gunboat madam backed off while Titus looked at the Negro bartender, finding fear in the man’s yellow eyes. He immediately turned his black face away, then stared down at his hands bound in whorehouse rags.
“Bass got him a fine idea,” Kingsbury whispered, wheeling about to shove Ovatt ahead of him with a jab of his elbow. “Go! Go!”
Shivering in the shreds of his torn shirt, Titus stood there a moment in the wake of the others as they ducked out to the deck. Root stopped at the canvas flaps, whirled about, and leaned back in to snag Titus by the arm— hauling him right out to what there was of deck between the brothel’s canvas wall and the gunnel’s grayed wood.
“You’re leading us, god-blessit!” Root growled, back to his normal ill-tempered self.
As Titus vaulted off the gunboat and landed on the wharf beside the others, Kingsbury pressed his face in close, staring intently at Bass’s eyes, flicking his gaze back and forth. “Know where you’re headed?”
Titus pointed.
Nodding, the pilot asked, “Your head clear enough to get us through that timber and away from any crowds?”
“Like them what’s coming now?” Ovatt announced in a shrill voice.
They turned, gazing north along the crude wharf where the low rows of clapboard card houses and grogshops lay clustered. Two hundred yards off danced the flare of at least a dozen torches held high above a considerable knot of boisterous men. From the crowd came loud voices, noise without the words. Little matter: only a deaf and blind man would fail to understand the intent of that murderous crowd moving their way.
“Take us to the timber, Titus Bass!” Kingsbury hissed in agony, shoving the youngster ahead of him into that narrow patch of shadow between a pair of weathered buildings, each of those shanties about to lean its shoulder against the other as they slowly sank into disrepair with each new year.
Bass drew up at the back of the shacks, peered into the dark. Immediately behind the short streets that branched off the main thoroughfare stretched along the wharf, thick timber rose against the pale bluff. Without signaling the men behind him, Titus darted from the shadows of that alley, making for the shadows of the trees. Once he was beneath their cover, he waited for them all to catch up. Kingsbury was the last, hobbling up, gasping, clutching his side, his pasty face beaded in sweat.
“You gonna make it, Hames?” Root asked, wrapping an arm around the pilot’s shoulder.
Kingsbury looked up, his eyes narrowing. “We allays have us some scrap or another coming downriver, don’t we, Reuben?”
“I s’pose we do.”
“Good you remember that,” Hames replied. “I don’t want neither of you go blaming Titus Bass for the trouble been dogging us this trip.”
Ovatt and Root glanced at the youth a moment. Then both of them shook their heads.
“Only thing I wanna do is get you back to the boat,” Heman declared.
“And get us the hell out of Natchez,” Root added.
“Maybe things cool down by the time we get back here again come next summer,” Kingsbury told them. Then with a thin-lipped nod he instructed Titus to lead on.
Bass swore his heart was going to leap out of his chest or pop right out of his mouth, the way it made his head pound, when they hadn’t gone all that far and he had to shush them. They all knelt back in the timbered shadows when the frantic jig of torchlight drew close—splashes of light dancing just on the far side of the low- roofed shanties. More frightening still was the sound of that mob: snarling, snapping, its quest for blood like a living thing that snaked along the wharf, headed for Annie Christmas’s gunboat. It reminded Titus of how he’d once watched a cottonmouth eat a field gopher, the dying prey slowly drawn along the length of the snake’s scaly body.
As the mob thundered into the distance, they moved on into the welcome darkness. For now the four of them had a little time. Not much. But it might just be enough.
As he reached the side of the flatboat, Bass watched the woman sit up like a shadow suddenly taking shape out of the night. Her dark form stood, pulling that ratty old blanket about her shoulders. She stepped to the side when he stopped at the gunnel, able to make out the red glow of embers and low flames she had shielded behind her.
“You fellas home earlier’n I figured you—”
“Help us get Hames aboard, ma’am,” Reuben demanded.
Immediately crawling over the crates, she held down both her hands, the blanket falling from her shoulders. Rearing back, she pulled with all her might as Ovatt and Root hoisted the wounded pilot from the wharf, his body dragged against the side of the flatboat and onto the gunnel, where Kingsbury lay gasping, groaning.
“You shot?” she asked.
He clamped down on his lower lip and shook his head, eyes moistening.
“They cut you?”
“No,” he huffed, perhaps the pain easing.
“Your side?”
When he nodded, she carefully lifted his left arm braced against his belly. “I do believe they broke your ribs,” the woman declared. “How many, we’ll just have to find out.”
“Ain’t got time for none of that now,” Ovatt snarled at her as he pushed past. “I’ll take the rudder, fellas. Reuben, get them hawsers freed so we can push off.”
She watched the two move off in different directions, then turned to look at Kingsbury once more before she snagged hold of Titus’s jerkin.
“What happened out there tonight?”
“I don’t know,” he answered sheepishly, hungover already. As if his very own mother had caught him at something wicked and now he was about to pay the high price for having his fun. “I was drunk. I dunno—”
“We’re leaving for Nawlins,” Kingsbury announced, sprawled beneath them. “You ain’t got folks to stay with here, ma’am—”
“No, I don’t.”
“Then you got one choice or another,” and the pilot visibly sagged with the effort the talk took out of him.
So she spoke up while he gathered his breath. “I can jump off this here boat and take my chances till I can get a way north on the Trace,” Beulah declared. “Or—I can throw in with you fellas all the way to Orlins.”
The pilot swiped the back of a hand across his bloodied mouth and replied, “That’s only choices you got.”
“We’re free!” Root cried, flinging the last hawser across the gunnel, then slinging himself aboard.
“Push us off, you two!” Ovatt bellowed. “Give him a goddamned hand, Titus!”
“I ain’t rightly got but one choice,” the woman said quietly as Titus started to move off, snatching up one of the long snag poles.
Bass stopped, turned to hear what she said so very quietly as Beulah knelt beside their wounded pilot.
“You fellas picked me out of the river. You give me a ride on your boat when every last one of you ’cept that young’un believed in all your hearts what bad luck it was to have a woman on your boat—”
“I ain’t … none of us blaming you for this,” Kingsbury interrupted, then coughed soddenly.
“Damn,” she said with a sad wag of her head. “Sounds of it: bet you gone and poked one of them ribs right through your lights.”
Kingsbury turned his head to glance at the wharf Root was pushing his pole against with a loud growl. As he heaved against his long hardwood pole, Bass noticed the flare of the torches bobbing in the distance, this time headed back upriver. In their direction.
The pilot rolled toward Beulah slightly, warning, “This be your last chance to jump off, woman.”
With a shake of her head she nearly whispered, “And if I do jump off—just who the hell gonna take care of you men?”
“He ain’t getting any better, is he?” Titus asked.
The woman looked up from the feverish, unconscious Kingsbury, then wagged her head. “Nothing more I can do. It ain’t in my hands no more.”
