by John Brunner
The preachers did the same. But the others were glad to help dispose of the liquor.
Race fever was apparent at Cairo, too. Half the countryside seemed to have decided to make an excursion, to the delight of those local traders who had settled here on the assumption that—regardless of what people might say about the land being muddy and swampy and given to breeding fevers—the junction of the Mississippi and the Ohio was a strategic point. They were, paradoxically, in favor of the railroads, for river people had their own long-standing trade centers: Mound City, in particular, a few miles up the Ohio, where so many great steamers had been built or fitted out. The railroads, in contrast, were converging here as though drawn by a giant magnet.
The atmosphere of the city was like Carnival in miniature. Ever alert for detail that might lend color to his reports, Joel learned by eavesdropping that the incoming flood of sightseers had begun a whole day ago. Already by yesterday evening the levee had begun to spawn clusters of tents, sprouting like mushrooms at convenient distances one from another, linked by newspaper sellers and gossip mongers who kept a flash flood of mingled fact and rumor at its swell.
Thanks to telegraph messages, it was known that the Atchafalaya was still in the lead; that Drew had ordered his coal flats to be made ready on the Missouri shore, where he could save time by not cutting across incoming currents from the mouth of the Ohio; that his few remaining passengers for Ohio ports were to be transferred on the run to the Luke S. Thrale. And she was standing by with steam up, heedless of the cost in fuel, for the sake of a part share in this epoch-making run.
Some therefore claimed that the result was a foregone conclusion. Others argued that if the Nonpareil had, as was reported, hired extra pilots for the stretch north of Cairo, she still stood an excellent chance, while others yet maintained that the idea had been abandoned. The debate raged furiously.
For here, if anywhere in the entire run, skill must be at a premium over speed. It was not for nothing that the vicious curve of Dog Tooth Bend was nicknamed “the graveyard.” Steamer after handsome steamer had gone down in its treacherous maze, adding countless obstacles to the passage of later vessels, especially because during the war and immediately after neither funds nor means were available to raise the metal from sunken boats.
And night was drawing on.
Worse yet, perhaps worst of all, one of the few boats to continue running this portion of the river on a Sunday, the Phalanx, arriving from St. Louis, reported stretches in the upper river where there was barely eight feet of water.
Eight feet! When everybody knew the racing boats drew at least nine when fully loaded.
But, of course, neither of them was. Learned disputes broke out concerning the superior advantages of lightness for one or the other boat, while Whitworth kept his secret counsel and sometimes smiled without it reaching his eyes.
Meantime Joel did his best not to, thinking of what was in his pocket safe. He had had deliberately to prevent himself from reaching for it on several occasions when Whitworth wanted a match.
In an odd sense he was starting to feel guilty. Direct acquaintance with his victim was evoking what had frequently brought him to quarrel with his father during the latter’s ill-judged speculation in slaves. He would rather have seen him copy Andrew Moyne’s venture in matchwood, even though that had brought in its train an even vaster financial disaster. Trees? Lord, they were sprouting the length of the Mississippi as fast as one could keep track! A sedge of willows could anchor a sandbar almost overnight! Granted, pine woods were a little less hasty, but even so, how could one compare the worth of trees with the worth of people?
It dawned on Joel by degrees that he was called on to act as both judge and jury over Whitworth.
He had condemned Arthur’s treatment of Louisette willingly enough, for he knew Arthur and—though he had never wished to cast the first stone—the man’s drunkenness would by itself have been enough to warrant condemnation.
Also (but this was very remote now, like the echo of a dream) he had loved Louisette.
Yet now, when he held Whitworth’s fate in the palm of his hand, and knew there was only one right course for him to follow, he felt guilty about exercising such responsibility. It was like owning a slave, and he had hated that since he first realized what it meant.
At the cost of not filing his report from Cairo, which he had worked out bar some figures and times he intended to pick up on arrival; at the cost of maybe not joining the Atchafalaya, and sacrificing his career in consequence; at any cost and all cost, he wanted to escape from the duty of pronouncing doom.
Therefore he hung at Whitworth’s heels when they left the train and headed for the wharf, instead of making at once for the telegraph office.
Therefore he put up with the older man’s snarling comments until they could be borne no longer and Whitworth rounded on him and said, “Say, Mister Reporter!”
Riding the cars they had become “Joel” and “Harry.” It was a warning sign, like the thin bright line of light across the sky presaging a storm’s arrival on the Mississippi.
“You have a story to send to your paper, don’t you? So quit hounding me or you’ll miss out on your plan to switch to the Atchafalaya! Me, I got plenty of time, if the Nonpareil ain’t taken her yet! And plenty of business!”
“Such as what?” Joel barked, emboldened by this opening.
Whitworth looked at him for a long while, panatela in one hand, carpetbag in the other.
At length he sighed.
“Hell and all its devils! Look, if you print one word of this I’ll swear you’re lying, and so will everybody else! But just to get you off my back… Drew’s hired the Thrale to take off his Ohio passengers, right? Well, we reckon he owes us a handicap time, which would be made up if he had to make a proper stop here. How can you compare the speed of two steamers when one had to make a stop and the other didn’t? We didn’t bargain for putting in at Baton Rouge! So they sent me to outbid Drew’s offer and force him to make a stop! And if I don’t fix it, I’ll be less than the dust Woodley shakes off his shoes!”
With that improbably biblical phrase, Whitworth stormed away, losing himself as quickly as possible in the crowd. There were crowds everywhere in Cairo today.
Joel wished for a heartbreaking moment he could believe what the other had told him. But he had felt that pine log: its weight in his hands, its rough surface under his fingers. And inside it he had seen and recognized…
He reached his decision without further ado. Whitworth was quite right: he had a story to file, one which must include reference to the Nonpareil’s second mate being aboard the train.
Nothing more than that. Not right now.
But after the dispatch was safely on its way, he would be ready to bet anything he could afford on their next rendezvous.
He planned to ride out on one of the Atchafalaya’s coal flats, and originally he had simply meant to take his chance of being allowed on board, using the threat of press power to persuade any of the junior officers who got in his way.
But now he had a weapon, and it sat on him uncomfortably, as though he had donned a gun belt and holster.
For he was sure to meet Whitworth at the coal flat, and Whitworth would be trying to toss that pine log into the fuel pile unobserved, relying on the assumption that nobody taking a box of coal aboard would question a fine chunk of burnable wood.
He pictured himself marching aboard the Atchafalaya and demanding to see Drew, offering the explosive in his pocket as evidence for the terrible story he had to relate.
And was dismayed to find that merely thinking about it made him indescribably sad.
Should not this truly have been a contest of giants—albeit the giants were machines? Instead, here he was finding it tarnished by the petty concerns of humanity: gambling wins and losses, self-aggrandizement, personal renown!
At the back of his mind had been hovering the notion that he might write a book-length memoir about this race, wheth
er in fictional or reportorial form. Since his time in company with Whitworth, he had been inclining more toward the novel version, which could be a gage for him to throw down in the literary arena. He made a resolution. Unless the Atchafalaya actually exploded, he would omit all reference to this loathsome episode.
In the meantime, though, he had that rendezvous to make. For if by some miracle he could produce Whitworth’s log to Drew, he would crown himself with glory. He tried not to think about the possibility that Whitworth might realize it had been emptied and fill it again with regular gunpowder, to be had anywhere.
Once embarked on his perilous course, being the taut, nervous person he was, he would never accept a setback. Out west, according to the newspapers, according to the dime thrillers now appearing on bookstalls—especially along the railroads—they spoke of “desperate men.”
What Joel could not understand was how such a man as Whitworth could have been deprived of hope.
His best guess seemed trivial, yet it was all he could come up with.
Solitary, wishing to imagine himself as better than he was, Whitworth needed a scapegoat. He had indicated something of the sort during their train ride. It so happened that he had been offended—how, Joel had no idea—by Fernand Lamenthe when he was working aboard the same boat. The notion that a colored man might aspire to pilot’s status, while he remained a hireling at far lower pay, was more than he could bear. From that point on he had frozen into the belief that those who, in his childhood, had been regarded as fit mainly to be bought and sold, were conspiring to take over the world.
Sinking a steamer with a Creole pilot at her helm by extension was no worse than shooting a dog, and the hell with anybody fool enough to ship with the black devil in the first place!
It had never come out so nakedly, but it was—was the taste Whitworth had left in Joel’s mind.
Consequently he went about his business with expedition, eager to reach the wharf where coal flats for the racing boats must even now be being readied.
And armed with something wholly unexpected.
Reading over the text he had to send, the clerk in the cable office glanced up.
“You going aboard the Atchafalaya now?”
Since the fact was plainly stated in his message, Joel nodded.
“Say, you can do us a favor!”—turning and signaling over his shoulder. “We had a telegram for Mr. Drew, and we ain’t got a one of our durn delivery boys to bring it to him! Mr. Meldrum!” he added as his chief approached. “Would it be okay if I gave that St. Louis cable for Captain Drew to this gentleman, who plans to join the Atchafalaya here?”
“Well, I wouldn’t know about that,” Meldrum began. Joel cut him short.
“It would be a pleasure! I’ve often interviewed Captain Drew for my newspaper. I know him well!”
“I guess it might be okay,” Meldrum sighed at length. “We figured on sending it care of his local agents, as usual. But every last one of our boys is missing! I guess they’re all down the levee, waiting for the boats. And if that’s so, I swear they’ll get their hides tanned in the morning!”
Triumphantly Joel pocketed the sealed envelope, which would be a passport for him to board the Atchafalaya, and signed a receipt for it with a cheerful flourish.
The reception awaiting the Atchafalaya and Nonpareil at Cairo outdid anything seen on the lower river. It being Sunday, scarcely any steamers were scheduled for departure, and most of them delayed it anyhow. Those downbound from either Mississippi or Ohio ports, or about to be overtaken on their way up by the racing boats, were likewise lying over to see them go by, and to hell with passengers impatient to reach their destination, or forfeiture charges on perishable goods! There were so many, there was room neither at the wharfs nor the wharf boats to cope with them all, and some stood into midstream, narrowing the channel dangerously.
Moreover dozens of excursion boats had turned out, and special trains had been run on both the Illinois Central and Cairo & Fulton railroads. The concourse of locomotives and other steam engines loaded the air with smuts that marked the smart white dresses of the ladies and the gentlemen’s snowy shirtbosoms.
Rumors abounded—that one or other of the boats had struck a snag, or gone aground, or burst a steam pipe, or collided with a barge adrift from its towboat. Gossip that afternoon was a growth industry.
Little by little, however, as the sun declined, the mood grew calmer, and all eyes turned on the Thrale. Brilliant in white and red and gold, though a bare two-thirds the length of either racing boat, she was an outstanding vessel in the local trades, with one year of reliable service behind her almost to the day. Therefore the spectators took her as a barometer. When smoke puffed from her chimneys, they cheered; then they waited anxiously for the first sign of movement from her wheels; then they cheered again when she cast off from the wharf and grew despondent when she merely sauntered downstream instead of hurrying.
But then she rounded to in a patch of dead water at the conflux of the rivers, and even those who had witnessed many previous fast runs—including the Atchafalaya’s with Larzenac, including the maiden voyage of the Nonpareil—started to urge silence on others, to create a hush requisite for an event so memorable, none present would wish to miss the slightest detail.
And Whitworth, Joel was prepared to bet, had not been within a hundred yards of her.
Aboard the Nonpareil it felt as though they were already doomed to endure the torments of eternity. It was so humiliating to review all her setbacks—not merely the stop at Baton Rouge, but the encounter with floating drift, and the broken rudder cable, and Barfoot grounding her, and, just to top it all, the need to slow for steam leaks!
None had been reported for an hour. They were breathing more easily in the pilothouse. But slowing in bends where they should at least have matched their rival’s speed had cost them dear. There was talk not only among the passengers but among the deck crew of treating the race as lost and won, and with less than two hundred miles to go it was a tempting notion.
Yet they were still in sight of the Atchafalaya’s smoke, and newspapers brought aboard at Memphis had included the assertion that she too had suffered a steam leak and it had been bad enough to scald one of her engineers.
If once, why not again? At least they were driving her to her limits!
This fortunate scrap of information was a source of great relief to Woodley and Gordon. Now they could hint at what they—
Knew? Well, not exactly. But expected.
For those not party to that deadly secret, misery was overcoming hope, and much of it had no connection with the racing steamers.
This morning, when Josephine took her place among the black deckhands, she had experienced a familiar sensation. It had seemed as though some outside force was in control of her actions.
Yet somehow the singing had dragged her back to her normal mode of existence. It was too calm, too weary, to complete the process which, in that past she sometimes had trouble remembering, had cut her loose entirely and delivered her into the grasp of the god. She had expected the feeling to go on when she told Caesar she would make him another trickenbag; that had not been her usual, considered, concealed personality speaking. It was as though this short time away from Cherouen had been enough to persuade her she had been wrong to live in disguise among strangers. But how foreign were the whites to her? She wanted to compare herself to Ruth, who followed love into an alien land; yet alien blood ran in her veins, and—for all she could tell—might soon be pulsing in her womb.
With the failure of the god to take command, she had found herself trapped once more in conventionality. What last night had seemed powerful magic was now disgusting. If only Auberon had come rushing after her to declare his attachment, seized her arm and swung her round to kiss her, that would have sufficed to reconnect her with his people. As it was, he had accepted her rebuff as meekly as though she were no more than a disappointed partner at a Mardi Gras ball, whose toe he had trodden on.
And there was no future for her among the other of her peoples! How could there be, when they were so cringing and overawed? And filthy! Even Caesar, who spoke up like a man, proved on inspection to be clad in rags, to have rotten teeth, to limp on one leg! She who—thanks to Cherouen—had visions of making humanity whole, ridding it of fleas and lice and grime: how could she treat such folk as equals? And how could she any longer be tempted by the notion of lording it over them like Marie Laveau?
And how, above all, could she ever have been so stupid as to think she might cut herself absolutely free from that half of her existence by taking a white man’s poison to lighten her skin?
She would never forget, so long as she lived, how Auberon last night had worshiped her dark body. No matter how she now hated the very thought of him!
These contradictions closed on her like ice floes grinding on a winter river. All of a sudden they became unbearable. She had to flee to her stateroom.
There she slumped on the bed and gave herself over to helpless weeping, during which she was chiefly conscious of one desire: that she might make real the visions she had had about a dangerous brown stick, so that this boat might be blown up with her and all aboard.
At some stage Auberon sent one of the stewards to ask if she would join him at table. She offered no reply, but buried her face in a pillow to prevent herself uttering curses.
Much later in the afternoon Auberon was sitting glumly on deck and watching this landscape which had indeed changed, but dreadfully slowly, since the start of the trip. He had never paid to go into a panorama, but he was coming to understand why people might. If the scenery from New Orleans to Alton could be displayed in an hour, with all the famous sights like Fort Pillow and Island 10 and the rest, why waste time on seeing it in real life?