Colter's Path (9781101604830) (6 page)

“Mr. Varney, are you all right?” Jedd asked the timid clerk he'd just gotten back to his feet. Varney brushed himself off and gave nervous assurances of his welfare, his embarrassment thorough and obvious.

“Very sorry,” Varney said. “Very sorry indeed.”

“I regret having startled you,” Jedd said.

“My own fault, sir. My own.”

“Let's hush this nonsense and have ourselves a bit of something worth drinking,” said Witherspoon Sadler.

“A little early to be doing that, don't you think, Withers?” said his brother, Wilberforce.

“I was thinking of coffee,” Witherspoon said, glancing at Jedd. “My brother ever misinterprets anything I say.”

Varney hurried into the office suite and off to a small kitchen area where a stove was kept burning for such times as this. He busied himself efficiently as Jedd turned to face Ottwell Plumb.

“I'm sorry for what happened to you, Ottwell,” he said, and Plumb smiled, a very different smile than the last he had given to Jedd, when there were still gilded teeth in his mouth.

“You warned me, Jedd,” he said. “You told me there
might be those ready to do me such harm for my golden teeth, and I'm hanged if you weren't right. I was struck down and subjected to, well, some fiercely unwanted dentistry not more than an hour after we parted, you and I. It was surely the greatest pain I have ever suffered in all my days so far, and if providence is cooperative, a level of pain I will never experience again.”

“Enough talk of that unfortunate matter,” said Wilberforce Sadler, pushing himself in front of Jedd and putting out his long-fingered, thin hand. Jedd shook the hand of a soft-palmed businessman unaccustomed to manual labor. “Ottwell tells me many good things of you, Jedd,” Wilberforce went on. “It is acceptable to you to be called Jedd, I presume?” A small, fast smile. “Or is my presuming merely presumptuous?” He chuckled at what he clearly thought had been clever wordplay.

“Jedd is my name, and Jedd I am pleased to be called, sir.”

“And you may call me Wilberforce. Or merely Wilber, as my brother, Withers, is wont to do.”

Wont to do.
Jedd squelched a grimace. Wilberforce Sadler obviously was one who invested too much effort in trying to sound and appear sophisticated. Such pretentiousness might pass unnoticed in Philadelphia or Boston or New York, but Knoxville was still far too much a frontier town for such airs to fit comfortably.

“It is fortunate that you have come by today,” Wilberforce told Jedd. “We had just been discussing the fact that we needed to have a general talk about our upcoming venture. Though not all the relevant parties are present, there are enough of us here to have a worthwhile discussion.”

The meeting occurred in a carpeted conference room that stood between the offices of the two Sadler brothers. Hanging on the patterned wall were large landscapes in oil, similar in style to the paintings in the hallway.

Jedd selected a chair at the side of the long, rectangular table and had just gotten settled when Witherspoon Sadler raised a fuss and hustled him to the head of the
table instead. It was evident, from the glowering expression on Wilberforce's watching face as this happened, that he had intended that head-of-the-table spot to be his own, but Witherspoon was determined and prevailed. Jedd kept his chair.

T
he Sadler brothers had just seated themselves when another party entered the room: a young man, sandy-haired and attempting with little success to cultivate a mustache, and possessing piercing blue eyes, one slightly darker than the other. He wore business attire of a cheap make, and carried in his hand a leather-bound notepad with a heavy pencil fitted into loops on the spine. The unevenly blue eyes were quick and in constant motion, and gave most of their attention to Wilberforce Sadler.

“We begin,” proclaimed Wilberforce. “The purpose we may give to our fortuitous and unplanned gathering today is simple: a general and introductory discussion of our venture, and the role we will play in it. It is regrettable that General Lloyd could not come by today, but to our misfortune he has been afflicted by ill health upon his rising this morning, and will not join us.”

“Trots,” Witherspoon stage-whispered to Jedd, grinning. “He was afflicted this morning with the trots. He'd planned to visit us today, but instead is visiting his privy.”

“Withers!” bellowed Wilberforce. “Dignity! Dignity!”

The fatter brother nodded, chastened. “Liquidity of the bowels, I should have put it,” he said. “My brother is of delicate and perhaps puritanical sensibilities, Jedd.”

Wilberforce sighed, rose from his chair, and yanked his brother up by the collar. Witherspoon came stumblingly to his feet, almost falling, but Wilberforce did not let him go. Witherspoon straightened and let Wilberforce turn him to face him. Witherspoon appeared about to speak, but his brother's hand fired up and slapped Witherspoon's fleshy cheek, hard. Witherspoon staggered back and against the table, gasping loudly in pain.

Jedd was stunned. Nothing in the rather silly words spoken before seemed to Jedd to have been adequate to have prompted Wilberforce's slapping of his brother. Jedd suspected at once that what was really playing out here transcended the matter immediately at hand. These two brothers had provoked and annoyed each other in a thousand ways for all the years of their lives, probably, and likely this was not the first time such minor violence had occurred between them.

The young sandy-haired man with the mismatched eyes whipped open his notebook, slid the pencil from its sleeve, and began scribbling notes.

Witherspoon, his left cheek a stinging red, glared at his taller brother. “The day'll come, Wilber, when that kind of treatment from you won't be abided.”

Wilberforce laughed. “If you don't like hard treatment from me, Withers, don't disport yourself in a manner that earns it. And if you plan to alter the way in which I interact with you, well, I'm standing right here. But you know you won't do anything about it, any more than you ever have. Because some were born to lead and others to follow. Or, perhaps, to sit on their fat posteriors and keep their mouths closed if they know what's good for them.”

Jedd looked over at Ottwell Plumb, who was seated at the far end of the table from him. Plumb was watching the Sadlers with a listless, hollow gaze. Jedd was immediately seized with an urge to get up and leave the place and put behind the agreement he had made with Plumb. There was something strange, flawed, and maybe poisonous here. But years of having been raised to honor agreements and promises overwhelmed Jedd's instincts and
froze him to his chair. He slumped back, shunning the impulse to flee but wondering just what it would be to travel all the way across the nation in company with such contentious men as these.

And who was the young scribbler so fervently recording the altercation? How, and why, did he fit into the scenario?

Witherspoon had returned to his chair after the slapping incident, but seemed ready to get up again when Wilberforce put his hand gently on his brother's shoulder and urged him to stay put. “You all right, Withers?” he asked, voice much softer, almost kindly. “That was a fierce blow, harder than intended. Are you all right?”

Witherspoon Sadler's shoulders began to heave and shake and his eyes moistened. Jedd had to look away, unable to watch a grown man weep so submissively and pathetically after such childish misuse by his own brother.

The scribbling continued on the notepad. Wilberforce turned his glare toward the young man. “Crozier, why are you writing? And what?”

The young man looked up, pencil stopping for a moment. “I'm doing what you hired me to do, Mr. Sadler,” he said. “I'm recording the details of the enterprise.”

Wilberforce shook his head. “No, Crozier. You were hired to record the details of the
journey
across the country and the successes we will experience in California's diggings, and report the same, with my clearance and approval, to the
Knoxville Standard
. This meeting is in
advance
of the enterprise, not part of it. Nothing that has happened here today merits notation or reporting. You were fetched here merely because of the fortuitous visit of Mr. Colter and the opportunity it affords for us to begin our planning.”

“I must take notes of everything,” Crozier said. “I decline to put myself in a position of lacking sufficient information, or having nothing to correct a failing of memory, because I was negligent in my note-taking.”

Wilberforce leaned over the table toward Crozier. “You work under my hire, and my approval is required
for what you write. Thus those notes are mine, not yours, and I instruct you to give them to me.”

“These are private notes, not public documents,” the young man countered in a shaky voice. “And I will not…”

Wilberforce seemed suddenly to loom up several inches taller, a vulture of a man with an intimidating glare that burned down at the young wordsmith. Crozier swallowed hard, and deeply, and managed to hide the trembling of his hands.

Wilberforce pondered the reporter for a few tense and silent moments, then slowly drew in a deep breath. “Do not seek to undermine my authority, Crozier. Such behavior simply will not be tolerated.”

Jedd had realized who the young scribbler of notes was. He'd read an edition or two of the
Knoxville Standard
, and seen the name of reporter Crozier Bellingham bylined there. And somewhere along the way he had picked up an awareness that Crozier's employing newspaper planned to have him chronicle the travels of a selected band of Knoxville-based gold seekers, start to finish. Apparently the band of travelers selected for this coverage was to be the very one Jedd was to pilot. This was no surprise given that the Sadlers owned the
Standard
.

Jedd glanced over at Ottwell Plumb and again noted the drained, listless aspect of the man who, upon their first meeting, had seemed almost absurdly enthusiastic and vigorous. Jedd could account for the change only by reference to the brutal attack Plumb had suffered. It was downright sad to see the previously lively man sitting there lethargically, with his crumpled mouth. No gilded smile now. No smile at all.

Jedd turned his attention to studying one of the paintings on the wall while Crozier Bellingham and Wilberforce Sadler continued their tense and, to Jedd, somewhat cryptic exchange. Jedd had no intention of lingering in this place if the meeting didn't take on some substance quickly. He wasn't sure what Bellingham's role in the venture was—official chronicler, he supposed—but that
was not his concern. He wanted to learn the details of the broader plan and precisely what would be expected of him.

At length Bellingham and Sadler seemingly finished what they had to say to each other, and the discussion turned to the enterprise at large, and Wilberforce presented a question to Jedd: “Ottwell has told us you are an experienced pilot, sir. How many journeys have you made along the Santa Fe Trail?”

Jedd looked him unflinchingly in the eye. “None. My experience is farther north, sir, along the California-Oregon Trail.”

Wilberforce was, for three long moments, unable to blink or to find his voice. Then he turned and stared fiercely at Plumb, whose toothless mouth squeezed into an even tighter pucker under the wilting glare. “None, he said.
None!
You have lied to me, Ottwell! You have hired a pilot under false pretense. You told me that Colter here has led multiple bands of travelers along the Santa Fe Trail…and now I find he has no experience on that trail at all!”

“I…I told you no such thing, Wilberforce,” Plumb said. “You misremember my words. I told you merely that Jedd has led multiple bands of travelers to California. Any further specifics you have supplied with your own imagination.”

Witherspoon stood. “Wrong, Ottwell. I also remember what you told us. My brother is correct: you clearly credited Mr. Colter here with experience on the Santa Fe…and on that basis we gave you our blessing in hiring him.”

Plumb was pale. “I…I don't think I said…uh…”

A snapping sound revealed the breaking of Bellingham's pencil lead. The young man swore softly and produced another pencil from an inner pocket.

Wilberforce glared at him. “Crozier, put down that pencil! I told you, this is nothing meriting a record. Just preliminary discussion.”

“And I told you, I prefer to keep complete notes,” Bellingham said. “It is not essential for me to report
from every note I take, but thorough notes I do intend to have.”

“You are a belligerent and obnoxious young man, and your place in the enterprise stands in an increasingly precarious status,” Wilberforce all but hissed back.

“Please,” said Witherspoon. “Please.” He looked all around, an expression on his face clearly intended to be placating and pleading, but which seemed only to aggravate his brother, who fired a harsh glance at him and muttered softly, “Shut up, Withers. Just shut up.”

“Gentlemen,” said Jedd, intervening in the disintegrating situation, “if my services are no longer desired, I am willing to withdraw without a complaint. Perhaps the best option is to leave you men to come to your own agreements, then see if I am still part of your picture. One thing I do ask, though. I traveled a long distance to be here, doing so at the invitation of Ottwell Plumb. If I am to be put out, it would seem fair to expect some degree of compensation for the time and expense already expended in order for me to be here.”

Ottwell Plumb was on his feet, hands waving and head shaking. “No! No! No! I will
not
stand for this! Hear me, partners: Jedd Colter is
essential
to our success. I invited him on terms I had every authority to present, and if I misspoke to you regarding which route he has previously followed to California, it was accidental. You have my apologies for any misstatement I may have made and for any other misunderstanding to which I may have contributed. But I insist that we not drive Jedd away. I absolutely and firmly
insist
!”