Crows & Cards (14 page)

Anyways, after I held Chilly's coat open, he had me sprinkle rose water on his shoulders. Closing his eyes, he'd tell me to let a few dabs fly at his face too. Then it was downstairs to tackle whatever Ho-John had scorched for breakfast, though late as it was by then, most folks would have called it lunch.

Ho-John's keeping all the vittles too close to the fire didn't slow down anybody's appetite. We tucked away seconds, sometimes thirds, complaining about the biscuits and gravy and bacon all the while. Once everyone let out a notch on their belts and eased up shouting for more fried ham and fixings, they leaned back and worked some on my education. Moving out to the parlor, Chilly dealt cards to everyone and we got down to rehearsing ways to help rich gents share their wealth with the less fortunate of this world.

Since there were sure to be times when we took our gambling elsewhere and couldn't cart the telegraph along, we practiced fake shuffles and false cuts and dealing seconds. Every once in a while Chilly or Goose or the Professor would say something like, "Now here's how Feathers McGraw used to stack decks down on the Red River." And everybody studied real careful how he done it. We'd ask him to do it again, slower, so we could get the hang of it. We all wanted a turn at trying our hand at it too. 'Course, I usually botched her pretty bad, small as my hands were, but every day my fingers limbered up a little more, allowing me hope that I was making progress, particularly when Chilly saw fit to present me with one of his old vests. It was a shiny thing and I wouldn't have taken it off for money, though it hung on me like a blanket and was fraying at the bottom and losing thread along its seams. Three secret pockets had been stitched into it, two in back, one on the side, and they were exactly the right size for holding cards.

I practiced slipping kings and aces in and out of that vest's pockets everywhere I went, all in the name of helping orphans. Day and night I was at it, clumsy at first but gaining confidence and improving my handiwork till I could switch cards under Goose's nose without his catching on. Given his eyesight, that may not have meant all that much, but it was a start.

"Zeb," Chilly told me one day, "you got smooth hands and that's a fact. You'll be going places with them."

Such flattery kept me plugging away harder than ever. 'Course, I was learning from the best. Anytime he wanted, Chilly could deal himself, or anyone else bellied up to the table, as many deuces or treys or jacks as need be. Swapping one whole deck for another didn't even make him break a sweat. His fingers struck like snakes. At first I couldn't spot none of it, not unless he wanted me to. Even old Goose, blind as a mole, could fling those cards around easy as pie, though he couldn't always tell which cards he was tossing.

Most every day they got out a satchel full of playing cards that the Professor kept tucked away behind the bar. There must have been thirty to forty decks in there, each marked up so their backs could be read good as their fronts. It was done by lifting a spot of glaze off here, or putting a dab of ink there, or trimming the edges of some cards so the dealer's fingertips could feel what they were when he flung them. They practiced handling those cards until playing poker began to seem more like reading a book than any game of chance. It was so handy that I couldn't help but ask why they even needed to bother with me running the telegraph.

"Oh, there's never enough ways to skin a cat," Chilly reckoned.

"Or get caught skinning one," the Professor added.

"What's that mean?" I asked.

"Just that nothing works every time," the Professor said. "There's always someone around who might have already seen what you're doing."

"Even the telegraph?" I didn't like the sound of this.

"There's nothing new under the sun, Squire Zeb," Chilly cautioned. "Telegraph's been run before."

"Didn't Ruby Ed run one on the
Still Kicking
?" Goose asked, naming a steamboat they liked to gas on about.

"Among other things," Chilly agreed.

"But what happens," I broke in, "if someone comes along who's seen a telegraph?"

"Why"—the Professor acted surprised to hear me ask it—"you get caught."

"Shoo, fly." Chilly waved the Professor off. "There's no need to go putting fool ideas in the boy's head."

The way he said it so throaty and low warned the Professor not to say another peep, though he looked sorely tempted. The Professor had been tending bar at the inn long before Chilly had horned in, and the two of them didn't often see eye to eye.

Up to then I'd had no idea that gambling took so much hard work, but I began to see that doing it proper took years and years of practice. Understanding why some gamblers leaned so hard on a lucky piece? That wasn't any strain at all. I told Chilly and Goose so too, maybe secretly hoping they might change their ways and settle for whatever they could win fair and square, which would help me out of the fix I was in over cheating. I pointed out that if we applied half so much sweat and toil to anything else, we could probably invent some way or other to fly.

"Son," Chilly told me, "playing cards beats flying any day of the week. Ain't nowhere else that you can get such satisfaction from helping your fellow man."

I do believe he meant every word of it too. He was rock solid on what he did for a living. You could tell by the way his voice got so swelled up and important sounding whenever he talked of it. Just hearing him carry on that way brought me scurrying back to the fold, filling my head with such thoughts as
Everything'll be fine ... Just got to give it some time,
which soothed me, though sometimes I had to repeat it to myself often as a clock ticks.

So we honed our card skills till late afternoon, me whipping cards in and out of my vest, everybody else brushing up on what suited them. Eventually we retired to gather strength for the night's work.

Around six or so, it was time for some more of Ho-John's crunchery. Come seven or eight in the evening, when most folks were snuffing out candles and fluffing their straw ticks for a good night's shuteye, Chilly would drift out of the inn for a promenade around town to take care of the charitable work the Brotherhood required of him. He dropped off packages of food and clothes for orphans and poor old widows and the like. The reason he waited till dusk? So he could do these deeds without anybody knowing who he was.

"We in the Brotherhood don't want no one feeling beholding to us," Chilly explained.

When he told me that, didn't I feel small for ever doubting him? If all the good we were doing required a little cheating, well, maybe that was the way of the world, says I to myself.

Depending on how much rich-man's money Chilly had to parcel out, some nights his do-gooding walk took longer than others, but eventually, say around ten or eleven, he drifted back to the inn, where he acted as though he hadn't seen Goose or the Professor for days and didn't live right upstairs and wasn't sure if he had any time to sit in on a hand of five-card. Though it always turned out that Goose could talk him into staying.

There weren't any promenades around town for me though. Right after supper, before any gamblers showed up, I was latched into the pantry, with a molasses barrel rolled in front of the door in case any of the inn's guests got to wandering. I had to crawl in so early to keep everybody from knowing my whereabouts. And there I stayed the whole night long, learning my trade and peeing as quiet as I could into a chamber pot if the need arose. Some nights it got so dag-blasted cramped and shrinking tight in there that I must have died a hundred times. I figured they'd find me in the morning, blue and ripe as country cheese. Thank goodness Ho-John sometimes slipped up to the pantry door and whispered a word or two.

"You in there?" he'd always start out.

It struck me as a strange question, considering there was but one door and he was stationed outside it. But glad as I was for some company, I never asked where he thought I might have gotten to. I'd just slip off my shelf and whisper that I was still there.

"Good," Ho-John would huff, sounding relieved, as if something might have happened to me that was too terrible to ponder. Then he'd sigh and say something like, "What would your ma and pa think 'bout you wearing that kind of vest you do?"

"Wouldn't matter to them," I'd answer, all stiff upper lip.

"Don't think that I'm believing such an answer as that. They the ones that raised ya, ain't they?"

Having said his piece, he'd shuffle and clink and mutter all the way back to the stove as if put out with me, though later on he always cracked the pantry door to slip me a drumstick or biscuit that wasn't burned too bad. I appreciated his concern but could have done without the ma-and-pa questions, which always left me feeling kind of low and moldy, even if my folks were the ones who'd shipped me to St. Louis.

That takes care of my first month or so on the job. It wasn't till my second month that I run into some real, honest-to-goodness troubles.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

W
E WERE GETTING INTO THE MIDDLE OF
M
AY
by then and the days had a low fire under 'em. Goose kept the windows of the inn propped open most always; I kept my vest unbuttoned.

By then I could pretty much tell ahead of time which guests I'd be running the telegraph on. Lying there in the dark, trying to hold my breath as I pressed an eye to the peephole, I began to feel more than a little sorry about it. We might be helping these fellows to learn about sharing, but they were mighty poor students. The way a few came back night after night for another lesson—that was heartbreaking.

Then Chief Standing Tenbears dropped by to try his luck.

The first I knew of the chief's arrival was a commotion that broke out in the front parlor, which was mostly used for drinking and eating the inn's burnt fare. There was some rough shouting, followed by a gunshot, which put a lid on all the hullabaloo.

"Let him through," I heard Goose yell into the silence. "The chief saved my hide once, over San Carlos way."

The next thing I knew, Chief Standing Tenbears came trailing the princess into the main parlor, head held high. He was wearing his buckskins and war bonnet, with his right hand resting on the princess's shoulder.

"Chilly Larpenteur," the princess announced, "my father wants to win his medicine bundle back. He thinks you've had it long enough now."

There wasn't any back-down to that girl, and you couldn't help but admire her for it.

"He does?" Chilly acted powerfully surprised and lamb-like all at once, which was one of his talents.

As the princess led her father forward, Chilly sprang to their side, chock-full of warm smiles and Sunday greetings while guiding them to the chair dead in front of me. There hadn't been anyone sitting there for a half hour or so, ever since Chilly and me had wrung the last dollar out of a traveling portrait painter from Louisville.

Something told me I wasn't headed for one of my proudest moments. All the other poker games folded quick, with the players bunching around Chilly's table as he fanned the cards, rippled them back together, and slapped them on the table so the chief could cut 'em. For gathering attention, there ain't nothing beats an Indian chief and princess dressed for show. It was lucky for telegraph operations that the gawkers couldn't squeeze between me and the chief, whose chair was tight against the wall. Chilly had seen to that.

"Did the Chief have one of his famous dreams?" Chilly asked solicitously.

When the princess translated that question, the chief pulled out a fur-lined pouch and dumped a good thirty to forty gold eagles on the table. The princess stacked the coins in four piles, each worth a hundred dollars. Trying to figure how many visions the chief had needed to earn all that knocked my cipherer clean out of kilter.

"I wish my dreams were so profitable," Chilly chuckled, which earned a general round of agreement from the crowd.

The chief spoke up before Chilly could start dealing.

"My father asks," the princess relayed, "if that boy helper of yours is still around."

Well, I nearly fell off my shelf when she up and said that.

"Oh, I expect he's hereabouts somewhere or other," Chilly answered, vague as could be. "Want me to scrounge him up?"

"My father just asks you to give him a message from his mother."

Hearing that poked me like a stick in the eye. From out of nowhere, a stick-bur rasped in my throat, 'cause I figured that by now they'd have forgot all about me back home.

"I'll see that it gets to him," Chilly said.

"Tell that boy," the princess went on, "that his mother asks him to write home. She's worrying about what's become of him."

I had to bite a knuckle to hold a whimper back. Maybe Pa and Ma were having second thoughts about packing me off the way they had.

"Any particular reason she's needing to hear from the young scamp?" Chilly asked.

"She didn't say."

"Well, I'll be sure to let him know," Chilly promised. "You ready to win that medicine bundle back now?"