The Misadventured Summer of Tumbleweed Thompson

Despite the blackness, I could hear Tumbleweed’s shuffling footsteps in the dark. There was the sound of fumbling and the scratch of a match being struck. Soon, the room came to light with the orange glow of a wall lantern.

“There,” Tumbleweed hissed, pointing. I followed his finger to the far side of the room, where a squadron of barrels stood upright against the wall. “That has to be the gunpowder,” he whispered victoriously. He raced over to the nearest barrel. “Help me find something to pry it open.”

I scanned the room frantically and found a crowbar against the wall. I handed it to Tumbleweed, who jimmied the lid off the barrel. He leaned close and inhaled deeply.

Suddenly, several things occurred in rapid succession, none of them expected.

First, the yowling returned: louder, longer, and seemingly from just outside the room. It was followed by two shouts, also louder and longer, and also from just outside. The shouts were followed by two shotgun blasts. But I couldn’t give that my full attention. Because at that moment, Tumbleweed exploded in a sneezing fit, the ferocity of which I had never heard to that moment. It was of a manner that made me believe his entire respiratory system, and perhaps his sinus cavity itself, would come hurtling from his slender body and fly across the room.

He staggered backward, doubled over. The yowling, the thumping of footsteps, and the shouts grew louder and closer.

Bent double, Tumbleweed stumbled to the lantern and blew. The room was plunged into darkness, and I felt my heart squirm its way up into my throat like a living thing. The door flew open and two men burst in, their faces—though only visible by a narrow shaft of moonlight—etched with stark terror. Tumbleweed staggered toward the wall, still wracked by those powerful sneezes.

As he bent over to collect his breath, a furry body darted through the doorway at his feet. The white bands on her black and brown tail gleamed in the moonlight. Could it be who I thought it was?

Perhaps she was simply hungry. Or perhaps I had underestimated the loyalty of which a young raccoon could be capable.

Tumbleweed grabbed my arm, tears streaming down his face, and attempted speech.

“get out of here.”

“It’s not?” I asked.

A body slammed into me. I whirled to see the tall, lanky figure of Alton Plunkett circle the room. Something furry and dark was latched onto his shoulder.

“Your face!” the second man called to him. “Cover your face.”

But it was too late. Bingo clambered on top of Plunkett’s head, ten claws needling his forehead. He dove behind the barrels and disappeared. A cacophony of howls and yowls erupted from behind them. The other man—shorter than Plunkett and as beefy as the thin man was tall—shoved his bulk into the barrels, sending them rolling toward me and Tumbleweed.

“What are you doing?” the short, burly man shouted at Plunkett, eyes wide and gleaming. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

Plunkett’s head appeared from behind the barrels. Bingo took a flying leap, which took her from the scrawny man’s head toward the barrels. She raced across them and flung herself head-first into Tumbleweed’s arms.

The beefy man ducked beside his partner. “Alton?” he called. “Speak to me, Alton!”

Tumbleweed tucked Bingo into the crook of his arm. “Let’s scram,” he called, and raced past me through the doorway. As I dashed after Tumbleweed, I caught a glimpse of the letters painted on the scattered barrels.

Ground Black Pepper.

I raced through the cabin, brain whirling, out onto the deck where the moon bathed a sweaty, teary-eyed Tumbleweed in white light. He was stuffing a pile of money into his pockets with one hand. Berger was nowhere in sight. We had to move fast. I dashed to the gangplank.

“Jump!” I shouted at Tumbleweed.

“Come on,” I yelled. “She’ll be fine. Raccoons can swim.”

“I know,” he said.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Cram it,” he said.

“What about the whale fishing?” I shouted.

“Never mind about that,” he said.

“But it’s shallow. Follow me!”

He hesitated. I leapt off the deck and splashed down into the river, sinking up to my chest. With a few paddles, I was at the shore and dragging myself onto the bank. I whirled toward the boat. Tumbleweed had vanished from the deck. Berger stood perched in his place, a shotgun aimed directly at me. My heart froze. Where was Tumbleweed?

“Hold it right there,” Berger called. “You’ve got my money. We ain’t square! Not by a long shot!”

Tumbleweed appeared beside me, hair matted and slick across his forehead. Water spluttered from his nose and mouth. “Ready?” he panted.

“You did it!” I cried.

“Yeah, but it wasn’t easy,” he said, wiping more water from his face.

“Hey, did you take all their blackjack money?”

“Never mind that. We’ve got to go.” He shoved me, and I raced for the woods. Tumbleweed passed me, and led the way, his long legs steering around sycamores and birches as we tried to find the path in the occasional snatch of moonlight. Finally, after long minutes of frantic running, we burst from the woods into a wide clearing. Tumbleweed staggered forward and slumped against the nearest tree.

“You think…they’ll follow us?” I asked.

He shook his head, chest heaving. “I didn’t get away with that much money. If we can get out of here soon, maybe they’ll just forget about it. We’re just a couple-a kids.”

“But they’re sticking around town for awhile, remember?”

He pointed to his face. “Disguises, remember?”

“Nah,” he said, waving a hand. “They’ve got bigger things to worry about than us.”

“No, it’s just…”

But Tumbleweed had started off into the woods again. We ran for what seemed like hours. It wasn’t until the woods had thinned, and I could spy buildings ahead that we stopped. I slumped against a tree. Tumbleweed staggered to the ground.

“Hang on,” he panted. “I ain’t ready to go home yet. Are you?”

My clothes were sopping wet, and my lungs felt like flames were crackling on the inside.

“Uh, kind of,” I said.

“Come on, Gene, just a little longer. I know a place where they’ll never find us,” Tumbleweed said. “Follow me.”

With one last glance back toward town, and the thought of my warm bed, I nearly called the whole thing off. But there was also the memory of the Dead-Eye Dan novel I’d finished that afternoon, the one with the Marshall’s narrow escape from the clutches of Blackjack Billy.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

He slapped me on the back. “Stay close.”

A scant few minutes later, I sat beside Tumbleweed inside the mouth of a cave that he said led to his Pa’s silver mine. A modest fire crackled from the ground in front of us, sending wisps of smoke curling out into the warm evening.

“Nobody can find us out here, right?” I asked.

“Come on, Gene. We’re at least a mile out of town to the north. The San Pedro’s way off thataway, and we’re in a dadgum cave. What do you think?”

“Yeah, okay,” I said.

Tumbleweed pulled Bingo from the crook of his arm and set her down next to him. She wrapped her tail around her like a cat, curled up in front of the fire, and promptly fell asleep. Tumbleweed pulled a piece of bacon from his pocket and laid it in front of her nose. Her eyes popped open, and she snapped up the bacon and dozed off again.

“No wonder she’s crazy for you,” I said.

He nodded. “Works like a charm. The way I figure, she was looking for me since I said goodbye to her tonight and snuck out of the boarding house.”

“Well, she found us alright,” I said.

He smirked. “Yup.”

“If you had any more bacon, I’d love some,” I said. “Well, only if you have some gunpowder to season it with.”

Tumbleweed snorted back a laugh.

“Is there even a Dakota Jack McGinty?” I asked.

He frowned. “‘Course there is.”

“And popping pepper? Did you just make that up?”

He paused, then smiled bashfully. “Well…”

“Spill it, Tumbleweed,” I said.

“Well, I was in the saloon a few days back, like I said. Dakota Jack was there, sitting right next to me nursing his sarsaparilla. He told me that some guy popped into Daisy’s earlier that day, bragging about how he’d got ahold of this new popping pepper. He said he’d got barrels and barrels of it on his boat on the San Pedro. Well Dakota Jack says to me that everyone knows that popping pepper is just smuggler slang for gunpowder. And—”

“And he was wrong about that.”

Tumbleweed flushed again. “Kind of.”

“So either Jack couldn’t figure out, or flat lied to you, about the fact that this man was a cook and he was talking about actual pepper. Or, you trimmed Jack’s story down, spiced it up with the bit about there being smugglers coming on the San Pedro, found a handful of gunpowder, and packaged the whole thing to me as God’s honest truth. Which is how we wound up eye-to-eye with a couple of whatever-they-were out there.”

Tumbleweed’s eyes widened. “Sure, I told a stretcher or two to get you hooked, but I didn’t know all that was going to happen, Gene. Honest.”

“Honest?” I asked.

“Hey, sometimes I can be,” he said. Tumbleweed sneezed again, and then was overtaken by a laughing fit nearly equal to his earlier sneezing one. Tears rolled down his cheeks. “Hey, I almost forgot. What did you find out there in the woods, anyway? Paprika? Oregano?”

The smile froze on my face. “It was…weapons, ammunition. I think it might have been dynamite.”

Tumbleweed leaned forward. “They had dynamite under that tarp? Now you’re pulling my leg, Gene. What would a chuck wagon cook be doing with all that?”

“I don’t think…” I said, the lump in my throat returning, “I don’t think it belonged to Jergenson.”

“You heard Berger and Plunkett. They’re moving off the boat. They said all that was their stuff.”

Tumbleweed stared at me, unblinking, for a long moment. Then, he threw back his head and laughed loudly. “That’s a good one, Gene. Three guys hiding out in the woods on a chuck wagon cook’s keelboat, with a cache of dynamite. That sounds like one of my stories.”

“It isn’t any crazier than gunpowder in the woods.”

“Right, but most of that was true,” he said. “Well, some of it.” He slapped me on the back and chuckled again. After all that had happened, I suppose I could have been angry. But even though it had all gone pretty much as wrong as a madcap scheme can go, as I sat drying out by the fire, the sound of the popping twigs drifting out into the June evening, I felt one certainty overtake me: come what may in the days ahead, a bond had been formed ’twixt Tumbleweed and myself. And I had come away from that whole pepper-popping episode with one thing more valuable than a lesson in blackjack.

’Course friendships are tested, and that certainly lay ahead for Tumbleweed and myself. And there were plenty of other items about my new friend he wasn’t being truthful about, beyond simply his inability to swim.

As I slipped between my sheets that night, I caught sight of the brilliant moon hanging in the sky outside my window. The night was warm, and my curtains drifted in the breeze. But, as I closed my eyes and awaited sleep, it was not Bingo, or Tumbleweed, or even a deck of cards, which popped into my head.

It was a pair of jet-black eyes, wide and unblinking, below bushy black eyebrows.

We ain’t square, not by a long shot!

I blinked and shook my head, but I couldn’t shake that image. Trent Berger’s words and his eyes haunted me that night. Try as I might to regain the peaceful satisfaction of our fireside conversation, my sleep was restless. His presence hung over me like a lead weight.