Dead water - Barbara Hambly [97]
From behind the corner January watched the burly slave-dealer put a brotherly arm around Hannibal's shoulders. “What'd he offer for your boy?”
Hannibal shook his head sadly. “Not a thing—not a red cent.”
January expelled his indrawn breath and whispered a prayer of thanks that Hannibal had decided on the truth rather than a fabrication, which, though it might open new avenues for information, might also be checked.
“Cheap bastard,” Hannibal added as if the thought had just occurred to him. “Stuck-up, too.”
Gleet nodded, and spat again. Cissy and Rose moved the boxes on which they sat back away from the smudge-pot, into the soft, gnat-filled gloom closer to the silent paddle.
“Gets his niggers to mind him, though,” Gleet told Hannibal. “They's so scared of him, if he told the lot of 'em to turn somersaults on the deck, they'd do it. Look at him like whip dogs, even that stuck-up boy 'Rodus—who I told him'll make him trouble, just see if I'm not right. And it is a stupid name, like I said. People don't want to buy a boy named Herodotus. Give 'em a boy name of Jim or Joe or Pete. . . . That boy Pete I got, you know what his name originally was?”
“Then you don't think Cain was staying close to you last night because he was worried about his own gang attacking him?”
“Attack him how?” demanded the dealer sharply. “They's chained to the wall, just long enough so's they can piss over the side. If any of 'em was so stupid as to take a swing at him, like tryin' to get the key away from him, all he'd have to do was sing out and get half a dozen deck-hands from the engine-room.” He shrugged, anger in his movement. January wondered if Gleet guessed Hannibal's real meaning. Not, Was Cain afraid of being thrown overboard by his own gang on so black a night, but, Was it physically possible for them to have thrown Weems over the side?
The last thing either Gleet or Cain would welcome, he reflected, was an accusation against any member of either of their gangs . . . which would automatically lose them over a thousand dollars, if the sheriff in Mayersville decided that that was what had happened. Far better to push off the blame onto someone else's slave.
“Though now you speak of it,” Gleet went on thoughtfully, “he might have been twitchy about somethin' at that. Cain, I mean. When I started around to see the bucks after we fed up the wenches, he did scamper some to catch me up, and most times he don't have the time of day to give me.”
“Does it sound to you,” asked January after Gleet had gone into the galley for the pail of rice and beans that would be dished out to the men of his coffle, “as if Cain was the one who expected to be attacked last night, and not Weems?”
“You could look at it that way,” agreed Rose, settling her box again beside the smudge. “Provided you can come up with some way Weems—or anyone on the boat for that matter—could have taken on Cain and done any damage. The night was pitch black and foggy, but it would need a blind man to mistake Weems for Cain.”
“Cain go armed with a pistol in his boot and a knife in his belt,” provided Cissy, washing her hands with a bandanna dampened in the rain-barrel after her hasty meal. “Even when he go in to dinner, he got a knuckle-duster in his pocket, Mr. Tredgold says.”
They fell silent as Gleet came out of the galley, and walked down the promenade checking his property for the night. On the other side of the boat, the women's voices rose in a gentle crooning, a lullaby over the stillness of the water and the muffled grunts and curses from the boiler-room.
The women weren't worried. The men were.
Because they'd seen Julie slip over the side there