“They’ll take your hand off!” Damon jumped up into the prow and clung to the gunnels. “Shoot it!”

Simon came alive, ran to the little deckhouse, and pulled the Dance revolver out of his rucksack, scattering socks. He spun the cylinder, jammed in four prepared cartridges, and seated them with the rammer. He ducked out of the shelter again, clambered on top. He got to his knees and held out the revolver in one thin hand. He remembered that the Dance had no recoil shield. He cocked the hammer back with two clicks and then sighted down the barrel with one eye squinted shut as the sudden ferocity of a hunter overtook him.

“Don’t let it get away, Doro!” Simon shouted. “Throw it a fish!”

“No, no, don’t throw it anything!” Damon waved both hands in the air. “No!”

Simon aimed between the creature’s eyes and pulled the trigger. There was a great exhilarating explosion and the gun barrel kicked up into the air while fire and gasses and bits of wadding flamed out of the rear of the cylinder. He was instantly enveloped in a cloud of powder smoke. Simon watched with intense interest as the alligator thrashed wildly in the water and gunsmoke drifted downstream in fire-lit clouds. By this time a couple of wagon men had come to the shore.

“Shoot it again!” called Doroteo, and he tossed the coiled rope up and down in his hand. Simon got to his feet there on the roof, leaned forward, cocked the hammer, and pulled the trigger once more. A dead click. Misfire. “Again!” A second hammer strike set off the cap and the .44 bucked up in Simon’s hands; another explosion and flash of light, more gunpowder smoke and a roaring from the alligator. It rolled over and over, its white belly appearing and then its leathery corrugated backside, and finally, in the foam, flaunting streams of red appeared. Simon pulled the trigger again and with a lucky shot the big .44 slug hit the spine.

One of the freighters shouted, “Grab him, he’ll sink!”

The last shot made the alligator curve itself backward, its head lifted and its white mouth wide open and fish falling out. Doroteo threw a perfect overhand loop and roped it around the jaws. “Hiiiiiiijo!” he screamed in triumph. It began to sink. Doroteo reached hand over hand, pulling the alligator to the surface.

A teamster on the bank shouted, “Jesus me Lord it’s a whale!”

Doroteo jumped onto the dock and then ashore with the rope in his hand. Simon looked down at the revolver and lowered the hammer carefully on an empty chamber. “By God this thing kicks,” he said, laying it down, then he jumped out with Damon to help haul it to the bank. But even with three of them it was too heavy to pull it all the way onto the land. The alligator had no neck and its front feet were star-shaped and scaled. It looked like an afterthought God had come up with on the eighth day when all He had to hand was black rock and pure evil. It probably weighed three hundred pounds.

Simon stood in amazement, watching it, oblivious of anything but that he had shot an alligator. All the dogs in the wagon yard were howling and barking in a demonic chorus.

“What’ll you take for it?” said a man with a clean-shaven face. “I can sell it to the undertaker, he’ll stuff it.”

Another man said, “Hell no, man, that hide is valuable. They make boots out of them.”

The three musicians looked at one another.

“Ten dollars and trade,” said Doroteo. He was still holding the rope and the dead alligator had turned on its back, half out of the water. Its belly was blue-white and its open mouth was bloody. The enormous thick tail was still moving. It was weltering in its gore.

“That’s an idea.” Simon raised his head and squinted through the drifting gunpowder smoke at the freighter. “Yes, sir, we need ten dollars and stuff in trade.”

Damon said, “A good tarp, a metal bucket and dipper, a skillet, soap. Two, three bars of soap.”

“A mirror,” said Simon.

“Three forks and three plates,” said Doroteo. He worried the rope off over the corrugated head and smiled up at the gathering of staring teamsters. “De acuerdo then, hey?”

The man said, “Done,” and turned back to his wagon. In half an hour they had gotten all that in trade for the enormous shot-up alligator, plus ten dollars in pesos. It took four men from the wagon yard to drag it up the bank and into the camp, where the skinning and butchering went on into the dark hours and the dogs made merry over the entrails.

The next day the three of them washed in turn with a bucket of hot water, they fried their hard-won fish in a skillet with lard, ate it with forks and plates, shaved using the mirror, and made an awning with the tarp. They went at their hands with soap and a rough cloth and Doro used the tip of his knife for a careful manicure.

Damon held his hands out in front of himself. “Beautiful,” he said. “Behold, fair ones, the piper’s hands are marvels of cleanliness and elegance. He never worked in his life but to run a cran on a D whistle.”

“Mine are wrecked,” said Simon.

“Use sand on those calluses. People notice.”

“Hmm. Sand. I never thought of it.” Simon inspected his palms.

“You should have. This is what we mean by tone, my dear boy. An indication of worklessness. Doro, front and center.”

“Quisquilloso que seas,” said Doro. “No lady has hands like mine.” He blew on his fingertips.

“Splendid,” said Damon. “Like an upper-class layabout. I congratulate you.”

They walked into town and bought, for the first time, shirts that were not previously owned from a seamstress on Bayou Street. No bullet holes. The newest kind that buttoned all the way down the front. They found black frock coats secondhand; Damon was delighted with one with a velvet collar. They had their boots shined and their hair cut. Doroteo bought a cake of wax for his mustache-ends and twirled them into points. For everyday, Simon found an old military coat with a stand collar from the Mexican War era. It was dark blue, thick, and warm. He gave the woman the Confederate shell jacket; she said she could dye it and then get a good price for it. Damon bought a pair of shoes that matched each other and gaily threw the old ones away.

Their improved appearance made their music better in the eyes of the saloon owners. They now had tone. They were hired by the Slippery Jack and by the beginning of March they had permanent employment at two different establishments. Simon pushed the other two into hard and fast mountain music. He wanted the relentless drive of Ohio River reels and jigs, because he wanted to exhaust these crowds and wear them out. He wanted to make them tip the musicians and then go to whatever home they had. It was exhausting, but by the second week they started to make good money, they began to bring in customers. Damon looked as if he had come upon the correct attire at last; he was tall, narrow and refined. They were black-clothed and formidable; they sent the music sailing out into the saloons and hotel dining rooms with a precise zest, not one missed note, starting and stopping together on a dime.

Simon’s fiddle case became heavy with silver.

He wrote his reply to Miss Dillon. He sat up late when the other two were asleep. Since they were making money, they had all the candles they wanted, could burn them half the night if they wished. He dipped his pen. Always he reminded himself that Mrs. or Colonel Webb would demand to read the letter first. They, the menacing censors of her world. So he said that a member of his musical group had indeed written to the boy’s parents in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and had sent on to them his effects, including the bodhran.

Simon knew he had to keep up the connection with Patrick as an excuse to write, but he was increasingly unsure of how to do that. Patrick was still his voice, his mask; then the memory of the boy’s bloody eyes came to him unbidden. He got up and walked back and forth on the flatboat from stern to prow and after a while he returned to his letter.

He wrote that the boy had been learning to read music and had become adept on the Irish tin whistle in the key of G, and had attempted “La Savane.” Did she know it? Also “The Last Rose of Summer.” Did she know that the tune to “The Last Rose” was originally called “A Young Man’s Dream”? He would like to ask her advice; should he send the musical scores on to the Dillons in Ohio or would she care to have them as a memento of her young relative?