3stalwarts (111 page)

The Sarsey Sal made good time westward. The big team were fast walkers, and the bays, getting a proper share of rest, kept the boat moving at a good pace when they were on the towline. Traveling beyond Rome, they found the towns sparser and smaller. Dan began to have a better idea of the greatness of the canal. Mile after mile, heading southwesterly, to Lenor, and then due west to Syracuse through sandstone country.

Dan took turns relieving Fortune on the towpath. He preferred the long stretches of walking. Since the long haul had started with that night at Delta, he had had a growing excitement. He had seen Molly roused again for a moment then, and though he had found her subdued the next morning, with that same haunting watchfulness in her eyes, he had felt that perhaps he might yet bring her back to him. At times she seemed closer to him than before, but she always kept some vital part of her just out of his reach. The exercise of walking helped to alleviate a growing urge in him for speed. He must get west and find Klore. For he was convinced that he and Klore must settle her between themselves before he and Molly could come together in the old vein.

Then, too, he had a feeling that he and Gentleman JOe would see each other again. It was a meeting that he looked forward to with a mingling of fear and excitement. Whenever he felt the spell of the canal, it was wound up for him in the figure of the mail robber. The man was so sure of himself, so able to preserve himself, that even the marshal, Henderson, who trailed him, gave him a grudging admiration. The more Dan found his own way muddled, the more he found himself regarding the image he created of the criminal riding the towpaths and roads on his fine grey horse. That he had never seen Calash’s face added to the illusion. When he had seen it once, he felt that he would see his own way clear. Perhaps he would find a secret there of the man’s strength. In his brooding way he tried to imagine the man’s features, but he could find nothing in his mind to build them on. The man was associated with action, with Dan’s first night on the wharf in Boonville, his first day on the canal, with his getting his own boat, in his very life with Molly. Even when he had bought a mirror for her, he had first seen the man’s reflection in it… .

In the morning, when they had hauled out of Delta, the first word of the chase had reached them. The night before, Henderson had been seen in Rome, outside the jail, talking to Sheriff Spinning, while his two deputies had stood by the heads of their horses in the street. Then the three had mounted and ridden south out of town.

At a canal tavern in East Boston they had tied up for the night. Here Fortune Friendly, in the process of cards, learned that Henderson had been in the village the night before-” A little fat twerp chewing a cigar like honest-to-God tobaccer,” the owner had described him. But this time he was alone. He had talked to the bank walker in his cabin, and the bank walker had refused to say anything about the interview, beyond telling them that the man was a Department man on the heels of Gentleman Joe. “Him a marshal!” the owner snorted, dealing the cards. “No wonder they can’t catch the rat.” Fortune remembered his very words because, when he picked up his hand, he had found double pinochle looking him in the eyes.

The canal was alive now with heavy trade. They had the familiar sight of boats hurrying ahead, passing during the night when they tied up. The relay stables on the towpath were a-scramble with teams going in and coming out. In the early morning when they went by they could hear the siss of men brushing down the mules like the whisper of bees.

The Sarsey Sal pushed on. They stopped in Syracuse next day for a little while to have one of the bays reshod. The blacksmith did a quick job, and while he worked he told Dan how he had made a shoe for a road horse. “A big grey,” he said, “and the dandiest plate shoe I ever worked out. A tall feller brought him late in the afternoon just when I was shutting shop. But trade isn’t so heavy just at this season, so I took the horse in.”

“Yeanh,” said Dan.

“I made a good penny out of it,” said the blacksmith. “It was a special job,” he added quickly. “I charge regular rates on work horses.”

“When was that?” Dan asked.

“Day afore yesterday,” said the blacksmith, sticking the hot shoe into the hogshead while a wisp of steam coiled out of the black water.

When Dan started to lead the bay out, he saw a man walking down the street leading a saddle horse. The man had a long yellow moustache, and Dan heard him say to the blacksmith that he wanted the nigh front shoe reset on his horse. He spoke with a gentle slur and drawl. Dan remembered the description Fortune had given them of Henderson’s two deputies. He hadn’t a doubt that this was one. He wondered what the blacksmith would say about the good penny he had made when he learned the tall man’s identity.

They passed the vast Montezuma swamps, where the towpaths rose like dams on either side, and the canal ran like a waterproof trough in level country. Here and there patches of black water showed, and the only growth was alder brush and gaunt cat-tails, broken over by the winds, or occasionally thin tamaracks, or clumps of cedars, or the skeletons of ancient trees. Fortune told him that in the early days the highwaymen who covered the western roads hung out here safely. Only they knew the winding trails by which a horse could pass the bogs. Even the Doanes and Tomblesons had used it in their day. If the great swarms of mosquitoes made their stay miserable, at least they knew no man could get at them. It was a melancholy stretch of thirty-five miles to haul through; it wore an aspect of death. The broken flight of low-hung clouds served only to heighten the sombre spirit of stagnation; and the blue open water of the great canal, with its slowly moving boats and horses and bright-faced people, held the eye with a promise of escape.

They hauled on. Twelve miles out at Geddes, where the salt works were, they saw Henderson riding along the towpath. He kept opposite them for a short time; he was a poor rider, his fat body thumping his horse unmercifully. The pot hat on the back of his head seemed perpetually on the point of sliding off, but he paid no attention to it. His cigar stuck upward from the corner of his mouth as rigidly as if he were standing on a street corner… .

As they entered Weed’s Basin, a man held them up to ask if they had seen anything of a man on a grey horse. The questioner had a scar on his temple, and when he took off his hat to Molly they saw that his hair was slicked down with some kind of grease and a smell of violets came to their nostrils. But they had no news for him. He stopped several other boats, and a little before dark he rode on westward.

“It’s queer,” Fortune said as they ate supper. “We keep seeing them all the while, here and there, but we don’t never get a sight of Calash. Nobody appears to. It makes me feel I’m dreaming.”

They came into Rochester, the Flour City, with the houses close to the towpaths and the roar of the high falls in their ears. At the Water Street turn two men stood talking, Henderson and the deputy with the long moustache. But the Sarsey Sal pushed on toward Buffalo with her load of ploughs, across the aqueduct, under the Exchange Street Bridge and the Main Street Bridge and on through the basin… .

John Durble’s Story

Dan sat on the edge of a dock at Buffalo; the Sarsey Sal was to take pork back to Rochester and there pick up a load of flour for Rome; they would start back in the afternoon. It was warm and dry where he was sitting. The raw, growing city with its high wooden buildings, some of the houses carrying triple porches, lay at his back, with the hill rising be-hind. Before him the canal ran into the open lake. A schooner was coming in on a brisk wind, heeling over toward the curve of her great sails, like the bend of a woman’s hip. But the bows caught snatches of diamond foam out of the water and shook them after her. Streaming out behind, and with thin cries to the wind, a flock of white gulls rose and dipped with the motions of the boat.

In the shelter of the warehouses, the sun had melted away the snow. A dry dusty summer smell rose out of the planks. Boats were coming and going at the far end of the basin. Teams worked back and forth along the wharves. Where Dan sat, it was quiet; he barely caught the hum of the city.

While he was watching the schooner drawing in, he became aware of a man standing within a few feet of his shoulder. He was sturdily built, with big, blunt-fingered hands, smooth-shaven but for a white goatee on his chin. Suddenly his brown eyes turned to Dan. His square face broke in a smile, and he came over and sat down beside Dan on the wharf.

“I like to see the gulls,” he said; “they’re the most beautiful fliers in the world.”

“Yeanh, they be pretty to watch, but they don’t fly as keen as a hawk does, mister.”

The stranger took snuff from a square silver box.

“That’s true,” he said. “Maybe I like to see ‘em because they hang round people.”

“Yeanh.”

“Do you work on the canal?”

“Yeanh. I work a boat.”

The other glanced at Dan.

“You’ve done well to get a boat so soon.”

“I was lucky,” Dan said.

“The canal’s the greatest thing this country has done; it’s the greatest thing it ever will do.”

“It must have been a big job,” Dan agreed.

“I saw it finished,” said the man. He sat with his hands on his knees, looking out to the west. “See there,” he pointed to a lake boat up whose gangways immigrants were crowding. “They all come by the Erie Canal. They may go clear to loway, but what they grow will find its way back through the Erie.”

“Yeanh.”

“I saw it finished,” said the man. “My name’s John Durble.”

“Mine’s Dan Harrow.”

They did not shake hands. There seemed to be no need of that.

“I was a carpenter, forty years ago, when I come to this country. I got work in New York and New Jersey. I made money fast. I was a master tradesman. I spent five years building houses for other people.”

“I’ve never been to New York,” Dan said.

“It was a growing city, but they say it’s grown a lot faster since the canal went through.”

“Yeanh.”

“I worked at the carpenter trade. It was good pay, but it seemed I was getting tired of it. I wanted to settle down on a place of my own.”

“Yeanh.”

“One day I was working on the roof of a house on Abingdon Road— fifty-three was the number. I’d been reshingling a patch; and I was coming down for the end of the day when I saw a girl no more than twenty coming out the door. She was looking white, and she was carrying a bag in her hand. I was a likely-looking lad and she a girl, so I asked her what was wrong, and she told me she was looking for service, but hadn’t been able to get any. Her money was running out, and she’d come over from England with her mother and her mother had died on the way, and there she was alone. So I said, ‘Come along to Asa’s,’ where I had a little cubby room on the top floor, and where I knew she could get one for but a little, and so she did. When I’d left my tools and put on a coat and washed my hands, we had a meal in the back tap, cheese and beer and a slice of cold beef; and, watching her, I saw the color come back. She was a very pretty girl. So after supper we walked out Love Lane and down by Lepner’s. It was a warm evening; there were a lot of couples out, but nobody paid no attention to us. Couples were never noticed in Love Lane. I told her how I was fixed; and I was proud about it, and had a right to be so, for, though I was a young lad, I was a master carpenter and earned my dollar with the best of them. Perhaps I said I had more money than I had, but that was only a natural thing, I got to liking her so. Her clothes was worn, but they were neatly sewed and I could see how clean she was.

“We sat in the meadows and watched the sun down over the river. So I told her how I had saved money and how I wanted to go up the state to the great Genesee Valley I’d heard of, where the land was so rich, and take to farming the way the folks had in England— Dorset; I remember the sheep, and the oil smell in the house at shearing. And I said I had planned to go before the month ended, but that a man settling a country alone did a poor job, because it took more than a man to settle. Still I said I didn’t know but what I would go. She asked where I went to get there, so I told her by boat to Albany, but after that I was vague about it, only mentioning Rochester, which was that year only a village. But I didn’t know that. In truth I had just only got the idea of being a farmer at all. Then she told me again how she was just alone and right at the end of everything, and we sat watching the sun down over the river and I as dumb as an owl at noon.

“But in the dusk we went round about back, all the way out to Kissing Bridge.”

The old man paused, took the silver box from his pocket, had his snuff, and watched the boat and the gulls. His face never changed expression.

“I took her there, for she was strange to the city, but after all I think she had a better acquaintance with the bridge than I did. We got married the next morning, and a month later we managed to reach Rochester. It was not more than a thousand people big. I doubt there were more than fifty buildings, all in all, built all on the west side of the river, and no more than a light bridge thrown across. She’d stood the trip dandy, but when she saw what a little place we’d come to I think it closed her up a little. But I’d got the fever then for getting my own place. They said land was high in the Genesee Valley, and I’d got the urge for gettin’ westward. We’d picked up a couple of cows in Rochester, and a pair of horses and a cart we’d got in Utica. I bought a plough and grain and flour, and we went on to the Tonawanda, where I’d been told there was good land much cheaper. It took a week nearly to get out, she driving and I bringing on the cows.

“We came in one night on the valley and we found a house there in meadows cut out and burnt by a settler. It was a log house, just one room and looking small in front of the woods, but there was a light in the win-dow and I got a smell of pigs from a pen out back. A man came out wearing a coon cap and leaned on a gun and just looked at us. It was the only farm we’d seen in two days. Just someway it was neither of us spoke, and then his wife came out of the door and right away mine got down and the man shook hands with me. We spent the night there. There was a good fire and the woman gave us bacon and tea. The woman and my wife slept in the bed bunk and he and I slept on the floor.”