Waltz Into Darkness Read Free Page B

once. Today's your day for hearing it."
    "I'd
better be on my way!" He bolted for the door, flung it open,
chased down the walk and gave a vault into the waiting carriage that
rocked it on its springs.
    "To
the Canal Street Pier," he sighed with blissful anticipation,
"to meet the boat from St. Louis."

    3

    The
river was empty, the sky was clear. Both were mirrored in his
anxious, waiting eyes. Then a little twirl of smudge appeared, no
bigger than if stroked by a man-sized finger against the God-sized
sky. It came from where there seemed to be no river, only an
embankment; it seemed to hover over dry land, for it was around a
turn the river made, before straightening to flow toward New Orleans
and the pier. And those assembled on it.
    He
stood there waiting, others like himself about him. Some so close
their elbows all but grazed him. Strangers, men he did not know, had
never seen before, would never see again, drawn together for a moment
by the arrival of a boat.
    He
had picked for his standing place a pilehead that protruded above the
pier-deck; that was his marker, he stood close beside that, and
wouldn't let others preempt it from him, knowing it would play its
part in securing the craft. For a while he stood with one leg raised,
foot planted squarely upon it. Then he leaned bodily forward over it
in anticipation, both hands flattened on it. At one time, briefly, he
even sat upon it, but got up again' fairly soon, as if with some idea
that by remaining on his feet he would hasten the vessel's approach.
    The
smoke had climbed now, was high in the sky, like dingy black ostrich
plumes massed together and struggling to escape from one another.
Under its profusion a black that was solid substance, a slender cone,
began to rise; a smokestack. Then a second.
    "There
she is," a roustabout shouted, and the needless, overdue
declaration was immediately taken up and repeated by two or three of
those about him.
    "Yes
sir, there she is," they echoed two or three times after him.
"There she is, all right."
    "There
she is," Durand's heart told him softly. But it meant a
different she.
    The
smokestack, like a blunted knife slicing through the earth, cleared
the embankment and came out upon the open water bed. A tawny
superstructure, that seemed to be indented with a myriad tiny niches
in two long even rows, was beneath it, and beneath that, only a thin
line at this distance, was the ungainly black hull. The paddles were
going, slats turning over as they reached the top of the wheel and
fell, shaking off spray into the turgid brown water below that they
kept beating upon.
    She
made the turn and grew larger, prow forward. She was lifesized now,
coursing down on the pier as if she meant to smash it asunder. A
shrill falsetto wail, infinitely mournful, like the cry of a lost
soul in torment, knifed from her, and a plume of white circled the
smokestack and vanished to the rear. The City of New Orleans, out
of St. Louis three days before, was back home again at its
namesake-port, its mother-haven.
    The
sidewheels stopped, and it began to glide, like a paper boat, like a
ghost over the water. It turned broadside to the pier, and ran along
beside it, its speed seeming swifter now, that it was lengthwise,
than it had been before, when it was coming head-on, though the
reverse was the truth.
    The
notched indentations went by like a picket fence, then slower,
slower; then stopped at last, then even reversed a little and seemed
to lose ground. The water, caught between the hull and pier, went
crazy with torment; squirmed and slashed and choked, trying to find
its way out. Thinned at last to a crevicelike canal.
    No
more river, no more sky, nothing but towering superstructure blotting
them both out. Someone idling against the upper deck rail waved
desultorily. Not to Durand, for it was a man. Not to anyone else in
particular, either, most likely. Just a friendly wave of arrival. One
of them on the pier took it upon himself to answer it with a