the bar on the back of the door as he passed it, flung it back to January out of the hall's blackness. He didn't take the candle. January guessed Abishag Shaw was the kind of man who would have found the kitchen knifedrawer in the dark.
Shaw was back in minutes, accompanied by Constable Boechter, a swart little Bavarian still rubbing sleep from his eyes. January had toweled dry his hair and face-not that it would make a particle of difference in ten minutes -and had set the slungshot and one of the two knives on top of the neat, shoulder-high arrangement of packingcases that occupied the whole of the room's riverward wall. The cases held an assortment of tidily folded calico shirts, another pair of clean but sorry trousers, and a dozen or more books. The tops of them were strewn with weapons-pistols, knives, brass powder-flasks and sacks of balls; a braided leather sap, an iron knuckle-duster. A six-and-a-half-foot-long rifle with a dozen crosses cut neatly in its stock hung on pegs above the bed. When Shaw and Boechter returned to the room Shaw began gathering these weapons and distributing them about his angular personhe'd acquired another plug of tobacco from somewhere as well-and January felt a flash of anger, that by the law of the state he could only follow this man like an unarmed valet.
"LaBranche went for reinforcements," the Kaintuck remarked as he checked the pistols' loads. "We been watchin' Roarke some little time, over one thing and an other. Not havin' a fancy to break my neck or drown'd, I'd say we got no choice but to follow up the shell road on foot. With luck we'll catch 'em 'fore they make the lakeGod knows, in rain like this they won't be makin' much time. You got any idea how many are in it, Maestro?"
January shook his head. "Five, maybe ten."
"We'll catch 'em, then." Shaw spat on the floor. The whole place was stained and sticky with old expectorations, the smell of the tobacco a faint, sweet queasiness in the heat. "Even haulin' on the canal they won't be making but a few rods an hour, an' when they hit the Bayou it'll get worse. Roarke'll never make it across the lake in this weather, but he's got a place up along the shore just over the border into Jefferson Parish. If so be he reaches it, we're in for some trouble."
It wasn't likely, after all this time, that they'd be there, January thought, as he strode through the darkness along Canal Street, head down in the sheeting rain. Not Cora. Rose?
His heart beat hard and heavy. She'd been missing only three days. Three days since she'd walked away from the Cabildo into the gathering dusk, with nowhere to go and no one to know if she vanished.
No one except H?lier Lapatie.
How long did they keep them before shipping them out?
They skirted the shacks and slums that lay between Rampart Street and Basin, passed the dark trees of Congo Square, silent in the rain. The smell of the burying grounds hung thick on the gluey night, and January wondered if the dark form he saw under those trees was Bronze John himself, or just one of the dead-cart men taking refuge from the storm. His clothes stuck to his body in the wet, and the exertions of the night whispered to him from exhausted muscles; but he moved on, following Shaw's scraggy pale form and followed in turn by Boechter-hustling hard to keep up with the two taller men-fueled by the fury in his heart.
Under the shallow embankment of mud and tree roots, the canal rattled with the rain, a hollow roaring, like tons of deer-shot being emptied into the sea. What scattered lights there were-here and there lanterns in sheds and bordellos-gave place to the shapeless dark of the city hastures, then the thunder of rain in the trees of the night browned swamps. Lightning flashed far off over the lake now and then, and showed up the fidgeting trees, the desolation that the French called the "desert." After each purile glare the dark was like blindness, through which the shell road shone like a bone, and the sound of water running off the back of Shaw's hat-brim was a constant, a localized spatter, in a world of deluge.
After almost half an hour they reached the Bayou, turned right along it and crossed over Judge Martin's stone bridge. The road ran a little wider along the