Butler Ellis Parker
The Jack-Knife Man
X. A VIOLENT INCIDENT
BOOGE waited until he knew Peter was well on his way. Then he took Buddy on his knee.
“Where is your ma, Buddy?” he asked. “Mama went away,” said Buddy vaguely. “Did she go away from this boat?”
“Yes. Let’s make a wagon, Uncle Booge,” but Booge was not ready. He considered his next question carefully.
“We’ll make that wagon right soon,” he said. “Was Uncle Peter your pa before your ma went away?”
“I don’t know,” said Buddy indefinitely. “You’d ought to know whether he was or not,” said Booge. “Didn’t you call Uncle Peter ‘pa,’ or ‘papa’ or ‘daddy’ or something like that?”
“No,” said Buddy. “You said you’d make a wagon, Uncle Booge.”
“Right away!” said Booge. “What did you call Uncle Peter before your ma went away, Buddy?”
The child looked at Booge in surprise. “Why, ‘course I didn’t call him at all,” he said as if Booge should have known as much. “He wasn’t my Uncle Peter, then.”
“Your ma just sort of stayed around the boat, did she?”
“No, my mama comed to the boat, and I comed to the boat, and my mama went away. But Uncle Peter and Buddy didn’t not go away. I want to make a wagon, Uncle Booge.”
“Just one minute and we’ll make that wagon, Buddy,” said Booge. “I just want to get this all straight first. What did your ma do when she came to the boat?”
“Mama cried,” said Buddy.
“I bet you!” said Booge. “And what did your ma do then, Buddy?”
“Mama hit Uncle Peter,” said Buddy, “and Mama went away, and Uncle Peter floated the boat, and I floated the boat. And I steered the boat.”
“And your ma left you with Uncle Peter when she went away,” said Booge. “What was your ma’s name, Buddy. Was it Lane?”
“It was Mama,” said Buddy.
“But what was your name?” insisted Booge. “What did you say your name was when anybody said, ‘What’s your name, little boy?’”
“Buddy,” said the boy.
“Buddy what?” urged Booge.
“Mama’s Buddy.”
Booge drew a deep breath. For five minutes more he questioned the boy, while Buddy grew more and more impatient to be at the wagon-making. Of Buddy’s past Peter had, of course, never told Booge a word, but the tramp had his own idea of it. He felt that Peter was no ordinary shanty-boat man, and he imputed Peter’s silence regarding the boy’s past and parentage to a desire on Peter’s part to shake himself free from that past. Why was Peter continually telling that he had begun a more respectable life? Peter’s wife might have been one of the low shanty-boat women, a shiftless mother and a worse than shiftless wife, running away from Peter only to bring back the boy when he became a burden, taking what money Peter had and going away again. Possibly Peter had never been married to the woman. In digging into Buddy’s memories Booge hoped to find some thread that would give him a hold on Peter, however slight. Booge liked the comfortable boat, but deeper than his love of idleness had grown an affection for the cheerful boy and for simple-minded Peter. If Peter had chosen this out-of-the-way slough for his winter harbor – when shanty-boat people usually came nearer the towns – in order that he might keep himself in hiding from the troublesome wife, veiling himself and the boy from discovery by giving out that he and Buddy were uncle and nephew, it was no more than Booge would have done.
“I suppose, when your ma come to the boat, she slept in the bunk, didn’t she?” asked Booge.
“Yes, Uncle Booge,” said Buddy. “I want you to make a wagon.”
“All right, bo!” said Booge gleefully. “Come ahead and make a wagon. And when Uncle Peter comes back we’ll have a nice surprise for him. We’ll shout out at him, when he comes in, ‘Hello, Papa!’ and just see what he says. That’ll be fun, won’t it?”
Booge worked on the wagon all morning.
Toward noon he made a meal for himself and Buddy, and set to work on the wagon again. He had found a canned-corn box that did well enough for the body, and he chopped out wheels as well as he could with the ax. He wished, by the time he had completed one wheel, that he had told Buddy it was to be a sled rather than a wagon, but he could not persuade the boy that a sled would be better, and he had to keep on.
He worked on the clean ice before the shanty-boat and he was deep in his work when Buddy asked a question.
“Who is that man, Uncle Booge?” he asked.
Booge glanced up quickly. Across the ice, from the direction of the road a man was coming. He was well wrapped in overcoat and cap and he advanced steadily, without haste. Booge leaned on his ax and waited. When the man was quite near Booge said, “Hello!”
“Good afternoon,” said the stranger. “Are you Peter Lane?”
Booge’s little eyes studied the stranger sharply. The man, for all the bulk given him by his ulster and cap, had a small, sharp face, and his eyes were shrewd and shifty.
“Mebby I am,” rumbled Booge, crossing his legs and putting one hand on his hip and one on his forehead, “and mebby I ain’t. Let me recall! Now, if I was Peter Lane, what might you want of me?”
The stranger smiled ingratiatingly and cleared his throat.
“My – my name,” he said slowly, “is Briggles – Reverend Rasmer Briggles, of Derlingport. My duty here is, I may say, one that, if you are Peter Lane, should give you cause only for satisfaction. Extreme satisfaction. Yes!”
Booge was watching the Reverend Mr. Briggles closely.
“I bet that’s so!” he said. “I sort of recall now that I am Peter Lane. And I don’t know when I’ve had any extreme satisfaction. I’ll be glad to have some.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Briggles rather doubtfully. “Yes! I am the President of the Child Rescue Society, an organization incorporated to rescue ill-cared-for children, placing them in good homes – ”
“Buddy,” said Booge roughly, “you go into that boat And you stay there. Understand?”
The child did as he was told. Booge’s tone was one he had never heard the tramp use, and it frightened him.
“It has come to my attention,” said Mr. Briggles, “that there is a child here. You will admit this is no place for a tender little child. You may do your best for him but the influence of a good home must be sadly lacking in such a place. In fact, I have an order from the court – ”
He began unbuttoning his ulster.
“I bet you have!” said Booge genially. “So, if you want to, you can sit right down on that bank there and read it. And if it’s in po’try you can sing it. And if you can’t sing, and you hang ‘round here for half an hour, I’ll come out and sing it for you. Just now I’ve got to go in and sing my scales.” He boosted himself to the deck of the shanty-boat and went inside, closing and locking the door. In a moment Mr. Briggles, out in the cold, heard Booge burst into song:
Go tell the little baby, the baby, the baby,
Go tell the little baby he can’t go out to-day;
Go tell the little baby, the baby, the baby,
Go tell the little baby old Briggles needn’t stay.
Mr. Briggles stood holding the court order in his hand. Armed with the law, he had every advantage on his side. He clambered up the bank and stepped to the deck of the shanty-boat. He rapped sharply on the door. “Mr. Lane, open this door!” he ordered. The door opened with unexpected suddenness and Booge threw his arms around Mr. Briggles and lifted him from his feet. He drew him forward as if to hug him, and then, with a mighty out-thrust of his arms, cast him bodily off the deck. Mr. Briggles fell full on the newly constructed wagon, and there was a crash of breaking wood. Booge came to the edge of the deck and looked down at him. The man was wedged into the rough wagon box, his feet and legs hanging over. He was bleeding at the nose, and his face was rather scratched. He was white with fear or anger. Booge laughed.
“I owed you that,” he rumbled. “I owed you that since the day you married me. And now I’ll give you what I owe you for coming after this boy.”
He jumped down from the deck, and Mr. Briggles struggled to release himself from the wagon-box. He was caught fast. He kicked violently, and Booge grinned. If he had intended punishing the interloper further, he changed his mind. The lake lay wide and smooth, with only a pile of snow here and there, and Booge grasped the damaged wagon and pushed it. Like a sled it slid along on its broken wheels, and Booge ran, gathering speed as he ran, until, with a last push, he sent the wagon and Mr. Briggles skimming alone over the glassy surface of the lake toward the road. Then he went into the shanty-boat and closed and locked the door.
XI. PETER HEARS NEWS
PETER reached town about noon, and set about his peddling at once, going to the better residential sections, where his spoons were in demand, and so successful was he that by three o’clock he had but a few left to trade at the grocer’s. He made his purchases with great care, for his list had grown large in spite of the refillings of his larder from time to time through the errands in town done for him by the farmer. He bought the Bible and the A. B. C. blocks, and a red sweater, stockings for Buddy and socks for himself, and the provisions he needed, and a bright, new jack-knife for Buddy. All these he tied in a big gunny-sack, except the knife, slung the sack over his shoulders, and went down to report to George Rapp, stopping at the Post Office, where he asked for mail. The clerk handed him, among the circulars and other advertising matter, a letter.
Peter turned the letter over and over in his hand. He had a sister, but this letter was not from her. It was addressed in pencil and bore the local postmark. Peter held it to the light, playing with the mystery as a cat plays with a mouse, and finally opened it. It was from Mrs. Potter.
“Now I know all about you, Peter Lane,” it ran, “and not much good I must say, although I might have expected it, and I am much surprised and such shiftlessness and you might have let me know that woman was sick for I am not a heathen whatever you may think. I want you to come and get your clock out of my sight and if you have time to saw me some wood I will pay cash. Mrs. Potter.”
Peter folded the letter slowly and put it in his pocket. He knew very well the widow had no cause to single him out to saw her wood, and that she would not be apt to write him for that reason, howevermuch she might underscore “cash.” That she should write him about the clock was not sufficient excuse for a letter. There was no reason why she should write to him at all, unless the underscoring of “that woman” meant she had heard how he had taken the woman and her boy in and it had given her a better opinion of him. If that was so Peter meant to keep far from Mrs. Potter! He began to fear George Rapp might be right, and that the widow had an eye on him – a matrimonial eye. When widows begin writing letters!
When Peter entered George Rapp’s livery stable, Rapp was superintending the harnessing of a colt.
“Hello!” he called heartily. “How’s Peter? How’s the boat? Friend of yours was just enquiring for you in here. Friend from up the river road.”
“She – who was?”
“You guess it!” laughed Rapp. “Widow Potter. Say, why didn’t you tell me you were married?”
“Me? Married to Widow Potter?” cried Peter, aghast. “I never in my life married her, George!”
“Oh, not her!” said Rapp. “Not her yet; the other woman. You with a boy three or four years old, posing around as a goody-goody bachelor. But that’s the way with you too-good fellows. Hope you can keep your little son.”
“My son?” stammered Peter. “But he’s not my son – not my own son.”
“Gee whiz! Is that so!” said Rapp with surprise. “She was that bad, was she? Well, it does you all the more credit, taking him to raise. Anybody else would have sent him to the poor farm or to old snoozer Briggles. You beat anything I ever seen, with your wives nobody ever guessed you had, and your sons that ain’t your sons. What makes you act so mysterious?”
Peter put his gunny-sack on the floor.
“I don’t know what you ‘re talking about, George,” he said. “What is it you think you know?”
“I think I know all about it,” said Rapp laughingly. “Come into the office. What a man in the livery stable don’t hear ain’t worth finding out. I know your wife come back to you at the shanty-boat, Peter, when she was sick and played out and hadn’t nowhere else to go, and I know you took her in and got a doctor for her, and I know she brought along her boy, which you say ain’t your son. And I know you sold me your boat so you could take her down river and bury her decent, just as if she hadn’t ever run off from you – ”
“Who said she was my wife? Who said she run off from me?” asked Peter. “You tell me that, George!”
“Why, Widow Potter said so,” said Rapp. “Everybody knows about it. There was a piece in the paper about it. The Doc you had up there told it all around town, I guess. And Widow Potter is so interested she can’t sit still. She’s just naturally bothering the life out of me. She says she’s buying a horse from me, but that’s all gee whiz. Anyway, she’s dropped in to look at a colt near every day lately, and sort of enquires if you’ve been up to town. She says she can understand a lot of things she couldn’t before. She says she can forgive you a lot of things, now she knows what kind of a wife you had. She says it’s some excuse for being shiftless. She’s anxious to see you, Peter.”
“She ain’t in town now, is she?” asked Peter nervously. “You didn’t tell her I was likely to stop in here?”
“I just naturally had to tell her something,” Rapp said. “She’s plumb crazy. She says she’s willing to let by-gones be by-gones; that it’s all as plain as day to her now.”
“All what?” asked poor Peter.
“Why, all,” said Rapp. “Everything. The whole business. Why you didn’t marry her long ago, I reckon. She didn’t say so in that many words, but she spoke about how curious it was a man could hang around a woman year in and year out, and saw three times as much wood for her as need be, and take any sort of tongue lashing as meek as Moses, and look kind of marriage-like, and not do it. She said a woman couldn’t understand that sort of thing, but it was easy to understand when she knew you had a wife somewhere. She said she’s sorry for your loss, and she’d like you to come right up and see her.”
Rapp lay back in his chair and laughed.
“Did she honestly say that?” asked Peter, very white.
“Did she!” said Rapp. “You ought to hear what she said, and me trying to sell her that bay colt of mine all the time. ‘Good withers on this animal, Mrs. Potter.‘’Well, he may be considered worthless by some,’ says she, ‘but I’ve studied him many a year, and the whole trouble is he’s too good.’ ‘And he’s a speedy colt, speedy but strong,’ says I. ‘Having a wife like that is what did it,’ says she, ‘for a wife like that chastens a man too much, but I guess he’ll be more human now she’s gone, and look after his own rights.’ ‘Want the colt?’ I says, and she just stared at the animal without seeing him and says, ‘For my part I’d enjoy having a small boy about the house.’”
“Did she say that?” asked Peter. “She didn’t say that!”
“I never told anything nearer the truth,” Rapp assured him. “She said that she believed, now, you were a fully proper person to raise a small boy, but that if Briggles was bound to take the boy, she – ”
“Briggles?” asked Peter breathlessly. “Who is Briggles? What has he got to do with it?”
“Don’t you know who Briggles is?” asked Rapp with real surprise. “He used to be a Reverend, but he got kicked out, I hear say. He hires a team now and again to take a child out in the country.”
“What does he take children to the country for?”
“To put them in families,” Rapp explained, and he told Peter how Mr. Briggles hunted up children for the Society he had organized; how he collected money and spent the money, and put the children in any family that would take them, and paid himself twenty dollars a child for doing it, charging mileage and expense extra. “Last time he come down here he had a nice little girl from Derlingport,” said Rapp. “Her name was Susie. He put her with a woman named Crink.”
“Susie? Susie what?” asked Peter.
“I don’t know, but I felt sorry for her. He might as well have put her in hell as with that Crink woman. He’ll probably get twenty dollars by-and-by for taking her out and putting her somewheres else, if they don’t work her to death. It’s ‘God help the little children but give me the money,’ so far as I see. He gets an order from the court, just like he did in your case – ”
Peter had let himself drop into a chair as Rapp talked but now he leaped from it.
“What’s that? He ain’t after Buddy?” he cried aghast.
“He drove down to-day,” said Rapp. “I told him – ”
But Peter was gone. He slammed the office door so hard that one of the small panes of glass clattered tinklingly to the floor. He slung his gunny-sack over his shoulder and was dog-trotting down the incline into the street before George Rapp could get to his feet, for Rapp was never hasty. Along the street toward the feed-yard, where his farmer friend had put up his team, Peter ran, the heavy sack swinging from side to side over his shoulder and almost swinging him off his feet. He had spent more time at Rapp’s than he had intended, but he met the farmer driving out of the feed-yard and threw the sack into the wagon bed.
“Whoa-up!” said the farmer, pulling hard on his reins, but Peter was already on the seat beside him.
“Get along,” he cried. “I want to get home. I want to get home quick.”
Through all the long ride Peter sat staring straight ahead, holding tight to the wagon seat. The cold wind blew against his face but he did not notice it. He was thinking of Buddy – of tow-headed, freckled-faced, blue-eyed, merry Buddy, perhaps already on his way to a “good home” like the “good home” to which Susie had been condemned. There were no hills and the horses, with their light load and a driver with several warming drinks in his body, covered most of the distance at a good trot, but when the track left the road to avoid the snow-drifts that covered it in places, and the horses slowed to a walk, Peter longed to get down and run. It was long after dark when they reached the gate that opened into Rapp’s lowland, and Peter did not stop to take his purchases from the wagon. He did not wait to open the gate, but cleared it at one leap and ran down the faintly defined path, between the trees and bushes, as fast as he could rim.
Years in the open had mended the weak lungs that had driven him to the open air, but long before he came in sight of the shanty-boat his breath was coming in great sobs and he was gasping painfully. But still he kept on, falling into a dog-trot and pressing his elbows close against his sides, breathing through his open mouth. The path was rough, rising and falling, littered with branches and roots. The calves of his legs seemed swelled to bursting. Time and again he fell but scrambled up and ran on until at last he caught sight of the light in the cabin-boat window. He stopped and leaned with his hand against a tree, striving to get one last breath sufficient to carry him to the boat, and as he stopped he heard the shrill falsetto of Booge:
Go wash the little baby, the baby, the baby, Go wash the little baby, and give it toast and tea, Go wash the little baby, the baby, the baby, Go wash the little baby and bring it back to me.
It was Buddy’s supper song.
“Sing it again, Uncle Booge! Sing it again!” came Buddy’s sharply commanding voice, and Peter wrapped his arms around the tree trunk, and laid his forehead against it. He was happy, but trembling so violently that the branches of the small elm shook above his head. He twined his legs around the tree, to still their trembling, and hugged the tree close, for he felt as if he would be shaken to pieces. Even his forehead rattled against the bark of the trunk, but he was happy. Buddy was not gone!
He clung there while his breath slowly returned, and until his trembling dwindled into mere shivers, listening to Booge boom and trill his songs, and to Buddy clamor for more. And as he stepped toward the boat Booge’s voice took up a new verse; one Peter had never heard: —
We took the old kazoozer, kazoozer, kazoozer,
We grabbed the old kazoozer and tore his preacher clothes;
We kicked the old ka-boozer, ka-doozer, ka-hoozer,
We scratched the old ka-roozer and smote him on the n-o-s-e!
Peter opened the door. Buddy flew from his seat on the bunk and threw himself into Peter’s arms.
“Uncle Peter! Uncle Peter!” he cried. “Did you bring me my mama?”
“No, Buddy-boy,” said Peter gently. “She’s off on the long trip yet. We mustn’t fret about that. Ain’t you glad Uncle Peter come back?”
“Yes – and – and Uncle Booge made me a wagon,” said Buddy, “and it got broke.”
“A feller sort of fell on it,” explained Booge carelessly, “and busted it. He come visiting when we wasn’t ready for comp’ny.”
Peter listened while Booge told the story of Mr. Briggles’s arrival, reception and departure.
“And he failed on the wagon and broke it,” said Buddy, “and Booge slided him. And Booge is going to mend my wagon.”
“Maybe Uncle Peter’ll mend it for you, Buddy,” said Booge. “I guess Booge has got to take a trip, like your ma did, to-morrow.”
“You couldn’t talk sense if you tried, could you?” said Peter with vexation. “You are going to stay here every bit as long as I do. Ain’t he, Buddy-boy?”
