Humbug Mountain (10 page)

The sky flashed and thundered, and the wind about took off the roof of the wheelhouse. Mr. Jim Chitwood scurried for cover from his harebrained gold-prospecting, and Ma rented him a cabin. The rain turned to great whistling balls of hail and a couple of other men turned up to warm themselves around the stove in the main cabin.

“Shucks, there's no gold strike around here,” Mr. Chitwood scoffed at them. It appeared to me he was trying to deceive them into clearing out. But they didn't believe him any more than they did us. Ma rented them cabins, too.

“The
Phoenix
is turning into a regular hotel,” she smiled. She seemed glad to be busy with things. Ma had a way of carrying her feelings locked up tight.

I kept pretty much to the pilothouse. During the worst of the storm it felt like being on a ship at sea. At times I couldn't see ten feet. I read my Quickshot Billy books all over again. But I was drawn back to the windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of Pa returning.

And then we woke up to clear, fresh skies. The earth began to steam under the sun. Mr. Chitwood lost no time making for his gold diggings. The other two men went dogging after him, and other strangers began turning up.

But not Pa.

I began to feel all thundery inside. How could he turn his back on us again? How could he be that way? Words I didn't want to think stormed about in my head. He was a cussed father. I didn't care a hoot if he never came back. Ever!

Glorietta wandered up to the pilothouse. We didn't say anything. One look and I could
tell
that she had been crying in her sleep again.

She spent a long time staring out the windows, due west. Finally, in a tight voice, she said, “Mr. Slathers wants to go back to Wolf Landing and fetch Pa. Ma won't let him. Let it be, she said. Why won't she let him? Is that what Pa does when he's gone? Locks himself up in a hotel room?”

“I don't know.” I shrugged and picked up my potato sack. Did Pa think it was enough to palm us off on Mr. Slathers? “It doesn't matter. We can get along without Pa.”

I didn't know that Ma had come up and was standing in the doorway. “Wiley, don't say a thing like that.”

I spun and red-hot anger spit out of me. “I hate him!”

Ma hardly lifted an eyebrow. She stood looking at us both and acting infernally calm. “Pa has his reasons. He'll turn up with a smile on his lips and a tip of his hat. That's the way it's always been. You know your father.”

“No I don't!” I said. I threw the gunnysack over my shoulder and left.

We could make our living with buffalo bones, I told myself. Me and Glorietta and Ma. I dumped the sack and wandered about again to fill it up.

It wasn't long before a pack of men hailed me from a swiftly floating raft. They were looking for Sunrise. I guessed there was no use telling them about Glorietta's gold locket, but I tried and they just laughed.

With the weather cleared, it wasn't ten minutes before I saw another three men trudging about. A sudden idea all but lifted me out of my boots. If they were so anxious to start using their picks and shovels maybe they could dig the Missouri River back where it belonged—and refloat Grandpa's boat!

“Over that way,” I called out, pointing. “At the end of the dry riverbed. Not a bit of gold, but that's where the other miners are digging.”

All that day men kept flocking in, and I kept pointing them to the old riverbed. By the next day gold-seekers were turning up in heaps and hordes, just as Mr. Jim Chitwood said they would. Some of them had come with tents, but others had been in too much of a rush. Ma rented out every cabin on the
Phoenix.

Mr. Slathers set out baited hooks every afternoon and in the mornings there'd almost always be a catfish or two to haul in. He showed me how to skin them. “Can't tell,” he said. “Those fools in the dry bed might turn up another lump of gold. We had a deckhand picked himself up after a fight—lost a gold tooth.”

The pile of bones was beginning to look like something. As often as not I'd find the crows sitting on top waiting for me.

“Fool Killer!”

“Hang'm!”

“Wiley!”

That caught me up short. Mr. Slathers! I thought. He'd taught the bull crow my name!

Every so often I'd stand at the dry riverbank and gaze at the men scrambling after gold. They swung picks in great arcs. Shovel loads of earth flew. Tents had sprung up along the bluffs like mushrooms after a rain. An army of men! And more rushing in from every direction.

One day Mr. Jim Chitwood, carrying his birchbark canoe over his head and shoulders like a tortoise shell, climbed the bluff and stomped past me.

“I'm clearing out,” he said. “No blasted gold here.”

“We tried to tell you,” I said.

“Rumsquaddled!” he scowled.

He headed off toward the river. I was glad to see the last of that bandy-legged man with his stuck-out ears.

I went about my business. My gunnysack was about full and I headed for the bone pile. I reached the spot where the dead man was buried.

The hand was sticking up again.

It rose in plain sight and gave me a start. You'd think it had clawed its way out of the ground.

Only the rainstorm, I thought. Must be. The rain had washed away the loose dirt. I shouldn't let the thing spook me that way.

I dropped to my knees to cover it up again.

“Wiley!”

That bull crow, I thought, perched way off on the bone pile.

But the voice came again, closer this time, and not a crow voice at all.

“What you got there, Wiley?”

I turned. It was Pa, with a smile on his lips and a touch of his hat.

16

THE PETRIFIED MAN

I gave Pa a lightning flash of eyes and turned my back again. He'd been gone for eleven confounded days, but from his easy manner you'd think he'd only been out for a ten-minute stroll.

“That looks like a dead man,” he said.

I picked up my heavy gunnysack and started away.

“Hold on, Wiley,” he called softly.

“You're back. I can see that, sir.”

“And you're angry. I can see that, too. I'd be surprised if you weren't.”

I shrugged a little, my back still to him.

“I found another Quickshot Billy nickel novel over in Wolf Landing,” he said. “It's kind of dog-eared and mouse-nibbled and not worth reading, but I thought you'd like to have it.”

“You thought wrong.” My insides were churning. I'd never talked to him that way before. “I'm too old for those infernal dumb stories anymore.”

“I see. Ma tells me you and Glorietta have gone into the buffalo-bone business. Enterprising. That's mighty enterprising. I'm proud of you both, Wiley.”

“I've got a mess of work to do,” I said.

“And I don't mean to keep you. But I declare, Wiley, that piece you wrote in
The Humbug Mountain Hoorah
certainly increased the population of Sunrise! All that amazing activity in the riverbed! I thought at first I'd come home to the wrong place. It wouldn't hurt if you turned around and looked at me. I'd be obliged, Wiley.”

I took my time swinging around. I was trying to hang on to all my anger and at the same time trying to keep the water from rising to my eyes. “You needn't have rushed back for us,” I said, doing my best to match his own loose and easy manner. “Hardly missed you. Me and Ma and Glorietta can take care of ourselves. We've done it before.”

“Know that. Knew you could. It eases my mind, Wiley.” He threw up the collar of his corduroy coat against the wind blowing off the river. “Truth is, your father's a shiftless, no-account, here-and-there sort of man. It pains me to admit it. I'm downright sorry.”

That wasn't the truth. Not the whole truth, I thought. I stood glaring at him, and my ears felt crisp in the wind. He was being careful to dodge the real reason. He wasn't saying a word about locking himself in the hotel room. But I made the mistake of looking into his eyes, kind of wet but holding steady on me, and the stove-hot anger inside me began to cool.

“I don't much enjoy the sight of that dead hand,” he said with a sudden grin. He was clearly glad to change the subject.

I took a long breath. “I didn't say you were no-account. Didn't think it, either.”

“That man was thrown into an uncommonly shallow grave.”

“Or shiftless, either.”

“We ought to bury him properly.”

I tried to wipe my nose on my sleeve without appearing to. “That man's solid as stone.”

“You don't say.”

I dropped the sack and tapped the dead hand with a stick. Pa cocked an ear to the hard sound.

“Stiffer'n a goose on ice,” he said. “I declare.”

He began scooping away the earth and pretty soon I was right there helping him. We uncovered a narrow, old face with shut
eyes
and hollow cheeks.

I said, “Looks like it could be an Indian.”

“Might be.” Pa snapped a finger against the man's sharp chin. Then he looked over at me. “Mummified.”

“I expect so.”

“Do you know what you found?”

“It was Mr. Johnson who found him first.”

Under the knife-edge hat brim, Pa's eyes were alive with excitement. “Wiley, we'll have to publish another edition of
The Humbug Mountain Hoorah.
A story like this could be the making of Sunrise. Those misled goldseekers will pack up one of these days soon, but other folks will come flocking.”

“To look at a scruffy old mummy?”

“It's not a mummy,” Pa said. “Must have been buried for an eternity, this man. And turned to stone. Wiley, what we're looking at is a
petrified man
!”

17

“SINNERS ONLY”

It was a week before we got out the next issue of
The Humbug Mountain Hoorah.
First we had to dig up the petrified man.

“Careful, careful now,” said Mr. Slathers as we pried the creature out of his grave. “We don't want the gentleman breaking like a vase.”

“Remarkable,” Pa said. “Not even a toe missing.”

The petrified man was no taller than Glorietta. Not even as tall as I, it appeared to me. But he
was
monstrously heavy. We bundled him up in canvas and Mr. Slathers lashed him to a pair of long boat poles. It took hours to drag him to the
Phoenix,
and it was a mighty struggle to get him aboard. All Glorietta and I could do was try to steady him. It would be awful if he broke now.

“Aft on the cabin deck's a good place for him,” Mr. Slathers said, and that's where they laid him out. Ma came over to have a look. “Horrors,” she muttered.

“It's a great scientific discovery,” Pa said.

“Well, don't expect me to keep him dusted.”

It wasn't long before the miners sleeping aboard took to striking matches on his stone foot to light their pipes.

“That won't do,” Pa said. “Wiley, with the cabins full I think you're going to have to share the pilothouse.”

“With
that?”
I exclaimed, shooting a look at the creepy, dead-cold figure.

“I'll admit he's not going to be the most sociable companion. On the other hand, he won't keep you awake snoring. And he'll be safe. An aborigine, from the looks of him. Might be two, three thousand years old.”

“We can cover him with a sheet,” Glorietta said.

I tossed her a glance. I didn't want her to think the sight of that ancient dead man rattled me. “Oh, it's just a hunk of stone,” I said. “No need to cover him.”

It took ropes and all of us pulling to haul the mighty weight of him up the stairway. Once inside the pilothouse Pa and Mr. Slathers stood the petrified man at a corner window so I wouldn't trip over him in the dark. His eyes were tight shut, like someone asleep. Even then it was as if he were gazing out at the miners in the dry riverbed tearing up the earth. I wondered
what
thoughts had turned to stone in his head.

“Colonel,” said Mr. Slathers. “If we could get some of those men to help us we've got cut lumber aboard for a ten-room hotel. Give some of the poor fools out there a roof over their heads.”

But the miners were in such a gold fever that none of them was willing to lay down his pick and shovel and lend a hand. Pa and Mr. Slathers and Glorietta and I began toting lumber and rolling kegs of nails ashore.

The trouble was, Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer had burned the blueprints.

“It's going to take some doing to figure out what goes where,” said Mr. Slathers. “And they burned up sticks of lumber with the blueprints. Pieces of the hotel are going to turn up missing.”

We meant to start with the hotel, but it turned out to take on more of the shape of an opera house. Pa and Mr. Slathers kept sorting through the lumber and started another building.

“I do believe this piece belongs to the hotel,” Pa said.

“If it fits, nail it down.”

Glorietta and I helped try to sort out the puzzle of studs, windows, and doors. Ma too, when she and Pa weren't setting type for the newspaper. But it wasn't long before Mr. Slathers stood back to study the two buildings going up.

“Colonel, I think we've got a hotel that's part opera house, and an opera house that's part hotel.”

Pa tipped back his hat. “Opera house,” he muttered. “Then there must be an asbestos curtain to go with it.”

“Of course there is. All rolled up.”

“Fine. Splendid!” I knew the look in Pa's eyes. Some rollicking idea had come to him. “I've a two-inch hole to fill in the newspaper. And I know just how to fill it.”

With fourteen miners sleeping aboard and taking breakfast and supper with us, Ma was running out of food again. It was mostly catfish every day. I'm certain we snared a rabbit now and then, but the men living along the riverbank stole them out from under us. Ma's chickens might have disappeared too if she hadn't penned them up on the freight deck. Mr. Johnson, too. The idea of roast goose must have set many a mouth to watering. The only times Ma marched them ashore to grub around was when we were hammering away at the hotel and opera house, and could keep an eye on them.