brother briefly, but I found him most attractive. As a matter of fact, that was
why I came here tonight. He was to have called on us and did not, and then they
told me you were here. Where is your brother?”
“I was just goin’ to ask you that question, ma’am. He’s a man never fails to
keep an appointment, so something serious must have happened. We had some
business here in town.”
“If we could help, Mr. Sackett, you have only to ask. We have many friends here.
Our people have lived in New Orleans since shortly after it was founded.”
“Must have been mighty hard on the menfolks back in those times,” I said. “There
weren’t many women around. Not until they sent in the correction girls.”
Bienville, when he was governor down here and had girls sent in from France to
make wives for his men, got a shipload of eighty-eight or nine girls from a
prison or “house of correction” in Paris. They were a bad lot, causing no end of
trouble, so after that they shipped in some girls from the better classes, each
of which was given a small chest of clothing and what not. These were a good lot
of girls, serious and skilled at making a home, and they were called filles A la
cassette—the casket girls.
Now as New Orleans folks have told me, nobody wanted to claim a correction girl
as an ancestor, so the way it sounds all those girls died without issue, as the
saying goes. And everybody who claims ancestry from those days claims a casket
girl. This I knew from talk I’d heard, but I played it like I never heard of
casket girls.
“No reason why some of those correction girls shouldn’t have turned out all
right,” I said. “You’ve no reason to be shamed by it.”
Her face flushed angrily and she said sharply, “We had nothing to do with
correction girls, Mr. Sackett! The Bastons descended from a very fine family—”
“I’ve no doubt,” I agreed. “Anyway, a mill doesn’t turn on water that’s past,
and no doubt your folks are contributing a great deal to the welfare of
Louisiana right now. Why, I’d say there’s probably a number of upstanding
citizens among them.”
From all I’d heard I knew the family had pretty much gone to seed. Philip was
the only one folks seemed to respect. The others had pride, an old home, and a
willingness to do anything as long as it wasn’t work. One branch of the family
had turned out honorable men, planters, public servants, soldiers, and the like;
the other, and that was the line Andre and Fanny belonged to, had turned to
gambling, spending, slave trading in the days when they could, and a lot of
questionable activities.
Fanny Baston did not like me. I could see that plain, and she was very rapidly
beginning to wish she’d never come here on what was, I suspected, a kind of
fishing expedition.
Yet she stuck to the job, I’ll give her that. “If you have business we would be
glad to help. Would you mind telling me what it is?”
Now I’d been giving thought to all of this, and it seemed to me there could be
only two reasons for the Bastons getting all heated up. They were afraid we were
trying to discover something or uncover something.
They’d likely not be interested unless there was money in it. Pa had taken off
to the western mountains with Pierre … for what?
It looked to me like Pierre knew, or thought he knew, where there was gold. From
the fact that the trip was supposed to be a quick one, the gold must have been
dug already, which meant hidden treasure.
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “Orrin an’ me were trying to trace down our pa.
He disappeared down thisaway some years back.”
“Isn’t it possible that he’s dead?”
“Surely is, ma’am, only we want to know. Ma’s getting on in years, and she
worries about it. I suspect pa went west guiding some hunters, if he didn’t get
himself killed right here in town. Anyway, soon’s we find out we’re going home.”
“To Tennessee?”
“No, ma’am. We live in New Mexico now, but we’re fixing to move to Colorado and
settle in the La Plata mountain country. Some of the boys are already there.
Tyrel’s in Santa Fe … unless he’s on his way down here.”
“Here?” Seemed to me there was anxiety in her voice, and I guess she was
wondering how many she’d have to deal with.
“Yes, ma’am. Tyrel may come, too. He’s the best of the lot at uncovering things.
He’s been a marshal in several towns out yonder. He’s used to investigations.”
We ordered some grub and talked of this and that for a while. It was early yet,
and I had time to waste until that meeting with the Tinker. If he’d sent for me
it meant he’d uncovered something, and it had to be something pretty positive or
he wouldn’t call me.
Fanny seemed anxious to leave Orrin out of it, and she chatted away, telling
stories about the French Quarter, the old homes, and the plantations. “I’d love
to show you ours,” she told me. “It is a lovely old place, magnificent oaks with
long Spanish moss trailing from them, flowers, green lawns … it is lovely!”
“I’ll bet it is,” I said, and meant it. There were some beautiful places around,
and as for me, if I had to be in a city, there was no place I’d rather be in
than New Orleans … if I had time on my hands. It had beauty and it had
atmosphere, and as for the mean streets, well, they added color and excitement
to the town.
“You mentioned Colorado,” Fanny said. “Where do you plan to live?”
“Like I said, some of the boys have settled on the La Plata. That’s pretty much
down in the southwestern corner, just beyond the San Juans.”
Well, I’m too old a fisherman not to know when I’d had a nibble, and I had one.
Just what it was about her expression I don’t know, but I knew she was
interested when I mentioned the San Juans.
Now that’s no little string of hills. There are fourteen peaks that go up
fourteen thousand feet or more, and that’s some of the most rugged country in
the world. When it starts to snow back in there you either light a shuck and get
out fast or you dig in for the winter.
“What is it like? I have never seen a mountain.”
Well, I just looked at her, but I wasn’t seeing her. I was seeing the La Plata
River where it comes down from the mountain country, picking up little streams
as it comes along, tumbling over the rocks, shaded by trees, chilled by the snow
water, catching the color of the sky and the shadows of clouds. The stillness of
beaver ponds, broken only by the widening V of a beaver swimming, mirroring the
trunks of the aspen, catching the gold of the sun. Canyons quiet as the day
after the earth was born, heights where the air was so clear the miles vanished
and the faraway mountains of New Mexico showed themselves through the purple
haze.
“Ma’am,” I said, “I don’t know what it is you are wishful for in this life, but
you set down of a night and you pray to God that he’ll let you walk alone across
a mountain meadow when the wild flowers are blooming.
“You pray he’ll let you set by a mountain stream with sunlight falling through
the aspens, or that he’ll let you ride across an above-timberline plateau with
the strong bare peaks around you and the black thunderheads gathering around
them—great, swelling rain clouds ready to turn the meadows into swamp in a
minute or two … you let him show you those things, ma’am, and you’ll never
miss heaven if you don’t make it.
“There’s majesty in those peaks, ma’am, and grandeur in the clouds, and there’s
a far and wonderful beauty in the distance.
“Have you never looked upon distance, ma’am? Have you never pulled up your horse
where your trail drops off into a black, deep canyon? Brimful with darkness and
shadow? Or seen a deer pause on the edge of a meadow and lift its head to look
at you? Standing there still as the trees around you to watch it? Have you never
seen the trout leaping in a still mountain lake? Ma’am, I have, and before God
… that’s country!”
For a moment she sat still, looking at me. “You are a strange man. Tell Sackett,
and I don’t believe I should know you long.”
She got up suddenly. “You would ruin me for what I want, and I’d ruin you
because of what I am.”