Stories of Erskine Caldwell (60 page)

“That’s all right, Benton,” Henry said. “You won’t have to lead him out. We’ll go inside and look at him in the stall.”

We all walked inside and went down through the harness room and opened the door to the stall. Benton stood back. He acted like he never wanted to look at King again. Anyway, he opened the door and stepped back instead of leading the way inside as he usually did when he was proud to show the horse he owned.

“There’s no horse in here, Benton,” Henry said, coming back through the door. “Is this a joke or something? The stall’s as empty as a Baptist church at blueberrying time.”

Both me and Benton stepped to the door and looked inside. Sure enough, King wasn’t there. We didn’t know what to think.

“He was there right after noontime,” Benton said excitedly, “because me and Clyde came in here and gave him a gunful of castor oil, didn’t we, Clyde?”

“Sure as I’ve got legs to stand on,” I said. “And he couldn’t have got out, because this door has been latched all day long.”

We ran inside, Benton and me. Then we saw what had happened. The side of the stall next to the areaway had been kicked down. All but the two bottom boards had been smashed to pieces.

Henry and Fred were standing behind us.

“That’s the quickest I ever saw a horse get well,” Benton said. “Here I’ve been all day trying to keep people from coming in to see King, and here he goes and gets well and kicks the side of the stall down.”

Benton was all excited, thinking that King had turned out to be a fine spirited horse, after all, in spite of his looks.

“Come on,” Benton said, leaping over the splintered boards. “He’s back in the areaway. I know he’s not out, because all the doors stay locked.”

The four of us ran out into the areaway, where all the harnessing is done, but King wasn’t anywhere in sight. The outside door was shut and latched just like Benton had said it was and just like I knew it was. But King wasn’t in the areaway, either.

“Maybe he got into another stall or into the grain room,” Henry said.

We went down toward the other end of the barn.

“He couldn’t have got into another stall,” Benton said, “because the rest of the stalls are on the other side of the one he was in. There’s no other way for him to go, that I can see. The grain-room door is shut tight.”

Just the same, to make sure, I opened it and looked around inside, but King wasn’t there and hadn’t been there.

It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen. I was stumped. Benton didn’t know what to do next, either.

“What’s that door lead into?” Henry said, walking to the door beyond the grain room.

“Shucks,” Benton said, “there’s no sense opening that door, because that’s just a sort of privy me and Clyde use in the winter when we’re working in the barn.”

Henry took a couple of steps, and stopped short around the corner of the grain room.

“There’s no sense in opening the door, all right,” Henry said. “It’s already open.”

The rest of us ran down so we could see what he was talking about.

Right then — well, I don’t know what anybody said after that. It was — I had to look three or four times myself before I knew what I was doing, and even then — sometimes I still can’t believe what I saw. Benton — if Benton — but there’s no use in trying to tell what Benton said. The whole thing —

We all finally got outside the barn someway. Benton sat down on a bench and looked off across the hills. Both Fred and Henry were laughing too much to talk sense any more. First they’d say something about Benton’s new horse, and then they’d look at each other, and then they’d break out laughing all over again.

“Benton,” Henry said after they had quieted down some, “it was worth your losing a horse just to know that your stock is the smartest in the country, wasn’t it? I’ve seen horses do smart things, but this is the first time I ever saw or heard of one being smart enough to go to the privy when he took sick.”

Benton got up.

“But King died in there, though,” he said. “I’ve lost him, Henry.”

“That’s just it, Benton,” Fred said. “Any horse that had enough sense to back in there and die on the bench proves that even when your horses are nothing to look at, they are still the smartest in the country.”

Benton could not see it in that light then. He was still worried to think that the tale would hurt his reputation as a horseman. Henry and Fred left soon afterward, still laughing like I knew they would be for the next four or five days, and I didn’t see much of Benton till late in the evening.

At bedtime Benton came upstairs while I was undressing to pass the night. He walked across the room and back before he said anything.

“I wouldn’t have had that to happen for anything in the world, Clyde,” he said. “I’d a heap rather have a horse of mine drop dead in the show ring — than that.”

“I don’t know, Benton,” I said. “It takes a smart animal to do a thing like that. Maybe King figured that he had to make up someway for his lack of looks.”

Benton came over to the table.

After a while he looked up at me. A change had come over his face.

“You’re right, Clyde,” he said. “It just goes to prove what I’ve felt ever since I was ten years old, when I started handling horses, and that is that there’s no bad horses. Some of them have good looks, some have good sense, and the ones that don’t have looks have the other, because all horses have some sense.”

“Well, King didn’t have any looks, but he sure had horse sense,” I said.

Benton jumped to his feet.

“That’s it, Clyde! Horse sense! I knew as well as I knew my name that that fellow I traded with thought he had stung me, and so did you and everybody else; but I could tell by watching King that day that he had what every horse worth his currycomb ought to have. By God, Clyde, King had horse sense!”

(First published in
Esquire
)

T
O
G
EORGE
W
ILLIAMS
went the distinction of being the first to suggest making Sam Billings the new town treasurer. The moment he made the nomination at the annual town meeting there was an enthusiastic chorus of approval that resulted in the first unanimous election in the history of Androscoggin. During the last of the meeting everybody was asking himself why no one had ever thought of Sam Billings before.

The election of Sam to the office of town treasurer pleased everybody. He was a good businessman and he was honest. Furthermore, the summer-hotel property that he owned and operated on the east shore of Androscoggin Lake paid about a tenth of the town’s total tax assessment, and during the season he gave employment to eighty or ninety people whose homes were in the town. After he was elected everybody wondered why they had been giving the office to crooks and scoundrels for the past twenty years or more when the public money could have been safe and secure with Sam Billings. The retiring treasurer was still unable to account to everybody’s satisfaction for about eighteen hundred dollars of the town’s money, and the one before him had allowed his books to get into such a tangled condition that it cost the town two hundred and fifty dollars to hire an accountant to make them balance.

Clyde Ballard, one of the selectmen, took George aside to talk to him when the meeting was over. Clyde ran one of the general stores in the village.

“You did the town a real service today,” he told George. “Sam Billings is the man who should have been treasurer all the time. How did you come to think of him?”

“Well,” George said, “Sam Billings was one of my dark horses. The next time we need a good selectman I’ll trot another one of them out.”

“George, there’s nothing wrong with me as a selectman, is there?” Clyde asked anxiously.

“Well, I’m not saying there is, and I’m not saying there’s not. I’m not ready to make up my mind yet. I’ll wait and see if the town builds me a passable road over my way. I may want to buy me an automobile one of these days and if I do I’ll want a lot of road work done between my place and the village.”

Clyde nodded his head understandingly. He had heard that George Williams was kicking about his road and saying that the selectmen had better make the road commissioners take more interest in it. He shook hands with George and drove back to the village.

The summer-hotel-season closed after the first week in September and the guests usually went home to Boston and New York Tuesday or Wednesday after Labor Day. Sam Billings kept his hotel open until the first of October because there were many men who came down over the week-ends to play golf. In October he boarded up the windows and doors and took a good rest after working hard all summer. It was two or three weeks after that before he could find out what his season’s profits were, because he took in a lot of money during July and August.

That autumn, for the first time in two or three decades, there was no one who spoke uneasily concerning the treasurer or the town’s money. Sam Billings was known to be an honest man, and because he was a good businessman everybody knew that he would keep the books accurately. All the money collected was given to Sam. The receipt of the money was promptly acknowledged, and all bills were paid when presented. It would have been almost impossible to find a complaint to make against the new treasurer.

It was not until the first real snow of the winter, which fell for three days during the first week in January, that anything was said about the new town treasurer. Then overnight there was in general circulation the news that Sam Billings had gone to Florida.

George Williams drove to the village the same afternoon the news reached him over on the back road. He happened to be listening to a conversation on the party line when something was said about Sam Billings having gone to Florida, otherwise George might possibly have waited a week or longer before somebody came by his place and told him.

He drove his horse to the village in a hurry and went into Clyde Ballard’s store. They were talking about Sam Billings when George walked in.

George threw off his heavy coat and sat down in a chair to warm his feet against the stove.

“Have you heard about it yet, George?” Clyde asked him.

“Sure I have, and God never made a bigger scoundrel than Sam Billings,” he answered. “I wouldn’t trust him with a half-dollar piece of my money any farther than I can toss a steer by the tail.”

“I heard you was one of Sam’s principal backers,” one of the men said from the other side of the stove. “You shouldn’t talk like that about your prime candidate, George.”

Clyde came up to the stove to warm his hands and light a cigar.

“George,” he said, winking at the other men around the fire, “you told me that Sam Billings was your dark-horse candidate — you must have meant to say
horse-thief
.”

Everybody shouted and clapped his knees and waited for George to say something.

“I used to swear that Sam was an honest man,” George began seriously, “but I didn’t think then that he would turn around and run off to Florida with all the town’s money in his pants. At the next election I’m going to vote to tie the town’s money around my old black cow’s neck. I’d never again trust an animal that walks standing up on its hind legs.”

“Well, George,” Clyde said, “you ain’t heard it all, about Sam yet. Can you stand a little more?”

“What else did he do?” George stood up to hear better.

“He took Jenny Russell with him. You know Jenny Russell —Arthur Russell’s oldest girl. I guess he’s having plenty of good times with her and the town’s money down in Florida. I used to think that I had good times when I was younger but Sam Billings’s got me beat a mile when it comes to anything like that.”

George sat down again. He filled his pipe and struck a match.

“So he made off with a woman too, did he? Well, that’s what they all do when they get their hands on some money that don’t belong to them. Those two things go hand in hand — stolen money and women.”

“He picked a good-looker while he was about it,” another of the men said. “He’d have to travel a far piece to find a better-looker than Jenny Russell. And if he don’t have a good time with her he ought to step aside for a younger man.”

George grunted contemptuously and sucked the flame into the bowl of his pipe. He remembered the time when he had had an eye on Jenny Russell himself.

“I heard it said this morning that Sam was going to have his hotel property fired so he could collect the insurance on it,” Clyde said from behind the counter where he was waiting on a customer. “If he does that, the whole town assessment will have to be changed so we will be able to collect enough tax money to keep the roads repaired and the schools running.”

Nobody said anything for several minutes. George glared at each man around the stove. The raising of the tax rate stared everybody full in the face.

Clyde came over to the stove again and stood beside it, warming his hands.

“My wife heard it said over the party line last night —” He paused and looked from face to face. Everybody in the store leaned forward to hear what Clyde was going to say. “She heard that Sam Billings murdered one of those rich men from New York in his hotel last summer. I guess he killed him to get his money. He wouldn’t stop at anything now.”

“Well, I always said that Sam Billings was the biggest crook that ever lived in the town of Androscoggin,” George said disgustedly. “The last time I saw Sam I thought to myself, ‘Now, how in hell is Sam Billings going to keep the town’s money from getting mixed up with his own?’ I know now that I was right in thinking that. We ought to catch him and have him sent to the Federal prison for the rest of his life.”

“He’ll be a slick eel to catch,” Clyde said. “Men like Sam Billings figure out their getaway months beforehand. He’s probably laughing at us up here now, too. That’s the way they all do.”

“The Federal government knows how to catch men like Sam Billings,” George said. “They can catch him if they start after him. But I don’t suppose they would bother with him. We can send him to the State prison, though.”

The men around the stove agreed with George. They said that if they ever got their hands on Sam they would do their best to have him sent to prison for as long a time as the law would allow.