Soon Captain Stewart appeared at the top of the stairs holding a lantern and stared at the blackened roof. “Now who the hell started this?”

“Those two.” Charlie pointed at the men, who had gone down to the dark outside rail of the lower deck and were looking up at the smoke, still holding their pistols. A waiter came up and pointed out the man on the right as the first to draw and shoot.

The captain passed Sam his lantern and thundered down the steps, and one of the men stumbled backwards. He was dressed in a bibbed cowboy shirt frayed through at the neck. “Hey, now. Ain’t no reason to go crazy,” the man said. “Ah’ll buy you a new fuckin’ lantern.”

Even in the dark the captain’s face was terrible to see. He jerked both revolvers away and threw them over the rail, then grabbed the man who’d fired his gun. “Can you swim or are you too drunk?”

The little man was bucktoothed, stubble-faced, and roundheaded. “Ah kin swim faster’n this here garbage tub you the captain of.”

“All right, you undernourished squirrel, start stroking for land.” Captain Stewart grabbed his triple-stitch shirt with one hand and his crotch with the other and hurled him over the rail into the blackness next to Chicken Neck Island, the only sign of his landing a brief white flash as he broke water.

The captain turned to the customers coming back out on deck, now that the fire was out, and through the wayward tendrils of smoke, he screamed, “Who’s the next son of a bitch wants to swim back to the landing?”

The other man in the gunfight said out loud, “Old George was just a havin’ some fun.”

The captain took a deep breath, then grabbed the man’s overall straps and shook him and hollered in his face, “If your idea of fun is turning a three-hundred-foot pineboard boat into a flaming coffin of fifteen hundred people, then you’re a thirty-second-degree asshole and the dumbest donkey turd in Arkansas!”

The electric lights came back up and the man blinked, looked over the rail, and said, “Who’s gonna pay fer my pistol?”

THE BOAT CAME into the landing at midnight. Though he nursed a bruised forearm and bleeding shins from breaking up three fights late in the cruise, Sam still had to go down to the stage plank and hand back weaponry. Charlie Duggs, who’d had some experience as a medic in the war, spent twenty minutes sewing up a busboy who’d been gouged with a bottle, then came down to help return the last of the knives and blackjacks.

“How’s the boy that got cut?” Sam asked.

“I think he’ll do fine. Sure thing there wasn’t no infection alive in that whiskey bottle.”

“What about the old gal who lost her dress overboard?”

“She’s passed out on the Texas deck. The maids’ll drag her down directly. Nobody can find her beau. I swear we come back with several less than we went out with.”

Sam handed over a rusty revolver. “You’re tempted to laugh, but if you think about it, none of it’s funny.”

Charlie handed the large Bowie back to its grim owner. “The things you laugh at never are funny. That’s why you just got to laugh.”

“I’ll think about that.”

“If you figure it out, explain to me what I said.”

Chapter Seventeen

ALL NIGHT the crews dried the skylight roof with a wood-alcohol wash, then wiped, scraped, and repainted it. They turned on every light and washed soot, cinders, tobacco ash, spit, snot, chili, beer, moonshine, popcorn, and chicken salad off of everything, and either repaired the broken furniture or threw it overboard.

Sam got up for breakfast and sat with August in the restaurant for the morning potatoes and eggs.

The boy looked at Sam’s denim shirt and frowned. “You going somewhere?”

“Just want to check out something onshore. Where’s your mother?”

He rolled his eyes. “In bed with the headache. A woman she was waiting on last night didn’t like the food she brought and punched her. Knocked her down.”

“I didn’t hear about that.”

“You hear about the man chased the woman through the firing gallery?”

Sam grabbed a hot biscuit and pulled it apart. “Ah, no.”

“She picked up that hammer we use to bust apart the big coal pieces and laid him out. He was asleep in the coal pile till an hour or so ago. I’ve never seen such people.”

Sam slathered butter on the steaming biscuit. “Well, I’m about to meet some more of them.”

THE TOWN OF BUNG CITY had no automobiles for hire but still supported three liveries. Sam held the reins before a mellow, listing mare and resigned himself to another ride. The animal was long legged and he let her walk up the hill as he read Morris Hightower’s telegram again. He put it back in his pants pocket and surveyed the two blocks of gray storefronts faced with cupped pine boards bleeding nail rust. Behind these sat a line of whitewashed houses faded to the color of wood smoke. The street was full of animals, and his mare stepped on a chick, leaving behind a yellow hoofprint in the hot dust. At the edge of town he went into a swaybacked store to ask where Ferry Road was, and the proprietor took ten minutes to make sure Sam wasn’t a revenuer, bounty hunter, deputy, or Northerner before he answered.

He found the unmarked turn in the cottonwoods that was the start of Ferry Road and several miles later he saw a shiplap-siding farmhouse in the back of a field of green beans. The man at the store had told him that this was where Biff Smally lived. The thought occurred to him that he might have brought a pistol along. He sat the mare and looked for someone in the field. The place had good wire fences, he’d give him that. The roof was of painted iron and the porch had rails. He turned in at the gate and wished himself luck.

Before he could dismount at the front porch, a woman about thirty years old came out. She wore a sunbonnet and was smoking a pipe. “You come to bid on our beans, mister?”

“I was looking for Smally.” He saw twin girls around ten years old come out from behind her to stare at him.

“What for?”

He didn’t know how to explain and just said, “It’s about the new child.”

The woman let out a puff of smoke. She was not unpleasant looking, what he could see of her. She raised a rawboned hand over her eyes and peered to the west. “They’re off in the barn yonder, loadin’ stakes in the dray.” She stepped off the porch, the girls following like ducklings as she walked to the pump.

He touched the animal up and rode to the barn and got down. A man came out and took off his straw hat. “You come about the beans?”

“I ain’t after your beans, Mr. Smally. I’m trying to help some folks find their young child that was taken from them, and I heard one showed up here.”

Smally was a young man and fair skinned for a farmer. “Who told you I brung in a child?”

“A friend in Greenville. I was already in Bung City and decided to see about it.”

Smally threw a thumb over his shoulder. “Well, this here child wasn’t lost from nobody. He come off the orphan train that stopped in town from New York City. You know, they line ’em up on the station platform and you can take your pick.”

“He?”

“Yeah.” He turned to the hayloft and called, “Jacob.”

A dark-eyed boy who looked about seven stepped tentatively up to the loft gate, his head bristling with a two-inch growth.

“When we got him his scalp was buggy, so we had to shave his head.”

Sam touched his chin. “I was looking for a little girl,” he said absently. He looked up at the child. “You doing all right?”

“Yes,” the boy said. “I have my own clothes.”

“All right, you can start throwin’ down those sticks into the dray,” Smally told him. The child backed off into the dark loft. “Where was this little girl took from?”