Two in the Field (10 page)

“Jump!” Slack yelled.

As I made another clutching try at the rung, I vaulted feet forward into the air as if trying to clear a bar, a gargantuan leap of faith. My hand closed around the rung as my calves hit the bottom of the doorway, and for a terrifying instant I teetered backward. Slack grabbed my shirt and held on until I could work myself in.

I hugged the rough floor like a lover.

“Always throw yourself forward,” he lectured. “On your back or belly, don’t matter, but flatten out and go forward. Easier with the cars coming at you, of course, but we didn’t have that choice.”

Right then just being alive was enough.

He looked around pleasurably as if we were in a luxury hotel. “This should be good till morning. Brawley got our cardboard and water but we got these soft bags.”

“When he comes to, won’t he telegraph ahead?”

“And say what?” Slack laughed. “That two men he had the drop on—one half his size and the other he can’t identify—drilled his foot and dented his head?”

“But we’re carrying his pistol now,” I said. “Doesn’t the railroad worry about things like that?”

“Oh, if this was a cushion run, they might make a search at the next stop,” he said offhandedly. “But, hell, there’s no shortage of guns on the freights.” He hefted Brawley’s and informed me that it was a wartime navy .36 originally designed for paper cartridges with powder and ball, now converted to take metal shells. “This’ll scare some off, but with Brawley so anxious to settle my hash, I’m thinking to pick up a .45 short-barrel Peacemaker.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere,” he replied. “They’re sellin’ fast as Colt can turn ’em out. Best single-action piece ever. Made in Hartford, right where we’re headed. Probably cheaper there, though thousands go out by catalogue.”

So much for gun control.

“Sorry you started out so rough, Sam,” he said. “Swinging aboard like that could’ve got you named ‘Stump’ or ‘Fingers.’ ” He stretched out on the bags with a pleasurable sigh. “I’m obliged to you for sticking up for me.”

“Damn right,” I agreed, moving unsteadily across the car, trying to gauge the bounces and jolts. At the doorway I unbuttoned my fly.

“They say when a feller takes his first piss from a train,” Slack commented, “the road starts workin’ him. Once it’s in his blood, he ain’t satisfied staying put.”

I doubted it would apply to me. Yet I did feel a subtle elation. There I was, spraying the tracks outside St. Louis from a train I’d hopped after knocking a man cold. I’d lost all my possessions. I’d found a friend. I was journeying to find the woman I loved.

It was springtime, 1875.

Things could be a lot worse.

Moving eastward during the next week, Slack and I put together new kits: blankets instead of cardboard. My crash course in tramping featured learning the proper way to approach swaying cars, gauging critical distance, and swinging on with reasonable safety. He taught me to avoid so-called flat wheels that shook every bone in your body, to squat while riding to lessen the jolts, and to wrap my face against swirling dust—residue from livestock hay being the worst.

My favorite place to ride was on the platforms of baggage cars on passenger trains. These were called “blinds” because the doors behind them were blocked by baggage and couldn’t be opened. They were easily the most comfortable outside perches. Except, of course, when we were showered with cinders and sparks, blasted by sun and wind, or pelted with rocks by sadistic trainmen.

I learned the tramps’ card games, a good deal of their slang, and paid close attention to their etiquette, especially after seeing two of them go at each other with knives over some point of honor I never quite got. I learned to leave camp chairs upside
down to avoid bad luck; to do dishes if I joined a meal; to refer to a small frying pan as a “banjo;” to shave my whiskers with a glass shard for a razor.

Under Slack’s tutelage I came to recognize tramps’ symbols on houses and fences and hitching rails: “good meal here,” or “handout if you act religious,” or “danger here.” I learned that hanging around churches early on Sundays was good for handouts, and more so for cigar and cigarette butts tossed aside as worshippers took their final pulls before going in—I didn’t smoke but they were valuable trade items. Slack also showed me the trick of placing a loaf of stale bread on a doorstep, then knocking and asking politely if he might have it. Often we went away with butter and jam and other delicacies.

At night, besides cards, “tramp orations” were popular. Many of them told of fighting in the war and then forming an “army of labor” in the postwar railroad building boom. The men had lived in style while laying track across the nation, sleeping legally in comfortable boxcars, dining on antelope and buffalo steaks, pulling top wages for “three strokes to the spike, four rails to the minute.”

Greed and corruption had ruined it all. The collapse of the banking house of Jay Cooke and Company, which according to Slack had bankrolled the whole Civil War, sparked a global depression. The Panic of ’73 saw swarms of businesses go under and more than half the railroads default on their bonds. Three million men lost their jobs. Veterans who’d tramped at Gettysburg and Antietam now tramped the whole country, and instead of building railroads they swarmed over them.

Which brought an inevitable backlash.

“They’re crackin’ down everywhere,” one tramp complained. “It’s gettin’ tougher to buy cheap into the cushion cars even when we
got
cash.”

Crooked passenger conductors bypassed the ticket system in order to pocket lower fares. The usual rate was ten cents a hundred miles or twenty cents a night. Slack and I traveled this way once. The trouble was that when you reached the end of a conductor’s geographical “division” and entered a new one, all deals were off.

“They’re all being watched,” another said. “The rail bosses hired this spy outfit out of Chicago called Pinkertons. They do what they call
infiltrate
. Them Pink bastards are the worst devils of all.”

“It ain’t just the railroads,” another tramp said. “The Pinks are in the coal mines, too. In Pennsylvania they’re settin’ the miners against each other and tryin’ to bring ’em down for bargaining together and daring to ask pennies more than starvation pay.”

That spurred angry reactions. The anthracite miners had been on strike for months. It was common knowledge that the operators had brought in scabs and armed thugs, but not that they’d stooped to using paid deceivers and informers.

“In K.C. I heard ’bout them Pinkertons,” another said. “I believe they’re the ones that blowed off Mother James’s hand.”

“Who’s Mother James?” he was asked.

“Why, Frank and Jesse’s ma, you ignorant fool. The cowardly Pinkertons threw a bomb inside the family house, but the James and Younger boys wasn’t there.”

“You’re talking ’bout bank robbers,” the first objected. “Not workers.”

“Banks been robbin’
us
long enough!” came the rejoinder, which provoked howls. “Anyway, I heard Jesse’s up in Chicago lookin’ to take vengeance on ol’ Pinkerton hisself.”

A flash of memory:
Cold hazel eyes nervously blinking … soft southern accents with a faint stammer … ready to shoot a man who’d
jokingly slighted the Confederacy … firing his revolvers with deadly calm in a hail of bullets in the Promontory gambling saloon …

I’d seen Jesse James in action.

I wouldn’t want him looking for me.

We jumped down from a coal car a quarter-mile or so outside Hartford’s Union Station, the Connecticut River off to our left. It was Sunday about eight o’clock, darkness settling. After making sure no bulls were around, we set out for Twain’s mansion. I remembered it being on Farmington Avenue, which lay several miles to the northwest.

That direction again.

“Stay out of public squares,” cautioned a tramp who’d directed us. “They’ll book you for vagrants, sure as cherry pie. Good luck with all the Puritans here.”

“I’m lookin’ to work,” Slack told him.

“For that,” the other said wryly, “you’ll require more than luck.”

In the past—the future—I’d visited Twain’s mansion as a museum. So recognizing it was no problem. What I’d forgotten was that it shared a compound with exclusive neighbors: Charles Dudley Warner, Twain’s collaborator on
The Gilded Age
, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the famed author of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
—the “little woman who started the war,” as Lincoln had called her.

Their houses loomed against the night sky.

Incredible that I was here and they were too.

Our shoes stirred the fine gravel of the curved driveway as we neared the massive structure that had cost Twain well over $100,000 to build. I hadn’t given the figure much thought. Now I knew what a staggering amount it was in these times. We stared up at windows glowing like cheery ornaments. For some reason the entrance faced the rear, while the service wing fronted on the street. Slack wanted to go there to knock.

“I’m using the main entrance,” I said.

“Sam …” He motioned at our clothes.

“Not my fault,” I said. “Twain’s my friend, dammit.
That’s
the important thing.”

Slack ran a dubious eye upward over the myriad turrets and balconies and gables and chimneys. By the time we stood beneath the porte cochère, where carriages dropped off their passengers, he looked ready to flee. “Sam, this is for top gentry.”

“And people like us, who know him, right?”

Slack said nothing.

I rapped on the door, which after a short interval was opened by a black man in a stylish gray frock coat. “Yes, sir?” His
r’s
were hard, pronunciation crisp. No southern tones. An African-American Connecticut Yankee.

“I’d like to see Mr. Clemens.”

“He’s at dinner presently.”

“Well …” Suddenly I felt uncertain. Twain had a wife and daughters now. “Tell you what, we’ll wait till he’s done.”

“The family,” he said smoothly, “contributes to the League for Indigent Support—”

“Pauper relief,” Slack muttered.

“—but direct assistance is sometimes made, so if you’ll go around to the kitchen door, I’ll see that you receive food.”

“We’re not here for handouts,” I countered, although I had every intention of asking Twain for a loan.

“May I ask why you
are
here, sir?”

“To pay respects to an old friend I’ve come a hell of a long way to see.”

“Mr. Clemens is not available,” he said stolidly.

“Let’s go,” Slack whispered.

“Look, tell him it’s Sam Fowler,” I pressed. “Say it’s urgent, will you?”

“Wait here,” he said finally.

It was several minutes before he returned. “Mr. Clemens has a dinner guest,” he said. “He is not receiving.”

“You told him my name?”

Slack pulled at my elbow.

As the servant tried to close the door I used my arm as a wedge to prevent it. His eyes widened. “Look, I’ve
got
to see him!

The servant froze at the sight of the navy pistol Slack had given to me to carry. I shoved past him into an entrance hall with a gleaming marble floor and a dark oak staircase.

“Crap,” I heard Slack groan. “Now they’ll think it’s a robbery.”

He had a point. I turned to hand him the weapon but he was already hurrying away. The servant was talking urgently into some sort of speaking tube. No time for dallying. I hid the pistol beneath my shirt and strode toward double doors where I heard laughter and clinking glasses. I took a breath, spread the doors wide, and marched in.

“What’s this ruckus?” an auburn-haired man blurted in a familiar reedy drawl. His blue-green eyes blazed at me as he rose from his chair. We’d been about the same age before, but now Twain was pushing 40. His temples had grayed and his hawklike features were thicker. Married life must be agreeable.

The long mahogany table held glowing candles and coffee and frosted cakes. To Twain’s left sat a small man whose piercing eyes regarded me with pleased surprise, as if I were a bonus entertainment. To Twain’s right sat a woman I recognized from old photographs: his wife Olivia … Livy … his beloved soul mate. As in the images, her dark hair was pulled into a severe bun and her features were more regular than beautiful. The photos, however, hadn’t done justice to her clear, pale skin and luminous eyes. She radiated a calm loveliness although her voice hinted of both alarm and disappointment as she said, “Oh, Youth.”