Read Dead Water for Free Online Page B

tree and crossed to the shack, sprang up the steps to the door.
    As he'd suspected, the saloon was empty.
    “Don't tell me you actually drink the liquor this place serves.”
    Hannibal was in back of the bar, replacing the bottle behind a loose board in the wall. “Good God, no! I may be a sot, but I'm not a fool. Old Hunks was charging a Santa Fe trapper fifty cents a shot for this on the grounds that it was Scots single-malt.”
    He straightened up in the grimy lamplight, resembling a disheveled elf with his long hair straggling out of its old-fashioned pigtail over his back, and his eyebrows standing out dark against his thin white face. “
Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn
. . . . But of course it's just the same bilgewater Hunks dips out of the barrel for a picayune a cup. . . . What
are
you doing here,
amicus meus
? If you're seriously looking to get yourself killed, I'll offer you a
drink. . . .”
    “There are better ways to die,” responded January with an exaggerated shudder.
    “And being in this room when the refined clientele returns is one of them,” retorted Hannibal. “Let us retire to my quarters. Nothing amiss with the owl-eyed Athene, I hope?”
    And as Hannibal limped over to the shaggy, out-of-fashion beaver hat that stood by his chair to receive whatever contributions his audience cared to give, January grinned at the nickname his friend had given the bespectacled Rose.
    “I must say I am cut to the quick to find my art playing second fiddle, as it were, to a bout of not-very-efficient fisticuffs,” Hannibal added as he dumped a few Spanish reales, a British shilling, two American half-dimes, and three eleven-penny bits into his hand. “But at least I can get out of here with all my takings this evening instead of having one of the customers relieve me of them ten feet from the door.”
    Small heaps of money lay on the room's single table amid a scattering of cards, and presumably there was a cashbox in the same cache as the so-called “single-malt Scotch.” But these Hannibal ignored as he wrapped his violin in its usual swaddling of faded silk scarves and tucked it into its case.
    “If you're getting robbed every night, why do you stay?” January glanced right and left as they emerged from the saloon's rear door, though in the pitch-black night a platoon of club-wielding Kaintucks could have stood within four feet of The Keelboat unseen. Undetected by any other sense as well, for that matter, for the ambient stench of privies would have covered the collective tobacco-reek of the average boatman, and the combined roar of the cicadas and the hollers of the fight still in progress at The Rough and Ready would have masked any sound.
    The ground squished under January's boots, and something moved—cat, rat, or gator—in the tangle of hackberry that surrounded the building's rear.
    “Old Hunks lets me sleep in one of the cribs.” Hannibal led the way to a sort of long shed that stood behind the saloon, three of its four French doors open into mephitic blackness. The usual inhabitants of the rooms—and their customers—were presumably at the fight as well.
    “It's exceedingly generous of him, considering how much he makes per night out of each room. He's from Dublin, and so regards me as a brother. He worked for years as a doorkeeper at the Covent Garden Opera in London. Sometimes after the place closes down for the night, I'll play on for him for hours.”
    He opened the door of the fourth crib—none of them had locks—and held January's lantern inside for a moment before entering. Two rats retreated unhurriedly through a crack in the wall. The room was windowless but so rudely put together that in daylight there would have been plenty of light, ventilation, and—to judge by the careful arrangement of old tin pots and broken jars about the floor—almost certainly rain.
    “Besides,” the fiddler went on, flicking a roach the size of a small mouse from the