Sam Green collected the umbrellas as they stepped on board, then cleared off a bench for them that allowed them to look out the side of the boat without getting rained on.
“It’ll be a few hours,” he said. “The river gets rough in spots as a matter of course, and the weather today is not ideal for it.”
Aunt Germaine smiled in a kindly way. “It is preferable to the alternative—riding horseback through Indian country.”
“Oh,” said Ruth, “I don’t know about that. I always enjoyed the trek. Particularly the horses. And the Indians—the Kootenays—oh, they were never any trouble. Mr. Green and his people were always most helpful in that regard.”
“I am just as happy,” said Miss Butler. “Indians terrify me.”
“There is no reason they should,” said Ruth. “Not these days.”
“Most of ’em are over in Montana now anyhow,” said Jason. The two women looked at him, and he shrugged. “Government set up a big reserve for Kootenays last year. I expect they’re all of them headed over there by now. ’Twas all the talk of Cracked Wheel.”
Miss Butler giggled. “Cracked Wheel? What sort of name is that?”
“Name of my home town, miss,” said Jason. “It is not very large, I guess. Or it
was
not,” he added.
“Was?” Ruth looked at him. “Mr.—Thistledown. You speak of your town with the weight of the world on you. Is there something the matter?”
Aunt Germaine caught his eye and gave him a warning glare, but that wasn’t what shut Jason up on the subject. He didn’t want to stray back to Cracked Wheel, didn’t want to pick at the scab forming over his grief. He’d misspoke, he saw, naming it at all.
So all he said was: “Sorry I brought it up. No. Nothing’s the matter.”
Had Ruth Harper known Jason a little better, she might have known to leave it lie, let him to himself for a few minutes. As it stood, her curiosity got the better of her, and she persisted.
“You,” she said, turning a third toward him on the bench, “have a secret, Mr. Thistledown. Is it, I wonder, a secret connected to your infamous surname?”
“My infamous surname?”
“I am sure,” said Aunt Germaine, intervening, “that he is unrelated to that scoundrel.”
“Well, Madame,” said Ruth, “as his aunt, you ought to know. Still—” she turned to Jason “—those are, as they say, ‘mighty big shoes to fill.’”
“Ruth!” said Miss Butler, but Ruth rolled her eyes. She looked at Jason, and pointed with her index finger. “Bang!” she said, and giggled.
Jason felt his hands squeezing into fists. He pushed them between his knees, and took a breath.
“Miss Harper,” he said. “I must apologize but I cannot make head nor tail of what you are saying.”
Miss Butler was trying not to laugh herself by now. “You are not alone, Mr. Thistledown. She has, I daresay, read altogether too many dime novels for her own good. And your name—”
“What about my name?” said Jason.
“You mean to say you don’t know?” said Ruth, having composed herself. “Never mind having not heard of the man—it beggars the imagination to conceive that no one would have suggested to you the similarity of your own name to that of Jack Thistledown’s.”
Jason thought that he might have enjoyed studying Miss Ruth Harper from afar a little longer. He did not like this sort of conversation.
“Oh come,” said Ruth. “Jack Thistledown—hero of the Incorporation Wars. Killed a dozen men fighting against Granville Stewart and his vigilantes, over the cattle ranges of south Montana. One of three men to walk away from the shootout at Snake River. Does that not jog your memory?”
“My pa’s name was John,” said Jason.
“Jack is another name for John.”
Jason sighed. This would come up from time to time in Cracked Wheel, when fellows were passing through town and overheard someone calling his name in the store. Jason said now the same thing he’d said then.
“I didn’t know him too well. But he was no good.”
“The same might be said of Jack Thistledown,” said Ruth. “Well—this
is
exciting. The son of a famous gunfighter—right here on this boat! I feel I ought to be swooning.”
“Ruth!” said Miss Butler, and this time Sam Green intervened too.
“Leave the boy be, Miss Harper,” he said. “It’s his own business who his pa is.”
This seemed to make an impression on Ruth where her old friend Louise Butler could not. Her face took a more sympathetic cast.
“Of course it is,” she said. “And look—my questions have made you positively crimson! Oh, I must apologize, Mr. Thistledown. As my dear Louise attests, I am quite mad for the dime novels. And here on my way to a summer at Utopian Eliada . . . Well. I am too hungry for intrigue and so invent it where there is none to be found. Can you forgive me?”
Jason had not been aware that he was crimson. He was not sure he liked having it pointed out. “I can,” he said.
They sat quiet for awhile, watching the shore of the Kootenai River transform from docks to tilled field to wilderness. After a moment, Aunt Germaine excused herself to freshen up. As she did so, Jason caught Ruth looking to him again. This time she looked away quickly, and Jason was fine with that. Let
her
turn all crimson for a change.
“What’d your pa buy this boat for?” asked Jason as they drew around a bend and the river stretched wide before them. “If I am not prying in asking.”
Ruth didn’t look over when she answered, and she spoke in a cool tone. “I suppose that he told the investors it was to haul his brailles of logs and lumber back to Bonner’s Ferry more efficiently. When he invested in the town, Father had hoped that the markets downriver in Canada might take an interest in Eliada wood; and he has always hoped that the Great Northern Railway might finally complete a line south through the town. Given that they have not . . .” She spread her hands to indicate the whole of
The Eliada
“. . .
voila
!”
“
Voila
. That’s what he told his investors,” said Jason. “You suppose.”
Now she did smile. “Yes. But you didn’t ask the proper question.”
“And what is that?”
“Why, given everything, did not my Father acquire his steamboat much sooner?” She did not wait for him to ask it. “That would be because it is only now that Father feels his grand project is enough of a success to let the world in.”
Louise Butler pursed her lips and shook her head. “Really,” she said.
“No,” said Ruth. “It is true. The fact of the matter is that until now, dear Father could not be certain that regular traffic through his community might not pollute it. Why—if the land were not so well-prepared, venal men might arrive and bring with them their terrible vices! Things such as cards—hard liquor—low women—”
“Ruth!”
She waved away her friend’s objections without even looking at her.
“—and worst of all: dancing!”
Jason laughed and shook his head. He didn’t have much experience with young women, and at first Ruth had sure thrown him. But it was like learning a fancy a dance step, talking with her. And he thought he was beginning to get the rhythm of her humour.
“Sounds like your pa has some definite ideas,” he said.
“Oh, only good ideas. Resolutely, unwaveringly
good
ones. For the betterment of all mankind.”
“That so,” said Jason. “Then he and my aunt have something in common. Hello, Aunt Germaine.”
Germaine took her seat beside Jason and straightened her skirts as Ruth Harper went on.
“For instance: do you know that Eliada, which has just a few hundred men and their families living and working there, boasts its own hospital?”
“That,” said Jason, “I did know as a matter of fact.”
“Well. Here is something that you do not know. Any man or woman needing a doctor’s attention may receive it free of payment. At first, the hospital was only for those men who worked directly for my father, cutting trees or milling them. But in the past year, why—anyone in need is seen to. There are doctors and a surgery and many clean white rooms. And it is not even affiliated with a church! But financed from Father’s own purse!”
“Fancy that,” said Jason.
“My father is very enlightened. You need only ask him. Or failing that, his investors back in the east. They will tell you he is enlightened to a fault.”
“Providing free doctoring for folks that need it? There’s not much fault in that.”
“Except,” said Ruth, “when commerce is involved. Father says that by doing this, he is forestalling any of the ugly labour conflicts that beset so many of his competitors. The others are not so convinced.”
Sam Green shook his head, which caught Ruth’s attention.
“Why, just ask Mr. Green,” she said. “He supervises the Pinkerton men who keep the peace in Eliada. Not that they have much to do. Father does frown on violence so, and the men who work for him are not at all prone to it. Tell him, Mr. Green: all is well in fair Eliada, now and forever, and never must you so much as raise a fist to keep it so.”
Sam Green made a fist and cleared his throat into it. “Miss Harper,” he said, looking at them from under his bowler hat, “talk like that is a good way to make the Devil laugh.”
Ruth stifled a laugh herself.
“What are you saying, Mr. Green?”
“Only that things are not so peaceful as you might think.”
Ruth frowned. “Pray tell—?”
Sam Green gave a long sigh. “I am in dutch with your father, I fear.”
“Oh no! Why is that? Tell us your tale.”
“Well. I suppose that you will like the story better than him,” said Sam Green. “Just two days ago I shot three men, me and my fellows did—men dressed in sheets, in the manner of the Ku Klux Klan.”
“They were not merely impersonating spectres? To cause you and your men to take a fright?”
“Ruth, this sounds to be serious,” scolded Miss Butler.
Green shook his head. “They were readying to string up a nigg—a Negro.”
“A Negro.” Ruth’s eyebrows raised. “Do we have any of those?”
“Yeah,” said Sam Green. “One, anyhow. He’s a doctor, too. Saved him. That’s why your father hasn’t run me and the Pinkertons out of town yet. The saving balanced the killing. But I’m not sure that is going to do the town much good. Dr. Waggoner’s going to make trouble in Eliada. Once he gets to his feet, he’s going to make trouble.”
Ruth smiled radiantly. “Splendid!” she said. “Trouble in Paradise! Made by a Negro doctor hired by Father! And Mr. Thistledown, who is
not
a famous gunfighter’s son, here to witness it all with us! See, Louise? This will not be a wasted summer after all.”
Louise blushed and looked to her lap. Jason felt the crimson coming on as well. He looked to the riverbank, which was devoid of any sign of human touch. They were in wilderness altogether.
And the further they got, the more came Ruth Harper into her element. Jason wished he could say the same for himself. He found himself wishing again that they’d stayed put in Bonner’s Ferry. Klansmen and Negroes and gunplay: Eliada sounded like more of Cracked Wheel again, in its own particular way, and Jason was not sure he was ready for that.
Eliada came upon them late in the day. The rains had stopped, and the cloud was beginning to clear as they rounded the bend in the river that hid Mr. Harper’s grand town.
It was not a peaceful arrival. The river ran fast at the bend, and
The Eliada
rode it hard. They had been through a few of the Kootenai’s rapids by then so Jason was more used to it, but he still hung on tight as the boat pitched side to side, veering through white foam and close past shallow rocks.
He was not alone; even Ruth Harper, who was so clever and brave, so up for trouble at the start of a dull summer, sat clutching the edge of her seat as the water sprayed up high alongside and the beams of the boat complained.
“Huzzah,” she exclaimed weakly when the river deepened and the boat became more steady. “Are we home now? We are!”
Sure enough, there it was—contained as it was in a tantalizingly brief glimpse: a collection of rooftops and chimneys that peeked between a now much-thinner growth of trees lining the bank. The boat turned then and Eliada’s rooftops swung from view, so Jason made his way to the bow, and up a steep stair he’d found earlier. That stair took him to the top deck where the pilot worked his craft and he could get a look.
The early evening sun showed the town to good effect. It was built on a flat stretch of river valley so behind it, the hill and forest rose to a chain of peaks that were not quite high enough for snow and bare rock. Crawling up those slopes, Jason could make out plots that had been cleared for agriculture—even what looked like some young orchards, their little trees all planted in tidy rows. Closer, the gold light caught taller wooden buildings like the ones in Cracked Wheel—general stores and hotels and such. There were more of them, though. There were even a couple of whitewashed church steeples, climbing a bit higher than the roofs of the businesses.
They were all made insignificant by the sawmill. Near the water at the north end of town, the mill dominated all. It was not as high as that in Bonner’s Ferry. But it was high enough; and it sprawled all the way down to the water and its own set of docks—off which floated a wide crescent of logs, crossing all but a narrow channel of the river and chained in against its fast current.