3stalwarts (79 page)

Once it had left the town, the feeder wound away due south between raw banks, in the cuts of which grass was just getting a foothold. The canal had been opened only the year before. It was the principal feeder of the Mohawk section of the Erie Canal, but it also opened all the Black River country, as far as Watertown, to trade.

The shadows in the wooded bends still held a taint of frost, and out of them the sun drew wraiths of mist that trailed away among the trees, leaving a dank touch lingering on the passer’s cheeks. A sadness came into Dan’s eyes. It might have been the sight of the open cuts through the meadows, or the scars left by the diggers in the woods, neither offering promise of the future beauty of the dark water which would in a few years reflect banks green with nature’s healing, but which now moved sombrely like a soul laid bare.

He started to hear the fat woman clearing her throat. She had been studying him for some time with a sort of smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. When she caught his eye, the smile broke into a grin, like a man’s, and he felt an answering grin on his lips. She was amusing in her bright clothes, with all that substantial liveliness of hers.

“Boonville,” she said, “will sure grow, now this ditch’s been opened up.”

“Yeanh.”

“Ain’t you never had no ma?” she asked after a time.

“Not to recollect it.”

She shivered.

“It must have been lonely up there on Tug Hill.”

“Yeanh.”

“Awful lonely.”

“Yeanh.”

“Me— I could never have stood it so long.”

“No. There weren’t pasture to keep good cattle there. Just little cross-bred dinkeys.

“Holsteins,” he went on, slowly, “is all right if you can keep big, blooded ones. Or red cattle. But them little dinkeys,”— he glanced at his hands,— “a man can’t hardly fetch a-holt of their teats.”

“When did your pa die?”

“Two months ago.”

“I used to know him, once.”

“Yeanh?”

“Everybody knew him on the canal. He was a fine big man. I was just a gal then.”

Before them the pasture land narrowed in the hills, and the road came in to the towpath; and way ahead the sky came down upon the level fields.

“The Lansing Kill,” Mrs. Gurget said to Dan… .

The white beams of lock gates stood out against the autumn green, and as they came closer Dan saw a small square house beside the towpath, and, farther on below, more locks, and next to each another house. He saw that they were entering a narrow deep gorge. On his left the Lansing Kill plunged eighty feet into a foaming cauldron and then roared downward over a long series of rapids. It had cut away a wide amphitheatre where it came first on the soft limestone, and the water fell in a broad curtain. An overflow from the canal shot another, more broken fall into the whirlpool of water. Between the two falls, on a small island, the froth feathering its roots, a white ash grew by itself, its smooth trunk glistening and its leaves trembling with the spray.

On the right side of the gorge, the road and canal went down together; the road in sharp curves and a steady descent, the canal following a straighter course, stairlike in its series of locks, so that to go down it made the boater feel as though he rose and fell. For at times the road ran high over his head, and at times it would lie below him, halfway to the valley floor, while his boat crept into the series of locks with its reflection in the reflection of the sky… .

There were no farms in the Lansing Kill Gorge; there were the forest, the stream, the canal, the road, and the lock-tenders living alone. Only the boats and the shadows of clouds went up or down the long defile. A commissioner had called it “a link in transportation.” “The Lansing Kill,” Mrs. Gurget said to Dan. But Solomon Tinkle, after a backward glance at the upland river country with its rolling hills from which they had just come, called to Dan, “Seventy locks in five miles. Regular stairs, I’d call it. Jeepers! It’s the stairways to the Erie!”

“Yeanh,” said Mrs. Gurget, “so it be. There’s life down there, Dan.”

“Yeanh,” said Hector Berry. “That’s right.”

In the Kill Gorge

As if he were an outpost there to hail them, they saw a man sitting his horse in the shadow of the bridge. Both boats stopped.

“Hey, there!” he shouted.

Far down the Kill Gorge they heard, in the instant following, another cry, faintly, “Hey, there!”

The man glanced over his shoulder suddenly, as if he were not sure it was an echo. There was a pastiness about his cheeks which might have come from a bilious constitution or nervousness, or both. While he talked to the boaters, his eyes, which were set flush with his cheeks, kept covering the road and the towpath ahead of him; and he held his right hand inside the flap of his coat resting near his left hip.

Mrs. Gurget had brought the Nancy in close to the towpath, and now she leaned forward toward Dan and said in a low voice, “It’s Nick Spinning —he’s sheriff to Rome.”

Solomon Tinkle engaged the sheriff in conversation. The little man had climbed down off the back of his mule and now stood leaning against it, his head resting on the animal’s flank. They had finished exchanging views on the weather.

“What’re you doing up this way, Spinning?”

Spinning glanced round him again.

“You’ve heard of this feller, Calash? Well,”— he opened a small saddle bag and pulled out a sheaf of bills,— “I’m going up to Boonville to set these up.”

Dan went over to him. “Two thousand dollars reward,” he read, “for information leading to the capture, dead or alive, of Joseph P. Calash.”

“Sheriff Jones told me to set these up here. I don’t see as there’s any point in it. They say there’s a special marshal, Department of Justice man, working on the job— regular hound for trailing. But he ain’t reported to us yet. Those marshals are rated too damned high. But there ain’t any point in hanging up these papers in Boonville.”

“No,” said Dan. “That’s right. There’s some posted there already.”

“Who done that?” exclaimed the sheriff, open-mouthed with astonishment.

“The marshal, maybe,” said Dan.

Spinning swore.

“I’ll bet that’s right. Jeepers Cripus! How can they expect us to help a marshal if he don’t let us know who he is? It ain’t right in the first place, their sending him in here to pick up the money.”

“Well, there’s your chance, Spinning,” said Solomon. “Calash is up there now. He laid out Klore last night on Uberfrau’s dock. You’d ought to catch him coming out.”

“I’d like to see him,” said the sheriff. “Just once.”

“Damned if I would,” said Hector Berry.

“I mean the marshal. I want to know who he is. You don’t know who he is?” he asked Dan.

“No,” said Dan slowly, “I guess not.”

He was thinking of the fat man, Henderson, who claimed he had lost a horse.

“Sol!” cried Mrs. Gurget. “Move them mules along. You’ll have the towline tangled!”

The boats had crept on with the current until they were opposite the teams. Now the mules took the weight of the boat upon the towline again and forged ahead until they came abreast of the gate beams of the lock.

“The Five Combines,” said Mrs. Gurget.

As if he liked their company, Spinning let his horse follow the boats.

Mrs. Gurget glanced at him and said in a low voice to Dan, “Spinning’s scared. There’s no doubt of it.”

After feeling under her chair, she straightened up, a long brass horn at her lips. Her bonnet rose as she drew in her breath, and then it sank behind a long-drawn braying that moaned in echoes on the wooded hills.

“My God!” chattered Hector. “Don’t do it again! It chips my teeth to hear it. Wait, I’ll ring my bell.”

“Shucks!” she mocked Hector. “Ben can’t hear your bell. The Angel Gabriel will have to punch him on the nose come Judgment Day to make him hear.”

Again she blew an unearthly blast, until the vein stood out between her eyes.

Solomon ducked his head and screamed.

“Cripus, Lucy! Stop it! Here he comes.”

Up from below the level of the lock they heard in the fallen quietness a hoarse voice singing out of key: —

“Oh God! that I Jerusalem

With speed may go behold! For why? the pleasures there abound

Which cannot here be told. Thy turrents and thy pinnacles

With carbuncles do shine, With jasper, pearls, and chrysolite,

Surpassing pure and fine.

“There be the prudent prophets all,

Th’ apostles, six and six, The glorious martyrs in a row,

Confessors in betwixt. There doth the crew of righteous men

And nations all consist; Young men and maids that here on earth

Their pleasures did resist!”

The singer was an old man with a white beard falling to his waist, hiding his red flannels (for he wore no shirt), and white hair hanging on his shoulders. He came forward with a swinging, rugged stride, head back and shoulders squared, a six-foot knotty staff in his hand, and his blue eyes peered at Mrs. Gurget like those of a hermit, who has seen no woman since his youth.

Mrs. Gurget cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted, “Two boats going down to Rome!”

“Happy New Year,” said the old man.

“Merry Christmas yourself,” said Solomon Tinkle. “We’ve got to get through this lock.”

“Course it ain’t really a happy new year,” observed the old man mildly. “That was just season’s greetin’s.”

He moved over to the sluice levers.

“First boat in,” he ordered.

The Nancy Haskins was already nosing in under the skillful direction of Mrs. Gurget. On one side Solomon and on the other Ben leaned on the balance beams and trod them round to close the gates. Then Ben pushed on the sluice lever at the lower end of the lock, a rush of water hissed through the sluice, and rapidly Mrs. Gurget’s bonnet sank from view between the limestone walls. Solomon had unhooked the team, so they poled the boat into the second of the five locks, which went down one after the other like a set of steps.

As soon as the gates had shut behind the Nancy, Ben came back and opened the sluice of the first lock to fill it, and then he and Dan opened the upper gates and closed them behind the Ella-Romeyn. So the boats went down a lock apart, each taking two minutes to a lock, while old Ben ran from sluice to sluice, bending his back as he ran and swinging his staff, with the sweat springing out on his cheeks and a gleam in his eyes like the gleam in the eyes of Elisha the prophet.

As the Nancy came out of the lowest of the five locks, they all heard a horn braying round the bend before them. By the time the last gates opened in front of the Ella, they heard another horn sounding. Then a boat came in view, hauled by three mules, almost on their knees under the heavy load they had to move against the current. Behind them walked a man who was very tall. He appeared to be making knots and patterns with his bull-snake whip over the backs of his mules. They cowered at each report and lunged in their collars, as if generally the patterns were marked upon their backs. And when they came closer Dan saw signs of it.

But the driver knew that a mule works best when he is afraid of being hurt, not when he is hurt.

“They’re beasts of extraordinary imaginations,” Solomon explained to Dan.

The man who steered the upstream boat kept throwing glances back over his shoulder.

“Hurry up, George,” he shouted. “Jason’s just cleared the last lock.”

“By grab,” exclaimed Hector Berry, as Dan passed him to fetch down the two teams to the foot of the five combines, “by Grab, they must be line boats! If the second boat gets up afore the other commences to lock through they’ll fight for it.”

The shadow of the sheriff’s head moved onto the deck. “Danged if I’ll let ‘em,” he said.

Beyond the bend, volleys of profanity burst at them and a team of mules came round on a trot, followed by a great bear of a man who heaved upon the towline at their heels and goaded them with a spike in the end of the whip handle. He made no articulate comment, but rumbled to himself, until he saw the leading boat still waiting at the lock.

“Put her in, put her in!” he shouted to the steersman, and as the boat came into the bank he ran back, caught the rope flung to him, snubbed it round a pose, and before the steersman could jump ashore, had started for the lock at a lumbering run.

“By Jeepers, George,” cried the steersman on the first boat, “there ain’t no ways out of it now! You’ve got to stand up to him.”

“That’s the first honest-to-God thing you ever said.” The driver of the second boat stood facing them on thick bowlegs, his arms half raised, his flat heavy hands half clenched, his pig’s eyes jumping from one to the other.

“You cheated me out of place down below, George, but you’ll have to hold it now or let me through.”

The tall man looked a bit scared, but he wanted the place. The first boat through would lead into Boonville.

“Go wipe yourself,” he said.

The sheriff rode down to them.

“I’m sheriff of Rome,” he announced. “Quit it!”

“Horse to you!”

The steersman of the first boat heaved on the sheriff’s right leg, and as he came down over the other side of his horse the steersman of the second boat caught him by the neck and thumped him on his back, and then they both sat on his belly, side by side, and threw pebbles at his horse until it trotted off.

Spinning swore furiously, so the one nearest his head dropped sand into his mouth.

“No sense in you and me arguing,” said the second steersman.

“No,” said the other, reaching into his hip pocket, “have a chaw.”

“Surely.”

He helped himself from the bag, chewed, and waited politely for the other to spit.

“Go ahead,” they said to the drivers.

The drivers walked up to the level space beside the upper lock. There they faced off, the man George head and shoulders taller than the other, with four inches more of reach. But there was a solidity about the second driver, that grew upon the onlookers.

“He can’t be hurt,” said the second steersman.

The crews of the down boats stopped where they were. “I guess we can spare the time,” said Hector.

“I wouldn’t miss it for a keg of real Jamaicy,” said Mrs. Gurget. She wiggled her shoulders and settled herself comfortably in her chair.