Huckleberry Finished Read Free Page B

go.”
    â€œWhat about the money I paid for a round-trip?”
    I thought about it. Since he had brought the trouble down on himself, I figured I’d be within my rights to keep his money. But since I like to be accommodating, I said, “I’ll refund you, say, thirty percent. But you’ll have to wait and let me send you a check.”
    â€œI’ll be out whatever a rental car costs me, too.”
    â€œShould’ve thought of that before you took a swing at that guy.”
    â€œYeah, I guess so.” He nodded, glum as ever. “All right. Thanks. I know you could’ve told me it was my own fault and to go to hell.”
    â€œThat’s right,” I said. “I could have.”
    He stopped in front of a door with metal numerals 1 and 7 nailed to it. “This is my cabin.”
    â€œI’m sorry this happened. You’d better stay in there, like Mr. Rafferty told you. I got the feeling he was pretty mad. He’ll call the cops if you give him any more trouble.”
    â€œHe looked to me more like he wanted to break my neck.”
    â€œYeah, well, he might do that, too.”
    I left Ben Webster at the door and headed back to my cabin. I got out my laptop and wrote an e-mail to Melissa, telling her to pull the file for Ben Webster and send a check for 30 percent of the money he had paid us to his home address. That was another big difference since Mark Twain’s time: The riverboats hadn’t been equipped with wireless Internet service back then. They didn’t even have dial-up.
    The cruise from St. Louis to Hannibal takes a couple of hours. The boat docks in Hannibal early enough so that folks can get some sightseeing done before dark. Then they have dinner on the boat and enjoy an evening of gambling and other entertainment, including Mark Lansing’s performance as Mark Twain. More sightseeing the next morning rounds out the trip, and then the boat cruises back downriver to St. Louis that afternoon, so the whole trip takes about twenty-seven hours. That’s long enough to give the passengers the authentic flavor of a Mississippi River voyage without causing a problem for modern-day attention spans.
    I didn’t have much interest in gambling. I own a small business; that’s enough of a gamble for me. I didn’t intend to spend the evening boozing it up like some of the passengers would, either. My hope was that nobody would get drunk and cause trouble. The incident with Ben Webster was more than enough of a ruckus for this trip.
    So my plan was to take in the Mark Twain show in the salon. Mark Lansing had struck me as a nice guy, and I couldn’t help but wonder what he looked like without the wig and the fake mustache and the old-man make-up.
    I hoped the wild white hair and the big mustache really were fake. You never know, though, with actors. Some of them really get into the parts they play.
    First, though, there were sights to see, and a little later, as the riverboat’s steam whistle let out several shrill blasts, I knew we were about to dock at Hannibal, Missouri, boyhood home of Mr. Samuel Langhorne Clemens himself.

C HAPTER 3
    I ’d never been to Hannibal before. As I walked toward the front of the boat, I saw the town sprawled on the western bank of the river with rolling green hills behind it. Since tourism was an important industry here, it was deliberately picturesque. Oh, there were plenty of modern touches visible, but many of the buildings really were old and had been restored to look like they had in Mark Twain’s time, like the riverboat itself.
    Quite a few of the passengers had gathered on the bow to watch the approach to the dock. I saw about half the members of my group among them. The others were still in the casino, I supposed. I noticed Eddie and Louise Kramer at the railing. She was snapping pictures with a digital camera. I was sort of surprised to see that he wasn’t talking on his cell phone but