Crows & Cards by Joseph Helgerson Read Free Book Online Page A

soddies in places that hadn't even been named yet, at least not in any language I could get my tongue around. Considering all that left me feeling small as a wheat berry.
    When the Rose Melinda 's pilot finally found an open berth, he plugged her quick. With upward of fifty steamers jockeying for position, space was at a premium. And then, just as we came to a rest, I saw the most amazing sight yet. Right down the middle of the levee rolled a blue and red wagon that had torches burning on either side of its front seat. Broad daylight, torches burning! Maybe they helped ward off the smells floating around that levee. On the near side of the wagon was a painting of a princess holding a sunburst in her hands. The painting, it wasn't any slouch and had bold letters running beneath it that read off this way:
D R. B UFFALO H ILLY'S F ANTASTIC I NDIAN M EDICINE S HOW
AS SEEN BY THE CROWNED HEADS OF EUROPE
ALL OF 'EM
    It surely left me with a powerful urge to find out what the other side of the wagon had to say.
    But for right then, one side would have to do me, 'cause Chilly wasn't in any hurry to get off the Rose Melinda. We stood up on the boiler deck, waiting to see if the coast was clear, or at least that's why Chilly said we were waiting. What the coast needed to be clear of remained a mystery, though Chilly did drag a dinky one-shot pistol out of a vest pocket when a bird's shadow glided over us. I've a notion he would have taken a potshot if it'd been a crow, but it turned out to be one of those long, gangly storklike things that are always wading around in the shallows. Whilst Chilly packed his shooter away, I shuffled a foot or two sideways, not wanting to get caught in the line of fire should any scavengers come flapping by. I wasn't exactly sure what he had against 'em. All I knew was that I was powerful glad not to be one of them.
    Meantime, I kept myself busy watching Dr. Buffalo Hilly up on the painted wagon's seat. He had to be the one driving it. Who else would be dressed up like a cavalry captain? And with a purple plume sticking out of his hat too. He was playing some kind of musical box that I later heard called an accordion.
    Did I mention he had a camel pulling that wagon?
    I recognized it straight off from a picture in my ma's dictionary, and that dromedary wasn't the end of the amazements either. No sir, what brought up the rear didn't simmer things down one bit, for tagging along behind that painted wagon was an Indian princess. Had to be. She was leading a white-faced pony that was carrying a full-grown Indian chief whose war bonnet was long enough to drag feathers across the ground.
    The medicine wagon creaked on past, gathering up the lame and achy and pockmarked as it went, but the Indian princess stopped directly in front of the Rose Melinda. Leaving the pony, she worked her way down to the shoreline in front of me. She couldn't have been much beyond fifteen feet distant and had the brownest, swimmingest eyes I'd ever run across. They beat horse eyes and cow eyes all flat. In fact, most every other pair of eyes I've seen before or since weren't nothing but washable buttons compared to 'em.
    And then she blinked!
    I flinched.
    That made her smile a flicker, if that long, before turning and warbling something in Indian lingo to the chief.
    Up to then the chief had been staring straight ahead, but now he turned toward the Rose Melinda and gazed at me. You could tell in a flash he was blind, as both his eyes were snowier than a blizzard, not that it mattered. I sure enough felt as though he was seeing parts of me never before seen under the sun, parts I didn't even know I had.
    After a bit, he raised his right hand, kind of stern-like, to show me his palm. I'd heard that's how Indian folks say hello, so I raised my hand back.
    The instant I done it, the chief smiled possum-wide and dropped his arm! Now how'd he know to do that? The princess sure had never said a word to tip him off. What's wilder, my hand