By Ken Drenten

From 1825 to 1850, the National Road was the primary route immigrants and east coast settlers used in their western migration. Small towns sprang up along the pike. At the time, the National Road was considered an engineering marvel that featured stone arched bridges and culverts that crossed Ohio’s countryside. Commerce thrived as livestock as well as wagons, coaches, carriages, and horseback riders moved across the state. (Touring Ohio)

CHAPTER FOUR: A Nasty Reminder

Tritt had been uncomfortable about discussing future plans in public for good reason. There were many unsavory ears about in these roughly-hewn pike towns, and you didn’t know who might be passing through looking for some unwholesome opportunity. Especially if it involved gold, no matter how imaginary it might be.

He had finished his second whiskey and was just starting to feel relaxed when he smelled sour breath in his face and felt hard metal pressing against his ribs.

“Mister,” the newcomer breathed. “I think we have some business to discuss.”

“What business?” Tritt said, startled momentarily but not really surprised.

“Outside.” Tritt looked over and saw a pockmarked face, scraggly beard and bloodshot eyes from which the sour whiskey-and-tobacco breath had emanated.

“Do I know you?” Tritt cocked an eye at the bartender, who gave both men a look.

“Sure,” the pockmarked man said, with a grin that revealed more teeth missing than present. “You’ll remember some friends of mine.”

The bartender started to reach under the bar for something hidden under there, but the man caught the movement and jerked a pistol into sight.

“Uh-uh,” he said. “Don’t reach for that —“

His comment was interrupted by a flash of movement from Tritt, who pinioned the man’s arm holding the gun behind him, knocked it violently out of his hand, and smashed his face into the wooden bar. The bartender calmly raised a truncheon.

“Should I let him have it?”

“No, just leave him be, but thanks anyway,” Tritt said. “Now, feller, how about statin’ your business in a more friendly manner?”

“You go to hell!” the man spat blood from his broken mouth.

The sheriff walked through the doors of the saloon just then, raising his eyebrows when he saw Tritt with his companion.

“Mr. Tritt, we meet again, and I see that trouble has followed you,” he said. “What’s news of the day?”

“This gentleman stuck that horse pistol lyin’ on the floor in my ribs and asked me to step outside,” Tritt said. “I was just givin’ him some better ideas.”

“Uh huh,” said the sheriff, walking over and picking up the pistol. “That so?” he asked the bartender, who nodded grimly.

“Well, I don’t allow gunplay in our taverns, or in my town. Come along,” he told the man, jerking him none too gently out the door. Another man, shorter than the pockmarked fellow, followed them out the door and walked quickly away in the other direction.

Tritt shook his head and wondered what else would come down the pike. “Down the pike,” of course, referred to The Pike, the National Pike, or the National Road, as it was variously known.

Tritt found himself a cheap room at the drover’s house across the street. It was also the room of about eight or 10 other dusty travelers, all of whom squeezed into spaces on the rough plank floor. He had been younger and stronger when he helped build the Road, he thought, as he viewed himself in a dusty mirror above a grimy washbasin in the communal room. He massaged his jaw with its three-day growth of beard and decided against shaving again. Maybe he’d let it grow out, he thought.

His reflection in the wavy mirror showed that he was plain but handsome in some respects, if one overlooked the jagged scar that cut through his left eyebrow and the way his nose was slightly off-center due to a run-in with a man who had fought like a bull moose. His brown hair, with only a few stray gray hairs, was also getting longish, over the ears and curling slightly in the back.

He shrugged and rinsed his face with water, deciding against using the grungy gray flour mill sack that hung on a rusty nail next to the basin. With that, he went out the back to the privy and completed his pre-bedtime rituals, and then found a narrow open spot on the floor next to two teamsters, laid an old horse blanket on the floor, and fell heavily asleep.

The next morning, he awoke before the sunrise, pulled his hat from off his face, stretched painfully, checked the belongings he had slept next to – his rifle and his saddlebag, which contained his pistols, powder, bullets, and knife – and found everything there. He felt someone’s eyes upon him from among the slumbering and snoring bodies on the floor and slowly turned around on his elbow. He gave the eyes a sharp, quizzical look in the half-dark room, and the man’s eyes squinted shut.

Then his face crinkled into a grin. “Mac,” he whispered hoarsely. “Mac, you old devil. It’s me, Tritt.”

The bearded figure in the shadows moved on the floor and slowly stretched to its full five-foot seven inches tall, not counting the tangled mop of thinning, mostly gray hair on his head. The man carefully stepped over other sleeping forms and came closer.

“May the saints be blessed,” he breathed with a full lungful of the scent of last night’s Irish whiskey. “It is you, Tritt!”

The pair climbed out of the room full of sleeping men and into the tavern’s main room.

“What are you doin’ here, Tritt, my boy?” asked Mac.

“Same as you, I guess,” Tritt said. “Takin’ things a day at a time.”

“What happened to you since the last time I saw you? I remember you was –“

“Shh,” Tritt said. “Not here or now. I’ve already had one gun shoved into my ribs since I arrived in this town.”

Mac, short for Patrick MacDonald, had helped Tritt work on the National Road when it was being built in eastern Ohio. Mac, who had come as a much younger man from the Old Country, and Tritt felt responsible for at least 20 miles of the road all by themselves – digging the roadway by hand, crushing gravel with hammers and flattening it into the roadbed, mile after tedious mile.

The two rolled up their gear and made their way to the drover’s house main floor and sat at a table, ordering coffee, eggs and bacon.

In low tones, Tritt told him of his and Miss Susan Whitworth’s plans in general terms, without revealing that the purpose was to locate a cache of gold.

“Just say the word,” Mac said in a stage whisper. “If you’re in on the plan, I’m for it too.”

Tritt told him of his appointment with the sheriff that morning, and Mac demurred. “I don’t want to be within 100 feet of that jail,” Mac said. Then his eyes narrowed with thought.

“Tritt, if you need another reliable hand for this venture of yours, I know where one is,” Mac said, pointing with one horny thumb. “He’s in that jail.”

NEXT: The Partnership

Ken Drenten is creator and editor of Dusty-Tires.com, a travel blog for out-of-the-ordinary places in Ohio.

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