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brightened, his hand on the doorknob. “You could pray for your friend.”
    Merville looked down at his empty mug. “I think God done fooled with that one enough.”
    Since the E. B. Newman wasn’t leaving until late the next morning, the captain allowed Randolph to keep his stateroom for two dollars, and he killed time at the boiler deck rail watching roustabouts roll two hundred barrels of molasses up the stage plank before nightfall. Later, he witnessed a thunderstorm walk in from the west and at sundown saw a ripping bolt take out the few electric lights along the street. When the rain stopped, he walked out on the cabin deck and listened to fast dance music—weeping clarinets and a stuttering trumpet coming from down an alley—and remembered it was Saturday night. A street lamp came on slowly, like a candle warming up, and he could see men, their boots lacquered with mud, slopping in and out of a doorway like bees in a hole. Somewhere a transformer detonated, and the lights failed again. On the wharf below, a sooty lantern rose above a crap game, then a short burst of doggy laughter split the air and a roustabout fell down with a bottle in his hand, the ocher glass shattering in the kerosene light. Three mosquitoes stung the back of the mill manager’s neck and he hurried inside.
    Hours later, awakened by a crescendo of angry hollering, he pulled on his trousers and walked barefoot through the carpeted salon back to the rail. Minos, the engineer, was standing forward, his shirt off. “It’s the rousters,” he said, when Randolph walked up. “They getting in it now with them bastards off the Edenborn .”
    A crash of drunken shouts sailed up from the wharf, then a single yell and a skitter of boots. On the top deck, someone ran to the wheelhouse and a spotlight fired up, shining on the dock where a dozen black men grappled and rolled, their rotten shirts ripping, loose overalls straps whipping the air. Suddenly, two of them pulled straight razors and began a ritual circling, then another unfolded a long blade and swung into a screaming curse. The captain walked out on the roof of the Texas and hollered down to the big rousters, who were deaf with drink. The hulking mate, yawning and pulling on his galluses, walked up next to the captain, who told him, “Go down there and put an end to it.”
    The mate spat over the rail. “Can’t nothing stop them now.”
    The captain twisted around and called up to the pilot in the wheelhouse. “Blow shorts and see if that brings the policeman. We can’t load freight with dead niggers.”
    The whistle coughed up a gallon of water and issued a series of yelping blasts. Another razor came out of a shirt, and the mill manager’s mouth fell open as the blade drew a long red line across the face of the rouster who’d ridden the mule out of the river. Three men ran over from the downstream steamer and began swinging boots and fists. A man shrieked and fell on his back, bloody fingers pinching his stomach together as the riot closed over him like a muddy surf.
    Minos bumped the mill manager’s elbow. “Here come Judgment Day,” he said, pointing.
    Randolph looked and could make out a little man with uncombed white hair advancing quickly from a side street. A badge winked on his coat and a double-barreled shotgun dangled at his side, but when he stepped up onto the dock and yelled at the men, his words might as well have been puffs of steam. So he pulled the forearm off the shotgun, dropped the barrel from the stock, grabbed the twin tubes on the smaller end, and swung hard against the skull of the nearest man, sending him to the dock like a stunned cow. A few dark faces went up at that, and he swung again, his white hair shocking up on impact, and then again, sending a third man screaming into the river, and the others began to scatter and run. Five men lay sprawled on the dock, and the one who’d been cut across the stomach was not moving. The marshal straightened up over