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

sail, was the clubfooted creature from the wintery bog in Vermont. "Hands high overhead now, niggers and nigger stealers alike," shrieked Doctor Surgeon.

    Flinging his musket to Dolt and calling out to the Caliph to run, run, run, Morgan broke into a sprint, heading directly back toward the City of Buffalo and straight into the maw of the Chesapeake punt gun now swiveling his way. As Doctor Surgeon thumbed back the gooseneck hammer, Morgan whipped the cord of Ludi's two-barreled scattershot over his head. He leaped over the mouth of the punt gun just as it exploded again, clearing the flying death-charge of shot by scant inches. He landed on the foredeck of the Buffalo and threw down on Doctor Surgeon with the scattershot. The terrified horses shied, causing the bow of the boat to crash into the side of the berm. A barrel of high-proof gin flew off the roof of the cabin, emptying its volatile contents over the deck. Morgan was flung across the deck by the collision. He fired one barrel of the scattershotwildly into the night, striking a running lantern, which shattered and fell onto the deck, torching the spreading pool of gin.

    From around the corner of the low cabin came Suggs, his ten-foot-long fending pole raised above his head. Morgan dodged aside and Suggs slipped and fell onto the flaming deck and instantly took fire, as if the tons of gin he had consumed over his lifetime had ignited to consume him. As the blazing captain leaped into the canal, Morgan sprang off the boat. Casks of gin in the hold were now exploding like barrels of gunpowder. One of the bay horses was missing, as was the creature in black. The revelers had fled back down the berm.

    Another barrel of gin burst and another and yet a third, as the City of Buffalo burned to the waterline. Soon all that could be heard was the jingling chorus of spring peeping frogs and one lone late-flying snipe, winnowing through the night sky high overhead.

    Then, coming from nowhere and everywhere, a trilling ululation. "Morrr-gaaan. Morrr-gaaan. The girl, Morrr-gaaan. Where is the girrrl?" Followed by curdling laughter. Followed by silence.

    D AWN WAS an enraged red streak in the northeastern sky. Black clouds scudded low overhead as Morgan and the elephant plodded west along the berm while Dolt manned the tiller of the showboat, its skeletal jaws pointing the way, its elegant blue-and-white gingerbread trim riddled to scrapwood. Two of the Underground passengers had been killed in the battle the night before by flying shrapnel from the punt gun. Two others, badly injured, had been taken on ahead to Utica for medical attention by the driver ofa passing lumber wagon. Dolt, who had never before lost a fugitive passenger, was close to distraction. Morgan blamed himself. He was the one who had led the mad killer straight to His Whaleship and the runaways. It seemed that wheresoever he went he brought nothing but death and destruction to all who would help him.

    Ahead on the towpath a goose girl was driving to market a score of gray Toulouse honkers and several dozen turkeys, and the path was beslimed with the birds' copious phlegm-green leavings. As Morgan passed the girl, who was long-legged and saucy and as sharp as the little end of nothing, she beckoned to him lewdly and broke into wild gales of laughter. She wore a shift of goose feathers and down glued to a potato sack, and her legs were as brown from the sun as the muddy canal water; her feet and ankles were the green of weathered copper from the droppings of the geese and turkeys, which kept up a din you could hear half a mile away, a constant lunatic honking and gabbling and gobbling. And as she harried them along, the little hoyden gabbled back at them in a strange and uncanny approximation of their own peculiar tongue.

    U TICA. AT THE JUNCTION of the Great Western Canal and the River Tug, which ran out of the dank spruces and hemlocks of an area called the Limberlost, the sun came streaming forth on the