Thieves Of Mercy

Wendy did the same.

“Shall we go?” Molly asked.

Wendy nodded. Once again, words abandoned her. She was not sure what to say. It was perhaps the strangest evening of her life. It was perhaps the most exhilarating.

FOUR

Unless some competent person of education, system, and brains is put over each division of this [River Defense] fleet it will, in my judgment, prove an utter failure. There is little or no discipline or subordination- too much “steamboat” and too little of the “man-of-war” to be very effective.

MAJOR GENERAL M. LOVELL TO GENERAL G.W. RANDOLPH, SECRETARY OF WAR, CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA

Samuel Bowater ran forward, reached the bottom of the ladder leading to the hurricane deck, pivoted around the rail, and raced up. He hit the upper deck running, passed the walking beam working up and down like a teeter- totter, made straight for the wheelhouse. A lifetime of his father’s strict instruction concerning the conduct of a gentleman, fifteen years of observing the decorum expected of a naval officer, were all obliterated by blind rage. Mississippi Mike Sullivan had set him up, played him like a flute. No one had ever done that to him before.

He reached the wheelhouse, threw open the door. He was breathing hard. In the window on the opposite side he caught his reflection, the picture of a feral and frightening thing, like one of Mr. Darwin’s ape-men. But Sullivan was not there.

“Where-where the hell is Sullivan?” Bowater gasped. Baxter, still at the helm, looked over at him. The cheroot was shorter now but still smoldering. His face was almost expressionless, maybe a bit amused. Men in a rage, looking to kill Sullivan, were probably common enough.

“Salon,” he said, nodding in that general direction.

Bowater cursed, slammed the door, stamped back across the hurricane deck. Sullivan must have gone down the starboard side ladder while Bowater charged up the port. He felt the fury ebb as he took the steps of the ladder fast and hit the main deck below. By the time he reached the salon door, his mood had changed from an irrational hysteria to a more controlled fury.

He kicked the door in, stamped into the big room. Oil lamps on the bulkheads lit the place with a warm, dull light. The riverboat men seemed to be celebrating, holding bottles aloft, shouting, while Bowater’s men stood in a tight and angry cluster to starboard.

“Captain Bowater!” Mike Sullivan extracted himself from the crowd, crossed the deck with hand extended. “Captain, that was a damn well-done thing, back there!”

The bonhomie, which would have irritated Bowater at any time, now made the fury boil again. “You bastard!” he shouted, taking a step toward Sullivan, so they were face to face, though Bowater had to look up to meet Sullivan’s eyes. “You son of a bitch, you played me… help you… steal a goddamned…”

“Ah, hell, Captain, we was just havin some fun! How we do it, here on the river. Come on, now, have a drink and forget it!”

Sullivan held up a bottle. Bowater drew back his arm and hit Sullivan in the face, as hard as he was able to drive his fist, hit him right in the jaw. The pain in his hand was like an explosion, as if he had shattered every bone clear up to his elbow.

Sullivan pivoted around and staggered back, but he did not fall, which was bad, because Bowater had reckoned on laying him out flat with that one blow.

The river pilot turned back to Bowater, blood running from his mouth, and his face was hard to read. Bowater shook out his hand, gasping at the pain, and got ready to take Sullivan on as he came. He had not been in a fistfight since his first year at the Navy School, but he was ready. The blood was up.

The sullen tension in the salon broke like a thunderstorm and the space was filled with shouting and pounding feet. Bowater’s blue-water sailors stormed across the cabin, leaping over tables, snatching up chairs, howling like banshees, and the riverboat men raced to meet them halfway, and then they were into it.

Sullivan straightened, balled his hands into fists. Behind him Bowater saw Ruffin Tanner, holding the back rails of a chair in both hands, drawing it back like he was swinging a baseball bat.

The chair came around, describing a wide arc, and hit Sullivan on the neck and shoulders, exploding into fragments, knocking Mississippi Mike sideways and a bit off balance.

Sullivan wheeled around to face this new threat. Tanner was standing there with the shattered remains of the chair in his hands, like twin clubs. He swung for Sullivan’s head and Sullivan snatched the chair rail in midswing, and while his arm was up Tanner drove the other rail into Sullivan’s gut, like he was thrusting a cutlass into him. Sullivan doubled over, and as his face came down it met Tanner’s knee coming up.

Damn, Bowater thought. His past fistfights were more gentlemanly affairs, boxing, really. This was a brawl, ugly and brutish.

Sullivan staggered, but still the man did not go down. He made a wounded and cornered animal sound, swung a big paw, and connected with Tanner’s head, sending the sailor sprawling back into Seth Williams and one of the riverboat men, who were bound together with left arms while they flailed at one another with their right fists. The three of them fell in a heap on the deck.

Bowater understood the rules of engagement now. He cocked his arm, ready to smash Sullivan on the neck, then considered what that would do to his shattered hand. He cocked his leg instead to give him a solid kick in the lower back, when out of the corner of his eye he caught an image of a man sailing through the air, actually airborne, a flash of red-checked shirt and thick beard coming at him, and then the man hit him at waist level and carried him down to the deck.

They came down in a tangle of confused limbs, with no room to fight. Bowater might have had only a half- dozen fights in his life, but he had years of fencing, and that gave him an instinctual sense for an opening. He saw one now, slamming the man’s face with his left elbow, one, two, three solid blows before the riverboat man was able to extract himself. Bowater rolled on his back, planted a foot on the man’s chest, and sent him sprawling.

Scrambling to his feet, Bowater shouted in agony as he thoughtlessly put his weight on his right hand. The salon was a battlefield now, blue-water sailors in their bibbed pullovers mixing it up with the wild men of the General Page, clusters of fighting men, knots of two and three hammering with fists and parts of broken chairs. A table flew across the room and brought Dick Merrow down, and the sailor took one of the riverboat’s black gang down with him.

Bowater gulped air, considered shouting for the men to stop it, but that was absurd, he could see it. They would stop when they could no longer move.

This is insane!

And then from his right, unseen, a fist came around and plowed into Bowater’s stomach, doubling him over. Bowater flung himself shoulder first into his attacker, bringing them both down to the deck. With his left hand he snatched up part of the chair Tanner had hit Sullivan with, all concern for the relative sanity of the situation lost in his powerful need to hit the son of a bitch who had punched him.

At the moment that Tanner’s chair met Sullivan’s unyielding back, Hieronymus Taylor was standing in the clear space between the boilers and the massive frame of the General Page’s engine. He was listening to the Page’s chief engineer, the short, wiry, nearly bald-save for a fringe of greasy hair around his head-Spence Guthrie. Guthrie was complaining, not an unusual circumstance. This time the subject was shortages in Memphis: coal, boiler plate, machine shops, piping, sheet lead, prostitutes.

Taylor ’s eyes wandered over the main steam line, caught the little bits of rust lurking against flanges. His ears heard, along with Guthrie’s litany of complaints, a noise from the crosshead that was not quite right. The pssst and thump of steam and piston told him that somewhere an alignment was off, just a bit. But it was not his engine room.

“Got three spare fire tubes. Three. And when they’s gone, god-damned if I know where we’ll get more,” Guthrie was saying. He turned to the fireman. “Come on now, get that damper open, all the way! She’ll take three more pounds of pressure or I ain’t Spence Guthrie!”

Taylor ’s eyes flickered over the steam gauge mounted on the face of the scotch boiler. The needle was