by Jerry Buck
I said, “You’re a handy man to have around. That walking stick of yours packs a good wallop.”
He twirled it around and brought it to rest on his shoulder. “It does command a little respect, doesn’t it? It’s getting so an honest man can’t stroll along the waterfront without encountering a ruffian.”
He was a heavyset man in a dark frock coat decorated with brass buttons. Muttonchop whiskers framed his round, friendly face. He had on a stovepipe hat.
“The name’s Ben Wheeler,” I said. “My friend here is Dusty Morgan.”
He extended a hand to me and said, “Malachi Petrie at your service, sir.”
“You a riverboat captain?” Dusty asked.
Petrie laughed. “A captain? Goodness no, son. A captain is an old lady who sits in his cabin and frets about expenses. On the other hand, son, I am a pilotl I run the boat! Any river man worth his salt is a pilot! A captain? Never!”
Malachi Petrie dumped three heaping spoons of sugar into his coffee and asked, “Why would any sensible man be looking for Jasper Rollins? The man’s a scoundrel!”
He stirred the syrupy liquid.
Suddenly his face lighted up. “Aha! That’s it! He is a scoundrel and that’s why you’re looking for him. The man owes you a debt!”
“You could say that,” I said, exchanging a look with Dusty. He looked up at me momentarily from his second piece of pie, but he said nothing.
I couldn’t tell Petrie that I was looking for Rollins to kill him. I hated betraying his trust. I hated lying to people. I hated this skulking around. I had to find Rollins so that it would be over and done with and I could purge myself of this sickening disease of vengeance that possessed me.
“Well, Mr. Rollins does fancy the Queen of Natchez. That’s my boat. It’s more luxurious than some of the others. Attracts a better crowd. Money, if you know what I mean. Mr. Rollins goes where the money is.”
I sipped the hot coffee. I asked casually, “You know where Rollins is now?”
We were sitting in the little cafe down the esplanade from where Dusty and I were attacked. My forehead still ached. It was the second time in a week that I had been beaten up. Dusty’s lip puffed up, and he kept a damp cloth to it.
I had discovered a treasure trove better than Jean Laffite’s buried swag. This was the first time since we had gotten to St. Louis that I had found a man who admitted he knew Jasper Rollins.
“Last I heard he skedaddled across the river to East St. Louis,” Petrie said. “Three, four days ago.”
That would be about the time he got word that I was looking for him.
“Things are more wide open in East St. Louis,” Petrie explained. “He’s probably been in a few games and made himself a stake for the river. That is, if he ain’t got himself kilt for cheating.”
Petrie looked at me over the top of his coffee cup.
“That man can’t cut a deck without cheating. It’s in his blood.”
I nodded. “So I’ve heard. Tell me, Mr. Petrie, you planning on taking the Queen of Natchez down river any time soon?”
“I certainly am. Ten o’clock sharp tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Ten o’clock sharp.” He hesitated. “Well, by noon, anyway. The captain’s always procrastinating, waiting for one more passenger, one more load of cargo. He’s afraid the general manager’s going to ask him why he left port with an empty cabin. So we’re always late. Course, he expects me to make up for the lost time on the river.”
“You think Rollins’ll be aboard when you leave?”
“Like I said, he does fancy the Queen of Natchez. Most likely he’ll have someone row him over before dawn, and he’ll sneak aboard before we leave like the rapscallion he is.”
I took a cheroot out of my pocket, bit off the end, and said, ’’You just let me know if he does. Then I’ll see to it that your captain gets two more paying passengers.”
I glanced up at the big clock on the side of the packet company office. It said eleven-thirty.
Petrie’s captain couldn’t procrastinate much longer. Dusty and I stood on the docks waiting to see if we would board the Queen of Natchez.
At eleven forty-five Petrie walked to the railing of the texas deck, tipped his stovepipe hat to me, and walked away.
I picked up my satchel, and Dusty and I boarded the stern-wheel riverboat.
Chapter Thirty-One
The next day we passed out of what Malachi Petrie called the Upper River. Below Cairo, its confluence with the Ohio, it became one powerful, meandering river, the Mighty Mississippi!
I was fifteen when I had leisurely floated downriver on Robby O’Bannion’s keelboat. In the years since, the river had changed, jumping its banks here, doubling back on itself there. River transportation had changed. Stern-wheelers had replaced the lumbering old side-wheelers. The boats were bigger, faster, safer. The keelboat had vanished forever from the river, driven to oblivion by Robby’s detested stinkpots. Even in his own day, Robby was an anachronism. I wondered if he ever learned to accept the riverboats.
“We’re in the Lower River,” Petrie said in the pilothouse atop the Queen of Natchez.
Petrie welcomed Dusty and me into the pilothouse. There were always four or five out-of-work pilots standing around, peering out the big windows. River inspectors, Petrie called them. But there was no question who reigned supreme in this aerie.
“The stretch from St. Looey to Cairo is pretty straight,” he said. “Cuts through rocky country. We can run that at night with no problem. ’Tween here and New Orleans the banks are alluvial. River can change overnight.”
He pronounced them “Kay-ro” and “Naw Lens.”
He wore his black frock coat with every button buttoned. His string tie was neatly tied. I expect he would have worn his tall hat, too, except it would have hit the ceiling.
The pilothouse perched atop the uppermost deck, looking for all the world like an oversized, windowed outhouse. It had a commanding view of the river. From here Petrie was able to read the river and divine meaning from every riffle, ripple, and shadow. He, of course, knew the river by heart, although each trip he had to relearn it because the river was always dynamic, always changing.
“I swear, I ain’t never seed the river look the same on any trip,” he said. He had both hands on a wheel so big that part of it extended into a slot cut in the deck. Its spokes shined from years of hands gripping the wheel.
“Goin’ down, it takes you two hours to get round some elbow. Then comin’ up you find the river’s cut through the neck of land and there ain’t no more elbow. The distance ’tween Cairo and New Orleans is getting shorter. I swear! No lie! In the last two hundred and fifty years the river’s shortened itself more’n a mile a year.”
Dusty and I spent hours in the pilothouse, absorbing Petrie’s tales of such mysteries as chutes and elbows, going inside and going outside, and of quarter twains and mark twains. I laughed at his stories about river inspectors, mud clerks, and alligator boats. He told me how the captain awed people whenever the boat puffed into a river port. He’d have the boiler stokers throw in pitch pine to turn the smoke a fearsome black. I recounted to him the story of my keelboat journey down the river and of my days on the cattle drive and as a marshal.
The novelty quickly wore off for Dusty. There wasn’t much romance in the river for him. He frequently curled up in a comer of the pilothouse with his dime novels. Oftentimes he simply fell asleep.
I felt a pang when I thought of how much Abby would have enjoyed riding a riverboat. The view from the wheelhouse of the flat prairies, the rolling plains, the high bluffs, and the wooded areas along the riverbank was spectacular. The river itself was a living thing: beautiful, mysterious, beckoning, dangerous. Abby had known little luxury in life. The Queen of Natchez was like an elegant, floating hotel, with waiters to serve delicious meals and maids to turn down your bed covers at night.
But she could not be beside me. And the last instrument of her re
moval was within my grasp.
I didn’t spot Rollins until the second night.
Petrie said he would sometimes hole up in his cabin with plantation owners and cotton brokers and not emerge until he had cleaned them out or the trip was over.
I hoped that would not be the case here. I planned to do more than simply shoot Rollins. I wanted to expose him as a cheat, and I wanted it to be as public as possible.
He was playing poker at a table in the large, noisy, smoky main salon. He wore a black cutaway coat, and a beaver hat was on his head. He had on a lacy pink shirt, string tie, and a brocaded vest. The ruffled shirtsleeves extended out beyond his coat sleeves. His red beard and mustache and his round, cheerful face gave him a benign appearance. He looked for all the world like a rube in his Sunday-go-to-meetin’ best. It was a disarming illusion that I felt certain he cultivated to lull his prey into overconfidence.
I watched him from a distance. Every now and then he spread his knees, as though stretching or searching for a more comfortable position. Each time he did, it activated the holdout and placed a card deftly in his palm. The ruffled sleeve helped hide it. He was quite slick about it.
None of his opponents had spotted it. I detected it because I knew what to look for. Doc Holliday had described to me how it worked.
Petrie joined me, and I said, “That’s an ingenious device he’s got there. It’s known as a Kepplinger holdout. When he wants a card, he spreads his knees and that yanks on a cord. Runs up to his shoulders through tubes and pulleys, and darned if a card doesn’t pop into his hand.”
“I always knew he was crooked,” Petrie said. “Never could prove it. Least till now. I’ll tell the captain and have him put ashore immediately. The captain don’t allow no cheaters on board. Neither do I.”
“Hold your horses,” I said. “I’ll take care of the man.”
Petrie looked at me. “You sure?”
“Why do you think I’ve been looking for him?”
Petrie kept looking at me. “I reckon maybe you can at that.”
Maybe I could, but I knew he would not be an easy man to take. He was a man who practiced deceit and deception. I wondered if he would recognize it when it was practiced on him.
Petrie, I noticed, was a cautious and meticulous man in the wheel-house. He had an awesome responsibility. It was his keen eyes and prodigious memory that saw the Queen of Natchez safely through the shoal waters and past the snags that clotted the constantly shifting riverbed.
But away from the wheelhouse he was open and gregarious. We drank whiskey and smoked cigars and watched the people around us. Dusty had long since crawled into the upper bunk in the tiny cabin we shared.
I felt the deck vibrating under my feet, an ever-present reminder of the clanking connecting rods turning the stem wheel. If you stepped outside, away from the din of the gamblers, you could hear the chuff-chuff of the boilers and the ringing of the watch bell in the pilothouse.
“Who’s at the wheel?” I asked. “One of them deadheading river inspectors?”
Petrie looked at me and smiled maliciously around the cigar in his mouth. Then he removed it and said, “I wouldn’t let one of them hold my coat. My cub’s at the wheel. He fancies himself a lightning pilot. The likes of Mr. Horace Bixby he’ll never be, but he’s a fair lad at the wheel. Learnin’ fast.”
“Good teacher,” I said, laughing.
Petrie raised his whiskey glass to me. “Well, I sure ain’t gonna argue with that.”
Petrie drifted off to bed for a few hours of sleep before his next watch.
I watched Rollins. He didn’t win every hand. That would have been suspicious. But he won enough to make him a consistent winner. The pile of chips in front of him grew ever larger during the night.
Rollins sat across the plush green table from me and said, “Gentlemen, a friendly game of bluff. Poker to you. Five-card stud. My deal.”
I had a cup of after-breakfast coffee and a pile of chips in front of me. Dusty stood behind me. There were nine players seated at the table.
“What’ll it be, gentlemen?” Rollins asked. “What’s the limit? A penny?”
“A penny?” said one man with a guffaw. “Maybe we should play for matchsticks.”
Another said, “I thought we were playing a man’s game.”
Rollins shrugged. “Ten cents?” he offered.
“Gentlemen,” a fourth man said, “let’s at least make it interestin’. This is a game of skill we playin’. I think a couple of rounds and we’ll eliminate any greenhorns. How ’bout twenty-five cents?”
Rollins quickly agreed to the increased limit.
The fourth man said, “Maybe later we can raise it to make it even more interestin’.”
My bet was this was a man who bore watching as closely as Rollins. I suspected they were in it together.
Rollins held a deck in his left hand. Three fingers were on the edge of the long side, and the index finger was at the outer right corner. It’s called a mechanic’s grip. He quickly and expertly dealt cards to the nine players at the table.
First he dealt the cards that go facedown on the table. The hole cards. The mechanic’s grip allows the dealer to take a peak at the cards as he flips them out or to deal from the bottom of the deck.
He was too fast and too good for anyone to detect any shenanigans. Once again I had been warned by Doc Holliday what to look for.
Rollins dealt the first round of face-up cards and called for bets.
My face-up card was a five of hearts. I looked at my hole card: the nine of clubs.
Rollins’s face-up card was the king of hearts. Two other players had kings. One had a queen.
I didn’t bid anything. On the next round I got a ten of diamonds. I folded.
A cotton planter from Louisiana won the pot with two pair. I could see it was going to be a long day.
By the fifth game I was down fifteen dollars and had not won a pot. Or come close. The man I suspected of being Rollins’s partner won two hands. A cotton broker won one and Rollins took one.
Dusty drifted away after that. I don’t blame him.
We played until nearly three o’clock in the afternoon. I was fifty dollars in the hole. The only consistent winner was Rollins’s “partner,” a man we had come to know as Mr. Fowler. He said he was in the factoring business in New Orleans.
Rollins raked in the cards and said, “Shall we meet here after supper? Say seven o’clock?”
“Sounds good to me,” said Fowler. “But I suggest we sweeten the pot. Make it a little more interestin’.”
“I dunno,” said one of the players. “It’s already kinda rich for my blood.”
Fowler laughed. “I said we’d eventually scare out the greenhorns.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Immediately after supper we gathered in the main salon to play cards. Three of our players didn’t show up, but a new man joined us.
As we sat down, a waiter delivered a tray with two bottles of Kentucky sour mash bourbon, glasses, and two new decks of cards.
“I took the liberty of orderin’, gentlemen,” said Rollins. “Help yourself. If you’d rather brandy, I’ve got a tab at the bar.”
Fowler rubbed his hands together. “Gents, tonight we’re gonna play a real man’s game!”
“High-stakes poker?” said Rollins. “That sounds mighty interestin’!”
Rollins looked at me and shoved over a new deck of cards. “Would you do us the honor of cuttin’ the deck, Mr.—er, Morgan, ain’t it?”
“That’s right,” I said. “Morgan. Algernon Morgan.”
I was glad Dusty wasn’t there. That was his real name, and if he heard anybody using it he would have died of embarrassment. I passed myself off as a cattleman who had just sold his herd in Kansas. It wasn’t too big a lie.
I cut the deck and handed it back to Rollins.
“I hope you feelin’ lucky tonight, Mr. Morgan,” he said. “Gentlemen, pour y’self a drink and let’s begin.”
<
br /> I studied my hand, then reached down to finger the rabbit’s foot Dusty had given me.
I tossed out two blue chips. “I’ll see your two hundred, Mr. Rollins.” I threw two more chips into the pile. “And I’ll raise you two hundred.”
I looked at my hand again. I had three of a kind. It was the best hand I’d had all night. My face-up cards were the nine of diamonds and the nine of spades, six of clubs and the jack of spades. My hole card was the nine of hearts.
I’d been losing steadily all night. Fowler had won several hands. But this time Rollins was the big winner.
“Well, gentlemen,” Rollins said.
The cotton broker on my right flipped his cards over facedown. “I fold,” he said.
The tobacco merchant next to him folded, too. So did the others, until it was just Rollins, a cotton planter, and me.
The cotton planter peeked at his hole card again. He said, “You got a mighty pleased look on your face, Mr. Rollins. Let’s see if you got something to back it up.”
The planter, whose name was Tatum, had the makings of a straight. Showing, he had a five of hearts, a four of clubs, a three of diamonds, and a two of clubs. If his hole card was an ace, he might have it.
But Rollins had the makings of a flush. He had the king, jack, ten, and nine of clubs on the table. If his hole card was a queen of clubs, he had the pot again.
But it was a big if, and he could be bluffing.
Rollins took a long swig of whiskey, then said, “Mr. Tatum, I’ll be happy to oblige. But it’s going to cost you the pot.”
Tatum turned over his hole card. It was an ace. He had me beat.
Tatum had a big smile on his face as he reached for the pot.
Rollins watched him, then said, “Pardon me, Mr. Tatum, but I do believe you’re being hasty. You haven’t seen my hole card yet.”
The chances that Rollins had a queen were astronomical—that is, if he was playing fair. I had watched him closely. I saw him work the holdout several times and come up with the right card. I had no doubt now that his hole card was a queen.
Rollins turned over the card. It was a queen.