Colter's Path (9781101604830) (3 page)

“Well, I didn't forget, and I found him. And I've got us a job. Got myself one, anyway, and I'll make sure you're brought in, too, even if I have to hire you out of my own pocket. I don't aim to do California pilot work without you coming with me.”

“And you don't make enough money at it to hire me out of your own pocket, either. Is that what he wants? You to pilot a group to California for him?”

“It is. But this time with a prospect for more than the usual pay.”

“Tell me about it.”

Jedd and Treemont walked and talked, leaving behind the street upon which Emma had lived and not noticing the movement of an upper-floor curtain as they departed, as if someone had been watching. Jedd related to Treemont the proposition Plumb had presented. Tree was suitably impressed. Inevitably Jedd began to talk of Plumb's oddities, especially the gilded teeth. Upon hearing of the latter, Tree halted abruptly and looked oddly at Jedd Colter.

“Golden teeth, you say?”

“Yep. Quite a sight to see.”

Treemont lifted a finger as if to tell Jedd to pause, and dug into his pocket. He pulled his hand out closed into a fist and held it out toward Jedd.

“Take it,” he said, quite solemn.

“Take what?”

“Just give me your palm.”

Tree dropped something small from his fist into Jedd's hand. Jedd looked at it as best he could in the thickening evening gloom. “What is this?”

Tree pulled him by the sleeve to the vicinity of a
lighted window facing the street. Jedd held up what Treemont had given him and saw it was a tooth. The root was its natural color, and crusted in dry blood, but what would have been the visible portion of the tooth was coated in gold.

“Where'd you get this?” Jedd asked his friend.

“Found it in an alleyway.”

Jedd sighed. “I warned him this would happen,” he said. “It ain't a wise move to make your own mouth a gold mine for any scoundrel who is willing to shoot you or knock you in the skull. I got to wonder if Plumb is dead.”

Tree shook his head. “Not 'cording to a fellow who seen the whole thing and told me about it. This fellow said that Plumb was still alive when they hauled him off to a doctor somewhere. Bleeding and toothless, but alive.”

“Maybe I've still got an employer and a piloting job, then.”

“Jedd, I won't lie. I don't believe you coming back to Knoxville had to do only with this Plumb fellow and his letter. I happen to know you got a letter from somebody else, too.”

“You reading my letters on the sneak, Tree?”

“Only when you go to sleep with one of them in your hand and the wind blows it over to the camping fire. I rescued that particular letter from getting burned up, and yes, I did see it. Enough to know who wrote it.”

“Did you read it?”

“Not after I seen it was from her. I figured it was none of my business. But I won't deny I was tempted. You getting a letter from a married woman you used to have your heart set on—I figure it would have made for interesting reading. But I didn't read it.”

“Now you expect me to tell you what she said to me,” Jedd said.

“I wouldn't fuss about it. But it ain't my business, and I ain't asking.”

“I don't mind saying. Kind of wanted to talk about it with somebody, anyway.”

“I'm your somebody.”

“You usually are.” Jedd paused and exhaled slowly. “I think she'd have me back, Tree. From what she wrote, I think she would take me back if that husband of hers wasn't in the way.”

“She's still married, Jedd. Ain't she? Still Mrs. Emma Candlewick? Or Wickhamton? Or whatever it is?”

“Wickham. Her cur of a husband is named Stanley Wickham. Far as I know she's still his wife. I know she was when she wrote the letter.”

“She turned you away 'cause you had no money, if I rightly recollect. You still got no money. Why would she take you now if she wouldn't then? 'Specially since she's already got a husband and would have to go through the shame of a divorce to do it?” Treemont paused and looked more serious all at once. “You wouldn't break up a family, would you, Jedd?”

“Her husband hasn't been good to her, Tree. She told me about it in her letter. He's turned his back on her, treated her like rubbish. She's certain he ain't been faithful.”

“Well, he's a fool, then. Any man who would pull away from an angel of a woman like Emma ain't got the sense of a garden slug.”

I
was born a freeman, sir,” said the black man who was fitting a boot to Jedd's right foot. Jedd was seated on a three-legged stool in a very humble little shop at the end of a dirt street in a disheveled part of town. “Born in the state of North Carolina, over near the coast, but I been in Knoxville for half my life now. I learned shoemaking from my uncle, who used to have a place just yonder across the street. He'd been a slave, but got hisself freed after he saved his master's family from a house fire.” He looked over his shoulder and pointed at what looked to Jedd like an ancient barn. “Warn't much of a place, no question, but he worked hard at his trade and there warn't a finer shoe made than what was made by Otis Slott.”

“That was your uncle's name? Otis?”

“Yes, sir. And me, I'm Ollie. Ollie Slott. My pap was Archie. Otis's brother.”

Jedd wriggled his toes in the boot Ollie had just slipped onto his right foot, nodded, and said, “Ollie, I believe Otis apprenticed you well. That feels just right.”

“Thank you, sir, but don't you go judging them till you've walked about in them a little. You can't rightly judge a fit until you've took some steps.” With that Ollie
slipped the remaining boot onto Jedd's left foot, feeling about Jedd's ankle with expert evaluative fingers as he did so.

Jedd stood and walked out into the empty street and back again. He wiggled his right foot again and the sound of a popping joint was heard.

“I heard the arch bone of your foot pop, sir,” Ollie said. “Mine does that just the same way.” He stuck out his foot, twisted it side to side, and popped it loudly. “I got to do that now and then, Mr. Colter, or at night that leg and foot will cramp up on me. You never saw a feller come out of his blankets as fast as me when I get hit with one of them cramps.”

Jedd said, “A man's feet can distress him bad. That's one reason I need a fine-fitting boot like this one.”

“Do you mind, sir, if I…” Ollie waved Jedd back toward the stool.

Jedd sat and with expert fingers Ollie pressed about on the leather and evaluated the fit of the boots he had made. “What's the verdict, Judge Ollie?” Jedd asked.

“Feels like a good fit to this judge,” Ollie said. “But it's the jury of twelve who have to render the final verdict in the case.”

“‘Jury of twelve'?”

“Ten toes and two feet. Yours.”

Jedd rose with a grin and took another little stroll into the street and back, then up and down the rough boardwalk a few paces. “Verdict's in,” he said. “Fine fit. Finest-fitting piece of boot-wear I've ever had on these twin dogs of mine.” He strode over and thrust his hand out to Ollie, who seemed taken aback by the gesture. Many of Ollie's white customers seemed to try hard to avoid even brushing against him. He stared at Jedd's extended fingers a moment before he glanced about quickly and accepted the handshake. Ollie noticed that Jedd, unlike many white men he dealt with, also did not wipe his palm against his clothing after touching Ollie's hand.

“Them boots should serve you well, sir, when you make your journey back to California,” Ollie said.

“How do you know about that?” Jedd asked.

“Well, it only figures you'd go back, if what I'm hearing is true.”

“What are you hearing?”

“Oh, you know how folks will talk, sir, when someone has come into wealth.”

Jedd pondered that a moment and could only conclude that word was beginning to spread that he had been hired to pilot a new band of travelers to California, and would be well compensated for it. Perhaps the story was being exaggerated; he didn't consider the deal he had made with Plumb to rise to the level of actual wealth, though perhaps it might seem so to an impoverished craftsman such as Ollie Slott.

Jedd reached into his pocket and felt the golden tooth there—Tree had left it with him—and wondered if his agreement with Plumb even existed anymore. Having his teeth pulled right out of his head could have soured Plumb on the whole matter of sponsoring a venture to the gold fields. Prior to visiting Ollie this day to pick up the new boots for which he had been fitted a few days before, Jedd had tried to discover the details of the attack and of Plumb's current condition, but so far had had no luck in gaining new information.

Jedd showed Ollie the gilded tooth. “Know anything about this?” he asked.

Ollie gaped at the tooth after he realized just what he was seeing. In that momentary silence, Jedd noticed a sound coming from somewhere across the street…a muffled thumping noise, repetitive and varying in speed and intensity.

“Mr. Colter, sir, I seen a man with just such gold teeth as that here on the street a day or two back. Kind of a dandy dresser, with a strut in his walk. Don't believe I know his name….”

“Plumb. Ottwell Plumb. He's the man who's hired me to become a pilot for a journey to California he's helping sponsor and get organized.”

“I ain't heard about that, sir.”

Jedd wondered, then, to what Ollie had been referring when he made the reference about wealth.

More muffled thudding came from across the street. It seemed to be coming from the old building where Ollie's uncle had once made footwear.

Jedd flipped the tooth to Ollie. “Any idea how Plumb came to lose that tooth, Ollie?”

Ollie caught the tooth reflexively. He looked at it intently. “Looks to me like it was pulled with pliers or tongs or some such.”

“I think so. And I figure that while that was happening, them doing it were interrupted and took off running and dropped this one.”

Ollie nodded in a distracted way. “Yes, sir. I think it happened in an alleyway somewhere up near the custom house.”

“So you know about it?”

“I…I heard some talk.”

“What did you hear?”

“I heard that some men seen this fellow flashing his gold Waterloos and decided they wanted them. So they followed him until they could get him into an alley. Knocked him out and went to gold mining.”

“What kind of men?”

“White men, I was told.”

“Any notion where Plumb is now?”

“No, sir. He was took to a doctor, I know, but I don't know if he stayed there or moved on. You said he'd hired you to work for him?”

“To pilot a group to California.”

Ollie seemed puzzled. “I'd have figured a man in your situation wouldn't be needful of hiring out for such a task as that, sir. Seems like you'd not want the bother of it, considering the way things stand with you now.”

“What do you mean, Ollie? The way things stand for me now is the way they stand for most everybody: a man's got to work for his living.”

“Not if he's come into money, he don't. A man with enough money don't have to work at all unless he wants to.”

“Just what have you been hearing about me? I get the feeling you think that I—”

There was a sudden crashing, splintering noise from across the street, followed by two loud thumps, as if heavy objects had been thrown to the ground from some height. Mixed with the thuds was the much fainter sound of masculine grunting. Ollie sprang up, worry in his expression, and without another word darted across to the barnlike building from which the sound had come. He grabbed at the door and yanked, but it was barred on the inside. Jedd could hear the rattle of the locking bar all the way across the street. But he didn't stay across the street long: a half moment later he followed Ollie across the avenue. “Stand back…. I'll see how these stout new boots you made me do for kicking in doors.”

His offer went unneeded. Ollie had already pulled back, put his shoulder forward, and lunged full body into the door before Jedd even finished speaking. The door jolted, the bar on the inside jumped out of its holders, and all at once the door was barred no more. Ollie was inside in an instant. Jedd followed, and once in, paused for a few moments to take in and make sense of what he saw.

J
edd found Ollie kneeling beside another, bigger man with the same richly dark skin, gently waving hair, and full jawline. The man wore heavy workman's trousers, but no shirt or shoes. He lay on the dirty floor beside what looked like a giant cylindrical leather sack, well stuffed, and around him were great splinters and shards of wood, and most of a heavy, broken beam.

Jedd looked up and saw that the man and the leather cylinder had fallen down to ground level because of the breakage of a beam and the collapse of part of the floor of a loft above them. Though he had little time and a scant level of light in which to figure out what had happened, it appeared to Jedd that the leather cylinder had by its weight fractured a beam from which it had been hanging, then fallen to and through the loft floor and dragged the man down after it through the gaping hole.

Jedd took another look at the shirtless man and figured it out.

The fellow wore rounded, puffed gloves of leather on his hands, seemingly some sort of protective wear, resembling overstuffed mittens. Clearly he had been pounding
at the leather sack when it had all given way and he had made his journey through the loft floor to the ground level below.

A fighter. He had to be a fighter who had been practicing and building his skills by punching at the hanging leather bag.

Jedd knelt beside the man and Ollie. Ollie said, “This is my brother, Rollins. Goes by Rollie. Rollie, this here is Jedd Colter. The one I been making the boots for. He's wearing them now…. See?”