Free The Crescent Spy by Michael Wallace Page A

having its annual country fair. The three of them spent a few minutes looking at the prize heifers and listening to the bull auction, but the girl was impatient to get to the amusements. Josephine ate iced cream and fried dough balls drizzled with honey before they went to the teeter boat. The girl and her mother tugged as hard as they could on one rope, with the Colonel pulling the rope on the other side. The boat swung higher and higher. After a few minutes, the iced cream and dough balls began churning in the girl’s stomach. Fortunately, they took her down before she threw up, and she was feeling better by the time they finished looking through the slit of a phenakistoscope at a flickering scene of a dancing bear.
    Late that afternoon, the three of them found a discreet spot in the shade of a sweet-gum grove downriver of Crescent Queen , which had already blasted two whistles indicating departure in thirty minutes. Josephine watched two men haul in a line with a catfish the size of a log, while Claire and the Colonel sat kissing beneath the trees. When Josephine turned back from watching the men wrestle the fish onshore, her mother was passing the Colonel a wad of banknotes, a sour expression on her face.
    “New Orleans,” he said. “Two weeks. I’ll pay you back double.”
    “I don’t care about double,” she said. “Forty will suffice. And maybe you can stay a little longer than one night and part of a day. We’ll be in the city the better part of a month for repairs.”
    The Colonel kissed her again. “I’d love to spend it with you. And this little scallywag.” He grinned at Josephine, and came over to kiss her cheek, which made her blush. “You be good, you hear? And no more diving into the river. It spooks your mama. You know she can’t swim a lick. You be good and I’ll bring you a whole bag of lemon drops.”
    After a final tip of the hat, he strolled whistling up the path, not toward the boat but into Frenchville again.
    Claire sighed. “I do believe we’ve seen the last of that no-gooder for a stretch.”
    “We’ll see him in New Orleans,” Josephine said, still looking admiringly at the Colonel, who had not yet disappeared around the bend. “That’s only two weeks.”
    Her mother didn’t answer this, but tugged Josephine’s hand and led her back to Crescent Queen , where passengers and crew were boarding. It was almost dusk, and the frogs started up a chorus along the riverbank. When Josephine was up top on the promenade, she looked back toward the town, trying to catch a glimpse of the Colonel, but couldn’t spot him.
    When Crescent Queen arrived in New Orleans later that month, the Colonel had not yet arrived, but there was a package waiting that included both the borrowed money—paid double, as he’d promised—plus the black-and-white photograph of mother and daughter standing on the railing of the riverboat.
    “Will you look at that, Josie?” Claire said, handing it over to Josephine, while she hid the money in a compartment beneath her dressing desk. “That fine gentleman is as good as his word. We never should have doubted him.” She hummed and sang to herself as she got ready for the show.
    Later that night, when the riverboat was sitting outside the levee near Jackson Square, and the saloon was in full, raucous swing below, Josephine turned up the lamp and stared at the photo, remembering everything about that day in Frenchville and enjoying it as if she were eating the fried dough and iced cream all over again.
    As for the Colonel himself, he did not show up after two weeks. Rather, it was two years later that he appeared. She had long since given up on him as a scoundrel, as her mother insisted.
    But when he did finally arrive, he was carrying a treasure that would change Josephine’s life forever.

I t took several days to sail down around the tip of Florida and into the harbor at Havana. The city was a sweltering tropical port of low-slung Spanish colonial buildings,