Port Hazard Read Online Free Page A

everything on their claims and had nowhere else to go and nothing to get them there if they had. The coming of the Northern Pacific had rekindled some of that early optimism. Fresh clapboard, glistening with new paint, had been nailed up over the log walls of the assayer’s office and the general merchandise, and the horse apples swept out of sight for the first time in a decade. The street, in fact, was faintly greenish, paved as it was with the uncollected droppings of a generation. The population was five hundred, but only if you counted the flies.
    Today the transient numbers were considerably higher. People had come from all around to get drunk and slap the back of the victor of Appomattox, to round up votes, fleece the sheep at the gaming tables, and lift the occasional poke in the press of flesh. There wasn’t a room to be had in any of the hotels, as I found out when I went looking for a roof. Most of the private homes had temporary boarders, and tents had sprung up like mushrooms all over the foothills. The whole place looked like the night before Gettysburg.
    Stepping down from the train I squeezed past a gang of Eastern Republicans handing out leaflets opposing protective tariffs and shoved aside a rodent in a striped jersey who tried to wrestle my valise out of my hand. This put me off balance, and I jostled a portly, gray-bearded gent in a suit that smelled of mothballs. I put out a hand to steady us both and muttered an apology. Someone barked at me and I turned my head that way just in time to be blinded when a heap of magnesium powder went up in a white flame. I had my Deane-Adams in my hand before I realized my photograph had been taken. Years later an acquaintance asked me how I’d come to know General Grant, and when I said we never met, he told me he’d seen a picture of me in a book with my hand on the shoulder of the eighteenth president of the United States. That made me feel bad, because if I’d known I was that close I’d have told him it was my privilege to have fought with Rosecrans at Murfreesboro. I never got another chance. Grant died two years later, penniless, a victim of his business associations.
    The third hotel I tried was full up like the others, but the clerk agreed to let me leave my valise there for a consideration. My expense book threatened to create a shortage of dollar coins in Denver. I asked where I might find Danny Moon’s Emporium. The clerk, a horse-faced Scandinavian, too young for his drinker’s rosy nose, looked me up and down from hat to heels, then mumbled something about following the creek south until it got dark. It wasn’t noon yet, but I took his meaning.
    It was built of logs without benefit of clapboard, with a long front porch supported on more logs, like a raft. Boards suspended from the roof with letters burned into them advertised whiskey, lunch, and cold beer. I stopped to let a bull-necked, bald-headed Negro in dungarees and a wool flannel shirt soaked through with sweat carry a streaming bucket of beer bottles up the front steps from the creek, then followed him inside, moving aside an oilcloth flap that covered the doorway. That old familiar mulch of tobacco, burned and chewed, sour mash, stale beer, and staler bodies greeted me in the darkened interior. I let my eyes adjust to the pewtery light struggling in through panes thick with grime, then made my way to the bar, towing a path of silence through the whirr of conversation. Mine was the only white face in the establishment, and I had on the only white shirt. My entrance had interrupted a game of dominoes atop a table made from a packing crate and an argument at the bar, which was made from a door laid across a pair of whiskey barrels.
    The bartender turned out to be the man I’d seen carrying in beer from the creek. He paused in the midst of unstopping one of the bottles to look at me from under a brow like a rock outcrop. I groped a nickel out of my pocket and laid