Dead water - Barbara Hambly [64]
“You in luck,” announced Amos as if he deeply regretted the fact.
January squirmed out from beneath the brushwood and sat up.
The Silver Moon was visible perhaps a half-mile downstream, hung up on one of the innumerable gravel bars that dotted the wide expanse of the river's loop. Men swarmed the decks in the slanted evening light, and January could see the long iron poles, like extra masts, wavering and wobbling above the hurricane deck as the men thrust them down into the mud of the bar. The boat must be firmly stuck, he reflected, for them to be sparring that way. He could see the piles of crates and trunks on the bank under a small guard of deck-hands, with the skiff beached beside them, where they'd been off-loaded to lighten the boat's draft.
He sprang down from the wagon, held out his hand to Amos. “Thank you,” he said, and handed the man one of the three dollars that remained to him. “More than I can ever say.”
The field-hand said, “Huh,” took the dollar, and pulled the mule's head savagely around. Whether the comment implied annoyance, envy, scorn, or shyness, January didn't know, for Amos lashed the beast's flanks with the cottonstalk whip, and drove back into the woods without another word.
Horsehead Bar—which January guessed this had to be—lay obliquely out into the channel, formed by the wash-off from a small point a half-mile or so below the bayou mouth. He couldn't imagine how even an inexperienced pilot like Mr. Souter could have missed it: trees and debris snagged on it showed clearly above the surface in four or five places. As he drew near the bar, the Mississippi planter Lockhart—who was in charge of the deck-hands around the luggage—exclaimed, “By God, just what we need, another pair of hands! You, boy . . . !”
And Colonel Davis came over from the skiff, rifle in hand, and said, “Why, it's Ben, isn't it?”
“Was last time I looked, Colonel Davis.” January scraped at the dried scum that still covered his clothing from his dip in Chickasaw Bayou, additionally speckled with straw from the wagon-bed and bits of brushwood. “Though I can't tell myself who I am, under all the mud.”
“There,” said Davis triumphantly to Lockhart, “I told you the boy hadn't run away.” Though he called him “boy,” Davis was probably January's junior by a dozen years. “You treat darkies decently and they are as loyal as any man.”
“Run away?” January scratched a shower of twigs from his hair. “You got to be joking, sir. Man'd have to be crazy to run away in this country.” And the men around him laughed. “I nearly got stole and sold to Texas twice, and that's the truth. . . .”
“Go on out to the boat,” chuckled Davis, and slapped him companionably on the shoulder. “They need every pair of hands out there. We're glad to have you back safe and sound.”
The water over the bar was so low, January could walk out along it most of the way to the boat, and it was seldom more than breast-deep thereafter. Where it was over his head, the bar broke the current so effectively that the water behind lay almost still. Rose and Hannibal emerged from the engine-room doorway and ran to the railing as January drew near: Hannibal held a rifle, one of the .45-caliber Lemans that were generally locked in the purser's office.
Simple caution on this relatively isolated stretch of the river? January wondered. Had someone—Mr. Lundy, perhaps?—convinced Mr. Tredgold that Levi Christmas might attack the boat?
Or had they armed all the white men on board because both coffles of slave men had been unchained and pressed into service in raising and planting the long sparring-poles? In the blue shadows of the starboard promenade the chains hung down empty against the wall, like a horrid still-life, and he heard 'Rodus's voice call out from the hurricane deck, “Slip her down!” followed by the splash of the pole-end in the shallow water at the stern.
“What the hell happened?” January asked softly as Rose threw herself into his arms regardless of his soaked and muddy clothing and the fact