CHAPTER I

Down the last long hill into Wheeling Town came the stage, its four lean horses at a canter and its brakes squealing under the heavy foot of Long Bill Mifflin.

The early April sun, which had been promising Spring all day, was gone now, and a chill rose with the dusk from the river. The boy on the seat beside the driver pulled his cloak around him.

“Le’s see, now,” said Long Bill, unwinding the lash of his sixteen-foot whip. “Ye say ye hain’t got no friends in the town, here, but I reckon ye got plenty o’ money. So it ’pears like a public house is the thing. Which one? Well, thar’s three or four good taverns. The one we put up at is the Gin’ral Jackson. Then thar’s the Injun Queen, an’ Burke Howard’s place, only I wouldn’t counsel ye to go thar. Good licker, good beds, an’ bad company. Most all of ’em will be full now, though, with the steamboat leavin’ tomorrow.”

Tad Hopkins thanked the driver for this information and looked down from his perch with interest as the big coach lurched through the ruts of Wheeling’s main thoroughfare. Soon they came to a stop in the yard of the General Jackson Inn. Tad climbed down, pulled his portmanteau out of the great leather “boot” at the back of the coach, said good-by to his comrade of the past two days, and went into the tavern.

“No beds--not even half a bed,” said the inn-keeper with a gesture of finality.

Tad went down the street, jostling his way through crowds of river-men, backwoodsmen, drovers, and traders. Occasionally he passed an elegantly dressed dandy, but for the most part the people he saw were rough and uncouth.

Wheeling, he now realized, was a frontier town of the great West, and he felt a tingle of excitement at the thought that he had come to the gate-way of his adventure.

Finding a place to sleep in this alluring outpost seemed a difficult matter, however. The landlord at the Indian Queen was as short in his refusal of lodgings as the first man had been, and at two other taverns where he inquired Tad was met with the same answer. Then, down close to the river front, he saw a big white-painted frame building with a crude sign that bore the letters “HOTELL.” Lights blazed in the downstairs windows, and a sound of music came from within.

Tad trudged up the steps and entered a large room with a sanded floor. Two fiddlers were scraping away diligently at the farther end of the place, and a crowd of thirty or forty men stood drinking and watching a raggedly dressed old fellow do a buck-and-wing dance.

At one end of the long and busy bar lounged a big, red-haired man in shirt-sleeves. Tad crossed to him.

“Could you put me up for tonight?” he asked.

The man eyed him shrewdly.

“I’ve got a cot in one of the rooms, but it’ll cost ye dear,” he answered at length. “Two dollars for the night. An’ I doubt ye’ve that much money.”

“Yes,” said Tad. “It’s high, but I can pay it.”

“Let’s see your cash,” the other replied coldly.

Tad hesitated a second, then pulled a purse from under his belt. The big handful of Government notes and silver which he held up seemed to satisfy the tavern-keeper.

“Two dollars--in advance,” he said, with a nod. “That’ll cover supper an’ breakfast.”

Tad paid him and was stuffing the purse back into its place when he saw a tall, dark man, who had come up during the conversation and was standing a few feet away, leaning an elbow on the bar. He was a rather handsome fellow of twenty-four or twenty-five, with a sweeping, dark mustache and restless, sharp, black eyes. His clothes, beautifully tailored and expensive, seemed to have been worn a little too long or too carelessly. But it was his hands that Tad noticed first of all. They were white and slim, with extraordinarily long fingers. And on the middle finger of the right hand was a queer-shaped silver ring with a dull green stone.

The man shifted his gaze quickly, as Tad looked up, and the next moment he was ordering a drink from one of the bartenders.

“Here, you, Rufus,” cried the landlord to a negro boy who emerged just then from the kitchen, “take this feller up to Number Four--lively.”

“Yassah, Marse’ Burke,” was the reply, and Tad, hearing the name, remembered the stage-driver’s warning.

“Burke Howard,” he thought. “Yes, that was the name. But I’ve got to sleep somewhere, and at any rate I’ll keep my eyes open.”

The darky led him upstairs to a large, bare room with two beds and a small cot. One of the beds was already occupied by a snoring guest, and the other had a shabby pair of boots beside it. Tad left his satchel under the cot and returned to the lower floor. In the great kitchen just back of the bar he found a long table at one end of which a few river-men were noisily finishing their supper. And sitting down at the other end, he was soon served with hot beef stew and potatoes. The long, cold ride had made him hungry. He did full justice to the meal and arose feeling better. The fiddlers were still playing when he returned to the main room. He watched awhile, then took his cloak and went out of the stuffy atmosphere of the bar into the cool night. A few steps down the hill brought him to the river front, and just below was the big gray shape of a steamboat, tied up at the landing. There were a few lights aboard her, and an occasional rumble of barrels came from the lower deck where sleepy stevedores were loading the last of her cargo for the long voyage down river.

Tad saw a small, lighted office at the landward end of the dock and picked his way through and around the scattered piles of freight till he reached it.

“I want to take passage to New Orleans,” he said to the sour-visaged clerk.

The man continued to write an entry in his book, scowling importantly. Then he cast a slow, scornful glance in the boy’s direction.

“To New Orleans,” he replied, “the fare is forty-five dollars-- _forty-five--dollars_--with yer stateroom an’ meals, that is. I reckon you mean Cincinnati or maybe Louisville, don’t you?”

“No, New Orleans,” Tad repeated patiently and drew forth his wallet. “Here’s fifty. The name is Thaddeus Hopkins of New York.”

Subdued, the clerk gave him his change and his receipt, and Tad climbed the hill once more to Burke Howard’s place with a great sense of being a man of the world.

It was not until a half hour later, when he lay in his cot in the big, dark bedroom at the Inn, that his lonesomeness returned.

The man in the farther bed snored steadily with a purring sound, and Tad could not go to sleep, try as he would. Instead he lay there thinking of the events of the last few days and of the journey ahead of him.

It was amazing to realize that less than a week had passed since he received his father’s letter. Back at the Academy for Young Gentlemen in southern Pennsylvania, where he had spent the last two winters, it had seemed, five days ago, as if the long routine of lessons would never end. And then, one morning, had come the long envelope from New Orleans, addressed in his father’s big, bold hand, and in it had been news!

It was in the breast pocket of his coat now, but he did not need to look at it, for he knew it by heart.

“Dearest Tad,” his father had written:

“I hear from Master Lang that you have been doing well in your work. Otherwise I would hesitate to suggest the plan I have in mind. As it is, I believe there can be no harm to your education in leaving the school before the end of the term.

“I shall be sailing for England in a short time, to look after some business, and it has occurred to me that it would make a pleasant vacation for us both if you were to accompany me. There is now a steam-packet leaving Wheeling every fortnight for the South, and I wish you to make ready as soon as possible, so as to sail by the next vessel, on the sixth of April.

“A draft on my bankers is enclosed, which Master Lang will cash for you, and this should provide ample funds for the journey to New Orleans.

“I am looking forward with great joy to our voyage together, and shall be waiting for you at the levee on the arrival of your steamboat.

“Lovingly, your father, “JEREMIAH HOPKINS. “March 12, 1828.”

Tad’s preparations for departure, watched enviously by the other boys in his form, had filled the next two days. And at daybreak of the third morning he had boarded the Baltimore-to-Wheeling stage.

Crossing the mountains on the great creaking coach, listening to Long Bill Mifflin’s stories and watching the road ahead for signs of the deer and bear and mountain lions that the driver assured him filled the woods--all this had made it a journey he would never forget. And now he was in Wheeling with the mighty river running past, not a hundred yards from his bed, and the steam-packet _Ohio Belle_ waiting to carry him on the long southward slant of nineteen hundred miles to New Orleans.

Tad was genuinely fond of his father, though they had seen little of each other for the past two years. Jeremiah Hopkins was a New York cotton broker of considerable wealth. His interests frequently took him into the South and to Europe, and after Tad’s mother died, he had left the boy in the care of school-masters.

The prospect of a whole long Spring and Summer spent in voyaging with his father made Ted’s heart thump joyfully. He was just drowsing off, with rosy thoughts of the future filling his head, when the door of the room was opened quietly.

A tall figure entered and crossed the room with slow steps, lurching a little as he walked. There was no lamp in the place, but a ray of moonlight, reflected from the wall, lighted the man’s face dimly. As Tad watched, he moved a few paces toward the cot and stood motionless, looking down at the boy with a somber expression as if he were deep in thought. Tad looked up from under lowered lids, pretending to be asleep, and after a moment the figure turned away and went over to the vacant bed. It was the gentleman with the long white fingers he had seen below in the bar.

For some reason he could not quite define, Tad was frightened. Surely there was nothing strange about the man’s actions. A little drunk perhaps, but incidents like that were to be expected in a river-front tavern. He watched him partially undress and tumble into the bed, where presently his snores began to mingle with those of the first sleeper. And not till then did Tad draw a full breath.

Stealthily he felt beneath his pillow for the purse. It was there, safe and sound. He wound the leather thong tightly about his fingers and lay quiet, too much disturbed to sleep.

An hour crept by. Somewhere off in the woods back of the town a fox barked, and hound dogs answered with a frenzy of baying. A tipsy roisterer went past, mouthing a river song. Then gradually the noises of the night subsided, and Tad dropped off to sleep.