Humbug Mountain (7 page)

I waited until we were alone, and told him that if it wasn't a rat, well, there was
someone
hiding down there. And keeping the machinery slick and clean.

“It could be the haunt Shagnasty John told us about,” I said.

“I never heard of a ghost cleaning and dusting,” Pa laughed. “More nonsense, Wiley. But come on. It could be your grandfather.”

I felt a surge of hope. Pa led the way. Once below, he threw open the engine-room door. He spied a square lantern hanging from a wall bracket, took it down, and struck a match to it. Pa appeared a bit surprised that there was enough oil in it to catch and light up.

He held it high as we poked through every corner of the engine room. But nothing showed itself. Nothing rustled. Nothing moved.

Pa
ran a finger along a valve rod. “It's been wiped down with oil,” he said, rubbing and feeling it between his thumb and fingertip. “Mighty strange.”

“It must be Grandpa!” I exclaimed.

“I doubt it. I've never known your grandfather to hide from anyone. He's pitched bigger ruffians than these two off his boat.”

Pa gave the machinery a final glance, blew out the lantern, and hung it up.

“Whoever is here, isn't here now,” he said.

Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer slicked down their hair before coming in to supper. Pa had lit the chandelier and we had all beat dust out of the faded red-velvet dining room chairs. And Glorietta was wearing her lost gold locket.

Ma had discovered it in the craw of one of the chickens. The hen had pecked it up way back in Mulesburg.

“M'am, I've eaten beaver, lizard, and coyote,” Shagnasty John said, eating with both hands. “But this fried chicken beats all!”

He gorged down drop biscuits whole. The Fool Killer cracked a chicken foot between his teeth and sucked the bones dry.

After a thunderous slurp of coffee, Shagnasty John said, “I expect you folks'll be up and gone shortly. Can't say I blame you. Nothing around here but this boat, and it ain't worth ten cents of God-help-you.”

“It'll do for the time being,” said Pa.

Shagnasty John gave the Fool Killer the merest sideways glance, and I barely caught a flicker of something secret between them. Every time the Fool Killer looked up from his plate, which was hardly at all, it was as if he reckoned us fools overripe for his bur-oak club.

“Miss Glorietta, pass back the biscuits,” Shagnasty John said in a merry tone of voice.

Glorietta glowered. “You're eating them all.”

“Am I? I declare, my dear.”

“I'm not your dear.”

“Well, spare me one more. Make it two or three. They tickle the throat something grand.”

I'd begun fooling with my mirror ring, glancing behind me at the wood-paneled wall and the fanlights of colored glass over the windows. I wondered what Quickshot Billy Bodeen would do if he were sitting in the main cabin with two ornery outlaws. Oh, he'd crack their heads together, I thought, and toss them in jail and be back for dessert. And if there wasn't a jailhouse handy, he'd build one.

Suddenly
my heart jumped a mile. The mirror ring caught the reflection of someone outside the window. I thought I glimpsed a face looking in, white as moonlight. I twisted my head and looked again. If my hair wasn't standing on end, it felt like it.

The window stood dark and empty.

Wasn't anyone at the table paying attention? Hadn't anyone seen the face! I looked across the table at Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer. If they'd seen anything they weren't letting on.

The haunt? But I didn't believe in ghosts, did I? I sat still, waiting for my breath to return and for the sudden coat of frost to melt off my skin.

I sat for a long time wondering what to do. Ma returned from the galley with dried-apple dessert. Maybe it had been the smell of hot food that lured the thing out of hiding. But haunts don't have to eat, I thought.

I looked at Pa. He'd be sorely disappointed in me if he thought I believed in ghosts. For certain it wasn't Grandpa I had seen. He'd have come roaring right in.

I kept my mouth shut. But by the time dinner was over, I had managed to snitch a chicken wing and two biscuits, wrapping them in the napkin on my lap. I'd find out if I'd seen a haunt or not.

Ma began collecting dishes off the table, and when she got around to Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer she said, “You two wash the dishes.”

Shagnasty John's cheeks flamed up like a prairie fire. “M'am, you're talking to desperate, no-souled, man-killing, bank-robbing outlaws! Apron work is not in our line!”

“It is tonight,” Ma said firmly.

“Doggone it, lady! That's goin' too far! We ain't had a wink of sleep all day the way you been ordering us around.”

“And tomorrow you can polish the brasswork.”

I managed to slip outside. I waited for my eyes to get used to the darkness. Clouds had drifted in and there wasn't a speck of starlight.

My heart thumping again, I felt my way to the stairs. I tried to imagine that I really was the sheriff of Sunrise and afraid of nothing. I slipped down to the freight deck and waited a moment, peering into the darkness all around me. It was not far to the engine room. I opened the door. The room was black. A team of oxen couldn't have dragged me inside.

I left the food just inside the door, and was quick getting myself back to the others. If the food was gone in the morning, there was a white-faced creature aboard—and hungry enough to come out of hiding. If the food was still in place, I reckoned, my mirror ring had caught sight of a genuine ghost.

By the time I returned, Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer had gathered up their bedrolls and belongings. They weren't going to stay aboard to wash dishes and polish doorknobs.

They were going to bed down in the cottonwoods. They went marching across the gangplank. The Fool Killer had fetched his bur-oak club and carried it on his shoulder.

Ma was smiling. “I thought I'd never persuade them to move off the boat.”

11

THE HUMBUG MOUNTAIN HOORAH

Great gusts of rain in the night rattled the pilothouse windows. Earlier in the day I'd announced I wanted to sleep in the wheelhouse and Ma had let me take my blankets up there. I wished I could change my mind when it came dark, but I didn't want to appear a coward.

I can't say I slept much. Broadsides of rain kept waking me. I thought about Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer. I imagined them stretched out in the mud and cussing the downpour. They might have come whimpering back aboard, like wet dogs, but I reckoned they were too proud and ornery for that. Or they were glad to be shed of the haunt aboard.

I felt scared myself and did wish I'd slept in one of the cabins, near Ma and Pa and Glorietta. I was glad when morning broke. By then the storm had tailed off, passing east over the prairie.

I watched through the windows for a while. With the
Phoenix
sunk to the bottom I couldn't look over the tops of the trees. But in the other direction I could see forever, and if I didn't know better I'd think the world was flat.

I stepped out onto the wet deck and didn't lose much time ankling down to the engine room. I took a turn on the brass knob and opened the door. The napkin lay neatly folded.

But the food was gone.

I stared at things. It wasn't rats who had got at the chicken and biscuits. Rats couldn't fold a napkin any more than a ghost.

No sir! Neither one. There was someone hiding aboard.

When I told Pa, he lowered his eyebrows thoughtfully. He said not to worry Ma and Glorietta about my discovery. A stranger aboard, prowling around at night, was enough to make anyone jumpy. Whoever it was, Pa calculated, he must have his own reasons for keeping himself out of sight. “Leaving a bit of food was clever of you, Wiley. That man's shy as a rabbit. When he discovers we mean him no harm it won't surprise me if he turns up big as life.”

Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer kept to the cottonwoods. Pa, with the pepperbox pistol in his coat pocket, himself carried them a pot of coffee and breakfast beans.

We spent the morning setting type and making up the pages of the newspaper. Ma pecked letters from the type drawer almost faster than the eye could follow. She said she was writing about “the Incredible Talking Crows of Sunrise.” Glorietta, at a different typecase,
wouldn't
say what she was up to. But she was smiling and humming to herself.

I held an empty typestick in my left hand, thinking awhile. Then I began setting a column inch or two about the gold locket found in the craw of the chicken. But I ran out of the letter
k
so I left out the word
locket.
I reckoned it didn't matter;
The Humbug Mountain Hoorah
wasn't a real newspaper with real news.

Every so often Shagnasty John yelled up from the cottonwoods. “Mornin' folks! Ain't our newspaper ready yet?”

Pa ignored him.

As our typesticks filled up, we transferred the lead letters to the composing stone. Pa had laid out two chases—cast-iron frames the size of the page—and with all of us setting type, the news columns grew fast.

Pa plugged up leftover space with advertisements he made up on the spot. With a maple block and mallet he leveled the type for printing and locked up the front page. He clamped the chase on the press and inked up the roller while the rest of us were still busy setting the back page.

The Humbug Mountain Hoorah
was going to be a single sheet, the size of a handbill, printed on both sides. Fifty copies, Pa said, would be enough. We didn't have paper to squander.

“Afternoon!” Shagnasty John called up. “What's keepin' you folks? Me and Fool Killer are rarin' to travel!”

When the newspapers came off the press, we stood around reading all the foolishment we had set in type. Ma shook her head and laughed. “No one with an ounce of sense is going to believe a word of it.”

GREAT EXCITEMENT! Outlaws Captured!

Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer Tried, Sentenced, and Hung!

Terrors of the Prairies Get their Necks Stretched.

Sheriff Wiley Flint makes daring,

single-handed arrest in Sunrise!

Pa filled two columns and a half with this brand of moonshine. I felt kind of embarrassed, but it was almost like reading a Quickshot Billy story. At the end Pa wrote:

After
Justice was done, the citizens of Sunrise showed admirable compassion for the departed desperados.

Tombstones made of solid blocks of ice were set over their graves.

“They'll need all the melted ice water they can get, where they're going,” explained Mr. Johnson, the justice of the peace.

Pa didn't mention that Mr. Johnson was a bull goose. Ma had finished her story with the claim that the Incredible Talking Crows spoke the King's English better than anyone else in the territories and were available for elocution lessons. Glorietta's story announced that Ma had just been elected mayor of Sunrise. Ma gave a little shriek of laughter when she read that.

When we had finished, Pa yelled down to the cottonwoods. “Come get your obituaries!”

I don't know how Shagnasty John had fished the pepperbox pistol out of Pa's coat pocket.

He came aboard, all smiles and friendliness, with the Fool Killer ambling along behind. They tracked muddy footprints on deck.

Pa handed over the stack of newspapers. “The ink's still wet,” he said. “But you'll see that I kept my word. Good day, gentlemen.”

“Well, not quite so fast,” Shagnasty John grinned. “Me and Fool Killer wouldn't want to be taken advantage of, Colonel. We'll just study it a bit and make sure you got it right.”

He licked his thumb, dealt off a single copy of
The Humbug Mountain Hoorah,
and shifted it back and forth in front of his nose until his eyes got the focus. Squinting hard, he commenced to read about the capture in a mumbling voice. He stumbled considerably and leaped over some words entirely. “Colonel,” he said, interrupting himself, “some of them paragraphs are thorny as a cactus patch. What is that pesky long word that keeps cropping up—
S-h-a-g-n-a-s-t-y
?”

“That's your name,” Pa said impatiently.

“I declare! I never saw it wrote out before.”

It took him so long I must have grown an inch before he got to the end. “Fool Killer,” he roared. “It says in white and black you and me are guaranteed dead—had our necks stretched
at
the end of a rope. Now, don't that cheer you up? Ain't nothing going to follow us now but our own shadows.”

The Fool Killer barely shrugged. His deep eyes fixed us with double-barreled shots of darkness.

“We're much obliged, Colonel,” Shagnasty John exclaimed. He rolled up the stack of newspapers and stuck them into a deep pocket of his bearskin coat. When his hand came out—there was the pepperbox pistol.

He spread his legs firmly, pointed the gun at us, and he wasn't smiling anymore. “Colonel, we weren't born in the woods to be bit by a fox. Directly we're gone you'll flap your coattails and inform the law that this here story is a bamboozle. Ain't that so, Fool Killer?”

The Fool Killer began to grin. Wider and wider. I remembered now the secret look the outlaws had traded at supper the night before. They'd had this in mind all along!

Pa straightened to his full height and viewed the men with such a wintery blast they ought to have suffered frostbite. “I had no such intention,” Pa said. “I see now that I misjudged you. I credited you with common intelligence. Smart enough to take full advantage of a man's word and handshake. It's clear now that one of you doesn't have the brains God gave geese, and the other is wearing a seven-dollar hat on a five-cent head.”