Gangway!

    "No," everybody said.

    Roscoe waited till everyone was set, with a secure grip on some part of the wagon or one another. Then he gave a strong lunging shove on the tailgate, enough to get the wagon trundling slowly forward, and leaped on board with all the others.

    Ittzy had a harder time steering with the added weight, but he managed to keep the wagon more or less in the middle of the street. Gabe watched with dubious hopes; they didn't seem to be gathering much speed at all.

    But pretty soon the wagon picked up some acceleration, then some more, and all at once they were rushing forward, swooping down the first slope much faster than before.

    "Gaaaaabe!" Vangie cried. Looking at her, Gabe saw her expression combined in the strangest way pride with alarm. He gri

    A real wind; the wind of their passage. The wagon was really tearing downhill now. The wheels racketed down the cobblestones; he thought for a second the whole contraption would fly apart, but in the noise, wind and rush there was nothing to do but hold on.

    The horseless wagon thundered ahead. It whammed down through the trough, whizzed up the second slope, whipped over the top without even slowing down, and gathered juggernaut speed down the second hill toward the Bay far far below…

    He grabbed Vangie, hugging her to him. Through the wind he shouted, "It works!"

    She didn't look all that ecstatically happy.

    He grabbed Ittzy's shoulder. "Okay," he yelled. "Slow us down now."

    Ittzy braced both feet against the brake handle. "It won't… I can't… it's going to…"

    Gabe and Roscoe both dived for the brake handle. Gabe almost fell off. Sparks flew from the brake shoes against the iron tires and the brake handle bent, but it didn't do a bit of good. The wagon flew. It kept going faster… and faster… and faster… Straight toward the pier…

    He had a glimpse out of the corner of his eye: Officer McCorkle, standing under a streetlight, his eyes wide open and his notebook wide open. He was shaking his head and licking his pencil.

    Gabe braced himself. He gathered Vangie to him, cushioned her with his arm and chest. "HANG ON!"

    Startled faces along the street watched as they whizzed between the dives and grog shops straight toward the riverboat pier… Vangie was shrieking, but he couldn't make out what she was trying to say until he turned his head and caught her words distinctly:

    "Make it stop! Make it stop! I just did my hair today!"

    The brake handle snapped.

    The wagon careened onto the pier, going just a little faster than a greased sled on an icy mountainside. Ittzy steered neatly around a crated cast-iron boiler. Vangie yelled something, Gabe clutched her close, Roscoe lost his footing and went tumbling around in the wagon bed. Captain Flagway started praying in Spanish, and Francis closed his nostrils with thumb and forefinger.

    Gabe stared straight ahead, and the nighttime world gradually filled with water. Black, cold, wet water.

    "No," Gabe said, very quietly and very privately. The wagon flashed right out to the end of the pier, straight out past the end of the pier, wheels spi

    There was an instant's sense of motionlessness, as safe and solid as a hotel room, and Gabe looked around at a view of San Francisco and its Bay that he'd never had before. Then the trajectory of the wagon curved downward, and water was dead ahead, and the buckboard landed in the choppy Bay like a bartender's palm slapping down on a double eagle.

    Everybody went rolling and tumbling, joining Roscoe in the wagon bed. Gabe found himself wrapped around Vangie, the two of them pasted to the back of the buckboard seat. And already water was spurting in through gaps between the boards.

    Gabe didn't even care. Water an inch deep in the wagon and rising, and he was too happy to even notice the stuff. He struggled to his feet, pulling Vangie with him, and clutched the side of the wagon. Water was pouring in everywhere, and he had a big idiotic smile on his face. He stared uphill toward the Mint far far away and toward the horse standing alone way up there, hitched to the lamp-post and chewing away slowly in mild amaze. "It works," he said, in an awed half whisper.

    Vangie gave him a bleary look.

    "It works!" Gabe cried. He spread his arms and crowed, shouting, "I knew it would work!"

    The jumble of people on the water-covered floor around him looked up with several expressions on their faces, none of them as happy as his. The wagon steadily sank, and Gabe stood in it, looking all around at the rising perspective and gri

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

    Somewhere off Puget Sound the Sea Wolf made heavy going through a tart sea. A pilot boat from Seattle came alongside, and a yellow sheet of paper passed from its deck to the hand of a sailor on board the Sea Wolf.

    Crung, the first mate, stood on the quarterdeck and watched the sailor climb toward the captain's cabin, the door of which was closed as always. Timidly the sailor went along there and knocked, and from within a colossal Roar bellowed at him. It made Crung wince-even Crung, who weighed two hundred and thirty pounds and had beat up eight railroad men at once in a saloon brawl.

    He watched the sailor hesitantly enter the captain's cabin, shaking with fear. The Roar got louder and angrier. Very quickly the sailor, pale and quaking and no longer carrying the telegram, came windmilling out of the cabin again. He slammed the door and leaned his back against it weakly, mopping his brow.

    From within, the Roar continued for a moment or two before it dwindled to an interested grumble.

    Crung relaxed a bit. At least the telegram, whatever it contained, hadn't made Captain Percival Arafoot angry, and that was a blessing. Crung remembered the last time the captain had been angry and, remembering, he shuddered gently all over like a sail in an uncertain breeze.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

    Francis strolled casually around the waterfront district wearing the expression of someone who has lost something and is looking for it without much hope of finding it.

    He turned a corner past Mme. Herz's Emporium and strolled on. Around him heaved and surged the business life of a busy ocean port; activity pleasantly masculine, for the most part, if perhaps a bit too overripe taken as a generality. The added mixture of Oriental grace notes served as a delicate contrast to the grosser elements of the scene; a cargo of Chinese temple bells, for instance, setting off and in a way commenting on the lusty obscenities of Irish and Scandinavian stevedores loading a grand piano onto a packet intended for a brothel in Nome.

    But it wasn't for a study in whimsical mongrelization that Francis had come down to this roaring reeking part of town. He had serious business of his own to transact, if only he could find just the right circumstances.

    Hmmm. In an alley between a whore shop and an incense importer's rickety warehouse a little tramp was hunkered over a small fire built of scraps, cooking a fish in a battered piece of tin shaped to the general outlines of a frying pan. Glancing in at the serious hunched back of the man, Francis paused and considered. Would he do? He would do.

    Francis entered the alley, nodded amiably at the tramp and said, "Afternoon."