The River Nymph

by Shirl Henke

  Daniels registered no response. In fact, his eyes, intently studying her, remained devoid of any emotion; certainly they did not reveal the anger or sense of defeat she had hoped to glimpse. After a moment, he merely smiled that smile that did not reach his eyes, pulled the deed across the table and signed it with a flourish, then tossed it cavalierly on the pile of currency.

  “Well, ma’am, you wouldn’t accept my condolences, but I do trust you’ll accept my congratulations.” He rose, touching the brim of his hat, and turned to leave.

  Delilah was furious. The bastard was patronizing her. Refuse to admit defeat, would he! She waited until he almost reached the bar. Then her husky voice stopped him. “Mr. Daniels, please don’t leave just yet. I pride myself on being a magnanimous victor.”

  Her uncle Horace bent down and put his hand on her arm, whispering something, but she shook her head.

  “I always like to leave my less fortunate opponents with something. How about one last bet, sir, a chance to win back a stake for another game? I’ll bet a thousand dollars against the clothes you’re wearing that I can beat you cutting for high card.” The crowd was stunned into silence. No one up or down the river had ever heard such an outrageous proposition.

  Clint cocked his head, studying the beautiful woman.

  Delilah had expected shock or anger, but not curiosity…or was it disappointment? At least his eyes were now alive. She flushed, suddenly uncertain of her triumph.

  Clint finally replied, “I’ll accept your wager, ma’am, if you’ll allow me to exclude my weapons and cigar case from the bet.”

  Delilah nodded woodenly. She had done what no professional ever did. What Uncle Horace had warned her not ever to do—let her emotions interfere with business.

  Clint moved back to the table but did not take a seat. Delilah had not realized he was quite so tall. He picked up the deck and riffled it contemplatively. Then he handed it to Ike Bauer, who was watching from the sidelines. “Would you shuffle the cards?” When Bauer nodded, he looked over at Mrs. Raymond’s protector. “If that’s all right with you?” he inquired.

  With a disgusted look at his niece, Horace agreed, eager to terminate the distasteful business. Bauer shuffled, then laid the deck on the table and stepped back. Clint nodded to Delilah. “Ladies first.”

  She drew a three of hearts and sighed with relief. This was one game she would be happy to lose. She had been a fool to taunt the hometown favorite into making the bet.

  The room grew deathly silent when Clint flipped over a deuce. The crowd groaned.

  But Delilah’s whisper-thin voice echoed over the noise. “You may send the clothes to the boat in the morning, Mr. Daniels.”

  Her face burned and she could not bear to look at any of the people surrounding her, least of all Clinton Daniels. Delilah knew she had humiliated him. He represented the life she hated, but the man had nothing to do with her past. A hard lump formed at the back of her throat. She turned away, staring out one of the side windows, recently installed to turn the open hurricane deck into an enclosed salon. The winking lights from the city above the levee seemed to mock her.

  Suddenly her attention was pulled back to the table by a soft thump.

  Clint’s hat dropped onto the pile of cash in the center of the table. Next came his coat, his waistcoat and a handful of shirt studs. An alarmed Delilah looked at his face with something akin to terror. “My God, Daniels, send the clothes tomorrow…or don’t send them at all—I was just making a bad joke.”

  Clint shrugged off his shirt, revealing a muscular chest flecked with gold hair narrowing to his waistband. Smiling, he said, “I don’t think so, ma’am. Remember? You never leave a table without collecting your winnin’s…no markers.”

  The stillness remained palpable as he continued to undress. But everyone’s hostile eyes fixed on her.

  Delilah could not seem to stop staring at the cunning pattern of his chest hair until he bent down and yanked off his hand-tooled leather boots and socks. When he straightened up and reached for the top button of his fly, her face was flame red. She bit her lip to keep from gasping aloud. But she could not force her gaze away from his hand as he deftly unfastened his trousers and shucked them down his long legs. Calm as could be, he peeled off the last item, silk unmentionables which almost floated onto the pile of clothing littering the money-covered table.

  Finally, he was newborn-naked, the most striking specimen of masculine beauty Delilah could ever have imagined. Like a Greek statue. Sinking her teeth into her lip with renewed vigor, she forced herself to look away from his coolly detached gaze. He was completely unconcerned about his nudity in a room full of people—in front of her. And why not? The rotter knew how humiliated she felt. He knew, too, that she had been fascinated looking at his body.

  He casually slipped into the shoulder sling of his .38-caliber Smith & Wesson, picked up the small Colt Derringer that had been tucked in his waistcoat, then held up a cigar. “Do you mind?” he asked.

  She shook her head in a daze. He fired up the stogie, then picked up his wallet, knife and cigar case. Clinton Daniels strolled out the door in an easy, long-legged gait, completely at his leisure, leaving pandemonium in his wake as the room exploded with furious whispers and muffled curses.

  “Unnatural bitch!”

  “I never seen anything so goddamned vicious in my life.”

  “Poor bastard was lucky to get outt a here with a full set of balls.”

  “Damn, not even Red Riley would do something this nasty!”

  “Bullshit! That wasn’t our deal.”

  Big Red Riley wasted little time meeting with Delilah and Horace to conclude the arrangement he had made with them the week before. The morning after the card game, he was seated at the large poker table in the salon of The River Nymph, glaring at his co-conspirators. Hell, I built this damned gambling hall!

  As his face turned puce with rage, Delilah thought that it clashed horribly with his bright red hair. The nickname “Big” was either a sop to the man’s inflated ego or an allusion to his undeniable power on the St. Louis riverfront. It certainly had not the remotest connection to his size. The scrawny little creature was at least two inches shorter than her own five feet seven. Adding to the “charm” of his weasely, narrow face was a boil on his oversized nose, an ugly thing that looked ready to erupt. She fervently hoped it would not do so before he could be removed from the premises.

  “Please, Mr. Riley, be rational,” Delilah cajoled softly, pushing the large stack of currency across the table. “You must admit—”

  “I ain’t admitting nothin’. Look, after losing this boat to that goddamned card hawk Daniels, I don’t intend to lose it a second time, least of all ta a female!” He punctuated the declaration with a thump of his fist on the oak table in front of him. “I looked high ’n low for somebody like you ta lure that bastard into a game. Get the Nymph back. My sources said you was top shelf. Never been this far west before. Nobody’d recognize you. I paid to bring you here, and by God, I offered you the sweetest deal any ringer could ask for—”

  “Mr. Riley—”

  “Mr. Riley, my ass! I put up the ten thousand dollars for your stake. Alls you had ta do was sucker Daniels into putting up the Nymph, win the game and give me back my stake money and the boat deed. You got lots of cash winnings for yourself.”

  Delilah’s impatience with the little man’s pigheadedness was reflected in her voice. “As of this moment we have a new arrangement. The sum in front of you is exactly thirty-five thousand dollars, your ten-thousand-dollar stake, plus a twenty-five-thousand-dollar profit. Take it!”

  “You double-dealing bitch!” Riley had not even seen the old man move, but he was keenly aware of the muzzle of Horace’s .45-caliber Colt pocket revolver jammed into his right nostril.

  The old man’s voice was surprisingly deep and strong. “Sir, you have a mouth as filthy as the floor of a stockyard. I grow tired of subjecting my niece to it. An English friend of mine is o
f the opinion that shooting an Irishman in the head is as feckless as shooting an elephant in the rump. While the target is large, the area of vulnerability is so minuscule that it is difficult to injure the beast. Would you care to put his theory to the test?”

  Riley very cautiously shook his head, no mean feat with a gun barrel stuffed up one sinus cavity.

  “Then,” continued Horace, “I can count on your exercising a modicum of civility?” Although the king of the St. Louis levee was as uncertain of the meaning of modicum as he had been of minuscule, it seemed wise to agree.

  “Now,” Horace continued, “before you pocket your money, you will sign this note indicating that your loan of ten thousand dollars has been returned, along with twenty-five thousand dollars interest. All dealings between you and Mrs. Raymond are concluded.”

  Red looked at the paper, unable to swallow his rage. “I didn’t ask you to sign nothin’,” he said petulantly.

  “No,” Horace agreed, “but then, you are intellectually deficient. Be a good fellow and sign, Mr. Riley.”

  “Yeah, I’ll sign, but this don’t change shit, old man. I converted the Nymph into the classiest floating gamblin’ hell and cathouse on the levee and I’m gonna get her back.”

  Delilah climbed to the wheelhouse, watching her uncle escort Riley down the gangplank and off The River Nymph, then turned her attention south along the cobblestone levee. As far as she could see there were steamboats, scores of them, so many that their tall black smokestacks formed what appeared to be a forest of denuded tree trunks. Not a particularly appealing vista. Although it was almost noon on a weekday, the levee was not especially busy.

  She drew her cloak more tightly about herself. It was only February. She knew that in another few weeks the last traces of ice would be gone. The levee would start to swarm with freight wagons and hand carts, furiously loading the boats for their summer runs on the Mississippi and the Missouri. Then the scene would compare with a large litter of greedy piglets vying for their mama’s teats.

  “St. Louis, the Sow of the West!” Delilah laughed. She was still young, and now she was finally free. She and Uncle Horace were the owners of a fine steamboat and had, counting their own savings, a bit over twenty-five thousand dollars in capital. As of this morning they were in the freight business—no more corpse-eyed cardsharps, no more smirking simpletons intent on her breasts rather than her hands.

  She took a deep breath, and even in the chill air she could smell that peculiar blend of decay and fecundity that was the river. That was life. She slapped the Nymph’s wheel. “Damn all of them to hell, I will keep you.”

  Clint Daniels pushed his half-eaten breakfast away and poured another cup of coffee. He opened the humidor on his desk and absently selected a cigar, clipped the tip, lit up and leaned back in the big leather chair. He rolled the smoke around in his mouth, then blew a large blue-white cloud toward the ceiling, watching cat-green eyes and burnished hair materialize in the haze. Suddenly it registered on him that he was smoking, something he made it a rule never to do until after supper.

  “Damn.” He put the cigar in the large brass ashtray and slid it across the desk next to his empty breakfast plate.

  There was a soft knock at the door, but before he could respond, Banjo came bursting in. Clint sighed. Banjo could not seem to grasp the concept that knocking on a door did not automatically confer upon the knocker the right to enter. Daniels had tried to explain the idea of waiting for a response, but to no avail. A man might as well try to convince a loyal hound not to drag home dead things.

  “Well, you pegged it, boss. Big Red had hisself a visit with the widda this mornin’.” Banjo grinned, revealing several missing teeth.

  “On the Nymph?” Clint asked his pear-shaped informant.

  “Yup, but get this: that feller with the widda tossed his ass off the boat. Old Red’s face was redder ’n his hair. Rat Turner was waitin’ at the end of the gangplank fer his boss. He started to reach fer his gun, but the old guy—just as cool as ya please—shook his head and grinned like a skull. Pointin’ a gun at Red. Shit, the old feller looked like one of them stiffs up at Hackameyer’s funeral parlor. ’Nough ta give ya the creeps. Hell, Rat turned into a statue. Bet he was driz-zlin’ down his laig.”

  “From what the boys picked up this morning, I figured she was some sort of ringer Riley had imported, but if you’re right, the lady may have reshaped the deal.” Daniels grinned.

  “Sharp, shrewd, vicious, bottom-dealing, beautiful little bitch,” Clint murmured to himself. “Red wanted to get back the boat, but it would appear the widow, with an assist from her dear uncle Horace, has decided to keep it. Why, I wonder? And just what will his majesty, the king of the St. Louis levee, do to avenge himself on our delectable double-crosser? This should prove very interesting.” A smile spread across his face.

  Banjo grunted, “That little bastard’s mean ’nough to burn the Nymph to the waterline outa spite. I’ll put the boys to watch in’ real careful. I know you want her.”

  “Make no mistake about that, Banjo. I want her…and I intend to have her.”

  Chapter Two

  That afternoon Delilah and Horace moved their belongings from their hotel rooms to cabins on the Nymph. Not only would they save money, but they would be able to keep some sort of watch over their new property in spite of their business excursions along the waterfront. When they returned in the early evening, they were greeted by the young bartender who took the first shift until Banjo arrived. But all of them knew that Daniels’s friend would not be in to spell Todd Spearman. Nor was there any reason for either employee to be there. Customers who usually trickled in by this time had yet to arrive.

  As Horace was stowing their trunks and bags in two of the cabins behind the salon, Delilah spoke with the young man. “I’m afraid that your services as bartender will no longer be required. We’ll be tearing out the card room and bar, making it into a hurricane deck again, to carry extra cargo. My uncle and I are going into the upriver freighting business.”

  Young Todd Spearman’s usually smiling face fell. “But, ma’am, it’s off season now, and jobs ain’t easy to come by. Won’t you at least need somebody to fetch and carry fer you and your uncle? He don’t look too sturdy…” Just then the feeble one, having unloaded his and his niece’s trunks, entered the salon. Todd flushed and tried to stammer out an apology. “I didn’t mean anythin’, sir.”

  Horace held up his hand. “You are quite right, young man. While there may remain a week or two of breath in these decaying lungs, I’m not —too sturdy.— And we do require a stout lad to keep the fire going, quite literally, and to keep the interior of this vessel clean. We are also in need of someone to man the galley. I assume that cooking is not one of your many skills?”

  “Naw, sir. My aunt, she says that if the meat warn’t dead, it’d get up and run from me. But I can read and do figures, and I bet I can get my aunt to come cook fer you. She’s cookin’ in a fancy house now and don’t much care fer it.”

  Horace smiled at Delilah. “So, young man, you are literate and possessed of math skills and an aunt who can cook. You have just earned a berth on The River Nymph.”

  The next morning Todd’s aunt, Luellen Colter, arrived to take command of the kitchen, her nephew and, for that matter, the boat itself. Each day, she rousted her sleepy nephew to fire up her stove. She made coffee and took it in small pots to the cabins of her employers—“the Lady” and “the Gentleman.” That was how she had come to think of them, no matter that they had been gamblers. They were quality and a more decent pair Luellen had never met.

  Each morning after breakfast, Delilah and Horace headed off on their rounds of the waterfront emporiums and mercantiles, attempting to learn the intricacies of the Missouri River freighting business. There was so much to find out and so little time. Fortunately, it took only a few days for them to locate the man whom everyone on the riverfront considered to be the most informative instructor and honest businessman in
the city, Mr. Joseph Krammer, owner of Krammer Mercantile and Provisioning, located on Broadway.

  After they had introduced themselves to the short, stocky man with the round face and smiling blue eyes, Horace departed on another mission, leaving his niece to begin shopping for trade goods. While Herr Krammer went to measure out a length of cotton cloth for an elderly woman, Delilah began wandering through the farm supply section.

  Finishing with his sale, Mr. Krammer approached her, shaking his head. “Nein, Frau Raymond, these stuffs are not the thing for the Fort Benton trade. Farmers, they are fewthere. Miners many. Custer and his troopers are making safe for them the far western lands. Picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, some light mining machinery and the dynamite, ya, those are what you want the most to buy. And strong tents, warm coats and pants and boots you will need. Miners must eat too. Take basic foodstuffs. And they work up a great thirst digging in the ground, so whiskey you will sell them. Only a small amount of farm implements to sell on the way will you need.”

  He gave a great booming laugh. “Ya, miners’ greed for gold will bring you gold. Please, good lady, come this way and I will show you your cargo.”

  In a few days, Delilah and Horace fashioned a deal with Krammer. Their poker winnings would supply them with a handsome freight load for the Benton trade, but they also required a warehouse in which to store the goods. If they had that, they could free up space in his mercantile, and in return he would give them a 5 percent rebate. That would help with the expense of renting the storage area for their cargo until spring. But the cost of storage and the teamsters to haul the goods was more than Delilah had to spare.

  Herr Krammer came up with a solution. He had faith in their venture and would advance them credit for the bulk of the goods, so they would have cash for their other expenses. He even knew of a sound, relatively inexpensive warehouse on Biddle Street. Compared to others closer to the levee, it was a bargain.