Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel by Howard Frank Mosher

by way of reply, the Caliph reached out with his trunk and planted a big, wet kiss, full on Dolt's mouth. Then Morgan would have sworn that the elephant gave him a sidelong glance and winked.

    I N THE EARLY AFTERNOON they came to a place where the berm was covered with blossoming dandelions. Butter-yellowcowslips bloomed along marshy backwaters, and each little puddle pond had its own pair of mallards. Wild black cherry trees were blossoming white as new snow in the hedgerows. Ahead was a lock through which canal boats were floated up to the next level of the waterway. It occurred to Morgan that, with his great love of exotic travel books, roaming the land with an elephant and seeing such wonders as the canal and the president's private train would, under normal circumstances, be a splendid adventure. But he doubted, after all he had witnessed and participated in, that he would ever want to read a travel book, or perhaps any book, again.

    With a proprietary air Dolt told Morgan that there were eighty-three locks on the Great Western and that the canal was forty feet wide and four feet deep and stretched three hundred and sixty-three miles from the Hudson River to Buffalo over a rise in elevation of five hundred feet. Eighteen cut-stone aqueducts carried side streams across the canal. Numerous dams let water drain in during drought time. The other boats waiting at the lock, their names gilded on their bows in gold flake, were Canal Master, J. J. Belden, Tug Ridge, Watertown , and City of Buffalo , this last a floating gin mill captained, Dolt said, by the infamous anti-abolitionist dandiprat and raging sodomite Captain Higgenbotham Suggs. Suggs, strutting the deck of his ship, stood four and a half feet tall and fully as wide across, and wore a yellow-and-red-flowered waistcoat, a tall castor hat, a high stock collar, and whipcord breeches tucked into glossy morocco boots with scarlet tops. He guyed Dolt mercilessly, inquiring whether he was expecting a flood and gathering up beasts from afar two by two, or was he hauling gold specie that he needed such a monstrous tusker to pull his boat? Could the elephant count to five with its foot? Recite the Lord's Prayer? Why in the name of King Herod were its ears so small and its snout so short? Dolt stoodby the Caliph with his boots planted two feet apart and his prunella neck cloth fluttering in the spring breeze, and when Suggs's fountain of wit ran dry, which did not take long, Dolt lifted to his lips the horn used to warn passengers of low bridges and blared out a great scornful raspberry by way of reply.

    "And what of you, my pretty soldier?" Suggs called out to Morgan. "Come aboard the City of Buffalo and I'll give you the cook's tour, lad, abovedeck and below."

    Morgan was staring at the two reddish brown horses Suggs was using instead of mules to pull his barge. The two big bays looked familiar. Giving Suggs a hard look, he checked his musket and scattershot to be sure they were primed and loaded.

    While they waited their turn to lock up, Dolt confided to Morgan that His Whaleship was owned by the wealthy Utica abolitionist Gerrit Smith and was frequently used to carry a cargo of far more importance than the jaws of a dead whale. Currently he was en route to Buffalo with five Underground passengers disguised as crewmen. From there they would be conveyed by steamship across Lake Ontario to Canada. Again Morgan's cousin gave him a look full of meaning. The whale, he said, was merely for flash and dash. Dolton Kinneson an Underground conductor on the canal! Morgan never could have imagined it.

    At dusk Morgan hayed the elephant at a town named, elegantly, Mule Fart, then walked on along the towpath under a million wheeling stars, talking to Dolton, while a deckhand manned the tiller. Suggs's City of Buffalo , now crowded with gin-swilling revelers bound for annual Spring Rout in Utica, kept pace two or three hundred yards behind them. The reflections of its red and green