At the river Pendrake drove his buggy right onto the deck of a stern-wheel boat that was sitting there. His horse by the way was a big, patient gray animal; and you might figure how strong he was to pull his gigantic owner. That horse was a might leery of me, as I could tell from the curve of his nostrils: I reckon he could smell the Indian on me though I had washed at least four or five times all over in the months since leaving the tribes.

After a while they got that boat going, and it was interesting but I didn’t like it much because I remembered Old Lodge Skins would mention that if a Human Being, anyway, went over much water he would die. Of course I had been raised on the Ohio at Evansville, but that was long ago, and the Missouri to look at won’t build your confidence. It is always undermining its banks before your eyes, and I reckon that if enough years go by it will have worked its way out to Nevada and be irrigating them deserts.

I ain’t going to tell you where we was heading, except it was a fairly prominent town in western Missouri. The reason for my delicacy will be clearly apparent in the sequel, as they say. So we’ll just go on here from where we docked after a trip of some hours, and drove off the boat, and through the town to the better section of it, where Pendrake had himself a proper church and next door to it a two-story house of some substance, with a barn in back into which he run the buggy, and said to me the first words I can recall he uttered since leaving Leavenworth: “Do you know how to unhitch a wagon, boy?”

I had learned my lesson. “No, I don’t, sir,” says I. “Not a-tall.”

“Then you must figure out how to do so,” he rumbles, though not nearly as mean as he talked at Leavenworth, and I immediately got the idea that maybe his manner there was intended to offset the mincing ways of that chaplain, so I wouldn’t think all preachers was alike. I’ll tell you right now about Pendrake: he never seemed to know how to act natural except when eating; otherwise he appeared to be trying to live up to an obligation to someone or something else. I think if he’d of cut himself, he might bleed to death before working it out laboriously that the thing to do was put on a bandage.

Well, it wasn’t hard to study out how to unhitch that horse, and aside from tossing his head some, but doing that slow and heavy, the animal didn’t give me no trouble, and I got him in the stall. After that was done, though, I was in a quandary, on account of I still didn’t have no faith that Pendrake wouldn’t take a marvelous price for a bad guess. If I stayed in the stable and he expected me up at the house, there might be hell to pay. On the other hand, if I went to the house, maybe he’d rather I stayed in the barn. I decided for movement, as usual, and headed for the house, but instead of going into the back door which he had used, walked around to the front, thinking I’d avoid him for a time that way and also get the lay of the building in case I’d have to run for it.

I went up on the porch and through the front door, and into a hall where a hatrack stood fashioned of deer antlers, then stepped into a parlor which I expect wouldn’t look like much today but it was then a wondrous sight to me with the brass coal-oil lamps and tidies on the furniture to keep off hair-grease, for though Pendrake wasn’t exactly wealthy, he sure wasn’t seedy like my folks had been and wasn’t Army like that chaplain.

Then that great voice said behind me: “You’re in the parlor?” He wasn’t exactly outraged by it, just dumfounded.

“I didn’t break nothing,” says I.

I hadn’t turned till then. When I did, expecting to see his hulk directly behind me, he was actually farther away than I thought. With that voice of his, he could be a hundred yards distant and still sound on your neck.

But now, between him and me, was a woman with dark-blonde hair drawn across either side of her face and into a bun at the back. She had blue eyes and pale skin, though not the dead white of his, and wore a blue dress. I reckoned she was about twenty years of age while Pendrake was fifty, so believed her his daughter.

She was smiling at me and had teeth smaller than average over a full underlip. She kept looking at me but talked to Pendrake.

“I don’t think he’s ever seen a parlor before,” she said velvety soft. “Would you like to sit down, Jack? Right here,” pointing out a kind of bench covered in green plush. “That’s called a loveseat.”

Pendrake sort of growled deep in his windpipe, not in rage but rather a sort of stupor.

I said: “No thank you, ma’am.”

And then she asked if I wanted a glass of milk and a piece of cake.

There wasn’t nothing I wanted less than milk, for which if I’d ever had a taste I had long lost it, but thought I’d better play along with this girl if I was going to have a friend in that house, so followed on to the kitchen and by so doing got out of Pendrake’s way for a while at least, for he went to a room off the parlor where he wrote his sermons and sometimes spoke them aloud; you could hear him rumbling through the woodwork and the glassware would tinkle all through the place.

In the kitchen I met another individual who was friendly right off. She didn’t have no other choice, being colored. Though freed, she wasn’t acting cocky about it, I can tell you, for it was within the law in Missouri of that day to keep slaves. I guess once you’ve been one, you always figure you can be made into one again. She got on my nerves slightly, however, with her everlasting good humor, which I suspect was partly fake, and I’d have had more in common with her great-grandpa who carried a spear in Africa. This cook’s name was Lucy and she was married to a fellow who worked around the place outside, cutting grass and all, another freedman by the name of Lavender. They lived in a little cottage out beyond the stable, and I could sometimes hear them arguing out there in the middle of the night.

That white woman which I took for Pendrake’s daughter was actually his wife. She was older by five or six years than I had first thought, just as he was some younger. Still, there was quite a range between them and I already wondered that first afternoon what she saw in him. And I might as well say now I never found out, either. I reckon it was one of them marriages arranged by the parents, for her Pa had been a judge and such a fellow wouldn’t want a saloonkeeper for a son-in-law.

Mrs. P. now sat across the table while I drunk the milk, and impressed me by the interest she took in my early life, or seemed to. Here was the first soul who ever asked about my adventures, which surprised me in a refined white woman in the Missouri settlements, whereas that colored Lucy, though laughing incessantly and saying “Lordy,” couldn’t have cared less and I knew figured me for a mighty liar.

I saw I had a good thing in my stories, so didn’t exhaust them all at once. I also tried to mind the eating manners showed me by that chaplain’s wife, where the first time I set down to table I picked the meat off the plate with my hands. I knowed better now and cut that cake Mrs. Pendrake give me bit by bit and daintily inserted it into my mouth on the point of a knife.

When I was done, she said: “You don’t know how glad we are to have you with us, Jack. There aren’t any other young people in this house. Your coming has let the sun in.” I thought it was a pretty thing to say.

Next thing she did was take me shopping for some new clothes. She got her bonnet and parasol, and her and me walked into the commercial part of town, for it was not far and the day was fine weather in early October as I recall. We come across a number of people that Mrs. Pendrake knowed and they gawked at me and sometimes talked with her as to my identity. The women generally made a clucking noise and sort of simpered, though I drew a belligerent look from certain of them who were old maids, schoolteachers, librarians, and such, for I hadn’t got a proper haircut in five years and probably had a nasty expression in spite of my efforts to look decent.