered, "This would be a kind of farewell piece, then."
They all thought for a minute, then nodded. Lewis said, "You tell ’em we’re gonna go raise h— in K.T, haw haw!" I laughed at this joke, then moved toward the door. Mabee said, "Where ya goin’ now?"
"Got to write my article and turn it in before three o’clock, or it can’t be in this week’s paper."
"What about the picture?"
Oh, that artist I had waiting. I said, "I got to bring him out here tomorrow. He didn’t want to come along today because I didn’t know if I’d find you."
Mabee stood up and opened the door a crack, then looked out carefully, then opened it the rest of the way. He said, ’An’t nobody out there. Okay. Now, you bring that fellow right here tomorrow, but not too early. We want to be dressed and in all our gear when he comes. We don’t want to be greetin’ no artist in our drawers, haw haw!"
We went out on the step, and he stared at me. I saw that Athens was grazing in the yard, maybe fifty feet from the door. Jeremiah, of course, would have looked up and walked over to me, but Athens just continued to graze. Mabee (Joseph, his given name was) said, "You talk funny, and you look funny, too."
I nodded.
"But you’re all right, anyway." He looked at Athens, then at me. He said, "You got any money?"
Only then, for the first time, really, did I think of Frank among just such a crowd (though, of course, of a somewhat higher tone, being New Englanders and reading men). I had been terribly angry with him, angrier than I realized. Really, there was no telling what he was doing, was there? Or what he had heard; what he knew about Thomas, what he knew about me. I had expected Thomas’s death to simply call him back, like some sort of resonance vibrating all over eastern K.T. I pulled the five dollars out of my pocket and handed it to him. A little guilt about Frank began to seep through my anger and color it.
Mabee said, "Thanks," almost graciously.
He turned and went back inside, closing the door behind himself, and I ran down across the yard and just about vaulted onto Athens, all my fears rushing up just then, as if they’d been held down by a lid before. Once we got out on the road, I made Athens trot as fast as he would go (he wouldn’t gallop) for at least a mile, until I got among other folks and felt my fears subside a little. I pulled out my pocket watch. It was only a little after ten yet, and really, I didn’t have to give Mr. Morton my article for a day or so; I saw that now was the time to try a bit of investigating on my own project. I had Athens for the rest of the day if I didn’t go back to the newspaper right away, and I thought saloons, where Missourians drank all day every day, and boasted the whole time, would probably be the place to start. After that, I thought, I might go back to the paper and sit at a desk and write my article, my ears pricked the whole time. I don’t have to tell the reader that I had never been in a saloon before, but then I was no longer much daunted by doing things that I had never done before. They all said that K.T coarsened a woman, but there was nothing for coarsening a woman quite like having her become a man!
I’d been warned all my life about low company. My father, for example, of necessity kept low company of the buying-and-selling, river-character sort, and by the time I was a child in our house in Quincy, I was aware that there were numbers of times when my mother and I would keep to her room while my father entertained low company downstairs. As I got older, though, and my father got a bit more prosperous, he found ways t
o keep the low company elsewhere. As my sisters grew older, they, too, were alert as terriers on the subject of low company. Each of their husbands’ positions in life were a degree or two above my father’s, and they were eager to make the most of the difference, especially Harriet, who was, and who saw herself as, the wife of a landowner (farmer if you absolutely had to look at it that way). Harriet sometimes acted as if the threshold of low company began with anything commercial (including Beatrice’s husband, Horace, and his father), as if she had never bought or sold anything in her life. When I got to K.T., low company was everywhere in evidence—the Missourians were the very type of low company—and Mrs. Bush, and to a lesser extent, Mrs. Jenkins, and even Louisa, were conscious of their elevation as New Englanders. In short, low company was a sort of poison ivy that could infect a lady any number of ways, and if it did, the effects were both painful and evident to all. Without having a very clear picture of the pastimes of low company, or how they could hurt me, I felt a decided moral dread when I had ridden back into Kansas City and saw a saloon, and knew I must go into it and then linger there, and even ask questions. The closest thing in my experience that my feeling of reluctance came to was the moment of entering the Mississippi River that time I swam across it—the skin, the sinews, the brain, the heart, all recoiled against any such immersion. I opened the door and went in, my hand in my pocket, holding Thomas’s watch for courage.
The low company numbered about eight men, including a profoundly bearded man behind a long table to one side. The room was grand in size but dimly lit, and furnished, like all of Kansas City, with an assortment of castoffs from other entrepreneurs and citizens who had gone out of business, moved on to other parts, backtracked, or died. A few of the men were sitting around a table playing cards, one of the principal occupations of low company. One man was sitting alone at another table, a pair of glasses in front of him, one full, the other empty, and two others were standing in front of the long table, chatting with the bearded man, who was dispensing whiskey, no doubt so highly rectified as to put his customers at risk for spontaneous combustion. Every single one looked up when I came in. This was another feature of low company—it was always inquisitive and unable to mind its own business.
"Hello, son," said the man behind the long table, who was, of course, the bartender, though I didn’t know this term at the time.
I remembered to whisper my hello, and to touch my throat, then appear to try to whisper a bit more loudly: "Hello!"
Another man said, "Oscar, give the boy a drink. He sounds a little dry!" Everyone in the room laughed.
"Come ’ere, boy," said the bartender. "I’ll give you a glass of water."
"Now, Oscar, water an’t gonna kill the frog in that boy’s throat. You give him a dose of that mule sweat you call whiskey, and that’ll set ’im up right!"
"Hanson, I an’t gonna give no boy whiskey, and you know it, especially a boy like this one, who looks like he should be home with his mama. How old are you, boy?"
"Sixteen," I croaked.
"Well, you’re tall, but you an’t sixteen. Fourteen more’n likely." He set a glass of water, of the usual kind, thick on the bottom and thin on the top, in front of me. I drank off the top and set it down again.
"Now, see," said Hanson. "You talk about your water, but drinking whiskey in this territory is just self-preservation, pure and simple. You see, whiskey’s been distilled. That means there an’t nothin’ in it but whiskey. There an’t no mud in it!" He held up his glass appreciatively. "You ken see all the way through it! G— d—, but I hate the taste of mud!"
"What do you need, son?" said the bartender.
"Well, I just come into the city, and I’m looking for my pa, my uncle, and my cousin, and here’s the fix I’m in. I know they changed their name, and I don’t know what the new name is!"
"What was the old name, son?"
"Well, it was Miller." I leaned over the table and whispered in the bartender’s ear. "But my ma heard from some folks that they killed them a G— d— abolitionist and had to change the name, but you see, now my ma is sick, she had a baby that died, and she might die herself, and so I got to find them!"
The bartender looked hard at me, his beard and eyebrows both shading and setting off his piercing gaze. I gripped Thomas’s watch and held the stare as best I could.
One of the other men called out, "What’d he say, Oscar? Cain’t have secrets in an establishment like this, haw haw!"
The bartender kept looking at me but said, "Deal ’em out, Hawley, and watch your cards. That’s your business!"
Everyone laughed.
Finally, he said to me, "Kansas City is a big place, son, and lots of folks are coming and going all the time. I an’t heard of nobody like you’re talking about."
"It’s been about a month or more since we heard about the shooting."
The bartender shrugged his shoulders, then said, "Now you better go on, son." He nodded toward the door, and pretty soon I was out of it.
There was a similar establishment down the street and across, and after checking on Athens, I went there.
This place had two bartenders, one fat and one thin, two tables of gamblers, and some steady whiskey drinkers. It also had a woman, most likely a harlot, as my sisters would say, but respectably dressed. She came over to me with a smile and said, ’’Are you looking for someone, dear?"
Now, I have to say that this was the first time I had tried out my disguise on a woman, and it disconcerted me to do so. She looked me up and down quite frankly, but she hid what she was inspecting with her steady smile and receptive demeanor. I whispered, "I’m looking for my pa and some other relations."
"Pardon me, dear?"
I tried a bit harder, careful to deepen my croak as much as possible. I was unsure about that "dear." "I got some relations who—"
Her smile changed, became more amused. I was sure all at once that she knew I was a woman, and so began backing out of the saloon, saying, "Thanks." When I got through the door, I turned and walked very quickly down to the corner and around’it. After a moment, I stopped, went back to the corner, and peered into the street that bar was in, but the woman had not come out. When I thought about it, I couldn’t imagine what she might do even if she did recognize my sex. Proclaim it to the world? A man of the west, especially a Missourian, certainly would do so. In K.T., there had been regular stories of humiliations: a man wouldn’t take a drink, and so the other men in the saloon bullied him until he either drank or pulled out his pistol and shot someone; a man on a steamboat wouldn’t remove his hat, and another man ragged on him until he removed his hat, to reveal a knife in it. Men of the west liked to enforce social regularity with lots of yelling and insisting. Those who didn’t participate liked to watch to see what might happen. But I didn’t think that woman would have done anything, except maybe give me a sign. I was tempted to go back and find out—she’d had a warm smile, to tell the truth, and a longing for friendship suddenly smote me, but you couldn’t have a letting down when you were in disguise. It made things too complicated.
There was another saloon in the side street where I was standing — no doubt every man in the state was guaranteed by law to a glass and a place at some bar or another — and so I went in there. This one was very dark. It was an old log structure, about twice the size of a claim cabin, with but two small windows, on either side of the door. It took some moments for my eyes to adjust to the dim light after I went in. The darkness gave me a spooky feeling. I could hear and sense others in there but couldn’t tell, really, how many or what they were doing. The bartender greeted me and said, "Step to your right, sir. The bar’s to your right."
I whispered, "You need some light in here."
"Well, sir, our patrons rather prefer this." He had an English accent. "It’s a relief from the outer glare, you know."
"Oh."
"Whiskey?"
No doubt he couldn’t see how young I was. Or maybe he didn’t care.
"Su
re," I said. "But mostly I’m looking for someone."
"A gentleman of the imbibing sort?"
"Pardon me?"
"Is your quarry a drinking man?"
"Oh. Yes."
"Name?"
"They changed their name. They killed an abolitionist over in K.T back in june."
"Indeed! And what do you want with these brave fellows?" The bartender’s whisper had come to match mine, which seemed appropriate in such a spot.
"One of ’em’s my pa, and the other two’s my uncle and my cousin. My ma wants ’em."
"Well, now," he said, and set a very small glass of whiskey in front of me. I looked at it. He said, "Will you be needing to chase that, then?"
"Pardon me?"
"Do you prefer to chase your shot of whiskey with a drink of water?"
"Oh. No, thanks."
Another customer came up to the bar, and the bartender walked off into the shadows. I glanced around. No one seemed to be nearby, so I lifted the shot glass to my mouth and touched the liquid in it with my tongue. That or the fumes rising off the liquid sent me into a coughing fit. The bartender returned.
"Unaccustomed to a fine malt, then?" he said.
I continued to cough, and he took away my shot and poured it into a bucket under the bar. I shuddered to think what would become of whatever was in that bucket. Certainly, in Missouri, it would not go to waste.
"Well, now. Tell me a bit more about these members of your family. Men of strong belief and ready action, then, like all the chivalry? Where are you from?"
"Palmyra, Missouri."
"Hmm."
"My cousin’s the easiest to distinguish. He’s about my height, got a pale moon face. Blue eyes, brown hair about down to his shoulders. My pa and my uncle look about alike. They got dark beards and long dark hair."
"That brings so many to mind, you know."
But I sensed that he did know something.
I said, mimicking pride, "An’t everybody’s shot a G— d— abolitionist, though! And my uncle an’t a bashful sort. He would of talked about it."
"Many talk about it who haven’t actually performed the deed, however."