Dark Voyage of the Mittie Stephens by Johnny D. Boggs

Author:Johnny D. Boggs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dorchester Publishing
Published: 2004-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

“It’s me,” Randow told her.

“Bobby!” Feeling her knees start to buckle, Laura dropped on the bunk. He stood in the corner, hat in one hand, grip in the other. “You took ten years off my life, sir, and . . .”—she lowered her voice; if a principled man like Homer Kellogg found Randow in her room, they’d both be put ashore—“what are you doing here?”

Randow let the luggage slide to the floor. “Six men were trying to kill me,” he said. “In New Orleans . . . at. . . .”

She finished for him: “The cemetery, the one where the body was found. Victor. . . .” She had always suspected that, after the discovery of Randow’s empty revolver, the story she had heard from LeBreton and read about in the newspaper.

He picked up immediately: “Desiderio. I shot him. . . .” He quickly added, “In self-defense, Laura.”

“I know,” she said. At least, she thought she knew. How well did she really know Bobby Randow? How well could she know anyone who didn’t even know himself? Her eyes brightened. “You remember . . . everything?”

She barely heard his sigh and curse. Randow stepped away from the wall and slapped his thigh with his hat. “No. That’s the . . .”—he shuddered down another oath—“irksome thing. I only remember part of it, and small parts . . . the cemetery, shooting Desiderio . . . and most of it’s smudged. Somebody called me ‘reverend’, and this was either before or after I shot the guy. It was after I went to see Apolline, though. She wasn’t there.”

Just as Apolline had admitted that night in her bordello. “That’s wonderful, Bobby. I mean you’re starting to remember.”

“Yeah . . . I even remembered your room number, came straight here after playing poker.”

“Why did you come here?” The man who had remembered he was a gentleman and stayed up all night in the St. Louis Hotel lobby while she slept in his room had no such reservations tonight.

“Because there were six men, Laura, and I killed one. Five of them are going to be trying to kill me, to finish the job. And I don’t know why, and I still don’t know who.”

Her heart quickened. “Five men.” She pictured the rowdies on the main deck this morning, the man wielding the big knife. “I think we should tell Hugh.”

Words fail to describe the scope of the Mississippi River here, for it spreads more than a mile, and, as I am told by Mr. Lodwick, the capable steersman of the Mittie Stephens, it sinks more than 200 feet in places. The banks on either side reach maybe fifteen feet, not enough, Mr. Lodwick says, to hold “The Big Drink” during flood-waters, with no trees to speak of, mostly plantations of sugar, but with little activity these days, four years after the suppression of the rebellion. Today we reach Baton Rouge, and by nightfall, Coupee. Sometime tomorrow night, we bid the Mississippi fare-the-well and continue our course up the Red River.

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