“He shot my black dog. I thought he’d get better but he got the infection and died on me.”

Sam pulled free and stood away. “The way I understand it, your dog was trying to eat his hand off at the time.”

Skadlock pulled a glossy automatic pistol out of his jacket and pressed it against Sam’s temple. “You think this is funny? Some kind of joke? Tell me where that man is.”

Sam looked at what he could see of the gun, then back at Skadlock. “You hurt him so bad they sent him on the train to Cincinnati. He’s got to have about five operations to straighten him up.”

Skadlock seemed to realize something all at once and his expression took on a blue heat as he pressed him against the stack. “You the dumb shit what tole him where we was.” He began to curse and ramble, and Sam wondered what he’d been drinking and for how many days.

“I was just trying to find his little girl,” Sam told him, yelling into his face, but Skadlock didn’t seem to care.

“You led him to us. I ought to kill you. I wish they hadn’t left you alive down in that shithole town so you could come back to haunt us.”

The statement was like a jolt of electricity. “What did you say?”

Skadlock strengthened his grip on the pistol and raised his elbow high. Sam closed his eyes and for an instant started praying, but then there was a bony pop, the kind of noise the blunt side of an ax makes when it kills a steer, and Skadlock hit the deck, slack all at once. Sam looked and saw Charlie pocketing his slapjack.

“Friend of yours?”

He straightened his coat. “Pick up his pistol and let’s get this bastard in the brig before he wakes up.”

“Better hurry. Trouble’s a-brewin’ below.”

They dragged Skadlock down the stairs, his riding boots banging every step and the people from Stovepipe Bend cheering them on. They’d just clapped him into the engine-room brig when August came back from the firing galley.

“Who’s that?”

“Nobody you need to know.” Sam pushed him along roughly and he and Charlie headed to the main-deck lounge, where they found a scuffle between smelter workers and sawmillers from Yunt. When they got among the tables they noticed ten different poker games were going on, and at one of them five men were standing and hollering back and forth.

Charlie spread his coat, showing his pistol. “What’s the beef here?”

A cross-eyed man wearing patched suspenders pulled his cigar. “This feller checked a bet and I raised and he raised me back.”

“So?”

“That’s sandbaggin’. We don’t play like that in Stovepipe.”

The man from Yunt put his finger in the first man’s face. “That’s how you play the game, chickenshit. That’s poker.”

“That’s ambushin’, you mean, and it would take somebody with sawdust for brains to play like that.”

The other man straightened his back and strutted two steps sideways like a rooster. “If they hadn’t of took my Smith I’d see what was in your fool head. Prob’ly lead sinkers.”

“Aw, sit down and just call dealer’s choice if you want to sandbag,” Duggs told him.

“Or what?” the man from Stovepipe Bend demanded, drawing a pearl-handled straight razor from his coat pocket.

Everyone at the table turned toward the sound of a pistol being cocked. Sam had pressed the muzzle of his revolver behind the man’s ear. “Or you’ll get a hot pitchfork in your ass in about half a second.”

Charlie took a step away from the table. “Easy, Sam.”

“Let’s have the razor,” Sam said, and the man handed it over his shoulder, his arm the only thing moving at the table. “We gonna have any more trouble out of you?”

“No,” the man said, but even from the one syllable Sam knew that for the rest of his life he’d better never find himself in Stovepipe Bend past dark.

IN TEN MINUTES the area was again filled with hollering and the stink of homegrown tobacco. Sam and Charlie leaned against the capstan, looking back into the lighted area of gamblers and drinkers.

“You scared me for a minute back there.”

“I kind of scared myself. I should’ve hauled his ass down to the engine room.”

“Well, maybe it was that other fellow got you excited. We all tend to go downhill when someone sticks a pistol in our face. Who the hell was that?”

“One of those Skadlocks I told you about.”

“Half man, half weasel.”

“The weasel part might be right.”

FOR THE NEXT HOUR they kept in motion on the dance floor, showing their pistols and palming slapjacks. Elsie appeared again and sang “Leave Me with a Smile,” her sweet alto taming down the room and calming Sam as well. Her voice was a drink of cool water.

Toward the staggering, glass-breaking end of the trip he went back to the engine room and saw Ralph standing above two passed-out drunks, holding on to the bars, staring at all the heaving machinery.

“We’ll get to the bank in about ten minutes, and I’ll escort you off.”

“Where’s my pistol?”

“Part of my salary for a hard night.”

Skadlock’s eyes showed several worlds of pain. “You gonna law me?”

Sam put his hand on one of the bars, tempted to say he wasn’t worth the trouble, but that would only make things worse. His uncle had taught him that for some people, hard words were the same as bullets. Finally he shook his head. Then he asked, “What do you know about the trouble down in Troumal?”

“I was livin’ in Arkansas them days.”

“Do you know who did it?”

Skadlock looked away, feeling the lump on the back of his skull. “Coulda been anybody.”

“You know.”

“Why would I tell you? You couldn’t touch ’em, even nowadays.” The big backing gong went off like a detonation above his head, but he didn’t flinch.

“How did you know somebody survived?”

“I didn’t till you hauled up in our kitchen.”

“Who did it?”

Skadlock stared at the port engine as though he envied its un-touchable heat.

Sam cocked his head, imagining what he could say to make Skadlock talk. Finally, he said, “Maybe I could pay them a visit like I did you.”

At that, Ralph Skadlock’s eyes rolled sideways into jaundiced thought. After a long time he said, “It was Cloats what did it.”

The name went through him like a chill. “How do I find them?”

“Everbody around Bung City has a opinion.”

“You’re just a fountain of information.”

“Go to hell. If I was you I’d grow some eyes in the back of my head.”

Sam heard the engine bells jangle for the landing. “Who’d you sell that little girl to?”

“The devil.”

“When I find her, I’ll do my best to send the law after you. Maybe some federal law.”

“I ain’t got her. They can’t arrest me for havin’ thin air.”

“But I got a feeling you’re worse than the ones that do.”

Skadlock looked away as if offended. “I don’t know about that. I ain’t the start of your troubles. And I sure as hell didn’t deserve no dead dog.”

When the landing whistle began roaring, Sam unlocked the brig and walked him to the stage.

Skadlock pushed out the dent in his hat and settled it back on his head. “I ain’t forgot about that Dutchman.”

“That’s your trouble. You don’t forget much of anything.”

“Keep a lookout, coonass.” He started down the plank with the rest of the tipsy crowd.

Sam faked a friendly wave. “Manges la merde, Skadlock.”

THE SECOND MOONLIGHT TRIP was worse. Among the eighteen hundred people dawdling at the landing, two hundred or so had been drinking while they waited. After they frisked the crowd and the boat slid off into the river, the generator failed again. The band kept playing, but after a few minutes a blind volcanic brawl broke out that took half an hour to stop. The mates and several waiters and even the cooks had to wade in to separate the fighters as best they could, and the captain showed up with a megaphone and shouted that there would be no more music if the crowd didn’t calm down. The crew brought up the coal-oil lanterns and hung them, and under the smoky yellow aura the band continued playing for the reeling dancers. Sam was still breathing hard when someone called out “Fire,” and he and the first mate ran to quench a smashed lamp in the men’s toilets at the rear of the boat, beating it down with sacks until an oiler coaxed the fire hose alive.