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staggering him briefly. When Julian opened his hands, Jeffers fell like a rag doll, his head twisted around grotesquely so it almost seemed it was on backwards.

Abner Marsh retreated hurriedly.

Julian touched his brow, as if gauging the effects of Marsh's blow. There was no blood, Marsh saw dismally. Strong as he was, he was no Hairy Mike Dunne, and hickory was not iron. Damon Julian kicked loose Jeffers' death-grip from the handle of the sword cane. Wincing, he drew the blood-slick blade awkwardly out of his own body. His shirt and trousers were damp and red, and stuck to him when he moved. He spun the blade off to one side, almost casually, and it whipped round and round like a top as it sailed off over the river, before vanishing into the dark moving water.

Julian staggered forward again, leaving bloody footsteps behind him on the deck. But he came.

Marsh retreated before him. There was no killing him, he thought in a blind sick panic; there is nothing to be done. Joshua and his dreams, Hairy Mike and his iron billet, Mister Jeffers and his sword, none of them could take the measure of this Damon Julian. Marsh scrambled down the short stairway to the hurricane deck, and began to run. Panting, he hurried aft, to the companionway leading down from the hurricane deck to the promenade, where he'd find people and safety. It was nearly dark, he saw. He took three thunderous steps downstairs, then gripped the handrail tightly and reeled, trying to check himself.

Sour Billy Tipton and four of them were climbing toward him.

Abner Marsh turned and ascended. Rush forward and ring the bell, he thought wildly, ring the bell for help... but Julian had come down from the texas deck now, and cut him off. For a moment Marsh stood, dead with despair. He had no escape, he was trapped between Julian and the others, unarmed except for his useless goddamned stick, and it didn't matter, nothing hurt them anyway, fighting was useless, he might as well give in. Julian wore a thin, cruel smile as he advanced. In his mind Marsh saw that pale face descending on his own, teeth bared, those eyes bright with fever and thirst, red and ancient and invincible. If he'd had tears Marsh might have wept. He found he could not move his legs from where they were rooted, and even his stick seemed far too heavy.

Then, far up the river, another side-wheeler came round a bend, and Abner Marsh would never have noticed, but the pilot did, and the steam whistle of the Fevre Dream called out to tell the other steamer that she'd take the larboard when they passed. The shrill wail of the great whistle stirred Marsh from his paralysis, and he looked up and saw the far-off lights of the descending boat and the fires belching from the tops of her tall chimneys, and the near-black sky that loomed above it, and the lightning dim in the distance lighting up the clouds from within, and the river, the river black and endless, the river that was his home and his trade and his friend and his worst enemy and fickle, brutal, loving consort to his ladies. It flowed on like it always flowed, and it didn't know nothing nor care nothing about Damon Julian and all his kind, they were nothing to it, they would be gone and forgotten and the old devil river would still be rolling and cutting new channels and drowning towns and crops and raising up others and crushing steamboats in its teeth so it could spit out splinters.

Abner Marsh moved to where the tops of the great paddleboxes loomed above the deck. Julian came following him. "Captain," he called, his voice twisted but still seductive. Marsh ignored it. He pulled himself up on top of the paddlebox with a strength born of urgency, a strength he didn't know he had. Beneath his feet the great side-wheel turned. He could feel it shaking through the wood, could hear the chunka-chunka. He moved aft, carefully, not wanting to fall in the wrong place, where the wheels would suck him under and smash him up. He looked down. The light was almost gone, and the water seemed black, but where the Fevre Dream had gone it was boiling and churning. The glow from the steamer's furnaces touched it with red, so it looked like boiling blood. Abner Marsh stared down at it and froze. More