Verwandte Artikel zu Summer of Pearls

Summer of Pearls - Softcover

Blakely, Mike

 
9780765322579: Summer of Pearls
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0765322579 ISBN 13: 9780765322579
Verlag: Forge Books, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Ben Crowell remembers the Great Caddo Lake Pearl Rush of 1874 well. Ben would fall in love for the first time that summer during one of the last great rushes of the nineteenth century, a rush that could not have come at a better time for the riverboat community of Port Caddo.

Just a few months earlier the town had been dying. The railroads that were cutting across the country made the riverboat meaningless, and those same railroads didn't stop anywhere near Port Caddo. By the end of the summer, the pearl rush was over, and the mystery about who killed Judd Kelso, a local riverboat owner, had begun.

It took Ben forty years to solve the mystery, and when he did, the proof came for him alone to witness. He is the only living soul who knows what happened that September night in 1874.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MIKE BLAKELY is the author of several novels of the American West, including Too Long at the Dance and Comanche Dawn. His newspaper column, "Lone Star Legacy," has appeared in more than thirty newspapers. He lives in Marble Falls, Texas.

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Summer of Pearls

By Mike Blakely

Forge Books

Copyright © 2008 Mike Blakely
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780765322579
SUMMER OF PEARLS
1
Port Caddo, Texas 1874
 
JUDD KELSO FELT AS IF HE HAD JUNE BUGS IN HIS STOMACH. HE STOOD AT the stern of the Glory of Caddo Lake, staring into the muddy waters.
The bayou lay dark and flat as ink in a well. Strange silhouettes of moss and cypress towered around its fringes, raking the dying stars. A pale yellow light reached into the sky from the east, defining the dark, angular shapes of Port Caddo squatting among the pines.
Kelso set his jaw, his facial muscles writhing like animals under his beard stubble. He listened to the sounds of men throwing wood into the furnace, the boat creaking under her load of cotton bales, the cook clanging his skillet down onto his wood-burning stove. He smelled bacon and coffee he knew no one would have a chance to eat or drink. The June bugs crawled in his stomach, and he turned around to study the riverboat.
The Glory of Caddo Lake sat low in the water, her first two decks encased in bales of cotton. A buyer in Jefferson had held the cotton in a warehouse for almost a year, waiting for prices to climb at the cotton exchange in New Orleans. Each bale was worth a few pennies more now, and was on its way to market. Captain Arnold Gentry had takenon as much as the Glory could handle, careful not to swamp her. She was drawing four feet, but the lake was high and the Glory would skim the shoals and plow through the sandbars that lay between her and deep water.
The rousters had stacked bales all the way to the ceiling on the main deck, leaving labyrinth-like passages to the engine room. Then they had stacked more bales on the boiler deck. Cotton completely filled the promenade around the staterooms, blocking the doorways, shutting out the light. The passengers could only enter their rooms now from the doors inside the passenger cabin.
Up the bayou, in Jefferson, Kelso had mused over all the work the rousters put into loading and stacking those bales--bales he knew would never reach New Orleans. He had felt a dark power. Now all he felt were the legs of bugs crawling in his guts.
As the first light of dawn struck the high tops of the cypress trees, the whistle blew. Four notes stepped off harmony as they climbed the scale, then a fifth shook windows as it struck an octave below. Roosters croaked feeble replies. Twin columns of smoke boiled from the chimneys and merged high in the morning air. Cords of pine stood on the foredeck, in front of the furnace. Captain Gentry rang the bell, signaling the engineer to throw open the valves and set the big paddle wheel to work.
Judd Kelso felt the nervous flutter in his stomach surge as he walked forward through the narrow passages left between the cotton bales. "You heard the bell," he said to his apprentice as he reached the engine controls. "Back her into the channel."
The apprentice, seventeen-year-old Reggie Swearengen, cracked the valves and fed steam to the twin engines. The riverboat shuddered as the blades of the paddle wheel dipped into Big Cypress Bayou. The Glory backed slowly away from the Port Caddo wharf to the pop and hiss of exhaust valves, rippling the inky bayou.
"Listen for the bells," Kelso ordered as he left the engine room at the stern. "I'm goin' forward."
"Yes, sir," Reggie replied.
Kelso was engineer and mate on the Glory. As engineer, he wasbarely competent, and he knew it. He had little experience with steam machinery. His apprentice had a much better knack for it than he did. He knew just enough about mechanics to keep the steam engines stroking. His real value came in his capacity as mate.
At bossing rousters, Kelso knew he had few equals. The deckhands were muscled-up black men whose scowls alone might wither a timid man. It was Kelso's job to work them as long and as hard as he could without killing them. He gave them no rest when there was work to do taking on freight or fuel, stoking the furnace, or winching the boat over shoals..This was his real job, and he liked it. He thought of the men as little better than animals, and treated them as such.
Kelso stood stump-like in build, shorter than six feet, but weighing over two hundred pounds. His jaws rippled constantly with ridges of muscle as he ground his teeth smooth. The rousters said he had gator eyes--mean little beads set at a slant under the ledges of his bony brow. No one on board liked him, but Captain Gentry knew his worth as a driver of men.
Kelso's father had worked as overseer at a big Caddo Lake plantation before the war. Judd had grown up learning where to poke a man to hurt him without ruining him. He remembered watching his father taunt black slaves with a whip. He remembered that same whip stinging him at times. It had made him tough. That's what he told himself. He took pride in meanness, considered it a strength. When rousters fought on his boat, he thought nothing of splitting their scalps with four-foot-long wedges of cordwood. He was worse than his old man in that respect. In his father's time, black men had held value as property. As far as Judd Kelso knew, they were worthless now.
He grabbed the iron capstan bar as he left the engine room and walked forward along the dark corridors formed by the bales of cotton. The majestic old boat creaked and moaned as she backed slowly into the bayou under him. In spite of the June bugs that continued to crawl, Kelso wore a smile on his face. He was going to have a little fun with the stokers.
He found the firemen standing back from the furnace, four-foot lengths of pinewood in their hands.
"Give me fire, damn it! Don't just stand there!"
The black men looked at each other. "She's hot, Mister Judd," one of them said.
"Oh, she is?" Kelso waited until the man turned his face away, then jabbed him hard with the capstan bar, between his rib cage and hip. The black man buckled, and the others reluctantly threw their billets of wood into the furnace.
"Get up, boy!" Kelso said to the injured man. "Stoke the fire! Damn you to tell me she's hot. You ever heard of a nigger engineer? I'm the engineer on this boat, and I want steam."
The stokers chucked in more fuel as the roar of the fire grew. Kelso knew they were hoping he would just go away.
"If you don't want to do your job, I can boot your black asses over the guards right now. I guess it wouldn't make much difference. Your jobs are all goin' to shit anyway."
The stokers glanced at each other and scowled at Kelso without looking him in the eyes. "What you mean, Mister Judd?" one of them asked.
"Haven't you boys heard about the railroads comin'? There's a new one gonna build in from Louisiana, through Marshall and Jefferson. They call it the Shreveport, Houston, and Indian Territory. The S.H. and I.T.!"
Kelso laughed like a rasp, but the stokers just looked at one another, puzzled.
"If you boys could spell," Kelso said, "you'd know S.H. and I.T. makes shit. Like I said, your jobs are all goin' to shit!"
"Yours too, ain't it, Mister Judd?" said the stoker who had been stuck with the capstan bar, now pulling himself back to his feet and grabbing a chunk of wood.
Kelso brandished the iron rod again, but only grinned at the man without using it. "I'm a mite smarter than you. I already got it planned...

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Verlag
Forge Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0765322579
ISBN 13 
9780765322579
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
224
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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