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By Root 1720 0

so, when, and what it would cost. Twenty dollars for each of us suddenly seemed cheap, if that was our only chance. Thirty would stretch us, and forty break us. Forty seemed impossible, but you could see at a glance that in Kansas City right then, all bets were off. We came to a street corner, and I turned imperiously to Lorna and barked, "The boats may be full, Ila! We need to come up with another plan in case they are!"

"Yes, missy," said Lorna, submissively.

We marched on. I brought myself to ask directions to the levee, but the man I asked said, "Ma’am, I jes’ got here myself! I don’t know up from down here! An’t it excitin’?" And he spit at my feet and rushed off, pistols thumping at his sides. We walked on. Talking itself seemed so dangerous that I could summon the courage to do it only once. After a few more minutes, Lorna muttered, "We is gone de wrong way!"

"I don’t think so."

"I does!"

She smiled as she spoke to me, trying to please me for the eyes of any and all onlookers, but her voice carried grit. She muttered, "Ask agin! It gettin’ dark."

I thought darkness would be some respite myself, but I didn’t dare argue with her. Even so, I could hardly bring myself to speak. Every man around seemed the incarnation of danger. Finally, I spotted a boy. A boy of the sort I recognized perfectly, a lounging boy with a seegar in his mouth, thirteen or fourteen, white-blond of hair and brown of face. I approached him, and he said, "Hey, ma’am."

"I need to get to the river, where the steamboats are."

"I need four bits for my supper."

I opened my reticule. The boy looked into it, idly, shamelessly. I handed him fifty cents, and he took the money in his hand and tossed it into the air. Only after catching it and depdsiting it in his pocket did he look at me again. "Everbody knows the river’s down that way, but I bet you an’t goin’ to find no boat unless you booked your passage last month, ’cause ever boat is d— full!"

"We can try."

"You go down that street ... Nah, I’ll show ya." He spun around in front of us, whipped off his hat and stuck it on his head again, then trotted off. Lorna and I trotted after him. After a moment, he looked back at me and paused. When I had caught up to him, he said, "That your gal?"

"Yes."

"She looks mad."

"She just looks that way."

"I wish I had a gal."

"You do?"

"Nah, not for me, but you kin get eight hunderd dollars for a gal in these parts. Lots of ’em have run off, that’s why."

"Where to?"

"What’s the matter with you—an’t you got no sense? The ablishinists get’em all together and run ’em off to Ioway They do that ever night! Last night alone, they got twenty-three gals and ten boys! Probably the catchers’ll only get half of ’em back."

"Who told you that?"

"Everbody knows that." He plucked the seegar out of the corner of his mouth, spit in the dust, and put the seegar back. I said, "Is the area well supplied with catchers?"

"Yeah, but they an’t good ones. I could be a catcher. They git twenty percent around here. That’s good money! If your gal run off, and I caught her, you’d have to give me a hunderd and sixty dollars to git her back!"

"What if I didn’t have that money?"

"Then I could keep her."

"I don’t believe that’s true."

"Well, it is. Man told me. His brother was a catcher, and he was goin’ to git into the business hisself! There’s the river. You got another two bits?" I saw that he was looking carefully at Lorna, so I handed him some more money, and he tipped his hat, then ran off. We made our way down to the boats. The shafts of late-afternoon light had blued now, and I thought soon we would be doubly safe, in the darkness, on some boat. Of boats there were not too many, but the levee was seething with activity, much more than it had been three weeks earlier, when I’d fled the Missouri Rose. That was the first boat I searched for, fearful that the captain would know me, but it wasn’t there. We had four choices—the Herald, the Jack Smith, the Missourian, and the Southern Joy. Of these, the Southern Joy looked the biggest, so I began with it. Lorna stuck close