Walking to Gatlinburg: A Novel by Howard Frank Mosher Page A

running lanterns glimmered in the black canal water as the gin boat crawled through the night under a pale quarter moon.

    Dolt too had heard that Pilgrim had gone missing at Gettysburg but scoffed at the reports that he might be dead and buried in a Pennsylvania ditch. "Old Pilgrim's too crafty to be killed, and that's a natural fact," he said. "I know he's alive."

    "So do I, cousin. But sometimes doubt creeps in."

    "What was it the old reverend at home used to say, Morgie? Faith without a measure of doubt ain't worth a brass farthin'. Doubt be damned, don't you never stop looking for your brother. Never. See here, cousin. Say you was the one missing. Do you think Pilgrim would stop looking for you? I guess he wouldn't. Now here's a hard question that I need to ask a smart person. It's about this war."

    "I don't care much about the war, Dolt."

    "Well, don't care about it, then. Just answer the question for me. They say the fighting ain't about slavery. Ruther it's about states' rights."

    "So I've heard."

    "All right, then. You tell me, Morgie. States' rights to do what?"

    "Secede, I reckon."

    "Secede why? Over what?"

    Morgan laughed. "Well, Mr. Grand Inquisitor, over slavery."

    "Then why ain't the war about slavery?"

    "I suppose it is."

    "I suppose it is too," Dolt said. "So don't you never stop looking for Pilgrim!"

    Morgan laughed again and shook his head. Philosophizing with Dolt Kinneson, now a canalman and Underground conductor, in the middle of the night in the company of a dead whale and a live elephant. And while Dolt's private algebra eluded Morgan--the x's and y's equating the cause of the war with the imperative to findPilgrim--the justness of his cousin's sentiments did not. He too believed that he must keep looking for Pilgrim, if only because the looking might sustain his faith that his brother was still alive. As to the war, well, he did not disagree that slavery, the greatest evil mankind had ever devised, was the ultimate issue, but it had long seemed to him that the conflict had acquired a malignant life of its own. Pilgrim had slipped away from it. Morgan wanted no part of it. His sole concern was to stay alive long enough to locate his missing brother.

    Later Dolt told him that according to Gerrit Smith, the sign on the boat,, stood for Mannaz , meaning beginnings. The canal, one of the main passages to Canada, was where the new lives of the Whaleship 's fugitive passengers truly began.

    Morgan was pondering this idea when he noticed, down the waterway in the thin moonlight, that the City of Buffalo had shortened the distance between the two boats by half. The bay horses pulling the barge were coming on at a sweeping trot.

    "S UGGS MEANS to pass us up yonder in the Yellow Jack Fens," Dolt said, looking back over his shoulder at the oncoming barge. "He means to cut our towropes with his boat scythes. Can your big boy run, Morgan? Shall we give the old sod a run for his money?"

    "He can," Morgan said. "And we shall. Hi, Caliph. Run! Run, boy!"

    The elephant broke into a lumbering trot. His Whaleship bounced along behind on the moon-shimmered surface of the canal. Suggs,at the tiller of his gin boat, blew his warning horn, and the hoggee leading the Buffalo's bays leaped onto the back of one of the horses and whipped them up. The chase was on.

    As the boats entered the vast swampy region known as the Yellow Jack Fens, the Buffalo continued to gain on them, the revelers on deck howling the bays on. Suggs blared out a ringing charge on his horn, and a blinding orange tongue of fire, accompanied by a terrific crashing report, shot out from the bow. A torrent of flying metal raked the stern and port side of His Whaleship . In the moonlight Morgan could make out the long shining barrel of the Admiral's Chesapeake Bay punt gun jutting off the bow of the City of Buffalo . Furiously reloading the deadly weapon, over which he hunched like a great cloaked bat, his outsized hat as black as a pirate