Chapter 4 - The Scale-Master's Lantern
The man who stepped into the kitchen three minutes later didn't look like a thief, a murderer, or a conspirator in a million-dollar river robbery.
He was past seventy, small and twisted like an apple branch that had grown against a north wall. His left leg was wood from the knee down—a turned oak peg wrapped at the tip with a strip of iron hoop from an oil barrel. He wore a heavy wool coat that had turned greyer than his beard from fifty years of flour dust, and his right eye was covered by a grey linen patch held in place by a piece of greasy twine.
In his left hand he carried a small horn lantern—not lit, but smelling strongly of fresh lard and cold wick. In his right hand, he carried a heavy cotton flour sack tied at the neck with wire.
He stopped three feet inside the door. He didn't look at Marcus. He didn't look at the broken table or the blood on the linoleum where Vance had lain.
He looked down at Raleigh.
"Nine," the old man said. His voice was like two dry shingles rubbing together in a high wind.
The dog didn't move from Carrie’s side, but his tail—a thick, grey-skinned whip that could break a man’s shin—flicked once against the wood stove.
"He’s not Nine anymore," Carrie said from the bench. "His name is Raleigh."
Gidley looked at her with his single, watery blue eye. The eye was milky around the iris, surrounded by deep, coal-dusted wrinkles that made him look like he was squinting into a bright sun that no one else could see.
"Names are for things you own, girl," Gidley said. "Nobody owns Nine. Sean thought he did because he bought forty dollars worth of iron chain from the hardware store. But you can't chain a thing that don't care if it lives till breakfast."
"He cares," Carrie said. "He likes the lard on the bread."
Gidley let out a dry, rattling cough that shook his narrow shoulders under the flour-dusted coat. He walked over to the table—his wooden peg going thunk-step, thunk-step—and set the cotton flour sack down beside the candle.
The sack didn't collapse like flour. It landed with a dull, heavy thud that bowed the middle of the pine table two inches lower.
"That’s sixteen pounds of silver ledger," Gidley said. "The ones Sean’s father kept before the fire in eighty-eight. Every ton of lead that came down from Galena on the night-barges. Every bushel of oats that was weighed forty pounds light at the Union scale."
Marcus stared at the sack. "Why bring it here?"
"Because Sean’s three miles out on the lake by now," Gidley said. He didn't sit down. He stood leaning on his good leg, his hand resting on the neck of the heavy sack. "He took the tug The Mary Ellen at three o'clock. He’s got four men with him and eight hundred pounds of bar silver in the coal bunker. He’s heading for the Canadian shore near Point Pelee."
"He left his dog?" Marcus asked.
"He left everything he couldn't put in a sack," Gidley said. "He knows the marshals are coming from Springfield. The grain inspectors brought two federal deputies into the river office at midnight. Someone gave 'em the tally numbers from the ninth barge."
Marcus looked at Carrie. Her small, pale face was completely calm in the candlelight.
"You," Marcus whispered.
"I didn't give 'em the numbers," Carrie said softly. "I blew the cedar."
"The cedar?" Gidley’s single eye opened a fraction wider. He turned his head slowly toward the girl. "You got your father’s call?"
"It’s not a call," Carrie said. "It’s just wood."
"It’s cedar from the big swamp near Grand Rapids," Gidley said, his rough voice softening just a fraction. "John Hayes cut that whistle out of a fallen root when we were sixteen years old and hauling pine for the river company. He could bring three brace of mallards down out of a cloudless sky with that little piece of stick."
"My father’s dead," Carrie said.
"I know he’s dead," Gidley said. "I helped haul him out from under the third car at the coal pocket. He had that whistle in his teeth when they lifted the timber off his chest."
Silence returned to the small room, deeper now, filled with the ghosts of forty years of hard iron, heavy river water, and cold coal dust.
"Sean took the lead," Marcus said, his mind working fast now, calculating the distance from the West End to the river mouth. "If he’s on The Mary Ellen, he’s doing eight knots against the current. He’ll reach the open lake before daylight."
"He won't reach the lake," Gidley said.
May you like
"Why not?"
"Because The Mary Ellen don't run on coal no more," the old man said with a cold, yellow smile that showed three long teeth in his lower jaw. "She was converted to oil three weeks ago. And the oil tank’s got three bushels of coarse river sand in the bottom of the feed pipe."
