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“Mr. Boggs,” she replied.
He extended a hand to help her out of the blower, and she took it. “Here about your brother, I assume?” Every word was pronounced with the oddly emphasized vowels of the Cajuns. His eyes protruded slightly and his stocky frame was approaching fat, but was comfortingly sturdy as he pulled Josephine onto the firmer surface of packed earth at the mud’s edge, then drew Ruthie up as well.
“Deaderick, yes. He’s here in the fort, isn’t he?”
“Where else would we take him? He’s here, and he’s all right for now. ”
“Have you any doctors?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No doctors, no lawyers, no teachers, no judges—or anything else too civilized,
I’m afraid. They’ve got us in a pickle, pinned down. But it could be worse. ” Mr. Boggs extended a hand to Gifford, too, and soon all three of the small blower’s passengers were standing on something closer to terra firma than they’d known since leaving the riverbanks.
“How’s that?” Gifford asked.
“We have fresh water, some food—and ready fishing, right outside the wall—and all the gunpowder and ammunition we can carry. ” He returned his attention to Josephine and cocked a head at the other men who’d joined him as part of the welcoming committee. “Listen, ma’am, we didn’t mean to alarm you. We had to check out the newcomers, you know how it goes. ”
“You’d be madmen if you didn’t. You know me—and this is my girl Ruthie Doniker, and our escort, Gifford Crooks. ”
“I seen you before,” said one of Boggs’s men to Gifford.
“I was here before, out on the island—not in the fort. I fight with the bayou lads, been sent down from Saint Louis. And I got no complaint with Barataria, let me make that real clear up front. ”
“Don’t worry about it, son,” said Mr. Boggs. “You’re with Miss Early, and that means you’re all right. I’m Planter Boggs,” he introduced himself, and then his men. “This is Arthur Tate, Mike Hardis, Frank Jones, and Tam Everly. They’re all that’s left from the crew of an airship called the Coyote Black, which is no longer with us. ”
The man introduced as Frank Jones was very thin, with ginger-colored hair and a pointed beard. He said, “It was one of the first to go, over there. ” He waved a hand to indicate something outside the fort.
And Mike Hardis added, “It went up like a Chinese New Year, though. Took half the dock out. Can’t say she didn’t leave us with a bang. ”
“Still, it’s a shame,” said Tam Everly. “I figured I’d run her ’til it was time to retire. Then pass her off to one of my nephews. Won’t be happening now. ” Arthur Tate patted him on the shoulder.
“I’m sorry to hear about your ship,” Josephine told the lot of them. “But can one of you, or all of you, I don’t care—can someone take me to my brother? I’m so tired, I can hardly hold my head up. But I won’t settle down for the night until I’ve set eyes on him. ”
“Right this way, Miss Early. ” Planter Boggs led the way. “And you there,” he said to Gifford. “Get out of those browns before you get yourself shot. You know what the Good Book says about avoiding the appearance of evil, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir, but the evil was a good disguise to get me in and out of town. ” He stripped off the jacket and tossed it into the empty blower, but despaired at the vest and pants.
“Everly, Tate. One of you fellows—can you get him something less … troubling?”
So Gifford Crooks took his leave, and Josephine and Ruthie followed Planter Boggs back into the depths of the old Spanish fort. “He’ll catch up to us later,” Boggs promised. “Come on now, and watch your step. It’s none too bright back here. We’re doing things the old-fashioned way, without any of those electric torches. Trying to conserve our power, you know how it goes. ”
He reached for a torch of the ancient variety, a wooden club with fuel-wrapped rags knotted around its head and set aflame. The stink of burning petroleum wafted along, carried and deposited in thick black smoke that stained the walls and the low stone ceiling.
Ruthie stuck close to Josephine, holding her mistress’s elbow as if she was steadying her, and not just looking for an excuse to keep the comforting contact. She asked, “Are we underneath the fort? I do not understand. We went under the wall, but…”
Mike Hardis, a terribly young man with a potato-shaped body but sharp, smart eyes, answered her. “The canal used to be deeper. The Spaniards moved supplies in and out of the fort on flats, all the way from the center inside … out to the bay, and then to the Gulf. But the years have filled it in, as you saw. And now the basement chamber—which is only halfway underground,” he noted as they began to climb a short flight of stairs, “is filled with a century’s worth of tidal mud and backwash. Even so, I can’t say it doesn’t make for a convenient back door. How’d you know to come looking for it?”
Planter Boggs looked pointedly at Josephine. She answered for herself. “In my younger days, I spent a good deal of time at Barataria, and sometimes in the fort. ”
“I imagine you still have a number of friends here,” Mr. Boggs said as he led the way up the narrow stairwell, torchlight bouncing off the walls around the rounded corners, up ahead of him.
“Friends and paying customers, if I cared to have them. Most of the men I knew back then are older now, and either wiser or dead. I hope you’ll pardon me saying so, gentlemen. ”
On that somber note, they hiked up into a large common room that was so sealed up, it felt to Josephine as if they were still underground, or mostly so. More firelight burned from every corner, some of it chimneyed away by ventilation shafts and columns of brick—but some of it accumulated within the long, flat room with the ceiling so low that the tallest men were compelled to hunch. Some forty or fifty men eyed the newcomers warily, then opportunistically, upon seeing that two were women. And then a name was breathed, somewhere in a back corner.
“Miss Early. ”
The whisper carried back and forth throughout the closed, dark nightmare of that cramped and awful place, until the men who stood in their path parted and let them pass.
