Buffalo Bill Wanted! (5 page)

Owens shrugged again. “As much as you'd need to slice a man's hair off ?” he asked. “Maybe he's the Indian who attacked the constable.”

“That copper was already wounded. He couldn't have stopped whoever scalped him,” Wiggins replied. “His attacker wasn't brave. He was a coward.”

Owens slowly nodded. “So, I say we go to the exhibition grounds and nose around some more.”

Moving southwest, the boys hitched rides on the backs of wagons and carriages until they jumped off only a short walk from the exhibition grounds.

“I hope you've been thinking up some sort of plan on the way here,” Owens said as they got closer to the exposition. “Do you plan to tell the ticket taker we're personal friends of Buffalo Bill?” He grinned. “Or do we hope they're moving another buffalo in?”

Wiggins didn't have a plan, but as they arrived at the exhibition grounds, they quickly saw that wouldn't have mattered. All bridges leading to the show grounds—and to the tent village—were guarded by groups of police constables.

“What are they all doing here?” Owens asked.

Wiggins sighed. “We heard Mr. Pryke shooting his mouth off to Inspector Desmond about Americans in general—and the Wild West show folk in particular. I'll bet he's been stirring up others as well. Maybe it would be a good idea to keep people out.”

Owens abruptly nudged him. “There are a couple of familiar folks.”

Wiggins quickly spotted a short figure in a dapper suit talking with a taller, bronze-skinned figure in rough clothes. “Nate Salsbury and Silent Eagle,” he said.

Even from a distance, Wiggins could see that the two men clearly weren't having a friendly chat. At last, Salsbury abruptly turned away and walked off through the police guards. When Silent Eagle went to follow, the constables turned him back. The Indian vanished into the tented area.

“Looks as if the idea is to keep
some
people in,” Owens said in a dry voice.

“Just yesterday, you were carrying on about the way Indians scalped people,” Wiggins growled. “Is it any wonder the coppers would be suspicious?”

“Buffalo Bill took some scalps too,” Owens replied. “I wonder if the coppers are keeping
him
in?”

There was no way to answer that, just as there was nothing they could do here. As the boys turned away, however, Wiggins caught a hint of movement from the corner of the lot where the performers' tents stood. He spotted a human figure drop from the top of the wall that enclosed the Wild West show area. The man slid down the steep embankment to the railway tracks, where he disappeared from the boys' sight. Seconds later, he swung himself over the top of the fence on their side of the tracks, dropping lightly to the pavement.

The boys looked toward the nearest group of policemen. Obviously, they'd noticed nothing. Wiggins and Owens stared as the escaping man paused to tuck long, black hair under a scruffy hat. He ran off, but there was no mistaking the hawk-like face they'd seen—it was Silent Eagle.

The question was, what was he up to?

Evening was coming on by the time the boys got back to the East End. Wiggins could feel a strange kind of energy in the neighborhood even before he spotted teams of men slapping large handbills on every space they could find.

It took both boys working together to figure out the words on the top line of the handbill. “ ‘Monster rally,' ” Wiggins said finally. But there was a lot more to decipher.

“I think we may need to show this to Jennie,” Owens said.

After glancing to see that the handbill crew had moved along, Wiggins yanked down the still-damp paper.

“So . . . let's find her,” he said.

They checked several places before finding Jennie at the Raven Pub. She sat grim-faced in the back room, Dooley at her side, an evening newspaper spread before them.

“Da ended up working late after all.” Dooley tried to hide his disappointment with a smile. “Then on the way home, I heard the newsboys—”

“And I bought another paper.” Jennie thumped a hand down on the newsprint. “Somehow, our friend Mr. Pryke must have gotten a look at Inspector Desmond's report from the hospital. According to this newspaper, he's accusing Buffalo Bill of smuggling, bringing savages into Britain, attacking people . . . just about everything but trying to overthrow the Crown.”

“Give him time,” Owens said.

Wiggins produced the handbill they'd taken down. “I suppose that's what this is all about.”

Jennie looked it over. “It's not as long-winded as the things he told the newspaper reporters, but otherwise it's about the same. Smuggling. No respect for law. Savage behavior. And he's inviting everyone to a mass meeting to discuss it tonight.”

Wiggins picked up the handbill. “Then that's where we should be.”

Just after nightfall, crowds of men appeared, whooping it up and waving burning torches as they marched through the East End. They congregated for the meeting in Stepney, at an open area called Arbour Square. Wiggins and the other members of the Raven League followed their friends and neighbors. Most of the people around them seemed to treat the proceedings as a sort of holiday, laughing and larking about.

“I don't see any of our folks here,” Wiggins observed.

“You won't catch my ma at one of these,” Owens replied. “Pryke doesn't spend much time in the West Indian and Hindu neighborhoods. Guess he's not ‘one of
us
' ”

Wiggins caught sight of a familiar figure standing at the edge of the growing crowd. He nudged Owens. “Isn't that your friend Mr. Shears?”

Shears was a local barber who'd served in the army with Owens's father. After the older Owens had died in battle, Shears had befriended the whole Owens family. Right now, he stood with his hands on his hips, looking as if he'd just tasted a particularly sour persimmon.

“Mr. Shears!” Owens said as they came closer. “What brings you out here?”

His smile of greeting dimmed a bit. “I came to hear what that
fellow
has to say.” From the look on the barber's face, Wiggins knew Mr. Shears had wanted to call Pryke some other name.

“I knew Jemmy Pryke when he had a rathole of an office, earning a dubious living by trying to keep burglars from going to prison,” Shears said. “Then all of a sudden he was standing for Parliament as ‘J. Montague Pryke, friend of the working man.' ”

Shears shook his head. “His whole life, he was just a mouth working for whoever crossed his palm with silver. That's what he's still doing, though I don't know where the money comes from.”

Jennie frowned. “You think someone is paying for all this?”

“Could be.” Mr. Shears shrugged. “Sometimes he does this to make himself look important. East Enders are Pryke's favorite audience. Folk round here are poor enough—ignorant enough—angry enough—to swallow his kind of ‘oratory.' ”

J. Montague Pryke began his speech. He started off sounding reasonable. But his voice began to rise as he called up every argument the British had had with their American cousins since the colonies broke away in 1776. Americans, it seemed, were just naturally greedy, crude, and treacherous in general. And when it came to Buffalo Bill and his performers in particular, Pryke painted an even worse picture. Colonel Cody and the cowboys represented some sort of nasty subhumans not fit to live in decent society. The Indians were even worse.

“They're a degenerate race that refuses to be civilized and that treats civilized folk with the utmost savagery,” Pryke shouted. “But when this Yankee brings his freak show to London—to the center of world civilization—what happens? Thirty to forty thousand people pack each performance. He dines with the finest in the land and sends millions back to America. Is this right?”

Faces red, eyes bulging, torches shaking, the crowd shouted, “NO!”

“But is Cody content? No! He unleashes his pet savages on the very symbol of decent, civilized London life—one of the honest bobbies who work to protect us all. Will we stand for this?”

For Wiggins, like most East Enders, the less he had to do with the coppers, the better. But now, his neighbors were ready to die for this injured constable.
And I'd be yelling right beside them,
he realized with some embarrassment,
except I met Buffalo Bill and saw what sort of man he is. I saw Silent Eagle risk his life calming that buffalo to save a crowd of people he didn't even know —people who would mock him as an ignorant savage.

He looked to see his friends' reactions. Jennie's lips were tight. “My friend Jacob told me stories about meetings like this in Russia,” she said. “Afterward, the people took their torches to burn down the Jewish part of town.”

“Happens here too,” Owens added grimly.

Wiggins didn't know what to say to that, so he turned away. Then he froze, staring.

Owens noticed. “What is it?”

Wiggins jerked his head off to the left. “I recognize someone over there. Natty Blount.” Natty had been a pickpocket when Wiggins brought him into the Baker Street Irregulars, the boys who did odd jobs for Sherlock Holmes. But he became another kind of thief, stealing control of the Irregulars from Wiggins. Owens's hand tightened on Wiggins's shoulder as he spotted Blount not twenty feet from them, waving a torch and yelling his head off.

Seeing the petty thief who had wrecked the Baker Street Irregulars filled Wiggins with familiar anger —and sudden suspicion. He began searching the crowd for other faces he knew.

They were easy enough to spot—shorter figures, all of them waving torches. Once they had been Sherlock Holmes's eyes and ears all over London. Now they were just another gang of street toughs. They cared nothing for politics or patriotism, just cold, hard cash. If they were here, they were here for money and no other reason.

“Pryke ain't alone in whipping up the crowd,” Wiggins told the others. “He's got a mob for hire helping him.”

Jennie's eyebrows drew together. “I wonder what that means?”

Wiggins and Owens exchanged worried looks. “It means,” Wiggins said slowly, “that someone is out to cause trouble for Colonel Cody and the Americans.”

Chapter 6

“ARCHIBALD WIGGINS! WHERE ARE YOU GOING?” Wiggins's mother stood in the doorway of their rooms, her hands on her hips and a grim expression on her face. “I've been baking all night. The least you could do is deliver these orders for me this morning.”

“I know, Mam,” Wiggins replied sheepishly. “But I have to meet the lads—uh, Jennie and the others. Something important has—”

“Not so important that you can slack off on your chores around here.”

“But—”

His mother raised a disapproving eyebrow, and the corners of her lips curled down. It was a look that Wiggins knew too well. His mother would tolerate no more debate. Selling her baked goods was their only source of income since Wiggins's father had died. Wiggins knew that the little money he made running errands for other people did not amount to much. Not even his work for Mr. Sherlock Holmes excluded him from helping her when she needed him.

Wiggins trotted back up the stairs and into their room. “Sorry, Mam,” he said with an apologetic grin. “Where did you want me to deliver those goodies?”

The two errands didn't really take too long. As he jogged along the cobblestone streets toward the last shopkeeper, Wiggins realized that the small detour was actually useful to him.

Everywhere he looked, Wiggins saw handbills posted up by Pryke's supporters. Here and there, small groups of agitated people stood reading the handbills and discussing the message.

Though Wiggins couldn't read them himself, he gathered from the others that the bills spoke angrily against what they called an American “infestation. ” They even suggested that the London constabulary was coddling people of prestige and influence.

Wiggins shook his head with disgust. Like Mr. Holmes, he had never cared much about politics. All the titles and speeches were just so much noise to him. But after the Raven League's first adventure, Wiggins had begun to put faces to the names in government. After all, he'd met the queen of England. He'd also met assassins and learned that there were spies—even in the British government.

Winding his way toward the Raven Pub, Wiggins continued to think about the case at hand. If someone was out to hurt Buffalo Bill and his show, or any Americans, they might be planning to use East Enders to do their dirty work. And later, when the law demanded justice, it would be the East Enders who would pay.

If that was the case, what could he and the League do to stop them? The last time they'd had Sherlock Holmes on their side. Should they go to the detective?

Wiggins reached a decision when he finally met up with Jennie and the others in the back room of the Raven Pub.

“You're late,” Jennie scolded. “What kept you?”

“I'll explain along the way,” Wiggins replied. “Right now, we're paying a call on Buffalo Bill. I got his address, but we have a ways to go.”

In a few minutes, the four were hurrying westward along Mile End Road. Wiggins quickly told them about the handbills and what he had heard.

“Yeah,” Dooley said, nodding in agreement. “I was out early shining shoes of folks going to work. I heard them talking about this all morning long.”

“I heard the same from the roughs hanging about the streets,” Wiggins added. “They're saying Cody and the other savages should leave London.” He glanced over at Owens, who hadn't cracked a joke or made a comment. “Have you heard anything?”