Dead water - Barbara Hambly [49]
He pressed the heavy coins into the boy's hand, closed the work-callused young fingers around it. “You got about two minutes to make up your mind,” he said, “before they come back inside.” With a corner of his sleeve he scuffed away the dusty ghost of the star-map from the wall. “Whatever you decide to do, you don't tell a soul it was me who warned you, or they come after me, too. All right?”
Bobby's lips formed the words all right without sound. Tears rolled down his cheeks—of disappointment, and of terror.
January descended the ladder, waded through the stinking tug of the Mississippi current, and back to shore.
Only the faintest wisps of smoke rose from the Silver Moon's stacks when he crossed the muddy landing to the boat. The big stern wheel was still, its upper surfaces dry under the grilling noon sun. Tremendous activity surged around the engine-room door on the bow-deck, and January could hear Molloy cursing.
“I refuse to allow you to let that man speak so in your presence!” Mrs. Tredgold's strident voice soared over the hubbub. “Let alone in mine! If there is damage to one of the boilers, I refuse to continue on this boat. . . .”
“Darling, I swear to you . . .”
Coming up the landing-stage, January could see Mr. Tredgold sweating and wringing his hands as he pleaded with his wife in the engine-room doorway.
“Every inch of the engine was checked before the voyage began! You know I would never let my family journey on an unsafe boat! Now, whoever it was who told you that one of the boilers was faulty could not possibly have known such a thing—”
“She said in her note that she was ‘walking out' with one of the engineers. But her handwriting is that of a lady.” Mrs. Tredgold thrust a piece of notepaper under her spouse's nose. Though not nearly close enough to study it, January felt almost certain that he would have recognized the hand.
“What happened?” he asked Mr. Lundy, who was leaning against one of the pilasters of the promenade arcade near-by.
The former pilot's lips tightened under his white-streaked mustache. “Some woman put a note under Mrs. Tredgold's door, claiming an assistant engineer had told her one of the boilers was faulty, and like to blow.”
All around them the anxious chatter of the deck-passengers covered their words. The Irish and Germans were trying vainly to grasp the nature of the danger, holding their children close and glancing at Tredgold as if debating whether or not to ask for their money back and take another boat, the Kaintucks speculating about how one could tell if the boilers were about to blow and trading tales of similar catastrophes: “I was comin' downstream on a raft and we was but thirty feet from the Queen of Sheba when she blew, this huge spurt of fire come flamin' out frontwise from her bow, then like the whole top of the boat ripped off with boards go sailin' up a hunnert feet in the air in shoots of flame. . . .
“Now it's true the boilers on this boat are American-made, which are likelier to split than the English, owin' to poorer-quality iron,” Lundy told January. “But if a boiler's faulty, nine times out of ten you can't tell by lookin' at it, unless it's a seam starting to give. Mostly you can't tell even by the sound of the steam, or by the shake of the engine, or the feel of the boat when she makes speed. But Mrs. Tredgold won't hear of goin' on until they been checked.” He nodded at the stout garnet-red form that nearly filled the engine-room door. “And she's standin' there until they're all checked in front of her eyes. I reckon if a woman's got her