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In his mind’s eye, he could see the long-lost floating pleasure palace, white as new cotton with towering double smokestack puffing away like a rich man’s cigars as she made her way along the Mississippi. He could picture the Southern belles in hoop skirts lining the ship’s second-story promenade, silk fans fluttering like caged birds, while riverboat gamblers in pristine linen suits and wide-brimmed hats tossed silver dollars and gold pieces onto the felt of the gaming tables. Hop saw himself dressed like Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind, tipping his hat to the young ladies of fashion gathered in the Delta Blossom’s grand salon for the evening’s entertainment. What a swath he could have cut back then!

As his well-dressed phantom-self began to dance underneath the swaying crystal chandeliers with a young woman who looked a great deal like Vivien Leigh, Hop’s nimble fingers were quick to provide the music. Granted, “Goodnight Irene” wasn’t around at the time, but it was his daydream, after all, wasn’t it?

As he played, a sudden movement in the middle of the river caught Hop’s eye. From where he was sitting, it looked as if a swimmer had surfaced in the middle of the bend, near where Sammy said the Delta Blossom had gone down, then just as quickly submerged. But that was impossible.

Swimming in the Mississippi was only slightly less hazardous to your health than brushing your teeth with lit dynamite. Every so often some fool would get drunk enough to try to swim the river—and disappear without a trace ten feet from shore. If the family was lucky, the body would turn up a few days later, fifty miles downstream, snagged in the branches of a tree on the floodplain, looking more like a drowned pig than a human being. But what Hop saw hadn’t looked anything like a floater popping to the surface. For one thing, it stayed in one place and didn’t follow the current. Hop shaded his eyes against the sun, trying to get a better look, but there was nothing there. His attention was brought back closer to shore as the bobber on his line registered a strike. Hop dropped his guitar and snatched up the fishing rod, reeling in a ten-pound catfish.

It looked like Lucinda wasn’t going to have anything to scold him about tonight, that much was for certain.

But as he headed back home, his fishing pole draped over one shoulder and his guitar slung over the other, Hop couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched—and by something besides the catfish hanging from his belt.

That night as he was lying in bed, Lucinda snoring beside him, Hop got to thinking.

Maybe what Sammy Herkimer said about catfish gals wasn’t all hogwash after all. He remembered reading in one of them yellow-backed magazines down at the barbershop about some kind of fish everyone thought was extinct being found in some foreign country a few years back. Besides, who was he to decide there weren’t no such things as catfish gals, when he didn’t know a soul who’d been to the bottom of the Mississippi and lived to tell the tale?

The very next day Hop went fishing without Lucinda telling him to.

He decided to try his luck again at Steamboat Bend. When he arrived at the dock, he was relieved to find he was alone. Hop set himself up on the dock just as he had the day before, but after a half hour of sitting and waiting for something to happen, he put down the fishing rod and picked up his guitar to pass the time.

Halfway into “Moanin’ at Midnight,” Hop heard what sounded like a fish slap the water near the pier. When he glanced up to see what had caused the noise, what he saw caused him to nearly drop his ax into the water below.

There was a human head bobbing in the water a hundred feet away from the dock. At the sound of his astonished gasp, the head ducked back down beneath the muddy surface without leaving so much as a ripple to mark its passing. Just as suddenly, there was a strike on Hop’s line so powerful it nearly yanked his fishing pole into the river.

* * *

Although Lucinda was extremely pleased with