“And Dutch ain’t? He’s riding on Brown now. Got a whole posse looking for ’em. Every redshirt within a hundred miles is rolling these plains for him. You can’t go back to Dutch nohow.”
“Why not?”
“Dutch ain’t stupid. He’ll sell you south and git his money for you while he can. Any nigger that’s had a sip of freedom ain’t worth squat to the white man out here. High-yellow boy like you’ll fetch a good price in New Orleans.”
“Dutch wouldn’t see me sold.”
“You wanna bet?”
That gived me pause then. For Dutch weren’t too sentimental.
“You know where I can go?”
“Your best bet is to go back to Old Brown. If you ain’t lyin’ ’bout being with his gang and all. They say they’re fearsome. Is it true he carries two seven-shooters?”
“One of ’em does.”
“Ooh, wee, that just tickles me,” he said.
“I’d rather blow my brains out than run around dressed like a girl. I can’t do it.”
“Well, save yourself the bullet and go on back to Dutch, then. He’ll send you to New Orleans and death’ll be knocking shortly. I never heard of a nigger escaped from there.”
That done me in. I hadn’t considered none of that. “I don’t know where the Old Man is now,” I said. “I couldn’t find him by myself nohow. I don’t know these parts.”
Bob said slowly, “If I help you find him, you think he could lead me to freedom, too? I’ll dress like a girl for it.”
Well, that sounded too complicated. But I needed a ride. “I can’t say what he’ll do, but he and his sons got a big army. And more guns than you ever saw. And I heard him say it clear, ‘I’m an abolitionist through and through, and I aims to free every colored in this territory.’ I heard him say that many times. So I expect he would take you.”
“What about my wife and children?”
“I don’t know about that.”
Bob thunk on it a long moment.
“I got a cousin down near Middle Creek who knows everything in these parts,” he said. “He’ll know where the Old Man’s hideout is. But if we set here too long, another posse’s gonna roll up, and they might not be drunk like the last. Help me tie that wagon wheel back.”
I hopped to work. We rolled a fallen tree stump under the wagon. He harred the horse up so it pulled the wagon high enough to free the bottom, then tied the rope to a tree and harred the horse up again, creating a winch. We piled planks and stones under it to keep it up. I searched the thickets and found that cotter pin and helped him put the wheel back on and chink it in. The sun was near to noon when we finished, and we was hot and sweaty by the time we got the thing done, but we got that wagon wheel spinning like new, and I hopped aboard the driver’s seat next to him, and we was off in no time.
6.
Prisoner Again
We didn’t get two miles down the road before we runned into patrols of every type. The entire territory was in alarm. Armed posses crisscrossed the trail every which way. Every passing wagon had a rider setting up front with a shotgun. Children acted as lookouts for every homestead, with Pas and Mas setting out front in rocking chairs holding shotguns. We passed several wagons pulling terrified Yankees going in the opposite direction, their possessions piled high, hauling ass back east fast as their mules could go, quitting the territory altogether. The Old Man’s killings terrified everyone. But Bob got safe passage, for he was riding his master’s wagon and had papers to show it.
We followed the Pottawatomie Creek on the California Trail toward Palmyra. Then we cut along the Marais des Cygnes River toward North Middle Creek. A short way along the river, Bob stopped the wagon, dismounted, and tied off the horse. “We got to walk from here,” he said.
We walked down a clean-dug trail to a fine, well-built house on the back side of the river. An old Negro was tending flowers at the gate, turning dirt on the walkway as we come. Bob howdied him and he hailed us over.
“Good afternoon, Cousin Herbert,” Bob said.
“What’s good about it?”
“The Captain’s good about it.”
At the mention of the word “Captain,” Herbert glanced at me, shot a nervous look at his master’s house, then fell to turning that dirt again on his hands and knees, getting busy on that dirt, looking down. “I don’t know nothing about no Captain, Bob.”
“C’mon, Herbert.”
The old feller kept his eyes on that dirt, turning it, busy, tending flowers, talking low as he worked. “Git on outta here. Old Brown’s hotter than a pig in shit. What you doing fooling with him? And whose knock-kneed girl is that? She too young for you.”
“Where’s he at?”
“Who?”
“Stop fooling. You know who I’m talking about.”
Herbert glanced up, then back down at his flowers. “There’s posses from here to Lawrence combing this whole country for him. They say he throwed the life spark outta ten white fellers up near Osawatomie. Knocked their heads clean off with swords. Any nigger that mentions his name’ll be shipped outta this territory in pieces. So git away from me. And send that girl home and run on home to your wife.”
“She belongs to the Captain.”
That changed things, and Herbert’s hands stopped a moment as he considered it, still looking down at the dirt, then he started digging again. “What that got to do with me?” Herbert said.
“She’s Captain’s property. He’s running her out this country, outta bondage.”
The old man stopped his work for a minute, glancing at me. “Well, she can suck her thumb at his funeral, then. Git. Both of y’all.”
“That’s a hell of a way to treat your third cousin.”
“Fourth cousin.”
“Third, Herbert.”
“How’s that?”
“My Aunt Stella and your Uncle Beall shared a second cousin named Melly, remember? She was Jamie’s daughter, second cousin to Odgin. That was Uncle Beall’s nephew by his first marriage to your Mom’s sister Stella, who got sold last year. Stella was my cousin Melly’s second cousin. So that makes Melly your third cousin, which puts your Uncle Jim in the back behind my uncles Fergus, Cook, and Doris, but before Lucas and Kurt, who was your first cousin. That means Uncle Beall and Aunt Stella was first cousins, which makes me and you third cousins. You would treat your third cousin this way?”
“I don’t care if you is Jesus Christ and my son together,” Herbert snapped. “I don’t know nothing ’bout no Captain. ’Specially in front of her,” he said, nodding at me.
“What you gettin’ in a knot over her for? She’s just a child.”
“That’s just it,” Herbert said. “I ain’t gonna eat tar and feathers over that high-yellow thing there who I don’t even know. She don’t look nothing like the Old Man, whatever he do look like.”
“I didn’t say she was his kin.”
“Whatever she is, she don’t belong with you, a married man.”
“You ought to check yourself, cousin.”
He turned to me. “Is you colored or white, miss, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“What difference do it make?” Bob snapped. “We got to find the Captain. This little girl is rolling with him.”
“Is she colored or not?”
“Course she’s colored. Can’t you see?”
The old man stopped his digging to stare at me a moment, then started digging again, and snorted, “If I didn’t know no better, I’d say she was kin to old Gus Shackleford, who they say got his spark blowed out on account of talking to John Brown in Dutch’s Tavern four days past, bless his soul. But Gus had a boy, that trifling Henry. He worried Gus to devilment, that one. Acting white and all. He needs a good spanking. I ever catch that little gamecock nigger outside Dutch’s I’ll warm his little buns with a switch so hard, he’ll crow like a rooster. I expect his devilment is what sent his Pa to his rewards, for he was as lazy as the devil. Children these days is just going to hell, Bob. Can’t tell ’em nothing.”