Read Online Riverboat Blaze by J. R. Roberts - Free Book Online

losing his gun. Wearing it was so second nature to him that it had never occurred to him to unstrap it in the river and let it sink to the bottom so it wouldn’t weigh him down. He just never noticed that it was any kind of a hindrance.
    Staring out at the boat, he noticed for the first time that some of the flames he saw were not coming from it. They were coming from the opposite shore.
    “Looks like some people made it to the other shore and had the same idea,” he said.
    “Where are we?” Angela asked. “How many miles did we cover?”
    “I can’t tell you that,” Clint said. “I know the Mississippi winds through Louisiana for a long time. It doesn’t even really start heading north until it crosses into Mississippi. And we were going upstream, which means we were covering ground much slower than we would if we were going downstream. We may be at Baton Rouge, or we may have gone as far as Vicksburg. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t really paying that much attention.”
    He looked across the river again.
    “It only seems to be a few hundred yards wide here, and not that deep. I know there are some places where the river is a mile wide and a couple of feet deep. We don’t seem to be anywhere near that here. We’re just going to have to wait and see, Angela.”
    He was cleaning his gun, getting it dry, when they heard some sounds in the brush. He stood up, gun in hand, as several people came into the light.
    “Oh my God,” a woman said. “We saw your light . . .”
    Clint rushed forward to catch the middle-aged woman before she could fall. There were other people with her, men and women, about eleven altogether.
    “We’ve been wanderin’,” a man said, “and saw your fire . . .”
    “Come and sit,” Angela said. “Everyone.”
    “Have you seen any others?” Clint asked.
    “Some,” the woman said. “Some were going in the opposite direction, looking for help. We saw some . . . some bodies that washed up on shore.” She started to cry. “What a horrible night.”
    Clint collected more wood so he could start a second fire. That way they’d all be able to sit close to the flames and dry out.
    Pretty soon others arrived who had seen the two fires, and Clint started even more. Eventually they had about six campfires going, and more than forty people sitting around them.
    “Does anybody know where we are?” someone asked.
    “I think we’re around St. Louis,” someone said, hopefully.
    “No,” another voice argued, “we haven’t come nearly that far.”
    “There’s really no point in guessing,” Clint said. “At first light we can start walking and see where we end up.”
    “Shouldn’t we stay here so we can be found?” a woman asked.
    “By who?” another voice asked.
    “Rescuers.”
    “You know how long it’ll take before someone comes looking for us?”
    People started to argue loudly, and Clint decided to let them go. Let them tire themselves out even more, he figured, and eventually they did. Before long they were all sitting around the fire with their heads lolling forward or back. Some of them simply used each other to lean against or lie on. Angela was sitting with her head on Clint’s shoulder.
    With all the people who had come into their camp, they still had not seen either Dean Dillon or Ava—or the Warrant brothers. Clint wanted to talk to those two!
    “Maybe,” Angela said to him, “some of us should stay here while others go searching for help.”
    “The women can stay behind,” Clint said. “When we find out where we are, or what town we’re near, we can come back with help.”
    “I don’t want to stay here with a bunch of hysterical women,” she said.
    “Let’s discuss it when the sun comes up,” he said.
    It was spring, but still cold along the shores of the Mississippi at night. They huddled together and kept the fire high for warmth.
    Clint wondered about the people across the river, on the other shore. Was Dillon there with Ava? Was the captain