FSF, October-November 2009 Read online

  Wrath-of-God Urquhart had flogged literacy into his daughters to make them able to read Holy Writ and copy out its precepts. Well, this was how Justice used her skill—one that must have seemed almost magical to an ignoramus like Robert Tole. And it gave her another hold over her dangerous lover. Besides being his bedmate and accomplice, she was also his scribe who, he thought, would make him famous in his own time and a byword to later generations.

  * * * *

  In one of his raids Tole captured half a dozen slaves. One day he took them to a high bluff overlooking the river and ordered them to cut timber and split it into rough boards, then excavate a tunnel in the loess and use the wood to shore up the sides and roof. The floor was simply hard earth, pounded down by many bare feet coming and going, and the tunnel at first nothing but a crude warehouse for goods he'd stolen but hadn't yet disposed of. In the woods nearby he penned captive animals, until he could sell them to passing boatmen or unscrupulous locals.

  Then, at Justice's bidding, he began turning the Cavern into a home. A slave who was a skilled carpenter built and framed and installed a door to make it livable in winter, then laid a wooden floor and fashioned a few pieces of rough furniture. Justice brought in carpets and comfortable bedding. What happened to the slaves when the Cavern was finished, nobody knew—one by one, Tole led them away, and they were not seen again. The single exception was a boy called Jimson, whom the outlaws kept to serve as what they called their “House Nigger.” He swept and scrubbed and polished and every day took his forty licks, for Justice like her Papa was an enthusiastic flogger.

  From Jimson's testimony we know that by 1830 or thereabouts the Cavern had become an underground residence, rudely comfortable, the wooden floors scattered with rugs, smooth clapboards covering the rough walls, storerooms off the main tunnel where the robbers kept foodstuffs and items for sale, a curtained alcove with a four-poster bed where the master and mistress slept, and a fireplace and clay chimney at the rear that gave warmth and light and also helped to suck in fresh air and keep the Cavern from becoming stuffy. Brass whale-oil lamps hung from the ceiling, their light screened from boats on the river by thickets of yaupon and wild holly.

  Lounging outside were six or seven big, ill-natured dogs that earned their keep by acting as guards and an early-warning system. Jimson made friends with the dogs by stealing them extra food, and didn't fear them. But he desperately feared his owners, and he had no doubt which was worse: “Master Robert, he would just as soon kill you as look at you. But Mistress Justice, she would rather kill you than look at you."

  He feared not only her cruelty but her intelligence. She could stare fixedly at him and see what he was thinking; she could read and write; and she had a way with numbers the slave boy thought unnatural in a woman. Wrath-of-God had forced her to learn ciphering as an incentive to thrift, and she'd taken to it like the proverbial duck to water. But for Jimson (in this respect a typical male of his time) to see her keeping a big ledger—entering items they'd stolen and the value and adding up columns of figures in her head—made him wonder if the Devil were not her instructor. Or even her true begetter. Maybe, he thought, Wrath-of-God had only been Old Nick's cuckold, as the preacher himself seemed to think when he called her a “dotter of Satan."

  With thoughts like this buzzing in his head, nobody was more surprised than Jimson when she began to confide in him. The reason was a new resident of the Cavern, one that scared both of them. Rats and mice had gotten into the storerooms, and one day a corn snake invited itself in from the woods to pursue the rodents. Justice wanted to kill it, but Tole said no, it wasn't poisonous and would do a better job than any cat. He named it Shadow (pronounced Shadder) because it moved so silently, and let it do what came naturally.

  Shadder was first-rate at pest control, pursuing the rodents down the holes they'd gnawed through and behind the walls, wrapping them in its coils and suffocating them, then swallowing them head-first until the last half-inch of naked tail disappeared from view. The mice went early on, and the snake grew and cast its skin. The rats followed, and Shadder left more and more dry papery skins about the Cavern, like ghostly memorials of itself. Quickly it reached the normal limit of its kind—about five feet—but then a puppy disappeared, and another, and Shadder began to expand in length and girth in a manner that seemed to defy nature.

  Was it really a corn snake, or had a python somehow gotten loose on the Mississippi frontier? Jimson said that Shadder looked “like a quilted Bolster,” a phrase suggesting the elegant attire in which pythons go about their business. Well, New Orleans traded with the world, and ships sometimes brought back surprising stowaways. Small animal shows and circuses wandered up and down the river, stopping off in towns along the way to fleece the locals, and strange snakes had always been a draw for the gaping public. So the possibility that Shadder was an exotic import that had escaped its captors can't be rejected out of hand.

  Whatever the truth, it grew and grew, and the bigger it got the more it fascinated Robert Tole. The man liked dangerous pets, and besides, he'd finally found something Justice feared and he didn't. On off-nights, when he wasn't murdering anybody, he took to draping Shadder around his neck and shuffling clumsily through the Cavern like a dancing bear, swilling corn whiskey from a jug and roaring out a coarse brothel song—

  * * * *

  Shagged and shagged until I stove her!

  Rig-a-jig-jig, rig-a-jig-jig, rig-a-jig-jig, très bon!

  * * * *

  (Pronounced tray bone.) The carpenter slave had made Tole an outsized chair, a throne for this king of the wild country, and when he was tired of solo dancing he'd collapse on it, hefting his demijohn with one hand and with the other caressing Shadder, another cold-blooded predator with which he felt a kinship.

  Speaking of cold blood, Shadder liked to sleep next to a human for warmth, and since Justice absolutely excluded it from her bed, that left the slave boy to serve as its warming-pan on winter nights. The rustling of his corn-shuck mattress would wake him and he'd find a cool and scaly bedmate beside him—one he was too frightened to disturb, especially after it grew to a length above nine feet, and a girth thicker than a stove pipe. Justice sympathized, quoting him Genesis 3:14-15 from memory and adding darkly that this time “'tis Adam and not Eve who heeds the Sarpent."

  From that small beginning—a shared fear—a surprising intimacy grew up between mistress and slave. Tole was no conversationalist, tending to alternate grim silence with drunken raving, and perhaps Justice merely needed someone to chat with. In any case, she got in the habit of talking to Jimson, not only about their mutual loathing of Shadder, but about other things as well. She told him tales of her childhood, and once mentioned that she and Tole had accumulated “a Treasure.” Getting it hadn't been easy, she said, for few of their victims could be called rich. “They are but poor Buckra,” she sneered, meaning buckwheat, the least edible of grains.

  Yet even people of modest means owned rings and other trinkets, and all carried some gold and silver coins, the only money that was accepted everywhere. The bandits kept the coins and the few good gems that came their way, and sold the trinkets to honest householders of Bonaparte “who would not spit on us in Daylight, but welcome us warmly after Dark, knowing we cannot come into the open Market, and so must sell cheap the Baubles we risque our Lives for."

  From time to time either Tole or Justice would take a bag of gold and silver, ride away on a captured mule, and return empty-handed. Jimson deduced that they had a hiding place, a sort of private bank, and in fact Justice occasionally spoke of “making a Deposite.” She told Jimson that in time she and her lover would retrieve the treasure and vanish, south to Cuba or west to Texas, there to live out their lives in luxury “as a Lady and Gentleman ought to, with a fine House and Horses and many Servants to do our Bidding."

  This was dangerous knowledge, as Jimson recognized. No one except Tole and Justice knew how much the treasure amounted to, or where it was kept, and Jimson, being
illiterate, could not read her ledger even when he was alone in the Cavern. Yet he believed that merely knowing of the treasure's existence would ultimately get him killed. Between fear of his owners and fear of the snake, his life was almost unbearable, and yet he could not run away because Tole would come after him with the dogs, which knew his scent.

  His chance to escape came suddenly in 1834. One spring morning, a tremendous bang from the direction of the river brought Tole running to the edge of the bluff. Jimson joined him, and together they watched the steamboat Cincinnati, disabled by an exploding boiler, drift grandly into a slough and stick fast on a sandbar. While the passengers sunned themselves and the crew worked to repair the damage, Justice mounted a mule and set off at a gallop to summon their gang. At sundown the brigands attacked, and general slaughter and looting followed. When Tole forced the captain to open his safe, he found that the boat was carrying Treasury gold in the sum of six thousand, four hundred and thirty-two dollars—in value closer to three hundred thousand today—to pay the soldiers in the New Orleans garrison.

  This was a coup beyond the bandits’ wildest dreams. Tole and Justice resolved to keep every penny for themselves. Treacherously they shot down their hirelings, then set the Cincinnati afire. Back in the Cavern, Tole roared out his usual song and swilled whiskey and strutted up and down with Shadder draped around his shoulders like a living garment. But the practical Justice ordered Jimson to begin packing clothes in some small trunks they'd stolen from travelers. Then, taking the strongbox with the government gold, she set out on her mule to make a final “Deposite."

  Jimson concluded that his masters—after a last “fire sale” of goods taken from the Cincinnati —now intended to gather up their treasure and flee. And he felt sure that their final act before going would be to cut his throat, for, as Tole liked to say, “The Dead do'n't bite.” When the drunken bandit passed out, the slave boy threw some food to the dogs to keep them occupied and fled into the woods, with only the vaguest idea of what direction he should take to reach Bonaparte, or what would happen to him if and when he got there.

  Next day, news of the Cincinnati's destruction spread apace and local people turned violently against the bandits. None doubted that President Jackson would send troops to avenge the theft of the Army's gold. But news of the affair would take weeks to reach Washington, and the troops would take more weeks to reach Bonaparte. So the locals resolved to take matters into their own hands—some because they were honestly outraged by the massacre, others because they'd been receivers of stolen goods and feared Old Hickory's wrath if he found out. Whatever their motives, everybody agreed that Tole and Justice needed to hang, and hang quick.

  Men armed themselves, and Sheriff Micah Jones of Burr County formed a posse. By the time his force was ready to move, he knew exactly where to look for the bandits, for Jimson, after struggling through dense tangles of woodland and swamp, had staggered into town, hungry, exhausted, and covered with mosquito bites. He began telling his story, and it's from his testimony, taken down by the local schoolmaster and later bound and sent to the archives in Washington, that we know so many details about the bandits and about life in the Cavern.

  Jimson doubted they would ever be caught. “Right now,” he said, “they most likely be taking their Treasure away to a far Countrey, where they can live like Kings and Queens."

  "They are going nowhere,” the sheriff assured him, “save to a Ball where they will dance on Air, to the Tune of the Dead March."

  Despite his fear of his former masters, Jimson bravely agreed to lead the posse back to the Cavern—a service for which the state legislature would later liberate him through an Act of Manumission sponsored by Sheriff Jones, and endorsed by the free citizens of Bonaparte, white and black.

  With the sheriff and Jimson in the lead, the posse struggled through thorns and thickets to the Cavern, and found it devoid of life. But not of death. Robert Tole sat slumped in his big chair, his face blue, his eyes protruding like hard-boiled eggs. The outlaw king had draped Shadder around his neck once too often, and the coil of rope brought by the sheriff had been rendered superfluous. The corpse's head was covered by a peculiar glaze, like the track of a huge snail plastering down the hair, and a few broken recurved teeth were embedded in the scalp. Jones concluded that Shadder had tried to ingest its former master, only to be defeated by the width of his shoulders.

  The fate of Justice was worse. The huge snake had left a trail leading down the bluff to the river, and there the posse discovered a thick and ill-smelling pile of dung. Embedded in it was one of Justice's tiny shoes, much charred by the fearsome acids of Shadder's stomach. After being suffocated in its coils, the petite villainess had gone head-first down the throat of the only thing in the world she feared.

  * * * *

  Sheriff Jones took possession of her lap-desk and the papers inside. The ledger was all very businesslike, listing the items taken on each raid and the prices they'd been sold for. A grand total entered just before the looting of the Cincinnati showed the value of the thieves’ treasure to be “in Sum, about 81 Thousands of $.” She'd never lived to enter the value of the loot from the Cincinnati, for Shadder had been waiting when she returned to the Cavern.

  Adding in the federal gold and whatever the bandits got by robbing the steamboat's passengers, it appears quite possible that our businesslike villains through years of robbery and murder had amassed almost ninety thousand dollars in gold and silver and gems. A huge sum at that time, when many a laborer fed and clothed and sheltered himself and his family—yes, and managed to get drunk every night on bad whiskey, too—on wages of a dollar a day. Today, of course, it would be worth much more, since the numismatic rather than the face value of the coins would have to be considered. Millions, probably—it's hard to guess how many.

  Besides the ledger, the desk contained writing paper and a letter already sealed and addressed to Justice's sister, Chastity, in New Orleans “at the House of Mme Lacaze, near the Ramparts.” It read:

  * * * *

  Dearest Sister, Presarve well these verses from Holy Scripture, for our Lives are perilous, and if aught sh'd befall Rob't and me, they will guide you by one, by two, and by three to those Gleanings, which we have gather'd with such Toil, thro’ a thousand Perils.

  —

  Proverbs, 20:15; Matthew, 7:7.

  —

  NUMBERS, 6:8

  DEUTERONOMY, 5:7

  II CHRONICLES, 7:15

  JOSHUA, 3:12

  MATTHEW, 4:9

  CORINTHIANS, 1:21

  TITUS, 2:9

  The Bible was favorite reading in those days, and we can be sure that when the posse returned to Bonaparte the testaments were pawed in a kind of frenzy, everyone looking for a clue to the bandits’ Gleanings.

  The first citations were encouraging, for the verse in Proverbs begins, “There is gold and abundance of costly stones,” while the verse in Matthew promises, “Seek and ye shall find.” From that point on, however, the way of the treasure hunters became as tangled as the path to the Cavern. The subsequent books were listed in correct order, but were scattered across the Old and New Testaments in a seemingly pointless way. II Chronicles was specified, but I or II Numbers was not, leaving in doubt which was meant. The texts seemed to have nothing to do with the treasure, or with each other. And yet if some sort of code was involved, it ought to be a simple one, devised by two farm girls and based on the only book they'd ever read.

  Then Sheriff Jones had an idea. The steamboat Girl of the Golden West was docked at Natchez, bound for New Orleans, and Jones persuaded the captain to carry a warrant to the authorities there, charging Chastity as an accessory to murder and river piracy. Once she was in his hands, Jones felt sure he could persuade her, one way or another, to explain the mysterious document left by Justice. But here he encountered the only absolutely immovable obstacle in the world. New Orleans's Criminal Sheriff reported that Chastity, while pursuing her vocation, had been throttled by a custo
mer whose gold watch she'd attempted to steal when she thought he was asleep.

  At Bonaparte, hit-or-miss became the rule for the treasure hunters. For a while, giant moles seemed to have attacked the town, as busy fools dug here, there, and everywhere, guided by dowsing rods or dreams or the babblings of the local witches, all of whom turned out to be wrong. The old Urquhart farm was the only place where the sisters had definitely been known to live together, but even finding it turned out to be a baffling problem. It had never been formally surveyed, so there was no plat to work from. The burned-down ruins of the house had long since vanished, and the fields had either been swallowed up by dense second-growth woodland, or occupied by squatters, or had sloughed into the Mississippi, which then as ever was hard at work undermining its banks. Not a single identifiable trace remained of the farm where Justice and Chastity had spent their unhappy childhoods, having virtue beaten into them and consequently learning to hate it.

  In time Treasury agents arrived, took depositions, and departed, carrying the documents from the lap-desk and the transcript of Jimson's testimony with them. Meanwhile troops sent by Old Hickory scoured the Trace, capturing and hanging a score of the scoundrels who infested it, and sending the others in panicked flight across the river into the Western Territories.

  As a result, it became a far safer road, and the whole region profited. Within a few decades Bonaparte grew from a hamlet into a thriving town with a courthouse, a jail, a barber shop, a billiard hall, four saloons, two brothels, and a Presbyterian church. By the time of the Civil War (which hardly touched it, for all the action was either downriver at New Orleans or upriver at Vicksburg), comfortable houses covered land that might once have belonged to Wrath-of-God's hardscrabble farm. The treasure left by Tole and Justice was never found, and its legend remains today one of the choice mysteries of the Mid-Mississippi Valley, and especially of Bonaparte, where it may—or may not—still lie hidden.