1824: The Arkansas War Page 4

  He raised the knife a couple of inches above the table and brought the heavy pommel down. Hard.

  “No, sir!” he bellowed. Baxter must have jumped the same two inches above his chair—and the glare suddenly vanished. Perhaps he’d finally remembered that that same voice had once bellowed orders across a battlefield, where British regulars had been beaten.

  “No, sir,” Houston repeated, forcibly if not as loudly. “Calhoun’s to blame—him and every one of those Barbary killers of his. Going around the way they have, murdering black folk for no reason.”

  Houston looked very, very big now, hunched like a buffalo at the table. That huge knife was held in a hand of a size to match. His left hand was clenched into a fist that looked pretty much like a small ham.

  Suddenly, the buffalo vanished, replaced by Houston’s earlier cheerful smile.

  “But, now—why am I carrying on like this? I’m sure a reasonable-looking man like yourself has no quarrel with me.”

  The steak had arrived. Akins’s wife shoved the plate into Ned’s hands. “Get it over there quick,” she hissed. “Maybe we can still get out of this without the place being torn down.”

  The innkeeper hurried over to the table. By now, he wasn’t actually worried about the tavern itself being wrecked. Meanest man in northern Kentucky or not, it was plain as day that Jack Baxter was thoroughly cowed. That still left the problem of cleaning the floor.

  Akins was proud of that floor, tarnation. Real wood. And he didn’t want to think about the howls his wife would put up, having to scour blood from it. Several quarts of blood, from the looks of that knife. Not to mention maybe eight feet of intestine.

  He planted the plate in front of Houston. “I’ll get you a fork.”

  “Don’t bother,” Houston growled. “Can’t stand forks. Never use ’em except at my wife’s table. Well, and my father-in-law’s, of course.”

  There was that, too. The buffalo who’d broken British regulars in front of the Capitol, and then again at New Orleans, also happened to be married to the president’s daughter.

  Jack Baxter was just about as dumb as he was mean. But it seemed his intelligence was rising in proportion to the way he was slumping in his chair.

  Houston seized the whole steak with his left hand, shoved it into his mouth, and began sawing off a chunk with the knife.

  “Goo teak” he mumbled. After chewing more or less the way a lion chews—twice; swallow—he lowered the meat slightly and said: “My compliments to the good wife, Mr. Akins. Why, this steak is cooked proper, for a change!”

  Akins looked at it. He’d wondered how Houston had managed to hold it bare-handed without burning himself. Now that the lion-bite had exposed the inside of the steak, the answer was obvious. His wife had been in such a hurry she’d barely cooked it at all. The meat was practically raw, once you got past the outside char.

  Houston shoved it into his mouth, and sawed off another chunk. “Some whiskey, if you would,” he said, after he swallowed. Again, after chewing it twice.

  Akins didn’t argue the matter. There was no way to stop Houston anyway—and, at least judging from his reputation and what the innkeeper had seen the night before, whiskey made him good-humored.

  The innkeeper blessed good humor four times, on his way to the whiskey cabinet and back, tossing in a short prayer for good measure.

  He didn’t bother offering the use of a tumbler. As soon as the whiskey bottle was on the table—by then, half the steak had vanished, and what was left was back on the plate—Houston grabbed it by the neck and took a hefty slug.

  He brought the bottle down with a thump. “Love whiskey with a rare steak. ’Course”—one more time, he bestowed that cheery grin on Baxter—“I dare not take more than the one good swallow, of a morning. Maybe two. As many enemies as I have.”

  Akins almost burst into laughter, then. He was standing by a table where a lion was beaming down on a rat. A cornered rat, at that, since there was no way for Baxter to get away from Houston, sitting where he was.

  “No, sir,” Houston stated, stabbing the steak again and bringing it back up. He reached halfway across the table and waved the piece of meat under Baxter’s nose. “I got to be careful. Even though I can drink half a bottle and still shoot straight or cut slicker’n you’d believe a man could do plain sober.”

  The steak went back into his mouth, and the knife sawed off another chunk. By now, at least, Houston was chewing four or five times before he swallowed.

  Akins heard a noise behind him. Turning, he saw that Houston’s slave had come into the room. He was holding a satchel in his left hand.

  “We’re ready to go whenever you’ve a mind, Mr. Sam,” he announced. “The horses are saddled, everything’s packed, and—”

  The same two men hissed as the slave brought a pistol out of the satchel.

  “—I got your pistol here, if you’ve a mind for that, too.”

  Houston swallowed, turned his head, and frowned. “Now why in the world would I need a pistol, Chester?” He held up the steak—what little was left of it—skewered on the knife. “Cow’s already dead.”

  The slave didn’t seem in the least abashed by the apparent rebuke. Nor did anyone in the room miss the fact that he wasn’t holding the pistol by the barrel, the way a man normally does when he’s readying to pass it over to another. Instead, he had the handle cupped neatly in his palm. And if his forefinger wasn’t precisely on the trigger, and his thumb wasn’t precisely on the hammer, neither digit was more than half an inch away from turning the gun into a deadly thing.

  He was holding the weapon as if he knew exactly how to use it, too. Most slaves didn’t.

  “You got enemies, Mr. Sam. Remember? Turrible enemies, people say.”

  Houston shook his head and waved the steak around the room. “Not here, surely! Chester, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Even thinking such a thing!”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Sam. Sorry ’bout that.” He didn’t seem any more abashed by that rebuke than he’d been by the first one.

  “As you should be! Why, I oughta have you apologize personally to every man in this room. Would, too, ’cept”—he paused for a moment while he sawed off another piece of steak and swallowed.

  “Except that wouldn’t be proper,” he continued. “You being a black slave and them being free white men. Apology presumes equality, you know. All the philosophers say so.”

  He turned and scowled at his slave. “You got no excuse, neither, since you read the same philosophers. I know, ’cause I taught you how to read.”

  Teaching slaves to read wasn’t illegal except in Virginia—yet, anyway. Calhoun and his followers were pressing for that, now, along with freedmen exclusion. Still, it certainly wasn’t the custom in slave states like Kentucky.

  But that, too, was part of Houston legend. He might as well have had Custom Be Damned for a crest on a formal coat of arms.

  “Yes, Mr. Sam. No, sir, I mean, it wouldn’t be proper.”

  Houston chewed the last piece of steak more slowly than he had any of the others. With a thoughtful expression on his face, now.

  When he was finished, he rose from the table. Then, suddenly and abruptly, shoved the table aside. Baxter, who’d been frozen in place for the past few minutes, started to jump from his chair, but Houston’s big left hand jammed him back in his seat.

  The young colonel held the knife in front of his face. Baxter’s eyes were round, and his complexion was ashen.

  “You’ll have to excuse me, sir,” Houston said politely. “I need to clean my knife, and there’s nothing else handy. I daren’t soil my blanket, of course. It’s a personal gift from none other than Major Ridge himself. He’d be most offended if I showed up in the Confederacy with stains on it.”

  Quickly and efficiently, he wiped the blade clean on the shoulder of Baxter’s coat. Then, moved the blanket aside and slid the knife into a scabbard.

  “My thanks, sir.” He bestowed the beaming smile on him. “And now, I
must be off.”

  He turned and strode toward the door, where Chester was waiting. The slave raised the pistol as if to offer it to his master, but Houston shook his head.

  “No, no, you keep it. I do have enemies, it’s true enough. Some of the rascals might be lurking outside. Since you shoot better than I do, best you keep the pistol.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Sam. If you say so.”

  Houston stopped abruptly. “Of course I do! Makes sense, doesn’t it? The slave shoots them, and the master guts ’em.”

  He patted the knife under his blanket, turned around, and bestowed the grin on the whole room.

  “You see, gentlemen? Easiest thing in the world to figure out, if you’re not an imbecile like Calhoun. I never have trouble with runaway slaves. You’re not planning to flee from lawful bondage, are you, Chester?”

  “No, sir. Don’t need to. ’Bout another two months, and I’ll have saved up enough to buy my way free.”

  Houston’s eyes widened. “Why…so you will. And since you learned how to blacksmith along the way, you won’t have any trouble setting yourself up.”

  Akins didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. On the one hand, seeing Baxter get his comeuppance was worth its weight in gold. On the other…

  Hiring out slaves as craftsmen was common, of course. Many of them were quite skilled, in fact. But Houston’s practice of letting his slaves keep their wages was just plain…

  “Some people say I’m a lunatic, Chester,” Houston boomed. “A veritable bedlamite!”

  “Yes, Mr. Sam. But maybe we ought to be going, now. Before your enemies learn where you are.”

  “Probably a good idea. Mr. Akins, the bill, if you please.”

  Less than a minute later, Akins had the money—a tavern still intact, too—and Houston was on his way.

  He watched him and the slave Chester for a while. The slave rode a horse just as well as the colonel did.

  “That man is pure crazy,” he muttered.

  His wife had come out of the tavern and was standing next to him.

  “I thought you said—bean’t more than two months ago—that if Colonel Houston ever ran for senator from Kentucky, you’d vote for him.”

  “Well, yes. He got rid of the Indians for us, didn’t he? And he backs Jackson against the stinking bank. The Senate’s way out there on the coast, anyway. But I sure wouldn’t vote for him as governor.”

  “Nobody would,” his wife agreed, “outside of a bedlam house.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “Probably shouldn’t have done that,” Sam admitted, a couple of hours later. They’d stopped at a creek crossing to let their horses drink.

  Chester studied the creek intently, as if the small stream were vastly more fascinating than any other body of moving waters on the face of the globe. “ ‘Probably’ meaning how, Mr. Sam? ‘Probably,’ as in ‘I probably shouldn’t have baited that bear’? Or ‘probably,’ as in ‘I probably shouldn’t have stuck a pitchfork in Sam Hill’?”

  Houston grinned. “Oh, surely the latter. But since I’m not a sinner—well, not much of one—what do I have to fear? Sam Hill won’t have no hold on me, when the blessed day comes. Hand me the whiskey.”

  Chester rummaged in the saddle pack and came out with the bottle. He didn’t say anything, but the expression on his face made clear his disapproval.

  “And stop nattering at me,” Sam said.

  “Didn’t say a word.”

  “Didn’t need to.” He opened the bottle, took a hefty but not heroic slug from the contents, stoppered it up, and handed it back to Chester. “See? Just needed something to take the taste out of my mouth. Blasted meat was practically raw.”

  As always, the warm glow in his belly steadied his nerves. Which needed it, in truth. There’d been a lot of encounters like that over the past two or three years. They’d been getting uglier, too.

  The United States had been hit by a series of crises, coming in quick succession. Sam thought people would have handled the Panic of 1819 and the economic dislocation that followed. They’d also have handled—well enough, anyway—the Missouri Compromise that Henry Clay had engineered the following year, and the political tensions that came with it. Sam was no admirer of Clay, but he’d admit the man’s vaunted political skills had been fully evident in that crisis.

  But together, the Panic and the Compromise had brought the nation to a heated point just short of boiling—and then John Calhoun had seized upon the Treaty of Oothcaloga and the Algiers Incident to advance his proslavery political program. His speeches and actions had met a receptive audience in much of the South and the West. Almost overnight, it seemed, Sam Houston had gone from being a man generally admired both for his heroism in the war with Britain and for his settlement of the most acute Indian land questions, to the architect of a fiendish scheme to undermine the supremacy of the European race in America in favor of its lesser races.

  “Still not sure how that happened,” he muttered, looking down at the back of his hand. “My own skin’s still as white as ever.”

  “What was that, Mr. Sam?”

  Houston glanced at Chester. “Just talking to myself.”

  He decided to change the subject. “When are you planning to buy your freedom, by the way? It’d be handy if you’d let me know a bit ahead of time, you rascal, so’s I don’t get caught in the lurch.”

  Chester went back to his creek-scrutiny. “Well. Wasn’t actually planning on it, all that soon, Mr. Sam. Thought I’d keep saving up my money. Once we get to Arkansas, I can put it in Mr. Patrick’s bank. It’ll be safe there.”

  “Wonderful! Now you’ll make me a liar, too.”

  Chester smiled apologetically but didn’t look away from the water. “You didn’t say anything about it in the tavern, Mr. Sam. I was the one said I could buy my way free in ’bout a couple of months. Wasn’t lying, neither. I could. But ‘could’ and ‘would’ is two different things. I just don’t see the point in being a freedman when I wouldn’t have enough money left to do anything more than work for someone else. I’m gonna do that, might as well keep working for you. There’s really not all that much difference for a poor man, when you get right down to it, between a master and a boss—and, either way, you’re the best one I know.”

  Sam rolled his eyes. “In other words, you’re agreeing with Calhoun. Slavery’s just the thing to elevate the black man. While his poor downtrodden white master pays the bills.”

  Chester’s smile widened and lost its apologetic flavor. “Begging your pardon, Mr. Sam, but I don’t recall Mr. Calhoun ever saying anything about black men being free, at any time, for any amount of money.”

  Sam scratched his chin. “Well, no. Of course not. If Calhoun had his way, freedmen wouldn’t exist at all. How’d he put it in his recent speech to the Senate?”

  His accent took on a mimicry of a much thicker and more Southern one. “ ‘I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color as well as intellectual differences, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding states between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.’ ”

  Sam dropped the accent and shook his head. “Not much room there for freedmen. Now that they’ve gotten exclusion acts passed in most states, Calhoun and his people are pushing to make manumission illegal altogether. Not to mention getting laws passed that make teaching slaves how to read and write illegal.”

  Chester stopped smiling, then.

  “He’s a prize, Calhoun is.” Sam leaned over and spit in the creek. Not so much as a gesture of disgust—although that was there, too—as to get rid of the taste of raw meat he still had in his mouth. The whiskey had helped some, but not enough.

  For a moment, he contemplated taking another slug but decided against it. He’d already drunk almost a quarter of the bottle this morning. He wasn’t worried about being able to ride a horse, of course. Sam could manage that with a full bottle under his belt. But he
had an awkward interview coming up today, and he needed his wits about him.

  “Come on,” he said. “The horses have had enough, and I’d like to make it to the senator’s house by midafternoon.”

  “Hi, Sam!”

  “Hi, Sam!”

  He grinned at the twin girls scampering around the front yard of Blue Spring Farm, as Richard M. Johnson’s house and plantation were called. “Settle down, will you? You’re making the horse nervous.”

  The admonishment had as much effect as such admonishments usually have on twelve-year-old girls. Fortunately, Sam’s horse was a placid creature.

  He decided to try the tactic of parental authority. “And you know your daddy doesn’t like it when his girls don’t act proper. Him being a United States senator and all.”

  That had no effect, either, not to Sam’s surprise. Richard Johnson was a genial man toward just about everybody, especially his own daughters. Threatening them with his wrath was as useful as threatening them with a snowstorm in July.

  In fact, they started laughing. And they were still bouncing up and down.

  Fortunately, the girls’ mother emerged onto the front porch.

  “Settle down! Right this minute, Imogene, or I’ll smack you proper! You too, Adaline!”

  That did it. In an instant, the girls were the very model of propriety and demure behavior. Their father might be easygoing, but their mother was not. Julia Chinn was so well organized and disciplined that she almost managed to keep the senator from losing his money.

  Almost, but not quite. But Sam didn’t think anyone else could have kept him from going broke years earlier.

  Sam got off his horse and handed the reins to Chester, who began leading the horses to the barn around the side. Sam stepped up onto the porch and took off his hat. He gave a polite nod to the two disabled veterans sitting on chairs further down the porch, and then turned to the lady of the house.

  “Afternoon, Julia.”

  Her stern look vanished. “Hello, Sam. It’s so nice to see you visit again. It’s been…what? Over a year, now. You shouldn’t stay away so long.”