Stand by london callin.., p.18
Stand By -- London Calling!, page 18
She stopped him. Though her words were gentle.
“Call it just, Steve, dear, a matter of—intuition. That I will see Pell this afternoon. And the only possible explanation that I would see him, in view of his marriage and all, is that he’d want to spring on me, as a sister, his new wife. I now have a moral obligation. To adhere rigidly—to the schedule I gave him. That I wouldn’t be leaving the show till show-close. Foleysburg. Friday, June 13th. Tonight. Thus I must—I must wait.”
The man shook his head helplessly. Amazed. Even admiringly.
“I love you more than ever, kidlet,” he said, “when you feel obligations—that you really haven’t got. You’re just one hundred per cent, gilt-edge—for me. So stick around we will—fait’fully—till the bitter end of eleven P.M. And we’re one hundred per cent, free—all of us—including even my ex-wife Freda! But don’t meanwhile waste time trying to ‘pretty up’ against the appearance here of one radiant beauty up to now waiting on tables in Detroit—nor against the appearance of your brother—for the chance, in my belief, of him and her—or even him alone—rolling here atop the pop-gun is—”
“Is what, Steve?” Her voice was almost pleading.
“Is the identical chance that a snowball, cooked in a nice hot oven, has of coming out browned on one side—and oozing delicious juice on the other. Figure it out yourself!”
CHAPTER XXXI
Hugo the Human Cannonball
“Vell, vell, vell, Pell! So ve made it chust boorfect, dittn’t ve? So beaceful looks der show-grounts right now, dot I voot almosd dink dot maype der show ain’d going to show tonide—dot me, I don’d get shooded tonide oud-d-d from der cannon—yah, dot maype der Mayor uf Foleysboorg he has vent oop on his ear for some reason—und von’d let Mac play—vell, iff so iss it, me I don’d gif vun voops—I am buh-lenty dired, belief you me, from fooling arount dot vundervul svamp. Pell!—und I lige besser to go bei bett dean be shooded oud-d from dot verdammte cannon. Yah!”
It was, of course, Hugo the Human Cannon ball, who was doing the speaking. Sitting upright alongside Pell Barneyfield, who was in the driver’s seat of the trick-cannon truck, the Human Cannonball’s blond hair so short-cropped that it revealed the hewn-block-like shape of his head, he looked both cool and hot; cool, in his sleeveless white tee-shirt, hot because of the fresh sunburn under his flapping wide-brimmed straw-hat. But at his feet were his precious mason jars filled with swamp weeds and one containing, moreover, two of the rare man-eating stark fishes.
Pell, at the wheel, made no reply. For driving along the Foleysburg Road at firm speed, as he was, and soaking in the grateful pre-evening coolness that was dropping down over the countryside, he also could see the circus front approaching him up ahead. Chiefly because of the blaze of colour made by the particular trailers which, parked longitudinally there, created the “front”.
Even the Big Top, visible back over the tops of the trailers, was a black silhouette against the still bright sky, as were the spires of the town, well back of everything, but discernible between the gaps of the trailer roofs, also silhouettes.
Now, however, because the dirt road on which Pell drove was firm and rutless, he was in front of the circus “front”—at least in front of the midmost of the five trailers that fringed the right of the “gate”.
The stout collapsible wooden latticework that formed the “gate”, he could see, was drawn firmly across the ten-foot gap lying between the two huge orange-and-green striped portable posts affixed by clamps to the rear corners of the two trailers always used to create the “gate”, even the great pictorial canvas used to drape this unfriendly device during no-show hours, hung loosely, even askew, in front of it. Indeed, all was so inordinately quiet that one might well have believed there was, for some strange reason, going to be no circus tonight! Except that the usual number of youthful yokels, aged from six to sixteen, hickory-shirted most of them, lounged about fascinatedly on the grass across the road from the “front”, knees drawn up to sunburned hands in the cases of some, others squatting playing mumble-tee-peg with each other, some resting on elbows, a few shouting catcalls and remarks at each other. But signs of life—the customary pre-opening life—there were quite none, oddly. And Pell could not understand it.
And now, from the great green-and-white checkered trailer—the largest of them all!—forming the very midmost of the five trailers fringing the right of the “gate” appeared life. At least, life in the matter of the gradual opening of its roadside facing door, and the appearance in it of a human being. A human being who, being occupant of this specific trailer, was none other than one Angus Milliron MacWhorter, Proprietor of the Biggest Little-Circus on Earth, which right now was demonstrating a bewildering absence of pre-show activity.
Tall and even ganglingly broad as he was, he filled the entire doorway of the trailer, even though minus the tall silk-hat and black frock-coat with which he always and invariably appeared “in public”; indeed, in this evidently impromptu appearance, he was clad but in his black ringmaster’s trousers, suspendered by ascetically jet-black braces to the stiff-fronted white shirt; but his great brooding long face, with the deep seams in it, and the high grey-touched sideburns each side, and the hair above it all thinning because of his sixty or so years of age, was beaming out instant welcome to the men on the road.
“Hi, Pell!” he called. “Hi, Hugo. I just suspected that healthy engine vibration uproad was the cannon-truck. Come in, Pell. Hugo, you take over now, will you?”
Pell Bameyfield, who had drawn to an immediate stop—a stop that would have been a skidding stop on anything but a dirt road—on sight of his employer, looked inquiringly towards the great artiste by his side who, for one moment each night, permitted himself to be shot, blindfolded and bound hand and foot, out of a cannon—and who was, for the remaining twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes of the day, a gentleman of no work. Or rather, one who laboured upon his great mechanico-philosophical treatise which, so it was claimed by those who had had parts of it expounded to them, proved conclusively that if nothing were compressed in a cylinder by a piston capable of exerting infinite pressure, matter composed of two dimensions would be created!
“Go on in, Pell.” pronounced the great philosopher-artist graciously. “Me. I am not too broud-d-d to do a liddle drifing. Yah, I take der gun arount meinzelf.”
Pell, thanks to having his blue serge coat on him instead of under him. clambered gratefully and hastily down, moved majestically over to the wheel. And even as Pell was crossing over to the MacWhorter trailer, the great trick gun was rumbling down the road to where, back of the furthermost trailer, there was always a single wide gap capable of admitting any vehicle.
MacWhorter was standing aside, holding open, with one giant tree trunk of an arm, the trailer door. Pell stepped up and in. The gaunt cheerless interior of the trailer, made so because of its few and so ascetic pieces of furniture, and its complete lack of colour, seemed to be the same gauntness as usual. For MacWhorter’s bunk, at one end, was neatly made up with its jet-black coverlid. His black crowlike long-tailed ringmaster’s coat hung casually across the back of the single battered all-wood chair, a folding one, his tall silk-hat perched, by being “dunked” firmly into its overlying folds, atop it, and his great loaded blackthorn cane, which he carried customarily on his long evening walks “under the stars with God”, leaning crazily awry against both. Moreover, MacWhorter’s huge collection of ten-cent-store canvas-bound ledgers and daybooks, in which he kept all the records of his show, were laid out over a portable table underneath the high small window on the lot side, letting in, however, plenty of light on the pencil-made entries, and revealing also that MacWhorter had at last bought himself a brand new canvasback chair to supplant his old one. For the new one stood there, its black wood blacker than black—its black canvas also blacker than black. Shouting its own newness. “Poor Mac!” thought Pell. “He had to sell off part—probably the heart—of the whole show for $3000 to pay a mortgage and does buy himself one poor little new canvas chair. Pathetic!”
“I’ve been doing my daily book-keeping now.” MacWhorter explained to Pell as he closed the door. Plainly getting Pell’s surprised glance toward the book-keeping layout. “Because show-opening is always exactly one hour later, here in Foleysburg—yes, the anniversary activities up town and all. I’m so glad you got here, Pell, in plenty of time. I was half-afraid you might come snorting up just about the time the Big Act would have to take place. I mean,” he said, half-jokingly, though half-seriously too, “I was kind of worried that, with your profound interest in odd peoples—lost races, and what not—that you might have dallied so much along the way with different of those families living along Old Twistibus that you’d maybe not get through with the gun till—”
“The number of people I saw along Old Twistibus today,” said Pell cryptically, “you could put—in your eye.”
MacWhorter raised surprised eyebrows.
“That’s funny,” he said, “I never myself saw so many blackbearded savages—and skinny-legged top-knotted girls—in all my life, as on this particular trek through. Wonder—wonder if news travelled ahead of you that you were gunning for ’em? Or if—”
He ventured no more.
“Well sit down, Pell,” he now invited. “Yes, over there in my new chair. I—I got it for sixty-nine cents. Isn’t it a beauty? For you’ve had some drive today. You——”
He took from the single wood chair where perched hung and stood, respectively, the tall silk-hat, the frock-coat which gave him that awesome dignity he always presented when he stepped into the ring, and the blackthorn cane. Swinging the chair around to face the table, and taking the garments and cane over to the bunk. Where he dropped them, and came back. The while Pell settled down into the new sixty-nine-cent acquisition of a show which had just lost—$3000 of itself. Disposing of his broad-brimmed grey felt hat that had been considerably around the country with him and back, by simply dropping it on the floor. For MacWhorter’s penchant for sweeping out his trailer was so great that no speck of dust ever remained there for over an hour.
MacWhorter meanwhile had swung over the folding wooden chair and settled down in it. Facing Pell across the ledgers.
Pell made a polite observation.
“And—so you were worried, eh, Chief,” he broke off, “that I might come snorting up with the gun just about the time the Big Act would have to go on?”
“Even worse,” said MacWhorter sepulchrally. “I couldn’t really know, you know, but that, while Hugo, marooned up there on that stretch of Old Twistibus that passes through the Poison Swamp, would fume and curse—and the band here would play the special introductory piece for the shooting act over and over—that you might—hrmph—be lallygagging on the roadside back there in Old Twistibus with some lank hillbilly girl who might have revealed to you that she had a yen for circus drivers, and—”
“Oh, come, Chief!” laughed Pell. “You don’t really think that at all. In view of all you know about me now. But just to show you the impossibility of all that, let me just say that I crossed Idiot’s Valley this day without seeing any idiots, or non-idiots, nor the famous feudin’ Cadwalladers and the Hucks, about which one of the clowns has told me, or any sod-thatched habitations, tumbled-in wells, flea-bitten hounds, rangy cats, lean-to corncribs, or—”
“Crossed—without seeing all—but how—what do you mean, Pell? How could you cross the valley—without crossing the vall—”
“By,” said Pell, “one of the strangest and most peculiar bridges in all history! A bridge that nobody’s ever seen—including even the men who built it. And consequently practically nobody on earth knows—exists. And which—oh, who built it? Bankrobbers, Chief—all three of ’em. It’s a bridge that, crossing Bear Creek at its northern end—yes, Bear Creek which cuts the whole valley from north to south—lies a full two feet under the surface of the blank black inky waters of that stream. Where it’s no more than ten feet wide, though consequently all of twenty feet deep. And the reason I got to be able to use that invisible bridge today—and thus cut off nearly a hundred miles of travel via Old Twistibus, including all the idiots plus the feudin’ Cadwalladers and the Hucks, was because I wouldn’t take, from a chap in a country store, a suit of clothes made by one, Andy Kerel, an honest woollens-maker from Glasgow, Scotland, who—But that’s—how I came through Idiot’s Valley—today!”
CHAPTER XXXII
The Skeptic
Mr. Angus MacWhorter who, for a decade and a half, had been taking his show annually through tortuous Old Twistibus on the same date of the year, in order to achieve contacts with two towns that both had anniversaries and consequently people in them, a day apart, gazed at his helper open-mouthed.
“Pell!” he now managed to say. “Are—are you ribbing me—for some reason? A bridge built by bankrobbers—who never saw the bridge they built—cutting off most of that confounded Valley—and all because of a suit of clothes made by one Andy Karel—why, the only part of your tale that makes sense is the reference to Andy the Honest Woollen-maker—of him I do know. But—”
Now he shook his head downright chidingly. As one confident that, for accusing Pell of holding dalliance at roadside edge with a half-idiot girl, he had been given as good as he’d handed out.
But Pell was shaking his own head.
“No, Chief,” he insisted. “My story’s hundred per cent, true. It stems out of a young man who works in that lonely store just ahead of where Carthage Road West winds down into the Valley and becomes—Old Twistibus. When I insisted today on loaning him ten bucks—instead of taking for it a certain precious suit of honest woollens, inherited from his daddy and grandfather—he called me back—gave me the real lowdown of why he was there in that godforsaken spot, working for a Simon Legree who, by some cunning labour agreement with him, kept him perpetually penniless at checkers.
“This young chap’s name, by the way—and grab on to your galluses, Chief!—is de St. Aubin Stockstill. And he lives in Boston. And he’s a ribbon clerk—speciality: satin ribbons. So much for that! He was an orphan, and living alone. He had, at least up to some time ago, a blacksheep uncle named Turnbo Potter. Thought to be a bankrobber or somep’n, in the far south-west. And who was! For following a certain recent shoot-fest that took place down in this part of the country, where three bankrobbers tried to take a small bank lying outside the Valley, and two were killed—Turnbo Potter showed up at this young chap’s rooms in Boston. Penniless, and ‘hot’, and with the flu. Oh, sure the young chap took him in. And Potter died there of pneumonia. But not before he told the stripling something of his life down here.
“It seems,” Pell recounted, “that Potter and his two pals, operating in this part of the country, had located a cave in the north end of the Valley, big enough to hide a whole truck in. With almost primeval forest all around. And a brackish deep creek cutting it off from the east Valley mouth, by which such as they could best go in unobserved—at least by night. Unbridged quite, that creek, as you know, except at its far south point, so that, to get across the Valley, one has to travel Old Twistibus clear down to Mid-Point, and then on up again to—”
“Lord what a trek!” ejaculated MacWhorter. “And here we’ve been doing it—all these years. And you say there’s a bridge—been a bridge all these years—”
“No,” corrected Pell. “Only since this spring. For of these three laddybucks who robbed banks, one was a surveyor and engineer. And discovered, as such people can, with even a ten-cent-store compass, that two points of Old Twistibus, reasonably near its ingress and egress, were actually no more than twenty miles apart! Discovered, even, a wandering channel in the forest that indicated plainly that back in Civil War Days an improvised wagon road must have gone through. The road, moreover, must have been sowed with some of the red mineral dust from the further Poison Swamp stretch of Old Twistibus, that inhibits growth, for no trees had ever filled it—just creeping vegetation from one side to the other. There doubtlessly must have been a wooden log bridge over Bear Creek where this wandering channel hit it. But of course no traces today! And it occurred to this engineer-bankrobber laddybuck that if he and his pals could create a secret passage across the creek, to that cave, they could live in it, with their fast truck, and go in and out of the Valley without any of the inhabitants ever seeing them or being able to report to any outside sheriff that they’d passed.
“So this engineer-bankrobber bought two steel rails in Bubbling Springs City. A lot of bolts and long steel slats. And they let these rails down in a couple of natural slots in some rock where Bear Creek is narrow. Then, under water, they bolted the iron slats across. And had a bridge, see—under water. Invisible! And thereafter they operated that way.
“Though but briefly,” Pell corrected. “For the little mob came a cropper. Two dead, including the engineer one—a fast truck captured—and one escaping to Boston. Where he died. And left the young fellow de St. Aubin Stockstill with this info, plus—and that, Chief, is why the young fellow spent all his savings to come ’way down here—the info that there was five hundred dollars in silver coins buried at the side of the leftmost of two white rocks that marked the ingress into the forest where the old wagon road probably headed in.”
Pell paused.
“Well,” he resumed, “the young fellow managed, after getting a job at the valley mouth so he could eat—he managed later, on a few days off, to go in the Valley by the monthly oil wagon. Found the white rocks easy enough, and hence the opening of the meandering channel through the woods. But—no silver! It’d been dug up, no doubt, by one of the bankrobbers double-crossing the other two—or maybe the two who were dead having double-crossed the one who later fled to Boston. But the young chappie, in order to find out if his uncle was sheer crazy or not, forged on through the forest. Traced the wandering passage. Came at last upon the creek. Explored it with a pole till he found apparently what was an underwater bridge, or something. Took off his shoes, socks, and trousers, and went out on it gingerly. Explored it carefully with his feet from one side to the other, and clear across. Yes, it was there, all right. Uncle’s story was correct. For the young fellow even followed on after he came up and out on to the opposite bank, and finally came out on to Old Twistibus, with no less than a great swamp off in the distance.”
