With all the fussy petticoats, there wasn’t room for all of them to walk side by side. They were trying, though, arms linked and giggling. One wrong step and someone would tumble headlong into the river.

While the image playing in her mind presented a humorous picture—with flailing legs getting all tangled up in ruffles, elegant hair dripping water and mud weeds—Ivy could only pity the woman who would have to launder the muck from the clothes. Sure as shootin’ wasn’t going to be those fancy ladies.

Wasn’t going to be Ivy, either.

Just because she was a female didn’t make her honor bound to clean up after folks. Uncle Patrick was training her to pilot the River Queen. She was happy as a fish in deep water to be his “cub.”

For the life of her, Ivy couldn’t figure the female species out.

Gosh all-mighty! Why would a soul want to stuff her body into whale bones and yards of heavy cloth that would only make her sweat and stumble? If she guessed right, the whole of female creation could not breathe.

“Gull-durned female duds...worst kind of a trap,” she repeated, this time with a dash of scorn.

Sometimes she thought her fellow sex were touched in the head to willingly—even happily—submit to such abuse.

Once again, she was grateful for the soft cotton shirt she wore, for the durable denim pants. Even the belt that held her trousers up was just a strip of red cloth. Its flower print and the bow she fastened it with was all the adornment she needed.

The oldest of the three women, the one walking in the middle, lost her balance when the plank heaved with the current. The young ones tried to set her to rights but they all listed toward the water.

Just in time, young Tom, a deckhand, dashed across the plank to help them rebalance.

Ivy had grown up on this boat. In her twenty-two years, she’d seen that not all of the ladies maneuvering the plank were so lucky. Last fall, one had gone over and washed up half a mile downriver. A couple of roustabouts fished her out a second before her waterlogged skirts dragged her to the Great Beyond.

These ladies were luckier than some. At least they might be, were they not destined for a life of selling their bodies in this wicked town.

Ivy was glad the boat would dock here only one night before turning east toward respectable towns...more profitable ones, too.

The River Queen was unique among the boats that did business along the Missouri. Most of them were workhorses, transporting goods and passengers.

But Patrick Malone, her uncle and the man who had raised her, had a different vision for his boat. The River Queen did transport people and their goods, but it was also a high-class gambling boat.

Like Ivy, Uncle Patrick had spent his life on a riverboat, but a grand one on the Mississippi.

Oh, the stories he loved to tell of a night, when the after watch took over and the boat grew quiet. He’d spend hours spinning yarns about the glory of the old days when floating palaces plied that great and perilous river.

He’d started as an apprentice, a cub. He’d gone on to become the highly respected pilot of the Jewel of the Mississippi.

The tales he’d spun about that huge boat left her breathless. The glitter of crystal chandeliers, the orchestra playing and lots of folks becoming instantly rich, then just as fast, poor again...it was as though she’d seen it all herself.

The events she witnessed through his eyes had been beyond grand, the gentlemen and the ladies all rich and refined, the firemen and roustabouts not refined but strong as bulls, their mighty muscles glistening with sweat in the reflected heat of the fire that kept the floating palaces moving.

Ivy’s favorite stories involved the river pilots, whose uncanny intuition sensed how the river changed, noticed every ripple in the current that might foretell disaster, could see below the water in their mind’s eye, even on a pitch-dark night.

Lives depended upon their knowing when and where the riverbed shifted. If a pilot made a mistake, failed to sense sudden changes below the water, tragedies occurred.

Uncle Patrick remembered many such events. But none of them were of his making.

Even as a tot, no more than two years old, Ivy used to sit at her uncle’s feet and listen to him spin his magical stories, fascinated even though she didn’t understand much of what he said.

By the time she was four, she knew that she wanted to be a pilot, just like Uncle Patrick.

But time was running out for riverboats. Her uncle expounded on this very subject every time he saw her becoming breathless with excitement over piloting a boat.

The railroad had done in the Mississippi years ago. It would do in the Missouri as well.

Just last night she had argued with him over it.

To her way of thinking, yes, freight hauling and transporting folks would give way to train travel, but gambling would not. Folks were always in a sure-fired hurry to lose their money and there was romance in doing it on a steamboat.

But Uncle Patrick believed even this recreation would end.

She sure did hope he was wrong because she was set on being a pilot.

“The ladies invited me to the Sullied Gully tonight, me being their hero and all.” Young Tom СКАЧАТЬ

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