The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion Read Online Free Page B

canvas and pulled on a heavy ribbed sweater and tan riding breeches of the kind worn by Western Union messengers, gathered tight to her calves with high lace-up boots. She made rather a homely man with her abundance of hair gathered up inside a tweed cap. Her cheeks were flushed from the cold.
    â€œAbout time, my pet. Thirty minutes more and you’d have pedaled all this way for nothing.”
    She fixed her husband with a stony gaze. “I’ve made it clear to Johnny these wagers of yours don’t include me.”
    â€œIn any case I didn’t agree to it.” Vermillion plucked the oilcloth bundle from the bicycle’s wicker basket while Ragland went to work with a wrench. In three minutes the front wheel and basket were off and the entire vehicle was packed in the trunk. Vermillion waited until he finished, then dumped the bundle out ontothe table. Packets of banknotes lay among the silver dollars and glittering gold double eagles. April sighed.
    The Major was the first to speak. “Next time, we must get inside the vault. I made more than this at the Old Vic.”

4
    Who is Johnny Vermillion?
    The history of the American theater makes no mention of him or the Prairie Rose, and his name occupies barely a footnote in the constantly mestasticizing library of Western outlawry, with inaccurate information appended. For answer, we must depart from the written record and borrow a technique from the medium of film.
    The color bleeds to sepia and we observe a sprawl of maverick construction on the swampy shore of Lake Michigan, far more impressive for its size than its architecture; for it appears to be without limit. Grain elevators tower above its few wooden stories of houses, shops, barns, and municipal and county buildings, the first generation of brick warehouses on the lake, and long horizontal columns of depots built of native sandstone. There are stacks and chimneys, of course, and smoke lies in coppery layers like the sunset. Locomotives chug high and low and all about like toy trains. Superimposed on this, a virile legend: CHICAGO 1844.
    Not, perhaps, the Chicago we expect. The eye searches in vain for the stockyards, slaughterhouses, and gingerbread mansions of iconic memory; they are yet to be built. This is an agrarian center, serving wheat and cotton and flax to the East on rails still shining and fresh. Its days of butchers and barons and grotesque wealth lie twenty-five years in the future. But it is a young force, brawny with plans.
    We are drawn, as by the Ghost of Christmas Past, over roofs, past lines of washing, and through a window on the third floor of the Winston Hotel, which will perish, along with its mahogany and crystal and miles of green velvet hung in swags, in the Great Fire of 1871. We cross the glistening tessellated floor of the ballroom, littered with confetti in heaps like cornstalks, and stop at last before an Empire chair supporting the prosperous corpulence of Scipio Africanus McNear, assistant city comptroller and chairman of the local Democratic Party. His collar is sprung, his waistcoat unbuttoned to provide egress for his grand belly. A tower clock chimes four; all his colleagues have retired to their beds, leaving him to smoke a final cigar and sift through a pile of telegrams congratulating him upon the election of James Knox Polk to the presidency of the United States. He has been a tireless supporter of the gentleman from Tennessee ever since John Tyler gave up his own bid for reelection, and McNear has delivered Chicago to the Democrats at the expense of fifty tons of coal distributed in the South Side and a number of fractured skulls in the disputed precincts. He expects much from Washington in exchange.
    However, the telegram we find him reading is not from a crony, but from the head of surgery at St. Patrick’s Hospital downtown:
    YOUR SON BORN TWO TWENTY THREE A M EIGHT POUNDS SEVEN OZ STOP MOTHER CHILD WELL RESTING STOP AWAITING NAME
    Boss McNear,