Captain Adam (28 page)

He had seen kicked-over ant heaps; nor was he one to disremember what the Book says about going to the ant, thou sluggard; but ants knew what they were doing, and they worked for one another.

He issued from out of an alley narrow enough so that he might have touched the houses on either side, and emerged into a street comparatively broad; and he saw a coach approaching.

Now Adam Long had never before seen a coach, though he recognized it from descriptions. This street was spacious only in comparison with the alleys he'd recently roamed: in itself it was scarcely wide enough to accommodate the coach, a yellow monstrous lumbrous contraption drawn by four fat horses. Most of the folks near him flattened themselves against walls or squeezed into doorv\'ays, but Adam stood staring, head cocked.

The coach was all over small wooden steeples and tassels, some red, some silver. Out of its center, high, wobbling precariously at every lurch of the coach as though it were going to break off, rose a flat wooden triangle on one side of which—Adam couldn't see the other side—were painted two diagonal white stripes, their edges clipped like the edge of a pie, against a background of red.

There were two men sitting up in the driver's seat, which didn't seem necessary. Only one held the reins. They wore red coats with silver froggery, the same sort of coats the two men who rode the left-hand horses wore. Adam couldn't for the life of him see a kernel of reason in those two men. They didn't do anything, just sat there.

Before the coach and on either side, behind, too, marched soldiers. There must have been twenty of these. They carried muskets, holding them out, away from their bodies, in readiness to use the butts as clubs. Folks faded before them. But Adam Long loitered a moment out from the line against the wall, rubbering for a peek at the person or persons within the coach. A soldier struck him in the chest.

"Out of the way, bumpkin!"

This was not a push but a substantial blow. Adam was slammed against the wall. He bellowed, reaching for his sword.

Instantly another soldier stooped low to slap his musket butt sideways across Adam's shins.

The pain was an explosion. The first blow had dizzied him but at the same time enraged him. Now all he could do was double up. He might have toppled into the path of the coach itself had not a third soldier kicked him in the mouth. That held him straight until the coach had passed. It also caused his mouth to bleed.

The coach gone, then, a final quartet of soldiers marching backward behind it, the street resumed its clangor, men tumbling about like water in a wake. Only one man, a pursy fellow of merchantlike mien, took the trouble to help Adam to his feet.

"Tut, tut! Lucky it isn't raining today. Might have ruined this." He was feeling the material of the coat as he brushed it. "Where, uh, did you buy this, if I may be so bold as to ask, sir?"

Adam had started to lug out his blade.

"No, no!" The pursy one grabbed his arms. "They're down to the river by now. You'd never even get near his lordship. They'd beat you to a pulp-"

Adam licked his lips, tasting the salty blood. He shook his head, clacked his sword back.

"Thank you, sir," he said as quiedy as he could.

"You're an American colonial, sir, I take it? "

Adam looked at him in amazement.

"Now how'd you ever know that?"

The pursy one summoned a water-seller, gave her a farthing for a can, proffered his own kerchief, and wiped Adam's mouth.

"Tut, tut! But you're lucky. I've seen men get all their front teeth smashed in, they didn't jump back fast enough."

"I was never taught to jump out of the way."

" 'Tis a good thing to know. There. Take care of that coat. You didn't buy it in Boston, I'll wager. Philadelphia perhaps?"

"Kingston, Jamaica."

"Ah," slowly raising and lowering his head. "Ah, yes. I see. Well, goodbye, sir. Your servant."

"Your servant, sir. And—thank you a bushel of times."

Still stunned, unsure of himself, struggling to hold his rage in, Adam must have walked half a mile after this before he as much as looked up —to see a sight so strange that in a wild moment he wondered whether he had been knocked unconscious and was dreaming this.

A f\ It was an open space, large for London, roughly round, the j^yj sort of place, as Adam later learned, though he was never to learn why, that was called a circus. There was a considerable crowd, in the center of which stood one of the largest persons Adam ever had seen, a man with immense shoulders, an ape's arms, black lank hair, a mouth continually atwist, hands that might have been hams, bare feet. This creature wore only a shaggy tuniclike affair seemingly made of the pelts of small animals, tasseled in unexpected places, and more than a little motheaten. He rumbled and growled pauselessly.

Prancing and capering around, and waving a branch of spruce, was a thin short man with the eyes of a malicious old monkey. He wore an extremely tall conical hat made of some sort of paper, on which had been crayoned pictures intended to represent (as near as Adam could make out) bears, birds, and bushes. He talked all the time.

". . . and the soil's rich and black, thousands of acres for any man wants to take 'em . . . and he don't have to work!" Grimacing, he pointed to the pictures on his hat. "The fruits of the orchards and the vegetables of the field, they're hisn for the picking!"

"Speakin' of vegetables," cried somebody, and threw a rotten turnip. It missed the talker by inches.

"Out to 'eave a paving stone at 'im, that's what," the man next to Adam muttered.

"What in Tophet's he talking about?" Adam asked.

"The American plantations. 'E's a bleedin' spirit."

"A what?"

"A spirit. Recruiter. We calls 'em spirits because they spirit men aw^6. They'll tike anybody—out of prisons, poor'ouses, anywhere."

The crowd itched to learn what that Samson in the patched pelts was supposed to be, and it was permitting itself to be entertained, and conceivably edified, but it was by no means co-operative.

"Four years of bloody slavery they gives you," somebody shouted. "Then they adds a couple more every time you let go a belch."

"Not so, my friends," cried the man in the dunce's cap. "A few years of easy, restful study, just so's you can look around and get used to being in that wonderful land—that's all. You wants time to pick your own plantation, don't you? Well, that's all it is. The contract don't mean nothing. Mere matter of form, my friends."

"He's a liar," Adam said, low.

"For sure. They all are. But there's a few as'll follow 'im, and ell turn 'em over to the top uns of the gang and they'll really pour the lies on like clabbered cream on berries."

The bleedin' spirit was thrusting the spruce first into this face, then into that, all the time dancing around.

"Ever sniff anything so delicious in your life, my friends? The true sequitur fugientum, straight from America."

"Don't smell like nothing to me," one man said.

"Didn't leave it under my nose long enough," another said.

"If the talk-talk-talk don't do it," said the man standing next to Adam, "then they buys 'em ale—spiked with gin."

"And if that doesn't work?"

The man shrugged.

"They 'its 'em on the 'ead."

The recruiter was losing his crowd. He whipped from a pocket three glass balls, which he began to juggle. He wasn't a very good juggler.

"You just lie there and watch the corn grow. And in the daytime you listen to the mooing of the kine, and at night to the—well, the nightingales."

"The roarin' of the tigers, I reckon," somebody shot out.

The recruiter shook a vigorous head.

"No tigers or lions left there any more. The first settlers killed 'em all off when they cleared the land."

"Bad enough they net nitwits, the only kind'd want to go to the plantations anyway," the man next to Adam said, "but when they grabs children it's a caution."

"They take children? Kids?"

"Aye. They're napping kids all over town. Offer 'em sweets, anything. Or just plain break into your 'ouse and steal 'em. Kidnappers—ain't you never heard of the kidnappers, sir?"

Adam slowly shook his head. The very word, he reflected, had an evil sound. Kidnappers. He shuddered.

"You never even heard of them? Say, where'n 'ell do you 'ail from, if a man might ask?"

"The American colonies," replied Adam.

Next time he looked the man was not there.

The man in the center of the circus remained, however, and he was working harder than ever. His glass balls were not getting much attention; his audience was walking out on him; so he played his trump card —the dark-haired monstrosity they were wondering about.

"Where else in the world except a place where the air's so pure and the climate's so balmy, where else would you find a specimen of the human race like my friend Cyossetta here?" 176

He thumped the big man's chest.

"It's the wonderful air, my friends!"

"This one of them red savages?"

"'E don't look red."

" 'Ard to tell what color 'e might turn out, somebody worked him over with soap and water awhile."

A pitchman doesn't dare to permit his audience to participate too freely, lest they take the show away from him.

"Cyossetta here, gents, happens to be a full-blooded Narragansett."

"That's a lie," Adam said loudly.

"Eh?" The recruiter peered at him, squinting, as though through smoke. He saw the sword. "Ah well, your lordship's right. I spoke too hasty. What I meant to say is, 'e's a full-blooded Indian. Matter of fact, 'is mother was a Massachusetts. So 'e's only half Narragansett."

"He's no more an American Indian than he is the man in the moon," declared Adam.

He couldn't have said why he broke in. He had nothing against the redskins, though he was no notable admirer of that race either. All the same, he didn't like to see the Narragansetts maligned.

Hands on hips, he surveyed the giant.

"He may be a Turk, for all I know, but he's no American. And everything else you've said here is a passel of lies, too."

Adam would have walked away then, had not the pitchman, fearing that he planned to linger, tried to scare him off.

Raising his voice: "Maybe if my fine jack-a-dandy here would like to swap a few buffets with Cyossetta he'd prove that a city-bred Englishman is physically superior to this product of the colonies?"

It was a threat. He was saying: "Be off—or I'll sic Samson on you!"

"I might, at that," Adam said.

Once again, there was no reason in it. This wasn't his cause, or shouldn't be. If the authorities of London permitted such goings-on, what was that to Adam?

Maybe he just felt like fighting? Maybe his blood still boiled from that encounter with the coach guards?

Anyway, he unstrapped his sword belt. He looked around for somebody to take it.

There was a thin, fragile-seeming youth, himself sworded. He was dressed in blue and silver, mighty jaunty, and on his mouth and in his eyes was a quizzical smile. Adam went to him.

"Would you be kind enough to guard my effects, sir?"

"Don't be a fool, sir," the young man said in a low voice, but smiling all the while. "That clod could crush you flat."

"I thank you kindly, sir," said Adam, "but I think I'll fight."

The man shrugged. He had thin shoulders. He took snuff from a gold case; but he also, in a moment, took Adam's sword, coat, hat. Adam had learned something about lace in Providence, and he'd have bet sixpence that that was real point d'Alengon at the young man's throat.

"God be w'ye. You'll need somebody's help."

"I don't think that this is any time," Adam said, "to be taking the name of Our Lord in vain."

The man opened his eyes very wide.

"Well, I'll be damned," he whispered.

Adam smiled, to show him there was no hard feeling, and then Adam turned and strode to the center of the circus.

A ~\ It would not be like hitting a man. This was not a man, truly.

-■- -L It was some beast curiously manlike in appearance. The re-

cruiter was more frenzical than ever, bobbing and leaping about, sweat bright on his face, while his wicked little eyes glittered. He spoke to Cyossetta, who gave over his yammering and came out with a real remark, his first, though nobody could understand anything either of them said. Likely enough they spouted a prearranged gibberish calculated to awe most listeners, or it could have been thieves' cant. Anyway, it wasn't Narragansett. Adam Long knew Narragansett.

Swinging his arms slowly, purposefully, Cyossetta shambled forward. Adam's breast tightened, his scalp tingled. Inside the hug of those arms any man would be crushed.

The brute stopped. He reached out, hands open, palms up. It was the gesture of a lazy Goliath. He seemed to be saying: Come here and let's get this over with; let me squash you like a melon, little man.

Standing his full height, Adam went in between those arms—but he went in fast. He punched right and left. He sprang back.

Cyossetta grunted. Blood stood out on his mouth.

"Clout 'im, yer ludship!"

"Bash'is beak in!"

"First claret's yourn! Now catch 'im a conker!"

Adam's fists hurt. Cyossetta seemed the same, except for the blood. He came shuffling in, his hands a little lower now, his shoulders hunched forward. His head was low, too, the chin on his chest. From somewhere behind that tangle of hair two small eyes regarded Adam: they might have been serpents watching from a bush.

Adam sprang again. He struck but one blow this time, a rounder with 178

the right fist, but he landed it just where he wanted it—a trifle to the left of the point of the chin. Then he danced back.

Any other man on earth, he thought with a sob, would have been stopped by that punch. It stung all down Adam's arm, and the fist itself had been set aflame. But Cyossetta came on in.

Adam retreated. He had to.

He ducked low, and went in with head down, hooking right and left. He butted the belly, swung for the groin, missed, slipped. Something that could have been an elbow struck the back of his head, and a knee came up and caught him on a cheekbone. He was down, but his head was clear. He had time to spring to his feet and scrabble away from Cyossetta's charge. Baffled, Cyossetta came to a stop. Adam jumped in and plopped a fist spang on the nose. The blood fairly gushed out, slobbering all down over Cyossetta's fur togs. Cyossetta paid it no mind. He simply shook his head, the impatient gesture of a man who has walked into a cobweb in the dark, and came shambling on.