Over the past twenty-four hours the river had fallen still farther. It was going to take some tricky maneuvering to come away from the vicinity of Hitchins' Chute: the glassy brown surface was broken by a hundred splinters and daggers of black snags barely showing above the water, and by a hundred more deadly arrowheads of ripple that marked others still hidden. Davis and Gleet, rowing the skiff, had to back or push a number of times to keep the little craft from tangling itself in the floating branches, and Mr. Quince, sitting stiffly amidships with a satchel full of bandages and medicines, winced visibly every time the boat so much as rocked.
As Davis had said, there was a clear space of thirty or forty feet on the bank, perhaps twenty feet above the muddy water and ooze of the river's brim. Behind it the trees formed a misty wall, which curved inward on both ends toward the river. At the downstream end the land rose into a higher bank above the chute, where the trees grew thicker near the now-invisible water. At the upstream end a tangle of willows and cottonwoods hovered over the jumble of leafy trash that the retreating water had left. The final shadows of night seemed to linger beneath the trees.
Behind January a slave dropped an armload of wood, and Cain shouted, “You black bastard, I've seen trained donkeys at the circus less clumsy than you!”
The skiff scraped the mud bank just west of the chute, and Molloy leaped ashore, as if impatient to kill his man and be done with it and on his way. Hannibal fished a flask from his pocket, then put it back unsipped. He looked very small and thin stepping ashore among the tangle of deadfalls, jetsam, and matted leaves.
The seconds conferred for a few minutes, then loaded both Mr. Byrne's pistols and held them out to their principals to choose.
Twenty yards, when paced off, looked appallingly short.
Rose's hand closed around January's.
A raven burst, squawking, from the stand of oaks that marked the entrance to Hitchins' Chute, like a vengeful ghost in the gray dawnlight.
Davis held up his handkerchief, and let it drop. The roar of the shots ringing out together was like a cannon.
Molloy spun like a kicked rag-doll, arms flung out, blood spraying from his head. His knees buckled and he dropped.
Hannibal stood for what seemed like nearly a minute as Gleet and Davis strode to the body; Mr. Quince sat down very suddenly on the nearest deadfall tree and put his head between his knees. In the gray morning mists, the pistol still in his hand, Hannibal looked absolutely alone as he lowered the weapon, then let it slip from his fingers. He turned, and walked as shakily as a drunken man to the edge of the river, where he fell to his knees and was violently sick.
EIGHTEEN
“Get your tools, boy.” A rough hand gripped January's arm. “The man needs a real doctor, not that quack.” The next moment Jubal Cain leaned over the rail and bellowed, “Send the skiff back, damn you!” to the men on shore.
Davis pressed a hand to the chest of the man at whose side he knelt, glanced across at the obviously useless Quince, and said something to Gleet. The slave-dealer grunted a reply but went to the skiff and began to row, while Davis got to his feet and walked over to Hannibal. From the engine-room, January could hear shouting beginning— including a whoop of joy from old Winslow, who was apparently the only man with faith in Hannibal's aim or luck. Mr. Souter came running down the steps in a panic, and January heard Tredgold gabbling, “What are we going to do . . . ?”
“Idiot,” grunted Cain, thrusting January along ahead of him to the bow-deck. His yellow fox-eyes glinted under the white slant of brows and his pockmarked face was grim. “Should have thought of that. . . . Guy! Marcus! Zack! Gonna need hands to carry that paddy bastard's corpse . . . Porter! Clay! And the rest of you trim the boat, god damn you! Nothing more on shore to see.”
The men of his coffle promptly retreated. Nobody else did.
“What the hell they gonna do for a pilot now?” demanded Gleet as he maneuvered the little boat against the rails. “We're losin' money every day, feedin' these damn niggers—”
“What the hell you think?” snarled Cain. “Man doesn't need to have nerves to guide a boat. Just brains enough not to get himself killed over yellow-headed bitches that aren't any better than they should be. Get in the boat, god damn you,” he added, half throwing his remaining men down into the skiff. As he climbed down after them, January saw Mrs. Fischer thrust her way through the little gathering of women at the promenade rail, staring out across the water at Molloy's body lying on the weedy bank.
January was the first ashore when the skiff scraped mud a few feet from the corpse. “Mr. Sefton is unwounded,” said Davis, who had returned to Molloy's side, probably to discourage the attentions of the ravens and buzzards that had already begun to circle overhead. “But deeply shaken, as any man of sensitive nature would be . . .”
Quince was crouched beside Hannibal, still rather greenish himself, proffering a bottle and spoon at which Hannibal was shaking his head with weary nausea. “I assure you,” Quince was saying, “that a decoction of boiled lettuce-root and honey is a sovereign remedy for complaints of the stomach.”
“Pray do not corrupt me with pallid brews and weak elixirs,” whispered Hannibal as January came near. “And the problem is not my stomach but my nerves . . . and probably my heart. Nothing will do for it but laudanum, and lots of it. . . .”
“Are you all right?” The fiddler was still shaking all over, as if with deathly cold despite the humid heat already thick in the air.
Hannibal responded with a cracked laugh. “As all right as any man is who has slain his first man.
