middle with the end of it. “Stand your distance, my man. Or I’ll break this over your stupid thick head.”
Shad blinked at the stick planted in his navel.
“You say you want that stick broke, brother?” He removed the cane from Ralston’s hand as though he were taking it from a baby. Then, holding it in both hands, he snapped it in two like a matchstick—not over his knee: just between his hands, in midair. He tossed the pieces over his shoulders and started lumbering toward Ralston again like a huge, trained walking bear.
Ralston lost his poise. He fell back a step.
“Stand away! Keep away from me, you great sweaty beast!”
Shad reached out with his left, caught up some of the black finery covering Ralston’s chest, and yanked the elegant actor in close to him, seemingly all in one quick, effortless movement.
Nat left his cot. “Shad! Don’t hurt him.”
Shad looked back at him with a shocked expression.
“Hurt him? My goodness, Natty, I ain’t about to hurt the poor skinny fella. All I was fixin’ to do was reset the slant of his hat.”
He caught the brim of Ralston’s buckled hat in both hands and yanked straight down—Ralston’s head popping through the crown like a jack-in-a-box—saying: “There. Now that didn’t hurt him none, did it? Then I was planning on spinning him about like this——”
He struck Ralston’s right shoulder with his flat hand, and Ralston, as helpless as a top, spun into an abrupt about-face, and Shad caught him by the scruff of the neck and the seat of the pants, saying: “Then I was going to walk him backstage, somewhat like this——”
Nat, following, would have sworn that Ralston’s kicking feet never once touched the floor.
“—till I found one a them buckets Benny uses for fires,” Shad continued, stopping by a row of filled buckets and picking up one of them and upsetting it with an appalling splash of water over Ralston’s head.
“Then I was gonna turn him just so and aim him for the alley door and give him a little start on his way, like this——”
He planted a huge booted foot in Ralston’s backside and propelled the helpless, drenched, bucket-headed man toward the door. Ralston, all arms and legs and no visible head, collided against the closed door, the bucket flying off, and collapsed in a soggy, dizzy heap on the floor. Shad rubbed his hands together energetically.
“Now you see? That’s all I was gonna do. I wasn’t thinkin’ to hurt him for a minute!”
The bedraggled, outraged actor lurched to his feet, got the door partway open, and clung to it as though for support. His eyes were no longer cold. They had the glassy hot look of a starved tiger.
“You’ll pay!” he hissed. “Every one of you rebels will pay. And I’ll be there on the day of reckoning. Towne, you hear? I promise you—I’ll be there!”
He slammed the door. He was gone. Shad shook his burly head and sighed. “Fella like that’s just as fancy-lookin’ as sugar. But I bet he could be mighty mean with a knife—if your back was turned.”
Which reminded Nat of the dead man in the alley. They returned to the dressing room to study the powder horn. It was just an ordinary cow horn reconverted to hold powder. They emptied the powder out, and that didn’t tell them anything. Then Shad gave the horn a shake.
“Something still in there.” So they broke the horn open.
They found a small, tightly rolled piece of birchbark. Shad grunted and carefully unrolled the strip of bark. To Nat, the hieroglyphic-like inscription it bore meant less than Latin.
“Injun,” Shad muttered. “I can read Mingo like you’d read a tavern notice, but this ain’t Mingo.” Then, perusing the strip closely, he said “Hmm!” and “Huh!” and finally “Ha!”
“Look here, Natty. See that word? ‘Androscoggins.’ That’s an Abenaki word. Tell you what. We got a fella on the committee, Jessie Greene, who’s made a study of Injun lingo. He keeps a wholesale winery at the foot of Hancock’s Wharf, and we been meeting Revere there in secret lately. I could take it over to him and see what he thinks it is.”
Nat hesitated. “I promised that man I wouldn’t let anybody else have it.”
Shad nodded understandingly. “Sure. Well, I’ll just slip over there tomorrow morning and see the boys, tell ’em about it. You can’t tell: it might just be something important.”
Nat cut the greasy rawhide thong from the horn and attached it to the roll of birchbark, then looped it about his neck and shoved it inside his shirt.
Yes, he thought. Important enough that a man killed to get it, and a man died to keep it.
3
I DON’T MIND DYING, BUT . . .
The house was packed the next night. Even the aisles were jammed. It was Standing Room Only. And once again the famous jousting scene between Robin Hood and Little John was a howling success. Benny was in a hysteria of happiness; he was forever attempting to throw his spindly arms about Shad to give him brotherly hugs . . . and Shad was forever giving him hasty, brotherly, straight-armed shoves away.
Benny’s only worry concerned the expense of burning up a fresh backdrop every night (and two on Saturday); and Nat’s and Shad’s only worry concerned the unpleasant possibility of not escaping in time from under the burning backdrop some night.
After the show Nat and Shad sat before the tarnished mirror to remove their greasepaint, and Shad said: “Jessie and the other boys want to see you and that birchbark you got. We can skip over there right now. There’s a mob fight going on over to the Common, and we ain’t likely to run afoul of no patrol tonight.”
Nat paused for a moment, staring at his grease-sheened reflection in the mirror. In a way he was a little doubtful of becoming personally involved in the hotbed of Boston politics. In another way he was impulsively glad, excited. But one way or another it seemed inexorable—and had been ever since he had unwittingly darted into that alleyway off Tremont Street.
“All right,” he said simply.
Greene’s warehouse had the damp, heady odor of brick walls long submerged in wine. The square façade was dark and shuttered for the night. It seemed to bear the somber aspect of a business building brooding over the wistful memory of old, happy, by-gone commercial days, as if watching a ghostly parade of long-gone customers coming and going. But then all the mercantile houses in Boston bore the same scar, ever since Gage’s Port Act.
Shad gave a tricky knock on the heavy slab door, and a minute later the spark of an eye appeared at the peephole.
A hoarse voice seemed to issue from the eye. “The word?”
“Doc,” Shad said.
“Doc who?”
“Oh for grab’s sake! Doc Warren, that’s who! You bent-headed old coot! Now open up! Who do I look like to you—Lord Rawdon?”
