An Embarrassment of Riches Read online

  “What is your mission?” I asked.

  “Why, to render aid to the unfortunate.”

  “Ah ha. What if I told you that we were at this very moment in the clutches of a treacherous and unregenerate villain?”

  The Woodsman burst into another paroxysm of laughter.

  “This has been a most diverting encounter,” he told us. “I can’t tell you when I’ve had better company of the human sort. Bears, as you know, are humorous critters, and wolves enjoy a roguish sort o’twitting, but we are in the main a melancholy race, don’t you agree?”

  He bowed and doffed his skunkskin cap.

  “What if I told you that the gentleman to my right were holding a pistol in my ribs this entire while?” I said.

  Bilbo now erupted into a fit of counterfeit hilarity whilst Bessie honked and Neddy yipped. It struck me that the scoundrel had entered the wrong profession after all; had he taken to the stage, he would have made a fortune by now, so superb was his flair for the sham; while his talent as a pirate seemed merely ordinary.

  This provoked yet another outburst of laughter in the Woodsman. He gripped his side and staggered over to lean against a tree trunk, so incapacitating was his jollity.

  “Really,” he protested, “this is too much. I must be on my way … ho ho ho ho ho … ha ha ha ha ha … hee hee hee hee hee….” And with his final farewell he backed out of our firelit glade and disappeared into the lugubrious darkness, his laughter subsumed into another sudden and freakish blast of warm wind that rattled the treetops.

  “Bilbo,” said I, “you are an obdurate wretch.”

  “Thou art a cloaca incarnate,” Uncle added.

  “What a way to speak to your partner,” Bilbo replied.

  The next several days, in fine weather, we floated down the Ohio between hilly, forested banks, sometimes abreast of steep gray bluffs. There were infrequent other craft upon the river, a keelboat like ours here, a gundalow there, a skiff, a broadhorn loaded with barrels, a scow full of hides, a lone Indian in his dugout. None of these could we hail, nor stop and parley with. The pretense of “partnership” aside, Bilbo hardly let us out of his sight a moment. Our relation of captives and captor went on as before. By day, we were confined within the limits of our boat; that is, free to roam its cramped deck. After supper each evening ashore, Uncle and I were bound back to back, at the wrists, with a leash run to the vigilant dwarf, and thus suffered to find sleep as we might. And not an hour of any day or night passed that I did not dream of escaping these scum. Sooner or later, of course, the mists of gullibility would disperse in Bilbo’s mind and our fountain of youth would stand unveiled for the hoax it was—which hour would bring leaden balls to both our brains.

  “Uncle,” I whispered one night as the others snored symphonically across the dying fire. “Uncle, we must conceive some plan of escape!”

  “Was that not the idea behind thy fountain of youth ploy?”

  “’Twas a mere buying of time. I beg you, sir. Rack your imagination!”

  “If only we could lay our hands upon any of an hundred noxious herbs that abound in the woods,” Uncle mused, “and somehow contrive to slip a dose upon these wretches. But Sammy, I must tell thee, being a Quaker I could not make myself a murderer, even of these scum who would be ours.”

  “Let me do the job, then, Uncle, for I shall attend to it with relish.”

  “Sammy!” he whispered, horrified. “To be thine accomplice would be one and the same thing. No, we must find some herb that is grossly incapacitating, yet not deadly, some—”

  “Phrensyweed?” I ventured.

  “Exactly! Furor muscaetoxicus,” Uncle agreed enthusiastically. “’Twould be ideal: incapacitating, yet not lethal. But, alack, ’tis such a rare and retiring little weed. Why, in complete freedom we would be hard-pressed to locate a patch. In our present confinement, I can’t see how—”

  “I think I know a way,” I said, a scheme taking shape in my mind requiring the amorous exploitation of that poor misbegotten creature, Bessie. Meanwhile, Uncle described for me in minute and vivid detail the characteristics of phrensyweed, that I might easily recognize it and snatch a handful before Bilbo took a notion to snatch our lives.

  Just after noon the following day a brief thundershower had sweetened the air by disuniting the noxious vapors that lay heavy upon the Ohio. I was sitting idly atop the cabin roof whilst Uncle leaned against a biscuit cask watching Neddy scratch behind his ear for fleas, as any mongrel might. Bilbo emerged from the companionway with a specimen jar of whiskey.

  “Studying my stalwart little companion?” Bilbo inquired, not impolitely. Though a villain through and through, he was a sociable villain. Our mode of travel, the scenery and teeming wildlife, failed to divert him, so he sought to enliven the hours of tedious flotation with palaver. Until now, he had found Uncle taciturn to one extreme and myself overlavish to the other extreme in scorn and effrontery. “Shall I tell you Neddy’s history?” he asked.

  “Can we prevent you?” I replied.

  “You shall not regret it. The afternoon will take wing and fly.”

  “Captain, the stage is yours.”

  He bowed, sipped his whiskey, cleared his throat, and blew his nose over the gunwale.

  “Are you ready?”

  “Let’s have it,” I said.

  “Abandoned in a wood outside of Pott’s Town, Pennsylvania, Neddy was raised among the wolves—”

  “What bosh!”

  “Strange but true. Taken into the pack by a nursing female, he was suckled through infancy at the teat of his wolf-mother. Happily did he disport himself in the wild with his brother and sister wolves. And sadly did he bid them all forever farewell when it was time for the litter to depart the den and strike out upon their own—”

  “Any fool knows that a wolf pup and an human baby do not mature in the same span of time,” I said.

  “I compress my narrative for dramatic effect.”

  “O, well then….”

  “He struck out on his own, in his own good time,” Bilbo glared at me. “By and by he endeavored to find a mate. No she-wolf would have him. The packs drove him away with snarl, fang, and claw. As the seasons chased one another, there he repined in his lonely den, an outcast. Then, one twilight in the approach of another winter, when a full moon shone coldly through the bare branches of the leafless trees, did Neddy, in a state of delirious despondency, wander into the rifle sights of a Pennsylvania marksman, who brought him down with a fifty-caliber ball to the shoulder. Imagine this huntsman’s surprise to wade through the browning bracken and discover his prey to be of the human form!”

  The dwarf began to snuffle. Soon his remembered miseries brought forth a draft of tears. Though entirely skeptical of this account, I found it hard to listen and watch unmoved. Even Uncle paid rapt attention.

  “Ah me,” Bilbo continued, dabbing his own moist eyes with the tattered lace cuff of his yellowed linen shirtsleeve. “This huntsman brought poor Neddy back to his hovel and there nursed him back to health—not out of kindness, but upon reasons of the basest calculation, for the moment he was able to stand upon all four limbs did this churl in buckskins sell Neddy to an enterprising Yankee named Artemis Swatley for the sum of one Spanish gold dollar. This Swatley, a Connecticut peddler with his wagonload of pots and pans, fancied himself something of a showman, and hauled about from town to town a collection of oddities—a six-legged cow, jars of pickled monstrosities of nature, a trio of speechless albino acrobats, and a plaster o’Paris effigy said to be the very mummy of King Philip, the notorious Wampanoag firebrand—all as a sort of window-dressing, as ’twere, to gather the ignorant country folk in order to sell them wooden nutmegs, nostrums, short-weighted sugarplums, and sundry gewgaws of the cheapest manufacture. He featured Neddy in this exhibition of horrors as ‘Bungo the Dogboy.’”

  “Dreadful,” Uncle declared, completely enthralled.

  “Came the revolution,” Bilbo went on portentously. “Alarms! Chao
s! Confusion! Slaughter! Swatley’s miserable caravan chanced to be caught in the vicinity of Monmouth Courthouse ’twixt a company of bloodthirsting Hessians on the one hand and a mob of fractious Jersey rabble on the other. This rabble destroyed his wagonload of wooden nutmegs and shoddy tinware whilst the Hessians captured his freaks, Neddy amongst them. Need I tell you he was cruelly treated by those mercenary German brutes? They released him upon their withdrawal to New York. Amid the clangor and smoke of war did poor Neddy wander the countryside, knowing not whether he were truly man or beast, his little heart a’palpitating with sorrow, and yet the indomitable will to live still burning in his bosom.”

  Neddy let loose a melancholy howl. Bilbo patted him upon his tin cap.

  “There, there,” he said. “Where was I?”

  “The war,” Uncle refreshed his memory.

  “Ay yes. It ended. At last, peace descends upon the land. The doves return to their roosts. The chimes ring out. The States are confederated, the Articles of Peace signed. Commerce and agriculture reawaken from the nightmare slumber. Neddy is taken in by a series of masters, one crueler than the next. He is used for everything from fetching wingshot ducks out of the freezing Chesapeake Bay to treeing coons in the County of Albemarle, Virginia. Barbarous children pull his ears. Till comes the day he wanders west.”

  Neddy ceased his lamentations and sat back upon his haunches, a far-away look in his eyes.

  “Ah, the West, my babes! That motherland of the castoff, the unwanted, the eccentric, of society’s flotsam and jetsam. Here he fled. Here he reapplied himself to those feral arts learned at his mother’s teat. Here did he at last find that peace of mind, that contentment, which society had denied him. Here, in the wilderness, on that little island in the Ohio, did Bessie and I find him, and enter into the mutually advantageous relation in which you found us.”

  Bilbo sighed and drained the whiskey from his jar. Uncle’s jaw had fallen progressively agape as the rascal had ground out this inconceivable fustian narrative.

  “Bilbo,” I said from my makeshift balcony seat on the cabin roof, “you have missed your calling. Beat a hasty path back to New York and take to the boards, I implore you!”

  “’Twas true, to every last detail,” he protested.

  “Come now. How could you possibly have any knowledge of this creature’s history lest you were at his side through each tribulation.”

  “I know because he told me,” Bilbo said.

  “He told you!” both Uncle and I exclaimed.

  “How else might he have conveyed such a wealth of detail?”

  I climbed down off the roof and approached the dwarf.

  “Do you speak English?” I addressed him directly.

  The dwarf shrugged his shoulders.

  “Neddy speaks only when he has something important to say,” Bilbo answered for him.

  “I see,” said I, still astounded. “Well, here is a question I deem to be of some importance: how in God’s name did he ever come to associate himself with such a thieving, nefarious, and unregenerate mountebank as you, Captain Melancton Bilbo, Esquire?”

  “I was the only human being who ever showed him a moment’s kindness,” said Bilbo with an expansive gesture of his skillet-sized hands, and there the matter rested.

  Later that same afternoon, we rounded a sharp bend in the river to see, at about three miles’ distance, a column of black smoke rising from the verdure. A look through our telescope disclosed many alarming details.

  The smoke arose from a sandy prominence at the junction of a tributary stream—no doubt the Dismal River—and this smoke issued not from a chimney, nor smokehouse, nor brick furnace, but from what appeared to be a rubble of ashes. This, we had been told, was the site of Bottomley’s Trading Station. As we drew closer, the scene appeared more desolate and awful. There was no sign of life. An odor, as of burning hides, soon reached our nostrils.

  “Man the sweeps,” Bilbo ordered us in an anxious tone of voice. “Make for that cove on the near bank.”

  We guided our craft to the place in question. It was a quiet eddy, out of the Ohio’s currents.

  “Put down the anchor,” Bilbo said. “We’d best lay to for a while.”

  “Do you think it was Indians?” I asked.

  “Do I think it was Indians?” Bilbo replied mockingly. “Well, now, who else do you supposed might o’done this? Kublee Khan?”

  A pitiless silence weighed upon the melancholy scene, as sinister in its own way as any fracas of marauding savages. Carrion crows wheeled soundlessly over the site, and at a great altitude. An hour passed and the sun descended behind the pillar of smoke. At twilight a few songbirds trilled wanly in the surrounding banks. The cinders of Bottomley’s Station glowed forbiddingly across the water as night finally fell.

  We remained in place, an hundred yards off the shore in our eddy. Bilbo disallowed the firing up of our shipboard brazier on the grounds that savages lurking on shore might swim out, try to climb on board, and assassinate us. We nibbled military biscuits. There was no moon. The shore rang with the cries of countless beasts. Sleep was out of the question. The hours dragged by as though time itself had been fettered in chains of lead.

  Dawn spread over the river like an ague. Fog obscured all banks. Our craft was enveloped in a dense miasma, each unseen leaping fish sending an alarm through our company as though it were the stroke of a swimming Indian, dagger clenched between his teeth and his savage heart bent on murderous mischief.

  In a little while, a chill breeze arose out of the west. We could smell the burnt station before this breeze dispersed the fog and revealed it. A fine drizzle began to spray out of the gray, cloud-clotted sky.

  “Weigh anchor,” Bilbo finally said, “and let’s see what the rascals left.”

  With that, we made for the far bank.

  Minutes later, we were wading ashore. I was limp with terror. Bilbo strode up the bank, pistol in hand, and motioned us to follow with a jerk of his head. We followed. Neddy scampered ahead. Soon he was barking at something in the charred weeds. We ran up to see what it was.

  Though we walk daily through this life hand-in-hand with the portent of death, though we are daily accosted by news of tragedy, though our kith and kin are yearly snatched by disease and accident from this only world we know into the daunting eternities, though we even divert ourselves by viewing plays about death, murder, regicide, suicide, massacre, poisoning, hanging, dueling, et cetera ad nauseum, it is actually uncommon amongst ordinary folk to view the unfortunate victims of such violent fates. We may sit at the bedside of a departing parent, we may minister to the injured, the stricken child, the mother in labor. But all these are domestic scenes chiefly of the bedchamber and do not prepare us for those scenes of brutality that are frequent occurrences on the frontier. Such was the portrait of horror that now presented itself to me, and I was seized at once by an explosive nausea—made worse by an empty stomach—that brought me down on all fours in the fire-blackened weeds.

  The corpse was stiffened into a pose that eloquently bespoke its owner’s final agonies. The top of its head was a blackened mass of clotted blood and flies, like an obscene skullcap, where the fellow had been scalped.

  There is a belief lately that this practice was actually taught the red man by us whites, and though there are countless records of abuses by us against the native tribes down through the centuries, it is also true that they had perfected the arts of mutilation in their own right before any Englishman or Spaniard set foot upon this continent. Scalping was an act too deeply embroidered in the fabric of their war customs to have been merely borrowed, and only a sentimentalist would believe the Indian to be less imaginative in this respect than any other race of men.

  The eyes of this unfortunate soul, presumably Mr. Bottomley himself, were stark staring open, and his mouth was gape, as if in that final instant he gazed in awe at his gentle green world turned a howling red hell. The droning blowflies swarmed at his lips and nostrils. Seven arrow
s had penetrated various parts of his body, though none in his heart or lungs—another sign that his death had not been quick. His feet were naked, denoting the theft of his boots. His clothing was singed, but not burnt. The stench of this tragic butchery is a memory that all the roses in Ohio would not avail to erase.

  “Poor devil,” Bilbo muttered. Neddy whined. Uncle tried to close those terror-stricken eyes and straighten the body supine on the ground, but rigor mortis defied his efforts. Bilbo, meanwhile, marched up to the smoldering ruin of the station itself and gingerly sifted through the ashes looking for items of utility that the Indians or flames had not already claimed. It was from there, whilst Uncle and I fussed with Bottomley, that I heard the pirate exclaim, simply but ominously, “O, dear…!”

  We hurried over. Just beyond the heap of blackened rubble and a smaller gutted outbuilding, Bilbo knelt cradling a woman who yet lived, but who had obviously been the victim of abuses so fiendishly vile as to challenge one’s most cherished precepts of a merciful God. Like her husband, she too had been scalped. A sanguinary trail, sort of an horrific red-black smudge in the weeds, evidenced that she had been carried off some distance by her assailants and then, with a struggle of heroic proportion, had somehow managed to crawl back to the only refuge her mind could conceive—though that refuge had already been destroyed.

  Her breathing came in short, weak huffs, like a puppy panting on a hot day. She made no effort to speak. The lower portion of her calico skirt was dyed entirely red with her own blood, while the shoulders were similarly ensanguined from her scalp wound. Uncle knelt beside her, opposite the encradling Bilbo, and tried to give her water from his wooden flask. Moments later, she simply ceased to be, her anguish and woe extinguished along with the life she had lately owned. It was when Bilbo laid her back down upon the earth that we discovered the hidden, obscene, and monstrous torment the savages had inflicted upon her. For, some minutes after she had ceased breathing, we all witnessed a movement ’neath her blood-soaked skirt. At first, we merely glanced at each other in bewilderment. Then, Bilbo, being the least fastidious among us, simply lifted the garment up, and there, between her blood-smudged thighs, protruded the rear half of a baby porcupine, itself desperately struggling for life and freedom. All four of us leaped from the sight of this abomination as though we had glimpsed the very face of all that is unholy. I reeled away, toward the river. A gunshot resounded. I looked back up the bank. There stood Bilbo, his pistol pointed toward the ground, muzzle smoking.