The Englishman's Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

ruts, shaking his fist, presumably swearing revenge to the same sky the heroine serenaded. Followed by night. The wagon train encamped in a circle, a blazing fire, a geyser of sparks, eerily luminous smoke shuddering up into the black sky. Three men saw soundless fiddles, a boy twangs a silent jew’s-harp, a mute concertina snakes back and forthbetween hands. Men in big boots swing women in calico dresses and poke bonnets.
    I can feel Chance stirring on the sofa beside me, his body tense with anticipation. I glance over at him. He is staring at the screen with such intensity that his soft, full face is as rigid as a granite Buddha’s. Suddenly he springs to his feet, gives a sharp, nervous tug to his trouser legs and skips to the screen. The hot white light of the projector glazes his features, giving him the queer, fixed look of a ceramic doll.
    The camera cuts to a little dog, jigging on its hind legs. Round and round it hops, tongue lolling. An old man joins in the dog’s dance, capering in a spry, lock-jointed way, waving crooked arms above his head. The dog leaps against his legs, barking and barking, noiselessly.
    “Him,” says Chance, holding a finger up to the face on the screen. Seemingly on his command, the camera cuts to a close-up. The old face swells, filling the screen the way a dream fills the mind. A huge, eroded face. He’s laughing now, the old man, the white stubble of his beard standing up like bristles on the back of an enraged hog, the deep eye sockets black and charred-looking, as if they had been burned into the face with a red-hot poker. “Him. His name is Shorty McAdoo. Find him for me, Harry.”
    It is after three o’clock in the morning when Fitz and I leave Chance’s house. There are many things to discuss and plan. I am to have a car placed at my disposal. I am to have an expense account. I am to have an increase in salary from seventy-five dollars a week to one hundred and fifty dollars a week. I am to find Shorty McAdoo and get his story. I am to do this without revealing who I am working for.
    When he bids me goodbye, Chance says, “My regrets at keeping you so late, Harry. But I do not sleep well. I sometimes forget that others are not accustomed to the same hours.”
    “You’d get more sleep if it wasn’t for the speech-making in the middle of the night,” says Fitzsimmons disapprovingly.
    “It is not speech-making,” Chance answers sharply. “It is thinking aloud. Thinking aloud, Denis.”
    Fitz, reproved, shrugs.
    Going down the long white corridor that morning, descending the long curved staircase, I feel the same anxiety I experienced earlier. In the midst of the silence, the starkness, I become too aware of myself. I watch my hand slide along the banister, my foot plant itself on the next step. Out of the corner of my eye I catch the ladder-backed chair isolated on the cold marble floor of the ballroom, the strangeness of its position.

3
 
    S eeing as it was unseasonably fine that morning of April 16, 1873, the swells took the opportunity to cut a figure by promenading to and fro on the hurricane deck of the
Yankton.
The stern-wheeler had been due to depart Sioux City, Iowa, at ten a.m. sharp, but loading one hundred and eighty ton of freight and ten cord of wood to fire the boilers was taking longer than expected. A number of the topside gents flashed pocket watches in the pale spring sunshine and rattled souvenir gold-nugget watch fobs from the Montana gold fields to illustrate their impatience. The remainder strolled about with a grave and stoical air, frock coats unbuttoned to display paisley waistcoats and brightly checkered peg-top pants stuffed into knee-high boots. Like clockwork, they lifted their hats to the same two ladies they kept meeting on their circuit around the pilot house, or paused to lean out and launch impressive arcs of dirty brown tobacco juice into the dirty brown waters of the Missouri.
    Down below, on the levee, a crowd of several hundred