George Martin - Fevre Dream

Marsh took his leave and retired to his stateroom. The bunk creaked beneath him when he sat down on its edge, opened the package, and took out the rifle and shells. He examined it carefully, hefting it in his hand, sighting down the barrel. It felt good. Maybe your ordinary pistol or rifle shot was nothing to the night folks, but this was something else again, custom made to his order by the best gunsmith in St. Louis. It was a buffalo gun, with a short, wide, octagonal barrel, designed to be fired from horseback and stop a charging buffalo in its tracks. The fifty custom shells were bigger than any the gunsmith had ever made before. “Hell,” the man had complained, “these’ll blow your game to pieces, won’t be nothing left to et.” Abner Marsh had only nodded. The rifle wouldn’t be worth much for accuracy, especially in Marsh’s hands, but it didn’t need to be. At close range it would wipe Damon Julian’s smile clean off his face, and blow his goddamn head off his shoulders for good measure. Marsh carefully loaded it up, and mounted it on the wall above his bed, where he could sit up and snatch it down in one easy motion. Only then did he let himself lie back.

And so it began. Day after day the Eli Reynolds steamed downriver, through rain and fog, through sunshine and overcast, stopping at every town and steamboat landing and woodyard to ask a question or two. Abner Marsh sat up on the hurricane deck, in a wooden chair beside the steamer’s old cracked bell, and watched the river for hour after hour. Sometimes he even took his meals up there. When he had to sleep, Captain Yoerger or Cat Grove or the mud-clerk took his place, and the vigil went on. When rafts and flatboats and other steamers went sliding by, Marsh called out, “You there! You seen a steamer named the Fevre Dream?” But the answer, when he got an answer, always came back, “No, Cap’n, we sure ain’t,” and the folks on the landings and in the woodyards told them nothing, and the river was full of steamboats, steamboats day and night, steamboats big and little, going up the river or down it or lying half-sunk by the banks, but none of them were the Fevre Dream.

She was a slow small boat on a big river, the Eli Reynolds, and she crept along at a pace that would make most steamboatmen ashamed, and her stops and her questions delayed her even more. But still the towns passed, the woodyards passed, the forests and the houses and other steamboats drifted on by in a blur of days and nights, islands and sandbars were left behind them, their pilot steered them deftly past the snags and sawyers, and they moved south, ever south. Sainte Genevieve came and went, Cape Girardeau and Crosno went by, they put in for a bit at Hickman and longer at New Madrid. Caruthersville was lost in fog, but they found it. Osceola was still and Memphis was loud. Helena. Rosedale. Arkansas City. Napoleon. Greenville. Lake Providence.

When the Eli Reynolds came steaming into Vicksburg one blustery October morning, two men were waiting on the landing.

Abner Marsh sent most of the crew ashore. He and Captain Yoerger and Cat Grove met with the visitors in the main cabin of the steamer. One of the men was a big, hard sort with red muttonchop whiskers and a head bald as a pigeon’s egg, dressed in a black broadcloth suit. The other was a slender, well-dressed black man with piercing dark eyes. Marsh sat them down and served them coffee. “Well?” he demanded. “Where is she?”

The bald man blew on his coffee and scowled. “Don’t know.”

“I paid you to find my steamer,” Marsh said.

“She ain’t to be found, Cap’n Marsh,” the black man said. “Hank and me looked, I tell you that.”

“Ain’t sayin’ we found nothin’,” the bald man said. “Only that we ain’t got the steamer pinned down yet.”

“All right,” Abner Marsh said. “Tell me what you found.”

The black man pulled a sheet of paper from inside his jacket and unfolded it. “Most of your steamer’s crew and near all her passengers left at Bayou Sara, after that yaller fever scare. Next morning, your Fevre Dream steamed out. Went upriver, from all accounts. We found some woodyard niggers who swear she wooded up with ’em. Maybe they was lyin’, but I can’t see why. So we know the direction your steamer went in. We got enough folks to swear they seen her go by. Or they think they did, anyway.”

“Only she never reached Natchez,” his partner put in. “That’s.. . what… eight, ten hours upriver.”

“Less,” said Abner Marsh. “The Fevre Dream was a damn fast boat.”

“Fast or not, she got herself lost ’tween Bayou Sara and Natchez.”

“The Red River branches off in there,” Marsh said.

The black man nodded. “But your boat ain’t been in Shreveport nor Alexandria neither, and none of the woodyards we checked can recall any Fevre Dream.”

“Damn,” said Marsh.

“Maybe she did sink,” Cat Grove suggested.

“We got more,” said the bald detective. He took a swallow of coffee. “Your steamer was never seen in Natchez, you understand. But some of the folks you were lookin’ for were.”

“Go on.” Marsh said.

“We spent a lot of time on Silver Street,” he said. “Askin’ around. Man called Raymond Ortega, he was known there, and he was on your list, too. He came back one night, early in September, paid a social call to one of the nabobs on top of the hill, and a lot of calls down under the hill. Had four other men with him. One of ’em fits your description of this Sour Billy Tipton. They stayed about a week. Did some interesting things. Hired a lot of men, whites, colored, didn’t matter. You know the kind of men you can hire from Natchez-under-the-hill.”

Abner Marsh knew all right. Sour Billy Tipton had scared off Marsh’s crew and replaced them with a gang of cutthroats like himself. “Steamboatmen?” he asked.

The bald man nodded. “There’s more. This Tipton visited Fork-in-the-Road.”

“It’s a big slave mart,” the black partner said.

“He bought a mess of slaves. Paid with gold.” The bald man pulled a twenty-dollar gold piece from his pocket and set it on the table. “Like this. Bought some other stuff back in Natchez, too. Paid the same way.”

“What kind of stuff?” Marsh asked.

“Slaver’s stuff,” the black man said. “Manacles. Chains. Hammers.

“Some paint, too,” said the other.

And suddenly the truth of it burst on Abner Marsh like a shower of fireworks. “Jesus God,” he swore. “ Paint! No wonder no one has seen her. Goddamn. They’re smarter than I thought, and I’m an eggsuckin’ fool not to have seen it straight off!” He slammed his big fist down on the table hard enough to make the coffee cups jump.

“We figure just what you’re thinkin’,” the bald man said. “They painted her. Changed her name.”

“A little paint ain’t enough to change a famous steamer,” objected Yoerger.

“No,” said Abner Marsh, “but she wasn’t famous yet. Hell, we made one damn trip down the river, never did make it back up. How many folks goin’ to recognize her? How many even heard of her? There’s new boats comin’ out most every day. Slap a new name on her wheelhouse, maybe some new colors here and there, you got a new boat.”

“But the Fevre Dream was big, ”said Yoerger. “And fast, you said.”

“Lots of big steamers on the damn river,” Marsh said. “Oh, she was bigger than nearly all of them except the Eclipse, but how many folks can tell that at a look, without another boat to measure her by? As for fast, hell, it’s easy enough to keep her times down. That way she don’t get talked about.” Marsh was furious. That was just what they’d do, he knew; run her slow, at well under her capability, and thereby keep her inconspicuous. Somehow that seemed obscene to him.