The Devil's Paintbox (37 page)

Aiden looked away. This feeling stupid was getting too familiar. Then he had another thought, even more chilling. He touched the bruises on the side of his face. Now he knew what was bothering him about last night's attack. Just like the camp fights, real Shanghai crews probably weren't out to injure a man. They wanted someone who could work on a ship. Bashing a man's skull in wasn't likely to get that.

“Papa! Papa!”

The shouts startled Aiden. A wave of children burst out of the trees into the clearing. All but the smallest toddlers carried baskets or bags of seal meat. Bright red droplets of blood left a wobbly trail behind them as they ran.

“I have three horses I could sell,” Jackson said, dropping the butter cat gently to the porch.

“Tupic knows horses,” Aiden said. “Let him choose.”

The sun was setting and the sky turned a deep red, as if God had just scratched a gash in the horizon and made it bleed. Behind the children came the women, carrying the rolled-up bundles of sealskins. The silvery brown fur glistened in the sun. The men, their work done now, carried nothing but their harpoons. Everyone was laughing and talking, and a group of young boys, nine or ten years old, were leaping about, arms waving, clearly telling some wild tales from their day's adventure. Aiden could see some physical differences between the Shoshone and the Yakima, but the Indians did not seem to be separated by tribe as much as age. The young boys were together, the mothers, babies and older women in another group. The scampering toddlers ran like a flock of ducklings. Young Indian girls walked close the same way white girls did, heads together in hushed confidence and unconscious beauty, like small important butterflies. The subject of their glances and giggles today seemed to be Tupic, who walked on obliviously with the young men.

“Papa!”

Jackson walked down the stairs into the middle of them all and was swallowed up in touch. He took a fat baby from a woman's arms and kissed it on the cheek. The little boys tugged at his hands. Aiden watched from the porch. He did not want to know these smiling women and triumphant young men, these pretty girls and giggling children with their chasing games and songs. He wanted only to be back in the dark woods, with the muscled days and thick black nights, with the anonymous fill of food and the coffin-shaped space
of his bunk. He wanted the foggy chill of morning, the prick of sweat on his back and the soft sink of drink at the end of the day. He wanted to fight and work and sleep. It made a manageable life.

He realized he hadn't eaten since the morning's lumpy corn bread, and the whiskey was spinning his brain. Then Tupic saw him and ran up onto the porch. He looked like a new person, his hair neatly cut, his eyes bright again.

“Aiden!” he called. Aiden saw the brightness fade when Tupic read his face. “You didn't get it.”

“Not yet,” Aiden said. “But I have a plan.”

“What do you mean? What happened?”

Children began racing up the steps and into the house as the swarm of people filled the clearing.

“I'll tell you everything later,” Aiden said. “Trust me. We need to leave after supper and travel tonight. Jackson will sell me a horse, and you need to choose it.”

Tupic gave him a long, searching look but finally nodded. “I will go look at the horses,” he said.

Jackson came back up on the porch just then, his hand on the arm of an Indian woman, escorting her as if she were the queen of the world. Aiden jumped to his feet.

“This is my wife, Salawee,” Jackson said. He sounded oddly shy.

“I'm pleased to meet you, ma'am.” Aiden wasn't sure how to greet her, but Salawee eased the awkwardness by stepping forward and kissing him on both cheeks.

“Welcome, Aiden. I am happy to meet you. I hear much of your help to Mr. Jackson on the journey.”

She was a small woman with large brown eyes framed by thick black lashes. There were threads of gray in her hair, and
Aiden figured she was in her early forties, but she was still quite beautiful.

“Please, you will honor us and join the meal?”

“Yes, ma'am, thank you.”

“I must go, then.” She looked sharply at two of the other women. “Or some will cook the seal too much.” She smiled and disappeared into the house.

“They do snipe some,” Jackson sighed. “Oh well, go on inside, make yourself comfortable. I'll show Tupic the horses, and Francis will open the store if there's anything else you need. I'll put it on your account.”

he main house was a single large room with a fireplace against one wall and a wood-burning stove at either end. One side of the room was full of cushioned chairs, tables and lots of good reading lamps. There were bearskins on the floor and colorful weavings and baskets and drawings hanging on the walls. Aiden recognized a pencil sketch by Lieutenant Gryf-fud, scenes from the wagon train.

Around the great room, bookshelves were built into the walls. On the lower shelves were stacks of grade-school primers for reading and arithmetic. On the higher shelves were dozens of leather-bound books. Aiden saw his own books there, all together in a row: Shakespeare, the mouse-eaten remains of
Aesop's Fables
and, of course, the
Atlas of the World.
Sitting there on the raw wooden shelf, it looked tattered and ordinary, with a battered spine inches thick that would repel any sensible child from ever taking it up. He reached out his hand to lift it but found himself frozen, unable to even stroke the worn leather cover with a finger. He could not bear the rustle of the pages or their rich smell. He did not want to remember all the dark nights he and Maddy had read together, those awful lost nights when fear had been blunted by stories of the Congo, Iceland and Rome. He shuddered and turned away.

The children dragged tables and benches into the center of the room and carried in piles of enamel plates and cups.
When the dinner was ready, Aiden and Tupic were seated across from Jackson and Salawee, in the place of honored guests. Everyone spoke some English, or at least understood it, but conversations still often got tangled in translation, with much debate and laughter around the table. The seal meat did taste strange, but not so strange that he would pass it up in his hunger. There were roasted carrots and some kind of pickled cabbage. There were baskets of flatbread and sourdough bread, even dishes of fresh butter.

“It is not a proper feast,” Salawee explained apologetically. “That would have many special foods. A feast must have many days to prepare. But when the seals come and the sea is good, the men hunt.”

“Seal don't keep well,” Jackson added. For one who didn't much like it, he had put away quite a plateful. After dinner, the women put out bowls of dried berries and roasted nuts and some of the men smoked pipes. Aiden felt dozy and warm and wanted nothing more than to just stay here forever in this peaceful and abundant place. Instead, he got up and looked around for Francis.

“Could you open the store for me?” Aiden asked. Francis looked nothing like his father upon first glance, but when he walked, Aiden could see an uncanny similarity in their posture and gestures. “There are a few things I need to buy for the trip home.”

“Yes, please come.” Francis led him outside and around the corner of the porch, then unlocked the door. “What do you need?”

“Well, some light rope might be useful. A new blanket, two pair of socks and a pistol. A box of cartridges too, I guess. Oh, and a couple of those kerchiefs.”

The moon was just starting to rise when Aiden met Tupic outside, holding the reins of two horses instead of one.

“This one is only to borrow,” Tupic said, nodding at a desultory brown mare. “Jackson knows even desperate Nimipu would never buy a horse this poor. He says you can send it back to him with someone from your camp whenever they travel this way. But this one is not too bad.” He patted the neck of a sturdy black horse with two white stockings and an eager gleam in his eye. “Not as good as our poorest horse, but I will not have shame to ride it.”

“Well, good.” Aiden smiled. “That was a top concern of mine.” He was glad both animals were dark and wondered how much Jackson had guessed of his plans. They walked the horses out of the clearing onto the forest trail.

“Where are we going?” Tupic asked.

“North, along the coast.”

“Why at night?”

“Because now we are bandits,” Aiden said. He handed Tupic one of the kerchiefs and kicked his horse into a trot. Soon the lights of Jackson's compound disappeared and the night closed in around them with a soft chill. When the trail broadened, Tupic rode up beside him.

“Talk to me now,” he said firmly. “You are not my chief. What do you plan?”

“There's a party of men out now, traveling with a large supply of the vaccine,” Aiden explained. “They're bringing it to towns and settlements all over the region. That's why the police were so suspicious of you and Silent Wolf. They thought there was an Indian plan to steal the vaccine.”

The brown mare shied as some branches smacked her
nose. Aiden worked to pull her back. “The team only carries a few hundred doses of the vaccine at a time, so they cover one area, then return to Seattle for more,” Aiden went on. “They left again just two days ago, going inland to logging camps.”

“How do you know all this?”

“There were stories in the newspaper over the past month. I went to the newspaper office and read them there.”

“But how do you know where they are going now?”

“Seattle isn't really such a big city. Comings and goings are high interest. Yesterday's paper said they were headed north by boat to Everett, then inland to some logging camps. I know that the first big logging camp near Everett is Alvin Tesler's.” Some wispy clouds drifted over the moon and a cold wind blew. “The boatman who brought me up to Jackson's says it only takes one day with good wind and sea from Seattle to Everett,” Aiden went on. “So if they take one day, which would be today, to vaccinate people in Everett, that puts them riding east tomorrow morning toward Tesler's camp. If we ride all night and get ahead of them, we can find a place to intercept them.”

“Intercept?” Tupic fingered the kerchief. “You mean we steal it?”

“They'll just go back to Seattle and get some more. They have a whole farm of cows to make it. All they lose are a few days.”

“Will this work?”

“God's own toss,” Aiden replied. “But if you have a better plan, I'm eager to hear it.”

“How many men in the party?”

“Three or four,” Aiden said.

“Why don't we wait until night? Follow them and sneak into their camp at night while they're sleeping?”

“I don't reckon they'll be sleeping out,” Aiden said. “After Tesler's camp, there's only about five miles to Grandview camp. Besides, there's at least a hundred men in Tesler's camp and another fifty or sixty at Grandview. That might use up all the vaccine they have.”

They rode on for a while, the only sound the soft thud of horse hooves on the pine-needle path.

“I will agree to this plan,” Tupic said.

hey rode on through the night. The trail was narrow but clear, and the horses walked steadily. Aiden fell into a sort of trance with the motion. The moon misted in and out of clouds and the air turned uncommonly cold. The sky was starting to lighten when they came to the river just south of Everett, and Tupic found the eastward trail easily. It was a well-traveled path, which made Aiden even more nervous.