Mice and Men

by Raymond S. Spears

 

Mice and Men

^by ⁠ R. S. Spears

Author of “Punished Enough,” etc.

TREMAN DAYLE and his son Noscoe lived up and down the Mississippi River in shanty boats, and made their living trapping fur, catching fish, and tonging for buttonshells. One year was like another in their lives, till Noscoe married a pretty river girl and went to live on a little boat of his own. Then Old Treman, because he was lonesome, tamed the little mice that found their way on board his twenty-two-foot boat, and tied little pink or blue ribbons or other collars around their necks, and fed them on the best he had.

People said Old Treman was demented, because he had three or four little mice that would sit on their haunches and nibble bits of corn pone from his fingers, but Noscoe knew better. His father, Noscoe knew, was a greater man than people realized, and if Noscoe had not married, the father and son would have still dwelt together and saved up money on their driftings and catchings.

As it was, Old Treman went to St. Paul one spring, to make a trip down the river, and to Fort Benton another spring, and wherever he went, he always had two or three pet mice on board his boat, and people remembered him longer than ever shanty boaters were remembered.

Noscoe received a letter from his father at the Cairo wharf boat one autumn. The letter was in tone like many other letters, and it said:

Dear Boy: I hope you all is well with yur wife, and I am well with my mice and I got a good bote this year, out of spruce an oak framin 24 ft long an a 28 inch hull. I am comin down an will likely mete you to Big island or montgomry shute or arkansaw old mouth an the tripin is gud on ole misoury so you beter try it sumtime an I made gud money so gud by ⁠ Dad.

The envelope was postmarked at Council Bluffs and had been on the Cairo boat two months when Noscoe arrived there. His father ought to be down in the lower Mississippi by this time, but no one along the river had seen him, and when Noscoe and his wife arrived at Montgomery Chute, the father had not appeared there.

Noscoe had a good gasoline launch and he went down to Arkansas Old Mouth, trying to get word of his father; and he went out to all the trippers he saw going down the river, to see if he had any news of Old Treman. He found a score of river people who knew his father, but none had seen him this trip down.

He should have arrived by Christmas at latest, but New Year's went by and Noscoe heard no word, either from whisky boater, trapper, or tripper. No market hunter had seen the old man but there was a trader and prospector out of the Yellowstone who had come down the Missouri for a few days with Old Treman Dayle.

“He was trapping in Missouri among the old rivers,” the prospector said. “He said he'd come down before the ice caught him. I left him with the pink-ribbon family, for I wanted to try the buttonshells this spring down in Lonesome swamps.”

Toward spring, when Noscoe Dayle had taken up his traps and was catching driftwood on the flood and overflow, he saw a shanty boat coming down with a line on a big cottonwood tree snag. It was a small, stoutly built boat, with a cabin about fourteen feet long and five-foot bow and stern decks. The hull was deep, and the boat floated high.

At length the boat cut loose from the boating snag and a man rowed it over to the dead water of Montgomery Chute and made fast by a short line to the same tree that Noscoe had his starboard bowline tied to.

“Howdy,” the stranger greeted. “Looks like she'd go above the danger line this flood!”

“I expect, but it's a good harbor here,” Noscoe replied

It was common river civility. The stranger mentioned casually that he was out of the Ohio, having tailed the ice down, after lying in the mouth of Trummer creek below Louisville. He was a short, stocky, flat-faced man, and of a rather common river type—the kind one watches, and yet does not wholly mistrust.

He remained in Montgomery Chute overnight, and pulled out soon after daybreak the following morning, after going up to Colonel Sibley's tree-top store to buy some supplies Colonel Sibley had gossiped with the man a long while, and learned that he wasn't rightly a river man but had finished in the Columbia for salmon and done some logging in Oregon and Idaho. It had been just by accident that he had taken to shanty boating.

Three days later Mrs. Dayle declared angrily that there were mice on their boat. Noscoe laughed and said that possibly the animals knew the Dayles were friendly toward them, but Mrs. Dayle declared sharply that whatever he Dayles might be, she wasn't a Dayle nor any relation to the Dayles except by marriage, and she wouldn't have anything to do with mice except to drown or trap them.

But for a week she failed to rout the intruder out. The animal was nibbling her bread and tracking up her pantry dishes and committing all the crimes known to miceland, about the Dayle boat. Her indignation was at its height when one evening they sat down at the supper table.

Right in the midst of the meal, during which her appetite had made her forget her troubles, they heard a tiny little scratching sound, saw the lace curtain of the window in front of which stood the table, wriggle suspiciously and the next instant there ran up on the table a gray mouse, as like all other house mice as possible. It darted into the middle of the snowy table cloth and sat up on its hind legs like a squirrel, and uttered a low squeak.

Mrs. Dayle, dumfounded at the insolence, sat paralyzed, and for a minute Noscoe Dayle hesitated. Then reaching his hand slowly, he made as if to seize the animal. He checked the motion, and slowly picking up a piece of biscuit held it to the upraised nose and fed it!

“Noscoe Dayle!” Mrs. Dayle exclaimed angrily. “Do think I'm going to stand for any such thing as that? You Dayles can——”

Her husband looked at her and her voice stopped in her throat. She knew well that expression, but not so tense a one. In all her life she had never seen him with that black look before.

“Noscoe,” she breathed, “what is the matter?”

“Look!” he whispered; and she saw that round the neck of the little rodent was a tiny, twisted white string.

Noscoe drank black, scalding coffee and sat by the stove that night in silence. Mrs. Dayle could not get a word out of him. When it was bedtime, she urged him to stop his brooding and go to bed, but he would not.

“It's something! It's something!”—he choked—"I got to think it! I got to think it!”

She sought to break in on his thoughts, and he swore at her. Then, suddenly, he demanded to know when she had first heard that mouse. She was positive that it had been Wednesday, because she had washed Monday and ironed Tuesday, and on Wednesday, while she was resting, she had heard the little beast.

“And you let him get away after you fed him!” she accused him, with sudden vehemence. “I believe you're as crazy as yur fath——”

“You shut up!” He turned on her, and, going to the stern of the boat, looked out across the river.

The night was dark, but not so dark but he could see there was no driftage running. he reëntered the cabin and took his repeating rifle and revolver, and lifted down boxes of ammunition, and told his wife to make him up a big “snack.”

“What are you going to do?” she demanded, and he swore and told her that she must do as he told her. She did, too.

“I'll be gone a week, maybe two weeks,” he said. “If I shouldn't come back, you'll find in the trapdoor under that corner, there, some papers and money—it'll keep you till you get another husband. But wait a month for me!”

With that, he cast off his motor boat line, and drifted out into the current, started the motor and drove away downstream. His wife thought he was crazy. She would have screamed, but she dared not. He saw her silhouetted against the lamplight within the cabin as he passed Sibley's Island and ran down toward Rosedale Bend.

He went on all that night and all the next day, and he stopped to make inquiries along the way about a man in a white cabin boat with blue trimmings and a red hull—a stockily built, flat-faced man. Shanty boaters remembered the boat and man described, and away down in Mozart Bend, one of the loneliest on the Mississippi River, Noscoe Dayle overtook the boat of his pursuit and went alongside.

“Howdy, aboard there!” he hailed; and the shanty boater came out on the deck to reply.

It was afternoon, bright and pretty, with the sun only half an hour from setting. Noscoe said:

“Did you all see a man a woman in a skiff with an outboard motor, going down?”

“No.” The shanty boater shook his head.

“I've been coming—an comin',” Noscoe declared. “I'm out of Montgomery Chute. Yo'd stopped theh!”

“Sho! Yo' wife runned away? Come abo'd!”

Noscoe made fast to the stern and went aboard. he told a tale of woe to the man. Two days before, he had gone up White River duck hunting, and coming back, he learned that his wife had gone way with a stranger in a skiff.

“He must be her brother,” Noscoe declared; “but if hit ain't, hit's a killing matter.”

They sat down to the supper the shanty boater prepared. it was roast coon and hot bread, Missouri sorghum molasses and white potatoes, coffee, and condensed milk. They ate with rattling dishes and clicking knives and forks. In a quiet pause they both heard a scratching sound. The shanty boater cursed.

“This damn boat's full of mice! I've killed most of them—I can't hit the danged things! Sh—h!”

Over the back of the table appeared the nose, whiskers and black beady eyes of a mouse. Nervously the animal crept farther and farther up the cloth.

“No use!” the shanty boater exclaimed. “They're quicker'n weasels, yo' caint hit 'em!”

Noscoe drew his revolver, and the shanty boater uttered a warning.

“Don't!” he said. “You'll shoot the boat full of holes!”

“Sh—h!” Noscoe replied. “Why, old man, that mouse has a collar on its neck!”

“That's right—Ah!”

The muzzle of the revolver was turned on his own chest.

“My name's Noscoe Dayle!” the visitor said. “You drove a mouse over to my boat at Montgomery Chute!”

“Yes!” The shanty boater nodded, his face white as wet flour. He dropped on his knees and begged,

“Don't kill me! My—— Hit him, Bill!'

It was an old ruse. Against another man, it should have worked, but not against Noscoe Dayle. The shanty boater had pounded the floor with his knee, to make it appear that some one was coming behind Dayle and had shouted to get Dayle to look around. The river man, however, first pulled the trigger where he had aimed, then threw himself to the floor, and turned to avoid the blow the shanty boater had threatened.

There was no one behind him. The shanty boater had lied, reaching for his own gun as he shouted. He was dead now, with the pistol cocked in his hand, but nerveless to fire it, so suddenly had death come to him

It was a lonely bend. Substantial justice had been done. Dayle was of the “river people,” and he had no intention of standing in court to the charge of murder.

With calm, grim care he searched his victim and found a few dollars in his pockets, a knife, and pipe. There was nothing sewed in his shirt or trousers' band. In his horsehide money belt, however, there were a dozen ten-dollar bills and several pieces of gold. Some St. Louis fur company bills showed that the man, Toby Long, had sold nearly five hundred dollars' worth of mink, otter, and beaver skins in late December.

After dark Noscoe put the body into a big burlap bag, with forty pounds of muskrat, coon, coyote, skunk, old iron lashed to its feet, and taking the grisly burden into mid-current, heaved it overboard. He returned on board, ripped up the oilcloth where the body had fallen and bled, and put it into the stove. He threw overboard the few identifiable relics of the man who had been abroad the boat, including all the fur bills.

Then he raised a little trapdoor in one corner, and, reaching far back, slid a block of wood to one side and drew out several long, neatly soldered tin document cans. Another square box he opened by raising the lid. In it he found four bank books and a little stack of red leather notebooks. All but one of the notebooks were filled with ink or pencil writing. They were the diaries of a shanty boater. Hardly a page that did not mention, in fine, even script, mice of various names. One notebook, which was half full, recorded the catch of fur from mid-November to December nineteenth.

Cold's a comin. Takin up traps an goin to drap down with feller name of toby, who come down in a skift las week an staid by me a few days, an slepin on board, but I kepe my eyes on him. Caint trust strange fellers.

“He'd lived longer if he hadn't taken on more company than his mice,” Noscoe muttered, shaking his head. “Po'r old daddy! He always did like company! An' the mice was friendly to him. Hit were a good thing I seen that mouse with ribbon on his neck. Le's see—I wonder which one hit was.”

He turned to the notebook.

A new mouse on board to Council Bluffs. I seen but couldn't ketch him. I'll put a white string on him when I do, so's I'll know him. An I'll call him nimesis.