was a charmer, he truly was. And so easy to talk to, and to look at. The more I looked into those eyes of his, the more tingly I felt. Why, he all but gave me goose bumps.
“Tell me about your travels,” I said. “Tell me about San Francisco.”
“With pleasure, Annabelle. I may call you Annabelle?”
“Please do.”
“And you’ll call me by my given name, if you please. James…never Jim.”
I laughed. “Will you play a song for me on your banjo, Mister James Never Jim Shock?”
He laughed, too. “That I will,” he said. “As many as you like.”
“Do you know ‘Little Brown Jug’?”
“One of my favorite tunes.” He caressed me with his eyes and I felt the goose bumps rise again. “I can see that we’re going to be good friends, Annabelle. Yes, indeed. Very good friends.”
T.J. Murdock
Supper was later than usual because of all the extra mouths to feed. After I finished eating, I donned my slicker and went outside to check on the ferry lashings and the cable. The driving rain had let up some, but the wind remained strong. I had to push my way through it, bent forward at the waist, as if it were something semisolid.
I thought Boone Nesbitt might follow me, but he didn’t. All through the meal I’d felt his eyes on me, dark and implacable in a poker face. He hadn’t said a word to me since the barn, and none to any of the others except for a brief response when someone addressed him directly. I had also remained silent. As had the other stranded travelers, except for the banjo-strumming peddler, Shock, who had kept up a running sales pitch for his various wares and told stories that Annabelle, if no one else, seemed to find entertaining. There was a lost quality to Caroline Devane, a strained tension in Joe Hoover and his companion that seemed more a product of private troubles than the pounding storm. But no one was as tautly wound as I, nor as troubled.
Nesbitt knew my real identity, there was little doubt of that from his questions and comments in the barn. A stranger from San Francisco by way of Sacramento, alone on horseback…come upon me so suddenly that I could scarcely think straight. Who was he? What was his game, with his sly talk and watchful eyes? Waiting for the storm to abate, likely, to make his intentions known to me. We both knew there was no escape while the storm raged, and none afterward because of Sophie and Annabelle.
How had he found me, after eight long years? My sketches in the Argonaut, The Overland Monthly, and other San Francisco publications? He had made a deliberate point of mentioning them and my distinctive writing style. I’d been a fool to submit my writings for publication, even under the Murdock name and in a city far from Chicago. But a writer such as I was and had been for the Chicago Sentinel is one who yearns not for fame or money, but to have his words, ideas, insights read by others. And the pittances I was paid augmented the pittance I earned as a ferrymaster, allowing us what few small luxuries we could afford.
I didn’t know what to do about Nesbitt. What could I do? Even if it weren’t for my family, I would not have run again. The flight from Chicago in 1887, the years of hardship since, were all of a fugitive’s life I could bear. If Nesbitt was bent on taking me back to face Patrick Bellright, there seemed little choice but to submit. If he was an assassin hired to finish me here, I would try to defend myself, but I would not take action against him first. I could not premeditate the destruction of a human life, even to save my own. It simply was not in me.
The ferry barge was secure, the cable whipped taut and singing in the wind but showing no indication that it might snap. Crucifixion Slough was a cauldron, frothing near to the tops of the embankments on both shores, inundating the cattails and blackberry shrubs that grew on this side. The levee road, as far as I could tell in the darkness, had not been breached close by, but if the storm’s fury continued long enough, there were bound to be breaks between here and River Bend and over on the Middle Island roads. In any case, it would be long hours through the night and perhaps