Free The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen by Geraldine McCaughrean

it? Magic wouldn’t go amiss.”
    Cissy could not think quite what this one might be about to offer in the way of entertainment, what with his sallow sunken face, limp suit, and straggling mustache overhanging his mouth like a soup strainer. Mind reading? Puppets? Peanuts?
    â€œDo you dance at all?” asked Tibbie of the man in the limp suit.
    â€œCould you give us a taste, maybe?” asked Cissy politely when the man still failed to mount the stage.
    â€œI’m not about to give you a damned thing,” said the man, loosening his frayed tie and glaring around him. “But you can give me back what’s mine. You can give me back this boat. I won her fair and square. And she’s mine !”

Chapter Seven
Patience Rewarded
    S omething inside Cissy withered and shrank. The back of her neck grew hot and sore, as if a starched apron had chafed it.
    Now the Calliope would be taken away, just like the store; just like school. . . . Of course the Calliope had an owner. Paddle steamers are not thrown away like apple cores, into the long grass of a riverbank. Apparently the Calliope had two owners to squabble over her, and neither of them was the Bright Lights Theater Company.
    The man showed them his gambling marker.

    â€œWe wuz sitting right there,” he recounted in his high mosquito whine. “I’m two thousand dollars up, and I want to call it a night. Then in comes this stranger. The house won’t give him credit, he says, and he’s thirsting for a game of poker. Who’ll lend him two hundred dollars so he can join in the game? ‘What you got to cover the loan?’ I ask him, ’cause I’m feeling flush, right? And he writes this pledge for his riverboat: ‘The Sunshine Queen and all that’s in her—an’ that’s includin’ the safe,’ says he. And dammee, but he cleans us out. I watch that two thousand dollars dwindle and dwindle—biggest pile I ever stacked up. You’re not telling me he was playing straight: no one gets that lucky without he’s carrying five aces up his sleeve! Come the end, I’ve got a fistful of colors—winning hand!—but nothing to bet on it but his damned marker. An’ I lay it down. I gotta! He’s skinned me. He’s just won every cent I got. Just gimme this one, I’m praying. Just lemme win this hand, God! Then this Black Hand gyp stands up. Puts down his cards and stands up. ‘Keep it,’ he says. ‘I’m gettin’ outa the shipping business.’ I’m holding this winning hand—three kings and a queen—and game’s over and I think . . . But it’s okay! I got the boat, yeah? I still got the boat? I seen this boat: it’s gotta be worth a sum! I’m off the hook! I’m not busted! If worst comes to worst, I kin mortgage it to the bank! Come the morning, I go down to the wharf to check her over: my ship. An’ guess what I find.” The man’s lip curled with such contempt that his mustache bristled like a hedgehog doing gymnastics. “Gone! He’s up and sailed away in the night. He’s beggared me, the crimper!”
    There was a long pause after the gambler’s sad story finished. It was all too plain to see that nothing good had happened to him since.
    â€œI think you are mistaken,” said Everett, almost convincingly. “This note refers to a ship called the Sunshine Queen . This vessel is the Calliope —a derelict we picked up near Salvation.” And he pointed at the sign on the roof.
    The gamer in the limp suit pulled another face. “That? That’s not her name ! That there’s a billboard! Might as well say she’s called ‘Don’t Lean Out’ or ‘No Spitting.’”
    They followed him up the various steps and ladders to the roof of the Texas and the peeling plywood noticeboard proclaiming CALLIOPE . On the way, they picked up a train of interested