Humbug Mountain Read online

  That wasn’t the truth. Not the whole truth, I thought. I stood glaring at him, and my ears felt crisp in the wind. He was being careful to dodge the real reason. He wasn’t saying a word about locking himself in the hotel room. But I made the mistake of looking into his eyes, kind of wet but holding steady on me, and the stove-hot anger inside me began to cool.

  “I don’t much enjoy the sight of that dead hand,” he said with a sudden grin. He was clearly glad to change the subject.

  I took a long breath. “I didn’t say you were no-account. Didn’t think it, either.”

  “That man was thrown into an uncommonly shallow grave.”

  “Or shiftless, either.”

  “We ought to bury him properly.”

  I tried to wipe my nose on my sleeve without appearing to. “That man’s solid as stone.”

  “You don’t say.”

  I dropped the sack and tapped the dead hand with a stick. Pa cocked an ear to the hard sound.

  “Stiffer’n a goose on ice,” he said. “I declare.”

  He began scooping away the earth and pretty soon I was right there helping him. We uncovered a narrow, old face with shut eyes and hollow cheeks.

  I said, “Looks like it could be an Indian.”

  “Might be.” Pa snapped a finger against the man’s sharp chin. Then he looked over at me. “Mummified.”

  “I expect so.”

  “Do you know what you found?”

  “It was Mr. Johnson who found him first.”

  Under the knife-edge hat brim, Pa’s eyes were alive with excitement. “Wiley, we’ll have to publish another edition of The Humbug Mountain Hoorah. A story like this could be the making of Sunrise. Those misled goldseekers will pack up one of these days soon, but other folks will come flocking.”

  “To look at a scruffy old mummy?”

  “It’s not a mummy,” Pa said. “Must have been buried for an eternity, this man. And turned to stone. Wiley, what we’re looking at is a petrified man!”

  17

  “SINNERS ONLY”

  It was a week before we got out the next issue of The Humbug Mountain Hoorah. First we had to dig up the petrified man.

  “Careful, careful now,” said Mr. Slathers as we pried the creature out of his grave. “We don’t want the gentleman breaking like a vase.”

  “Remarkable,” Pa said. “Not even a toe missing.”

  The petrified man was no taller than Glorietta. Not even as tall as I, it appeared to me. But he was monstrously heavy. We bundled him up in canvas and Mr. Slathers lashed him to a pair of long boat poles. It took hours to drag him to the Phoenix, and it was a mighty struggle to get him aboard. All Glorietta and I could do was try to steady him. It would be awful if he broke now.

  “Aft on the cabin deck’s a good place for him,” Mr. Slathers said, and that’s where they laid him out. Ma came over to have a look. “Horrors,” she muttered.

  “It’s a great scientific discovery,” Pa said.

  “Well, don’t expect me to keep him dusted.”

  It wasn’t long before the miners sleeping aboard took to striking matches on his stone foot to light their pipes.

  “That won’t do,” Pa said. “Wiley, with the cabins full I think you’re going to have to share the pilothouse.”

  “With that?” I exclaimed, shooting a look at the creepy, dead-cold figure.

  “I’ll admit he’s not going to be the most sociable companion. On the other hand, he won’t keep you awake snoring. And he’ll be safe. An aborigine, from the looks of him. Might be two, three thousand years old.”

  “We can cover him with a sheet,” Glorietta said.

  I tossed her a glance. I didn’t want her to think the sight of that ancient dead man rattled me. “Oh, it’s just a hunk of stone,” I said. “No need to cover him.”

  It took ropes and all of us pulling to haul the mighty weight of him up the stairway. Once inside the pilothouse Pa and Mr. Slathers stood the petrified man at a corner window so I wouldn’t trip over him in the dark. His eyes were tight shut, like someone asleep. Even then it was as if he were gazing out at the miners in the dry riverbed tearing up the earth. I wondered what thoughts had turned to stone in his head.

  “Colonel,” said Mr. Slathers. “If we could get some of those men to help us we’ve got cut lumber aboard for a ten-room hotel. Give some of the poor fools out there a roof over their heads.”

  But the miners were in such a gold fever that none of them was willing to lay down his pick and shovel and lend a hand. Pa and Mr. Slathers and Glorietta and I began toting lumber and rolling kegs of nails ashore.

  The trouble was, Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer had burned the blueprints.

  “It’s going to take some doing to figure out what goes where,” said Mr. Slathers. “And they burned up sticks of lumber with the blueprints. Pieces of the hotel are going to turn up missing.”

  We meant to start with the hotel, but it turned out to take on more of the shape of an opera house. Pa and Mr. Slathers kept sorting through the lumber and started another building.

  “I do believe this piece belongs to the hotel,” Pa said.

  “If it fits, nail it down.”

  Glorietta and I helped try to sort out the puzzle of studs, windows, and doors. Ma too, when she and Pa weren’t setting type for the newspaper. But it wasn’t long before Mr. Slathers stood back to study the two buildings going up.

  “Colonel, I think we’ve got a hotel that’s part opera house, and an opera house that’s part hotel.”

  Pa tipped back his hat. “Opera house,” he muttered. “Then there must be an asbestos curtain to go with it.”

  “Of course there is. All rolled up.”

  “Fine. Splendid!” I knew the look in Pa’s eyes. Some rollicking idea had come to him. “I’ve a two-inch hole to fill in the newspaper. And I know just how to fill it.”

  With fourteen miners sleeping aboard and taking breakfast and supper with us, Ma was running out of food again. It was mostly catfish every day. I’m certain we snared a rabbit now and then, but the men living along the riverbank stole them out from under us. Ma’s chickens might have disappeared too if she hadn’t penned them up on the freight deck. Mr. Johnson, too. The idea of roast goose must have set many a mouth to watering. The only times Ma marched them ashore to grub around was when we were hammering away at the hotel and opera house, and could keep an eye on them.

  Glorietta and I hardly had a moment of time to add buffalo bones to our heap. But we did slip away occasionally.

  “Must be near a ton by now,” Glorietta said.

  “A ton, easy. Maybe two.”

  “We’d better keep a sharp lookout for Captain Cully.”

  “Wear your specs,” I said.

  She bridled. “You wear ’em. There’s nothing out here to see. Anyway, we ought to be able to hear Captain Cully. The Prairie Buzzard rattles up more noise than a peddler’s load of teakettles.”

  Not a day went by but more gold-seekers turned up. They began arriving on steamboats heading upriver. News of that confounded lump of gold had shot to great distances. Those miners would skin me alive if they knew it was all because I had left out the word locket. Just one dratted word. Well, I’d tried to tell them.

  I know that Ma was keeping an eye out for Grandpa with every new man who showed up. I imagined the way he’d probably lift his eyebrows and look at the dirt flying in the riverbed and say, “What in Sam Hill is going on here?”

  I can’t say that my first nights with the scruffy petrified man were exactly joyful. At least his back was turned, and after a while I got used to his dead-silent company. It beat listening to the crows.

  “Sunrise, Home of the Great and Only Genuine Petrified Man,” Pa announced one evening. “That’s the way I’m printing it up. Bound to create a stir in the world. Why, so many folks will come for a sight of it we’ll need a hundred-room hotel—and then some.”

  Mr. Slathers cleared his throat faintly. It had taken
him a while to shuck all his hermit shyness, but ever since Pa had stayed away he’d got used to looking out for us. He warmed right up to it. I got the feeling he was kind of borrowing us as his own kin. “That ancient gentleman must have got washed down in a roaring flood,” he said. “Looks to me like he must have been buried way back somewhere with limestone-water dripping down. All that sediment hardened him into solid limestone—that’s the way I figure it.” And then, almost without a pause, “I’ll be going back to Wolf Landing in a day or so.”

  I shot a glance at Pa. Mr. Slathers looked at Ma.

  “You’ll need more than a backload of supplies if you’re going to feed all these miners aboard.”

  “Yes,” Ma said in a flat voice. Her eyes avoided Pa. Then she seemed to perk up. “Yes, of course, Mr. Slathers. A wagonload of supplies. There’s money from the miners’ room and board.”

  “I’ll rent a wagon and fill it up.”

  I was still watching Pa and so was Glorietta. If he noticed us, he didn’t let on. “While you’re in Wolf Landing,” Pa said, “I’d be obliged if you’d drop off some copies of The Humbug Mountain Hoorah. It would be a fine start for the Petrified Man.”

  I could feel all my muscles let loose. Pa was staying with us.

  He added, “And would you see if the postmaster is holding a letter for me?”

  The Petrified Man wasn’t the only company I had in the pilothouse. There was the nickel novel Pa had brought back from Wolf Landing, and I had tried to ignore it. But now I read it.

  It was called Quickshot Billy on the Warpath, and was all about the time he had tracked a desperate outlaw two thousand miles to the Mexican border. The badman got the drop on him while Quickshot was having a breakfast of hot chili peppers and took his guns. But that ruffian hadn’t counted on Quickshot Billy’s resourcefulness. With a chili pepper between his fingers like a slippery watermelon seed he’d squirted the fiery juice into the outlaw’s eyes. “First time I ever enlisted the aid of a vegetable in capturing an outlaw,” Billy remarked.

  “I don’t believe a word of it,” Glorietta said when I told her the story.

  “You don’t know Quickshot Billy’s quick and agile mind,” I said. “Nor his steel-clad courage.”

  “A chili pepper!” She groaned and rolled her eyes.

  There was no talking sense to Glorietta at times. I read the book all over again, and it was even better.

  When Pa got the second issue of The Humbug Mountain Hoorah printed, Mr. Slathers left with twenty copies on the long walk to Wolf Landing. Glorietta and I wandered among the gold diggers and sold a quantity of newspapers. Pa had mentioned a lot of their names in a column of mining news, not bothering to mention that no one had found a flake of gold. But that didn’t seem to discourage them. As far as I knew the only one who had given up was Mr. Jim Chitwood.

  Pa used his largest wooden type to announce the finding of the Great and Only Genuine Petrified Man, but that didn’t cause any stir among the miners.

  I heard a man who everyone called Hogfat laugh. “A petrified chap wouldn’t assay out at a penny a pound—unless he had gold teeth!” That’s where their mind was.

  But he and some other rough-looking miners turned up at the Phoenix that night. It wasn’t the limestone man that brought them. They had found something of greater interest on the back page.

  Pa had needed to fill space and had printed:

  SINNERS ONLY!

  ASBESTOS COFFINS!

  Men Bound for Hades! Get measured for our exclusive asbestos-lined coffins. Fireproof! Guaranteed to see you through the hereafter without scorching a hair. Money-back guarantee! Don’t delay. Supply limited.

  SUNRISE COFFIN WORKS

  Flint & Slathers, Props.

  18

  MR. SLATHERS’S SURPRISE

  Sunset was flaring up red as silk when Mr. Slathers rode into sight. He was driving a wagon heaped with groceries.

  “Wiley! Glorietta!” he called out. I think it was the first time I ever saw his lean face in a total burst of smiles. “Brought you a cargo of candy. Licorice and sour balls. Hope that meets with your approval.”

  “I’m partial to licorice and sour balls, both!” I said.

  “Me too, Mr. Slathers!”

  He leaped from the wagon and moved around with a joyful step. He had a gift of garden seeds for Ma. He’d had only his engine-room machinery to look after before. Now there was us and he was enjoying himself hugely. And he did bring back a letter for Pa, but Pa just stuffed it into his coat without opening it.

  It fell dark before we toted all the supplies aboard. Campfires sprang up all along the dry riverbank, and the sky was a vast sparkle of stars. Mr. Slathers never stopped smiling. I got the feeling he was all but busting with a secret.

  He had brought half a box of cigars, and after supper he and Pa lit up. I kept watching Mr. Slathers, but maybe he was waiting for the right moment to spring his surprise. If he had a surprise.

  “There are enough supplies to feed an army,” Ma said. “You must have struck some hard bargains, Mr. Slathers.”

  “Did my best, and got the rest on credit.”

  Ma looked slightly stricken. “Dear me. We’re not only flat broke again, but in debt.”

  “Only temporary,” Pa said, puffing away. “Mr. Slathers, I’m not much of a carpenter. I hope you are.”

  “I’ve done my share, Colonel.”

  “Splendid. You may have noticed we’re partners in the Sunrise Coffin Works.”

  “I did. Be glad to help. Not that there’s anyone fool enough to turn up for an asbestos coffin.”

  “So I thought,” Pa laughed. “But there are. And they did. I’ve taken orders for seven fireproof coffins. Measured the sinners from toe to head. I guess they figure on hauling the boxes around with them in case of sudden need.”

  Finally Mr. Slathers let the cat out of the bag. I think if he’d had to wait another moment he would have exploded.

  “I picked up some fresh news in Wolf Landing,” he began. “Remember those two tons of dirt Shagnasty John and the Fool Killer talked about?”

  “I seem to recall your mentioning it,” Pa said.

  “Well, it’s not dirt. It’s dust.”

  “Dust?” Ma remarked.

  “Gold dust.” Mr. Slathers leaned back and drew a long, slow puff of smoke. “Two tons of gold dust. From a rich strike last year way up in Montana. They had a terrible winter up there and the miners got froze in. The dust had been piling up and they couldn’t get it out. There was a Missouri steamboat locked in the ice, but with the spring thaw the dust was put aboard for the voyage to St. Louis. With a valuable cargo like that, the captain refitted the deckhouses with tin. Word has it the job’s finally done and the boat’s heading downriver.”

  “Refitted with tin?” Ma said.

  “The way they did in the Civil War, ma’am. Made tinclads out of their common riverboats. Why, every outlaw in the territories is figuring to bushwack the vessel. There’s a sheriff aboard to guard the dust.”

  “A tin-clad,” Pa mused. “That was mighty smart of the captain.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me a bit,” Mr. Slathers smiled. He took a long pause. And then he sprung his surprise. “Rumor has it the captain’s name is Tuggle. Captain Jack Tuggle.”

  Grandpa.

  And he must already be steaming toward us down the Missouri River!

  19

  THE RETURN

  I kept a sharp eye out for distant puffs of steamboat smoke. Pa and Mr. Slathers made money enough at the coffin trade to pay off our grocery bill. They sawed up pinewood flooring that didn’t seem to fit anywhere. And in going through the muddle of lumber, Pa found an illustrated catalog of “Lyman Bridges Building Materials and Ready-Made Houses.” There were woodcut drawings of what the finished hotel and opera house were supposed to look like.

  “Mr. Slathers,” Pa said with a slow shake of his head. “What we’re building bears no more resemblance to these pictures than a cracke
r barrel does to a silk hat.”

  As it turned out, we weren’t likely to finish the opera house or hotel or anything else in Sunrise.

  For Mr. Jim Chitwood returned on horseback, pulling a small shed on two buggy wheels. And with a wave of his arm he claimed ownership to all of Sunrise.

  “You’re squatting on my land,” he declared.

  “You bandy-legged, fish-eyed pipsqueak,” Pa snorted. “What in blue blazes are you talking about?”

  “You’re trespassing—that’s what I’m talking about.”

  “Sir, you’re batty as a jaybird.”

  Mr. Jim Chitwood grinned and bit off a large chaw of black tobacco. “Them miners are trespassing, too. They got no legal right to be rooting up my gold claim.”

  “Your claim, is it?”

  Mr. Chitwood began unhitching the little frame shed on wheels. “Didn’t I hear you folks say that the river jumped? Well! Maybe all this land was filed on in Dakota, but it’s now Nebraska. Your title’s not worth crow bait. I’ve been over at the land office filing my claim, Colonel. Cost me eighteen dollars in hard cash. A house is all it takes to prove up a claim, and I’m doing that now.”

  “You call that doghouse a house?’

  Mr. Chitwood squeaked out a laugh. “All the law says is you’ve got to have a door and a winder. Look for yourself. There’s a door and a winder. Even a roof. Nothing in the law says how big your house has got to be. Haw! Haw!”

  Pa’s eyes were ablaze under the brim of his hat. “You mouse-eared small end of nothing. That’s a fraud and a hoax!”

  “I go by the letter of the law, Colonel. Why, many a homestead’s been proved up with that very two-wheeled bitty house. Rented it from a real-estate gent. We’re going to have a boomtown here, with the gold and all.”

  I wished I could sink into the ground for not printing up the accurate truth about Glorietta’s locket. Now this sly, law-spouting rascal had pulled Sunrise right out from under us. And Grandpa coming!

  “That boat of yours is sitting on my land,” Mr. Jim Chitwood went on. “Welcome to stay, all of you. Of course, you’ll have to pay me rent. It’s only proper, Colonel.”