Джеймс Кейн - Mignon

“I’m not. I hope never to see her again. But—”

“You are. If you weren’t, you’d be the first to tell me that bottom is all mine, if I can manage to get it. Well, I’d love to, I own, if it weren’t—”

“You want a puck on the jaw?”

“... Who died, do you have any idea?”

“What do I care who died?”

“I’m just curious, that’s all.”

Two days later it was done, and we’d succeeded only too well. We’d got a rise all right, five feet of it at least, reaching back to the head of the falls, and enough, you’d have thought, for the Great Eastern to turn around in. Still the Navy wanted more depth, and as no bracket could possibly hold out there near the middle, we put six cribs in, like the ones on the other side, and the Navy filled them with stone. But even that wasn’t enough, and the Navy drove pilings, in threes braced with planks, and hauled four barges up that they moored to the pilings with hawsers. The water rose still more, until you stood there holding your breath, watching the whole thing shake from the pressure backed up behind it and its own will to float, knowing as you did that something had to give. The whole Army started to yell that now was the time, or never, that the Navy had to come down. They built a fire, a great thing of pine logs that blazed to the sky from the burning resin, so it looked like a scene from hell. The idea was to give light for the boats to come down by, but still nothing happened, and word came through the woods that the Navy didn’t have steam. That was the last straw, and the yells began to sound ugly.

Still, I was done, and the captain was, and we were stretched out by his fire, sipping some coffee he had, when suddenly Sandy was there. By then, the Navy or anything like it had kind of a rat-poison look, so the welcome he got from the captain was not of a rousing kind. But when he came up with the news, and made it pretty curt, that the reason no boats could come down was “this insane fire you’ve built, that has blinded all our pilots,” it kind of quenched the discussion, and I could feel Sandy out, as I thought he had stuff on his mind. “Bill,” he said when the captain subsided, “this may be nothing at all — a mare’s nest pure and simple. But I keep thinking about it.”

“Go on,” I said. “Shoot.”

“My boat,” he began, “the Neosho , is moored to the right bank up there — and of course we don’t keep a lookout posted. Just the same, a seaman was there, in the pilothouse polishing brass, when he saw a skiff upstream — a joeboat, they call it. Square-ended thing that seemed to be drifting down. Then he didn’t see it, that’s all.”

“You mean it disappeared?”

“That’s it. It was there, and then it wasn’t there.”

“Could have grounded. Maybe bushes hid it.”

“Maybe. Maybe.”

“What did your skipper say?”

“Told the boy thanks.”

“Well, that’s not much of a help.”

“Bill, I can’t shake it out of my head, the threats that man made, your friend Mr. Landry, as we left that day — and he wasn’t just talking to talk; he meant something . And he has some motive, I gathered, for wanting this dam to go out?”

“Just a million dollars is all.”

“That’s in cotton, up at Shreveport?”

“That he can grab with Burke as godpappy.”

“Providing, Bill, that the Navy doesn’t get out, and the Army, to save its face, marches upriver again, ’stead of down?”

“Which I say we should do,” said the captain.

“Now you’ve got it,” I said.

“Then Mr. Landry,” said Sandy, “if he had a skiff, if he brought one down on a tether, if he hauled it into the bushes and had it there tonight, he could fill it with powder, couldn’t he? And start it drifting down? To explode it against our dam?”

“That danger,” said the Captain, “occurred to me .”

“At least he could try,” I said.

“Still,” said Sandy, “where would he get powder?”

“ Out of his store! ” I yelped, jumping up.

And as they both stared, I told them: “Out of stock that he kept on hand to sell for blasting stumps! Now we know who died! It was as many kegs of powder as would fit in a nailed-up coffin. Captain, have I your permission to scout these woods with Sandy?”

“I’ll scout them with you, Cresap.”

He belted himself for duty with a Colt sidearm he had, a .44 six in a holster. Then, so I needn’t carry a musket, he called a lieutenant and borrowed a sidearm for me, another Colt in a holster. Then he called the supply sergeant and had a lantern brought, the regular Army bull’s-eye, but didn’t light it yet. All that took a half-hour or so, and it was half past eight at least, when he, Sandy, and I started out to look for our skiff. By that time, we each knew the woods like the back of our hand, yet it was suddenly strange, especially in the light of the fire, which made everything a glare of dancing light or else a dancing shadow. But what got Sandy was the few sentries we met. “It makes my blood run cold,” he said one time; “bivouacs everywhere, thousands of men around putting this dam in, and hardly one on duty to guard it from destruction.” But the captain wasn’t impressed. “You know what a sentry means?” he asked Sandy sourly. “He’s not like a fencepost or mailbox that you put there and then forget about. He’s a man, who does a two and six, and it takes a guard to post him, four men and a corporal, a special place to sleep him, and a mess squad to feed him. Who has that many men, and who takes that much trouble?”

They both had a case, I thought, but it was too dark and the going much too rough for me to get into the discussion. We pressed on to the place where the skiff had been seen, a spot across from the Neosho , which was lit, with banjos banging on deck, to the wreck of the steamer Woodford . We saw nothing, not even the ghost of a skiff, and had to start on back. We went several hundred yards and then had to cross a bridge over a little stream called, I believe, Rock Creek, that ran down to the river from the high ground known as Spanish Hill. And as we started over, my nose caught something I couldn’t mistake. It was the sweetish, heavy smell of perique smoking tobacco, and I knew of course who used that. I whispered to Captain Seymour to stay where he was but to get his lantern lit. Then I told Sandy to take one side of the stream while I took the other, and comb it down to the river. But the captain, being armed, reversed me, taking one bank of the stream while Sandy handled the light. We crept along, having perhaps two hundred feet to cover from the bridge to the river. Up in the trees it was light, as the glare from the fire flickered, but down in the stream bed, in under the bank, it was dark as pitch. And then all of a sudden, sounding almost in my ear, he said very quietly: “Skiff’s here. I can hear the water slapping her.”

“River’s right there,” I said.

“Gregg! Bring your lantern! Now! ”

“Aye, sir!” called Sandy. “Coming, lit.”

He must have already lit it, because now he shot its beam, and there was the skiff on a sandbank, her painter made fast to a bush. But there too, staring at me, were two tremendous eyes in a pale, beautiful face. In a thicket nearby Mr. Landry and Burke were crouching, but what froze the blood in my veins was the realization that here with this fatal evidence was Mignon.

“Well there it is, a floating torpedo.”

The captain almost whispered it, at the same time covering the prisoners; then, as Sandy held the light, we all three crept closer to look. It was the usual square-end joeboat, with four kegs up near one end, held with wire two-and-two. Each had a cork in the bung, with a copper cap in the cork. Leading out over the end, set in a screwed-on oarlock, was an outrigger thing made of fishing pole, and wired to that were four prongs, thin rods made of iron, that led to the copper caps. Controlling the pole was a spring, also bound on with wire, of the kind used in store scales. In the other end of the boat was a pile of chain attached by a heavy staple, apparently meant as a drag once the craft was started down, to hold it on its course, and especially to keep the business end pointed to the dam. “Quite a contrivance,” said the captain. “No wonder they took all night getting it wired up.” And then: “Lieutenant Gregg, I’m not organized to guard this bunch tonight — and besides it could happen that if something goes wrong at the dam I’ll need every man I have. Could you take them up to your boat?”