The blood drained from his chest, and though he knew he should remain as frozen and quiet as a stump, he understood that an animal’s nose couldn’t be fooled. Against his will he rose and his left hand floated up in defense just as a dark fury of indeterminate size struck it like a hungry fish, pain streaking up his arm at once. His hand was crushed and shredded by a huge invisible animal and he drew his pistol and pumped one detonation toward the dark pull, guessing at what had hold of him since he could see only phantom movement in the crashing reeds. The growling power on his hand turned him loose, and he tried to lurch away and find his stride but was seized in the back of the neck by a set of steel-trap fangs that shook him like a rabbit, trying to snap his brain stem. He raised the pistol again and fired once over his shoulder and then something metal banged his skull and a shower of sparks rained down in his eyes. A gruff cry that might have been for the dog’s benefit rose behind him. Ted was down on his knees when he felt a second blow and then the crush of wet, sulphurous swamp grass against his cheek.

MRS. BENTON was in the wheelhouse when the Ambassador drifted up against the foot of the bluff in Vicksburg, and she laid the boat against the pilings as gently as she’d once put her baby in a crib. Down in the boiler room, August cleaned his fires. Getting off duty, he washed up, combed his brassy hair, and hiked the steep redbrick street to check the train schedule at the Y &MV station. The agent told him that passengers coming up from St. Frank would arrive in two hours on the eleven o’clock train from Harriston. The boy went out on the platform and sat on a bench under the overhang, just out of the sunshine, looking down the track. A switch engine chuffed by, pulling two flats of lumber, and he watched it hiss and smoke off toward the upriver end of town. Half an hour later a passenger train of three wooden coaches creaked up to the station, thirty or so people getting off. One portly man in a straw boater kissed his wife and two daughters who had come to the station to meet him. August watched their shiny Ford chatter up the hill. His father had told him that they’d buy a car as soon as they finished up the season and went back to Cincinnati, that they’d have a better place for the winter, a flat with hot water and more than two rooms, a ground-floor place that would support a substantial piano and have room for them to play music and sing. He began to pass the time going over arrangements in his head, fox-trots he’d picked up on the way downriver. When he got stuck figuring which way to go with a note, he pictured his father’s fingers on the keyboard, rolling up, skipping down, showing the way to the melody. Those same fingers had stung his legs as a child, pulled back at his thick hair when he disobeyed. His father was pretty much all business, and his business was music. So no matter what, they were the same in that.

At ten he heard Mrs. Benton pull the whistle ring for the Moose lodge trip as he was meditating on “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” the way the white band played the melody, then how the colored orchestra played around the melody, going in and out of it, and he came to the revelation that there were more notes around a song than in it. He closed his eyes and began to hum and pat his feet on the cindery brickwork.

At 10:58, August lifted his chin toward the whistle of a passenger train, three blended notes rising toward A-sharp, D, and F-sharp. A well-maintained ten-wheeler pulled a train of six coaches into the station, and two conductors lowered step stools to the apron the moment the wheels stopped turning, getting off in their sharp black uniforms and pulling bright watches from their vests. August waited at the first coach, watching down the line toward the third in case his father came out of that vestibule. After every passenger had left the train, he approached the head-end conductor.

“My father was supposed to be on this train, but he didn’t get off.”

The conductor pulled his watch again and looked toward the engine. “Could be he’s asleep in his seat. I got to do a walk-through anyways.” He went up into the first coach and five minutes later August saw him come out of the last car, wave, and then shake his head. The agent had told him this was the only train from St. Frank today, but August was not yet at the age of worry, and what would happen tomorrow was for his mother to fret about. He left the station and walked through town looking in shop windows and wondering what it would be like to have any money at all.

THE MOOSE lodge trip was back at twelve-thirty, and he wanted to find his mother before he ate and went to sleep. The crew was racing to clean up the spilled root beer, popcorn, hot-dog chili, puke, tobacco spit, and stepped-out ready-mades. His mother was in the kitchen, helping the cooks make sandwiches for the two o’clock general excursion. Her hair was half down, her apron smudged with ketchup. He could smell the morning’s sweat on her.

When she noticed him at her elbow, alone, she grabbed his arm hard and pushed him through the swinging door into the restaurant. “Where’s your father?”

“I met the one train he’d be on and he wasn’t on it.”

She dug a fingernail into his biceps. “You must’ve missed him.”

“Ow.” He pulled back. “That train was empty when it left, Mom.”

She dropped her hands against her apron. “He must’ve run into trouble with those people.”

August couldn’t imagine what kind of trouble she was talking about. “Can I turn in?”

She looked at him as though seeing him for the first time. “Sure, sure. You go back on at eight?” She ran a finger through his hair and saw the cinders peppering his scalp. “How’s your back?”

“All right.” He pulled in a notch on his belt. “The second engineer said he’d find me a short-handled coal scoop that I can swing better.”

“I can tell it hurts.”

“It’s not nothing. The worst part is the sweating.”

She lowered her voice. “You have any more loose bowels from the heat?”

He rolled his eyes. “No. Engineer told me to drink a spoonful of coal ashes in a glass of water.”

Elsie seemed alarmed. “Did it work?”

“Dried me right up.” He gave her a smile. “Now quit worrying about everything.”

SOME OF THE MOOSE LODGE MEN had come on board already drunk and eager to fight with members of their fellow lodge from across the river. Sam shoved four men apart for twenty minutes and spent another half hour wrestling two of them into the brig. By the end of the run he was tired and his shoulder was sprung, but the captain told him to play for the two o’clock trip. He barely had time to sew his vest buttons back on before climbing the bandstand and catching the downbeat from the drummer. The first tune was “Japanese Sandman,” jacked up in tempo, and he felt he was an eighth beat behind everyone else, playing uphill into the alto sax and clarinet duel in the middle. Several young Vicksburg couples began dancing badly, tripping, kicking shins on their turns, and Sam hung on. The next tune was a waltz, and then he got on top of the following fox-trot and stayed there. As the dance deck heated up, sweat began to sting his eyes; then the boat pulled out and the breeze came through, fluttering the bleached tablecloths. Between tunes he watched the floor, looked at faces, tried to read minds, studied the men lurking against the white-enameled stanchions, hoping to see Ted, maybe a Skadlock, or just someone whose face showed inexplicable guilt or longing. He imagined that by now the little girl could be anywhere on the boat’s downbound route, because that was the one connection he understood, that someone saw her and had to have her, someone near the river’s fogs, within reach of the big boat’s whistle and the pull of the blasting calliope.