LITMIR.BIZ

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o’Paris effigy said to be the very mummy of King Philip, the notorious Wampanoag firebrand—all as a sort of window-dressing, as ’twere, to gather the ignorant country folk in order to sell them wooden nutmegs, nostrums, short-weighted sugarplums, and sundry gewgaws of the cheapest manufacture. He featured Neddy in this exhibition of horrors as ‘Bungo the Dogboy.’”

      “Dreadful,” Uncle declared, completely enthralled.

      “Came the revolution,” Bilbo went on portentously. “Alarms! Chaos! Confusion! Slaughter! Swatley’s miserable caravan chanced to be caught in the vicinity of Monmouth Courthouse ’twixt a company of bloodthirsting Hessians on the one hand and a mob of fractious Jersey rabble on the other. This rabble destroyed his wagonload of wooden nutmegs and shoddy tinware whilst the Hessians captured his freaks, Neddy amongst them. Need I tell you he was cruelly treated by those mercenary German brutes? They released him upon their withdrawal to New York. Amid the clangor and smoke of war did poor Neddy wander the countryside, knowing not whether he were truly man or beast, his little heart a’palpitating with sorrow, and yet the indomitable will to live still burning in his bosom.”

      Neddy let loose a melancholy howl. Bilbo patted him upon his tin cap.

      “There, there,” he said. “Where was I?”

      “The war,” Uncle refreshed his memory.

      “Ay yes. It ended. At last, peace descends upon the land. The doves return to their roosts. The chimes ring out. The States are confederated, the Articles of Peace signed. Commerce and agriculture reawaken from the nightmare slumber. Neddy is taken in by a series of masters, one crueler than the next. He is used for everything from fetching wingshot ducks out of the freezing Chesapeake Bay to treeing coons in the County of Albemarle, Virginia. Barbarous children pull his ears. Till comes the day he wanders west.”

      Neddy ceased his lamentations and sat back upon his haunches, a far-away look in his eyes.

      “Ah, the West, my babes! That motherland of the castoff, the unwanted, the eccentric, of society’s flotsam and jetsam. Here he fled. Here he reapplied himself to those feral arts learned at his mother’s teat. Here did he at last find that peace of mind, that contentment, which society had denied him. Here, in the wilderness, on that little island in the Ohio, did Bessie and I find him, and enter into the mutually advantageous relation in which you found us.”

      Bilbo sighed and drained the whiskey from his jar. Uncle’s jaw had fallen progressively agape as the rascal had ground out this inconceivable fustian narrative.

      “Bilbo,” I said from my makeshift balcony seat on the cabin roof, “you have missed your calling. Beat a hasty path back to New York and take to the boards, I implore you!”

      “’Twas true, to every last detail,” he protested.

      “Come now. How could you possibly have any knowledge of this creature’s history lest you were at his side through each tribulation.”

      “I know because he told me,” Bilbo said.

      “He told you!” both Uncle and I exclaimed.

      “How else might he have conveyed such a wealth of detail?”

      I climbed down off the roof and approached the dwarf.

      “Do you speak English?” I addressed him directly.

      The dwarf shrugged his shoulders.

      “Neddy speaks only when he has something important to say,” Bilbo answered for him.

      “I see,” said I, still astounded. “Well, here is a question I deem to be of some importance: how in God’s name did he ever come to associate himself with such a thieving, nefarious, and unregenerate mountebank as you, Captain Melancton Bilbo, Esquire?”

      “I was the only human being who ever showed him a moment’s kindness,” said Bilbo with an expansive gesture of his skillet-sized hands, and there the matter rested.

      Later that same afternoon, we rounded a sharp bend in the river to see, at about three miles’ distance, a column of black smoke rising from the verdure. A look through our telescope disclosed many alarming details.

      The smoke arose from a sandy prominence at the junction of a tributary stream—no doubt the Dismal River—and this smoke issued not from a chimney, nor smokehouse, nor brick furnace, but from what appeared to be a rubble of ashes. This, we had been told, was the site of Bottomley’s Trading Station. As we drew closer, the scene appeared more desolate and awful. There was no sign of life. An odor, as of burning hides, soon reached our nostrils.

      “Man the sweeps,” Bilbo ordered us in an anxious tone of voice. “Make for that cove on the near bank.”

      We guided our craft to the place in question. It was a quiet eddy, out of the Ohio’s currents.

      “Put down the anchor,” Bilbo said. “We’d best lay to for a while.”

      “Do you think it was Indians?” I asked.

      “Do I think it was Indians?” Bilbo replied mockingly. “Well, now, who else do you supposed might o’done this? Kublee Khan?”

      A pitiless silence weighed upon the melancholy scene, as sinister in its own way as any fracas of marauding savages. Carrion crows wheeled soundlessly over the site, and at a great altitude. An hour passed and the sun descended behind the pillar of smoke. At twilight a few songbirds trilled wanly in the surrounding banks. The cinders of Bottomley’s Station glowed forbiddingly across the water as night finally fell.

      We remained in place, an hundred yards off the shore in our eddy. Bilbo disallowed the firing up of our shipboard brazier on the grounds that savages lurking on shore might swim out, try to climb on board, and assassinate us. We nibbled military biscuits. There was no moon. The shore rang with the cries of countless beasts. Sleep was out of the question. The hours dragged by as though time itself had been fettered in chains of lead.

      Dawn spread over the river like an ague. Fog obscured all banks. Our craft was enveloped in a dense miasma, each unseen leaping fish sending an alarm through our company as though it were the stroke of a swimming Indian, dagger clenched between his teeth and his savage heart bent on murderous mischief.

      In a little while, a chill breeze arose out of the west. We could smell the burnt station before this breeze dispersed the fog and revealed it. A fine drizzle began to spray out of the gray, cloud-clotted sky.

      “Weigh anchor,” Bilbo finally said, “and let’s see what the rascals left.”

      With that, we made for the far bank.

      Minutes later, we were wading ashore. I was limp with terror. Bilbo strode up the bank, pistol in hand, and motioned us to follow with a jerk of his head. We followed. Neddy scampered ahead. Soon he was barking at something in the charred weeds. We ran up to see what it was.

      Though we walk daily through this life hand-in-hand with the portent of death, though we are daily accosted by news of tragedy, though our kith and kin are yearly snatched by disease and accident from this only world we know into the daunting eternities, though we even divert ourselves by viewing plays about death, murder, regicide, suicide, massacre, poisoning, hanging, dueling, et cetera ad nauseum, it is actually uncommon amongst ordinary folk to view the unfortunate victims of such violent fates. We may sit at the bedside of a departing parent, we may minister to the injured, the stricken child, the mother in labor. But all these are domestic scenes chiefly of the bedchamber and do not prepare us for those scenes of brutality that are frequent occurrences on the frontier. Such was the portrait of horror that now presented itself to me, and I was seized at once by an explosive nausea—made worse by an empty stomach—that brought me down on all fours in the fire-blackened weeds.

      The corpse was stiffened into a pose that eloquently bespoke its owner’s final agonies. The top of its head was a blackened mass of clotted blood and flies, like an obscene skullcap, where the fellow had been scalped.

      There is a belief lately that this practice was actually taught the red man by us whites,

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