the unluckiest man ever to own a steamboat. They say you got some kind of curse on you, worse'n the curse on the Drennan Whyte. One of your steamers blew her boilers, they say, and killed everybody. Four got crushed up in an ice jam. One got burned after everybody on her died of yaller fever. And the last one, they say you wrecked her yourself, after you went crazy and beat your pilot with a club."
"Damn that man," Marsh swore,
"Now, I ask you, who the hell is goin' to ride with a cursed man like that? Or work for him either. Not me, I tell you that for sure. Not me."
The man he'd hired to replace Jonathon Jeffers begged Marsh more than once to take the Reynolds out of the New Orleans trade, and have her work the upper Mississippi or the Illinois, where she'd be better suited, or even the Missouri, which was rough and dangerous but enormously profitable if your steamboat didn't get smashed to splinters. Abner Marsh refused, and fired the man when he persisted. He figured there was no chance that he'd find the Fevre Dream on the northern rivers. Besides, during the last few months he'd been making secret stops by night at certain Louisiana woodyards and deserted islands in Mississippi and Arkansas, taking on runaway slaves and bringing them up north to the free states. Toby had put him in touch with a bunch called the underground railroad, who made all the arrangements. Abner Marsh had no use for the goddamned railroads and insisted on calling it the underground river, but it made him feel good to help, kind of like he was hurting Damon Julian somehow. At times he'd hunker down with the runaways on the main deck, and ask them about night folks and the Fevre Dream and such, figuring that maybe the blacks knew things that white folks didn't, but none of them ever told him anything useful.
For nearly three years, Abner Marsh continued his hunt. They were hard years. By 1860 Marsh was heavily in debt due to the losses incurred in running the Reynolds. He had been forced to close the offices he had maintained in St. Louis, New Orleans, and other river towns. Nightmares no longer troubled him as they had, but he grew more and more isolated with the passage of years. At times it seemed to Marsh as if the time he had spent with Joshua York on the Fevre Dream was the last real life he had known, that the months and years since were drifting past as if in a dream. At other times, he felt just the opposite, felt that this was real, the red ink in his ledger books, the deck of the Eli Reynolds under him, the smell of her steam, the stains on her new yellow carpet. The memories of Joshua, the splendor of the great steamboat they had built together, the cold terror that Julian had stirred in him, these things were the dream, Marsh thought, and no wonder they had vanished, no wonder that folks along the river thought him mad.
The events of the summer of 1857 became even more dreamlike as, one by one, those who had shared some of Marsh's experiences began to drift out of his life. Old Toby Lanyard had gone east a month after they had returned to St. Louis. Being returned to slavery once had been enough for him, now he wanted to get as far from the slave states as possible. Marsh got a brief letter from him early in 1858, saying that he'd gotten a job cooking in a Boston hotel. After that he never heard from Toby again. Dan Albright had found him self a berth on a spanking new New Orleans side-wheeler. In the summer of 1858, however, Albright and his boat had the misfortune to be in New Orleans during a virulent outbreak of yellow fever. It killed thousands, including Albright, and eventually led to the city improving its sanitation so it wasn't quite so much like an open sewer in summer. Captain Yoerger ran the Eli Reynolds for Marsh until after the season of 1859, when he retired to his farm in Wisconsin, where he died peacefully a year later. When Yoerger had gone, Marsh took over captaining the stern-wheeler himself, to save money. By then only a handful of familiar faces remained among the crew. Doc Turney had been killed and robbed in Natchez-under-the-hill