Tom and Huck's Howling Adventure Page 2

  “You’re talkin’ like we already decided to go,” Huck said. “Even if Jim wants to go—which he won’t—the widow, she ain’t gonna turn me loose. I reckon I’m in her charge now, and obliged to do what she says.”

  Tom ignored this comment and plunged ahead. “Maybe we could roust up Joe Harper and Ben Rogers to come along, too.”

  But Huck shook his head. “Their folks is even tougher than your Aunt Polly.”

  “Huck Finn, I don’t know what to think of such a sap-headed fool. Ain’t you possessed of no gumption atall? You used to do whatever took your fancy, and was game for any new enterprise. Now you’re talkin’ like half the remainders of the folks in this one-horse village who act like they’re hitched to singletrees and horse collars.”

  “And what about Becky Thatcher?”

  “What about her?”

  “I thought you was sweet on her.”

  “Girls come and go.” He squirmed a bit as an early pang of loneliness stabbed his innards. “Anyways, she ain’t gonna be around. Her father’s taking her down to visit her cousins in Marsville for three weeks. She ain’t comin’ back ’til the fourth of July. You think I’m gonna sit around here wastin’ vacation while she’s off havin’ a larrupin’ good time? Not by a durn sight. I got better things to do. She’ll be mighty proud o’ me when I come back the end of summer brown as an Injun, feathers in my long hair, speakin’ Sioux, wearin’ buckskin britches like a mountain man . . .”

  “We been heroes before, you recollect, and it didn’t last no time.”

  “That’s what living a life of adventure is all about,” Tom said, struggling to hold onto his patience. “It don’t stop. New things all the time. If you quit and sit down, you go to seed and before you can spit, you die. You want that?”

  “Don’t reckon I do.”

  “Well, then, let’s snag Jim and bring some fishin’ lines and go over to Jackson’s Island and talk it over. If he’s agreeable to go, it’d be good to have him along ’cause he’s a full-grown man, and plenty strong in case o’ trouble. And a nigger’d be an almighty curiosity amongst them Injuns who likely ain’t never seen one before.”

  Huck drew on his pipe, discovered the fire was dead, and tapped out the dottle on a paving stone.

  “I’m agreeable. We need a boat to row over t’ the island.”

  “Go roust out Jim and I’ll borrow one. One of these days I’m gonna buy one.”

  “Reckon it’d be good to have a skiff if we’re gonna do much fishin’ this summer,” Huck said. “The widow says ‘borrowing’ ain’t nothin’ but a soft word for stealin’ anyhow. How’s a body supposed to feel when he has enough gold to waller in? Somehow I don’t feel no different, even though I could buy a boat or anything else I want.”

  “We don’t have all the money we want,” Tom corrected him. “We can only lay our hands on whatever interest that money earns—about a dollar a day last I looked.”

  “Well, that’s enough for me,” Huck said. “Don’t reckon I have that much to buy, nowadays, but maybe some fish hooks or tobacco.”

  “We’ll have to talk the judge into dippin’ into our gold if we buy horses and outfits,” Tom said.

  “How you gonna do that if you want t’ keep this all a secret?” Huck asked.

  “I’ll make up some kind o’ story to tell him,” Tom said.

  “Yeah. I learnt about dealin’ with grown-ups when me and Jim was on the river,” Huck said. “Mostly, I trusted to Providence to put the right words in my mouth when I needed ’em to keep us outa trouble. But I warn’t as smart about that the year before when we found the gold. Now I look back on it, maybe we shoulda kept it all a dark secret, not told nobody and hid it somers so we could spend as much as we wanted on anything we had a mind to.”

  “Comes o’ living with tethers on us,” Tom said, a little sadly. “I hope you ain’t discovered that too late.”

  As the boys left the levee, the stern-wheeler Annabelle hove into view from around an upstream bend and swung wide, puffing black smoke, her paddle wheel slowing, as she swung in toward the landing.

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  “So you catch runaway niggers for a living?” “Chigger” Smealey said, eyeing his drinking companion in the smoky light of an overhead Rochester lamp. He was only into his second drink and still cautious around this stranger who’d bought the bottle they were sharing.

  “Shh! Not so loud, Smealey,” Gus Weir hissed, glancing around at the other men in the riverside tavern. “You want everybody in Keokuk to know my business?”

  “I’d a thought most folks on the river would know you already if you been at this awhile,” Smealey said.

  “Hell, no!”

  Smealey felt the obsidian eyes bore into him. He looked down and toyed with his glass. This guy is fearsome; I’d best be careful. Weir was a lean, muscular man, of about thirty-five—younger than Smealey. His collar-length black hair and black eyebrows made his sun-bronzed skin even darker. The face was cloven by a straight nose that overhung a drooping black mustache, tinged with gray. Smealey had the uneasy feeling that looking dead-on into this man’s face was like staring down a water moccasin.

  “I operate in disguise, generally,” Weir continued. “Sometimes I wear a wig, sometimes a beard, sometimes a fake scar or a putty nose. Use a bunch of aliases. That way if word slips out in some of these little burgs that a stranger’s in the area, ain’t nobody knows it’s the same person who snagged a nigger offen a farm hereabouts only two weeks ago.”

  “Is Augustus Weir your real name?”

  “Yeah. But it ain’t Augustus. Gus is short for ‘Gussage.’ ”

  “What kinda name is that?” Smealey said before he thought.

  But the hunter seemed to take no offense. “It means ‘water gushing out of the ground.’ Name of some place in the old country where my ancestors came from.” He poured himself another drink. “What about you? Nobody’s named ‘Chigger.’ ”

  “That’s what I been called since I was knee-high to a katydid. My folks hung the name ‘Chignall’ on me—a village in England where my grandfather was born. As a kid, I was little and wiry, and so m’friends slapped me with the nickname ‘Chigger.’ Better than ‘Chignall’ for sure. At least everybody knows what it means. Seems we’re both named after some place across the ocean.” Maybe he could strike some common ground with this man.

  After a long minute of uneasy silence, Smealey thought maybe he’d said something to offend Weir, so he changed the subject. “So, how’s the nigger-catching business?” He didn’t care but felt he had to make conversation. As a straight-up robber and thief himself, he considered Weir’s occupation akin to that of a bounty hunter—beneath his own dignity. But as long as the free drink was flowing, he wasn’t about to say so.

  “Well, business has slowed down considerable,” Weir replied, topping off his shot glass. “These runaways are travelin’ inland or farther north with the help of a few abolitionists. Not as many right along the river as used to be. Three, four years ago, I could take me a handful o’ posters and cruise up and down along the Iowa and Illinois shore and snatch ’em offen these farms like scooping minnows in a seine. Same along the north bank of the Ohio. They run off from the plantations on the river down in Louisiana, mostly. And the rich planters there have the money to post substantial rewards. Some o’ those healthy bucks cost upwards of three thousand dollars each at auction, so the owners can afford to pay me, or somebody, to bring ’em back in good shape.”

  “Not bein’ nosey, but I reckon from what I seen o’ those wanted posters, the reward money must be pretty good.”

  Weir nodded. “Yeah, there’s money in it all right, but I have my travel expenses, too. This is a pretty chancy business and it ain’t gonna last forever. That’s why I’m doin’ all I can to pile up a stash now.”

  “I reckon you run into lots o’ trouble, too,” Smealey said, sipping from his glass.

  “That’s for sure. I’ve had bus
ted bones and been knocked over the head and shot at. See that there?” He pointed at a livid scar on his forearm that rested on the table. “Nigger knifed me. Fought like a wildcat, and I had to use a club on him. But I have to be careful. Can’t damage the merchandise or it loses value.”

  The two men stopped talking as the burly bartender opened the nearby front door and blocked it with an empty keg. “Let some o’ the smoke outa here,” he said.

  Smealey, accustomed to the miasma of the place, barely noticed the difference, but did look out at the sweep of water below the bluff. Now, in the afterglow of sunset, the broad surface took on the hue of sliding quicksilver.

  The two men continued to talk and drink as dusk deepened and the stars appeared over the tree line on the Illinois shore. After full dark the bartender returned and lighted the lantern that illuminated the swinging wooden sign over the door, announcing his establishment to the world as The Oxblood. It was Smealey’s favorite hangout when he was in Keokuk.

  When they were halfway through the second bottle, the worms were crawling in Smealey’s brain, but he was still very much in control. His wariness had vanished, and he was toying with an idea that was, to him, nothing short of brilliant. In fact, he began to think that Fate had sent this man his way.

  “So, where do you go from here?” Smealey asked. “You on the trail of somebody right now?”

  “Naw. I wasted twelve days lookin’ for one but found out he’d worked his way in amongst some free blacks as a deckhand on a steamer bound for Minnesota. The reward was only 6200. Wasn’t worth the time and effort to go that far. I’m on my way back to New Orleans. I’ll rest up a day or two and pick up a new batch o’ wanted posters. There’s others doin’ this, too, but I work alone and have to stay ahead of the competition.”

  Smealey was silent for a few minutes, thinking, and stoking the fire with the fairly decent whiskey. The edge was off his sobriety now and the amber liquid trickled down his chin. He wiped it off with the back of his hand, feeling the rasping stubble of a four-day growth.

  “As long as you’re between jobs, I have a question for you,” Smealey said after a bit.

  “I’m listening.”

  “How do you feel about kidnapping?”

  Weir glanced up sharply. “I’m a businessman. I ain’t into that kinda stuff.” There was no mistaking his grim refusal.

  “Before you say ‘No,’ you might want to know there’d be at least 66,000 in gold for you.”

  Weir shook his head. “I know what you’re gonna say, and the answer is still ‘No.’ I been asked to do this before when I fell on hard times. I ain’t gonna snatch no free niggers and sell ’em back into slavery. I ain’t good at forgin’ papers on ’em so I can pull that off. And the penalty is too severe if you’re caught.”

  “No, you got it all wrong. If I was talking about snatching free niggers there’s a good one only a few miles from here working for a widow in St. Petersburg. He’d likely fetch top dollar, but he’d be a tough nut to crack. He ain’t your average nigger.” Smealey shook his head. “No. That ain’t what I’m talkin’ about at all. This has nothin’ to do with niggers. Let me start at the beginning so you’ll see the whole layout . . .” He leaned forward on his elbows so his voice would blend with the buzz of conversation in the dim room. “You ever hear of Injun Joe?”

  “Sure, everybody has. That ’breed was a mean one, but he died in a cave down south of here a couple year ago. Wasn’t he mixed up with a murder and some gold? I forget the details, but I read in the paper where two kids wound up with the gold.”

  “Right. Well, I was Injun Joe’s pardner. That was our gold. Me and Joe found it hid in an old ramshackle house in the woods, likely buried by the Murrell gang a few years back. We took and hid it in that cave. Dumb luck those kids got mixed up in our business. Joe was locked in the cave by mistake and starved to death, and those two boys stumbled onto our stash and claimed it as their own.” Even retelling the tale made him angry.

  Weir was staring at him with those hypnotic snake eyes.

  Smealey dropped his gaze and continued, “Those two boys who wound up stealing our money—over 612,000 in gold coin, mind you—are named Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. They’re both still living in St. Petersburg, struttin’ around like gentry.”

  He paused to wet his whistle.

  “Where’s the gold now?” Weir asked, piercing eyes fixed on Smealey.

  “A judge in that village name of Thatcher took charge of it for them. Don’t know if it’s in his safe or he invested it in their name ’cause those boys are underage.” Smealey shrugged. “But he has access to it, even if it ain’t right handy. Thatcher’s a mighty important man in that town.”

  “Would these boys be a problem? They seem to have outsmarted you and Injun Joe.”

  Smealey felt a stab of anger at this jibe, but didn’t show it. “One boy, Tom, lives with an aunt and the other, Huckleberry, is the son of the town drunkard. When his old man died, the kid was taken in by a rich widow.”

  “I see. But you feel sure they wouldn’t be underfoot if you robbed the judge? We would want this to go smooth, without any rough stuff. The only law near that village is a few miles away at the county seat of Palmyra. I ain’t above robbery if I’m forced to it by circumstances, mind you. But I prefer a legitimate occupation.”

  “This isn’t about robbery, but I’ll explain that in a minute. My pardner, Joe, is dead, so the gold is rightfully mine. But Fate took a hand and bad luck has done me out of my hard-won riches.” He paused to sip. He had to slow down and stay in control. “It so happens this Judge Thatcher has a young daughter named Becky who’s about thirteen or fourteen, and he thinks the world of her.” Smealey was almost whispering now. “I’m sayin’ we snatch the daughter, then send word to the judge she’ll be returned safely if he forks over the 612,000 in gold. It’s a very simple plan, and it don’t involve violence or armed robbery. We can pull it off slicker ’an a hound’s tooth.”

  “I don’t know . . . High-toned, classy folks blow up like an overheated boiler when one of their own is taken for ransom—especially a kid.”

  “I’ll go halves with you. How many niggers would you have to run down to earn that kind of cash?” He sat back, pleased with his cleverness. He emptied his glass, feeling the warm glow. “Once we have the gold and turn the girl loose unharmed, we split up and head for Texas or somers out west.”

  “Why don’t you figure out a way to grab the whole 612,000 yourself?” Weir asked. “Why’re you bringing me into this?”

  “I never done anything like this before, and I need a man with your experience at snatching to make it work.” Best to flatter Weir a little. “I figure that half o’ that gold is better than none at all. And that’s what I have now.”

  Weir studied his fingernails, then leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs.

  Smealey had another part of his plan he’d hold in reserve for now to see if this man would take the offer. As hard-edged as Weir seemed, Smealey felt the slave-hunter was a man of his word. And he would know how to manage all the little details that needed to be thought of.

  “When did you figure on doing this?”

  “As soon as possible. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Too soon. I need time to look over the village and the situation there with the girl and her father.”

  “How long would that take?”

  “Hmmm . . . A day or two.”

  “Well, I was hanging around that village some last week. Saw one o’ them society pieces in the newspaper that the judge was gonna send his daughter off to visit relatives in some little town down toward St. Louis for a few weeks soon as school let out for the summer.”

  Weir sat up straight. “What town? Is she traveling by herself? When is she leaving?” The rapid questions reminded Smealey of a hound catching a scent.

  “Uh . . . Pretty sure it said this week, but can’t recall if it gave the date.”

  “If you expect to carry this off, we
must pay attention to the details. We’ll take the steamboat down to St. Petersburg in the morning and nose around. If that girl is traveling alone, it should be a cinch to grab her—best if she goes by boat instead of coach.”

  “So you’ll take the job?”

  “We’ll look over the layout. If I think there’s a good chance it’ll succeed, I’ll take your offer for half the ransom.”

  “That’s a relief,” Smealey smiled and held out his hand.

  Weir ignored it. “Go back to your place for a good night’s sleep and I’ll meet you at the riverfront in the morning at half past nine. I was planning to take the Annabelle south anyway. I’ll change my ticket to stop at St. Petersburg.” He stood up from the table, but paused as Smealey took up the bottle by the neck. “Leave the rest o’ that red-eye. No drinking until this is over. We both need to be sharp.” He donned his broad-brimmed hat. “By the way, you won’t recognize me; I’ll be in disguise. I’ll find you.” Then he melted through the open doorway and into the night.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  When Zane Rasmussen awoke, lying on his back, he instantly regretted having eaten that peanut bar covered with dark chocolate. His head was pounding, his stomach queasy.

  The doctor had warned him. He should’ve listened. At age thirteen, he had enough sense to avoid eating things to which he was violently allergic without his mother having to hide them from him. But temptation proved too powerful and he’d given in.

  He rationalized that he’d done it to gain weight for sports. Baseball wasn’t a game that required a player to be heavy, but his teammates on the Rangers had begun calling him “stick man” and “slats” for his skinny arms and neck. He was strong enough to hit singles, and he was very quick. But the names were hurtful, nonetheless.