He wouldn’t turn me loose all the way, but he motioned them fellers to back off, which they done. And right there, standing at the fence, with him gripping my arm tight as a raccoon trap, I gived it to him. Quickly told them everything: About how the Old Man come to Dutch’s and took me. How I run off and met Bob near Dutch’s Crossing. About how Bob refused to ride Pardee home once the rebels rode off. How Bob helped me get back to the Old Man and was stolen along with his master’s wagon by the Old Man hisself and brung into camp. How Chase and Randy brung us there after Old Man Brown run off after Osawatomie, where Frederick was murdered. I left out the part about not knowing for sure if the Old Man was alive.
It moved him enough not to kill me right there, but he weren’t moved enough to turn me loose. He considered what I spoke on though, then said slowly, “You had the run of things in the hotel for months. How come you never took off?”
I couldn’t tell him about Pie. I still loved her. He could’a put it all together and suspected what I knowed. They would’a deadened Pie right off, though I suspected they planned as such anyway, and I didn’t want that. I hated her guts but I still loved her. I was in a tight spot all the way around.
“I had to wait on Bob,” I said. “He got cross with me. Wouldn’t run. Now the trap’s sprung. They watching everybody close now. Ain’t nobody going nowhere.”
Broadnax pondered it thoughtfully, and he softened some, letting go of my arm. “That’s a good thing for you, for these fellers here is game to send their knives rambling across your pretty little face and throw you in the hog pen without instructions. I’ll give you a chance at redemption, for we got bigger game. Turncoat like you, you’ll get reward for your labor from us or somebody else down the road one way or the other.”
He backed off the fence and allowed me to straighten myself out. I didn’t turn and run. Weren’t no use in that. I had to hear him through.
“This is what I want you to do,” he said. “We hear word the Free Staters is riding this way. Next time you get wind of where they are, come out here and pass it to me. That’ll even us.”
“How I’m gonna do that? I can’t get out here easy. The missus is watching me close. And Darg’s out here.”
“Don’t you study ol’ Darg,” Broadnax said. “We’ll take care of him. You just pass the word on what you hear ’bout the Free Staters. Do that, and we’ll leave your Bob alone. But if you tarry, or we get word about them Free Staters from some corner other than you? Well, you’ll be overdue. And you won’t have to sneak out here with lemonade and biscuits for Bob no more, ’cause we’ll bust him so hard across the head, he’ll have a headache that’ll deaden him right where he is. As it is, only reason he’s drawing air right now is ’cause of me.”
With that, he snatched the handkerchief holding the biscuits and the mug of lemonade I brung out for Bob, shoved the biscuits down his mouth, drunk down the lemonade, and handed me the mug. Then he turned and walked back to the other side of the pen, and the others followed.
Oh, I was stuck tight then. Love will hang you up in many a direction. I thunk on it quite a while that day, thunk about Broadnax busting Bob’s brains out and coming into the hotel after me, and that was a worrisome notion. That Negro was determined. A man would have to pump a bunch of iron into a feller like that to stop him. He had a purpose, and that strangled the hope outta me. I fretted on it quite a bit that night and the next morning, then decided to run outta town, quit the idea right off, then thunk on it again all afternoon, decided to run again, waited all night, quit on the idea again, then runned the same whole bit around my head in the same fashion the next day. The third day I got tired of spinning ’round and fretting in that fashion, and gone back and done what I normally done in them days, ever since I lost Pie really: I got drunker with greater purpose.
The fourth night after Broadnax made his threat, I went on a bender with a redshirt who’d stumbled into the saloon full of trail dust, and we was having a good go at it—me more than him, to be honest. He was a young feller, broad-chested feller, more thirsty for water than liquor it seemed. He sat at a table in a big hat pulled close over his face, a long beard, and his arm in a sling. He stared at me in silence while I laughed and joked at him and throwed his rotgut down my red lane while double-talking him and switching glasses so as to jug him more water than his whiskey. I overserved myself and he didn’t seem to mind it a bit. In fact he seemed to enjoy watching me get out my skull, which, on the prairie, if you can’t please a man one way, why you can always please him another. I seen Pie do that a million times. I took this big young feller for one of those, and after several toots and tears and swipes at his glass with him watching and saying nothing, I flat out asked him if I could polish off the entire bottle of whiskey which he had purchased, as it sat on the table hardly getting used by him in the proper manner and it was a waste of breakfast, lunch, and dinner and mother’s milk to let such a precious thing go to waste.
He remarked, “You drinks a lot of rotgut for a girl. How long has you worked here?”
“Oh, long enough,” I said, “and if you allows me to finish that bottle of bleary on the table there, sir, why, this lonely colored girl will fillet your ears with a song about fish.”
“I will do just that if you tells me where you is from, dear maiden,” he said.
“Many places, stranger,” I said, for I was of the habit about lying about myself, and the “dear maiden” part of his talking meant that he was prone to perhaps buy me a second bottle of that buttercup whiskey after we finished the first. Fact is, when I thunk on it, seemed like he hadn’t drunk much at all, and seemed to enjoy watching me do all the sipping and soaking of the alkie for him, which at that point was more than a thrill, for I was already two sheets to the wind and wanted more. I said, “If you buy us a second bottle of moral suasion, I’ll give you the whole sad story, plus a haircut, stranger. Then I’ll sing ‘Dixie Is My Home’ for you, which will stir your spirits and put you right to sleep.”
“I will do that,” the feller said, “but first I needs a favor. I got a saddlebag on my horse, which is tied outside on the alley side of the hotel. That saddlebag needs cleaning. On account of my arm”—and here he pointed to his arm, which was hung in a sling—“I can’t lift it. So if I can trust you to go out and fetch that saddlebag and bring it inside and lather it up with saddle soap, why, I’ll give you two bits or even three and you can buy your own whiskey. I rides the brown-and-white pinto.”
“I will be happy to do that, friend,” I said.
I went outside and untied his saddlebag from his pinto in a jiffy, but it was loaded up full, and that thing was heavy. Plus I was pixilated. I lost my grip on it when I got it loose from the horse and it fell to the ground, and the leather top flap popped open. When I bent to close the flap, I noticed in the moonlight an odd thing sticking out the top of that flap.
It was a feather. A long, black-and-white feather with a touch of red on it. Drunk as I was, I still knowed what it was. I hadn’t seen a feather like that in two years. I seen a plume of them very same type feathers on Frederick Brown’s chest when he was buried. A Good Lord Bird.
I quick stuffed it back into the saddlebag, turned to go inside, and walked straight into the feller who’d sent me out there. “Onion?” he said.
I was two sheets to the wind and seeing double, and he was so tall standing up there in that dark alley that I couldn’t quite make out his face, and I was seeing threes anyway. Then he pulled off his hat, throwed back his hair, leaned down to look at me close, and I seen past his beard into his face, and found myself staring at Owen Brown.
“I been seeking you for two years,” he said. “What is you doing here, carousing around like a drunk?”
I was shocked out my petticoat, practically, and didn’t know what to cook up to tell him on the spot, for lying takes wit, and that was on a high shelf in my brain on account of that essence, which tied up my tongue, so I blurted the truth: “I has fallen in love with someone who don’t want no parts of me,” I said.
To my surprise, Owen said, “I understands. I too has fallen in love with someone who don’t want no parts of me. I went to Iowa to fetch a young lady but she said I am too grumpy. She wants prosperity and a man with a farm, not a poor abolitionist. But that didn’t turn me into a drunk like you. Is I too grumpy, by the way?”
Fact is, there weren’t a soul in Kansas Territory more grumpy than Owen Brown, who would grumble to Jesus Himself on account of just about anything that weren’t to his liking. But it weren’t for me to say. Instead I said, “Where was you at Osawatomie? We was waiting for you.”
“We runned into some rebels.”
“Whyn’t you come back and get me and Bob?”
“I’m here, ain’t I?”
He frowned, glanced up and down the alley, then picked up his saddlebag, and throwed it on his horse with one hand, tying it, using his teeth to hold one of the straps as he did so. “Set tight,” he said. “We’ll be ridin’ here
