Eight of the brutes conducted us roughly back to our luncheon bivouac. We arrived there to find several more Indians in vicious assault upon Bilbo, whilst three were required merely to hold back the snarling, snapping, slavering Neddy, and two clutched Uncle.
Bilbo’s assailants belabored him with the ferocity of famished wildcats, tearing his clothing away in shreds and gnawing the tips of his fingers amid shrieks and squirts of blood and clouds of dust as they thrashed upon the forest floor. The reason for their fury was immediately apparent: one of their number lay on the ground, a neat round hole in his throat and bright blood pooling warmly over the leaf litter beneath his lifeless body. I surmised at once that Bilbo had shot him—a singularly stupid thing to do, given their superiority of forces. The villain might as well have pointed the pistol at his own head and pulled the trigger.
Though he had oppressed us for weeks, I cannot say that I was glad to see him so harshly treated, for it did not portend anything but misery and abuse to come for Uncle and myself, who were, after all, members of his party. Bessie, of course, was beside herself, honking and flailing uselessly at our new captors. Then one of the savages stood forward and shouted at Bilbo’s tormenters. When they did not heed him, he fetched one of his own fellows a kick to the shins and shouted again. They desisted at last and climbed off Bilbo, who yet writhed upon the blood-smeared leaves.
The savage who had shouted appeared to be the band’s captain—though still a young warrior and not necessarily a tribal chieftain. He was dressed more gaudily than his compatriots. They wore only the simple breechcloth and moccasins that is their summer costume, plus various armbands, beaded necklaces, and similar adornments. Their hair was worn to shoulder length, unbraided, each with an eagle’s feather hanging downward. This captain, however, wore what had been a white gentleman’s puce silken waistcoat, embellished since his acquisition of it with porcupine quillwork. From the waistcoat’s hem had been stitched a tufted fringe of what looked like human hair—most of the tufts black, but some brown, yellow, and red. Over the waistcoat this wight wore a very fine necklace of bear claws that must have been an accessory of much envy among them. Atop his head was a gaudy bonnet based upon the felt crown of a stolen hat, with ermine skins dangling from the side and a single spray of parti-colored plumes stitched to the front. All of his party bore painted faces and bodies, but this fellow’s was at once the simplest and most fearsome. His face was daubed sheer white, with the eye sockets colored blue, so that he looked like a bedizened ghoul.
All of the foregoing action had happened very quickly upon our delivery from the thicket, and when this war-captain was done freeing Bilbo from his assailants, he turned his attention to Bessie and me. The warriors began laughing at us with much mischievous delight, while their leader—who was not laughing at all—strode up to us imperiously.
“Pull up thy pants, Sammy,” Uncle advised me and I did so. The leader wheeled and angrily remonstrated his troops, who ceased their jollity that instant. He reached tremulously out and lightly ran his fingers over Bessie’s face, in particular the harelike aperture that was her mouth. His whole manner seemed steeped in the deepest reverence. Though terrified, Bessie was held by a stout brave and could not escape this officer’s fondling. He muttered a litany of incomprehensible words.
“He says that the she-rabbit spirit came to him in a vision last night and told him she would be his people’s deliverer,” Uncle translated, to my complete surprise.
“You understand them?”
“Yes,” Uncle replied. “They are Shannoah. ’Tis a tongue not unlike Tuscarora.” He then proceeded to say a few words in their language, and the headman turned abruptly to Uncle, apparently surprised at his facility. “I asked him from whom or what the she-rabbit had promised to deliver his people,” Uncle said. The leader spoke again, rapidly and with greater vehemence.
“What does he say now?”
“He says the she-rabbit had promised to deliver them from us, the white pig-people,” Uncle reported. “He says he did not expect the she-rabbit to present herself in the guise of a white woman.”
The officer spouted several more sentences.
“He says that this turn of events perplexes him. He is additionally troubled that she has crossed his path in company with the man-wolf—meaning the dwarf, I suppose—who is his personal medicine spirit.”
With this, the officer sat down on the ground and removed from a leathern pouch at his hip a gray fur bundle that contained his collection of enchanted objects: an eagle’s skull and talons bound in sort of a red cloth strait waistcoat and very evil-looking; various odd-shaped stones; a few burnished bits of bone (whether animal or human I had no idea); and a crudely carved wooden effigy of a wolf. These he spread out in the dust before him and fingered while he sang a grim little song. Shortly, he closed his eyes and appeared to be entering a trance.
His troops observed a brief decorum, but soon were about other business—seeing to the dead man and breaking open the crate of specimen jars. It was with unqualified joy that they discovered the jars to contain whiskey, which they began to guzzle at once. Bilbo, meanwhile, had ceased his writhings and now knelt in the dust sucking his fingertips. His face and pale, bared torso were a mass of bruises. The headman awoke from his meditation. One of the braves presented him with a jar, which he sniffed suspiciously and then addressed with delight. Sipping it with the daintiness of a Broadway fop enjoying a rum punch, he began to speak. Uncle translated:
“He says he has consulted his advisors in the nether world and they have instructed him to bring the white she-rabbit back to their town where she will make many baby warriors until the Shannoah have such numbers that they can push all the white pig-people into the Big Sweet Water. He states furthermore”—Uncle paused portentously—“that the rest of us shall have the honor of the laughing death at Shannoah-town.”
“What is that: the laughing death?” I asked.
“Sammy, believe me, it is no laughing matter.”
Bilbo drew his bloody, gnawed upon fingers from his mouth and said, desperately, “Tell this son o’Satan that I am the rabbit’s father!”
Uncle did so.
The officer rejoined hotly.
“It were perhaps better thee hadn’t mentioned that,” Uncle reported. The leader then went on in Shannoah at some length, Bilbo growing obviously more discomposed by the minute. When the Indian was finished, Uncle made a sour face, cleared his throat, and commenced the long translation: “It seems that in their mythology, the she-rabbit was the daughter of an hare who had been ravished by a very bad windigo, or evil forest spirit, whom thee has just claimed to be—”
Bilbo groaned.
“He says furthermore that in light of this development, they have a special death in store for thee. First, they are going to beat thee to a bloody pulp with clubs. Then they are going to festoon thee all about thy flesh with splinters of the fatwood tree”—
“Enough!”
—“and set them aflame, after which they will stake thee to an ant heap, following which, if thee yet breathes, they will carefully remove thy large bowel, tack it to a tree, and wrap thee around like a maypole dancer”—
“Stop!” Bilbo shrieked.
—“in case of which thee survives, they will chop thee to fragments from the toes upward. I must say,” Uncle paused to catch his breath, “’tis a most un-Christian bill of particulars.”
The Indian captain stood up. Bilbo commenced crawling across the ground toward him, tears streaking his bloody, dust-coated face, and imploring the stern-visaged savage to spare him in the most abject, groveling manner. He kissed the Indian’s very moccasin tips. This, of course, impressed the headman as nothing short of the basest cowardice. He spat on Bilbo’s head and tried to step away from his groveling entreaties; and this being impossible finally stamped Bilbo’s face into the dust and hurled objurgations down upon him in the Shannoah tongue. Uncle dutifully translated:
“ … thou detestable clown … thou woman-hearted pig-man … thou reeking, pusillanimous craven … thou earthworm….”
Finally, Bilbo yet clutching at the headman’s ankles, as a drowning man might grasp at a shark’s fin, mistaking it for a flotsam on the dark and raging sea, the Indian drew back his foot and fetched Bilbo a staunch kick to the head, which persuasive blow sent the whimpering blackguard a’reeling head over heels ’til he landed with a sickening thump against the ground, unconscious. The leader then ordered us all bound to separate trees—save Bessie, who was already being amorously abused by more than a few of the braves—while they proceeded to drink themselves into a stupor. This they accomplished with astounding rapidity. There was a brief interlude of dancing, singing, crowing, and chesty tarryhooting, but before the sun went down all the Indians lay scattered about the bivouac in alcoholic slumber, whilst we passed the night lashed in the embrace of tree trunks, with naught to dote on but the manifold ingenious ways that the Indians might devise to afflict, revile, and mutilate our persons.
It is a very sorry Indian that awakens to the nether side of firewater the day after a drunken spree, and it is a sorrier white man who is in their captivity when they so awaken. Reeling and vomicking, groaning, wincing at the sun shining down through the forest’s leafy vaults, flinching at the peet peet peet of the warblers, cursing one another, it was more than an hour before the sickened brutes could gather their collective wits about them; and when they did, their wits were darkened by a very black temper indeed. At first, they ignored us, tied to trees as we were, whilst plunging their heads in the brook’s cold water to clear the cobwebs from their skulls. Bessie, I noticed, awoke amid a heap of them.
This Bilbo witnessed too, of course, and his loud, opprobrious anathemas drew the savages’ attention back upon us, to Bilbo’s grief above all; for they trussed him up like a Christmas turkey and slung him between the poles we had lately utilized to carry our jars, whilst Uncle and I were merely hobbled and led on two leathern leashes as the party finally made to depart.
We were all day trekking under a burning sun, and at what was, at times, nearly a trot. We left the course of the river, crossed a kind of beargrass prairie that showed signs of having been burnt over some years previous, and finally arrived late that afternoon, in a state of exhaustion, at Shannoah-town. I’d say we marched ten leagues in all.
This savage metropolis was built upon a bluff some thirty feet above a good-sized, clear-watered, north-flowing river (the Sandusky, I would guess, which empties into Lake Erie, their “Big Sweet Water”) and was no rude collection of hovels, but a very well-laid-out village of bark-covered wigwams atop an even more impressive series of mounds and earthwork embankments. A sort of Main Street led to a conical tumulus some fifty feet high and very impressive. We were conducted down this boulevard amid a mob of the homefolk, who spilled out of every dwelling to greet the returning band and see their spoils—namely, us.
Foremost among our greeters were the Indian dogs, fierce, half-starved mongrels as mean as their masters. These were followed by the children, better fed than the dogs yet crueler. They were upon us in a trice, kicking, spitting, scratching, biting, and pulling at our hair and parts while the dogs snapped at our ankles. I tell you, I was in as much fear for my life at the hands of those little monsters as I had been at the hands of their fathers and uncles. Fortunately, the warriors formed a cordon around us so as to keep the little demons and their dogs at bay.
Beyond this cordon we could hear a rising hubbub. At a signal, the braves parted and we beheld an hundred feet distant what must have been the entire female population of the village, formed into two parallel lines and armed with paddles, some of these fearsomely studded with teeth of the garfish. Bilbo was untrussed, but refused to get up off the ground. A few well-placed kicks prompted him to his feet.
“By Satan’s horns,” Bilbo croaked, spying the formation of women, “The gauntlet!”
Our captors formed themselves into a sort of human funnel, directing us toward the ranks of women.
“Cover thy head and privy parts with thy arms thusly,” Uncle said, and I imitated him. The next thing I knew, we were amidst a chaos of shrieks and blows, and emerged many long seconds after dripping gore from countless lacerations and aching in every bone. The women laughed uproariously at our sufferings. I despaired that they would run us back and forth through this gauntlet again and again like so much meat in a sausage grinder, but this was not to be. Apparently, the gauntlet was a mere welcoming committee. Uncle, Neddy, and I were dragged away to a kind of pen built of stout poles and girdled by an interwoven wattle of tough vines as thick as a rifle barrel. It was about ten feet in diameter, and we were free to move about inside.
Bessie—who alone among us had not been driven through the gauntlet—now vanished, upon what service I dreaded to imagine. Bilbo was lashed spreadeagle within a framework of poles, where he was subject to the rude goadings of the Indian children. Two braves were posted at either side of the grim apparatus upon which he was stretched. Their job was to make sure the children did not go too far in their persecutions and spoil the grown-ups’ pleasure. Thus, the boys and girls were permitted to twit him, thrash him about the legs with thorny sticks, pull the hairs thereon (for his breeches were torn to shreds), and worry him with smoldering brands. This Bilbo endured, at first, with characteristic oaths and curses before lapsing into a kind of stoical resignation. For all the trouble he had caused us, I felt very sorry for the poor mountebank.
It was not long before we were honored by a visit from the grand sachem of the Shannoah, an handsome, well-preserved old rascal a decade or more past Uncle’s age, whose thick silver hair hung beneath a black and red cloth turban, and whose earlobes had been distended to form two fleshy loops enbaubled with copper rings. His hatchet blade of a nose was also decorated with a silver ring, between the nostrils. His only garment was a white buffalo robe worn over one shoulder. He had the habit of sucking his gums as if his teeth hurt, but otherwise seemed in excellent fettle for a man of his years. Accompanying him was the same officer who had captured us. The sachem said a few words to Uncle, who replied cool-headedly, despite our mistreatment and our prospects for far worse.
“They wish to introduce themselves,” Uncle translated.
“I hope you told them the honor is all ours.”
“The chief is named Yoosi-hoori Runji-hoo, meaning, roughly, ‘He Who Eats Fish.’ The lieutenant is his son, and is called Oono-wak, meaning ‘Ghost.’ He says tomorrow they are going to make a spectacle of the windigo lashed on yonder rack—and that depending on how long he lasts, I, thee, and the dwarf shall follow. He bids us practice our death songs in order that we may perish like men.”
“Tell him … we ourselves were captives of this brute,” I stammered desperately, “this … this windigo, and that we are in no wise his confederates.”
Uncle, himself in one of those heedless moods that are the privilege of the doomed, relayed my plea. The chief and his son laughed. They were a very jocose tribe, one could tell. Just then, a distant rumbling rose out of the north, like thunder, except there was not a cloud in the sky. The ground shook. The timbers of our pen creaked ominously. Neddy howled like a wolf, silencing the dogs of the village, who had commenced a riotous barking at the first rumble. The shaking went on less than a minute, then subsided. What we had just felt was, no doubt, an earthquake.
Doctor Johnson was right when he said nothing concentrates a man’s mind like waiting to be hanged (or beat to a pulp, or flayed, or staked upon an ant heap, et cetera), for though I was quite giddy with terror, an idea somehow sprang fullblown to me.
“Tell him that you are a wizard and made the earth shake,” I prompted Uncle, “and that if they don’t let us go at once, you will destroy their village.”
Uncle gave the matter a moment’s thought, shrugged his eyebrows, and told them precisely that. The old sachem poked his son in the ribs. Both laughed again, heartily, with much slapping of the knees, and then the old man replied.
“The chief says we must take him for a blockhead. He says he knows an earthquake when he feels one.”
“It isn’t an earthquake, you black-hearted boors!” I shouted at the two and rattled my cage. “It is medicine, by God, and we will pull out all the stops if you don’t let us go. Do you hear me …!”
I had grown quite hysterical. The chief laughed again. His son took out an iron dagger and rapped me smartly on the knuckles. This provoked in them another gale of hilarity. The two walked away from our pen, holding their sides and shaking with mirth.
“O, God,” I sank to my knees in the grass. “What are we going to do?”
“Die like men, I guess,” Neddy said.
The evening was fraught with frightful portents. The air itself had grown as dank and sticky as a nervous sweat. We were bedeviled by biting horseflies, who liked nothing better than to alight on our wounds. Several guards were posted about our miserable pen, and though Neddy tried both to chew and burrow his way free, these attempts were foiled. Food was passed to us, but the meat was rank and wormy, and the water tainted with urine, and we grasped that this was just another joke by this tribe of fiendish pranksters. We were also the butt of the children, who, tired of molesting Bilbo, or chased away by his guards, came over to abuse us by rolling red-hot coals between the pickets of our pen, or flinging offals over the top, until our sentries grew cross and chased them back to Bilbo, and so on, well into darkness.
Through this darkness we could no longer see Bilbo, though his groans resounded at intervals.
“O, Uncle,” I despaired. “What have I done in my short life to earn this fate? What have you done but served mankind? There cannot be a God—”
At that very moment a shooting star of prodigious size and brilliance cleaved the night sky, lighting up the village as bright as day. One could even hear it hiss in its trajectory. Our guards were visibly disconcerted. There was some shouting in the village. The dogs barked again. Uncle importuned our guards. Two of them ran off in terror.
“What did you tell them?”
“That it was another sign of my wizardry and that they had better let us go ere I lose my temper and bring down a hail of calamities upon their heads.”
That seemed reasonably apt, thought I.
Shortly, the sachem and the Ghost returned to our prison, both seemingly unperturbed, a’belching from their supper, and in all respects calm and happy. They exchanged words with Uncle.
“Now what?” I pressed.
Uncle made a sour face.
“The chief entreated to know if I thought he were born yesterday. He says he is well-acquainted with the oddities of the sky—possibly more so than we—because he hath dwelt outdoors beneath them some eighty summers, and knows a comet when he sees one.” Uncle grew flushed with anger. “By thunder, I never met with such a tribe of skeptics!” he cried.
The two savage muckamucks burst out laughing and turned back to their supper fire, a’tittering and guffawing all the way. Heat lightning flickered on the far horizon. I sank back down upon my aching haunches, thinking of rude phrases with which to greet my maker.
The morning dawned cool and clear, the previous day’s brain-sapping heat banished and the woodland ringing with birdsong—in short, a perfectly splendid spring morning, but depressing, inasmuch as it was to be my last day on earth, replete, what is more, with unutterable agonies.
A holiday spirit seemed to reign throughout Shannoah-town as the sun crept up in the sky and steamed away the morning dew. Drums sounded here and there, and men tried little jigs as though rehearsing for a later performance. The braves took fastidious pains to bedaub each other with paint while other savage swains dallied with giggling maidens, as on market day in any white town. Most alarming of all was the sight of Bessie, emerging at suspicious intervals from one wigwam and then being led by the hand to the next. The brutes were using her rudely, but there was an added dimension to it that puzzled me. At first I perceived that my feelings for this misbegotten creature had somehow lapsed into tenderness, and that what I was feeling were the emotions any youth might suffer upon seeing his sweetheart cruelly ravished. But then, seeing her emerge and disappear twice more in the space of an hour, a more appalling realization fused in my mind: I saw that she was enjoying herself! There was a strange lightness to her step; and once, I swear, I heard her unmistakable honk of rapture. I sank back into the offal-strewn grass amazed at the unceasing wickedness of this world and almost eager to be shed of it forever.
At midday, the savages formed into a procession and, with a great ceremonial banking of drums, yowling, and caterwauling, began snaking up their Main Street toward us. They took seats on the ground in a semicircle before Bilbo’s rack, as a house of playgoers might fill the seats of a theater, with much chattering and expectancy of thrills to come. Bilbo, for his part, sneered at them and hurled the most odious vituperations—which none of them could understand, thank goodness. Meanwhile, several braves worked at setting up three stout timbers into holes dug for that purpose about twenty feet from Bilbo’s station. We were shortly fetched out of our filthy pen and bound by rawhide thongs to these timbers. They were like the box seats at a playhouse; close to the action and reserved for persons of distinction—in our case, the doomed.
The sachem strode to the fore and addressed the lively throng. He seemed to be in excellent humor, and the audience interrupted his remarks more than once with appreciative laughter.
“What’s he saying?” I asked Uncle.
“He’s telling jokes,” Uncle reported. “Three squirrels come into a wigwam looking for a jug of firewater—”
“Spare me,” I said, and Uncle obliged.
After an half hour of this falderal, the chief turned and addressed us.
“What now?” I asked.
“He bids us sing our death songs,” Uncle said.
“Death song, eh?” Bilbo croaked dryly from his rack. “Try this one on for size, you ruddy savage fucker:
I heard the merry wag protest
The muff between her haunches
Resembled most a magpie’s nest
Between two lofty branches.”
Bilbo smiled salaciously at the conclusion of this ditty. The chief and his tribe were well pleased by it.
“You may all suck my mutton,” Bilbo added pleasantly.
The sachem asked Uncle to translate. To my horror, Uncle did. Strangely, the tribe beamed and gloated as one.
“What did you tell them?” I asked.
“That Bilbo has placed himself at their complete disposal.”
Two braves of middle age—apparently experts in these matters—advanced toward Bilbo with a basket of fatwood splinters. The first act of today’s performance was under way. Suddenly, though not a cloud sullied the sky, the day grew dimmer. Some of the savages noticed the phenomenon at once, though the principals went about their work. They inserted the first splinter into the meaty part of Bilbo’s arm. He shrieked. The sun dimmed by another degree.
“By heaven, Sammy, I believe we are about to sustain an eclipse of the sun!”
The Indians soon began to roister in noisy alarm. Some pointed at the sun. Uncle shouted at the assembled brutes. It was obvious he was telling them that if they didn’t halt their barbarisms at once and set us free that he would deprive them of their very sun. Not a few of them now howled in a rising panic, but their old sachem addressed them calmly and bid them remain seated. Smiling serenely as ever, he turned back to Uncle and challenged him. Uncle did not stop to translate, but I gathered the gist of it, to wit: “Do you take me for an imbecile who has never seen an eclipse of the sun before?” His smugness, however, was short-lived.
Inexorably day turned to twilight as the moon swung ’twixt sun and earth and cloaked the planet in its shadow. The crickets commenced their night song. Try as he might to lead by serene example, the sachem failed to quell his tribe’s growing fright. Several warriors yelled into the sky as though entreating the sun to come back, while one faint-hearted fellow prostrated himself at Uncle’s feet—much as Bilbo had done the day before to the Ghost—begging Uncle to stop the terrible proceeding, to the obvious disgust of his implacable chief. Then a warm wind arose out of the west and rattled the treetops around the Shannoahs’ clearing, while the somber, twilit air filled with choking dust. The sachem himself now showed a trace of discomposure, for he began to raise his voice at both Uncle and his tribesmen, shaking his fist at the former, as if admitting for the first time the possibility that he was indeed a wizard and admonishing him. Women and children screamed. Braves beat their breasts and chanted. The wind roared and began to swirl with great violence. I myself quailed at my stake at what seemed verily a manifestation of apocalypse. Finally, the whirlwind compressed to a dusty column between us three at our stakes and Bilbo upon his rack. A figure of a man materialized eerily at the center of it, and as quickly as the zephyr had welled up it now dissipated. Standing where it had swirled, his white doeskin suit and golden hair aglow like a beacon in the darkness, was our recent acquaintance, the Woodsman.
“O-wari-aka Yunno-kwat-haw! O-wari-aka Yunno-Kwat-haw!” the Indians wailed in supplication to the impressive figure, who struck various poses of lordly authority over them. Even the sachem sank to his knees in deference.
“Sorry I could not come sooner,” the Woodsman said to us, “but I had my hands full with a war party of Chickasaws down the Big Sandy way. Durn me, but you devils made a hash of my friends the Bottomleys,” he admonished the chief now, as a father might upbraid a naughty child for maiming a pet. “And now, what do I find you at, you ruffian, Fisheater? About to make sport of these fine gentlemen with whom, not a fortnight ago, I shared as tasty a ragout of ’possum as ever a weary sojourner et?”
The sachem merely looked dumbly up at the glowing Woodsman whilst his people moaned and whimpered behind. Of course, the sachem did not understand this scolding in English—which was performed as much for our benefit as for sheer effect—so the Woodsman repeated it in Shannoah.
“Shame on you,” the Woodsman concluded with a flutter of his eyelids. He drew a gleaming golden dagger from his waistband, turned abruptly to Bilbo, and cut the rawhide thongs that bound him to his rack. Heaving a groan of thanksgiving, Bilbo fell face down in the dust with a thud.
“No, no!” I cried. “Leave him there and free us!” But the Woodsman ignored my pleas as though he hadn’t even heard it.
“Did ever a man have such ignoble partners?” Bilbo observed, painfully raising himself up and extracting the fatwood splinter from his arm. “Yee-ouch!”
The Woodsman spoke again to Fisheater, angrily, who turned just as hotly upon his son, the Ghost, who railed likewise at two subordinates. Then our knight-errant cut Uncle, Neddy, and me free from our stakes. Moments later, a pile of goods was laid at our feet—among them, I was alarmed to see, Bilbo’s pistol.
“No!” I protested, but not before the battered pirate clapped the beloved weapon to his bosom and began belaboring it with kisses.
“Here, dear fellow,” the Woodsman held out a pair of Shannoah leggings to Bilbo, whose own pants hung in shreds. There was a deerskin blouse to match as well, of very fine quillwork, obviously garments of great worth to the Indians. The Woodsman proffered similar raiment to us, whose clothing had been very much besotted with own [O6]blood and the soils of our imprisonment.
“Neddy,” Bilbo said, “take grumpy-guts and find that chest o’jars. You”—he pointed to me—“come help me find my poor, darling Bessie.”
“I shall not, Bilbo, by heaven! Woodsman, O, Woodsman, can’t you see that we are the captives of this knave?” I begged our noble, but seemingly oblivious, emancipator.
“What…?” he said, placing a hand behind his ear.
“I say, we have been for almost a month the captives of this pirate scum—”
“I cannot hear you,” the Woodsman said. Bilbo clasped me ’round the arm with one gigantic hand. I reiterated my plea, tears streaming down my face, but the Woodsman merely shook his head helplessly and pointed to his ear. It was then that I realized that in the weeks since our first encounter, along the Ohio, he had somehow the misfortune of being struck deaf. Bilbo dragged me off.
In the third dwelling that we entered, we located Bessie. To her father’s mild annoyance, and my utter disgust, we found her asleep upon a heap of buffalo robes, musically a’snoring away as though enjoying a midday nap on any idle spring noontide. She stretched languorously as he shook her toe.
“Up, my little apple,” he urged her sweetly.
“Slut,” I muttered.
She arose off the primitive bedstead, not entirely sure afoot and evidently somewhat sore of gait as we followed her back outside.
The sky had grown lighter, the eclipse returning from its climax and a second dawn redeeming the stolen day. The Woodsman remained where we had left him, lecturing and rebuking the tribe in a very spirited tone of voice. At the far end of town Neddy and Uncle trundled the specimen jar chest. The Woodsman concluded his harangue.
“Tsooka thoo ah ka nee! Tsooka thoo ah ka nee!” he told them, gesturing broadly with outstretched hands. He looked down in the dust and shook his head. “Go to your wigwams,” he muttered disgustedly.
They had already arisen from the ground like sullen yet obedient children and skulked back to their dwellings, until the dusty street was empty of all save a few of their ragtag dogs.
The Woodsman sighed like a college master who had just sent an entire class to their lodgings without supper for having turned a solemn holiday observance into a drunken spree.
“Ah me …” he said, but the utterance had barely rolled off his tongue when he lifted his head and began to sniff the air. His delicate nostrils quavered while his eyes narrowed in concentration. “Why, durn me, if those Kickapoos aren’t up to more mischief! Gentlemen, I must say adieu—”
“Wait!” I cried, but he did not heed my call. The wind once again whipped into a sudden gale. The treetops banked and dust once more filled the air. In a few moments it dissipated, and our savior had vanished. The dust settled. A mangy Indian mutt howled. None of the savages dared to so much as peek outside its wigwam, however, and we hurried out of Shannoah-town as though we were leaving a city of the dead.
We backtracked swiftly, wasting not a moment in idle halts, despite our exhaustion and injuries, so zealous were we to escape the Shannoah stamping ground. By late afternoon we had traversed that burnt-over district of beargrass prairie, and by sunset we reentered the daunting woods, tripping over logs and roots along the trail, and finally arriving at a little meadow surrounded by chestnut trees, where the springy ground cover beckoned us like a gigantic featherbed. So fatigued were we that getting a supper was too much of an effort. Bilbo bound Uncle and me back to back, in the old customary way. Soon the others were deep in slumber.
“O, Uncle, I’m afraid he’ll murder us if we don’t lead him to the fountain tomorrow.”
“To the fountain?” Uncle replied in a whisper.
“The fountain of youth.”
“Hast lost thy mind? There is no fountain.”
“O … goodness….” I said. A pang of fear ran through me; for in a way I had lost my mind and forgot that the fountain of youth was made up, fantastical, and did not exist. “There is no fountain?” I added confusedly.
“There is no fountain,” Uncle affirmed.
“Then he will blast our brains to atoms.”
“Stouten thy heart. Our salvation lies all about thee, is thy very bed, thy pillow.”
“What…?” said I, wholly flummoxed. Bessie, her father, and the dwarf snored like a little chamber orchestra yards away.
“Look about thee, Sammy.”
I did, in utter puzzlement, seeing nothing but the same loathsome verdure that had been our constant element since Pittsburgh, six weeks earlier. “’Tis nothing but vegetation. Vile, damnable leaf and wood!”
“The ground cover, Sammy, the ground cover!”
I plucked a sprig and hold [O7]it up against the moon. Hope yet flooded my heart. For pinched ’twixt my thumb and forefinger was that timid herb characterized by compound treble leaves, irregularly toothed or lobed, cordate, slightly reddish, and hairless. The entire meadow was carpeted with the same humble plant.
“Furor muscaetoxicus!” I breathed as though a prayer.
“Correct,” Uncle said. “Phrensyweed! The great [O8]single patch of it that ever I saw!”
Though he had shown us as many dark sides of a human nature as might be possessed by one individual, Bilbo awoke the next morning in a mood so black and murderous that a brute like Fisheater would compare to him as an affable gentleman from a police [O9]society.
“By hell’s stinking shit pits, I ache all over,” he groaned. “O that I have given up the peace and serenity of my happy islet for this evil swindling! O my throbbing bones, my smarting flesh, my ringing ears. By Christ’s cankerous crank I have been hornswoggled, cozened, maimed! And who, by Old Bogey’s bungchute, have I to thank? Eh …?”
He had no further to look than Uncle and me, yet bound together. He hoisted up his pistol, cocked the hammer, knocked a little powder into the flashpan, and dandled it at us, squinting along the barrel with one blood-shot, jaundiced eye.
“You may feel a bit under the weather now, but just wait ’til you have a draught or two from the fountain,” I tried diverting his mind from murder.
“Fountain of youth,” he sneered. “O that I ever believed you! What are you but another Voorhees, purveyor of counterfeit silkworms! Homewrecker! Inveigling pettifogger! Humbug! Picaroon!”
“If those Indians hadn’t guzzled all your whiskey, you’d be a [O10]cheerful and gay as ever,” I tried to mollify the villain.
The while this colloquy took place, Bessie woke up and looked upon the scene with rising emotion. Her experiences at Shannoah-town had apparently put a certain starch in her character, for she began remonstrating with her father hotly.
“Hwong honk hwanga huh, hoo hawng pwee hwonk!” she railed at him.
“Yes, my little—”
“Hwank hwanga pwee!” she went on and slapped the very pistol in his hand. It discharged and the bullet flew into a nearby treetop. Three partridges, two oppossums, and a squirrel all tumbled dead to the ground, slain by a single ball.
“What a shot!” Bilbo stopped to marvel.
“Perhaps it is your lucky day,” I desperately proposed.
Bessie continued to admonish the old scalawag, and he shrank visibly under the onslaught, though I could not make out a word of her obloquy.
“All right, all right, all right!” he finally gave in to whatever she was demanding. I wondered what our fate would be.
“Well, thou blackguard?” Uncle forced the issue.
“’Tis your lucky day, after all,” Bilbo informed us. “For my little sweetmeat has sued on your behalf for twenty-four hours’ more life, which time you have to lead us to that damnable fountain, or I shall feel free to make a pudding of your brains. Is that right, my dove?”
Bessie nodded her head, shrugged her shoulders, and honked in the affirmative.
“Be a good boy and fetch those viands, Neddy,” he told the dwarf, who scampered off to fetch the birds, oppossums, and squirrel.
Soon, Uncle and I were at work helping Bessie to pluck the partridges while Neddy built a fire and Bilbo reconnoitered the woods for a water source.
“Here, watch me,” Uncle said, grasping a fistful of phrensyweed and showing Bessie how to stuff the body cavities of the fowls with the leaves. “’Tis a most aromatic and epicurean herb,” he assured her. “A nice substitute for sweet sage, thyme, and other treasures of the kitchen garden. Believe me.”
Bessie plucked a sprig or two herself, sniffed them through that unfortunate aperture that was her nasal opening, and honked to show her appreciation. She stuffed the fowls, skewered them upon a green stick and began roasting them over the fire. Uncle and I skinned the oppossums and the squirrel, stuffed them likewise, and placed them on the fire. Meanwhile, Bilbo returned with several jars of water from a springhole he’d located nearby.
“I am so hungry I could eat an herd of buffalo,” he declared. “By Jove’s celestial diddlehorn, those redskins don’t treat a fellow right, now do they?” He hung his great blade of a nose over the roasting birds and fanned the fragrant air to his nostrils with a gigantic paw. “Partridge is the nonpareil of wildfowls, don’t you agree, Neddy?”
“Arf, arf!”
“Others may have their toothsome turkeys, their quotidian quails, their dainty doves, squabs, what-have-you; but give me partridge every time, I say.”
“Rowf, rowf!”
“Succulent and never dry, with a flavor like sweet sage and thyme! Ah, there is partridge: jack o’diamonds among the avian kingdom! I would say they are done now, wouldn’t you, my little sugarplum?”
“Hwonk!” Bessie affirmed.
Bilbo lifted the skewer off the fire and gingerly removed the birds, giving one each to Neddy and his daughter. I reached for an opossum. Bilbo thwacked me upon the knuckles as I did so.
“Tut-tut,” he chided me. “I said I would let you live another day, not that I would feed you.”
I hung my head stoically. Uncle sighed. Bilbo et famille made short work of the partridges, devouring with squeals of delectation their herbal stuffing, and then turned their appetites loose on the oppossums and squirrel. In a little while their gluttony was dissipated. Bilbo washed down the repast with a jar of springwater, then reclined in the weeds, picking his teeth with a squirrel’s rib, while Bessie belched and the dwarf scratched his fleas. Uncle and I sat across the fire looking woebegone and starved.
In a few minutes, the company began to show the first signs of intoxication. Bilbo’s eyes widened. The pupils contracted and dilated violently. A noticeable tremor began to shake Bessie’s whole body. The dwarf also trembled and blinked. Soon a kind of foaming spittle began to gather at the corners of Bilbo’s mouth. Bessie was vibrating like a child’s mechanical toy. Wisps of hot vapor steamed from the flanges of Neddy’s flattened nose. The next moment Bilbo sat bolt upright, looked down at his hands, felt about his face, and fairly exploded with exaltation. He seized one of the water-filled specimen jars, held it out as though he were gripping the Holy Grail itself, and cried, “The fountain! The fountain! I have found it, by the suckling Nazarene! The fountain of youth!”
He rose unsteadily to his feet, the phrensyweed rapidly reaching full effect.
“Come! Come, my lambs,” Bilbo entreated his daughter and the dwarf. The three of them lurched off into the woods, a’quivering and a’slathering like victims of snakebite. In his toxic transport, Bilbo had even left his pistol and shot pouch behind, and I now seized them with the passion of a true believer finally grasping hold of a crucifix in a land of barbarous infidels. We followed the trio’s tracks into the verdure at a prudent distance.
There, an hundred feet away, the pirate, his misbegotten slut of a daughter, and the dwarf lay upon their backs amid the coruscating water of a little woodland brook, splashing, giggling, and bawling like infants under the complete deliriant dominion of the herb. And there, in the howling wilds of Ohio, we at last stole away from that nonpareil of vice, corruption, and depravity to enter the sunny vale of freedom.