Fevre Dream Page 0,34

red silk tie, and patent leather boots. "Are you telling me to pass by?"

"No," Abner Marsh said hastily. York might have warned him, he thought, but their bargain gave Joshua the right to give queer orders. "You know how long we're goin' to be here?"

"I hear York has business ashore. If he don't get up till dark, that's all day."

"Damn. Our schedule-the passengers will be askin' no end of bothersome questions." Marsh frowned. "Well, I suppose there's no help for it. We might as well take on some more wood long as we're here. I'll go see to it."

Marsh struck up a bargain with the boy running the woodyard, a slender Negro in a thin cotton shirt. The boy wasn't much for dickering; Marsh got beech from him at cottonwood prices, and made him throw in some pine knots too. As the roustabouts and deckhands meandered over to load up, Marsh looked the colored boy square in the eye, smiled, and said, "You're new at this, ain't you?"

The boy nodded. "Yassuh, Cap'n." Marsh nodded, and was starting to turn back to the steamer, but the boy continued, "I jest been here a week, Cap'n. Ol' white man useta be here got hisself et up by wolves."

Marsh looked at the boy hard. "We're only a couple miles north of New Madrid, ain't we, boy?"

"Thass right, Cap'n."

When Abner Marsh returned to the Fevre Dream, he was feeling very agitated. Damn Joshua York, he thought. What was the man up to, and why did they have to waste a whole day at this fool woodyard? Marsh had a good mind to go storming up to York's cabin and give him a good talking to. He considered the idea briefly, then thought better of it. It was none of his business, Marsh reminded himself forcibly. He settled down to wait.

The hours passed slowly as the Fevre Dream lay dead in the water off the woodyard. A dozen other steamers slid by downriver, much to Abner Marsh's annoyance. Almost as many came struggling upstream. A brief knife fight between two deck passengers in which no one was injured provided the afternoon's excitement. Mostly the passengers and crew of the Fevre Dream lazed about on her decks, chairs tilted back in the sun, smoking or chewing or arguing politics, Jeffers and Albright played chess in the pilot house. Framm told wild stories in the grand saloon. Some of the ladies started talk of getting up a dance. And Abner Marsh grew more and more impatient.

At dark, Marsh was sitting up on the texas porch, drinking coffee and swatting mosquitoes, when he happened to glance toward shore in time to see Joshua York leave the steamer. Simon was with him. They stopped by the cabin and talked briefly to the woodyard boy, then vanished down a rutted mud road into the woods. "Well, I'll be," Marsh said, rising. "With not even a by-your-leave or a hello." He frowned. "No supper neither." That reminded him, though, and he went on down to the main cabin to eat.

The night went by; passengers and crew alike grew restless. Drinking was heavy around the bar. Some planter started up a game of brag, and others began to sing, and one stiff-necked young man got himself hit with a cane for calling for abolition.

Near midnight, Simon returned alone. Abner Marsh was in the saloon when Hairy Mike tapped him on the shoulder; Marsh had left orders to be summoned as soon as York came back. "Get your roustas aboard and tell Whitey to get our steam up," he snapped at the mate, "we got us some time to make up." Then he went to see York. Only York wasn't there.

"Joshua wants you to go on," Simon reported. "He will travel by land, and meet you in New Madrid. Wait for him." Heated questioning drew nothing more out of him; Simon only fixed Marsh with his small, cold eyes and repeated the message, that the Fevre Dream was to wait for York at New Madrid.

Once steam was up, it was a short, pleasant voyage. New Madrid was a bare few miles downriver from the woodyard where they had been tied up all day. Marsh gladly bid the desolate place farewell as they steamed off into the night. "Damn that Joshua," he muttered.

They lost almost two full days in New Madrid.

"He's dead," Jonathon Jeffers opined when they had been tied up for a day and a half. New Madrid had hotels, billiard parlors, churches,