Брайан Гарфилд - Gangway!

“I’d rather be called Hey-You.”

“In your line of work you probably are, most of the time.”

“That was the first time in my life I ever did anything like that,” she said.

He just looked at her.

She shifted around a bit, looking defensive. “That’s the truth,” she said.

“Fine,” he said. “Now tell me a lie. I want to see the difference.”

“No, really.” She leaned toward him, her expression earnest and brave but tragic. “My folks are down in San Francisco,” she said, “and all my money was stolen from me, and...”

“Vangie,” he said. “Just pretend you told me the whole story, all right?”

Innocent bewilderment spread across her face. “Story?”

“Let’s just say,” he suggested, “that I’m not quite as gullible as some of these acorn-crackers you’re used to around here.”

She would have had a comment on that, but he’d hardly got the statement out before he was into another relapse. Evangeline left him in disgust and took a turn around the deck. When she returned he was still draped over the rail with one eye on the big toughs who stood in a circle around the stack of gold boxes.

He looked like a consumptive with the wadded handkerchief pressed against his mouth, but she knew that wasn’t it. She’d never seen such a persistent case of seasickness before. It was a terrible thing. She patted his shoulder. “I’m sorry. Really.”

He looked at her balefully, but when the relapse ended he straightened up and said, “It’s supposed to be funny.”

“I don’t think it’s funny.”

“You don’t, do you,” he said. He was looking at her in a different way now.

“Well it must be very painful. I mean I don’t see anything to laugh about.”

“That’s real sweet of you, Vangie.”

“You’ll feel better when we get to dry land.”

“Yeah.”

Liking him, feeling a strange sort of comradeship, a kind of rapport, she said, “You still haven’t told me your name.”

“Uh,” he said. He looked pale, but alert. “It’s, uh, John Lexington.”

So much for rapport. “What do people mostly call you?” she asked. “Mister Avenue?”

It was his turn to display injured innocence. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I maybe never was in New York City,” she said, “but I’ve heard of it. And I’ve heard of Lexington Avenue.”

“Well, it’s a name,” he said. “They called it after somebody, didn’t they?”

“Not after you. Come on, now, I told you my real name.”

“E-van-ge-line Kemp,” he said slowly, working the name over like a tough steak. “Yeah, you probably did.”

“I did.”

“Mine’s Gabe,” he said.

“Gabe what?”

“Beauchamps.”

“Bo-champs?”

“Right.”

“What’s the Gabe stand for?”

“Gabe,” he said. “Excuse me.”

She watched him go into another relapse, sagging over the rail once more like a mattress hanging out a window to air. She studied him with a mixture of sympathy and awe. “Don’t you ever empty?”

“Uuuurrrrg.”

Gabe watched the water go by. How could there be so much water in the world?

“There it is,” the girl said.

He went on peering droop-lidded at the water. Whatever it was, he didn’t see it. “Where?”

“Not down there. Over there. San Francisco!” She made it sound like a fanfare of cornets.

He lifted his head — it weighed a ton — and saw one of the world’s biggest small towns. “Oh, that’s fine,” he said. “That’s just dandy.”

“We’ve got tall buildings and everything,” she said, on the defensive again.

“You do not. You have short buildings on tall hills. There’s a difference.”

“We’ve even got a cable car.”

“A what?”

“Never mind. You’ll see.”

If he lived that long. He collapsed over the rail, wishing he were dead.

But he still had one eye on that gold shipment to the Mint.

The riverboat docked, not without much wrenching and heaving. At long last, clutching Vangie’s arm Gabe tottered ashore.

“There now,” she said. “Isn’t it better to be on dry land?”

Dry land. He lifted one foot and studied his shoe with disapproval. “In New York,” he said, “we think of mud as something we like to get rid of.”

It made her angry again. “You should just have stayed in New York,” she told him.

Gabe looked around. “I know I should have.”

It was bleak to look at. From Chicago west the climate had at least been sunny. Sunny all the way to Sacramento and even sunny on the riverboat. But here the clouds seemed to be attached to the tops of the hills. Everything was grey and dreary. It matched Gabe’s mood. Fifty-five cents in his pocket and nobody waiting to meet him except some “associate” of Twill’s. You could bet there wouldn’t be any help forthcoming from that quarter.

The passengers had gathered their luggage and there was a stream of people moving past Gabe and the girl and on in toward town. Hansoms and victorias were drawn up to meet the more important arrivals. The waterfront streets were jammed with a traffic of pedestrians, horses and wagons. Narrow streets, he noted with approval. Almost narrow enough to qualify as city streets. At least they weren’t like those half-mile-wide flats of rutted dust that passed for streets in the towns he’d passed through the past five days.

It was about six o’clock and the sun would be up for another two or three hours, which didn’t matter much because the clouds blotted it out completely, obscuring the tops of the hills and sending wispy tendrils down toward the Bay. Gaslights and oil lamps were lit everywhere along the streets. It was freezing goddam cold for August.

Horse-drawn trolleys clanged past along the waterfront and there was a swaggering mass to the crowd that shifted like heavy liquid through the alleys, streets and piers. Forty or fifty ships were lined up along the Bay shore, smokestacks and masts making a forest along the docks; there was a great deal of racket. It wasn’t busy enough or loud enough to make him feel at home, but at least it wasn’t quite as bad as what he’d been braced to find here.

He began to look at faces. He had no way of knowing who Twill’s associate was but, if it was somebody Twill knew well enough to trust, it might just be somebody recognizable. Not that Gabe expected to recognize him as an individual, but he might spot the type. You didn’t see many Hell’s Kitchen mugs around here.

But there were too many faces flowing past. None of them drew his attention. Was Twill’s man somewhere in the crowd, just watching? There was no reason to expect the man to make himself known. Then again there was no reason not to. The guy might very well come up to Gabe and drop a few words of warning.

But nobody did.

Vangie was starting off. “Well? You coming?”

“Just a minute.” He turned and looked back down the pier toward the riverboat. He hated the riverboat so that wasn’t what he was looking at; if he never saw the New World again it would be far too soon.

What he was interested in was the gold. The big guys were unloading it from the deck. There was a wagon drawn up by the freight gangplank and he could read its sign from here: UNITED STATES MINT. Half a dozen horseback guards. The big guys were bringing the stuff down a box at a time, the same way they’d done the reverse in Sacramento. As the pile on deck diminished and the pile in the wagon grew, the number of big guys with each pile shifted accordingly. In the end almost all the big guys were on the dock, standing in a circle around the wagon, shoulder to shoulder, rifles ready for the Battle of Gettysburg.