Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [133]
The boy twisted in his arms and kicked at him with both bare feet.
“Quit that,” Forrest said. “Fore ye break yore toe.”
The boy squirmed and looked with white eyes toward the river, where a boat horn blew a long low hoot. “Now where did ye drop from?”
Wordless, the boy gaped at him, revealing a flash of sound-looking teeth, then puckered his lips tight shut.
“Cat got yore tongue, hah?” Forrest said. “Well I reckon ye didn’t just fall from the moon.”
He looked in the direction the boy was refusing to look, and saw R. J. Willis come huffing around the corner, all in a lather, a rope leash in one hand and a short braided riding crop in the other. Forrest swung the boy to his left hip and set his right leg forward. Willis stopped for a second when he saw them, then came on at a slower pace.
“You don’t mean to use all that on a little ole shirttail boy,” Forrest said. He was wearing a pistol on his right hip and he touched it briefly through the coat flap beneath which it was hidden.
“Goddamn runaway needs to be tied.” Willis halted about three paces away. “Needs to be taught a good lesson too.”
“I got him, don’t I?” Forrest said. “He ain’t goen nowhar.”
“That there’s my propitty, Forrest,” Willis said. “Hand him over.”
Forrest looked about himself. Women with their shopping baskets were tucking pale faces away in their bonnets as they discreetly left the street, and the shopkeepers stood well away from their windows. In one of the shops a plank shutter banged closed, though it was well short of the dinner hour. Disputes between slave-traders could turn very salty. Forrest himself had been a witness in the case where Bolton shot poor McMillan, claiming McMillan had sold him a free nigger. He still felt troubled when he thought of that business, for McMillan had been uneasy about going to see Bolton in the first place, and Forrest had advised him to go, and not seen till later he ought to have gone with him. He had traveled with McMillan once in a while, running coffles upriver from New Orleans in the early summer, when the heat made unhealthy to keep too many slaves in the barracoons down there, and he’d been struck by the fact that McMillan never carried a pistol and never seemed to need one to govern the people he was transporting.
Bolton must also have known McMillan generally went unarmed, for he shot him in cold blood and threw down a knife afterward to make a claim he’d been attacked. McMillan had lived long enough to tell this story; they carried him back to Forrest’s house to finish his dying. In the back of his mind Forrest had thought Bolton too much a coward to do what he did—a poor risk to misjudge a man that way. Though Forrest and others testified to the murder, Bolton went free. As for the free nigger, it turned that he really was free and could prove it to boot, so he had been turned loose a good while before, and whoever had paid for him lost his money. There was no use thinking about any of it really.
“Did I say he ain’t?” Forrest was saying to Willis meanwhile.
“Ain’t what?” Willis said.
“Yore propitty,” Forrest said. The boy had gone stone quiet on his hip, like a rabbit caught out in an open field, hoping to hide himself in stillness.
“He ain’t worth much all by hisself, little bit of a thing like that,” Forrest said. “Let’s see what you got that goes with him.”
Tobacco-stained teeth framed the hole in Willis’s heavy jowls. After a moment he snapped his jaw shut, hung the rope’s end over one shoulder, and stuck the riding crop in a back pocket. He looked at his empty palms for a second, then raised his eyes to Forrest.
“All right, then,” he said. “Come on.”
Forrest hitched the boy up on his hip and followed. The riding crop jigged up and down in Willis’s back pocket as he walked. The boy hadn’t run so far, after all; Willis’s establishment was half a block around the corner from where he’d first appeared.
Duffy, hanging around the gateposts, took a long step back when Forrest came