The Radical Element by Jessica Spotswood (3)

Hey, Rat, you got a player!” Joe called.

Ray looked up from her meal to see a mousy-haired Yankee standing beside Joe, thumbs hooked in his pockets. Moored just behind them, the General Jesup swayed as muddy water lapped against her hull.

Ray was not a man, nor was she a rat, but she’d arrived in Yuma Crossing around the age of eight, scavenging the shores with a mop of matted hair slung over her bony shoulders, and the name had stuck. So had the assumption that she was a boy. She’d been scrawny as a fence post then, and twice as dirty. It was easy to overlook the truth.

Now that she was fifteen or thereabouts, Ray’s body was betraying her. She kept her hair short and her clothing baggy, but she’d begun wrapping her chest. The smooth state of her jaw would grow suspicious soon, too, but Ray would keep up the act as long as possible. She’d seen how women stuck out in these parts. They were full of curves and garnered attention, and they certainly didn’t work as stevedores, loading and unloading steamboats’ freight.

Ray set aside her can of sardines, brushed some corn bread crumbs from her lap, and signaled the Yankee. “Five hands. That’s all I got time for.”

Joe shouted for his buddies, and Carlos and the Bartlett twins came running to watch. Joe was the leader of the bunch, and everything Ray wanted to be as a stevedore — bigger, stronger, faster. He was charming and well-liked, too. A natural leader. He threw a friendly punch into Carlos’s arm — as brown as her own — and began to debate the margin of Ray’s inevitable win.

Her reputation as an unbeatable poker player had spread along the shores of the Colorado the past year, and while most of her fellow stevedores now hesitated to play her, they took pleasure in watching her whip others. Ray made it worth their while, shuffling with flair, cutting the deck one-handed, and dealing with such precision that the cards looked like blades slicing through the air. Watching Ray play was like listening to a concerto, a continued swelling of flourishes and concentration, until her opponent’s mouth fell open in shocked loss come the finale.

Ray blocked out the boys’ rowdy predictions and sized up the Yankee. Average build, forgettable face. His clothing wasn’t threadbare enough for a copper miner, so she figured he was the owner of one of the woodyards that supplied steamers with fuel along the river. His business in Yuma Crossing didn’t concern her nearly as much as his willingness to lose coins.

The man sat on the opposite side of the crate that would serve as their playing table, and Ray drew the deck she always carried from her back pocket. Pinching the stack of cards, she let them spring into her other hand, facedown. They made a satisfying, muted thwiiiiick as they flew through the air.

“I heard you’re good,” the Yankee said, watching the cards dance. “Too good.”

If she was too good, perhaps men should stop challenging her, but it was as if the more a loss might damage their egos, the more intensely they were drawn to her table. Like moths to a flame.

“I’m all right,” Ray said with a shrug.

“Then you won’t mind if we use a fresh deck, I reckon?” He set a pack on the crate.

“Not at all.” Ray pocketed her deck, then slit the tape on the new one. She let the cards fall into her palm and sent them springing from hand to hand, just as gracefully as with her own set.

Behind her, the boys cackled.

Ray made a few artful shuffles. Then she let the Yankee cut the deck for good measure and began the game before he could get cold feet.

Ray took the first hand easily, then let the Yankee win the next three. This was the key: to lose a small sum before winning big; to fan a man’s confidence so he believed himself unbeatable.

Ray dealt the final hand. Bets were made and raised, cards traded.

“Check,” she said, tapping the crate with her knuckle.

The Yankee squinted at his cards, then pushed a dollar forward. A week’s pay in one bet. Combined with the rest of the pot, Ray would win back all she’d lost and then some. Her heart beat with excitement, but she made sure to keep her face as plain and emotionless as the General Jesup’s faded freeboard.

“What the heck,” she said, feigning rashness. “I’ll see ya.” She counted out the coins.

“Sorry, kid.” The Yankee threw down his cards, and Ray savored it a moment — his glibness and pride. Then she spread out her winning hand. Joe whistled, and Carlos slapped a knee. The Yankee swore flagrantly.

“Double or nothing,” he said.

But someone was shouting from the shore. “Rat! Johnson wants a word.”

Ray leaped to her feet and scooped up her winnings. When the owner of the George A. Johnson & Company requested your presence, you obliged. Besides, men could be dangerous when they’d been beaten, and Ray wasn’t particularly keen on lingering around the Yankee longer than necessary.

“But I had a full house!” he went on grousing. “How’d ya beat me?”

“Just lucky, I guess.”

The truth was that Ray had stacked the deck in her favor. She’d known the face value of the next dozen cards to be dealt, plus each one that had been in her opponent’s hand, to boot. Some would call it cheating, but Ray figured it was only cheating if you got yourself caught. Until then, it was merely skill and sleight of hand, theatrics and misdirection.

Ray wasn’t a cheat. She was a magician.

Mr. Johnson’s office was little more than a hole in the wall — a tiny shanty along the edge of the river, where a string of similar shacks had been erected by the Company for storage and other business affairs. He’d done his best to make it presentable, but the once-vibrant rug on the floor was now caked with mud, and the whole place smelled musty. All the furniture was stained with water lines from a spring when the river rose beyond its banks.

“Ah, Ray,” Mr. Johnson said, spotting her in the doorway. “Come in, come in.”

She lowered herself into the chair opposite his desk.

“I’m assembling men for an expedition,” he said, getting right to the point. “Escalating tensions with the Mormons have forced the War Department’s hand, and they need to know if bringing troops into Utah by way of the Colorado is possible. Fort Yuma has ordered a detachment to accompany me for a speedy assessment of the upper river. We’ll take the General Jesup and have twenty-five days’ rations, plus a howitzer. I’m working to secure additional men now. If you’re in agreement, we leave tomorrow at dawn.”

Ray worked to keep the surprise from her face. Embarking on the eve of the New Year was downright foolish. The river would be low, starved from the summer heat. Sandbars would choke the passage. Ray did not take Johnson for an idiot, but Utah was more than five hundred winding miles of river north, and little more than three weeks’ provisions did not seem sufficient, even for a steamer as impressive as the General Jesup. Besides, Ray had heard of a similar expedition, also departing on New Year’s Eve.

Joe had mentioned it one mild November morning as they moved freight. “Expedition was Johnson’s idea — he pushed the legislature and everything — but the Secretary of War appointed his in-law for the job.”

“Lieutenant Ives,” Carlos had chimed in. “His steamer is only fifty-four feet long. They tested her on the Delaware and are reassembling her out here, thinking she’ll be strong enough for the Colorado.”

“I heard she draws three feet of water,” Joe scoffed, “leaving barely six inches of freeboard when she’s loaded. Yeah, you heard me right — just six inches between the waterline and the deck. It’s absurd!”

“Sounds like a damn wheelbarrow.” Ray had laughed. “Thing’s gonna sputter and struggle up every inch of the river.”

Now, sitting in Johnson’s office, she wondered if her boss was just as miffed that Ives’s ridiculous-sounding expedition had garnered the full support of the War Department, and if his own quest to navigate the Colorado was little more than a schoolboy’s battle of who could accomplish the feat first. But this was an expedition, not some steamboat race on the Mississippi. If it wasn’t approached seriously, Ray wanted nothing to do with it. Hell, she didn’t have the time to be involved, period. Every day she spent on that steamer was a day she wouldn’t be earning coin in Yuma Crossing. And that was all that mattered these days: coin from work, and coin from cards. A ticket to San Francisco wasn’t going to buy itself.

“I’ll pay, of course,” Mr. Johnson continued. “Fifty dollars, supplied in full as soon as we return to Fort Yuma, whether the river proves navigable or not.”

Ray nearly fell from her seat. With an additional fifty dollars, she could finally leave Yuma Crossing. No more saving dime by dime. No more handing a small portion of her meager earnings to Mr. Lowry every week.

But what Mr. Johnson proposed would be no easy mission. For years, Johnson had been yammering about opening trade with the Mormons, but Ray had figured all his talk to be hot air. Above the fort, rapids made it impossible for pole skiffs to battle the currents, and sand beds and shoals on a constantly shifting riverbed had kept men like Johnson from attempting a journey even by powerful steamboat. Until now.

“Why me?” Ray asked, suddenly suspicious. “We ain’t moving freight, and that’s all I do for you here.”

“You’ve worked hard for the Company, proven yourself reliable. Without woodyards to the north, I need men to gather fuel twice daily. The boiler will need to be cleaned, provisions loaded and moved. You’ll keep busy.”

Ray considered Mr. Johnson. He was a serious man with a serious mustache, and he had a monopoly of business along the river. It was his steamers that brought goods from the estuary to every river settlement, and his steamers that carried ore from the mining establishments back down to Robinson’s Landing to be smelted. He was a proven businessman, and if he was financing this exploration out of his own pocket, he must know what he was doing.

It wasn’t a riskless wager. Steamers could run aground and sink. Boilers could explode, burning and killing crew. But the money was too good to walk away.

Ray reached out and shook Mr. Johnson’s hand.

“Are you mad?” Mrs. Lowry erupted. “Three weeks on the cramped deck of a steamboat, pretending to be a boy? You’ll be found out, Ray.”

“You worry too much.”

“And you worry too little. I’m amazed you’ve kept up the ruse this long.”

“You’re the one who encouraged it!”

Mrs. Lowry let her hands fall from her knitting. “I was trying to help you, Ray. Same as I am now. The expedition ain’t worth the risk.”

Ray had foreseen this argument. While walking home after work, she’d considered keeping news of the trip to herself. But then she’d pushed open the door, looked Mrs. Lowry in the eye, and the truth had come tumbling out.

Mrs. Lowry was a mess cook at Fort Yuma. Seven years earlier, she’d found Ray picking through garbage outside the kitchen, with nothing but the rags on her back and a newspaper clipping clutched in her fist. The woman had ushered Ray inside and given her a bath, surprised to find a girl beneath all the grime. “You go on letting them think you’re a boy,” she’d said. “Those girl bits will be our secret. Think you can pretend all right?”

Ray had not been pretending — she’d merely been trying to survive — but if being a boy could make life easier . . . Well, that sounded like magic. Ray had smiled and told Mrs. Lowry she could pretend just fine.

She swept floors and washed dishes in the fort kitchen until Mrs. Lowry’s husband said Ray’s help wasn’t enough to offset the inconvenience of housing a child who was not theirs. Then Ray began her work as a stevedore, handing over a portion of her earnings to Mr. Lowry to cover that “inconvenience.” Mrs. Lowry had since left her husband, taking Ray with her, but Mr. Lowry still knew Ray’s secrets, and she still paid him a cut of her wages to guarantee his silence. If he spoke to the wrong person, Ray could lose her job or, at best, see a drastic change in her wages. Women in Yuma Crossing made less than the men, and there weren’t many jobs available to begin with. Mrs. Lowry already had one of the better ones, working at the fort, and unless they were someone’s wife or a painted dove at the brothels, most women in Yuma Crossing were only passing through.

“This is about San Francisco again. Isn’t it?” Mrs. Lowry prodded.

Truth be told, it was always about San Francisco.

It all came back to that newspaper clipping Ray had been clutching when Mrs. Lowry found her. “Inexhaustible Gold Mines in California,” the headline announced, followed by claims of an abundance of gold dust, lumps, and nuggets in the area. A brief handwritten note was scrawled in the margins:

Ray hadn’t been able to read or write when Mrs. Lowry took her in, so the woman had read the message to her. Despite the fact that Ray couldn’t remember any family, she was immediately convinced the note was from her parents. As far back as she had memories, she’d been scavenging along the shores of the Colorado, but perhaps before that, they’d been separated while seeking out gold, Ray left behind in a tragic accident.

“I don’t think it’s addressed to you,” Mrs. Lowry was always reminding her. “I call you Ray ’cause you treasured that clipping, that’s all. It don’t mean nothing.”

But to Ray it meant everything. She had to believe that there was more out there for her, that she had family waiting. That if she went to San Francisco, she would find them. But Mrs. Lowry maintained that Ray had been roaming the river long before the Yankee argonauts descended on the southern trail like locusts, and that it was far more likely Ray was a Sonoran — a Mexican, orphaned by the war with the Americans — and that she was looking for family in places she would never find it.

Ray could see the logic in Mrs. Lowry’s theory, and yet she was unable to fully accept it. If her newspaper clipping was only a piece of paper — something she’d happened upon as a child and picked up by chance — what future did she have? Yuma Crossing wasn’t her home. It was a festering hellhole of insufferable heat, no better than living on the devil’s doorstep. It was just a place she was stuck.

“I’m begging you to reconsider,” Mrs. Lowry said, regarding Ray sadly. “Passing as a boy for the whole expedition will be impossible, and you make fair money working for Johnson right here. Do not gamble it away.”

“I ain’t gambling and I’m not gonna lose,” Ray snapped. Mrs. Lowry gave her an all-knowing look, and Ray’s patience sizzled. “Mark my words, I’m gonna disappear one of these days. I’m gonna vanish like magic!”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Mrs. Lowry deadpanned, “to not have to live by the rules of reality.” Her tone was cheerful, but her expression sour. Ray couldn’t figure if Mrs. Lowry was sad that Ray believed in such wishful thinking or disappointed that she, herself, could not.

Magic was real, Ray had learned. It could inspire. It could trick. It could save. It provided an escape from the dark, grueling, unfair nature of the world.

The catch was that magic demanded respect. Without believing in it, magic would get you nowhere.

So Ray had practiced and perfected and practiced more, until she trusted her fingers and felt magic flowing in her veins. That was when she started conning at cards. And now she’d pull one last con aboard the General Jesup, and then she’d disappear forever.

Ray and Mrs. Lowry ate stewed oysters, the cracking shells filling the silence between them.

“It ain’t you,” Ray said finally, unable to stand the quiet a moment longer. “This is just something I gotta do for myself. I gotta try to find my family, or I’ll be spending my whole life wondering if maybe they’re waiting for me, too. You get that, don’t you, Mrs. Lowry?”

The woman patted her mouth with a napkin. “Of course, dear. And you can call me ‘Ma,’ you know.”

It was not the first time Mrs. Lowry had suggested this. Ray was grateful for all the woman had done, and sometimes she truly did think of her as a mother, but Ray couldn’t bring herself to say the word. How cruel would it be to Mrs. Lowry when Ray only planned to disappear? Still, there was a part of Ray that also worried it was cruel to withhold it.

It had been an insufferable July afternoon when Mrs. Lowry chose Ray over her husband. Ray had been in the kitchen, scrubbing burnt beans from the bottom of a cast-iron pot.

“’Course you don’t care about giving me a son!” Mr. Lowry had yelled from the mess. “You got that pet rat to fawn over.”

Ray froze, standing still as a statue. The couple argued so often over children that Ray was starting to suspect Mrs. Lowry was barren.

“Don’t talk about Ray that way,” Mrs. Lowry had countered.

“She ain’t our kid. She’s a bit of filth using us. Turn her out.”

“No.”

“Turn her out or so help me —”

“So help you what? You’ll leave? Abandon us? Frankly, that might be a blessing!”

Skin struck skin, and Ray’s eyes went wide. She was used to their arguments. They happened nearly every time Mr. Lowry lingered in the mess after a meal to discuss something with his wife. But he had never struck her.

“Get out,” Mrs. Lowry said, so low Ray had to strain to hear.

“If I go, I ain’t coming back,” he threatened.

“Good! We don’t need you. Go!”

A door slammed so hard, a stack of dirty dishes rattled. For a moment, the mess was eerily quiet. Then came Mrs. Lowry’s crying.

That was the day they’d left to create their own home on the opposite side of the river. It was also the first day Mrs. Lowry had asked Ray to call her “Ma.” Every day since, she’d failed to. Every week since, she’d given that horrible man a half-dollar for his silence and cooperation.

Now Ray dunked her sourdough bread in her tea and pulled her gaze up to meet Mrs. Lowry’s. She was opposite Ray in almost every way: fair hair to dark, pale skin to brown, curves and plumpness to wiry muscle.

“It’s just that I don’t belong here,” Ray said. “I ain’t like the Yankees, but I ain’t like the Sonorans, neither. I don’t fit with the boys at the Company, not truly, but I also don’t fit with girls. I don’t fit in nowhere, and I gotta go somewhere I might.”

“You fit here with me,” the woman said softly.

Ray fit with Mrs. Lowry fine in this house, where there were no secrets and Ray could be herself without fear of consequence. But not in public, not if she wanted a life beyond these walls, and passing as a boy wouldn’t be possible forever. What would she do when the ruse was up? What future did she have? The beds of civilization shifted in favor of men. Ray could be swept in the direction of their choosing or try to carve her own course. And by God, Ray was going to try.

Come dawn, Ray stood before the banks of the Colorado, a small bag of supplies slung over her shoulder.

The General Jesup was a beauty of a steamboat, capable of carrying fifty tons of freight on just thirty inches of water and making the trip from estuary to fort in a lightning-quick five days. Granted, she was nothing like the grandiose steamers that navigated the Mississippi back east. The General Jesup had only one deck. She was greatly exposed to the elements, little more glamorous than a flatboat. But even still, Ray felt pride looking at the side-wheeled steamer. It was no easy feat to navigate the Colorado, and the General Jesup had proved her mettle countless times over. Now it was a question of if she could prove it heading north.

“You too, Rat?” a voice said.

She turned to see Joe approaching, a Colt holstered on his hip. Carlos and the Bartlett twins hurried after him, each sporting their own pieces. Mr. Johnson had said to come armed, and Ray suddenly felt foolish for the lone knife in her boot. She should have asked Joe for advice. From the day she started working for the Company, he’d always been willing to give it.

“Me too,” she said.

“I didn’t think rats liked water,” Carlos teased.

“You forget I ain’t actually a rat.”

“That ain’t been proven,” he said, and scurried aboard the steamer, the Bartlett twins sniggering at his heels.

“Just get up there quick,” Joe said, pointing at the deck, “and make ’em eat their words.” Then he winked at her before following the others.

He’d been winking like that since the day they met.

She’d been eleven. Her previous employer had left the river, and Mr. Johnson had agreed to take Ray on despite the fact that much of the freight was still beyond her strength.

“You gotta lift with your legs,” Joe had called to her as she struggled with a crate. He looked about fourteen or fifteen and was lean like Ray, but clearly stronger. He squatted to retrieve his own crate and stood with such seemingly little effort, Ray wondered if the case was full of feathers, not flour.

“Thanks,” she’d muttered, too shy to admit she’d been given this advice ages ago and always tried to apply it.

He winked reassuringly. “No problem, Rat.”

“It’s Ray,” she’d corrected.

His brows pitched up. Probably he’d already heard another stevedore use the nickname. “Well, just holler if you need help.”

“Who do I holler for?”

“You call for me. I’m saying I’ll lend you a hand.”

“Yeah, I got that. I meant, what’s your name?”

“Joe,” he’d said, smiling brashly. “I’m Joe Henry.”

How nice, she’d thought, to have two first names when she barely had the one.

Later he’d shown her a variety of tricks for surviving as a stevedore, plus introduced her to Carlos, who had skin as brown as Ray’s. By the end of the day, she felt like one of the boys.

They went on calling her Rat, but Ray had decided years ago that it was a small price to pay to feel like she belonged. Besides, Joe made it all bearable. He would never imply that she actually was a rat, like the other stevedores sometimes did. To him, it was just a name, and that wink had become a silent encouragement, a secret handshake. I got your back, it said. She was lucky to have a friend like Joe Henry.

Ray squared her shoulders to the General Jesup and hurried aboard.

Fifteen soldiers from Fort Yuma and nearly as many civilians crowded the deck. Mr. Johnson shouted orders, anxious to set out. The boiler was loaded. Pistons fired and smoke belched from the stack. As paddles turned, muddying the Colorado, the General Jesup departed — not to the south, as she typically did, but to the north.

Next time Ray set foot on a boat, it would be bound for San Francisco.

She stood at the stern and watched Fort Yuma grow smaller.

Besides the narrow canyon that the General Jesup passed through a few days after departing, the river above the fort was not all that different from the river below. It roamed and meandered through lengthy valleys, flanked by shores of mesquite and cottonwoods. Rancherías were visible on occasion; corn, bean, and melon patches peppering the banks. The rapids Mr. Johnson initially feared seemed all but nonexistent to Ray. Droves of sandbars proved just as dangerous, making navigation slow and tedious.

Besides a few of her fellow stevedores, Ray didn’t know most of the men who’d signed on for the expedition, but she quickly decided the soldiers were as good as useless. They spent their days lounging on the deck, believing their responsibilities limited to security and defense only, and so Ray often found herself at the bow with Joe and Carlos, shouting out warnings of shoals as they appeared upriver. An old civilian named Paulino Weaver joined them on occasion. He knew the river from his days as a trapper, and only a Yuma chief the Yankees called Pascual seemed to know the land better. Paulino had a broad smile and spoke to Ray like she was an adult, not a child of fifteen, and she was quick to decide that she liked him quite much.

Still, Ray found herself longing for home. Even smack in the middle of a noisy stretch of establishments, neighbored by a saloon on one side and a butcher on the other, Mrs. Lowry’s place had offered privacy. It had been Ray’s escape from reality, the only place where she didn’t have to pretend, and she hated to admit that Mrs. Lowry had been right. It was damn near impossible to keep up her con aboard the General Jesup.

Ray’s only reprieve came twice a day — around noon and then again in the evening — when Mr. Johnson ordered the steamer moored so the crew could gather fuel. It was brutal, backbreaking work, and Ray was grateful for her thick work gloves, which protected her hands from vicious mesquite thorns and prickers. But she could relieve herself without fear, and she could think clearly in those quiet moments of solitude.

Each evening, after wood had been gathered and dinner eaten, Ray felt sharp and springy, reenergized. As bedrolls were rolled out, she’d draw her cards and put on a show of dramatic shuffles and passes. Drawn by her flair, the soldiers would wander into a game, and tempted by the pot, they’d stay. Some nights, even Joe and the stevedores would join in, perhaps out of boredom. The expedition was getting rather tedious, and the money they were slated to earn from it made a game or two against Ray worth the risk.

Regardless of her opponents, Ray always made sure to lose occasionally, but for the most part, her pockets grew heavy with winnings.

About two weeks into their journey, the General Jesup entered its second canyon and spent the evening moored in shadowy waters. Men stretched out in bedrolls took up most of the deck, so poker was played on land. Joe, Carlos, the Bartlett twins, Weaver, and Ray were deep in a game on the rocky shoreline, and Ray was consistently losing hands she expected to win. Joe was on such a hot streak that by the time Weaver and the twins retired for bed, Ray was nearly broke.

“You been doing awfully good tonight,” she said.

“Luck,” Joe replied. “Same as you on your winning streaks, I reckon.”

He winked, but Ray wasn’t buying it. Joe was never this lucky. He tried to throw players off with his theatrical expressions but always overcompensated. Any smile meant his hand was worthless. A deep frown meant his cards were solid, if not great. He was easy to read, and Ray had never lost to him unintentionally. At least not before tonight.

Carlos folded and Ray regarded her hand.

“I’m telling ya, you should fold,” Joe warned. A rolled cigarette bobbed between his teeth as he gave her a dimpled smile.

It was his deal and the lantern did little to brighten their playing area, let alone make it easy for Ray to count cards. She had only the slightest guess at where the face cards sat within the deck, but her hand was too good to quit. With another king or jack, she’d have a full house. Without it, she still had a two-pair — two jacks and two kings. She met Joe’s wager.

He replaced the single card she slid forward for a trade, then traded two of his own. As he dealt out their replacements, Ray caught it — how Joe drew the first card from the top of the deck but skimmed a second off the bottom. It was not a smooth sleight, nothing like how Ray could pad and stack the deck without a fumble. But in the dim lighting, with the canyon walls towering around them and Ray shrugging low inside her jacket to ward off the cold, her guard had been down.

Her hand flew out, closing over Joe’s wrist. “What the hell are you doing?”

The cigarette sagged as his gaze dipped to where her dark fingers had closed over his flannel.

“I told you, Joe,” Carlos muttered. “I told you you were gonna get caught. Rat’s too good not to spot somebody chiseling.”

“He’s too good, period,” Joe shot back, his eyes never leaving Ray’s.

He suspected her of cheating, too. Her pulse beat wildly between her ribs. Joe held his chin high, but he always oozed confidence. The truth was in his eyes, crinkled at the corners, tense with fear. He didn’t want to be revealed as a cheat any more than she did. Bad things happened to cheats — things involving fists and bullets. And they didn’t know half the expedition crew. There was no way of guessing how they might react.

“How about you just surrender the pot, and we’ll call it a night,” she said slowly. “I won’t tell the crew you been cheating, and you’ll still be able to play the rest of the journey, maybe win back what I’m taking here.”

“Sounds like a fair deal, Rat.” He pried her fingers from his wrist. Then he leaned across the cards and coins, so close that his nose nearly touched hers. “You keep my secret,” he whispered, “and I’ll keep yours.”

He stalked toward the steamer with Carlos, and Ray shook out her hand, flexing her fingers. She sat there on the cold rocks, shuffling the deck until her breathing steadied.

The deck of the General Jesup had never seemed so crowded. Joe now constantly sought Ray out to discuss the art of padding a deck or counting cards or manipulating a shuffle, and the steamer seemed to grow smaller each day.

To avoid having to relieve herself often, she drank and ate little while on the river. The weak winter sun and mild temperatures were a blessing, yet she still battled dizziness from dehydration. When the captain called for fuel, Ray went farther to gather it, relieving herself only when she felt she was truly alone. On the rare occasion that she needed to see to her business aboard the General Jesup, she’d take the chamber pot and disappear behind the howitzer and freight, going as fast as possible and then dumping the contents into the river just as quick, lest Joe show up in time to question why she refused to piss while standing on the lip of the steamer like a normal fellow.

On the evenings that the crew had time for cards, she refrained from dramatic shuffles or sleight of hand. Part of her wished to quit playing altogether, but that would only look more suspicious, so she settled for taking in smaller pots. All the while, Joe watched her fingers dealing and shuffling and cutting the deck. He was only looking for proof that she cheated, too, to improve his own lackluster skills, but Ray began to worry. What if he uncovered her other secret? How would the crew feel to have been cheated by a girl? How would Mr. Johnson react to learning he’d been deceived all those years?

Ray could be tossed aside, left on the banks to starve, or worse.

She shook the thought aside. Those fears might be justified if any other member of the crew discovered her secret — Carlos or the twins or one of the soldiers — but she could trust Joe. He didn’t make jokes about her nickname, after all, or treat her like a rat. And for her first two years with the Company, Joe had made sure to handle her heaviest freight so she didn’t appear to be falling behind.

Her thoughts drifted back to the first day they met. Ray had skipped home from the river to tell Mrs. Lowry all about her new friends, but instead of being pleased for her, the woman had put down her knitting to give Ray a stern glance.

“Joe Henry pesters the Richardson girls to no end,” she’d warned. “Be wary of him, Ray, you hear me? He don’t take no one’s feelings to heart but his own.”

At the time, Ray had dismissed this comment. She didn’t expect Mrs. Lowry to understand what it was like to move freight, or to spend your whole life, day in and day out, pretending to be someone you weren’t. She didn’t understand the importance of Ray having a friend at work.

Now Ray wasn’t so sure.

For as good a friend as Joe was, he never told the other stevedores to stop comparing her to a rat. He knew she hated it — she’d complained about it to him more than once. The boys listened to Joe, but instead of wielding that power, he just threw around winks. Empty winks and dimpled smiles and encouragements that Ray should prove the boys wrong.

He don’t take no one’s feelings to heart but his own.

Maybe Joe wasn’t the friend Ray thought he was.

The Mohave Canyon greeted the crew with some of the worst rapids yet, and cries to adjust the steam power were constant while the General Jesup battled its way up the rocky-bottomed river. When they eventually moored for the evening, rock towered around them, dwarfing the steamer.

The grueling conquest left Mr. Johnson fretful, and by the time adequate wood had been gathered for the following day and the engineer had realigned components and checked for leaking joints and cracked steam pipes, it was too late for poker. In a way, Ray was grateful.

The following days were just as exhausting, and some seventy winding miles above Mohave Canyon, the expedition found itself navigating another ravine with additional rapids waiting beyond. They were passable — no worse than what they’d crossed thus far — but Mr. Johnson and Lieutenant White had begun to argue about their thinning provisions. It was a sight to be seen, spit flying and mustaches flapping, perhaps the best bit of entertainment Ray had witnessed in weeks. In the end, they struck a compromise, agreeing that they would take a skiff through the rapids and determine their location once they had an unobstructed view of the river ahead. If the General Jesup was as far north as the captain suspected, the mission might be deemed a success.

After the skiff departed, Joe fanned a deck of cards in Ray’s direction. “Wanna play, Rat?” He smiled, showing her those familiar dimples, but Ray shook her head. She wanted nothing less than to risk slipping up so near the end. With the help of the current, the trip home would be swift, nothing like the ascent upriver, and she couldn’t wait to get out of these suffocating canyons.

Johnson returned the following day at twilight, grinning fiercely as he told them he could see a good forty miles to the north after crossing the rapids. “We are undoubtedly within seventy-five miles of the mouth of the Virgin River,” he declared, “which means Utah is reachable! We’ve beaten the other expedition — shown that the Colorado is clearly navigable by steamer, and the Mormon settlements within reach. I say we return to Fort Yuma, triumphant!”

The claim was far from sound — Johnson hadn’t actually taken the steamer all the way to the Mormons — but Ray bit her tongue, and when the General Jesup turned to the south, she cheered as loudly as the others.

Feigning a sickness on the return trip, Ray had an excuse to linger near the chamber pot in isolation. But fifty miles from Fort Yuma — when no one else had caught Ray’s ailment — Joe seemed to figure she posed him no true risk and approached her at the bow. He leaned into Ray’s shoulder, the February sun beating down on their necks, and said, for perhaps the hundredth time, “You gotta show me how you do it.”

She cocked an eyebrow at him, attempting to appear cool when every muscle in her body was taut.

“Cheat all the time without getting caught,” he pressed.

“I ain’t a cheat,” Ray said. I’m a magician.

“’Course you’re a cheat. You’ve prolly been cheating as long as I’ve known you.”

Ray’s insides curled. Did he know? Had he seen or found her out somehow?

“No one wins as often as you if they ain’t,” he continued. “I been suspecting it for ages, and I kept quiet all this time.”

His insistence had nothing to do with her being a girl, Ray realized. In his drive to learn her skills, he’d been blind to the even larger con. Ray breathed a sigh of relief.

“I reckon I should get something for that,” he continued, voice light and jovial. “Like your expedition earnings. Consider it a repayment for all my losses over the years.”

“Good one,” Ray said, laughing.

She looked at him only to realize he wasn’t joking. His brows were drawn down, and his mouth was twisted into a smirk. Only one dimple appeared.

“You can’t be serious,” she said.

“Oh, I’m serious as can be,” Joe said coldly.

He was no longer lean like her. Over the years he’d filled out, put on muscle like extra layers of clothing. He could lift freight with ease, limbs never seeming to tire even as they bulged beneath the weight of goods. What she’d come to envy now made Ray feel small — her just fifteen and wiry, him broad-shouldered and nearing twenty. She’d be no match for Joe if he decided he truly wanted her fifty dollars. The blade in her boot felt no better than a butter knife.

“Well?” he prompted, still smirking.

Ray’s gaze flicked away, settling on the muddy waters so stagnant and low that —

“Rock!” she shouted. “Rocky bottom straight ahead!”

Johnson screamed orders, and the engineer worked frantically at the valves, but the General Jesup was positioned midriver and running under too much steam to adequately slow or alter course.

They ran aground hard.

Propelled by the impact, Ray flew off the bow and into the shallows. Her right wrist broke her fall, and she gasped in pain, cold water filling her nose.

Coughing and sputtering, Ray rolled onto her back only to see the General Jesup still crawling forward, her hull tearing open with an ungodly sound. An arm came over Ray’s shoulder, locked firm across the front of her chest, and yanked her away from the vessel. The steamer lurched to a stop, caught on the rocky bottom.

In three feet of water, the General Jesup met its match.

And so did Ray.

Because it was Joe who had pulled her to safety. Joe who still had a hand on her chest. Joe who was spinning her to face him, eyes ablaze with fury as his palms flew over her form, patting and prodding, confirming the truth.

“Joe, don’t say anything,” she begged. “Please don’t tell anyone.”

She’d lose her job, the expedition earnings, everything. She’d never be able to work for the Company again. And if the pain in her wrist told her anything, it would be a while before she could shuffle a deck smoothly, either.

Crew members splashed into the water, inspecting the steamer and shouting about damage.

“All this time?” Joe glowered. “For years I been helping you, and giving advice, saving your hide from underperformance, and you ain’t had the decency to be honest?”

“Joe, please.”

He considered it a moment, mouth in a hard, flat line. After a moment, he said, “You know what, Rat? It’ll cost you fifty damn dollars.”

The way he said the nickname made Ray’s stomach shrivel with dread. She’d been wrong about everything. He might not have made jokes about her being a rat, but his silence was only complacency. He agreed, deep down, and now he’d decided their friendship meant nothing, that she was nothing.

The con had come crumbling down.

She had no cards up her sleeve, no way of saving the act.

It was over.

“Hey, you two all right?” someone called from the steamer.

“Well, Rat?” Joe asked, dimples flashing. “What’s it gonna be?”

She still had her earnings from poker, plus everything else she’d saved up at home. If fifty dollars bought Joe’s silence, well, she could make that money back. It would take ages but it was better than losing her job.

Not knowing what else to do, Ray said, “Fine. Fifty dollars.”

The bastard gave the crewman a thumbs-up and left Ray standing alone in the shallows.

Mr. Johnson took a skiff to Fort Yuma and returned with a stern-wheeled steamer called the Colorado. Before they continued home, he had the crew build a bulkhead around his flooded General Jesup, which he swore he would raise and repair. Joe watched Ray like a hawk through it all, and by the time the crew moored the Colorado in Fort Yuma, she felt naked despite her sweat-stained clothes.

Lieutenant White marched off proudly with his soldiers, ready to send word to the War Department of their success. The rest of the crew marched into Johnson’s office one by one and left with their pay.

The banknote was crisp, and Ray thumbed its edge like a card, knowing its time with her would be fleeting. She made it all the way to the alley behind Mrs. Lowry’s before her shadow caught up with her. She let him brush by, his shoulder knocking into hers. Then his hands were on her arms. He shoved her against the building, pinning her there.

“Gimme my money, Rat.”

She relinquished the banknote, and Joe winked. God, did she hate that wink. She hated everything about him now.

He flapped the two notes in her face, taunting her. “Watch me add to this pot.”

“This ain’t a game of poker, Joe.”

“Oh, I think it is. See, I bet that Tom Polluck would want another whore for his establishment ’cause they don’t got many youngins over there. And my wager were right. He’s meeting me any minute. I’ll get good money for you.”

She wrestled against him. “I’m a person, not a thing you can sell.”

“You’re a rat.” His fingers pinched her arms harder. “You been stealing our money, stealing an honest man’s job. You’re a fraud and a liar, and you’re getting what you deserve. You’re getting the roof you always should’ve been under.”

He kept smiling, those dimples jeering at Ray. She didn’t know how she’d ever admired Joe Henry. He was the rat, the louse, the swine. She squirmed against him, but her right arm was still pinned to the wall, and she needed it free. She needed to vanish.

It was time for the final act.

“Hey, Joe,” Ray said coolly. “Where’s your Colt?”

Finally — finally — he let go, dropping his head to see what his fingers could not believe. An empty holster. His gaze snapped back up, locking on the pistol in Ray’s hand, now aimed at his chest. She’d lifted it off him when he’d first brushed by.

“Cheat,” he snarled.

“Magician,” she replied.

Using the Colt, she struck him as hard as she could. Joe Henry crumpled to the dirt. Ray gathered the hundred dollars in banknotes — his pay, along with her own — and left him in the alley, unconscious.

Mrs. Lowry was sleeping deeply.

Ray watched the rise and fall of her chest in the feeble candlelight. She longed to say good-bye, but this was easiest. “I don’t know where Ray is,” the woman would be able to say tomorrow. “I weren’t even aware the expedition had returned, and I haven’t the slightest how Joe Henry got himself robbed.”

Besides, Ray wouldn’t be able to stand the begging. Mrs. Lowry would implore Ray to stay, and she couldn’t, not with Joe knowing her secret. The gig was up, the show over. It was time for the curtain to fall. For so long, Ray had dreamed of leaving, and now that the moment was here, she was startled by how much it hurt.

Ray knew she might never find her family. Quite likely, the only family she had was right here in Yuma Crossing. But she was tired of pretending, and here along the river, she was a mystery even to herself. She was a boy and she was a girl. She was motherless and she was someone’s child. She was a soul wanting to belong and a soul desperate to escape. If she left, she could become more than these labels. In San Francisco, she could find who she was.

By the light of the flickering candle, Ray unfolded the newspaper clipping, crossed out words, and wrote new ones until the note read:

She placed the clipping on Mrs. Lowry’s nightstand, along with one of the fifty-dollar notes. Then she gathered her few possessions, packed a small rucksack, and crept for the Colorado.

The river was inky black. The current tugged south.

She stepped onto a skiff and, with the moon as her only audience, the magician disappeared.