Steamboat Explosion
by
tallsunshine12
Chapter 1 Explosion
Burned by steam, cut by flying debris, cast into hot oily superheated water, he hazarded a sooty look around. The boat, the whole boat, blown to smithereens, some sections huge and recognizable as deck or rail, other pieces so small, he couldn't guess what they had been.
Something white and flouncy floated a few feet away, with tousled brown hair. The body face down, her arms floating above her head, framing it, her tiny black shoes protruding out of the water, she was young, too young. Not more than fourteen or fifteen.
His eyes blurred by oil and warm blood—as the Salmon P. Chase disintegrated beneath his feet, a board had struck him, cutting his forehead above his right eye—he swam over and hooked an arm around her waist.
He drove on towards the shore and its relative safety, about twenty-five feet away. Dragging his inanimate burden onto the sand, he tossed himself on his back, wiping his oily mouth with a torn sleeve.
His breathing tortured, his throat raw, his steam-blasted lungs heaving, he rolled over onto his stomach, and closed his eyes. It was a short sleep, but one in which he could still hear the shrieks and curses, followed by mournful cries of the drowning and burned.
Much wailing and misery. The day had been so fair.
Breathing deep of the cool, good air of the shore, he thought about his friend Clancy, one of the pilots. They'd been talking on the hurricane deck two decks above the water line when the boilers blew, throwing them both over the rail.
Clancy's folks were making him a visit from Omaha in a few weeks. The Harbingers farmed—or ranched, for it was a combination estate—in Nebraska. Their coming had made Clancy glad. But now, he might be as dead as the girl lying cold and pale at Bret's side. He'd have to identify the body and more than likely write to the Harbingers.
The gambler gathered his tattered clothes together and struggled to his feet. He crossed the dead girl's arms over her chest, a very tiny chest, and strode into the water. He gripped an arm here, a waist there, pulling out others, those dead, alive, or not so alive. The cold water swirled around his knees and the head blow made him stagger in and out of the swells.
Then he saw Clancy struggling in the current. Seeing his friend alive, though battered and lung-scalded, filled Bret with a weightless joy that no winning at the poker tables could match. Leaping out into the current again, he grabbed Clancy's short pilot jacket around the lapels and heaved and pulled, yanking him out of the river.
Clancy lay and gasped on the bank, his lungs seared by steam as sorely as if a torch had passed through them. Maverick ran back in and stooped to give a few others struggling to shore, in all kinds of disarray, a pull the last few feet.
When the sky became too dark to pursue the quest for the living any longer, Bret slipped down beside Clancy and was shortly sleeping, his head pillowed on an old cottonwood log. He awoke abruptly what seemed like days later.
It was light. A couple of ministering hands helped him to sit up. As he moved, his eyes fluttered open and closed, while his lips parted in a sharp, "Oh!"
"Lie still there. Just you rest, boy," said an older man, who gently patted him down with a warm woolen blanket. He put it around Maverick's shoulders, shushing him as he tried to question and protest all at once.
"What about-?"
"No, no more questions. You're dazed. It's been a very bad time."
"What kind of … what day is it?"
"It's Friday. The boat blew up yesterday. Early last night. We got here as quick as we could. You were real lucky not to get caught in the blast."
Bret looked around. "My friend, Clancy. Where is he? Dead?"
"No," came the short answer. "Here, drink this. It's strong coffee. It'll perk your spirits up."
Bret sipped, and then laid his head back on the pillow. He was no longer conscious.
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Waking later on, he found himself in a bed in a warm room. Glancing past the covers that were pulled up to his nose, he saw a fire blazing in a small grate. He looked around. The room was dim, but he could make out things. Pictures, a four-poster where he lay, the mantle with figurines and photographs on it. He didn't know whose room this was, or whose house. What family had taken the watery stray in?
He couldn't keep awake and slept for a while longer, waking to the sound of a door opening and a cheery female voice calling out to him. Something about 'tea.' He looked past his feet to the door, thinking had he fallen in with a colony of Englishmen. He had heard of them. They lived in one or two places along the river, farming, going to town, but mostly keeping to themselves.
"What town is this?" he asked, weakly. "Is it—?"
"Westport?" She laughed, setting the tray down on a little bedside table. "You bet."
"I was going upriver." Westport was downriver.
"What happened? Was it as bad an explosion as they say?"
"All I know, I was standing on the deck. Everything went at once." He coughed, finishing with, "The floor of the deck vanished into splinters and fell into the water, taking me along with it."
"I reckon so," she said, non-committally. She stirred some sugar lumps into the tea and poured in a bit of milk from a flowered pot.
"You're not English, are you?"
"Oh, you mean because of this tea!"
She was pretty, pert. Maverick liked her. Maybe they'd have time to talk. Then he got hit with a bolt of lightning. He sat up on his elbows in the bed. He could thank the explosion, the head-blow and the presence of the pretty girl with the tea things for his not remembering that Clancy had been almost dead.
"Clancy! Is he alright? I almost plum forgot about him. He was with me. Where's he now?"
"He's not well, but he's just in the other room. You asked about him once or twice, and he was the only other man about your age, so we figured he was your friend."
"Not well—how?"
"He's burned a lot, but not his face." She looked down and away and seemed to smile. "He has a broken collarbone, but it's his lungs. He lays and gasps. We keep the room well-aired, as cold as it is."
"I'd like to see him, if I may."
She helped him to sit up all the way in bed, pulling the pillows up behind his shoulders. She was strong for a young person, about twenty or twenty-one. He took the mug holding the tea in his hand and kept gazing at her for an answer.
"Not tonight. You're tired, he's asleep. Won't do you both any good. Tomorrow, maybe."
"Whose house is this? You live here?"
"No, I work here. I'm a maid for Mr. and Mrs. Alsop. They're the owners. It's raining again, you know."
He liked the way she changed subjects. "Wish I could help it," he said, trying to sound playful, though he was really tired. "Seems like it's always doing that. I'll just drink my tea, and then get back down under the covers. Feel like a chill's coming on."
"I know it ought to be!" she exclaimed. "After that drenching that you and—Clancy?" He nodded. "You and Clancy got." Her voice got softer as she said that name. Maverick could tell she was smitten by him. His friend was a good-looker, with a long, graceful neck, a small, consumptive frame that made girls want to shelter him in their arms, and darting, dark eyes with big black lashes. Maverick, himself, the card player, was bigger, broader, and had brown, well-tanned skin and dark eyes and hair—his curled, while Clancy's was straight.
He was reputedly a good-looker, himself.
The next day, Bret dressed in borrowed clothes. Having his own aches and bruises, he walked gingerly into his friend's room, sat down next to the bed and sighed. It would be all over for him in a few days, but for Clancy, it was just the beginning. A long and expensive recovery. How long would the Alsops put him up in their house?
Maverick, who had lost all of his money and papers in the steamboat explosion, didn't like the thought of Clancy's going to a cold, uncaring St. Louis hospital down the river, not with those lungs. He listened to his deep-throated breathing and wondered what kind of pain his friend was in. Perhaps none just then, for his eyelids were closed and he seemed to be wholly unconscious of his surroundings.
His facial muscles twitched every so often, and his left arm had a tremor in it due to the broken clavicle, but that was all. He was dead to the world while still breathing in it. His room was cold, so Maverick drew the covers up around the man's shoulders, noting the huge bandage on his neck under the sleeping gown he wore.
He sighed again, still feeling spent, running a tired hand through his hair.
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In the days to come, Bret found himself busy. He moved Clancy to a little hotel in town that didn't do much business and was happy for any it could get, even broke refugees from the river. The Alsops duly protested Clancy's move, but not too much.
Bret played cards in the hotel's small saloon, won some money, and took care of his friend. When Clancy was sitting up again and talking, able to describe the hurt he felt, Bret sat up too, long of a night, listening. He wrote his letters.
When Clancy felt as if he could get around on his own, with the Alsops' maid Laura there to help him, Maverick left town. He traveled upriver on another steamboat, a little leery of it, but knowing he had to get over his own fears. After all, he worked on steamboats as a gambler!
He met Clancy's family in Omaha, before they had begun their journey to Westport.
"He's doin' better," he told them. "He's got a pretty girl who reads to him and helps him walk around some. He's sure lookin' forward to seeing all of you," he told the Harbingers, then accompanied the three, father, older brother and younger sister, as they traveled down to Westport by steamer.
Four more excited people he couldn't hope to see, including Clancy himself. Only Laura seemed a little put out. Who was this other, slightly older girl, visiting Clancy?
Maverick leaned over to her where they stood at the fireplace. "That beautiful young lady," he said, "is Clancy's sister, Corrie."
She brightened up after that, though now she had no excuse to continue visiting Clancy, if he had friends to look after him. He pressed Laura to have dinner with them before she had to return to the Alsops' for the night. Clancy got down to the dining room and it was a festive time.
The talk ran as if the explosion had been ages ago instead of only recently. Clancy, swathed in bandages, kept eyeing Laura over the flower centerpiece. Maverick knew they wished they could move it out of the way, if only to hold hands directly across the table, they were that smitten.
He found himself looking at Corrie with an interested eye. Older than Laura, with cascades of thick, wavy auburn hair, she had a heart-shaped face, a tiny button nose, and a slightly pointed chin. Corrie kept an eye on him, too, at the dinner and even after. When they began to take walks together in town or along the Missouri shore in the next few days, everyone in Westport noticed. It was not a big town.
Four or five strangers in town made Westport's pulse race, but it calmed down by indulging in looking and gossiping. The little hotel loved the business. Clancy's father was a big enough spender for what little the hotel had to offer in service and accommodations, and the other brother Charlie liked to drink in its saloon, sometimes playing cards with Maverick and learning a bit of the art.
With a bit of concern, Maverick kept watch on Charlie, the first of the two sons. Charlie had a booming voice, as if he was always calling across a wide sea to a tiny boat in the ocean. He was a heavy enough man, all around, but lightweight in morals. He drank to excess, and then became belligerent.
"Why weren't you hurt as badly as Clancy?" he once asked Maverick, right there in the saloon, raising his hands to fight him. He had already had a few whiskies.
Maverick laughed him off. "I just had a bit o' extra luck that day."
Charlie's wrath only grew. His face purpled. Charles the Elder, his and Clancy's pa, pulled them apart before any blows were struck, and Maverick was grateful. Big as he himself was, the other man was several inches taller and broader. He was built for bear.
Three more or less blissful weeks passed for the party. Most or all of Bret's expenses were reimbursed him, he made money at the tables, and Corrie gave him those candid, brown eyes of hers in a rented buggy. He noticed how plump she was in the cheeks, more so about the middle, almost as if—he dared not think it. Not of Corrie.
Though a bit heady to deal with at times, she was a glorious girl and fun to be around on those tree-sheltered drives through the Missouri bottomland. Clancy could have thin girls like Laura, who barely ate so much as a chicken wing on their foursome picnics together. Give Bret Maverick the plumpness of ripe and blooming health. Corrie fit that description.
They passed a couple of hours alone together every day. Charles got in the act sometimes with his haughty voice and forward demeanor, arguing in public how Bret was spending too much time with Corrie. Even the deck hands on the quay were beginning to talk. He wasn't fit for the parlor, he heard. Up to no good. Pa's money was involved. His interest in Corrie was a fiction, they'd say.
Maverick had other ideas. What he felt for Corrie may not have been leading to vows, but it was deep and real enough. And hadn't he done rather nobly by Clancy, nursing him through a languishing illness when Laura, the Alsops' maid, couldn't be there? He kept him company, greeted his kinfolk—and acted the friend in everything. He hadn't asked for anything in return.
Why should Charlie have an edge against him? Couldn't he be as grateful as Corrie and their pa? Maverick liked to keep his distance from the man, who was especially warlike when Old Mr. Charles wasn't around. In a game of whist one night, Charlie fairly snarled at Bret during one of Bret's winning plays.
Charlie was a couple of years older than he, and half a hundred pounds heavier. Bret wouldn't like to climb that lofty perch to knock a few inches off it. He might end up in too many pieces—on the ground far, far below.