One night around two o’clock she heard a sound like a mosquito whining in her ear and sat up, dizzy, to realize it was her Madeline crying in the next bedroom.

She sat in a brocaded chair next to the child and could see in the glow of the night-light that she was sweaty under the fine sheets and coverlet. “Here, honey, let’s get all this off of you. It’s okay to sleep just under a sheet when it’s warm.”

“Where’s my mommy and Gussie?” the child cried, her voice sleepy and thick.

“You’re just confused, Madeline. Your family got sick and passed away, remember?”

“No, they didn’t.”

“You were in the orphanage just one day when we picked you out to be our own little girl, precious.” She leaned over and began to stroke the girl’s hair. “I saw right away you were talented and pretty, not like those dirty, snotty children. Oh, you could sing like a bird.”

“My mommy taught me songs.”

“Well…” Willa straightened her back. “Didn’t I hire a trained musician to teach you better ones? He cost lots and lots of money, Madeline.”

“He didn’t like the song I sang for him.”

Willa looked toward the window and frowned. “‘Cleopatra’ is a nasty New York song from one of those tawdry revues.”

The child began to whimper. “Vessy said she liked it.”

“Vessy is an uneducated servant who barely knows how to wear shoes. She probably sleeps with hound dogs back in the woods.”

“I like her,” the girl said.

“Bless you, there’s not a thing you know about how people are. I’ll teach you, Madeline, the difference between good and bad people. All you have to do is listen to me and watch me.”

“Can I have a drink of water?”

Willa let out a sigh. “All right. I probably won’t get back to sleep anyway.”

Down in the kitchen she fumbled around in the cabinets for a common tumbler. She started to draw a glass of tepid water from the mop faucet, which still ran to the old rainwater cistern, then remembered Vessy saying the water had things in it. What things? She would have to ask. She remembered the girl’s hot face and chipped a little ice for the glass and drew water from the city tap. What a bother it was to raise a child! But as she stood in the dark hall outside the girl’s door, holding the sweating glass, she felt somehow ennobled. The child sat up in the dim room, barely visible.

“Can I have the water?”

“Can I have the water, what?” Her heart nearly stopped beating with the expectation of her answer.

“Can I have the water, lady?”

THE AMBASSADOR stayed several days in Memphis. No big excursion boats had come to town for months, and the men’s lodges, church groups, trade unions, and general crowds kept the steamer running three outings a day at full capacity. The passengers on the night trips were mostly couples, very well dressed, fairly good dancers out for a civilized time, and the crew was able to relax.

Ted Weller, when he could walk on crutches, decided it was time to travel to Cincinnati to another hospital. After Elsie and August said their goodbyes before rushing off for a two o’clock excursion, Sam helped him into a cab and rode with him to the station, bought his ticket, and handled his trunk. He sat a long time next to him on a bench and waited for the train, noting the hurt in Ted’s face and wondering if surgery could put the rhythmic lightning back in his fingers.

“God, Lucky, I feel awful. This whole left arm is throbbing.”

“You feel too bad to travel, we can catch a hack back to the hospital.”

Ted took a long breath. “No. I’ll be all right once I get on board.”

Sam reached over and stuffed the long ticket into Ted’s inside coat pocket. “I’ll watch out for August.”

He moved and his face showed a bolt of pain. “What do you think about Lily? That maybe we’ve lost her for good?”

“You can’t think like that. We can find her if we believe we can. Maybe that sounds dumb, but if you expect something to happen, sometimes it does. Kind of like my piano playing.”

“Stop, it hurts too much to laugh.”

Sam put his hands together and hung them between his knees. “I’ll keep looking.”

Ted turned slowly toward him, bones popping in his back. “I expect it of you.”

BETWEEN TRIPS Sam stayed busy and spoke to the police sergeants, showed a picture of Lily around at the various precincts, journeyed to the city’s rail stations, and spoke with telegraphers, telling everyone that he’d pay for the telegram if they learned anything that might be useful. Twice he called home and spoke with Linda, telling her how much he’d missed her, asking if any messages for him had come to their house. She seemed to sense a sadness about him that he himself was unaware of, and she was overly cheerful, unlike her usual steady self. She told him she was glad to get the money he’d wired her, that she was eating so much good food she was getting fat. Though he knew this was a lie, it delighted him.

The night before the boat was to pull out, he was leaning against the starboard smokestack ignoring the heat running up his back when Captain Stewart came down from the pilothouse and handed him two revolvers.

“What’s this?”

“Two new Smiths I got in town. Give one to Duggs. We’re playing Stovepipe Bend tomorrow, and I want you to wear them in your waistband out on the stage.”

“Same setup as Bung City?”

The captain shook his head. “Bung City’s like a Sunday school compared to this place. Watch out. These things are loaded.”

He found Charlie in his bunk, suffering from a dizzy headache, and he tossed a revolver onto his stomach. “What’s Stovepipe Bend?”

“The advance man told me, but I didn’t believe it.” He put a forearm over his eyes. “Oh, it’s just a bad place, Sam. We’ll live through it.”

“You got a sick headache or the alcohol flu?”

Charlie gave him a look. His eyes looked like a copper sunset, and Sam reached over and felt his forehead. “Oh, I’m all right.”

“You got a little fever there.”

“It’s just being tired. My back hurts from wrestling those slot machines on the late-night run.” He closed his eyes. “Just let me be, and I’ll get up or I won’t.”

Sam removed the revolver from Charlie’s bunk. “I’ll put this on the washstand so you don’t roll over on it and shoot us both.”

“Obliged.”

Sam looked at the shiny revolver, a.38 Special with checkered walnut grips. “You ever shoot anybody?”

“You tryin’ to be funny?”

At once he realized his mistake. “Sorry. I forgot you really were in the war.”

“Yeah, really,” Charlie groaned.

THE BOAT BACKED OUT and would steam north all day through empty territory. Between Memphis and Cairo only a few small towns withered on the bank and between them was uninhabited shoreline, short hills, slick and panther-haunted lowlands, sandbars, and willows-a gravelscape fit for nothing but avoidance. Mr. Brandywine told him stories of outlaws still living in the unpoliced backwaters, some making whiskey in factory quantities, of revenuers who went in but never came out. Swaneli told him of one Arkansas lawman’s skeleton found shackled to a drift log, pulled out at Vicksburg.

As he turned in, Sam listened to the engines’ escape stacks sending big gasps up into the night sky. The engineers were using steam full-stroke to make good time, and he knew the firemen were suffering for it as they fought to keep pressure up. He wondered if August was holding his own, if the more experienced firemen were helping him out. He was a child, really, and had no business being down there in the heat and soot and leaking pipes. When Sam was a boy he’d worked all day digging potatoes with the sun rolling around on his back like a hot rock, but he’d been stronger than August. Thinking about it, he was glad to leave a place where he had to get up in the sleeting December dark to cut sugarcane all day wearing only a thin shirt, eating only a cold sweet potato in a tin cup for lunch. He smiled in his bunk as he thought of getting away from Uncle Claude’s farm. He smiled again when he remembered Krine’s department store, the broad aisles, the glowing salesgirls in their stylish dresses, Maurice playing waltzes on the mezzanine pipe organ.