and see the Cherokee Medicine Show. I’ll be back before anyone’s likely to mosey in looking for supper.”
“Gonna buy ya some snake oil, eh?” Detwiler asked with a chuckle.
“Hardly,” she said, and pushed through the batwing doors to the outside.
Down the street she could see a buckboard with an extralong wagon bed pulled up in front of the mercantile. The wagon bed was gaily painted in emerald-green with navy trim and an inscription along the side in fancy script lettering. As she drew closer, she saw that the inscription read The Cherokee Marvelous Medicine Show. In the middle of the wagon bed stood a narrow podium, with a box on either side stacked full of amber bottles—no doubt the famous Cherokee elixir.
Then she saw Nate emerge from the other side of the wagon, holding a stool and a banjo he’d evidently brought out from storage beneath the wagon. She watched as he placed the stool to one side of the podium, laid the banjo on one of the boxes and, using the front wheel of the wagon, climbed gracefully aboard. He settled himself on the stool and picked up the banjo. For a moment, he tried each of the strings, adjusting one or two as needed at the end of the neck, then began strumming a few chords. Then his fingers began flying over the frets and strings as he played a rollicking tune that reminded her of a minstrel show she’d once seen in New Orleans.
Why, he’s really good, she marveled. She hadn’t expected him to have such musical talent.
She was distracted then by a flash of color down the street, and made out a swarthy, strangely dressed man in some sort of outlandish striped turban and matching waist sash, pacing up and down the street, holding a speaking trumpet to his lips. He cried, “Come one, come all, and learn of the marvelous, wondrous, extraordinary medicine first discovered by Cherokee healers. Hear about the amazing cures this medicine has brought about, from dreaded diseases like consumption, dropsy and apoplexy, to the everyday ills of catarrh, melancholia and piles!”
Everywhere up and down Main Street, people turned around and heads poked out of shops to see what was going on, including a fellow at the barbershop whose face was half shaved, half covered in thick white lather. Not much happened out of the ordinary in Simpson Creek, Texas, and its inhabitants didn’t want to miss it when it did.
So this was Robert Salali, the man Nate Bohannan had said he worked for.
Salali strode to the end of Main Street, calling through his speaking trumpet, and Ella saw the postmaster emerge from the post office and Sheriff Bishop and Deputy Menendez amble out from the jail. The medicine-show man was obviously in his element, drawing the crowd with his singsong pitch and stopping to exchange remarks with individual townspeople, even chucking a baby held by a young mother under the chin.
When Salali headed back toward the wagon-bed stage, Ella heard Delbert Perry, the town’s handyman, ask him, “How much is this amazing medicine, mister? Does it cure a bad liver?”
“Yes, my friend, it’ll underange a deranged liver faster than a crow can fly from here to San Saba. As for the price, come listen to our show and we’ll sell it to you at a discount for being the first person to ask, but I promise you, it’ll be the best money you ever spent!”
Ella couldn’t help chuckling at the idea of an underanged liver. Everyone knew Delbert Perry had been the town drunk before he’d gotten right with the Lord, and he hadn’t touched a drop of liquor since then, but years of hard living had taken its toll, leaving him with a permanently veiny, reddened nose and a paunch that was at odds with his skinny arms and legs.
Bohannan spotted her then, and flashed an intimate smile and a wink that had Ella blushing and wishing she was wearing something besides her plain, serviceable dark blue skirt and waist.
Don’t be silly, she told herself sternly. Why should she give two hoots about what a charming stranger working for a medicine-show man thought of her? He’d be gone tomorrow and she’d never see him again. And she had a goal to accomplish that didn’t include falling for the wiles of a smooth talker like Bohannan, even if he had saved her from that drifter. She should be using this time to bread chicken for her supper customers, and not be out here on the street lollygagging when she had no intention of wasting her pennies on this quackery. She hoped Perry wouldn’t buy any, either; these nostrums were usually half alcohol and it might cost him his hard-won sobriety.
Despite her reservations, though, Ella joined the crowd gathering in front of the medicine wagon. She might as well see the show, since that was what she’d come out for.
Bohannan strummed faster, escalating the music to a frenzied pace. Then just as suddenly, he stopped and laid the banjo aside, then stood and faced the crowd.
The only noise was the buzzing of horseflies plaguing the rumps of the horses tied up to a nearby hitching rail.
He leaned forward, making eye contact with everyone in the crowd in turn, until Ella found herself holding her breath. Even the flies seemed to cease buzzing.
“I’m Nathan Bohannan, and it is my honor and privilege to be the one to introduce you to the purveyor of the amazing elixir of health, Cherokee Marvelous Medicine. And now, direct from a secret Cherokee fortress in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, I give you Robert Salali! Let’s have a round of applause to welcome him, shall we, folks?”
Chapter Two
Now the medicine-show man ascended to the wagon bed via a set of steps that Bohannan had apparently placed there for him. He carried himself like royalty ascending to the throne instead of a gaudily painted wagon.
The medicine-show man paused a moment, surveying the crowd before him with a lordly air, a king in front of his subjects, as if he wore ermine-trimmed robes instead of buckskin trousers and a navy blue tunic. Around his neck was a necklace strung with what looked like alternating bear and panther claws. An eagle feather stuck out of the back of his striped turban. Raven-black hair brushed his shoulders.
He certainly had a presence, Ella thought before he had spoken so much as a single word.
When he opened his mouth at last, a torrent of syllables poured out, all of them strange and foreign to her ears. “I am Robert Salali,” he proclaimed, switching to English. “What I said in the Cherokee tongue is this—I bring you greetings in the name of the Cherokee Nation.”
Ella could not place his accent. It was neither Yankee nor a Southern drawl nor quite foreign.
“How did I come by the knowledge of this astonishing medicine, you may be wondering?” Salali said. “It is quite a tale. I saved a Cherokee chief from an agonizing death at the claws of a fierce, enormous bear. In gratitude, the chief gave me this necklace, these articles of Cherokee clothing and the knowledge of the ingredients of the elixir. He said I could share the elixir with those I wished, or keep it to myself. ‘But how could I be so selfish?’ I asked him. ‘Ah, you have a great soul,’ the chief told me. ‘So I will give you a new surname, which means “Generous Heart” and you may share the elixir as you choose. It is a gesture of friendship to our white brothers.’”
“They must be more neighborly Injuns than the Comanches, then,” somebody muttered, and there were answering chuckles.
“That must mean this medicine’s free, I reckon!” hooted one of the town’s graybeards.
Salali smiled and raised his arm majestically to quiet his audience. “Not free, no, for what is free is often not valued, and the ingredients of our amazing Cherokee medicine do cost money to obtain.
