The Ragtime Kid Read Online Free PDF Page B

“On’y question is when. All of the time he spendin’ in St. Lou these last few months, talkin’ with printers and pokin’ around in the big music stores? That Will’s a real go-getter, always was. He ain’t never been satisfied walking on a trail somebody else cut out.”
    Little chuckle from Stark. “I’m afraid you’re right, Isaac. He’s not thirty yet. Lord, when I was his age…”
    Isaac noticed that suddenly Stark stood straighter, all the slump gone from his shoulders, his blue eyes bright and clear. He seemed to drop twenty years the way a man might take off an overcoat. But then he sagged again. “I’m coming up on sixty, Isaac. That’s not when a man ought to be taking new risks in life.”
    “Oh, stop that talk now, Mr. Stark.” Isaac was disgusted. “You got plenty good years left.”
    “Go on.” Stark waved Isaac’s words out the door into the street. “Old people need to make room for the young, not get in their way. Another year or two, I’ll be ready for the rocking chair.”
    Isaac seemed ready to argue the point further, but then changed course. “Did you see how that man looked when you told him where you served in the War?”
    Stark nodded, but didn’t speak.
    “I hate sayin’ it, Mr. Stark, but I hope we ain’t got us some trouble.”
    Stark glanced at the shotgun under the counter, then turned weary eyes on Isaac. “Maybe not…I hope not. Blast it, I’m too old for any more trouble.”
    Silence between the two men. Then Isaac said, “Mr. Stark, ain’t nobody in this world too old for trouble.”

Chapter Three
    El Reno, Oklahoma
Sunday, July 16, 1899
Early morning
    Brun Campbell found himself sitting up in bed, wide awake. The little alarm clock his father had gotten him so he wouldn’t be late for work told him it was a few minutes past one. As suddenly as he’d awakened, he realized he’d somehow come to a decision, a big one. He was going to run away.
    Close to a year now since he’d met Otis Saunders in Oklahoma City, and it had been the worst year of his life. Schoolwork, chores, his old friends—none existed for him any more. There was only ragtime music. He played “Maple Leaf Rag” on the piano, over and over and over, struggled with rhythm breaks, fumbled with shifted and shifting accents, fiddled with the bass line. And the more he worked over the tune, the more he heard himself falling short. Like starting to read a book about something you figure is pretty well cut and dried, but the further you get into it, the more you see you really don’t know.
    All through that long winter of ’ninety-eight into ’ninety-nine, Brun bought every ragtime music sheet he could find in El Reno, not a whole lot. “Mississippi Rag,” by someone named William Krell, couldn’t hold a candle to “Maple Leaf.” But he liked “Harlem Rag,” a tune with a good driving bass, written by a colored man from St. Louis, Tom Turpin. He worked his way through
Ben Harney’s Ragtime Instructor
, but in the end he felt disappointed. Harney’s exercises were no more than a bunch of different songs decked out in syncopation, and “Annie Laurie,” even with her beats shifted, could not begin to compare in Brun’s mind with “Maple Leaf Rag.” Come spring, he found a copy of “Original Rags,” by Scott Joplin, published by Carl Hoffman Music Company in Kansas City. He couldn’t run home fast enough, but when he played the music, he felt a bit disappointed. Not quite up to “Maple Leaf,” he thought, but a fair bit of likeness, and both tunes different somehow from Tom Turpin’s piece.
    Evenings, Brun usually went out and listened to the colored piano men who played in restaurants and bars. Sometimes an owner let him fill in while the professor went for a stretch, and some nights the boy came home with a dollar or two in tips, which he hid in a poke under his mattress. Once, he got up the nerve to catch one of those professors on his break and ask for ragtime piano