Dance on the Wind by Terry C. Johnston

Author:Terry C. Johnston [Johnston, Terry C.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2010-07-09T07:00:00+00:00

“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.”

If it wasn’t in her skilled, sure hands, Titus wondered—then in whose hands did the life of Hames Kingsbury lie? It troubled him that the woman expected him to understand her … when he had no earthly idea who might hold the power to save the man.

First off, he lost Ebenezer Zane. Now another man clung tenuously to life. No matter that he had people around him at this moment, Titus had rarely felt so alone.

He raised his eyes from the pilot’s pale, clammy face, looking at Root manning the gouger, turning to gaze again at Ovatt stationed at the stern rudder.

“It’s good water from here on down,” Heman had told him earlier that morning as the sun came up milk-pale in a cold sky. “I could get this broadhorn down to Nawlins, steering it on my lonesome, if’n I had to. Easy enough, though there’s cypress swamp what can fool a man if he don’t keep his nose locked in the main channel. But don’t you fret none, Titus. I’ll holler when I need you on one oar or t’other.”

Many, many night fires this crew of four had told him how they’d worked the rivers together for more than a decade, without much bloodletting at all: a few fights, a few knife cuts sewn up with the same thread they used to repair their clothing, mostly a lot of good-natured head thumping in the midst of one hell of a lot of work. As much as there had been Indian scares in years past, they had never caused much more than an anxious moment or two for Ebenezer Zane’s boatmen—nothing more than threats from a far bank now and again.

But what with that old pilot resting among the mud and catfish and sawyers at the bottom of the Mississippi, Heman Ovatt was beginning to think things had changed for the worse. And what was usually nothing more than some bruises and perhaps a broken bone now and then whenever they tied up for a frolic at Louisville’s red-candle district, Natchez-Under-the-Hill, or even the Swamp in New Orleans—now their raucous brawling had turned deadly. For no reason they could figure out.

Except that it just might have to do with settling an old score with Ebenezer Zane.

Kingsbury coughed in his sleep. Bass sensed the pilot slipping away from him too.

Hames had passed out about the time they were pushing free of the wharf, with that mob drawing ever closer below those bouncing torches, their discordant voices looming louder out of the dark. One of that drunken lot had spotted them making for the main channel of the river, shrieked his warning to the others, and a great cry of frustration and disappointment had gone up. More than a handful of that rabble had yanked pistols from their belts and fired at the southbound flatboat.

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