The next morning, I stood on the forecastle and watched the passing riverbanks, well-timbered with cottonwood and beech. The War Eagle was making swift progress downriver, covering twelve miles or more in the course of each hour. The river was dotted with low islands, many covered by stands of tall trees, and the pilot weaved in and out of them expertly, following a navigable channel known only to him. A clutch of birds soared overhead, heading south like us but making faster time on their airy river than we could on our earthbound one.
Here and there we passed a shanty or a rude cottage teetering on an exposed bank. Beside one dwelling, a hollow-cheeked, pale man stood motionless and watched us go by. At midmorning we steamed past a dozen Indians encamped on the western shore. They turned their backs with disinterest at the White Man’s floating castle.
Not just the natural scenery was on display. The Mississippi was alive with vessels, and it seemed miraculous we did not collide with any of our fellow travelers. Most numerous were an endless variety of flatboats, ranging from one-person rafts no larger than a horse-drawn wagon to multi-boat barges—lashed together with thick dock rope—nearly as broad as the War Eagle herself.
The flatboats carried on their open-air decks the entire variety of goods in Western commerce: cows, horses, pigs, produce, lumber, grain, slaves. On one flatboat alone, I counted eleven horses, munching peaceably on hay and seemingly oblivious to their surroundings as they floated downstream. On another, four slaves sat in a circle, their arms chained behind them, watching the riverbank pass with tight expressions.
The flatboats went exclusively downstream, but we passed a few keel-boats headed back upriver toward St. Louis. Narrow walkways ran along each side of the central roofed compartment of the keel-boats. On each walkway, a line of muscular boatmen walked steadily toward the rear of the ship, bracing against their shoulders long poles that reached the river bottom, thus propelling the craft forward. As each man in the chain reached the rear of the ship, he would pull his pole out of the river’s muck, race back to the bow of the boat, and thrust his pole back into the river bottom, thereby overcoming the current by sheer human will.
I heard the clanging of the ship’s bell for the second time that day—the first had been at daybreak, as the vessel weighed anchor—and left the absorbing river scene and headed back to the captain’s office. Pound was absent, but another officer was there, and he gestured to several sheaves of paper spread out across the mahogany desk. I helped myself to Pound’s chair and got to work.
The first thing I did was to locate the daily ledger of income and expenses. I wet my index finger and pressed it onto an entry from the previous day. A small smudge appeared on my finger; the ink was still slightly wet. I picked several entries from the prior weeks and repeated the same exercise. No smudges. The ledgers had not been rewritten overnight.
Four hours later, my eyes stinging from squinting so long at the tiny handwriting that filled the books, I was certain of little else. The transport numbers for slaves were down greatly from prior years, just as Pound had said, as were the numbers for barrels of whiskey and molasses and tonnage of cotton transported. The number of passengers had declined too, though more modestly, while the expenses recorded seemed necessary and unexceptional.
My head swam with figures—dates, dollars and cents, tonnage and heads. It felt like I was staring out from the forecastle into a pea-soup fog as the ship crept down the river at low throttle: there was something out there, somewhere, but I didn’t know what it was or where to look.
There was just one item that struck me as out of place. On several occasions during the present year, the term “Inspector” appeared in the listing of expenses. The size of the costs associated with the entry varied, but they were large enough to make a difference to the overall profitability of the War Eagle—large enough to matter to my father. It was as if there really was an Inspector of the Port, demanding payments from the ship, but Pound had confirmed for me the prior night that no such person existed.
I went off in search of Pound to seek an explanation. But when I reached the forecastle, another event intervened. It was time for the ship’s daily wooding stop. A crewman was circulating among the cabin passengers, explaining that the boat would stop at the next wood-yard for thirty-five minutes but not a second longer and that any cabin passenger who wanted to go ashore to stretch his or her legs was responsible for being back on board before the ship cut loose.
“The captain has never been known to wait for a tardy man,” the crewman cried boastfully. “And as for the only woman who tried to make him wait—the captain left his own wife behind without a second glance.” The gentlemen around me chuckled appreciatively at the captain’s manly instincts.
Meanwhile, I could hear another crewman below, shouting out for recruits from among the deck passengers to help with loading the wood. Any man who volunteered, I heard the crewman shout, would be entitled to ten cents off his passage. Leaning over the railing and looking down at a jostling mass of deck passengers, I saw many who were prepared to trade upon their labor.
Soon we rounded a great bend in the river and saw a large wood-yard, stretching for nearly a quarter mile, ahead of us on the eastern bank. Neat stacks of logs, eight feet high and some eighty feet long, lined the yard. There was another steamboat—a two-deck, side-wheeled affair, perhaps half the size of the War Eagle—tied up at the small dock adjoining the yard. A continuous line of men marched through the yard and up the plank of the smaller ship, logs held aloft on each shoulder, like an army of industrious ants filling up the colony’s communal food supply before an approaching storm.
The crew of the War Eagle cut her engines, and we drifted with the current toward the other ship, trying to time matters in order to pull up just as the other steamer was ready to cast off. The forecastle was crowded now as the cabin passengers came out in force to watch the wooding operation. Martha and Nanny Mae had reappeared and stood ten feet from my perch. As we approached, I could see the name “Vicksburg” painted on the other ship’s hull. Soon the ships were quite close together, separated by perhaps one hundred feet in the swirling waters, and we could easily see the passengers lining the decks of the Vicksburg.
Suddenly three pulses of bright light flashed into my eyes, temporarily blinding me. I blinked, then sought out the source of the light. It had come from the direction of the Vicksburg, and looking down at its top deck I saw a squat, unshaven man with a low cap slipping a spyglass into his pocket. He should be more careful, I thought as the man turned away from the War Eagle, he could have blinded—
I gasped. As the spyglass man turned, the afternoon sun cast his silhouette against the base of the Vicksburg’s pilot house in stark relief. The profile was unmistakable. It was the hook-nosed man.
I called out and waved my arms. But the man either couldn’t hear me or chose to ignore me, as he continued to walk toward the stern of the Vicksburg. What’s more, at that moment, the Vicksburg cast off from the wooding dock, and its waterwheels began to pick up speed. It pulled away from the dock, heading downstream, while at the same time the War Eagle steered toward the vacated berth.
I grabbed the tunic of the nearest crewman. “We must proceed downriver at once,” I shouted. “Follow that ship!”
“Soon enough, sir,” he replied, firmly removing my hand from his shirt. “The wooding shouldn’t take longer than half an hour, and we’ll be on our way.”
“But we need to leave now!”
“I’m afraid that’s impossi—”
“Where’s Captain Pound?” I demanded, realizing only his word would produce the needed result.
“There’s no need to panic, sir. We’ll be on our way soon.”
“Where’s Captain Pound?” I shouted again. Not a few cabin passengers had noticed the commotion by now. I had the vague sense Martha and Nanny Mae were among the onlookers, but I had no time to spare for them.
“The capt’n likes to supervise the wooding personally,” the crewman said, looking at me with distaste. “I imagine you’ll find him by the guards on the main deck, right next to the boiler room.”
I raced down three flights of stairs and was almost decapitated as I rounded a bend and nearly ran headlong into the first set of logs being carried aboard. But I managed to duck beneath them at the last minute, and on the other side of the gathering procession of wooders, I found Pound. He was in full throat, directing the stacking of the logs crossways in a cavernous hold that was virtually empty, save for enormous twin black boilers, each the size of a small house, which gurgled and spat at the far end of the space.
I ran up to him. “Do you know the ship at the wood-yard just before us? The Vicksburg?”
Pound made a show of directing a half-dozen newcomers in turn to the corners where he wanted them to stack their logs. Then, as slowly as humanly possible—no, slower—Pound turned to acknowledge my presence.
“I know all the ships on the river,” he said with exaggerated deliberation. “As soon as we finish wooding up, I’m sure I’d be content to instruct you about each of them, starting with the Vicksburg, if you like.”
I shook my head frantically. “That man in the sketch I showed you—the one you called your old adversary—I just spied him aboard the Vicksburg. We’ve got to go after that ship at once.”
Interest flickered in Pound’s eyes. But he said, “The problem is, we’re plumb out of wood, as you can see. No wood means no fire. No fire means no steam. As a steamboat”—he paused as one would with a small schoolboy to see if he was following a piece of elementary logic—“we need steam. I don’t suppose your papa bothered to teach you any of this before he sent you off on this frolic, did he?”
“Well, we’ve got some now,” I said, gesturing at the two small stacks of logs that had begun to grow on either side of the boilers. “Surely that’s enough for us to overtake the Vicksburg. That’s all that matters. Give the order to cut loose.”
Pound rubbed his eyes with his pudgy hands. “That’s not enough wood to feed the furnace for an hour. We burn through forty cords a day. This room”—he waved his arms around it—“holds forty-six and a quarter cords. When it’s full we’ll leave.”
“But can’t you wait—”
“No, we can’t wait for the next wood-yard. It’s on past New Madrid. We won’t get there ‘til tomorrow afternoon. If we don’t leave here with a full supply of fuel for the boilers, we’ll end up drifting down the river without power. Subject to the whim of the current. When we hit a rock and sink to the bottom of the channel, I’ll let you write to your father to explain his boat’s fate. If you manage to get off before we sink, that is.”
I took a deep breath to steady myself. “Load your wood. But will you agree, as soon as you’re full up, you’ll order your firemen to raise the steam as high as it’ll go so we can run down the Vicksburg?”
“What happens if we catch this fellow?” asked Pound.
“If I can prove he was involved in Jones’s death, then he’ll go on trial himself. At the least, he’ll end up with a long stretch in prison. Put to death, potentially.”
In truth, I thought this scenario a little farfetched, but I figured it was the way to engage the captain’s interest. Indeed, his fleshy face seemed alert to the prospect of such a decisive defeat of his mysterious adversary.
“I was told you fancied yourself one of the fastest navigators on the river,” I added for good measure.
“The fastest,” said Pound.
“Terrific. The fastest. You’ve given the Vicksburg a head start. Now let’s see how quickly you can catch her.”
Pound smiled broadly. The gleam of his golden teeth matched the one in his eyes. “That,” he said, “is one order I will take from you, young Speed.”