The Best Coal Stoker's Western Passage

• Chapter 1 Ashes on the Rio Grande
• Chapter 2 Cast Iron Sanctuary
• Chapter 3 The Lady of New Orleans
• Chapter 4 Below the Waterline
• Chapter 5 Bloodhounds on the Levee
• Chapter 6 The Rhythm of the Shovel
• Chapter 7 Smoke Along the Reeds
• Chapter 8 Whispers in Steerage
• Chapter 9 The First Gauge Blows
• Chapter 10 Shadows at Natchez Under-the-Hill
• Chapter 11 Scars Beneath the Soot
• Chapter 12 A Deputy's Ghost
• Chapter 13 The Fireman’s Grip
• Chapter 14 Muddy Waters, Red Horizons
• Chapter 15 A Bullet in the Timber
• Chapter 16 Fuel and Fury
• Chapter 17 The Devil’s Bend
• Chapter 18 Trapped in the Hold
• Chapter 19 Steam and Cordite
• Chapter 20 Mutiny by the Boiler
• Chapter 21 The Lawman’s Brand
• Chapter 22 High Pressure Reckoning
• Chapter 23 Ambush at the Landing
• Chapter 24 Into the Furnace
• Chapter 25 Cold Water, Burning Iron
• Chapter 26 The Western Horizon

A tin star weighed about two ounces, but when you pulled it off your shirt and dropped it into three feet of silt-heavy water, it went down like an anvil.

Silas Vance watched the sluggish brown swirl of the Rio Grande swallow the last five years of his life. The current took the piece of hammered silver, rolled it twice along a shelf of cracked limestone, and tucked it neatly beneath a drift of rotting mesquite leaves. Silas didn't wait to see if the sun caught it one last time through the shallows. A man standing still on a riverbank at midday in the Republic of Texas was simply volunteering to be target practice, and Silas had already absorbed quite enough lead over the course of his thirty-four years to know it had a sour aftertaste.

Behind him, three miles to the northeast across a flat griddle of caliche and prickly pear, the town of San Pedro was busy smelling of cordite, horse sweat, and self-righteous indignation. By now, Judge Ebersole would have finished his noon whiskey, wiped the fried lard from his goatee, and walked across the plank boardwalk to find his favorite nephew lying cold and stiff on the floor of the dry-goods storeroom. The boy had possessed four distinct aces in his coat sleeve and an extra hole in his sternum, courtesy of Silas’s five-shot Paterson Colt.

It was an honest shooting, which was precisely the problem. In that corner of the territory, honesty was tolerated only when it did not interfere with the local judge’s pocketbook, and young Julian Ebersole had been the family’s primary collector of unpaid cattle notes and river taxes.

Silas wiped his brow with the greasy cuff of his homespun shirt. The Texas sun felt like an iron skillet pressed flat against the crown of his skull. His horse, an ugly, roman-nosed roan that Silas had borrowed without explicitly consulting the county sheriff, was already blowing hard under the meager shade of a salt cedar. The gelding’s ribs looked like a row of barrel staves, and a yellow froth of alkaline lather crusted the animal's flank.

"One more run, you old mule," Silas muttered, patting the horse's coarse neck. "Just enough to clear the sandbars."

The horse didn't bother to lift its head. It merely twitched an ear to dislodge a swarm of greenhead flies that had taken an interest in a crusty spur mark.

Silas reached down to unbuckle his gun belt. It was thick, harness-grade leather, oiled with tallow and black with ten seasons of trail dust. The holster was cut low, molded to the cylinder of the Paterson. He didn't drop the gun into the river. A man could surrender his authority without surrendering his skin. Instead, he unpinned the cylinder, checked the percussion caps with his thumbnail, and shoved the entire rig deep into the greasy canvas sack lashed behind his cantle. If anyone asked between here and the coast, he was just another broken-down drover with bad lungs and no kin, heading east to look for deck work.

A breeze scraped across the salt flats, carrying the faint, dry clatter of dried grasshoppers and the sharp tang of burning creosote. Then came the sound he was waiting for: the flat, wood-chopping crack of a rifle shot, followed by a second, duller thump half a second later.

They were testing the brush along the Arroyo Seco. That meant Harlan Vance—no relation Silas cared to claim, though they shared the same cursed grandfather from Tennessee—was leading the pack. Harlan liked to burn powder early. He was the kind of deputy who thought noise was an adequate substitute for tracking ability, which made him dangerous only when he got bored and started shooting at shadows. But behind Harlan would be four or five of the judge’s hired vaqueros, men who could trail an ant across bare granite if the ant had stepped in bacon grease.

Silas swung his leg over the roan. The leather groaned, and the horse gave a shuddering grunt of protest that came up through the stirrups.

"I know," Silas told the beast. "You’d rather lie down and die. Do it tomorrow. The river’s too wet for a grave."

He turned the horse downstream, staying in the ankle-deep shallows where the water erased the horseshoe impressions almost before the iron left the mud. The river was dying of summer, narrowed down to a braided trickle between yellow sandbars that looked like the backs of sleeping whales. To his left lay the sovereign land of Texas, where men were currently forming a circle to hang him from the nearest cottonwood; to his right lay the state of Tamaulipas, where a company of Mexican cavalry under a captain named Morales was reportedly looking for the same man over an unsettled matter involving three mules and an uninspected shipment of saltpeter.

Between the two, Silas had about thirty yards of damp clay and a sky the color of a bruised plum.

For four hours, he rode with his chin tucked into his chest, letting the roan find its own footing over the sunken snags and slick gravel bars. The heat came off the water in sheets, thick and rank with the odor of dying garfish. He kept his eyes peeled on the bluffs to the north. Every few miles, a ridge of caliche would rise sixty cubits above the salt grass, topped with stunted oaks that looked like clumps of burnt parsley. A rider up there would silhouette clean against the blue, but Silas saw nothing except turkey vultures wheeling in loose, lazy circles, waiting for him to fall out of the saddle.

Around four in the afternoon, the river widened and the roan finally gave up. It didn't bolt or buck; it simply folded its front knees into the soft silt of an eddy, sighed a long, wheezing breath, and rolled slowly onto its ribs. Silas had just enough warning to slip his left boot from the stirrup and jump clear into the brown foam.

He stood up, knee-deep in water, dragging the canvas sack by its hemp tie. The roan lay with its muzzle submerged to the nostrils, its big brown eye rolled back toward Silas with an expression of profound, uncomplicated exhaustion.

"Fair enough," Silas said, slinging the sack over his shoulder.

He didn't shoot the animal. The sound would carry ten miles across the flats, and the horse was merely spent, not broken. By nightfall, when the cool air came down from the Davis Mountains, the gelding would haul itself out of the muck and find grass. Harlan’s boys would pick it up by morning, look at the dry girth marks, and know they were within half a day’s march of their man.

Silas climbed the cutbank, his boots sucking out of the mud with sounds like small corks popping from jugs. He reached the level brush and crouched low under the shade of a mesquite clump.

To the south, down toward Point Isabel and the wider mouth of the bay, the flat earth ended in a pale grey smudge that was not cloud. It was smoke—not the blue, light haze of mesquite campfires, but the thick, black, greasy pillar that came from bituminous coal burned under a forced draft.

A boat.

Silas spit a mouthful of grit into the brush. A side-wheel passenger packet, most likely, or a government transport churning its way up from the mouth of the Mississippi with supplies for General Taylor’s garrison down at Fort Brown. The war was coming, everybody said so; you could smell it in the way the merchants were hoarding flour and the young men were polishing their spurs. Where there were steam boilers, there was a firebox, and where there was a firebox, there was usually some desperate German or Irish engineer who didn't give a damn about a man's name as long as he could swing a fourteen-pound scoop for twelve hours without puking on the floorboards.

He reached down to touch his ribs. They still ached from the boot Julian Ebersole had planted there before Silas had managed to draw. Two cracked bones, by the feel of it. They ground together like wet pebbles every time he took a full breath.

"A shovel," Silas whispered to the mesquite thorns. "Nothing to it. Just lift and throw."

He waited until the sun dipped behind the western ridge, turning the water from milky chocolate to the color of cold tea. The shadows of the prickly pear lengthened into long, spiked fingers that reached across the sandbars. From the bluffs three miles back, he heard the faint, metallic yip of a coyote, followed immediately by the halloo of a man shouting to his horses.

The posse had hit the cutbank where he’d left the roan.

Silas stood up, adjusted the strap of his sack, and began to run. He ran with the shambling, low-hipped trot of an infantryman who knew the difference between speed and endurance, his boots crunching rhythmically on the dry caliche crust, heading straight toward the pillar of coal smoke that was slowly staining the southern horizon.

The smell reached him before the sound did. It was the greasy, sulfurous reek of cheap bituminous coal, laced with the stink of rancid tallow and fried river fish. It hung low over the salt marsh like a foul blanket, drowning out the sweet rot of the delta weeds. Silas Vance slowed his loping stride to a brisk, heel-bruising walk as the scrub gave way to soggy, black muck that squelched hungrily against the uppers of his boots.

Through the tangled skein of dwarf willows and river cane, the hull rose like a wall of whitewashed oak. She was a three-deck packet, blunt-nosed and wide in the beam, her high wooden paddleboxes painted with a fading golden star that was shedding its gilt in long scabs. The vessel sat pinned against a temporary corduroy pier built of pine logs and sunken cottonwood crates, groaning against her hemp hawsers with every swell of the brown tide. From twin iron chimneys towering fifty feet above her texas deck, thick cylinders of black smoke tumbled out into the evening damp, smothering the stars before they had a chance to show themselves.

Silas dropped to his haunches behind a clump of buttonwillow. His lungs felt like someone had rubbed them down with dry sand, and the cracked ribs on his left side gave a sickening little hitch every time he bent his knee. He laid the canvas sack across his thighs and uncinched the throat. Inside, the disassembled Paterson lay nestled against an extra wool shirt that had stiffened from months of stale sweat. He reached into the gloom of the bag, felt for the cold, oil-slick iron of the barrel, then took his hand back. A gun was a declaration of identity. In Texas, a man with a five-shot Paterson tucked beneath his ribs was an officer, a desperado, or a fool who had twenty-five dollars to burn. In the hold of a working steamer, he was simply an extra mouth that might shoot a hole through the hull planking if he took a fit of the vapors.

He retied the twine, knotted it with his teeth, and stood up into the open.

The landing was a chaos of lanterns, bellowing oxen, and swearing deckhands. Two dozen hogsheads of pickled pork were being rolled up a wide gangway by sweating Irish laborers whose red hair shone like copper in the pitch-pine torches stuck into the sandbars. A cluster of civilian teamsters, looking nervous in homespun wool and beaver hats, leaned against a barricade of flour sacks, watching the dark line of the river bluffs. Everybody was running away from something, or running toward a contract with the army. In the spring of 1846, the border was full of men who could not explain why they were three hundred miles from their lawful wives, but the quartermasters in Point Isabel did not ask for marriage certificates; they asked for backs that wouldn't buckle under a barrel of salt pork.

Silas swung his sack over his uninjured shoulder and walked toward the staging plank. He did not hurry, nor did he look over his shoulder. A man who looked behind him was a man expecting a bullet, and men expecting bullets were routinely obliged by any bored sentry with an Enfield musket.

"Hold up, uncle," a voice rasped from the base of the staging.

The man sitting on an upturned grease cask had teeth like salted pumpkin seeds and arms the color of cured ham. He wore a red flannel shirt with the sleeves ripped off at the armpits, exposing arm-meat scarred by old scald marks. Across his grease-spotted canvas breeches lay a hickory tally-stick notched with dozens of little crosscuts.

"Boats are full," the man said without looking up from his whittling. "Unless you're a sergeant with a manifest, in which case you can take your papers to the clerk on the boiler deck and wait four hours while he drinks his supper."

"I ain't a sergeant," Silas said. His voice was lower than usual, sanded flat by river grit. "And I don't need a bed."

The man with the tally-stick finally lifted his chin. His eyes were milky around the rims, the result of too many hours staring into open firebox doors, but they took in Silas’s boots, the dust ground into the knees of his homespun, and the awkward, shallow way he carried his left flank.

"You look like you're about two hours ahead of an oak limb and a short hemp collar," the man observed cheerfully.

"Three hours," Silas corrected. "Maybe three and a half if their horses got into the cockleburs by the crossing."

The man spat a brown wad of plug tobacco that struck the side of a lard tub with a clean thwack. "Name's McTeague. First Assistant when the chief's sober, which means I'm First Assistant twenty minutes out of every twenty-four hours. You ever seen the inside of a flue?"

"I've cleaned chimneys."

"Chimneys don't explode and scald your meat off down to the marrow, drover. You know how much pressure we carry when the captain wants to beat the morning packet into the bay?"

"Enough to reach the wharf, I reckon."

McTeague chuckled, a dry sound like corn husks rattling in an iron hopper. "Sixteen pounds to the square inch. Sometimes twenty if the relief valve's stuck with salt crust, which it usually is. We lost three firemen between New Orleans and the mouth. Two took the swamp fever and jumped overboard to cool their tripes; the third got his wrist crushed between the pitman and the balance wheel because he thought he saw a five-dollar gold piece shining in the crank pit. That makes you fourth choice, friend."

"Fourth is better than swinging," Silas said.

"Pay is sixteen dollars a month, found in hard bread and chicory, payable in treasury script at St. Louis or New Orleans. If you die before the turn, the company keeps the script and buys three boards to nail you into the sand. You got an iron back?"

Silas reached down with his right hand, gripped the rim of a two-hundred-pound brine barrel that sat half-tilted in the sand, and hoisted it six inches off the mud until the brine sloshed against the staves. His ribs screamed an unholy protest, the broken ends grinding together like broken glass, but his face remained as flat and indifferent as an empty lard tin.

McTeague watched the display with a lazy squint. "Put it down before you pop your stitches, boy. I don't need dead men on the muster; they stink up the bilges. Get up the stage. Go down the hatchway abaft the starboard cylinder. Find a Dutch lad named Gimp. Tell him McTeague sent him an apprentice and that if he doesn't clean the clinkers out of number three by midnight, I'll skin him with a barrel hoop."

"My sack?" Silas asked.

"Nobody steals down there," McTeague said, already turning his attention back to his whittling. "A thief needs his hands to run, and in the hole, if you take your hands off the scoop for two minutes, the steam drops and the engineer comes down with an iron slice-bar to see who wants to die first. Move along."

Silas mounted the plank. The wood was wet with hog grease and river scum, slick under the smooth leather of his boots. As he cleared the main deck, the sheer noise of the vessel took him by the ears.

Up here, the boat was an engine of frantic commerce. Teamsters were shouting, mules were kicking the bulkheads with dry, wooden thuds, and crates of musket ammunition marked U.S. ORDNANCE were being stacked three-high against the dining saloon's louvered doors. Silas didn't linger to admire the woodwork. He found the square opening behind the iron machinery housing, where an iron ladder descended vertically into a black pit that breathed like a sick furnace.

The heat hit him ten feet before he reached the bottom rungs. It was not the dry, sun-scorched heat of the Texas brush, which bake a man until he dried up like a locust shell; this was wet, greasy heat that had nowhere to go. It smelled of sulfur, whale oil, boiled river mud, and the sharp, vinegar tang of men who had not washed since they cleared the passes of the Mississippi.

Silas reached the iron deck plates. The floor was hot enough to be felt through the thick soles of his boots, vibrating with a deep, regular thung-chunk, thung-chunk that seemed to start somewhere in the riverbed beneath the hull and travel directly up through a man’s pelvis.

"You! The big one!"

The voice came from behind a battery of four boilers that sat side-by-side like enormous, black iron hogs sleeping in an iron pen. A small, square-shouldered boy with yellow hair plastered to his forehead by sweat and soot was waving a bent iron rod with an end shaped like a claw. His shirt was gone, his torso covered in a film of grease so thick that his ribs looked like they were painted with axle oil.

"McTeague sent me," Silas said, shouting over the rhythmic roar of the draft. "Said to find Gimp."

The boy spat against the face of the nearest boiler. The spit vanished instantly with a sharp hiss, leaving a little ring of white salt behind. "I'm Gimp. Because of my leg. A timber dropped on it at Natchez. McTeague's an old horse-thief, but if he sent you, you're on the starboard fires. Take that scoop."

He pointed a blackened thumb toward a massive iron shovel that leaned against the coal bunker. Its blade was nearly eighteen inches across, hammered out of quarter-inch boiler plate, with a hickory handle as thick as a wrist.

"That's for mules," Silas said.

"That's for men," Gimp spat back. "The river's falling. We got to clear the shoals before dawn or the whole army will be walking to Point Isabel on our deck planks. We're burning coal now—real Pennsylvania stone. It don't catch like pine knots; you got to lay it flat, three inches deep, no more, no less. If you leave a hole, the cold air rushes in and kills the steam. If you pile it too thick, you choke her and she clinkers up into a gray crust that takes a crowbar to crack."

The boy stepped toward an iron door that was roughly three feet square, held shut by a heavy latch. He hooked the latch with his iron claw, jerked it back, and kicked the door open with his heel.

The glare that came out of the hole was blinding. It wasn't the yellow flicker of a campfire; it was a white-hot, roaring throat that seemed to reach back into the center of the earth. The air within three feet of the opening simply vanished, sucked in by the draft with a sound like a drawn breath. Silas took half a step back, his instincts screaming at him to turn and reach for a weapon, but there was nothing to shoot. There was only the heat, hitting his face like a slap with a dry plank.

"Don't look at it," Gimp yelled, not looking himself. "It'll make you blind as an owl by thirty. Look at the coal at your feet. Swing, drop, and shut the iron. Three scoops every two minutes. If you hear the iron bell ring twice from the deck, that's the chief wanting ten pounds more. Then you throw in the lard."

"The lard?"

"The rancid stuff in the tubs by the bilge. Burns hot enough to melt brass. We save it for the crossings."

Gimp shoved the scoop into Silas’s hands. The wood was slick with old palm-sweat, blackened until it looked like ebony. Silas shifted his feet on the iron plates, feeling the boat sway slightly as some heavy freight was rolled across the deck above. His ribs caught, but he clamped his jaw until his back teeth creaked.

He drove the shovel into the mound of black rocks behind him. The coal was heavy, jagged, and coated in a fine, greasy dust that rose in a cloud and settled immediately into the sweat on his neck. He pivoted on his right heel, swung the broad blade through the doorway, and snapped his wrists the way he’d seen grain-heavers do in the storehouses at Galveston.

The coal scattered across the white-hot bed like black hail. A tongue of red gas flickered, curled around the stones, and then the whole mass roared into fresh, furious life.

"Too slow!" Gimp yelled, kicking the iron door shut. The latch fell with a heavy clatter. "You left the door open long enough to fry an egg on your tail. Fast in, fast out. You let the cold draft hit them flues and they leak like old tubs. Again!"

Silas didn't answer. He drove the scoop into the mound a second time.

Above their heads, through two inches of oak timber and an inch of ash flooring, the boots of men began to pound. There was shouting on the levee—the distinct, high-pitched yapping of men who had found a track. Silas paused with the shovel loaded, his ears straining against the roar of the draft and the thump of the engines.

"Don't stop!" Gimp barked, shoving him in the shoulder. The boy didn't come up to Silas's chest, but he had the wiry, desperate strength of an animal that lived in a chimney. "You drop that iron and the steam falls two pounds, McTeague will come down that ladder with the skin-cleaver!"

A single shot sounded from the levee. It was thin and distant, muffled by the boat’s heavy timbers and the thick humidity of the river mud, but Silas knew the report. It was the dry crack of Harlan Vance’s long rifle—the one he called "The Parson" because it was six feet long and never spoke without someone going into the dirt. Harlan had reached the staging. He’d found the horse, or maybe he’d found the tracks where Silas had climbed out of the garfish shallows.

Silas took a breath. The heat burned the back of his palate, tasting of sulfur and cold iron. He did not drop the scoop.

He hooked the latch with the iron toe of his boot, hauled the door back, and fed the fire.

The blaze took the coal with a violent, snapping roar that rattled the draft dampers in the chimney base. The red light washed across Silas’s face, catching the hard, crooked line of his jaw and the graying stubble on his cheeks. For five seconds, the heat was so intense he could feel the marrow of his shin bones aching, but he didn't blink. He watched the black stones catch, turning from dull slate to glowing cherry, and then to that terrible, blinding white that ate everything it touched.

"Not bad," Gimp muttered, slamming the door home. "You don't talk much, drover."

"Talking wastes wind," Silas said. His shirt was already soaked through, sticking to his ribs like wet paper. Every time he moved, the broken bones reminded him they were there, but the pain was different now. It was no longer the sharp, sickening fear of being cornered in the caliche with an empty cylinder; it was a rhythmic, mechanical misery that had a place to go.

A bell clanged above the machinery—a single, sharp ding from a brass gong mounted to the deck beam.

"Watch the doors!" Gimp shouted. "They're casting off!"

A long, shuddering groan passed through the timbers of the hull. The high-pressure engine, a massive horizontal brute with a twenty-foot stroke, gave a hiss that sounded like a locomotive dying in a ditch. Then the great wooden pitman rods began to heave. Silas could see them through the iron grate—huge beams of white oak banded with iron, rising and falling with the relentless, stupid power of a falling tree. The boat trembled, lifted two inches as the paddlewheels took their first bite of the brown river, and then settled into the steady, pounding thrash that would not stop until they hit the bay.

Above the racket, faint and tiny as an insect’s buzz, came another shout from the riverbank.

Silas didn't look up. He drove the shovel into the coal heap once more, his boots wide on the iron plates, his eyes fixed on the black latch of number four.

"You're going to make it, drover," Gimp said with a crooked grin that showed three missing front teeth. "Or you're going to drown down here when we hit a snag. It's about five to one either way."

"Them's good odds," Silas Vance said, and threw another twenty pounds of Pennsylvania stone into the mouth of the fire.