“Is this heaven?”
A green nimbus of light. Glowing pink center.
“He speaks at last! O, merciful Lord!”
“It is heaven!”
The green, the pink, both verged to resolution. Sun-dappled leaf. Uncle’s face.
“I was certain I’d go to … to the other place. Have you seen him yet, Uncle?”
“Seen whom?”
“Our heavenly father.”
“Bless me, but I haven’t. Not yet.”
“No?” said I. “That’s odd. He appeared to me from on high. He reached down from the clouds and drew me up here. He—”
“Sammy.”
“Uncle…?”
“Be not dismayed. Thou art as yet upon the earth.”
“Do you mean we are not dead?”
Uncle pursed his lips and shook his head.
True, I felt a pang of disappointment. But it quickly fled my mind, replaced by the warm gratitude for being.
“How did I get here?”
“We plucked thee from the river.”
“You and the Woodsman?”
“No. I and….” Uncle turned his gaze over my head. Of course by this time I had determined that I was lying upon the aft deck of our keelboat, Megatherium. Following the line of Uncle’s gaze, who should I spy upon the cabin roof, manning the steering sweep no less, but the dear royal booby, Lou-Lou.
Upon seeing me awake, the feckless boy flew into such a rapture of happiness that it was all Uncle could do to keep him at his station.
“My friend! My friend!” he cried.
“Stay aloft, lad,” Uncle told him. “Steer clear of the bars.”
“Yes, Uncle William,” he replied, gushing with excitement and joy. “I am so happy!”
“How long have I been unconscious?” I asked.
“Two days.”
“Gad!” I tried to raise an arm, but it felt like a leaden sash weight. “Might I sit up, Uncle?”
“By all means. Let me help thee. Careful, Nephew.” He inserted a bearskin twixt my spine and the bulwark. “Can thee eat, Sammy?”
“Eat…?” The mere suggestion set me a’ravening. “I am starving, Uncle.”
Behind him, upon our brazier, sat a kettle. He ladled an aromatic chowder into a wooden bowl and handed it to me. I slurped it in a trice like a sot at a pailful of beer. Much of it dribbled down my chest.
“More!” I gasped, and he obliged. After the second bowl my mind reattained a measure of equanimity. I even paused to examine the firm-textured chunks of white fish that was the concoction’s chief ingredient.
“Yellow mud cat,” Uncle informed me.
“Delicious,” I sighed. “But tell me, Uncle, however did you chance to find me?”
“In the dugout,” he answered. “Out of thy head.”
“Damn me, the dugout!” I exclaimed with a shudder, remembering the maelstrom, the butchery, the blood and fire. “Why did you leave the chateau without me?”
“The Woodsman importuned me, saying ‘The boy is on board! The boy is on board!’ By the time we cast off and I had discovered that ‘the boy’ was Lou-Lou and not thee, the gale prevented our return. We lay some miles below the lake upon this river, waiting, waiting.”
“Did you see the chateau go up in flames?”
He shook his head. “I saw only a yellow glow on the horizon. But I knew all the same. Terrible, terrible,” he snuffled. “Fernand is dead.” This sotto voce so Lou-Lou would not hear.
“I know,” said I, trying to sound sympathetic. “But how did you know?”
“The Woodsman said so.”
“Ah,” said I. “By the by, where is the poor afflicted nimrod?”
“Vanished in a mist the morning after. Just like that,” Uncle snapped his fingers. “Queer the way he comes and goes.”
“I should say,” I could not help but agree. “Uncle, do you think he is God?”
“The Woodsman? God?” he replied scoffingly. “What an idea!”
“I saw him on high in my delirium, looming among the clouds in his white buckskins and skunk hat, like a very titan out of Raphael.”
“A delirium seized me once. ’Twas on our sloop off Belle Isle on the way back from Cape Porcupine. I saw many queer things and mistook them for the face of God. Grinning whales, lights in the sky, skulking krakens. Such is delirium.”
“Perhaps you are right,” said I, still wondering. “But did he say how the insurrection was begun?”
“He said ’twas many months a’brewing.”
“Did he also relate how Yago was plotting to steal both LeBoeuf’s empire and his wife?”
“Aye,” Uncle affirmed. “A shocking scandal.”
“And that they would become King and Queen of Louisiana?”
“Such is ambition. Now ’tis nothing but a heap of cinders. Poor LeBoeuf,” Uncle said, his eyes growing moist. “For all his weaknesses, he was a man of rare gifts. I shall miss him. He might have become another Gallatin, had he but removed back to the civilized states….”
I lacked the heart to dispute with Uncle and call his lost friend a villain. Weariness overcame me again, this time as a warm, benevolent tide in a shallow lagoon, not the oceanic undertow of my former delirium.
“Have you seen any sloths, Uncle?” I murmured.
“Not one,” he shook his head sadly.
“Uncle, when next we meet the Woodsman, let us ask if he would be so kind as to procure for us a specimen of megatherium so that we might go home.”
“Very well, Sammy,” he agreed, humoring me.
“For I wish so dearly to go home,” I added, a lump in my throat and my eyes brimming with salt tears.
“The rivers flow but one way,” he answered firmly but gently. “To the Gulf of Mexico. We must go on. Sleep, my boy.”
I lay me down again and in a little while I was dreaming of the hills above Lloyd’s Neck and the faces of my boyhood comrades.
The next day I awoke in far better fettle and consumed so many catfish for breakfast that I might well have sprouted fins and barbells and dived into the river to become one of them. Lou-Lou, or Louis, as I now addressed him, had adapted to his new surroundings handsomely. He delighted in the change of scene, a pleasure denied him in all his years of captivity. He took very well to the duties of shipboard life and developed a deft hand at the steering sweep for one of such limited experience—so that despite his intellectual faults, it was hard to believe he was a true halfwit. If he sorrowed for his lost “Uncle” Fernand and his former life of ineffable luxury aboard the floating palace, he concealed his feelings admirably. And it was on this hot morning, as we drifted slowly back down the sunny Tennessee River to its confluence with the Ohio, that I sought to acquaint Louis with the circumstances of his birth, his history, and his suzerainty over the dominion of France.
“Do you know who this gentleman is?” I asked him, proffering the miniature portrait that I had taken from his room in the devastated chateau.
“It is my papa,” he avouched without hesitation, and I confess a thrill ran through me to hear him confirm what I had all along suspected. “Is he your papa too?”
“Why do you say that, Louis?”
“Because I had a portrait just like it in my room.”
“This is that same one. I took it.”
“How kind you are to bring it for me, Sammy.”
“Do you know who your papa was?”
Louis knitted his brow in concentration, staring at the little portrait in its gold frame. “He was the husband of my mother, yes?”
“That is correct,” said I. Up on the cabin roof where he took his turn at the steering sweep, Uncle listened with a humorous, skeptical face. “Do you know what was your papa’s position in the world, Louis?”
The smooth-faced boy looked back with bewilderment.
“He was the King of France,” I told him.
“Ah,” Louis said. “I wish that he would own a store like your papa.”
“A store, Louis! All France was his, everyone and everything in it was at his command.”
“Like Chateau Félicité and Uncle Fernand?”
“Bigger! Grander than that by ten thousand times.”
“It must be very lonely to be this king,” Louis said.
“Not a’tall. A king is surrounded by his court, filled with dazzling beauties and brilliant men, all of whom are his friends, so he never lacks company for a moment.”
“Can he have treacle cake whenever he wants it?”
“Treacle cake by the hundredweight and hogsheads of sugarplums to follow. Now, I want you to brace yourself, for I have some unhappy news for you.”
He seized my upper arms and held them tightly. His strength was surprising.
“Your papa is dead.”
He sharply drew in a breath. The color drained from his face.
“Your mama too,” I added.
Tears pooled in his eyes. “I was afraid so,” he confessed at length in choked voice.
“This was many years ago,” I informed him to soften the blow. “Now I have some happy news for you to balance out the sad. When the king is dead, his son becomes the new king. Therefore, you are the King of France, Louis.”
He let go of me. His arms dropped limply to his side as he absorbed the shock.
“I am the King of France?” he echoed timidly.
“You are.”
“May I have some treacle cake, please?”
“Ahem. It is not quite so simple, Louis.”
“O…?”
“Besides, there are some impediments. A general of the army, named Bonaparte, has usurped the King’s power in France. If you wish to reclaim your throne, you would have to raise a large army to dispose of this fellow.”
“The Choctaws?”
“I don’t think they would suffice, Louis.”
He mulled over the matter and wrinkled his nose. “I will stay with you then. Can I be King of France here?”
“For now I suppose you’ll have to. But you must be very careful whom you tell that you are King.”
“To the contrary,” Uncle weighed in from his station above, “they will suspect it more if he says nothing. Let him proclaim to one and all that he is the King of France and no one will believe it.”
“Very well,” said I and shouted into the dark green riverbanks, “Here stands Louis XVII of the House of Bourbon, Lord of the Kingdom of France!”
Louis grinned broadly, delighted with himself and his estate in life.
“May I have some treacle cake now, please?” he asked.
Our plan was to return to the Ohio, make for its confluence with the Mississippi, and journey down the “Father of the Waters” as far as the town of Natchez, where, we understood from our charts on board, several blazed traces or wilderness trails penetrated to the interior of the southern terra incognita. There we would undertake a further search for megatherium. Whether in triumph or failure, we would find our way back to New Orleans, and get on the first good ship bound for Philadelphia, thence to be home by Christmas. As to Louis, we could see no alternative but to enlist him in our Corps of Wonders and Marvels until such time as he might be placed in the care of responsible government officials. For his existence in this hemisphere would no doubt keenly arouse the interest of many rival factions, few of them primarily concerned with Louis’s well-being.
Thus, our plan drawn, we floated happily down the Tennessee in clear, hot weather, unhindered by men or savages or beasts, until fate again intervened.
The dreaded fever that stalks the transriverine country in the summer season is a more dangerous enemy to life than all the wolves, panthers, snakes, bears, and wild tribesmen ever in creation. I speak here of the harrowing malady known as the ague. Both Uncle and I were struck down by it of a bright and airy morning, and by noontide had been rendered practically senseless.
It began with an aching in the joints and large muscles. Soon, an apprehension of coldness swept through the body as though the blood had turned to springwater. Within an hour, our teeth chattered and extremities turned blue. We shook and shivered as though we were adrift on an iceberg off Greenland’s shore rather than aboard a keelboat in summery Tennessee. No amount of clothing or blankets availed to drive away the chill. Then, an hour later, these chills inexplicably gave way to warmth, and this to heat, and this to a blazing fever as though the veins now ran with molten lava. Our ears roared. Pains racked our spine and legs as though flesh-eating beetles bored through our bones. Finally, sweat poured forth in pints as the fever broke. We victims enjoyed a brief and illusory return to normal sensation, as mice enjoy a brief and illusory taste of freedom from the cruel clutches of a cat. Then the miserable cycle of ice and fire recommenced again and again until we were addled.
Louis was untouched by the disease, possibly because of his long domicile in the region, and it was a good thing indeed he was aboard, for without his ministrations we might well have died. Louis it was who tucked in our blankets as the chills descended. Louis it was who fetched cups of water when the fever set our throats aflame and left us too weak to crawl from the cabin. Louis it was who spoon-fed us cornmeal mush, who sat awake at night with rifle at the ready, alert for enemies. Louis it was who watered the valuable Puya. And Louis it was who delivered us, and himself, into the hands of another fate that only a wilderness as fabulous as the American frontier might furnish, a fate both terrible and sublime.
One afternoon some days after the onset of our illness, Louis maneuvered our craft near to shore in an effort to ascertain whether we had reached the ruins of Fort Assurance. I was prostrate in the cabin, but awake. Poor Uncle, however, lay in a delirium, thrashing this way and that, the sweat pouring from his brow as he railed at imaginary monsters, laughed with friends not seen for an half a century, or babbled the nonsense that a fevered brain fosters. Louis had been ashore long enough to start me worrying when I heard him cry from the bank.
“Sammy! My friend! Uncle William! I have found a doctor!”
A doctor, thought I? Here, in the middle of nowhere?
I crawled up the companionway and blinked in the harsh sunlight. Two figures stood fuzzily upon the shore: a plump pear-shaped form and a taller, hulking one.
“Why, dress me in sheep’s shit!” boomed a familiar voice. My heart went to my stomach like a small, frightened animal retreating to the depths of its burrow.
“Please, God,” I begged the empty sky. “If you exist, assure me that what I behold yonder is but the figment of a feverish mind.”
I closed my eyes and squeezed the lids tightly. When I opened them again, the awful sight still remained. For there upon the bank, among the flies and the water willows (Justicia Americana), stood that paragon of knavery in all seven feet of his obdurate refulgence, our late and unlamented traveling companion from the country of the Shannoah, that summing up of all that is vile in the frontier character, Captain Melancton Bilbo, Esquire.
I immediately endeavored to raise our anchor so as to escape this scoundrel, but I lacked the strength and collapsed upon the deck blubbering.
“See how he weeps for joy at the sight of his old partner!” Bilbo exclaimed as he waded out to our craft. I lay there awaiting the long-ago-promised bullet to my brain, but rather than blast me to the next world, Bilbo clambered aboard and smothered me in his foul embrace, saying, “How happy I am to see you again, old fellow. Where’s grumpy-guts?”
“Deathly ill and defenseless with the ague,” said I.
“’Tis the high season for it. But fear no longer, for you have happed into just the right place.” He let go of me and rose again to full stature, dusting off his tattered frock coat and clearing his throat. “I have upon my person a medicament so powerful that all disease shrinks from it as worms and crawling things do shrink from the noonday sun.” He produced from his pocket one of our old specimen jars and held it up. Upon it was pasted a hand-printed label:
Dr. Bilbo’s Universal Physic
“You don’t look so well yourself, my saucy comrade,” the villain observed of me.
“I too am in the grips of the ague,” said I.
“Well then,” he proffered the bottle, “try a dose of this.”
I took the bottle from him and regarded it with the sharpest suspicion.
“What is it?” I inquired.
“You will recall that pleasant wooded glade in the neighborhood of Zane’s Trace where last we enjoyed each other’s company?” he began.
“I remember that you wanted to blow our brains to a custard.”
“I prefer to think upon the old days of our consociation with fondness. But let us not quibble. Do you recall the place of which I speak?”
“I do.”
“Hard by it, I chanced across an humble springhole, and partaking of its waters I fell into a rapture. I was convinced for a time that we had stumbled upon the very fountain of life to which you had commended me. But repeated doses of the water failed to produce the desired effect. I searched about for some other cause. Lo and behold, I discovered it in the savory herb that my darling Bessie had used to flavor our viands.”
“You don’t say?”
“I at once undertook a program of experiments, and bugger me if this meek little botanical was not a marvelous wonder! It cured all my aches and pains acquired in our regrettable sojourn amongst the Shannoah. It drove out my gout. It dissipated my gastric vapors. It banished warts. It alleviated my dropsical ankles. But most of all, it improved my outlook. For where once the vicissitudes of life sank me in a bilious humor, now bluebirds sing. Where anger once tempted me to rash acts against my fellows, now benignity reigns. In short, I was made a new man, and thus set about to manufacture a tonic of this miraculous plant so as to benefit all humankind. And so much of my success do I owe to you, who led me back to the hurly-burly of the business world. I urge you, try some and see for yourself.”
I unstopped the jar and sniffed it.
“Why, this is whiskey, Bilbo!”
“’Tis a tincture, old fellow, and what better medium than Monongahela sour mash, eh? Go on, I say: drink and prepare to be reborn!”
I took a sip of the decoction. It had a very bitter taste.
“Look, monsieur doctor, how his eyes roll,” Louis remarked.
Indeed, Bilbo’s tonic did not lack puissance. It acted almost at once upon ingestion. My fever dropped in a matter of seconds. The pains fled my joints. My brain cleared. Suddenly I felt as strong as an horse.
“There may be something to this, Bilbo,” I confessed.
“Would I lie to you?”
“Of course you would. But this physic speaks for itself.”
“Come then,” said Bilbo, rubbing his huge hands gleefully, “let’s lay a dose on old piss-and-vinegar.”
We went below to Uncle in the cabin.
“He’s got it bad,” Bilbo observed, and sitting on a mealsack beside him, passed two spoonfuls of the amber tincture down Uncle’s rasping gullet. Inside of a minute, the patient ceased sweating, opened his eyes, blinked, and sat up. Imagine his shock to see our old companion beside him.
“Heavenly merciful father!” he exclaimed in horror. “Not thee.”
“None other than your old cohort in the very flesh,” Bilbo assured him and clapped his arms around Uncle, who remained horrified and disgusted while the old blowhard reiterated the story of his transformation from pirate to medical benefactor of the human race. But, on the other hand, Uncle was himself for the first time in many days, and much as he rued crossing the villain’s path again, he could not refute the wondrous health-giving potency of Bilbo’s elixir.
“’Tis somewhat palliative,” he grudgingly admitted.
“Of course, further doses are needed lest the disease return, but in time my physic defeats it utterly, you’ll see,” Bilbo declared whilst helping Uncle to his feet. “Do come along now, my lambs, for I am eager to show you our new establishment. By the by, who is the plump young fellow?”
“I am Louis Dix-sept, the King of France.”
“Is that so,” quoth Bilbo, looking him up and down. Louis nodded his head that it was so indeed. “Well, Your Majesty could not have fallen into better company.” The scoundrel winked broadly at me as though sharing a joke. “Up now, one and all, to the sunshine of health and happiness!”
“Might we perhaps decline your hospitality and instead continue on our way?” I asked.
“You may,” he averred. “But then you shall have no more of my Universal Physic and, who knows, but that you will both perish of the ague.”
Uncle and I shared a fearful glance.
“Very well, thou extortioner Bilbo,” Uncle relented. “Lead the way.”
“That will be Dr. Bilbo to you, sir.”
We followed Bilbo across the little peninsula where lay the ruins of Fort Assurance.
“Look here, friends,” he said, pointing to a patch of luxuriant herbage that sprouted beyond the old foundation walls, “an inexhaustible supply of my medicament!”
“’Tis phrensyweed all right,” Uncle whispered to me. “Indeed as frightful a patch as ever I saw.”
“When I look at those plants I see an half acre of Spanish gold dollars,” Bilbo declared shamelessly, nipping at a jar of the stuff. “Come along, kindred spirits.”
A remarkable spectacle now hove into view on the Ohio River side of the prominence: an old army mess tent emblazoned with alarming advertisements. ague cured here, the topmost declared in red letters four feet high, large enough to be easily descried from the middle of the river. Under that, in blue letters slightly less grandiose, was the legend western museum of rarities.
On either side of the tent’s front, canvas flaps depicted two of the “rarities” within. To the left was proclaimed one bungo the dogboy. His portrait there showed an hirsute monstrosity like unto a Barbary ape, with long fangs dripping blood. On the other side of the entrance was a crude painting of a voluptuous female attired in the bib and pantaloons of a Turkish concubine, including a veil that covered her face from the eyes down. This exhibit was billed as the far-seeing girl.
We had no sooner arrived than said girl and said dogboy emerged from the tent’s interior, the first throwing her arms around my neck and honking with abandon, while the second scurried around our ankles raising clouds of dust, barking. Louis seemed astonished to behold Bessie, and not simply on account of her unique facial physiognomy, nor her peculiar costume. I do believe she was the first young maiden neither a Negro nor Choctaw that he had ever laid eyes on. For her part, she looked up and down his bulky figure and registered a most rabbitlike look of contempt.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle,” Louis bowed awkwardly.
“Hwump!” Bessie replied.
“This way, gentlemen,” Bilbo urged us inside. Here, arrayed on an half dozen crude puncheon tables of obviously recent manufacture, were the curious articles of Bilbo’s museum: a collection of Indian miscellany, various bead trinkets, a quill gorget, a bow, and a few warped arrows, a rusted bayonet declared to be geo. washington’s own from the battle of great meadow; a pickling jug containing the wrinkled carcass of a two-headed opossum; an effigy, carved out of wood with less than a Michelangelo’s expertise, purporting to be the petrified hessian; a large nest of the paper wasp (Polistes fuscatus); a collection of spherical rocks of the type found in any stream bed, here billed as moonstones; a dead snake with the legs of a frog protruding from its gullet; a painting of an herd of cows, and a stuffed lynx—both objects that had adorned his parlor in the little cottage three hundred miles upstream.
“What prompted you to abandon your snug harbor?” I inquired of his former home built out of pillaged flatboats.
“Conditions grew somewhat warm for us there,” he related. “The newly minted state of Ohio is not congenial to the advancement of medical science. They burnt us out.”
We continued on among the exhibits: an horned beetle nearly three inches long pinned to a piece of clapboard; a tree fungus carved on the pithy side so as to portray a quaint pastoral scene of trees and clouds; a wreath of brambles advertised as like unto the one worn by our savior, j. christ, in his time of tribulation; a collection of divers feathers; two lumps of resin described as the gallstones of a behemoth, an assortment of cocoons; the dessicated remains of a fetal bear cub labeled dead pygmy; and finally a ten-inch-long claw the color of tortoise shell, dubbed satan’s toenail.
“Where did you find this?” I asked the mountebank, holding the claw to the light for both Uncle and me to see.
“’Twas extracted from my own hide after a brawl with its owner,” Bilbo said.
“Pish, this is a claw of megatherium. Remember the drawing of the strange animal I showed you?”
“Ah yes. That son o’Satan,” Bilbo took pains to recall. “This belonged to its father—”
Our colloquy was interrupted by a chorus of honks, whistles, barkings, and howls from without. We hurried from the tent to see what the matter was. A flatboat was approaching from a quarter mile out. Bilbo waved his tattered lace handkerchief at them. A lank figure on the boat’s cabin roof waved back. Soon we could descry a half-starved cow and a swaybacked nag on the aft quarter. The human beings on board appeared to be a family of settlers: a man, his wife, three boy children, an infant, and an old grandmother.
Bilbo rubbed his hands in anticipation. “Neddy, Bessie, to your stations!” he trilled cheerfully. The two hurried back into the museum. “Why this is the third boatload today. How I love commerce!”
“Is this man your father, Sammy?” Louis whispered as Bilbo hobbled out onto his rough-hewn boat landing.
“Most certainly not,” I replied, appalled at the notion.
“Whatever put the idea in thy head, Louis?” Uncle asked the abashed booby, but before he could answer, the settler’s boat bumped up against the landing, while the father threw us down a line.
“Welcome! Welcome pilgrims!” Bilbo greeted them effusively.
All aboard looked very unhealthy indeed—gaunt, ashen, with red-rimmed eyes sunk in dark sockets. The grandmother was toothless and the wife lacked her four upper incisors. All were attired in the rudest and filthiest of raiment, their skin flocked with angry, scrofulous sores.
“Where are you fine folk coming from?” Bilbo inquired pleasantly.
“Virginny,” the husband said, squinting at Bilbo with suspicion.
“Ah! The Old Dominion! Where going to?”
“Illinois Territory.”
“Your names, sir?”
The father shifted his weight impatiently. “Huggins,” he said.
“What a coincidence,” Bilbo rejoined. “I knew a Huggins at the University of Heidelberg, where I took my doctoring. Brilliant student. Any relation per chance?”
The husband shook his head glumly. “We ain’t got no docturs in the family. Kin you cure ague?”
“Verily, sir, you may depend on it.”
“Grandpaw got it.”
“How unfortunate. Where is the old gentleman?”
The husband jerked his head toward the cabin. “Down b’low.”
“You are in luck, Mr. Huggins. I have no other appointments for the nonce. Show me the patient.”
Bilbo climbed aboard and disappeared inside the cabin. He reemerged only minutes later with the white-bearded grandfather, to the amazement of the family. In full view of everybody Bilbo administered another spoonful of his physic to the old man, who promptly leaped onto the roof with the spring of a billygoat and commenced to dance a jig. It was a most persuasive demonstration of the tonic’s potency. Next, Bilbo dosed the entire family, save the infant, and it was astonishing to see the gaunt, listless group come alive, like drought-withered weeds returning to vigor after a nourishing rain.
“Sakes alive! What’s in that stuff?” exclaimed Mrs. Huggins, a forbidding blade of a woman prematurely aged from poverty and childbirth, with skin the color of tallow.
“The formula must remain secret, madam,” Bilbo told her. “A precaution lest it fall into the hands of hostile powers. Why, just think what a cask or two would do for the doddering Spanish empire—”
“What ye got in that’ere tent?” one of the boys interrupted Bilbo, while he and his brothers goggled at the alarming portraits on the flaps.
“’Tis the Museum of Western Rarities, my bold stripling. Wonders and curiosities garnered from the four corners of El Dorado.”
“Maw, Paw, it’s a raree show!”
“Kin we go in, mistur?” his brother asked.
“You are all welcome inside,” Bilbo declared grandiloquently.
“Do it cost money?” Mr. Huggins asked.
“The museum is free of charge. In fact, you are in luck again, friends, for the afternoon performance is about to commence. By the by, sir, what are your little ones’ names and their ages?”
“That’ere’s Henry, he’s nine year. T’other’s Thomas, he’s seven. Thishyere’s John, he’s four. An’ the baby’s a infant.”
“How nice,” Bilbo patted the boys’ heads and kissed the grubby suckling. His gifts as a politician were on a par with his talent as an actor. “Step inside, everyone.”
We followed the clan within. They perused the exhibits, oohing and ahing as Bilbo explained the provenance of each item. They were especially taken with the dead pygmy and Satan’s toenail. Next, Neddy mounted a packing crate while Bilbo put him through his paces as Bungo the Dogboy. He barked, howled, sat up and begged, leaped through a hoop, rolled over, and caught a ball in his mouth. How sad it was to see the little fellow recreate this humiliating chapter of his youth, though he seemed to enjoy his capers. Finally, Bessie the Far-seeing Girl was presented in her veil and Turkish pantaloons.
“During this demonstration of her remarkable oracular powers, utter silence must prevail, ladies and gentlemen, so as not to obstruct the philosophical ethers that emanate betwixt human minds. Tell us, Far-seeing Girl, the names and ages of these boys here before you.”
Bessie peered over her veil at the lesser Hugginses, her long-lashed eyes darting in concentration. At length, she replied.
“Hwonk, pwee hungmwah nwum. Hunga pwee hingwam. Hwan hwong pwee hungapwonkmuh.”
“She says they are Henry, nine, Thomas, seven, and John, four,” Bilbo translated.
The family traded stupefied glances.
“How do she do that?” the grandfather asked.
“’Tis a power of mind few men understand,” Bilbo explained. “Go ahead, ask her anything you like.”
“Kin you say whar we is bound for, gal?” the wife put it to Bessie.
“Hwonk hwingwhum hweepwee,” Bessie said.
“Illinois Territory,” Bilbo relayed the information.
“I’ll be!” the grandmother declared. “It’s a sure enough marvel!”
“Kin you prophesy what our fortune’ll be thar, gal?” Mr. Huggins next asked.
Bessie here expounded at considerable length as the family looked on raptly. When she was done, Bilbo cleared his throat and commenced the “translation.”
“You shall prosper in Illinois beyond your wildest imaginings. The soil of your new homestead will bring forth munificent crops and colossal fruits. Winter there will be unknown. You shall strike a treasure of buried gold in the sod. Your son Henry shall grow up to be President. The baby will be the greatest general that the hemisphere has ever known, conquering both Mexico and Canada—”
“But it’s a girl-child.”
“No matter, sir. Does not the name Joan of Arc ring synonymous with the words ‘victory’ and ‘valor’? I tell you, this family is destined for great things!”
The Hugginses looked at one another much pleased.
“Dear friends,” Bilbo continued in a sugar-coated tone of voice. “This is indeed your lucky day, for the Western Museum of Rarities has this very afternoon just acquired the services of a genuine idiot-savant.”
“What kind o’idiot is that?” Mr. Huggins asked.
“A very special sort,” Bilbo said. “For he is perfectly stupid in some respects and a genius in others. Permit me to demonstrate. Your Majesty….” He bowed to Louis and gestured to the packing crate. Louis mounted it, happy to be included in what he no doubt took to be a kind of game. Uncle and I could only look on in helpless dismay.
“I am ready, monsieur doctor,” Louis said.
“Very well. Now, Mr. Huggins, go ahead and ask him any question you wish so as to satisfy yourself of his idiocy.”
“What month o’the year air it?” Huggins asked.
Louis puzzled his brains a minute. “I don’t know,” he admitted at length.
Bilbo patted him on the head. “Ask him another, friends.”
“Who air president o’the Yoonited States?”
“I … I don’t know.”
“How miny quarts to a gallon?”
Louis shrugged his shoulders.
“What sort o’tree do a acorn come from?”
“What’s catgut made outer?”
“Who was Adam’s wife?”
“What’s the dif’rence ’twixt a crabapple and a road apple?”
“Which is yer left foot?”
Louis threw up his hands. “I do not know!” he cried.
Bilbo stepped forward and silenced the Huggins throng.
“Satisfied?” he asked them.
“He sure air stupid,” the grandmother avouched.
“Dumb as a p’tater,” the grandfather concurred.
“A durned idiot,” Mrs. Huggins nodded her head in agreement.
“What’s the genius part?” Mr. Huggins asked.
“He speaks French,” Bilbo told them. “And in that tongue he knows the answers not only to all your questions but to many that heretofore have baffled the world’s greatest philosophers.”
The family’s jaws dropped as one.
“No!” Mrs. Huggins said.
“I don’t believe it,” said Grandpapa.
“I’ll be swoggled!”
“Kin such a thing be so?”
“Behold, ladies and gentlemen….” Bilbo gave the stage back to Louis. “Speak, my boy.”
“Je suis charmé de faire votre connaissance.”
The family recoiled in amazement.
“Land sakes!”
“It’s a wonder!”
“How do we know he ain’t dumb in French too?” Mrs. Huggins inquired with knife-edged skepticism.
“Does he sound stupid, madam?” Bilbo challenged her. “Go ahead: ask him something yourself in the French tongue.”
She pursed her lips and squinted, then shook her head.
“I reckon I’ll take yer word for’t,” she gave in.
“I sure never seed sich a dadburn curiosity,” the grandfather scratched his head. “Say, mistur doctur, kin we git some more o’that’ere ague remedy of yourn?”
“Why, certainly, friend. How many bottles do you suppose you shall require?”
He glanced back to his loved ones. “I reckon five might see us through t’Illinois.”
Bilbo hastened to a shelf at the rear of the museum and brought forward the requested number of bottles.
“Here you are, old fellow. That will be twenty dollars.”
“What!” the grandfather winced.
“The house call was gratis.”
“Mistur doctur,” Huggins replied sheepishly, “we ain’t got that kind o’money.”
“Well, how much have you got?”
The gaunt settler dug into the pocket of his tattered kersey breeches and produced a greasy leather purse. He opened it and peered inside as though it were four feet deep, then shook it upside down into his palm. Two coins spilled out: a Spanish gold dollar and an American dime.
“Thishyear’s alls we got.”
“It won’t do, friend. Why, it doesn’t even cover the cost of the containers—”
“Bilbo, thou villain!” Uncle finally exploded. “Thee stole every bottle from us!”
“Stole, sir! I beg your pardon. You entered into a business consociation with me and took flight when the going got hard. These capital assets thus reverted to myself, your partner in the venture, who has endured untold tribulation to make the scheme the success it has become. Your claim has no merit. I dismiss it. Now, Mr. Huggins, surely you have a few more dollars hidden somewhere upon yonder barge.”
The family traded anxious looks.
“Honest, mistur doctur, we ain’t.”
“I reckon we could give’m old Bossy,” the grandfather suggested.
“You propose to fob off that bovine bag of bones upon me, sir?” Bilbo laughed derisively. “This is a cash business, not a livestock mart. Return the merchandise, if you please.”
“But … but … what if we die?”
“The sun will yet rise, I assure you,” Bilbo crossed his arms. “The goods, please.”
Huggins looked longingly down at the bottles in his hands and then back up at the hulking, implacable Bilbo.
“Ye kin have my personal I.O.U.,” he proposed in desperation. “We’re gonna strike treasure when we git whar we’re goin’. You said so yerse’f. Please…?”
Bilbo fluttered his eyelids and shook his head.
“O, come now, Bilbo,” I pleaded in the poor pilgrims’ behalf. “Let them have a few jars, for goodness’ sake.”
“This is not a charity, sir. Every day the river sends me ague victims by the score. Were I to treat them all free of charge, I would be bankrupt tomorrow, the venture would go up in a vapor, and all mankind would be deprived this boon of medical science. I am adamant. Pay or be gone.”
The wife began to sniffle. The children looked up with reddened, watery eyes. Mr. Huggins sighed and made as though he were about to hand the jars back to Bilbo, then apparently thought better of it, cried, “Run for th’ boat, ever’body!” and bolted out of the tent in the direction of the river. The family were right behind him—all except the grandmother, that is, for Bilbo had collared the wizened crone and was now escorting her down to the landing with a pistol held to her ear.
“Look! He got Grandmaw!” one of the boys cried.
“Let’m blow me t’tarnation,” the old woman squawked. Bilbo made ready to oblige by cocking the hammer of his weapon.
“What do you say, friend,” he called to Huggins up on the boat.
“I say you best lay yer mangy hooks off’n my maw,” Huggins replied, “for my Pa’s has got a holt to his squirrel rifle and is about to send a ball through yer ornery liver, less’n you trade her up here and back off.”
As a matter of fact, the black muzzle of a rifle now protruded from the flatboat’s cabin door. Then, a gnarled thumb appeared and wiped the front sight. Bilbo slowly lowered his pistol and unhanded the frail old woman.
“Go on, git back.”
“Heh heh,” Bilbo laughed unconvincingly as he retreated. “’Twas all a jest.”
“We ain’t laughin’, mistur.”
“Let us say the price is negotiable.”
A shot rang out and the pistol flew out of Bilbo’s hand. It discharged upon hitting the ground and shot the hat off his head.
“It ain’t negotiable no more,” Huggins retorted and helped the grandmother aboard. The oldest boy cast off the line, and the flatboat, with its half-starved humans and livestock, hove away from the shore.
“Thanks for the raree show, mistur!” the middle boy cried as the current carried them off.
“Next time you shall pay the regular price of admission!” Bilbo replied across the water. “Damned rabble! Such is democracy.” He bent to retrieve his pistol and hat, recharging the former and dusting off the latter. “There go your pioneers: a ragtag and bobtail of diseased imbeciles who believe that the world owes them a sustentation. Let the ague take them all!”
“Sammy, Louis, come along” said Uncle, who turned and started back up the path in the direction of Fort Assurance’s ruins, whereat our own boat lay at anchor.
“Just a minute. Where are you going?” Bilbo asked indignantly.
“We are departing thy establishment, thou weevil,” Uncle informed him. I was beginning to feel an onset of chills again and noticed that Uncle too had recommenced to sweat and shiver. Yet he seemed determined to go.
“And how do you propose to survive the ague without my Universal Physic?” Bilbo asked smugly, following close behind with both the dwarf and his daughter.
“Dost thee take me for an idiot too, Bilbo?” Uncle rejoined. “I shall make my own physic and to blazes with yours.” So saying, Uncle reached down, snatched a handful of phrensyweed that grew there, and ate it.
“’Twere better perhaps you hadn’t done that,” Bilbo said. “The dose must needs be carefully regulated to achieve the desired effect.”
“Piffle.”
Uncle resumed his path to our boat. Suddenly, he halted in his tracks. A great shudder ran through him. Steam escaped his nostrils while his eyeballs danced in their sockets. Soon he was trembling uncontrollably.
“Overdose,” quoth Bilbo, nipping at a bottle himself.
Louis and I rushed to Uncle just as he toppled backward into our arms.
“That will teach him to follow his physician’s advice.”
“Villain! Is there no antidote?”
“Time.”
My teeth began to chatter as the ague once again befouled my own humors. The verdure whirled before my eyes, and my ears roared. I no longer had the strength to help support Uncle.
“We’re not … staying here with you … another minute,” I gasped defiantly at the scoundrel as my knees wobbled.
“That’s what you think,” Bilbo said with a smile, dandling the bottle of his remedy just beyond my grasp.
The next thing I knew, the ground was rushing upward toward my face.
We were now as much at the blackguard’s mercy as though we had been bonded slaves from the Guinea coast; more so, in fact, for a slave has but one master while we had two—Bilbo and the terrible ague. We were also in possession of something that Bilbo sorely lacked—a sound keelboat—for it developed that he had a scheme to relocate in the city of New Orleans, where his reputation as a miscreant was unknown, and there raise a fortune by proffering his physic to the multitudes who pass through that “keyhole to the continent.”
Louis and I were put to work harvesting as much of the phrensyweed as we could well find growing in the vicinity, while poor Uncle fell into a sleep so profound that it was like unto death itself. His heart beat at the astoundingly slow rate of ten pulses per minute, while he barely seemed to breathe at all. I labored in the gravest anxiety for his eventual recovery. Not so Bilbo, who, opportunistic humbugger that he was, saw pecuniary advantage even in Uncle’s deathlike sleep, for he installed the great botanist in a prominent part of the museum under a painted bill advertising him as the mummy of dctr. benjamin franklin.
So too was I at the mercy of that insatiable wanton, the Far-seeing Girl, who repeatedly coerced me behind a whortleberry bush to loose the fire of her haunches upon my helpless person. But my acquittance from this swinish duty sadly proved to be the undoing of another. One morning I awoke to the sound of footfalls. Who should I espy preparing to micturate not ten paces away but Louis. When he unbuttoned his breeches, out came an organ so prodigious that it would have put to shame any of the monstrous puzzles that figured in the late Madame LeBoeuf’s watercolors. One might have thought Louis were carrying a log of firewood in both hands, but for the torrent that issued from its massive end. The sound of this cascade roused Bessie from her slumber beside me. Her mouth, such as it was, fell agape. I tried to clap my hand over her eyes but she jabbed an elbow ’twixt my ribs, knocking the wind from me.
“Unph…”
Louis turned around, hearing me exclaim as I crumpled, while the torrent continued to flow from the monstrous member. He did not espy us in the thicket, but just went about his business. Bessie goggled at the display as though it embodied all her hopes and dreams. When he plodded away, she followed on his heels like a hound after some poor, unknowing prey.
“You want to what?” Bilbo thundered that evening as our company, minus poor Uncle, sat ’round the fire to a supper of planked garfish and roasted snipes. Bessie leaned toward her father and again whispered in his ear. The old fakir went pale. “You want to marry!” he gasped.
“Unh-hunh,” she nodded avidly.
Bilbo fanned his face with his hat, so great was his shock. “Why, just yesterday she was a little girl rolling her hoop down Maiden Lane,” he exclaimed, breathless with the news. “And now: matrimony? How fleet are the years! But what provision is to be made for her dear old papa, I should like to know,” he squinted across the flickering fire in my direction.
“Don’t look at me. I am not the lucky fellow,” said I.
“What! You can’t marry Neddy!”
“Hwong! Hwee pwunduh hwumpunh, pwuh hwonpwongfuh,” she assailed her father and then threw her arms around Louis.
“Egad! Not the idiot!”
“Hwonk hwumpah.”
Bilbo turned a fish-eye upon the prospective groom. “Exactly what do you propose as a livelihood, Your Majesty?”
“Commerce?” Louis ventured in an uncertain tone. “Like you?”
Bilbo curled his lip in a sneer.
Bessie glanced at her prospective husband with a look of exasperation and whispered again in her father’s ear, spreading her hands apart as though showing the size of a trout she had caught.
“Really?” Bilbo exclaimed. “That big?”
“Un-hwonk.”
“Well now, this sheds a different light upon the matter,” the father of the bride said and rolled his eyes in calculation. “I suppose people might pay to see it….”
Thus, the following morning, before commencing my hated labor of weed collection, did I observe the obdurate wretch at work installing the latest, and certainly most deplorable, curio in his lurid collection. He had cut a hole in a cheap trade blanket and hung said blanket from a wire. Above it flew a placard that proclaimed:
Amazing Western Monster!
The Talking Anaconda
“Are you ready back there, my boy?”
“Oui, monsieur doctor.”
“Very well. Let the snake out of its burrow.”
I heard giggling from behind the blanket. Suddenly, the monstrous pizzle appeared through the hole, a great ugly pink lardoon, bobbing this way and that like indeed the head of a terrible large serpent. Two eyes had even been painted on it. My capacity for revulsion was here outrun.
“Excellent, my boy,” Bilbo praised the booby. “Now, pretend I am a visitor in the museum. What do you say?”
“Allô, je m’appelle—”
“No, no, in English,” Bilbo prompted him.
“Hello, my name is Anatole the Anaconda. How nice to make your acquaintance. What is your name, little girl?”
“My name is Sarah Huggins,” Bilbo replied in falsetto.
“Where is your family going, Sarah Huggins?”
“To Illinois.”
“How happy I am for you. Kiss me and I will bring you good luck—”
I could not abide another instant of this execrable mummery and stepped forward to tear down the placard and blanket.
“Put that thing back in your breeches before I cut it off,” I told Louis, who shrank from my remonstrance. “As for you, Bilbo, I implore you: don’t let success go to your head.”
“Spoilsport,” quoth the villain.
“So long have you lived outside society that you seem to forget that the law operates at all, even here in Kentucky.”
“And who are you, the town magistrate?”
“If you will not respect the dignity of others, at least consider the well-being of your own hide. Someone out there on the river might take offense at these shenanigans.”
“Well, balls to the law,” he riposted, swigging upon a jar of his physic. “And balls to you. And balls to anyone out there.”
It is a reckless physician who takes too much of his own medicine, and the sorry truth was that Bilbo had overindulged in his Universal Physic to the degree that it had begun to affect his judgment. Thus, later that same day, when I returned from the woods dragging a heavy sack of herb behind me, I found a very large keelboat of ten tons’ capacity and a pair of twenty-foot-long flat-bottomed pirogues tied up at the landing. A familiar-looking spotted gray horse stood upon the aft quarter of the keelboat. As I rounded to the front of the tent I heard the murmur of many voices, then saw that the museum was filled with customers, at least a dozen of them soldiers. My heart gladdened to see these ensigns of civilization and to know our deliverance from Bilbo was at hand.
I entered and made my way amongst them. Bilbo was displaying Louis’s idiocy for the crowd, conducting the questions and answers, when a familiar voice rang out, “Captain, I know this man!” All heads turned toward the right. A look of anxiety came over Bilbo’s face. I elbowed my way closer.
There, standing around the packing crate that contained the alleged mummy of Benjamin Franklin, stood those two manly young officers whom we had last seen in Washington City in the public room of Rupert & MacSneed’s Hotel, viz., Captain Lewis and Lieutenant Clark. And between them, gazing down upon Uncle’s prostrate figure in horror, was Judge Felix Ravenel.
Bilbo’s fortune from that moment entered a phase of precipitous decline.
“Permit me to explain …” he would protest at each stage of the inquiry into his conduct. But Judge Ravenel, who was visiting Kentucky’s westernmost counties “on court’s business,” recognized him for the scoundrel he was. There was some consideration of bringing him and his brood back to Lewis County for trial. But Judge Ravenel would be returning alone on horseback and did not relish the prospect of hauling them back as prisoners. Instead, he convened an “extraordinary session” of the circuit court on the spot in order to try the villain.
“I know the law!” railed Bilbo. “I am entitled to counsel!”
“So you are,” replied the judge from his bench improvised at the rail of their keelboat. And he temporarily admitted to the bar Captain Lewis and Lieutenant Clark, that they might serve respectively as prosecutor and defense attorney in the proceeding. They were given half an hour to prepare their cases.
“Melancton Bilbo,” Judge Ravenel read the bill of indictment, “you are charged with defrauding the public, twenty-seven counts; unlawful detention, three counts; robbery, fifty-three counts [our boat plus equipments]; creating a public nuisance and practicing medicine without a license, one count each. How do you plead?”
“He pleads guilty, your honor,” said Clark, sunnily.
“What! I plead innocent!”
“Guilty,” Clark repeated.
“I want to discharge my attorney.”
“Whom do you propose to replace him?”
“Myself, your honor.”
“You are incompetent,” Judge Ravenel declared. “You are also obviously guilty, but I will permit you to plead innocent so as to preclude an appeal for leniency when you are convicted and sentenced. Proceed, Captain Lewis….”
Bilbo’s desperate histrionics testifying in his own behalf so delighted the soldiers and boatmen who constituted the jury that he won their applause, if not their sympathy. He contrived to have a bottle of his physic admitted as evidence, and sampled by the jurors, which put them in a much more amiable frame of mind. As to his demeaning exhibition of Uncle, he claimed it was necessary to defray the expense of his treatment. All in all, it was a most diverting defense, and in the end, despite the earnest efforts of the court, he was found guilty only of the twenty-seven counts of fraud (one each for the exhibits in his museum), each a mere misdemeanor.
“Have you anything to say?” Judge Ravenel asked after the verdict had been pronounced.
“How much time have I?”
“Brevity alone will avail.”
“Then remember Galileo,” Bilbo said, glancing upward to the clouds.
“I’d love to hang you. Perhaps some day it shall be my pleasure to do so. For the present, and in conformity with the statutes, I sentence you to twenty-seven lashes with the horsewhip, said punishment to be carried out at once.”
The judge rapped his gavel—a pistol butt—and the court was adjourned.
A sturdy corporal nearly as tall as Bilbo, and twice as broad at the shoulders, was selected to lay the cowhide on the miscreant’s back. I confess I had no stomach to witness the spectacle and repaired to the deserted museum while Bilbo’s cries of “Balls! Balls! Balls!” echoed in the distance. And it was during this carrying out of sentence that dear Uncle suddenly revived. I heard a groan and rushed to the crate where he lay to find him blinking and licking his lips. But though he woke from his five-day slumber like a man roused from nothing more than an afternoon nap, some of his faculties were slow in returning to full function: his memory, for instance. He knew Judge Ravenel, but could not for the life of him identify Clark and Lewis, for whom he had felt such a keen rivalry upon our commission in Washington City.
“I know those two from somewhere,” he whispered to me as we convened around the supper fire. When Judge Ravenel introduced the two officers, it finally came to him. “The Corps of Discovery!” Uncle exclaimed.
The amiable Clark smiled to be so acknowledged, whilst the broody Lewis attacked his catfish fillet and scowled.
“We are indeed honored to meet you here on La Belle Riviere,” Clark declared, “but I had your assurance that you would not tread in our footsteps, Mr. Walker, and here you are.”
“Louisiana is not the object of our mission,” said I to assuage their jealousy.
“Then what is its object?” Lewis asked bluntly.
Uncle seemed puzzled, as though he could not remember.
“Have you pen, ink, and paper?” I asked.
Soon I had concocted another sketch of our quarry. The officers laughed as they examined it.
“Looks like a warthog,” said Lewis.
“’Tis the giant sloth, and we are commissioned to secure a specimen.”
“I have seen the bones of this monster with my own eyes, gentlemen,” Judge Ravenel avouched.
“At Mammoth Lick it was,” Uncle inserted, and I was glad to see his faculties coming back into focus.
“Indeed, we saw some pretty mastodon bones there ourselves,” Clark said.
“Where is the rest of your corps, Mr. Walker?” Lewis asked without mincing words. “Didn’t you tell us it numbered upward of fifty men?”
“It does, sir.”
“Then where are they?”
“We are the vanguard, Captain. The others follow some days behind us.”
If Judge Ravenel detected prevarication on our part, he kept his own counsel, realizing no doubt that Uncle, a close friend of the President’s, had his reasons.
“You serve as your own scouts, then?” Lewis pressed his interrogation.
“We do not shrink from danger, sir,” I countered his insinuation, “and we are no longer in a court of law, if you please.”
For the first time, Lewis smiled. It was an artificial-looking thing, but I was happy to observe the discomfort it evinced.
“Had any luck thus far?” Lieutenant Clark changed the subject diplomatically.
“We saw a few of the beasts up Tennessee way.”
“Where are your specimens?”
“Strange to relate, they are such thundering great creatures that a rifle ball affects them like the sting of a gnat.”
“I have heard the same thing about the great yellow bear of the prairie,” Clark said.
“A toast, gentlemen, to the prodigalities of our republic,” Judge Ravenel proposed, hoisting his tin flagon in salute, whilst we four rival adventurers eyed one another with suspicion. I had no doubt that Messrs. Lewis and Clark regarded us as spies sent to shadow the Corps of Discovery—for Lewis had served as Jefferson’s personal secretary and knew better than anyone his master’s devious mind.
After the meal, the men broke out their jaw’s harps and a fiddle, not to mention their flasks of ever-flowing whiskey, and commenced a’capering by the light of their campfires. I excused myself from the officers’ mess and went to find Louis, whose allegiance to his sweetheart was undimmed by her family connection.
Bessie was applying a poultice of mosses and mud to her father’s raw back, while Neddy lay upon all fours in the firelight quietly sharing Bilbo’s misery like a loyal hound. Louis was gazing dejectedly into the fire as I approached.
“My friend, how happy I am to see you,” he said without much conviction.
“There is he: Judas in buckskins!” Bilbo sneered. Neddy bared his teeth and growled lowly.
“May I speak to you in private, Louis?” I asked.
He assented and we withdrew down to the river’s edge. The peacock-blue western sky was coming alive with countless twinkling stars, and the katydids chirped so loud they all but drowned out the boatmen’s songs.
“Why did you not take supper with us tonight, Louis?”
He shrugged his shoulders and flicked a pebble out into the river.
“You know we must leave tomorrow, Louis.”
“Where do we go from here, Sammy?”
“Uncle and I to Natchez on the Mississippi. Yourself to St. Louis with Captain Lewis and Lieutenant Clark, who are officers of our government and will see to your safety.”
“What will happen to me in St. Louis, Sammy?”
“You will wait there while the President and his cabinet are notified.”
“Then what will happen to me?”
“You will be transported to Washington City.”
“On a boat?”
“Several boats, I should imagine.”
“What will happen to me in Washington City?”
“You will wait until General Bonaparte is cast out of France and then you will claim your throne.”
“When will this happen, Sammy?”
“I don’t know. Not more than a few years, I shouldn’t think.”
Louis nodded his head. I was rather surprised to notice how brown his face and hands had become from days spent in the sun, and how he was beginning to lose the bloated, pear-shaped figure, a result of the first physical labors he had ever performed.
“May I not come with you and Uncle William?” he asked following a long silence.
“I don’t think so, Louis. For we must penetrate into the wilderness, where there is much danger.”
“I will help you.”
“No, Louis. You are the King of France. Your life must be protected for the sake of your people.”
“At Chateau Félicité my life was protected,” Louis recalled with a sigh. “So many years. Do you know, Sammy, that I was never allowed outside the gate?”
“Not once?”
“Never. The world outside was a pretty picture in the window, nothing more. Since I am with you and Uncle William is the first time I have felt like a living creature, out here amid the other creatures. The world is such a beautiful place, more beautiful even than Chateau Félicité. I would like to stay in this world.”
“But you shall, Louis.”
“I don’t think so, Sammy. I think I shall be once again a prisoner.”
“But you must be patient if you want your throne.”
“I am not so sure that I desire this throne. Am I not an idiot?”
“No,” I assured him emphatically. “You are not. The longer we are acquainted, the more I am convinced that your education was deliberately thwarted by Monsieur LeBoeuf.”
At the mention of his former guardian, a tear came to his eye as he harked back upon what had been—till two weeks ago—the only home he had ever known.
“Very well, perhaps I am not an idiot, but I am not a genius like Monsieur Napoleon Bonaparte. Let him be King of France. I think he would make a better king than me.”
“Do I understand that you will not go to St. Louis with these officers?”
He nodded his head in the affirmative.
“Still, you cannot come with us.”
“I will go to New Orleans with monsieur doctor—”
“With Bilbo! Louis, I cannot permit it.”
“You cannot permit it!” he retorted with astounding vehemence. It was not a little intimidating to see such a large young man lose his temper. “Who are you to prevent me? You are not my uncle. You are Sammy. I am a man too, you know.”
“But … but he is a villain, a scoundrel, a fraud, a thief, a—”
“You should hear what he says about you. Besides, he has a beautiful daughter.”
“Beautiful! Why, she is a monster.”
“Then why did you go into the whortleberry bush with her?”
“I was merely helping her search for something.”
“I know what she was looking for, Sammy. She has asked me to become her husband.”
“Louis, I beg you, wait before you make this decision—”
“I do no more waiting,” he declared in a manner more regal than he might ever know.
“But you have so little experience in the world. When you are King, all the beauties of the realm will come to your door.”
“Sammy,” he put his hand on my shoulder. “I will never be King.”
“But it is your birthright.”
“Are you my friend?” he forced me to look into his large brown eyes.
“Yes, Louis. You know I am your friend.”
“Then forget that I am this King, please, and let me just be Louis.”
“Very well,” I gave in. “I will do as you wish.”
“O, I am so happy!” he threw his arms about my neck. “Come, let us tell monsieur doctor.”
Bilbo took the news with surprising equanimity, considering his smarting back and what little he had seen of his prospective son-in-law’s intelligence.
“I always said I’d live to see my little Bessie dressed in Paris silks,” he averred, and I wondered if he had come to believe Louis’s true identity, or whether he was merely happy to have found his beloved offspring a serviceable husband. “After the ceremony, we shall embark for New Orleans.”
“After the ceremony—?”
“Why yes, surely that judge friend o’yours will tie the knot. ’Tis his civic duty as much as hounding the trail-blazers of medical science with lawsuits and prosecutions. I shall ask him myself tomorrow.”
“But what is the hurry?”
“Indeed, why wait,” Bilbo gathered Bessie and Louis under each enormous arm, “and deprive the happy couple of marital bliss?”
So it was that the two lovebirds were united in wedlock under a bower of Rubus odoratus the next day at nine in the morning—a rude hour, but the Corps of Discovery, and Judge Ravenel with them, were anxious to be under way. The bride wore her Oriental pantaloons and veil—and I stood as Louis’s best man. Bilbo gave Bessie away, and Uncle gnashed his teeth. When the deed was done, Bilbo started a keg of Monongahela whiskey and passed out rations to all present. He even took the opportunity to sell over a dozen jars of his Universal Physic to the crew, for it had been many miles between towns, and they had had nothing to spend their pay upon.
Finally, it came time to bid adieu to the old mountebank, and more particularly to Louis—promising to meet him in New Orleans anon—for we assumed we would be traveling at least as far as the confluence of the Mississippi in convoy with the Corps of Discovery. And so imagine our chagrin to learn that they would not grant us even this minor courtesy.
“Sirs,” Uncle appealed to them as they boarded their flagship, “would you leave us in the clutches of this contumacious villain?”
“We are bound for St. Louis, Mr. Walker,” Lieutenant Clark stated, “whilst you are headed in the opposite way, to Natchez.”
“Yes, but let us follow to the Mississippi, for heaven’s sake.”
“I think not,” the gloomy Lewis shook his head, looking down upon us with squinched eyes and grim-set mouth.
“President Jefferson will hear about this!” I cried up at them, shaking my fist.
“That I do not doubt,” Lewis said.
“Felix, tell them who I am,” Uncle implored his old friend.
“We know who you are,” Lewis said, throwing back his head and laughing.
Judge Ravenel made a helpless face and held his palms up. “They are determined, William,” he said. “And I am going only so far as Ballard County.”
“Then come with us.”
“You have not room for my horse on your little boat.”
“Cast off the lines, men!” Captain Lewis shouted. “I warn you, Walkers, do not follow.”
“Felix!”
“Good luck, William!”
The great keelboat, with its attending pirogues to the stern, hove away from shore and out into the Ohio’s current. In a matter of minutes they rounded a bend and vanished out of sight.
“What a strange mistress is fate,” Bilbo commiserated, nipping at a bottle of his physic. “But how I will enjoy the pleasure of your company all the way down the Big Muddy.”