The sun had risen before the crew of the ark finished their grim clearing of the decks and the skiff in which the outlaws had rowed out to attack the ark. There was no way of telling who had fired the shot which killed the notorious outlaw, on whose head a price of a thousand dollars had been fixed. Marion was in favor of burying him in the river with his two companions of the skiff, but Jimmy had the matter very much at heart.
“Just let me have his head,” pleaded that young savage. “If I can take his head to the fort I won’t ask them for the reward—honest, I won’t. But this Big Harp was just about the worst of the whole lot, and mebby if the others learn that he’s paid for his crimes they won’t be so venturesome. He was worse than the Indians.”
He spoke with so much emotion that Marion felt the force of his argument. If it became definitely proven that Big Harp had been delivered up to justice at the army post, it would make a great difference in the safety of the pioneers and rivermen. They—Big Harp and Little Harp, and John Mason—had been the leaders of a band of robbers, thirty or more in number, who for ten years were the terror of Ohio boatmen; they attacked “arks” and “keels” alike, and on several occasions had murdered the entire crew of the captured craft. Their actual headquarters had been Diamond Island, just below Henderson; but the caverns higher up the river made convenient lurking places, from which they could sally forth, or into which they could retreat secure from pursuit.
Jimmy watched the captain anxiously. In the bright light of sunrise, Jimmy’s paint and feathers failed grotesquely to conceal the white man. His head had been shorn, all but the scalp and forelock, which were put up in a piece of tin, with a bunch of turkey feathers, while the feathers of at least two turkeys hung to the hair of his scalp.
“You’re a sight,” said Moses, as he gazed on these uncouth adornments, while Marion was making up his mind.
“I’d ’a been more of a sight if this Big Harp had had his way with me,” answered Jimmy, whose eyes never left the young captain’s face. “He wanted to cut off my ears and eyelids because I wouldn’t tell him exactly when the ark would sail from Fish Creek. Only for Logan—the one I went away with from my cabin—he would have done it, too. Logan was a pretty good friend to me because I helped him to get away when he had a broken leg. He would have been caught and handed over to the authorities more than once if I hadn’t been along. He was pretty helpless. After he was killed by the Shawnees I lost my job, though, and as the robbers didn’t have any agricultural employment for me (they said that that was all I was fit for, because I wouldn’t turn pirate), they took my gun away from me and launched me in a canoe that happened to be hauled up in a creek where we camped. There was a dead Shawnee lying by it; and, before they let me go, Big Harp and that one-eyed fellow that you dumped out of the skiff just now, thought it would be fun to decorate me with his head-dress, so that I shouldn’t miss the clothes they took from me. Those outlaws actually lost a good hour fixing me up, and then put me into the canoe and shoved me off and told me I could go on and join my father at the Chickasaw Bluffs, and maybe he’d recognize me by the resemblance between us. They wouldn’t give me even a day’s rations. Big Harp said the ark would be along and that you’d take me in.”
Jimmy told these things stolidly, without laying any particular stress on them until he came to the way in which Big Harp and his gang had amused themselves by making him into a feathered object of derision before launching him on the river without food and with no more covering than the dead savage had worn. His voice trembled with rage when he told of that, and Moses, who was always the first to feel any strong emotion in those around him, and to respond to it, shut his fists passionately.
“I wish we could kill them over again,” Mose ejaculated. “We killed ’em too easy. They had ought to have hung.”
Jimmy looked at him. It was the first moment he had taken his somber eyes off of Marion since he had asked for the outlaw’s head.