Gangway! Read Free Page B

pier. Got on solid ground and stood there taking deep breaths. His vision began to clear.
        He looked up toward the forward deck. The big guys stood like trees. So San Francisco had a U. S. Mint, did it? And gold was shipped there.
        That was interesting. Very interesting.
        He was still thinking about that when a sailor in a striped shirt went by bawling, "All aboard-all aboard," which suggested these Westerners couldn't tell the difference between a steamboat and a train.
        Gabe dragged himself aboard.
        He draped himself over the rail as near as he could get to the gold stack, because he thought maybe if he could keep looking at all that gold it would take his mind off being seasick.
        It didn't work out that way. But between spells of being violently sick and spells of dry heaves, there were the occasional merciful moments of respite. During one of those moments he caught sight of a girl drifting unhurriedly along the deck, stopping here and there to look around her with pert wide-eyed interest. A slip of a girl, a delicate innocent flower of a girl. She wasn't looking in his direction; she stopped not too far away, a little beauty of a girl sweetly taking deep breaths of the warm and sunny afternoon air.
        The lovely wisp of a girl, wearing chaste innocence like a clean fragrance, moved daintily past Gabe. He would have turned to watch her go, but his time was up. He lurched back over the rail, clutched a stanchion with one hand, and hung his head weakly, keeping his eyes tight shut so he wouldn't have to watch the water roll past below him. Desperately his mind clung to a vision of the girl he had just seen. The simple dainty frock she wore; the wind gently whipping the long blonde hair around her little face…
        Something jostled him slightly. In his wracked condition, he hardly noticed.
        The first he knew anything was wrong was when he heard the shot and the scream.
        He whipped around, as fast as he could under the circumstances, and slapped his right hand against his hip pocket where his knuckle-duster was.
        Except it wasn't.
        He realized the pocket was empty at the same time that he saw the girl. The same girl he'd been dreaming about, trying to distract himself from his stomach. Damn if Gabe's knuckle duster wasn't in her hand, still smoking at the muzzle as she held it out away from her as though it were a dead rat.
        "Well, by God," Gabe muttered. He pushed himself away from the rail and reached for his property. "I'll take that."
        But she held onto it; partly from panic, it seemed, and partly from a grasping nature. She glared at him, her jaw set, and held on tight.
        Gabe felt as weak as railroad beer. He yanked at the knuckle-duster, clutching his cap in his other hand, and panted, "Gimme that. Give it to me."
        "No." She said it through clenched teeth and held on.
        The knuckle-duster was turning this way and that in their hands, neither of them able to keep a firm grip on it. One of them-probably the girl, who obviously had no idea what it was she'd stolen-accidentally touched the concealed button on the side. The duster's knife-blade snapped open, flipping up between all those fingers without quite removing any of them.
        "Sheee!" The girl let go in a sudden hurry and jumped backward.
        Gabe slapped his cap on his head to free his other hand, then disengaged the blade and folded it shut. Opening the single-shot chamber, he rummaged in his cluttered pockets for a new cartridge. At the same time he kept one eye on the girl and the other on the corner of the forward cabin beyond which the gold guards were clustered. They weren't visible from here, but it was curious that the sound of the shot hadn't brought them on the run.
        No. It wasn't curious after all. They knew their business, those guys. They weren't about to be distracted from the gold by some trivial