The Highwayman Page 4

  One game followed another on and on with the evening dusk arriving early under the overcast sky. In the failing light, she drew a picture of their orphanages side by side as seen from the street. Then to his surprise, she quickly drew a boy and girl standing holding hands. As if embarrassed by what she had drawn, she gave him a timid smile, a wave of her hand and backed away from the window and disappeared.

  Patrick felt a deep loss at the girl’s going. However that last picture sent a thrill through him. He stood and looked at the picture until its last traces had faded from the window. One day he must find a way to talk with the girl.

  *

  On the day following the game of tick-tack-toe, Patrick and Alfie were standing in line with the other boys and waiting to enter the kitchen for the mid-day meal when Mr. Duckett came into the room. With him was a large, bewhiskered man wearing a heavy winter coat, a thick scarf around his neck and a cap with ear flaps. The man swept is eyes over the gathering of boys. Patrick saw his mouth move and thought he was counting. The stranger said something to Duckett. After a moment of evaluating the boys himself, Duckett nodded in agreement. The stranger handed something to Duckett, who hastily shoved whatever it was into a pocket.

  Patrick knew what the presence of the stranger meant for he had seen other men come into the orphanage and act in that same manner. The orphanage was overcrowded and the larger boys must leave to allow space for the young ones that frequently arrived. He looked along the line of boys and noted that he could see over the heads of nearly all of them. A chill ran up his spine for he knew that he had been included in the man’s count and the day had come when he would be sent away from the orphanage. Still it was fair that he must leave for boys like Alfie deserved to come in off the streets to a place where there was food and a safe place to sleep.

  Mr. Duckett moved along the queue of boys, stopping beside the larger ones and drawing him out from the others, and saying a few words to him. Reaching Patrick, he caught him by the shoulder and pulled him away from Alfie.

  “You must go with Mr. Caskey. He’s owner of a weaving mill in Derbyshire and you’ll be working for him. Now go gather your things. Dress as warm as you can for it’ll be a long, cold ride. Once you’re ready to go, stop by the kitchen. The cook will have sandwiches to take with you.”

  Alfie caught Patrick by the hand and held it tightly. “Let me go with Patrick,” he cried up at Mr. Duckett.

  “That can’t be for you’re too little to work in the mill.” Duckett pushed Alfie back into line.

  Patrick reached out and patted Alfie on the shoulder. “You’ll be all right. Just remember what I’ve told you. Maybe I’ll see you one day.” Mr. Duckett spoke curtly to Patrick. “Go on now and get ready to leave.”

  Patrick went up to the sleeping quarters. He had one change of shirt and pants and these he put on over the clothes he wore. He took his coat and cap from the hook on the wall near his pallet and pulled them on. A handful of personal items were slid into a pocket of his coat. He made a last look around at the dormitory. It felt strange and scary leaving the orphanage for it had been the only home he had ever known. He wiped at a tear and hurried down to the kitchen and took the sandwich the cook had wrapped in an oiled paper.

  At the front door, fourteen boys had gathered near the man from Derbyshire, and Patrick went up to the group. He had always known that he would leave the orphanage one day so why feel sorry about it. He would find a way to escape from the mill owner before they reached Derbyshire and make his own way in the outside world.

  “All right boys, let’s go,” Caskey said in a gruff voice and led the way outside into the cold and snow.

  “Get in the wagon,” he directed and pointed at a large horse drawn wagon parked on the street in front of the orphanage.

  The boys began to climb into the wagon. Patrick held back so that he would be near the rear of the wagon and could jump out and run once they were moving.

  The vehicle had tall sideboards and an arching wooden top covered with canvas. The inside of the wagon was high enough that Patrick could stand erect. The wagon driver, dressed in winter clothing, sat in the front opening of the wagon and held the reins of the team of horses. The boys found seats on the wooden benches built along both sides of the wagon bed.

  Caskey entered and pulled up the tail gate and fastened it in place with a short length of chain. He unfolded a chair and placed it squarely in the center of the exit and sat down. He reached out and took down a short whip hanging on a nail driven into the wooden side of the wagon. Running the leather tails of the whip through a hand, he gave the boys a fierce look.

  “You boys are bought and paid for and now belong to me. Some of you may be thinking about running away. Any one of you who tries that will get the whipping of his life. I’ll sure as hell skin you alive.” He shook the whip at the pale, frightened faces, and then swung the leather tails down against the floor of the wagon with a sharp crack.

  Patrick sat closest to Caskey and the whip passed in front of his face with a hissing sound. He hastily shrank back from the man.

  “Let’s go,” Caskey shouted out in a bullhorn voice to the driver, making all the boys flinch.

  The wagon rolled off with a lurch and a rumble of wheels on the cobblestone street.

  Patrick knew he must escape regardless of Caskey’s threat. Just give him the slightest chance and he would jump out and run, run, run

  CHAPTER 6

  In a late hour of the third day of travel, the wagon carrying Patrick and the other boys crossed over the crest of the range of hills east of Derbyshire and continued down into a shallow valley were the town lay beside a small river.

  “Town’s in sight, Mr. Caskey,” the driver called out.

  “Go right along to the mill,” Caskey directed

  Patrick looked past the broad form of the driver and out the front of the wagon and saw the town huddled in the lowlands under a thick black pall of coal smoke pouring from hundreds of chimneys. What an awful looking place, he thought, and he was doomed to live there and work for his bed and bread. He had found no opportunity to escape from the vehicle with the ever watchful Caskey guarding the rear and the driver the front opening. At night the boys were locked up, once in a barn Caskey rented from a farmer and the second night in a room in a roadside inn. Patrick trembled with a premonition that he would never escape from the mill owner.

  They crossed the river on a wooden bridge supported by stone pillars and entered the town. Night had fallen and here and there candles and oil lamps cast rectangles of frail light out through windows of buildings and into the black night. Patrick’s throat and lungs began to sting from the thick fog of smoke. Some of the boys started to cough. Neither Mr. Caskey nor the driver seemed to notice the smoke.

  The driver guided the team of horses onward at a swift pace along the narrow streets of the town. People moved off the street and stood close to the buildings to make way for the big wagon. A staggering drunkard fell against one of horses and down onto the street. He escaped by the slimmest margin from ending up under the beast’s iron shod hooves and the iron rimmed wheels of the wagon.

  Deep inside the town, the driver pulled the horses to a stop in front of a huge, cavernous building covering a full city block. Caskey dropped the tail gate and ordered the boys out of the wagon. Patrick climbed stiffly down onto the snow made black by soot.

  “Inside with all of you.” Caskey shoved the nearest boy toward the door of the mill to get the exhausted group moving.

  A stoop shouldered man hastened forward. “Welcome back, Mr. Caskey,” the man called out in a toadying voice as he came closer.

  “I’m turning them over to you, Coote,” said Caskey. “See that none of them run off for I paid a fair sum for them.”

  “Yes sir, Mr. Caskey.”

  “Get the cook’s lazy ass stirring and fix them something to eat. Then get them bedded down. I want them at the machines at daybreak. Tell the foreman to show them how to operate the machi
nes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Lock the door after me,” directed Mr. Caskey.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Caskey left banging the door behind him. Coote hastened to the door and locked it with a big iron key.

  Patrick looked around at the mill. More than a hundred weaving machines were jammed side by side in four long rows on the main floor. From each machine, spools of white cotton thread ran to bobbins that led to wide pieces of woven cloth. Long leather belts ran to each machine. Patrick grasped the purpose of the belts was to make the machines weave the cloth. Huge bales of cotton were stacked in tall mounds in the distant end of the building. He had heard the cotton for the mills came from some place called America. As if it had snowed inside the mill, thick layers of white cotton dust covered the floor and every other surface to which it could cling.

  “Come along, all of you,” Coote ordered.

  He led the boys to a kitchen at the end of the mill. The short, dumpy cook dished out cold soup in tin bowls, handed out a piece of hard bread to each boy, and shuffled off out of sight. Patrick, starved, dipped the hard bread in the thin watery soup and ate both bread and soup, and could have eaten twice as much again.

  “To bed with all of you,” Coote said. “We get up before daylight here for Mr. Caskey insists you be at your machine by the time you can see.”

  Patrick and the others followed Coote up a wide staircase just off the kitchen to the loft with bare wooden rafters showing. Here too, cotton dust was plastered to every level surface and some dust clung like icicles to splinters of wood projecting from the beams that supported the roof. Nearly a hundred boys lay on pallets on the floor. Some of them had awakened at the sound of the boys’ arrival and raised their heads to examine them. After but a few seconds the aroused sleepers lowered their heads and closed their eyes.

  “That room down there with the door at the end is mine,” Coote said and pointed. “None of you had better ever go in there. Never! You understand me?”

  The weary boys remained motionless and silent. All they wanted was to rest and sleep.

  “Take any empty bed you want,” said Coote and gestured around at several unoccupied pallets on the floor. “I’ll wake you for breakfast and then turn you over to the mill foreman. He’ll show you how to do your job. I warn you, don’t sass the foreman, or be slow to move when he tells you to do something. He’s got a damn bad temper and a heavy hand.”

  *

  Patrick worked at the clattering, noisy weaving machines eleven hours every day, from cold dawn to weary night with his nose and lungs full of cotton dust. He hated the endless work and confinement within the mill. By March the weather was warm enough that the foreman, a large, pock faced man with long arms, opened the windows to allow fresh air into the mill. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, as when repair was needed on the machine he was assigned to operate, or the engine driving the belts ceased to run, Patrick would steal out of the mill through an open window and into the narrow space between the wall of the building and the tall, too tall to climb over, solid wooden fence surrounding it. He basked in the warmth of the sunshine on his face and boney shoulders and dreamed of the green eyed girl in Derbyshire who played tick-tack-toe with him on the mist of the window glass. His time with the girl had been much too short and he longed to see her again.

  The foreman sometimes caught him during his short escapes and whipped him with a leather strap. Each whipping was more severe than the one before. Still Patrick couldn’t deny himself a moment in the sun. He was whipped for other reasons. Once he refused to feed the cotton thread to the “Billy-bobbin” of his weaving machine. The mill foreman whipped him until his tender flesh bled. The next time Patrick refused to feed the “Billy-bobbin”, the foreman screwed an iron vise of a pound weight to each of his ears. The irons had hung on Patrick until he agreed to work. His ears would always carry the scars from the vises.

  Patrick’s intervals of submission were short lived. He often felt as though he was but a part of the big weaving machine. By resisting the foreman’s orders, he made his human presence known and that he existed beyond the machine. So again he refused to work, and as punishment and a warning to the other boys, he was stripped naked and hung by a rope tied to his wrists to a crossbeam above his weaving machine. After hanging for hours and his arms nearly torn from their sockets, he had caved-in and gone back to work. He hated surrendering to punishment, but he must survive. He would wait for that one chance to end the torment of being a slave.

  One day in early April of the following year, Patrick fell asleep in the late part of his shift. He awoke to find his hands still going through the motion of feeding the “billy-bobbin” with the machinery stopped and all the other boys gone to the kitchen to eat their supper. The foreman made his head count and finding his number short by one went back into the mill with his leather strap.

  Patrick wanted no more beatings. He saw the chance for escape at the end of the mill where a grocer man was delivering food stuffs to the cook. The kitchen door to the street stood open as the men talked. Bad things might exist in that unknown world outside the mill; however they could not be worse than being a slave working from daylight to dark and whipped until he bled. He gathered his strength and courage as the mill foreman came toward him. As the man raised the strap to strike, Patrick dove past him and dashed along the length of the mill. He darted past the cook and the grocer man and plunged through the doorway into the day and the world beyond the walls of the mill.

  He ran with all his strength and speed, lungs sucking air and bare feet slapping the stone pavement. He darted into a warren of shacks, raced onward past decaying tenements, along narrow and tangled alleys choked with garbage and offal and dung. He paid no heed to the people who stopped to watch the skinny, raggedy boy run as if all the banshees of hell were after him.

  He slowed after a time so as not to draw attention to himself, and moved with the pedestrians on the street. Several blocks from the mill and in a part of the town with dilapidated buildings, he came upon an abandoned house with broken windows and set back from the street behind a yard overgrown with weeds. This would be a good place to hide from Caskey. The man had said he had paid money for Patrick and that would surely bring him searching. Patrick pushed the sagging door out of the way and entered. The building smelled of damp, rotten wood and the floor was littered with trash. Other homeless people had at times made use of the house. He climbed the rickety stairs to the attic. Tired and trembling with anxiety, he lay down on the floor by a tiny window with the glass missing and spied upon the street for anyone that might come looking for him.

  Men, women and children passed below him. Horse drawn wagons from the country rolled past loaded with pieces of freshly killed hogs and cattle, live chickens in coops, and potatoes and turnips and cabbages that had been kept unspoiled during the cold of winter by being stored in cellars in the earth. Groups of three, four and more boys wandered along the street. Patrick noted the boys watched the adults with sharp interest and wondered why. Two girls about the size of the green eyed girl of the orphanage strolled past smiling and talking to each other and seemingly obliviously of the other people. A bare foot beggar boy about Alfie’s size and dressed in tattered, dirty clothes was accosting the passersby for pennies. Patrick saw only one man dig into a pocket for a coin and hand it to the boy.

  Gradually Patrick relaxed for he saw nobody that appeared to be searching for him. Weariness over came him and he slept stretched out on his back on the floor.

  He awoke with flies buzzing in his ears and hovering near his eyes. He slapped them away and hastily looked out the window to check the street. Everything was as before except fewer people were on the street, and the beggar boy was gone. Throughout the remainder of the day nobody gave the appearance of looking for Patrick to force him to return to slave at the mill. Maybe he didn’t have value, and this time it was to his benefit. For the first time in his life, Patrick smiled at the irony of a though
t.

  In the night’s darkness, Patrick came down from the attic of the house and onto the deserted street lit only by the frail light from the thin yellow arc of a moon. The shadow filled night felt full of danger for never before had he been out on the street after sundown. He batted at a droning mosquito and warily checked all around him. The street was empty except for the shadowy figure of one person half a block distant and moving away from him. A dog slunk past. It gave him a sideways look and a low growl. Patrick kept an eye on the beast until it was well beyond him and could do him no harm. The town with its night was strange to him but he must not be afraid. Hadn’t Charley lived on the street for three years and survived by fighting. Patrick could do the same, for he was a Scanlan.

  His stomach growled with the bite of hunger. However water was his first priority for he had had none for a full day. He moved along the street and checking the dark yards of the homes for a well.

  A block farther along, Patrick made out the waist high curbing of a well in a side yard of a small house. He halted at the gate while his eyes looked for movement and his ears searched for sound, anything that would tell him there was danger within the fenced area.

  Deciding the yard was empty he lifted the metal loop holding the gate closed and cautiously stole through and onward past laundry hung on a line to dry. A wooden bucket with a rope fastened to the bail sat on the well curb. Making as little noise as possible, he lowered the bucket into the well and drew it up full, with the water dripping from the vessel and tinkling as it fell back into the well. He lifted the bucket rim to his moth and with the wet wood pressing against his lower lip, drank of the cold, sweet water. He paused to take a breath and then drank again, the coolness of the water a pleasant weight in his stomach.