I went outside and untied his saddlebag from his pinto in a jiffy, but it was loaded up full, and that thing was heavy. Plus I was pixilated. I lost my grip on it when I got it loose from the horse and it fell to the ground, and the leather top flap popped open. When I bent to close the flap, I noticed in the moonlight an odd thing sticking out the top of that flap.
It was a feather. A long, black-and-white feather with a touch of red on it. Drunk as I was, I still knowed what it was. I hadn’t seen a feather like that in two years. I seen a plume of them very same type feathers on Frederick Brown’s chest when he was buried. A Good Lord Bird.
I quick stuffed it back into the saddlebag, turned to go inside, and walked straight into the feller who’d sent me out there. “Onion?” he said.
I was two sheets to the wind and seeing double, and he was so tall standing up there in that dark alley that I couldn’t quite make out his face, and I was seeing threes anyway. Then he pulled off his hat, throwed back his hair, leaned down to look at me close, and I seen past his beard into his face, and found myself staring at Owen Brown.
“I been seeking you for two years,” he said. “What is you doing here, carousing around like a drunk?”
I was shocked out my petticoat, practically, and didn’t know what to cook up to tell him on the spot, for lying takes wit, and that was on a high shelf in my brain on account of that essence, which tied up my tongue, so I blurted the truth: “I has fallen in love with someone who don’t want no parts of me,” I said.
To my surprise, Owen said, “I understands. I too has fallen in love with someone who don’t want no parts of me. I went to Iowa to fetch a young lady but she said I am too grumpy. She wants prosperity and a man with a farm, not a poor abolitionist. But that didn’t turn me into a drunk like you. Is I too grumpy, by the way?”
Fact is, there weren’t a soul in Kansas Territory more grumpy than Owen Brown, who would grumble to Jesus Himself on account of just about anything that weren’t to his liking. But it weren’t for me to say. Instead I said, “Where was you at Osawatomie? We was waiting for you.”
“We runned into some rebels.”
“Whyn’t you come back and get me and Bob?”
“I’m here, ain’t I?”
He frowned, glanced up and down the alley, then picked up his saddlebag, and throwed it on his horse with one hand, tying it, using his teeth to hold one of the straps as he did so. “Set tight,” he said. “We’ll be ridin’ here soon. And quit sipping that joy juice.”
He mounted up on his horse. “Where’s the Old Man?” I hissed. “Is he dead?”
But he had already turned his horse up the alley and was gone.
It was the next day before I got a chance to slip out to the pen. Someone had tipped off the town that the Free Staters was coming, and that made the white folks get busy and also watch the niggers close. The town loaded up all over again. They never really geared down after Sibonia’s hanging, truth be told, but now the sure sign of Free Staters picked things up. The saloon bar was packed three deep with rebels and militia armed to the teeth. They made plans to block off the streets to the town, this time with cannons on both sides, facing outward. They posted watchouts on both ends and on the hills around the town. They knowed trouble was coming.
I was sent to draw water after lunch the next afternoon, and got out to the yard. I found Bob pining at the edge of the pen by himself as usual. He looked about low as a man can get, like a feller waiting for his execution, which I reckon he was. As I trotted to the gate, Broadnax and his men seen me and peeled away from their side, where they was working with the hogs, and come on over. Broadnax stuck his face inside the rails.
“I got news,” I said.
The words hadn’t left my mouth when the back door of the hut on the other side of the alley opened and Darg rolled out. That big Negro always moved fast. The slaves scattered when he came, except for Broadnax, who stood alone at the gate.
Darg stomped up to the gate and glared inside the pen. “Git along the back of the fence there, Broadnax, so I can make my count.”
Broadnax took his face out the fence railing and stood up straight, facing Darg.
“Git along,” Darg said.
“I ain’t got to jump like a chicken every time you open that hole in your face,” Broadnax said.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
Without a word, Darg removed his shawl, pulled out his whip, and moved to unwire the gate and unlock the fence to go inside.
I couldn’t stand it. There was rebels three deep in the saloon just inside. A dustup between them two would bring Miss Abby and twenty-five armed redshirts out of the back door ready to throw lead at every colored out there, including them two. I couldn’t have that, not with freedom so close. Owen said he was coming, and his word was good.
