"Fevre Dream" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R. R.)

CHAPTER SEVEN

St. Louis, July 1857

The Fevre Dream lay up in St. Louis for twelve days.

It was a busy time for the entire crew, but for Joshua York and his strange companions. Abner Marsh was up and about early every morning, and on the streets by ten, making calls on shippers and hotel proprietors, talking up his boat and trying to scare up business. He had a mess of handbills printed for Fevre River Packets-now that he had more than one packet again-and hired some boys to paste them up all over the city. Drinking and eating in all the best places, Marsh told and retold the story of how the Fevre Dream took the Southerner, to make sure the word got around. He even took out advertisements in three of the local papers.

The lightning pilots that Abner Marsh had hired for the lower river came aboard as soon as the Fevre Dream put in to St. Louis, and drew their wages for the time they’d idled away waiting. Pilots didn’t come cheap, especially pilots like these two, but Marsh didn’t begrudge the money too much, since he wanted the best for his steamer. Once paid, the new men resumed their idling; pilots drew full wages all the time, but didn’t do a lick of work until the steamer was in the river. Anything besides piloting was beneath their dignity.

The two pilots Marsh had found had their own individual styles of idling, though. Dan Albright, prim and taciturn and fashionable, strolled aboard the day the Fevre Dream put in, surveyed the boat, the engines, and the pilot house, nodded with satisfaction, and immediately took up residence in his cabin. He spent his days reading in the steamer’s well-stocked library, and played a few games of chess with Jonathon Jeffers in the main saloon, although Jeffers invariably beat him. Karl Framm, on the other hand, could usually be found in the billiard halls along the riverfront, grinning crookedly beneath his wide-brimmed felt hat and bragging about how him and his new boat were going to run everyone else off the river. Framm had a heller’s reputation. He liked to joke about how he kept one wife in St. Louis, one in New Orleans, and a third in Natchez-under-the-hill.

Abner Marsh didn’t have the time to worry over much about what his pilots were doing; he was too busy with this task or that one. Nor did he see much of Joshua York and his friends, although he understood that York frequently went on long nightly walks into the city, often with Simon, the silent one. Simon was also learning how to mix drinks, since Joshua had told Marsh he had a mind to use him as night bartender on the run down to New Orleans.

Marsh did frequently see his partner over supper, which Joshua York was in the habit of taking in the main cabin with the other officers, before he retired to his own cabin or the library to read newspapers, packets of which were delivered to him every day, fresh off incoming steamers. Once York announced that he was going in to the city to see a group of players perform. He invited Abner Marsh and the other officers to accompany him, but Marsh was having none of it, so York wound up going with Jonathon Jeffers. “Poems and plays,” Marsh muttered to Hairy Mike Dunne as they sauntered off, “it makes you wonder what this damn river is comin’ to.” Afterward, Jeffers began to teach York to play chess.

“He has quite a mind, Abner,” Jeffers told Marsh a few days later, on the morning of their eighth day in St. Louis.

“Who?”

“Why, Joshua of course. I taught him the moves two days ago. Last night I found him in the saloon playing over the score of one of Morphy’s games, from one of those New York newspapers he takes. A strange man. How much do you know about him?”

Marsh frowned. He didn’t want his people getting too curious about Joshua York; that was part of the bargain. “Joshua don’t like to talk much about himself. I don’t ask him. A man’s past is none of my business, I figure. You ought to take the same attitude, Mister Jeffers. In fact, see that you do.”

The clerk arched his thin, dark eyebrows. “If you say so, Cap’n,” he replied. But there was a cool smile on his face that Abner Marsh found disquieting.

Jeffers was not the only one to ask questions. Hairy Mike came to Marsh, too, and said that the roustabouts and stokers were spreading some funny talk about York and his four guests, and did Marsh want him to do anything about it?

“What kind of talk?”

Hairy Mike shrugged eloquently. “Bout him only comin’ out at night. Bout those queer friends o’ his, too. You know Tom, who stokes the middle larboard? He been tellin’ this story-says that night we left Louisville, well, you ’member how thick the skeeters were, well, Tom says he saw that old Simon down on the main deck, jest kind o’ looking around, and a skeeter landed on his hand, and he went and swatted it with his other hand. Squashed it. But you know how full up skeeters git sometimes, so when you squash ’em they jest bust with the blood. Tom says that happen’d with the skeeter on the back of Simon’s hand, so it smeared up all bloody when he got it. Only then, Tom tells it, that Simon jest kind of stared at his hand for the longest while, then lifted it up, and damned if he didn’t lick it clean.”

Abner Marsh scowled. “You tell your boy Tom that he better stop telling such stories, or he’s goin’ to be stokin’ the middle larboard on somebody else’s steamer.” Hairy Mike nodded, brought his iron billet into his other hand with a meaty thwack, and turned to go. But Marsh stopped him. “No,” he said. “Wait. You tell him not to go spreadin’ no stories. But if he sees anything else funny, he should come to you, or to me. Tell him we’ll give him a half-dollar.”

“He’ll lie for the half-dollar.”

“Well, forget the half-dollar then, but you tell him the rest of it.”

The more Abner thought about Tom’s story, the more it bothered him. He was just as glad that Joshua York was going to install Simon as bartender, where he’d be out in public and a man could keep an eye on him. Marsh had never liked morticians, and Simon still reminded him of one something ungodly, when he didn’t remind him of one of their patrons, that is. He only hoped that Simon didn’t go licking up no mosquitoes while he was serving drinks to the cabin passengers. That kind of thing could ruin a boat’s reputation awful fast.

Marsh soon put the incident out of his mind, and plunged back into business. On the night before their scheduled departure, however, something else bothered him. He had called on Joshua York in his cabin to go over a few details of their trip. York was sitting at his desk, with his slim ivory-handled knife in hand, slicing an article out of a newspaper. He and Marsh chatted briefly for a few minutes about the business at hand, and Marsh was about to take his leave when he noticed a copy of the Democrat on York’s desk. “They were supposed to run one of our advertisements today,” Marsh said, reaching for the paper. “You finished with this, Joshua?”

York dismissed the paper with a wave of his hand. “Take it if you’d like,” he said.

Abner Marsh carried the paper under his arm to the main cabin, and paged through it while Simon made him a drink. He was annoyed. He couldn’t locate their advertisement. Of course, it might not be an omission; York had sliced out a story on the page that backed up the shipping news, so there was a hole just in the prime place. Marsh drained his glass, folded up the paper, and went forward to the clerk’s office.

“You got the latest number of the Democrat?” Marsh asked Jeffers. “I think that damn Blair left out my advertisement.”

“It’s there yonder,” Jeffers replied, “but he didn’t. Look on the shipping page.”

And sure enough, there it was, a box smack in the middle of a column of similar boxes: