David Nickle - Eutopia

“I bet a few of them have been in prison,” said Jason, and Aunt Germaine chuckled into her handkerchief.

“No doubt,” she said. “But please keep your voice down, Nephew. If you are correct, we don’t wish to provoke an incident.”

Jason sat quiet and tried as best he might to look beyond the window. The land here was not dissimilar to that around his mama’s old homestead: low foothills covered thick in pine trees, little tongues of lakes with rocky beaches, but mostly—trees.

For parts of the trip, those trees would draw in on the train, so all you could see going past was greenery and the shadows beyond. Then they would open up, and the green would spread out forever, crawling up the sides of far mountains strange to Jason’s eye. Jason understood Bonner’s Ferry to be a mill town like Eliada, only one that had been there longer. He figured towns like that would do well up here for a long time, all those trees they had to chew on.

“Is there a prison up in Eliada?” he asked.

“No,” said Aunt Germaine. “They don’t have a great many prisons up this way, I shouldn’t think. What’s in Eliada is perhaps even less common.”

“Well, Aunt?” said Jason, after a long moment watching her stare out the window, not telling him what was less common. “Are you going to tell me what?”

She smiled. “Here comes the town,” she said, as the train whistle hooted. The view out the window went dark then as the wind blew the smoke from the engine down and they started a slow turn. “Get ready for a boat ride, Nephew.”

Jason found that he liked Bonner’s Ferry, and he was disappointed it was only a way station. It smelled like sap and sawdust and wood smoke, and was dominated by a towering sawmill on a river that was all but covered in floating tree trunks. It was raining quite hard under a rolling dark sky as they got off the train, but that didn’t stop the men in this town from going about the hard business of logging and lumber-milling. There was an air of industry here, unlike any he’d seen in Helena or Sand Point—or especially, in those days when its inhabitants still drew breath, Cracked Wheel. Perhaps, he thought, Eliada will be the same as Bonner’s Ferry.

“Where do we go?”

Germaine pointed. “With that fellow.”

Jason looked. There was a moustachioed man in a black coat and a bowler hat standing very straight at the far end of the platform. He held an umbrella in one hand and a sign in the other, which had painted on it neatly “Eliada.”

“Oh,” said Jason as Aunt Germaine waved.

As the fellow drew closer, Jason saw that he had more umbrellas rolled up under his arm: four of them altogether. He juggled the sign into the crook of his arm, pulled out two umbrellas and handed one to Aunt Germaine and one to Jason. Then he tipped his hat. “Sam Green,” he said.

Aunt Germaine introduced herself and Jason, at the same time as she expertly popped open the umbrella and swung it over her head. Jason watched to see how she’d done it, but she was too fast for him to see exactly, so he had to fiddle with his. He did not get far, though. Sam Green reached down and found the catch, and a second later Jason was dry under his own black dome, still not sure of the trick to it.

“How soon may we be off?” asked Aunt Germaine.

“Presently,” said Sam Green. “Mr. Harper’s new boat is waiting at dock. But I must first gather the rest of our party.”

“The rest of our party?”

Sam Green tipped his hat once more. “Please stay here, Ma’am. I shall return.” And he strode off toward the train.

“So there’s a boat waiting for us? A new one?” said Jason. He set Aunt Germaine’s carpet bag down. “I thought it would be a barge. Maybe that is what it is and Mr. Green simply misstated.”

Aunt Germaine smiled. “Mr. Harper is a wealthy man—becoming wealthier by the day. If he has a new boat, it will be a fine one. It was not so long ago that a trip to Eliada meant a long and hazardous march or a horseback ride through wilderness. Not now, though. It seems that Mr. Harper’s investments are paying off, and civilization draws northward.”

“Who is Mr. Harper, anyhow? Aside from a rich man getting richer.”

“Garrison Harper?” Aunt Germaine began. “Why—”

“Why, he is my father.”

Jason turned. He found himself staring into a smile that was all too familiar. The girl it belonged to curtsied, her own black umbrella tilting to one side and a wash of rainwater splashing off it.

And that was when Jason Thistledown learned the thing he thought he never would.

“I am Ruth Harper,” said the girl. “May I introduce my companion, Miss Louise Butler of Evanston, Illinois.” The other lady—a little taller, with darker hair, a longer forehead and thin, half-smiling lips—likewise curtsied. “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” she said.

Ruth Harper glanced behind her, where Sam Green was supervising two porters who were each hauling a large steamer trunk. “Mr. Green informs me that we will all be travelling together—” and she turned back to Jason, her smile fading and her eye catching his directly “—for a short while longer.”

Jason nodded and blinked. Aunt Germaine smiled.

“He is cross with us,” she continued. “Mr. Green is, I should say—because we dismissed his associate in Chicago. Vulgar man. He smelled so. I believe—” she leaned forward and whispered to Aunt Germaine: “—he drank .”

“Ruth!” said Miss Butler.

“Mr. Green will overcome it,” said Ruth. “We are after all here in one piece. Two pieces.” Then she turned and looked at Jason in a direct and discomforting way.

“Well?” she said at length. “I believe, sir, that you have the advantage.”

“Thank you, Miss Harper,” Jason managed at last. “But I don’t see it that way at all.”

Ruth Harper’s laughter was the prettiest sound that Jason had ever heard. He did not know how he felt about having it directed his way, but he sure did like how it fell on his ears. So he grinned and joined in.

“I am Germaine Frost,” said Aunt Germaine when they had quieted down. “This is my nephew.”

“Jason Thistledown,” said Jason.

“Really,” said Ruth. “ Thistledown. ”

Her smile faded, and was replaced by a look that Jason had not seen on her before: an eyebrow arched a hair higher than its twin, and her mouth half open, a fold of her lower lip pinched gently in her teeth.

Days ahead, when he had composed himself and knew her a little better, he would learn what that look signified.

Miss Harper’s considerable store of curiosity was mightily piqued.

Jason found the Harper steamboat not so very impressive. Not more than fifty feet long, it had a shape that reminded Jason of a shoe. The boat was a side-wheeler, with a tall, fluted smokestack coming out the middle, a wheel on either side to propel it, and an interior that was mostly filled with barrels and crates and sacks. It was called The Eliada , which, while not imaginative, at least hit the point. Its skipper could take a wrong turn or even two, and it would not stay lost for long before someone read the bow and sent it on its right way home.

Sam Green collected the umbrellas as they stepped on board, then cleared off a bench for them that allowed them to look out the side of the boat without getting rained on.

“It’ll be a few hours,” he said. “The river gets rough in spots as a matter of course, and the weather today is not ideal for it.”

Aunt Germaine smiled in a kindly way. “It is preferable to the alternative—riding horseback through Indian country.”

“Oh,” said Ruth, “I don’t know about that. I always enjoyed the trek. Particularly the horses. And the Indians—the Kootenays—oh, they were never any trouble. Mr. Green and his people were always most helpful in that regard.”