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him, put his shotgun back together, and dropped two shells into its barrels.
    “Alors, quoi c’est son nom?” he asked.
    The engineer yelled down in French that he was not on the Newman’s crew.
    A rouster sat up, holding his bleeding head as if afraid it might roll off his shoulders. “Don’t shoot me, Mister Merville.”
    The marshal slid the gun into the crook of his arm. “A high-brass shell costs seven cents, and the bastard of a mayor we got would charge it against my pay.” He pointed to the dead man. “You know him?”
    “He on the Drew with us.”
    “He got a family?” Merville checked the corpse’s pockets, found a silver dollar, and put it in his vest.
    “He from way up the country.” The rouster took a hand away from his face and looked at the blood. “He ain’t got no people.”
    The marshal slid his shotgun under the shining waist, lifted, and rolled the corpse over, repeating the motion until it tumbled into the river. He looked toward the wheelhouse and shaded his eyes. “You can kill that light, yeah,” he said.
    The engineer spat over the side and turned to Randolph. “So much for that.”
    The mill manager finally closed his mouth. “Is that how you have to operate around here?”
    “It is now.” Minos looked down. “In ten years or fifteen years, maybe it’ll be different.”
    “Who’s the policeman?”
    Minos turned his head to where the old man herded three limping men back to their boat, the bloody shotgun sideways against their backs. “Him? That’s my daddy.”
    Randolph climbed onto his thin mattress and lay awake and sweating until he heard a tap on the door at five. Speck, doubling as porter, cleared his throat and the mill manager told him fifteen minutes. He got up and washed at the basin, shaved, and put on a fresh dark wool suit. In the narrow main salon he sat at a naked table in the dark, smelling the enamel and tobacco latent in the air, imagining the carnivorous swamp he was traveling toward and wondering how all the fine books his brother had read could have prepared him to police its mill saloon. He remembered the thump of the shotgun barrels on the skulls of the roustabouts, then looked up to where first light spangled in the textured glass of the clerestories, sooty greens and golds flaring dimly like fire seen through mica. He moved through the tinted light down onto the foredeck and stood among the freight boxes and sacks to wait for his luggage. Hearing a noise he turned to see the rouster who’d been cut in the face. He was sitting back against a pile of rice sacks, moaning like a record played much too slowly, and the mill manager lifted a deck lamp off its hook and walked back among the crates, thinking that it would be a shame for such a worker to be ruined.
    He raised the light. “Is someone going to get a doctor for you?”
    A pair of eyes opened, boiled eggs floating in a tabasco of pain. “Ain’t one’ll come.”
    Speck, the waiter, suddenly loomed at Randolph’s back. “You want me to carry these bags up to the depot on the dolly, sah?”
    The mill manager stooped down. “Do you have any alcohol and bandages on board?”
    Speck sniffed. “Seem like some niggers done had enough alcohol.”
    “He needs some for the outside. And bring me a roll of gauze and a strip of salt meat from the galley.” He looked up and couldn’t make out the man’s face, but he could smell his sour black uniform. “There’ll be more than a nickel under a plate.”
    “Sah,” Speck said, turning for the staircase.
    The rouster raised his head and the gash in his face opened like a long, red mouth, spreading from above the temple, across the cheek, down to the chin. When the waiter returned with a bottle of straight neutral spirits, the mill manager poured it onto the cut, some trickling into the man’s left eye, and he hollered out to God Almighty, thrashed his arms, and fell back against the sacks, trembling like a mule shaking off flies. Randolph wiped