Brian Garfield (52 page)

“We will pursue the thieves, Bill.”

“No sir. Anyhow by now the boat's probably kindling and they're probably drowned or froze to death.”

“We will pursue them, by thunder! It's a matter of defending principle. To submit tamely and meekly to theft is to reward evil and encourage repetition of the offense. Great Scott, man!”

Uncle Bill flinched before the outburst. “That may be as you say. But there's a power of white water on this river.”

“I know that, but you two are used to this kind of navigation in Maine. You're so accomplished at handling boats in rough water I always suspected you had webbed feet.”

Wil Dow said, “We can't ride and we can't walk and we have no boat, so I don't rightly see how we can pursue them.”

“We shall simply have to build a boat,” said Roosevelt.

They fashioned a boat by stripping lumber from the ranch house. They nailed it together and caulked it with pitch. Wil Dow gave it a little run on a slack eddy in the river and with dubious faith pronounced it serviceable.

“They've got a mighty jump on us,” grumbled Uncle Bill. “No chance to catch them now.”

“We may fail,” Roosevelt replied, “but it won't be for want of trying. We'll go now. By George, old fellows, this will be a grand adventure!”

Uncle Bill caught Wil's attention. Then he rolled his eyes toward the sky.

They loaded provisions and Roosevelt's camera and a knapsack full of books, armed themselves and gave chase.

With Uncle Bill in the bow steering and Wil aft at the oars and Roosevelt athwart the boat with his rifle at the ready they made slow advance through great slabs of broken ice that had tumbled over one another in wild confusion. The chinook had scoured the hills and left them bare and grey, scarred by washouts where the clay was still dark from melted snow that had run off and swollen the river.

The temperature kept dropping. Uncle Bill sat forward, hands on gunwales, swaying his body-weight to balance the boat as it breasted ridges of white water.

The wind in Wil's face was ice-cold and he said, “Likely have this breeze in our faces all day.”

“That would have to be the crookedest wind in history,” Uncle Bill replied.

Along one stretch a coal vein was on fire high above them. It burned for more than a quarter of a mile, at the end of which a great boulder tipped ominously from a precarious overhang; sure enough it did tumble into the river and they had scarcely gone past it at the time. The plunging rock made a tidal wave that lifted the boat ten feet and nearly swamped it.

They came around a bend into a gale blowing straight upstream. Funneled into a howling rush by the narrowing cliffs it roiled the water into a froth that stood higher than Wil could believe. He heard Uncle Bill say, “That looks pretty saucy.”

Wil said, “We can weather it if we lay the boat about right.”

“Give it your all, boys!” Roosevelt's voice, and subsequent coughing fit, were all but lost in the racket as the strong wind met the current hard enough to make a vertical wall of water. The boat met the bared teeth of the gale; knifed into the white wall and rocked and shuddered. Foam soaked Wil's every pore. The homemade skiff took on more water than he believed she could hold; but she came through the roil without striking rock and when they wheeled into the lee of the cliffs they were still afloat and it was time to start bailing with their hats.

Sewall said calmly, “I believe that is the swiftest run I've ever had.”

The boss said, “By Godfrey, that was fun!”

They camped at dark with no sign that the fugitives were within reach. Wil and his uncle put up the tent. The three of them huddled inside under the post lantern. Roosevelt kept busy reading
Anna Karenina
with keen interest and writing for energetic hours in his Benton biography. Wil shivered and thought that after all, much as he hated to admit it, Uncle Bill was right. This cowboying was not a pleasant sort of life. It was time to get back to a civilized country where you could trust the climate and the animals and the human creatures as well.

Roosevelt put away his writing box. He grinned at Wil. “Self-reliance is a quality I deem fundamental.”

Wil thought,
I shall hit him with my fist if I hear one more “By Godfrey this is fun!
”

On the third day they found the stolen Mackinaw boat.

It was tethered to a rock near a clump of undersized cotton woods. The ferocious current nearly carried them past it but they made a landing.

Roosevelt was first ashore, as they all leaped from the boat brandishing rifles and revolvers. Campfire smoke curled up from the lee of the cottonwoods. Uncle Bill had a quick look at the Mackinaw boat and nodded his head, pronouncing it sound. Roosevelt pointed toward the cooksmoke. Then he jabbed his rifle first to the right, then to the left, indicating that he wanted them to disperse and converge upon the camp. They separated to move inland. Feeling the beat of his pulse, Wil cocked both hammers of his ten-gauge Parker. There were sixteen buckshot in each cartridge—enough to mince a man.

He crept among the bushes.

When his hands were ready to fall off in ice splinters he heard Roosevelt's loud high-pitched cry: “Put up your hands!”

Hurrying around from behind the cottonwoods Wil caught the sorry sight of Dutch Reuter at the campfire, hands in the air quivering.

Roosevelt's voice ran forward out of the trees: “Are you alone here?”

“Right now I am.”

“Dutch, what on earth are you doing here?”

“To get warm trying.”

“Well old fellow, I advise you to offer no resistance.”

“Yah. All right.”

Dutch seemed sheepish, and in a way glad to see them. Uncle Bill ventured out of the woods. When his appearance drew no fire he advanced into the camp.

“You look underfed, Dutch.”

“Not much food. Three weeks on the run I have been.”

Wil came out. Roosevelt said to Dutch, “We are going to have to take your weapons,” and when there was no objection Wil helped his uncle disarm Dutch—two holster guns, a pocket pepperbox, a big knife and a little knife and a rifle leaning against a stump.

Roosevelt kneeled down to put wood on the fire and said, “Dutch, you are a blue-rumped ape. I had not hoped to meet you again in circumstances such as these.”

Dutch rolled a smoke and accepted the chastisement without comment.

Uncle Bill said, “It ever occur to you about the irony in stealing a boat that belongs to the very man who saved your life more than once just lately?”

Dutch said, “Shut up, Bill.”

“The devil I will. Who's with you?”

“Red and Frank.” That would be Finnegan and O'Donnell.

“And I guess you'd be on the run from the Stranglers?”

“Yah,” said Dutch. “They us on the list put.”

“That's no justification for stealing a boat that isn't your property,” said Roosevelt.

“Yes sir.” Dutch offered no argument.

Wil said, “Finnegan and O'Donnell. Where are they?”

“Hunting. Food.”

Uncle Bill said, “Keep the fire burning. They'll be back.”

They waited in ambush. The chinook had died; the air was still and cold. There was no sound except the lash of the river and a grinding of pack ice.

Tight with strain Wil listened for sounds and kept thinking of the things that could go wrong. He mistrusted the silence; he strained his ears against it and half a dozen times thought he heard things but there was nothing and then suddenly without warning Redhead Finnegan was there, looming in the twilight as apparitious as if he were hanging from a gallows.

Frank O'Donnell was right behind Finnegan.

They walked silently into the camp. Finnegan carried a snowshoe rabbit by its hind feet. They weren't expecting trouble; they hadn't seen anything to alarm them. Dutch sat morosely by the fire and did not look up.

Roosevelt said, “Hold up.”

“Guns all around you, boys,” said Uncle Bill.

Wil said, “Over here too.”

O'Donnell stood motionless. Finnegan, rifle across his left forearm, seemed undecided.

Roosevelt stepped into sight. Wil followed suit and he saw Uncle Bill step forward from the trees.

O'Donnell said to Roosevelt, “Doing the Stranglers' job for them now, are you.” But upon Uncle Bill's gesture he dropped his rifle readily enough.

Finnegan stood at the focal point, near the fire. He had not relinquished his rifle. After a long interval he said with pathetic bravado, “Hell, a man's got to die sometime.”

“We are prepared to shoot you down if you offer trouble.” Roosevelt's teeth flashed—a white rectangle across his weather-darkened face.

Finnegan took his right off the grip of his rifle. He dragged his hand over his face, rubbing hard, as if to scrub his features away. He looked over his shoulder. “Frank …”

Frank O'Donnell gave a haggard little wave from down by his hip to indicate that he meant to stay out of it.

Redhead Finnegan's head swung heavily from side to side. His darkly matted hair swung back and forth under his hat. Wil caught the hard killer glint in his gaze. The stretching moment was taut with uncertainty.

Uncle Bill said mildly, “Red, maybe you remember how we all saw how that fellow Calamity tried to fight the drop and died for his trouble? I still kind of remember how slippery the ground got underfoot with his blood. Is that a mistake you care to imitate?”

Finnegan brooded more and at the end uttered a deep hollow sigh. “I guess not,” he murmured, and let the rifle slide to the ground.

They searched the two thieves and relieved them of an arsenal. Uncle Bill borrowed Wil's double-barrel and Wil said, “If you're going to use that to cover them, be careful with it. The right-hand barrel goes off when you don't mean it to.”

“If it happens to go off it'll make more difference to them than to me,” Uncle Bill replied. He turned his head toward Roosevelt. “Now we've got them. What'll we do with them?”

“What do you suggest?”

Cautiously Uncle Bill muttered, “Some might say why not just shoot them down
ley fuga?
”

“Because we are not murderers,” Roosevelt said. “Wil—your suggestion?”

“Well I suppose they ought to be hanged, sir, but I don't know.”

“What makes you hesitate?”

“Well Dutch has been a friend of ours and all.”

“And that makes him less guilty than if he were a stranger?”

“Well I guess not, sir.”

“And so?”

“I don't like the idea of hanging people, Mr. Roosevelt. There's got to be some kind of difference between us and the Stranglers.”

“Bully. Bully for you. You have grown up a great deal, Wil. You're absolutely right. Now there'll be no more talk of shooting or lynching—unless they should be so foolish as to make a break for it. I assume everyone understands me clearly? We'll take these three in with us and surrender them to the lawfully constituted authorities and they'll be prosecuted in a court of law.”

“So's the Stranglers can hang us proper,” said Finnegan.

Roosevelt said, “You have our protection against the Stranglers, Mr. Finnegan.”

That made Finnegan laugh aloud.

Before they lost the light entirely Roosevelt set up his glass-plate camera and had Wil and Uncle Bill take pictures of Roosevelt holding the three boat thieves at rifle-point. The capture of the thieves, Roosevelt said, would make a good chapter for his new book about the West.

Handling the prisoners was not as difficult as Wil had at first feared. O'Donnell did as he was told. Dutch was eager to oblige—anything Roosevelt wanted of him. As for Finnegan he ignored the proceedings; he seemed disgusted with himself.

That evening the temperature dropped to around zero. Wil supervised while the prisoners gathered firewood. It was too cold to tie their hands; they'd have got the frost. Roosevelt took their boots away from them and put the three prisoners on the far side of the fire and told them not to come across it or they'd be shot. The prisoners rolled up in buffalo robes and did not look eager to bolt barefoot through the frozen spiny wilderness, but all the same, by Roosevelt's decree, the three captors took turns standing night-guard.

That first night Wil watched until midnight, then Roosevelt until daybreak; next night Uncle Bill would take the first watch, then Wil; so forth. In that manner every third night one of them would get to sleep all the way through. Except that Roosevelt never slept very much anyway. He was always reading a book or writing one. Or keeping up with his correspondence with his sister and Miss Carow—for, Wil had learned, that was the name of Roosevelt's constant correspondent in New York. Miss Edith Carow. Must be a warm and tender romance there, judging by the ever increasing frequency and thickness of the letters they exchanged. Wil wondered what she was like, this Edith Carow.

In the morning they assembled at the roaring bank. Bill Sewall contemplated the heaving froth. “What now?”

“Downriver, old fellow. No choice.”

“Nobody knows where this river goes. Where we are right now—the map says the river's fifteen miles from here. Nobody has done a survey. It's guesswork. We could hit a hundred-foot waterfall around any bend.”

“Then keep your ears open, that's a good chap.” Roosevelt's grin was luminous.

They headed downstream in both boats. Almost immediately they ran into an enormous ice jam that held them back for hours. All they could do was follow it at its own petty pace. “Maybe we'll get a warmer thaw,” Wil suggested.

“And maybe if my aunt had wheels she'd be a buckboard,” Uncle Bill said.

Each time they touched shore Frank O'Donnell would think about trying to make a break; sometimes he actually tried. He never got more than three or four paces before a loud word would bring him up short. Dutch Reuter was ashamed of himself and tried nothing. Redhead Finnegan, oddly, seemed remorseful and sad—evidently not because he felt guilty of any crime but because he was disgusted with himself for having got caught.