The Ordways (28 page)

“‘Proposition?' I said. They knew something about Will, I figured. They looked the type.

“‘That's right. But now before we get down to business there's something you ought to know. There's actually three of us, see? Our pardner is watching us right this minute. You don't see him but he sees us. He knows all that we know, and he is watching every move you make. Understand?'

“‘No,'” I said.

“‘Yes you do,' said the one at my back.

“‘Now we are ready to take that boy there off your hands and see that his daddy gets him back. We will give you the rest of the day to clear out of town before we go to him.'

“‘It's going to cost you,' the one behind me said, and he looked around me to check with the other one, ‘five hundred dollars? Five hundred dollars.'

“The first one said, ‘Now let's not raise our voices.' I didn't even have any voice. ‘There's a mighty big crowd in town here today for this rally. They're already tanked up and just itching for a little excitement. Wouldn't take them a minute to lay hands on a rope. Catch my drift? And just remember, we ain't alone.'

“‘So that's our offer, Mr. Vinson,' says the other one, and when I wheeled around, there was a copy of my own handbill in my face. ‘Five hundred dollars and me and my friend here will take this boy and …'

“He looked down. The other fellow looked down. I looked down. The boy was nowhere to be seen. I must have let go of his hand, and for the second time that day he had wandered off on his own. We all three just caught sight of him walking in under the swinging doors of a saloon down in the middle of the block.

“When we got there this is what we saw. From the door there was a trail in the sawdust on the floor that his trouser cuffs had made, and at the end of the trail that boy, just putting down, on a tabletop above his head, a beer stein that he had drunk the suds from. Before we could get to him there came a cry from a man standing at the bar. ‘Raymond!' he said.

“‘Papa!' cried the boy, and he ran to throw himself into his daddy's arms.

“‘Raymond?' came two more cries. And the two at my side spun and disappeared, leaving the doors flapping.

“‘Boy, where have you been?' the man yells. ‘I've been all over this town looking for you!' And he grabs him by one wrist and swings him into the air and lands a series of whacks on his baggy little bottom that sounded like somebody beating out a rug. ‘If I've told you once I've told you a thousand times never to let go of my hand in a crowd. Haven't I? Haven't I? You've had me and your mamma half out of our minds! I'll never bring you into town again, hear?'

“Well, I got to laughing. I thought of how I'd pictured the scene, this man getting his boy back and hugging and kissing him and crying over him, and how I would stand there real noble, not letting him know how much like and yet how different my own situation was from his, and how he would say to me, ‘You don't know what I've been through' and I would say, ‘I can just imagine.' I laughed so hard he turned to me and said, ‘What's so all-fired funny? What are you laughing at?'

“‘Myself,' I said.

“He went back to beating his boy. Now I hope I know better than to interfere with another man's way of treating his children. I wouldn't have interfered on that occasion, except anybody could see that the man had lost all self-control. He was going through the same spiel again and the boy's screams just seemed to make him all the madder, and when finally the boy couldn't scream any more then his silence maddened him. In for a penny in for a pound, so I caught his arm and said, ‘Here, here, friend. Get a grip on yourself. You've punished the boy enough.'

“‘You trying to tell me how to treat my own boy?' he said. This here is my boy, and by God, I'll whup him whenever I feel like it. And I feel like it now! And if I have to whup you first to do it, that's all right with me too.'

“Well, somebody stepped in and took our coats. There's always somebody ready to do that, I've noticed. And somebody else took the boy. We closed, and I don't know who threw who, but we went down and commenced rolling around in the sawdust. He got on top of me and said, ‘Holler calf rope. I'll hold you down till you do!' And I got on top of him and said more or less the same. Well, finally I began to get the best of it. What happened was, I sat down real hard on his stomach and knocked his wind out. His eyes rolled back in his head and the whites showed and I thought for a minute I'd killed him. Then all of a sudden I felt a terrific pain in my leg. I twisted around and there was that little boy with his teeth sunk in the calf of my leg and chewing like he meant to chew it right off. I grabbed him by the hair and pried him loose and pulled my pants leg up. The skin was broken with the print of a perfect set of milk teeth and already the whole calf was turning purple. I looked up and saw my opponent hoisting his boy onto his shoulders. The two of them stood laughing down at me. For a moment I thought of getting up and giving them both a good licking. But I sat back down and watched them leave. And right then my leg stopped hurting. That is to say, it hurt worse than ever, only the pain felt good. Blood
is
thicker than water, I thought. Watching that man stride off with his boy on his shoulders I felt that they were Ned and me, and I was Will Vinson.”

Back at his hotel, where he arrived limping, still sprinkled with sawdust from rolling on that barroom floor, my grandfather found three men waiting to see him. Two of them obviously belonged to the shady sort he had dreaded meeting, the other one was a preacher. You could tell he was a preacher, he had his collar on backwards.

First in line was a man who embodied the faceless figure that had flitted, or rather had slunk, through his thoughts the night before. This one differed from his imagined informer in one respect only: instead of being shabby he was quite well dressed, as if he was doing well by doing bad. He was one of those forms of life that shun the light and flourish in the shade, and one had the feeling that like a chameleon he could change the color of his blood to blend with any background. “Ten dollars,” my grandfather was on the verge of saying, “not a cent more.” Luckily he did not, for this turned out to be Lieutenant R. D. (Bob) Loftus, twenty-two years a Pinkerton man, instrumental in solving the notorious Hastings and Alancaster cases among others, recently retired and now at liberty and here now to offer Mr. Ordway the benefit of his wide professional experience. “Father myself,” he concluded his introduction, “and know just how you must feel.”

That was why he was willing to make him this offer: he (Mr. Ordway) would guarantee his
per diem
expenses for six months. If at the end of that time he had found neither of them, man nor boy, then that was every last cent he owed him. If he found them both: twenty-five hundred dollars.

That was more than enough for my grandfather, right there, and he opened his mouth to say so. However, the lieutenant proceeded, if—and this was a possibility, alas, that Mr. Ordway must surely have considered—if all that was ever found was the kidnapper: two thousand. This was a very fair offer. He couldn't hope to do better than that. Not and get a man with real experience.

What did he mean, my grandfather asked, face the possibility that all that might ever be found was the kidnapper? What did he mean by that?

“Well,” said Lieutenant Loftus, cocking his head to one side and slowly shaking it, “it's six months, Mr. Ordway. They panic, you know. Lose their heads. A child is a pretty large and loud piece of evidence to have on you. Lots of bother, too, for a man. And even when they really intend to return them unharmed, they sometimes get frightened at the last minute of a trap. I don't mean to alarm you. You've surely thought of all this yourself. In your case let us hope for the best. But let us be prepared for the worst. For even if you've been paying the fellow off regularly, it's no guarantee, I'm afraid, that he has kept his share of the bargain. Big Ben Alancaster paid out more than eleven thousand dollars to Frankie Thorpe, but when we tracked Frankie down … Well,” he sighed, “I won't go into the details. You no doubt recall the case.”

My grandfather shook his head. “No,” he breathed. “What happened?”

“Don't recall the Alancaster case!” exclaimed Lieutenant Loftus. “Why it was headline news every day for months! The search for little Benny Alancaster, sole heir to Alancaster Starch and Bluing? Then pardon me, I'm sorry I brought it up.”

“Tell me,” said my grandfather.

Lieutenant Loftus fetched a sigh. “Well,” he said, “we found him, all right, poor little devil—right where he'd been all the time. It was Frankie himself led us to the spot, behind a prize
American Beauty
in Mr. Alancaster's rose garden. It took six of us to hold the poor old man back. But Frankie got his neck stretched, and so will our friend Will Vinson. How much, if you don't mind saying, has he worked you for up to now, Mr. Ordway, in round numbers? More than you care to remember, eh? Well, small guarantee that it is, I'm afraid, sir, you'd better keep on paying until we catch him.”

When first he realized that the man thought Will was holding Ned for ransom, my grandfather breathed again. Then at once he began to worry. Never having been able to comprehend why a man like Will with children of his own should want his boy, he found it all too easy now to believe that gain should have been Will's motive. The fact that he had never received any ransom note did not comfort him. Possibly at the last minute, out of fear of being traced through it, Will had not dared send it. Then to get the child off his hands he had … Or perhaps he had sent it and it had gone astray in the mails. And then Will had gone to the spot where he had directed the money to be left, and had found nothing there, and then had waited until the deadline he had set, and then, just as he had threatened in his note to do, he had …

All that my grandfather could gasp out was, “I've never paid him a cent.”

“Never paid him a cent!” Lieutenant Loftus echoed. “In six months' time?” Lieutenant Loftus had seen many contemptible sights in his career, but now he needed all his protective coloring to hide the contempt he felt for a man rich enough to have his son kidnapped being too tight-fisted to pay—no matter how little hope it held out of ever seeing him again—to get him back. Nevertheless he said, “Well, don't repent yourself, Mr. Ordway. Frankly, my experience has been that it doesn't matter much in cases like this whether you pay or don't pay, and that's the very same advice I gave to Mr. Oscar Hastings. He too refused to pay, and in case you may have forgotten, he was much criticized for it at the time. There were even editorials against him in the newspapers. But Oscar Hastings was not the heartless monster he was made out to be. He cried like a baby when poor little Oscar Jr. was brought up out of that well. I was there and I can vouch for it. It wasn't the money. What did a few thousand dollars more or less mean to a man like Oscar Hastings? He'd have gladly spent any amount if he had believed it would bring the boy back. And he was proved right. At Pete Fernandez's trial it was established that Oscar Hastings, Jr., had been beyond all hope of recall before the ink on the ransom note was dry. No, sir, I've raised three. All grown and married now, of course; but if one of mine had ever been kidnapped, instead of paying the rascal that took him I'd have spent the money bringing him to justice.”

At last the man's deadly tongue fell silent. Then my grandfather launched into a long and desperately pitched defense of the man who had stolen his child. Lieutenant Loftus had heard a lot, but this flabbergasted him. My grandfather said Will Vinson was no ordinary kidnapper. He hadn't done it for money. He and Mrs. Vinson were fond of the boy, loved him like one of their own, better than any of their own, had almost raised him during that first year following his poor mamma's death. How probably they believed they were rescuing the child from a stepmother and from a father who didn't love him as much as they did. How he had never received any ransom demands from Will. Not in six whole months. How he was not a rich man by any manner of means but just a poor farmer and his son not the heir to anything but eighty acres of not very good cotton land, and how Will Vinson, his next-door neighbor, knew how he lived and what he was worth and that you couldn't get blood out of a turnip. And so on, until he succeeded in convincing himself, but not Lieutenant Loftus. About midway through this harangue Lieutenant Loftus began to perceive that here was a man who not only would drive some desperate poor devil of a kidnapper to strangle his son sooner than buy him back, but that he was working around to haggling with
him
over his fee, when out of fatherly feeling he had made him a rock-bottom price. He said, drily, “Sir, I bid you good day. And I wish you luck in finding your man on your own. If you should change your mind and decide that I can be of service to you, here's my card.”

My grandfather succeeded in whitewashing over the picture that this man had drawn upon his mind, but it was always coming through and requiring another coat. It was an image of Ned lying dead and buried in a secret unmarked grave far from his mother's side, or possibly someplace on Will Vinson's farm back home, beneath that very soil that he himself had worked. In trying to efface it he was to become Will Vinson's passionate apologist. He reviewed his memories of Will, dwelling with fond gratitude upon the decent and kindhearted actions he had known the man to perform, exaggerating them, in the end even inventing some. The jealousy he had begun to feel of Will's love for his son shriveled in the chill of his dread, and he strove now to recall every evidence of Will's partiality for the boy. Whenever people to whom he told his story on his subsequent travels sought to commiserate with him by attacking Will, he would amaze, mystify, and would frequently disgust them by seeming almost to excuse his enemy. Search on he did, of course, and by day believed that the sun shone somewhere on Ned. But as soon as the lights were out and he lay himself down in another strange bed, his heart rose on tiptoe to await the small mangled ghost that walked nightly in his dreams.