Past All Dishonor Read Free Page A

stagecoaches. Then she got her black cape and I took it, and leaned out the window so I could pull her through. We slipped down the stairway and I helped her in the boat. As I lowered the trunk, a bell rang in the engine room. It seemed a year before I could cast off the painter, grab the oars, and dig. As I shot away, the wheel began to turn. I was headed upstream, because the current had swung me that way, but I didn’t take time to turn. I kept on going, past the steamer’s bow, and shot under the next pier. She was in the stern, but now she moved up beside me, and we sat there, and held our breath, and watched. The steamer was pointed upstream too, because they always come in against the current, and she kept on that way until she was pretty close to the bridge. Then a hawser lifted out of the water, and you could hear the deckhands grunt as they began pulling it in. She came around till we could almost have touched her, then she was pointed downriver, and the wharfmaster threw the hawser off the piling, and another bell rang in the engine room. We got some spray in our faces, and almost before you could believe it there was nothing but lights going downriver while the band played Oh! Susanna.
    We laughed. Then we laughed again, and I put my arm around her and she let me. Then she came close and kissed me and I kissed back and I knew I loved her and she had to be mine.

2
    “W HAT DO I DO now?”
    “Your family live here?”
    “My family’s dead.”
    “Where did you figure to go from the boat?”
    “To a hotel.”
    “You can’t do that now. They’ll be looking for you.”
    “What you trembling about?”
    “I got a shack.”
    “Must be cold there, the way you shake.”
    “You could come in there.”
    “With you?”
    “It’s not much, but you’d be hidden.”
    “What’s your name?”
    “Roger. Roger Duval.”
    “You from Louisiana?”
    “The name’s French, but I’m from Maryland.”
    “Morina’s my name. Morina Crockett.”
    “You talk like Louisiana.”
    “I was born in Mobile, but I lived in New Orleans.”
    “How old are you?”
    “Twenty-three. How old are you?”
    “Twenty-one.”
    “My little piece of live bait, with blue eyes and curly gold hair, that I pulled out of the river. Roger, when I get a little bitty shrimp, I like to hold him in my hand, just to feel him wiggle. Suppose I get to wondering how you’d feel wiggling?”
    “Then you’re coming?”
    “I’m a coon up a tree. What else can I do?”
    She moved over to the stern, and leaned back on both hands while I pulled across the river, and kept looking at me, her eyes big and black in the starlight, and just a little bit it seemed they were laughing at me. At the landing I stood up to help her out, but she kept sitting there, and then: “Roger, could I borrow your boat?”
    “...What for?”
    “Something I got to do.”
    “Well, can’t I do it for you?”
    “It’s kind of private.”
    I stood there figuring, and all of a sudden it hit me that if she could handle a boat and pull up the next landing, that would kind of take care of everything she had to worry about, specially as it was on the Yolo side and there would be no Sacramento officers to be looking for her. I must have sounded pretty sulky: “Take it, then. Will you drop me a note where you leave it? So I can come get it? It handles nice and I kind of like it. Roger Duval, care general delivery, Sacramento, Calif.”
    “I bet you wiggle nice.”
    “And watch the oarlocks. They’re loose.”
    “Aren’t you taking my trunk out? ... You’re the cutest thing I ever saw in my life, and I’m not leaving you. But I got a use for this boat.”
    Then I saw, or thought I saw, that it had something to do with the ladies’ promenade, and wanted to tell her I was pretty well fixed in that line back of the shack, but you can’t say a thing like that, so I just stooped down to pick up her trunk. She put her hand over my lips. “Wiggle your mouth.”
    I kissed